by K. T. Tomb
Savannah decided that she needed a drink. God only knew that she’d need several more when Travis got back to the hotel with his head full of chasing lost causes. She came in off the balcony, and raided the minibar for a vodka and tonic, staring into space, vaguely in the direction of the still-stacked pile of records on the lounge sofa bed that was, in its current form, extended out into its sleeping configuration. The papers took up two thirds of the space. Why did Travis always find the excitement? Would it be too much to ask for a good lead to cross her path that she could throw herself into with abandon, and leave Travis to pick up the pieces, and worry for her safety? Of course, Savannah knew that her personality traits would never allow that to happen. That was why she worked so well with Travis, of course. Calm, level headed and rational.
Still it didn’t stop her from daydreaming.
***
Travis rocked to and fro in the throes of his nightmare. It was a familiar one, a well-practiced one. One that had haunted for a full year after they’d returned from Japan. A living nightmare that he’d relived every night and had driven him to the edge of sanity but thrown him fully over the precipice of sobriety. Travis had been shot on their very first adventure to Russia and even savagely attacked since the Monica Chen assignment, but for some reason none of those incidents had stuck with him like that had. Perhaps it was on account of the woman’s calculating lack of conscience. She had ice in her veins; cold fish. He’d sought solace in every type of self-medication legally possible to rid himself of those visions. In the end, it had been Savannah that had thrown him the life line that saved him.
But here it was again. Worming its way through the recesses of his sleeping mind and throwing up the Technicolor motion picture of his encounter with Monica Chen in the basement of that house in Druid Hills; the basement where she’d shot him in the gut and left him for dead.
He’d found the front door to Miya’s house locked, but on skirting round the side of the property to the backyard, he found he was able to gain access through an open window. He was clearly getting the hang of this breaking and entering business, having doubled the number of buildings he had entered illegally in his lifetime in just a couple of days. He tried to minimize his breathing, which made the noise of the blood pumping in his ears seem that much louder. He could hear raised female voices echoing through the wood-paneled halls of the house so, as softly footed as he could, Travis made his way toward them. He had a reasonable guess as to whom the voices belonged to. One sounded in a considerable amount of distress; the other calm, but he couldn’t quite make out the words which, as he came to the front entrance of the house, became louder. Travis saw that there was an open door with steps leading down to the basement, there was a dim light coming from below. Before he investigated further, Travis had a sudden idea. Retracing his steps, he made his way back to the study that they had handed over the deed to the mine in less than thirty minutes earlier. The deed lay on the table, neatly folded next to an open briefcase that on inspection contained several passports from various nationalities, all bearing the picture of the woman claiming to be Miya Richards but bearing different names. Travis found a United States passport in the Richards name, and pocketed it along with the deed. He had this imposter effectively trapped in a basement, and Savannah would surely be along with the police soon, but despite having the clear advantage there was always the possibility that the fake Richards would escape him. He would need evidence that he was right were that to be the case. He was about to go and confront the woman, when he thought it might be prudent to arm himself. Travis was far from a violent man—in fact he abhorred it—but from the experiences that still haunted his days and nights, he knew all too well that other people were not so reticent. He found a heavy iron poker in the study’s fireplace and now suitably armed, he crept back to the entrance to the cellar.
Travis saw as he was halfway down the steps that there would be a time at the bottom of the steps where his legs would come into view of anyone in the room before the rest of his body, which would leave him completely exposed. Savannah did warn him about not doing anything rash, but he didn’t see any other options available, so he decided to leap the last six steps or so, landing with a loud thud and a grunt on the basement floor. Richards was standing in the well-lit room and had been clearly talking to someone in a chair whose features were blocked by the impostor’s body. Richards, or whoever she was, turned calmly to face Travis as he landed.
“Mr. Monahan, so good to see you again.”
Travis was reminded of what he had thought about the woman the first time they had met. Cold fish. That was right. This woman must have ice in her veins.
“I don’t know who you are,” Travis said, “but you’re not Miya Richards and I’m afraid I can’t allow you to do… whatever it is you’re planning to do.”
