Fringe 03 - Sins of the Father

by Christa Faust

  It was pretty much the only serious cover. All five of the angry Chechens were crammed there together, in the narrow strip that separated the structure from the spindly railing on the edge of the roof. Taking turns leaning around the corner and shooting at the Koreans, they were having some kind of unfathomable argument in Chechen, which Peter didn’t understand at all.

  What he did understand was that he was stuck on the wrong side of the stairwell—the side that didn’t have a door. He needed to get the Chechens to cover him, while he made a run for the door. Otherwise he’d get plugged the second he stuck his head out.

  But his brain was spinning, coming up blank, again and again.

  He had to think.

  Think!

  Die Hard jokes notwithstanding, Peter wasn’t an action hero. He knew how to use a gun, but he was an average shot under the best of circumstances. He wasn’t particularly brave. Reckless, yes, but not because of courage.

  He really wasn’t a bad ass.

  But he was good at manipulation. That was his super power. The ability to think on his feet, and talk his way out of any situation. Not that it was doing him much good.

  Think, Peter!

  Suddenly, it hit him. He knew exactly what he needed to say, and was retrieving the proper Russian translation from his adrenaline-addled brain when one of the boys took a bullet in the shoulder and reeled backward, spinning and slamming into him.

  Peter let out an involuntary shout and fell into one of the slender railings that stood between him and the deadly thirty-story drop to the hot Bangkok street below. Unsurprisingly, the half-assed railing bent backward under his weight, and his feet slipped into the narrow gap between the railing and the edge of the roof.

  He dropped Jaruk’s gun and flailed for balance as both his legs followed his feet. He was narrowly saved from falling to his death by a flat metal post, which wedged between his legs and slammed into his junk, preventing the rest of his body from slipping through.

  Bolts of pain shot through him.

  Never in his life had he been so happy to be hit in the nuts.

  The awkward fall left him balanced like a witch on a broomstick. Instead of its usual vertical position, the post was sticking horizontally off the edge of the roof at a 90-degree angle. It had been attached to the roof with four bolts, three of which had been torn loose by Peter’s weight. The only thing holding him up was that one bolt and the two flimsy wires connecting the bent post to its wobbly neighbors.

  Below his dangling feet lay the teeming nighttime city.

  Concentrating on breathing through the nauseating pain and trying to recover enough to climb back up onto the roof, he forgot for a crucial moment what a bad idea it would be to look down.

  He looked down.

  Vertigo slammed into him harder than the wounded Chechen, and he swallowed an airless, terrified gasp, grasping frantically for the post. He could see dozens of tiny motorbikes and taxis flowing like glowing corpuscles along Wireless Road, far below. Ant-sized people swarmed around the brightly lit, multicolored fountain in front of the neighboring shopping plaza. It might have been a beautiful view, if he weren’t about to fall into it.

  His body told him in no uncertain terms that he shouldn’t move an inch, under any circumstances. His arms and legs had the fence post in a boa constrictor’s death grip, but dangling there—with his heart pounding and his eyes squeezed shut—wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

  Then he heard a rasping sound. The last bolt—the one thing standing between him and certain death—was starting to inch slowly and inexorably out of its hole.

  He peered at the edge of the roof.

  Just reach up with first one hand, then the other, he told himself. Grip the edge, and then pull the top half of your body up. Raise one leg up, then the other and voila! You’re home free. Hauling himself up wouldn’t take much effort. It’d be a piece of cake.

  There was just one problem.

  In order to reach up and grip the edge of the roof, he’d need to let go of the post. Which didn’t seem like much at all, really. Just a slight shift of one hand, a movement of about ten inches from the post to the edge. He’d still have his other hand and both legs holding on to the post.

  No big deal.

  So why couldn’t he do it?

  C’mon, just reach over…

  Or he might just stay there, frozen and clinging to that post for the rest of his life.

  The last bolt made the choice for him. It emitted a creaking, stressed-metal sound, and finally slid loose from its hole.

