by Jason Kasper
All I had to do now was bring the pen back to Sage, and my role in the Handler’s death would be complete.
Yet I felt an inexplicable sense of dread, like some impending doom was lurking not for me but for something I cared about more desperately. I’d just secured the item and delivered it for final production, and was days away from freeing Ian at last. So why wasn’t I ecstatic? Rather than satisfied, I felt almost plagued, cursed, the memory of my father’s last moments replaying in my mind as I awaited my transport out of Myanmar. Some nagging thought lurked in the back of my mind, something I couldn’t put my finger on.
“Mr. David,” Cong said, “may I speak with you?”
I turned to see him standing hesitantly in the doorway to the roof, and gestured for him to have a seat.
“For you, Cong, I’ve got all the time in the world. What’s on your mind?”
He sat beside me.
“Yesterday was my first battle.”
“And what a battle it was.” I glanced at him, thinking he looked much older than he had at the outset of our mission the day before. Combat had a way of aging its participants with undue haste. “Let me ask you a question: when it seemed like we were about to be overrun, did you feel scared or excited?”
“Scared.”
“Good. Either is normal.”
“What did you feel, Mr. David?” He spoke with intensity, like a failing student asking his professor one last question before the start of a final exam.
I considered the inquiry, wondering whether I should be honest or inspiring, and sided with honesty. “I felt nothing. And that means it’s time to retire.”
“So you are done? Forever?”
I scoffed. “Just getting warmed up, probably.”
“How do you live with this? Or with Tiao dying like he did?”
“You’ve got the rest of your life to think about what could have gone differently on that mission, brother. That’s the game in this business. Believe me.”
“I could not sleep last night. Did you?”
“I don’t sleep much anymore, Cong. Hell, if I’m not fighting or among people I’ve fought with, I feel like I’m a stranger to everyone and everything. I’m completely isolated, and everything’s…surreal. Constantly numb, like everything I experience is absurdly superficial compared to combat. Does that make sense?”
He looked profoundly troubled, staring into the middle distance between our rooftop and the idyllic Asian landscape. “The man I shot…in the room, with the item. I keep seeing him. No gun. Trying to surrender…innocent.”
“The man you shot in that room”—I focused on Cong intently—“was my interrogator. Take it from me, he was an evil man deserving of death. You didn’t kill an innocent; you performed a necessary execution.”
But his gaze was fixed, his mind lost. I put a hand on his arm. “Cong—listen to someone who’s been doing this longer than a day.”
He blinked his vision clear and whipped his head toward me, startled.
“You lost sleep last night, yeah.” I gave a short sigh, feeling my chest begin to tighten with a fleeting emotion between anger and disgust. “But don’t make that a lifelong occurrence. You’re not me, and you’ve got plenty of gunfights left before you start losing your humanity. In the meantime, there’s one thing you need to remember.”
He nodded, receptive, looking for any straw to grasp. I could’ve told him anything in that moment and he would have held onto it, desperate.
“Anyone who joins a side during combat has entered the arena, and whatever happens, happens. Executions included. But there are true innocents in every fight, Cong. Too many of them. We’re lucky here because most of the civilians have fled Laukkai, but that won’t always be the case. One day you’re going to do battle somewhere with a lot of people who want nothing to do with it.
“And when that day comes, you do your best to avoid killing innocent people. War involves collateral damage no matter what you do. But those who freely kill innocents will never get it off their soul. Once you break that, there’s no coming back. Until you do,” I concluded, “you’re intact. Whole. You understand?”
Cong’s features softened, a glimpse of youthfulness returning to his expression. “Yes. I think I do, Mr. David.”
“Know what you do when it’s all over, before you lose your soul?”
“No.”
I thought of Boss’s words to me at our final team dinner. “You put it all in that place inside that you don’t speak of, the one that not even your wife will know about. Veterans have been doing that since the dawn of war, and one day it’ll be your turn. Pack it up with all the horrible shit you’ve ever done and seen, and start over.”
He nodded distantly and we lapsed into silence for a few moments, each observing the landscape in our own way. Suddenly a deep thump was followed by the whirring screech of a rocket ignition, and then a distant explosion initiated the rolling chatter of machineguns. Cong was startled by the sudden noise, but I didn’t flinch. Fighting had begun for the day.
A voice behind us snapped, “Mr. David.”
I turned to see Peng holding the door to the roof open with one arm, looking more solemn than I’d ever seen him.
“It is time,” he said sharply. “Kun would like to speak with you.”
I arrived downstairs to a flurry of men moving crates in and out of Kun’s workshop, now a gutted shell being quickly packed up and loaded into a panel truck.
Kun slipped through the crowd, his face solemn.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“The war is over.”
“Cong and I just heard the fighting resume—”
He put up a hand to interrupt. “You heard a battle, David. Not the war.” Leaning in, he lowered his voice so the men moving his equipment couldn’t hear. “Seven hundred Kokang fighters were just captured near the Nansan border gate with China. That is less than three kilometers east. The fighting will end before sunset, and I must be gone before the Myanmar troops have free rein in Laukkai.”