“Well, I have to say Mr. Monahan, I am impressed with your deductive skills in at least figuring things out this far, but I see things a little differently. I was about to let Miya here go. I don’t need to be her, anymore.”
The woman stood aside to reveal that the person sitting in the chair was in fact tied to it. Miya Richards was covered in grime, and her face was streaked with tears. She looked like she had been kept there for quite some time. She appeared to be unconscious.
“You see, I have just injected her with a little something to help her sleep.” She waved an empty hypodermic needle she was carrying in her left hand. “By the time she wakes up, I’ll be long gone, and on my way to sell the most valuable amethyst mine in Japanese history to the highest bidder on the black market, now that you’ve done such a good job in finding it and the deed.”
“Assuming you get past me.”
Travis squared himself up. He was considerably bigger than the fraudulent woman.
“Tell me this though, who are you, really? The game is over; you might as well give it up.”
“Yes, I suppose this game is indeed over.”
Travis noticed that her Boston accent had slowly faded, being steadily replaced by an upper-class British one.
“You can call me Monica. I do this for a living. Sometimes for myself, like this little jaunt, and sometimes for paying clients who need things done quietly and well. I’m very good at impersonating people, you see. I’m also very good at not getting caught out, until now it would appear.”
“Drop the needle. The police are on their way.” Travis hefted the iron poker high.
Monica merely raised her eyebrows.
“Well, that means that sadly I will have to cut our little chat short.”
She tossed the hypodermic at Travis with terrific accuracy which made him flinch despite the fact that a needle would do him little damage. It was a momentary reflex that gave Monica all the time she needed. Travis looked at her, saw the gun that had appeared in her right hand, and felt a burning sensation in his stomach that accompanied the loud pop of the firing of a suppressed weapon. He fell backward, dropping the poker with a clattering, ringing noise that echoed round the stone walls of the cellar.
Not again, he thought. He saw Monica’s stocking clad legs step over him, and he tried to feebly grab her ankle. She shook him off with very little effort and he heard her high heels clicking up the steps.
Savannah was going to be mad at him. He had screwed it all up by being rash. Oh well. Never mind that now. It was done. He reached inside his breast pocket and withdrew the deed and the passport. At least when they found him, they’d know what was going on from these documents. He wondered if there really were gods who looked after the dead. Is that what Izanami did? Or did she cause people to die? Maybe this was punishment for swinging on her statue back in Nikko. His shirt was turning red. That could be a problem. Someone else’s problem now, unless Savannah got here pretty quickly. He remembered that Monica was trying to leave the country. He should stop her. Not that he could catch her again now, but he should do something. Using the ink Monica had just given him, he finger painted a short message fo
r Savannah on the floor next to him. He could sleep for a year. Travis closed his eyes, and drifted away to a place where nothing hurt.
He woke up drenched in sweat. As his mind cleared, Travis couldn’t decide whether that was as a result of the intense nightmare or the horrible Sri Lankan weather. Within a few moments, he was breathing regularly again and was shivering from the cold dampness against his skin.
I guess it was the dream, he thought, as he pulled off the wet T-shirt and stood up to go search for a dry one. The AC is kicking in here.
He pulled a clean, white shirt over his head and sat on the edge of the bed with his head in both his hands, trying to shake the memories from his mind.
“Pull it together, old boy,” he said out loud, before falling backward onto the bed, pulling the blankets around him and going back to sleep.