  In that moment, all the air was suddenly gone from his lungs. He hoped whatever panicked, involuntary noise he made didn’t sound too girly, but he couldn’t hear it himself over the sound of the wind—and of his pounding heart.

  He shot forward as if someone had jammed a branding iron into his ass. He caught hold with both hands and pulled himself up so that the sharp edge of the roof dug into his roiling belly. The post hung loosely between his legs, held up now by the wires that connected it to its neighbors.

  If Peter’s full weight had still been on it, the wires would have broken.

  The shoot-out on the roof continued with undiminished vigor. When he managed to swing up and onto the roof, he lay there gasping for a handful of seconds, bullets flying all around him.

  When he got his shaking legs under him and retrieved the shreds of a plan from the terrified Jell-O of his brain, he realized how little time had passed since he slipped off. It felt like a lifetime, but in reality it had been less than a minute.

  None of the Chechens were dead yet, although one of the wounded was starting to look a little bit rough—icy-pale and breathing heavily through his open mouth. But he was still in the fight. Another was bleeding, but didn’t seem to notice.

  Umarov was intact, and looked almost happy, like a corpse-sniffing dog thrilled to be playing the fun game his trainer taught him. When the Chechen leader ducked back behind the stairwell to reload, Peter gripped his arm and spoke close to his ear.

  “They’ve still got your money,” he said. “You can’t let them get away. Don’t just hold your position—go on the offensive, before they duck out and take your cash with them.”

  Umarov’s eyes widened as the words sank in. Suddenly the firefight was more than an enjoyable diversion. He started barking orders to his underlings, and they split into two groups of two, moving to the left and right of the staircase, while the badly wounded guy hung back and covered their attack.

  Peter followed Umarov around the right side of the stairwell. The Chechen gave a passionate shout that didn’t need translation, and charged toward the Koreans with his boys covering him on the right and left. Peter crouched low and duck-walked around to the stairway door.

  He flinched as a bullet slammed into the wooden frame just above his head, spraying his face with paint chips and splinters. But he still managed to grab the handle. It took all the strength left in his shaking arms to pull the door open wide enough that he could squeeze into the stairwell.

  The wind slammed it behind him.

  * * *

  Peter went down the steps two at a time, hitting the next door with his shoulder to shove it open. Once he was in the public stairwell, he took a moment to compose himself before opening the door to the hallway. The last thing he needed was to go tearing through the hotel like a maniac. Let the guys on the roof have all the attention. He had to look like just another unremarkable guest—preoccupied, maybe, but not in any rush.

  He put on what he hoped was a nonchalant, slightly bored expression and pushed down the handle.

  There was no one in the hushed hallway as he walked with a measured pace to his suite. Using the key card, he let himself in, and quickly shut the door behind him.

  The racket on the roof echoed through the suite, and the smell of cordite wafted in through the missing pane. Shouting, and then more gunshots, but Peter did his best to ignore them, instead zeroing in on the two briefcases. One had fal
len on the bed, and the other had bounced off to the left and landed on the carpet. He grabbed the one on the bed first and cracked it open. It was filled with stacks of greenbacks, exactly as promised.

  He lifted a few of the banded stacks, to make certain the case was filled with money, through and through. It was legit.

  The second one was similarly filled. Peter did an internal victory dance, but maintained an outward calm while he closed the two cases and put them into the empty suitcase. He zipped it up, set it on its end, and pulled out its telescoping handle. He was just about to leave the room when one of the intact panes in the skylight suddenly shattered, dumping a bloody rag doll onto the thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton comforter cover.

  Peter flinched away from the rain of glass, one arm thrown up over his face, the other hand locked in a death grip around the handle of the suitcase. Then he braced himself. He’d worked hard for this, and he was ready to fight for it.