“Where will you go? If the alliance with the Wa is broken, then…”
Kun shot me a stern glance, as if to say I should know better than to ask.
I concluded, “Forget everything I just said. I don’t need to know.”
“Your employer’s commission has been completed,” he announced. “Given the countermeasures this item was designed to bypass, and your insistence on a backup, you must be targeting someone special.”
I nodded.
“President?” he asked. “Pope?”
I said nothing.
He shook his head. “No, you wouldn’t have the budget you’re paying. No, I think this will be used on the Handler.”
My blood ran cold, a shudder racing up my spine to the base of my neck. But Kun chuckled merrily. “I look forward to hearing the news of your success. It brings me great joy to satisfy the needs of a client.”
“Then I hope I’ll have good news for you soon.”
“After what you accomplished to recover the item, I trust that you will succeed.”
I gave a shrug and admitted, “I’m not the assassin. Only the deliveryman.”
“We shall see, David.”
He looked at me curiously, as if he was about to expound on the thought. Instead he extended a hand in my direction, holding both the enormous fountain pen and an innocuous ballpoint in his closed fist.
I accepted them as he cleared his throat and said, “You will have one chance, and one chance only. Do not remove the cap of either pen, ever. The only person to remove the cap must be the target. Items like this only work with known quantities of poison, and with objects that only one person is known to touch. You have both in the replica fountain pen. But you have neither in your backup.”
“If the first pen succeeds,” I assured him, “then I’ll destroy the second.”
“See that you do. Now we must both go from this place forever.”
I bowed my head to him. “Thank you f
or everything, Kun. Goodbye.”
“Not goodbye, David.” He clapped his hands on my shoulders, giving me a sudden brisk shake before releasing me. “I will see you later.”
I felt my mouth sliding into an unconvinced grin. “Kun…I don’t think you will.”
“In this life? Perhaps not. But in the next?” He shrugged helplessly, a playful expression dancing across his face. “Who is to say?”
14
Four Days Later
September 2, 2009
Link-up Point, British Columbia
The air was clean and crisp as a powerful breeze swayed the tall pine forest all around me. After my stay in Asia, the wild, resinous smell was unmistakably North American, and it felt like home.
A combination of being passed from driver to driver and a five-mile off-road hike had led me to a curve in a winding dirt trail through the forest, barely wide enough for an ATV and marked by the vague imprints of tire passage. I checked my GPS again, seeing that I was in the right spot, plus or minus three meters—this was my link-up point, and now all I had to do was wait for Sage.
I heard an all-terrain vehicle approaching only a minute before I caught sight of it. Finally Sage’s flat black ATV rolled into view, still laden with fuel cans and cargo bags. The driver wore a full-faced helmet with tinted visor down. Broad shoulders and no breasts: not Sage, but a man intending for his face to remain hidden.
A second ATV trailed behind, this one similarly equipped for long-range use but painted olive drab. A Caucasian man I’d never seen before drove it.
Both ATVs stopped beside me.
The lead driver shouted, his voice muffled within the helmet, “You have it?”
Squinting at his visor, I saw only a reflection of myself. “Yes. And I’ve got—”
“Give it to me. Now.”
I handed him the fountain pen. He held it up to his visor, examining it closely.
“It’s ready to go?”
“It’s good.”
“If there were any complications,” he said gravely, “now’s the time to tell me.”
“There were none. Death within five seconds, guaranteed.”
He wrapped it in a black cloth, then slipped it inside his jacket.
I reached for the backup ballpoint in my pocket. “I’ve also got—”
The man revved his ATV, carving a tight circle between the trees and back onto the trail before speeding off the way he’d come.
“Asshole,” I muttered, replacing the ballpoint as the second ATV pulled up. This driver wore a pistol on his hip but was without a helmet, his sharp features and long blond hair tucked behind his ears.
“I’m Brett,” he said. “Get on. I’m taking you back to the cabin.”
“Where’s Sage?”
“She’s meeting us there.”
Brett urgently gestured for me to get on the ATV behind him, and I hesitated. Something about Sage’s absence struck me as unsettling, but what did it matter? Everything else was going according to plan. If this was some type of elaborate setup orchestrated by the Handler, then I was already caught. And it wouldn’t have been the first time, either.
I got behind Brett on the ATV, and he accelerated forward down the trail.
It took us just over two hours to reach the cabin, and I spent the vast majority of that time in a state of relief bordering on ecstasy. This was the definition of the home stretch—Sage’s scheme had gone undetected by the Handler or it never would have gotten this far. Given the pains I’d gone to in order to retrieve the item, there was no alternate reality in which Sage betrayed our agreement to free Ian while sending me to fight with the Outfit. I found myself smiling when the mountain terrain became increasingly more familiar as we approached the cabin. It seemed strangely fitting that I would finish this bizarre journey where it had begun, in the wilderness hideaway Sage had rigged for the effort.
But when we finally burst into the boulder-strewn clearing that hosted the cabin, I barely recognized it.
A twenty-foot-tall antenna stood upright in the field. It was held in place by a concentric arrangement of guy wires anchoring it to the ground, enabling radio communications from the depths of the forest. The cabin roof was now covered in solar panels.