Chapter Three
Buzz-Cut walked a pace and a half behind Hatchet-Face, hovering just over his right shoulder like a linebacker sized bird of prey. Now that he was in step behind the two men, it was apparent to Travis how large both of them were, although Buzz-Cut was easily by fifty pounds the heavier and apparently chiseled from granite. Travis felt that he’d have to go to the gym for at least a year before standing next to this specimen, especially if Savannah happened to be around. Hatchet-Face— whose name Travis decided was a poor nom-de-guerre and resolved to come up with a better suiting one as soon as he could marshal his thoughts to the task—led Buzz-Cut deeper and deeper into the market district of Colombo. The relative opulence of the street with the hotel and bank gave way to tight, unmarked streets that were barely more than bare earth roads. The deluge had washed out the streets, and the stench of the drains was high. Three story buildings flanked the ruler straight road the two men led Travis on to, and every building bore at least two advertising signs, electronics, timber merchants, the ubiquitous independent diamond traders. Travis thought he had been down this road before, but couldn’t be sure. Colombo was a city of different similarities; all streets were unique and identical in different measures. Tuk-tuks buzzed slowly, sharing the street with the pedestrians like bumblebees amongst ants. The ants flowed around the pollen-carriers, truncating the spread of humanity. Travis had to move closer to his marks, lest he lose them completely.
This was an error. After another fifty yards, Travis stopped. The two men had disappeared from sight completely, although it seemed impossible that two broad shouldered six footers could vanish anywhere; let alone in a district of Colombo where tourists were rare. Travis turned around, looking for the brutally short hair and shined head of Buzz-Cut. This was Travis’ second mistake, which he recognized immediately. He had turned his back on an alleyway, and some part of his brain alerted him to what his eyes had missed. There was someone behind him, and in a trice he was being roughly dragged backward into the shade of this gap between two ramshackle buildings. The air left his lungs as he was tossed into the wall, rough concrete grazing him through his light jacket. Travis gasped, clutching for air, and put up his right hand as his left went to his breast as if to pump his lungs like bellows. No words would form in his mouth, only rasping gasps. His eyes had a red tint as his retinas rattled in his skull. Buzz-Cut looked gargantuan, purple skinned and possessed of cool, controlled violence. The giant of myth stepped toward Travis, and hauled him to his feet. A cultured, west coast voice spoke, and Hatchet-Face came into view. The man’s voice was incongruous with his appearance, that of a gunslinger.
“It’s not polite to follow people,” he said. “A pudgy white man like you, gonna get yourself messed up if you’re not careful. Who the hell are you?”
Travis, slowly getting to his feet, barely had the mental acuity to lie and decided that honesty might be the best policy; mostly, at least. He knew a false name would not survive a shakedown, revealing his passport in his jacket pocket. “Travis Monahan, I’m a lecturer. Damn, that hurt. I just spotted you up the street, and I haven’t met many Americans lately. I was just trying to catch up to you, say hello. What was with the bushwhacking?” He coughed, and spat out a freshly loosened chunk of phlegm.
“A lecturer?” Hatchet-Face broke into a dry, cackling laugh that to Travis contained not one ounce of genuine mirth. “Barnes, we got ourselves a teacher playing spy. Listen, Monahan. Fuck off. Let him go, Barnes.” Buzz-Cut, or Barnes as he was apparently known, stepped back from Travis, but didn’t take his eyes off him for a moment. Travis was reminded of movies of the Vietnam War, the scenes where marines bearing the same haircut as Barnes train themselves to peak fitness before smoking heroin in the jungle—except this guy was too young to be a Vietnam veteran, so he never went down that route. Could these guys be army? Ex-Special forces? What are they doing here, and connected to Monica Chen, no less?
“Wait, hold on, just relax,” Travis said. “I clearly made an error in judgment and I’ll be on my way. Damn, what the hell is it with you guys? You’re acting like mafia, or something.”
More laughter, even Barnes cracked the faintest fake smile. “Maybe we are, Monahan, or something. You think about that? Now, run along, and I’ll forget this happened. Don’t follow us again, capice?”
The Italian word was enunciated to show the joke. This bastard was actually joking. Travis felt his jaw flap with words that would not form as he watched the weather beaten skin on the man’s face contort as he laughed. The deep olive tones in his flesh gave the impression of a well-worn armchair, shiny and stretched taut over too much frame. Hatchet-Face turned away, and his man Barnes, silent, monolithic, followed in his wake.