  But whoever had fallen though the skylight was in no shape to fight for anything. He was still alive, groaning softly, but so bloodied that Peter couldn’t tell if he was Chechen or Korean. The figure reached out a shaking, broken hand, but there was nothing to do for him.

  Nothing to do but get the hell out of there before anybody decided to look down through the ruined skylight to see what had happened to their buddy. He pulled the suitcase toward the door, its cheap plastic wheels crunching on broken shards. He didn’t look back as he let himself out of the suite.

  Out in the hallway, away from the skylights, the sounds of the gunfight seemed much more distant—they might be mistaken for construction, or even a large piece of machinery on the roof. As he pulled the door shut, he heard a scrabbling nearby.

  What the hell…?

  There was another guest, trying with some difficulty to enter a neighboring suite. The man was just a scant inch shorter than Peter, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a coarse ponytail, and a sharp, aquiline profile. He wore heavy, horn-rim glasses and an appalling Hawaiian shirt with pineapples and parrots. It gave him the look of a college professor on vacation.

  He had a large carry-on bag slung over one shoulder, a laptop case, and a roller suitcase as innocuous as the one Peter was pulling. He seemed extremely nervous, fumbling with the lock on the door and trying the key card forward, then backward. He glanced up and eyed Peter with a furtive, almost embarrassed glance.

  Peter gave him a casual nod and headed for the elevator. He was less than halfway there when the door to the stairwell burst open.

  “Freeze!”

  A group of Thai cops in SWAT armor came swarming out of the stairwell. The lead man yelled in flawless English as the men behind him drew down with an eclectic mix of handguns and rifles.

  “Drop the suitcase!”

  Peter felt a sick, helpless fury racing through his veins.

  Goddamn, Jaruk—you swore that the cops had been paid off. Bastard probably kept the bribe money for himself, and left Peter with his ass in the wind. He’d been so close to pulling this off, too, and it infuriated him to think that his undoing would come from a trusted friend’s betrayal.

  Peter let go of the handle of the suitcase and slowly raised his hands, palms out. Then he heard a noise behind him. As he turned, the man in the Hawaiian shirt drew a massive Dirty Harry hand cannon and aimed it at the cops.

  “You won’t take me alive!” he shouted, revealing a rich, plummy, upper class British accent.

  Peter was so dumbfounded by this astounding turn of events that he just stood there for a surreal handful of seconds—until the crazed Englishman rushed him and shoved him aside. The man tripped over the jumble of their combined luggage as he fired a wild shot into the expensive modernist chandelier. The gun was so close to Peter’s ear that the sound deafened him.

  He dropped to the carpet and rolled away, wedging his body against the wall and trying to will himself to become invisible as the trigger-happy Thai cops returned fire. Their aim was much better than the Englishman, and when Peter looked up, he saw that their quarry’s ugly shirt had been enhanced by several large crimson blossoms.

  Those were getting larger by the second.

  The man staggered backward in a crooked zigzag, bouncing off the wall, and then threw himself onto his roller case. It was as if he was trying to protect it at all costs.

  The Thai cops swarmed in, completely ignoring Peter and surrounding the bleeding Englishman. One of them cuffed him, while another wrestled the suitcase out of his weakening grip.

  Peter was about to reach for his own suitcase and bug the hell out, when his previous mess came flooding out of the eastern stairwell. Two of the Chechens, neither of which was the kid calling himself Umarov, backed into the hallway, firing up the stairs at the pursuing Koreans.

  They started down the hall as the first of their pursuers came into sight. One of the Chechens took a bullet in the hip and went sprawling on the carpet while a stray bullet from the Koreans caught one of the Thai cops in the shoulder.

  That was enough to jolt the cops into action. One of them kicked in a nearby door, while another dragged the handcuffed prisoner and his precious suitcase out of the line of fire and into the hotel room. A third and fourth cop engaged with the Chechens, while the one who’d been shot grabbed Peter by the arm, shouting something unintelligible into his gun-deaf ear.