My ATV driver Brett bounded up the stairs, pushing open the door and shouting, “Look alive, Dustin! The hero of Burma returns.”
Brett slipped into the side room as I entered the cigarette smoke-filled cabin, finding it had been transformed into a command post. A table supported a mobile satellite phone and stacks of radios with hand mics attached to coiled cables, and the wooden walls were tacked with maps, radio brevity codes, and time sequences.
This wasn’t an assassination; it was a full-blown coup.
The radio operator seated at the table looked up at me, his bearded jaw falling open, eyes squinting as he watched me. Like Brett, he had a pistol on his hip, and I didn’t know if he wanted to fight or shake my hand as he stumbled out of his chair, thumping his knee against the table.
“You’re David, aren’t you?”
I took a half step back. “Yeah…we cool?”
“Of course! I mean—it’s an honor to meet you. We can’t believe you managed to get the item out of Myanmar once Laukkai fell—but you did. None of this would’ve been possible without you.”
He shook my hand eagerly, his grip powerful but his voice high and nasally. The physical build of a commando with the mind of a radio nerd.
“Sure, man,” I offered. “You’re welcome, the service was my pleasure and other, you know, trite banalities.” I glanced around the cabin, seeing that the blond ATV driver was kneeling in the side room arranging briefcases. One of them was open on the floor, lined from side to side with stacks of neatly bundled cash. Many such briefcases or bank account transfers had surely changed hands in the months leading up to this attempt. I was probably only looking at the remaining balance to be paid once everyone involved had delivered on their final commitment.
The two men in the cabin were a skeleton crew awaiting Sage’s return, but I wondered how many more knew of the Handler’s imminent death and were eagerly awaiting their final payment.
“So, how much longer?” I asked.
Dustin the radio operator stammered, “H-how much longer…until what?”
“Until he’s fucking dead. The assassination, man. All of it.”
“Of course!” He sat down and scooted his chair closer to the table, then began analyzing an open laptop. “The item has already made it into the Mist Palace, so it’s getting placed in his office now. He’s got a signing in thirty-two minutes, so he’s dead within the hour. The next call we get from our man in place will be when it’s done.”
“Your man? You mean Sage?”
“Sage isn’t placing it. She’s on her way back here now.”
“Then who’s taking over for the Handler after his death?”
Dustin hesitated at this, retrieving a cigarette and snatching a butane lighter from the desk. “There’ll be a…temporary incumbent. When we get the call that the Handler is dead, that individual will safeguard our return to the Mist Palace, and Sage will assume control upon arrival.”
I caught the delay in his response and the delicate way with which he phrased the words “assume control.” Whoever was taking command after the Handler’s death didn’t know he was going to be killed by Sage, that the real transition of power was a two-phase effort. She pulled the strings, her inside man risked it all to emplace the pen, and when she was done with him she’d simply kill him and assume the throne.
Given how she’d placed a knife to my throat, this detail didn’t surprise me much. And it didn’t matter. Ian would be a free man by sunset, and on his way home within days. I’d be on my way to South America, free of Parvaneh and the palace politics of the Organization. Why Jais had fought to be promoted there, I had no idea—the real action occurred at the Outfit.
I nodded to Dustin. “Good. What then?”
He fired
up the cigarette between his lips, the thin hiss of the butane lighter shooting a blue-orange spike of flame. “She receives her in-briefs from the vicars, begins the transition—”
“What’s this?” I asked, pointing to a map of Rio de Janeiro with a neatly compassed circle around a cluster of populated areas between the mountains and the sea: Rocinha. My slum battleground of a highly eventful trip to Brazil earlier that year.
“Ground zero,” he answered, dropping the lighter and taking a drag. “The Handler’s private nuke will be transported to Rio de Janeiro and placed in Rocinha for detonation within seventy-two hours of our regime change.”
“Detonation? Why?” I blurted the words, patently unable to feign agreement with or even acceptance of what he was telling me. My chest was constricting with dread, breath quickening as I struggled to follow Dustin’s response.
“Don’t you see the genius? Rocinha is where the opposition group hunted the Handler’s ambassador and heir. Sage is going to send a message: you hunted our people in your backyard, and we recovered them and retaliated.”
“But the fallout…from a nuke in Rio—”
“It’s contained by the mountains. Look, it’s a small device, right? Blast radius contained to a ghetto sitting in the bowl of mountains between the wealthiest parts of Rio: Sao Conrado to the west, Leblon and Ipanema to the east, none of which will be harmed in the slightest. Sure, the tunnel under the mountains will be shut down for decontamination, but no real infrastructure will be harmed in the slightest.”
I balked. “Except Rocinha.”
“Well, yeah,” he agreed. “Obviously that’ll be mostly wiped from the map. Two hours after detonation we’ll release a statement of responsibility by an Islamic extremist group. The civilized world will blame terrorists: there’s a two-hundred-foot statue of Jesus in Rio, for Christ’s sake. But the criminal underground will know, and the Organization’s legitimacy will be secured for decades.”