That the two men were up to no good was abundantly clear. Cocksure arrogance backed with menace and a propensity for instantaneous violent response to perceived threat? It all sounded like so much military industrial complex run off to Travis. As he dusted himself down, he realized that his gut instinct might not be too far off the mark. The faces fit, but not the location. Why would US military types be all the way out here? Sri Lankans were with some justification, paranoid about external influences in the post-colonial era. India is on the doorstep, and the island made close links to China and Russia a priority to stave off US interference; that much was common enough knowledge for even Travis to have. Though it was true that the American hegemony was an attractive proposition in economic terms, to get in bed with Washington would antagonize China and Russia; Sri Lanka found itself playing a grand game of chess, with the sole aim being a stalemate with no loss of pieces.
This knowledge did not help Travis shine any light on the relationship between Chen and the two Americans. Perhaps it meant nothing. He was, after all, supposed to be here investigating fraud in the diamond trade, not mixing it up with his nemesis and who he could only presume to be agents of the US Government. The streets were beginning to sweat again as Travis left the alley, and headed toward the hotel he was staying at with Savannah. The rising heat brought with it the spicy smells of the market stalls that propped up against the walls of almost every building and enforced bottlenecked traffic of both vehicular and pedestrian varieties. He walked back through his original route, which took him past the hotel where Chen had spoken to Hatchet-Face. Damn it, it felt like blood on his tongue, there had to be a connection between his investigation and these other two actors. His rational mind came into play. He wasn’t so important, Alpha Adventures certainly didn’t rate high enough for governmental interference. Still. Chen had been foiled by him twice before; and twice she had responded by putting a bullet in him. Why would she be here?
He stopped at the doors to the hotel, and after a moment went inside. The same concierge that had opened the door for Chen and the two Americans also opened it to Travis. He was a slim man, almost a boy with barely a hair on his upper lip. The uniform he was wearing, now Travis was closer, was particularly well pressed. Like the cleanliness of the doorman would suggest, the bar would not have been out of place back home in uptown Atlanta. Travis ordered a beer, and sat where Hatchet-Face had sat only fifteen or twenty minutes earlier. The
beer brought no insight, but the local brew was refreshing and remarkably tasty. The second beer sunk in the same way as the first. Travis sat in silence, trying to douse the intentions of Monica Chen via osmosis. If he could just pluck her motivation out of the air she had breathed, the place where she had been, if only there was still an echo of her words.
Why had that bitch been speaking to Hatchet-Face? If they were also enemies, didn’t that mean that he should be allied with the interests of the Americans? Perhaps it was the troublesome disregard for authority and bullies that Travis held, but it didn’t seem to him that the kind of business Hatchet-Face was involved with was anything positive, not for Sri Lanka, and probably not in the interests of Travis Monahan. There had to be a connection. What was the history here? Chen impersonated a descendant of the ancestral owners of an amethyst mine in Japan in order to steal it. She then conspired with crooked officials in Russia to steal a container ship full of gold bullion. Those were the first two cases Travis had been involved in. Both involved an audacious theft of natural resources; could that be what Chen was really up to?
No, it couldn’t be that. Diamonds aren’t an indigenous Sri Lankan product. Did that matter? Maybe Chen was just a master thief, and Hatchet-Face is protecting the interests of his business, which could well be in the diamond trade after all. Travis was having a hard time convincing himself of this rationale, so he ordered a third beer. No doubt Savannah would smell it on him later, but to hell with it. It had been a rough day. The bartender brought over the cool, refreshing nectar from the gods. Travis began to feel a little rush. It had been far too long.
Chapter Five
There was no doubt, to Savannah’s mind at least, that Travis had certainly lost his. The wild look in his eyes as he foamed and raved on the ride home was so far from his usual world-weary and laconic self she had felt like a character in a particularly lurid episode of The Twilight Zone. Dawn broke, and the dream was gone. When Savannah woke up at seven thirty in the morning, the alternate-world Travis who fought women in the street and drank himself into jail seemed to be gone again, replaced by a jovial and gregarious version already at the laptop they had brought with them.