  The cop who grabbed Peter was thickly built and moon-faced, with small, close-together eyes and a wide, flattened nose. He was wearing so much fake sandalwood cologne that it made Peter’s eyes water. And even though the big man had just taken a bullet, he hardly seemed to notice it. He raised Peter up to a crouch, shoved his suitcase into his arms, and then duck-walked him to the elevator, using his Kevlar-covered body as a shield to protect them from the ongoing gunfire.

  When the elevator door opened, Moonface thrust Peter through so hard that he nearly fell back on his ass, clutching the suitcase like a precious child. The cop reached into the elevator and hit the “L” button, pulling his arm back out of the car as the doors started to close. Peter tried to thank him before they shut all the way, but he could barely hear his own voice, and had no idea how loudly he was speaking.

  Then it was too late.

  As the elevator slid smoothly down, he noticed there was something wet on the sleeve of his shirt where the Thai cop had grabbed him. He touched the damp spot, expecting blood, but was surprised to find his fingers slicked with a strange silvery fluid. He stared at it for a moment, trying to figure out what it was.

  Then he gave up.

  He was lucky to be alive. As the car descended, a sort of euphoria swept over him. The fact that he’d made it out with the loot was like winning the lottery. This time, alone in the elevator with no one to see, his victory dance was on the outside.

  Peter had rented three different rooms in three different generic franchise hotels near the airport, using three different names and three different creatively obtained credit-card numbers.

  In each room he’d stashed a go-bag containing a change of clothing, basic toiletries, a gun, a wad of American dollars, a fake passport, a cheap laptop, and a poker hand of clean credit cards. Those were an essential part of his repertoire, and it had taken him years to set up a reliable source.

  He staggered into the first one he reached, and collapsed on the bed for several blank, blissful minutes, just breathing and enjoying not being dead. Once he got his heart rate down to something not too far above normal, he hit the minibar like a typhoon, downing several tiny bottles of booze in a row without bothering to check the labels, and then cracking an ice-cold Singha.

  He raised the bottle, toasting himself and the precious suitcase, and took a deep, heroic swallow. Simple beer had never tasted so good.

  Flopping back down on the bed, he put the bottle onto the nightstand, pulled the last of the disposable cell phones from his pocket, and dialed a number he knew by heart. A woman answered.

  “Hello.”

  “Let
me talk to him,” Peter said.

  There was a pause, a muffled exchange, and then the sound of violent, incomprehensible Scottish swearing starting on the other end of the line. It became louder and louder, like the leading edge of a nuclear blast. When it hit, Peter had to hold his phone away from his ear.

  Finally the roar died down.

  “Hello, Eddie,” he said.

  “That Peter Bishop?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Peter said, sitting up on the edge of the bed. “I got your money.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” Eddie’s words became slow and condescending, as if he was talking to a child of questionable intellect. “And why should I believe you now,” he demanded, “as opposed to the forty-seven other times you said you had my money?”

  “Because it’s right here,” Peter said patting the suitcase and putting the phone between his ear and shoulder so he could turn it to face him. “I’m looking right at it.” He unzipped the case.

  There was a momentary silence on the other end.

  “Tell me where you are, and I’ll send someone,” Eddie said. “And you’d best not be talkin’ out your fanny flaps again, because I’m runnin’ out of reasons not to kill you.”

  As he said it, Peter opened the suitcase. Then he stared, slack-jawed and disbelieving, at its contents.

  There were no briefcases.

  “Bishop?” Eddie said, his voice full of suspicion.

  In place of the briefcases full of neatly banded stacks of American greenbacks, there was a custom-cut gray foam liner. It was shaped to cradle a Plexiglas cylinder clearly marked with a red biohazard sticker. Inside of that, there was a single pinkie-sized vial with an orange cap and black hash marks to measure volume.

  It was a little less than a quarter full of cloudy pink liquid.

  “Let me get back to you,” Peter said. He disconnected the call before the Scotsman could launch into another wave of swearing.