by David Stone
Dalton did not look at Mandy as he bowed—a short, insulting bow, during which he never took his eyes off Chong’s face—he had made an enemy, he could see. But right now, he didn’t give a damn. He straightened, and walked easily to the door. Chong turned to follow, his face set and his body poised to do . . . something.
But he did nothing. Mandy breezed by him with a half smile on her lips and her heart in her mouth. The open doorway, where Dalton was waiting with an expression of polite impatience on his face, looked a hundred miles away, and the long hallway beyond it seemed to recede into infinity. No one stopped them at the stairwell. No one stepped into their path at the front gate. They hailed a cab and left the compound. A short while later, leaning back into the greasy vinyl of a lime green gypsy Hyundai, Mandy found that she could actually breathe. She looked across at Dalton.
“Micah, I think I want to bear your children.”
Dalton, staring out the window, had already made three futile calls to Venice. Brancati was in Florence. Galan was out. No one knew anything.
“Yeah. I was pretty good.”
“Good? You were magnificent. It was like watching Rupert Everett dress down Jabba the Hutt. I particularly liked insupportable affronts.”
Dalton’s mind remained in Florence. They sat a while in silence.
“Try calling again,” she said.
“The battery’s dead. Do you have your phone?”
“In the room. Needed a charge. Sorry.”
Mandy was quiet again, for a few blocks.
“This cyberhacker thing worries me. It’s always the X factor that gets you. This is definitely an X factor. Maybe it’s time to get out of Dodge.”
Dalton looked at her.
“What, you mean cheese it and scarper?”
“It’s a thought. I’m not happy with the idea of being in a cell alone with Chong Kew Sak. Nor am I thrilled with the alternate plan, which involves being dead. My long-term plans did not include being dead.”
“Nor did mine. Anyway, we can’t scarper. Chong will have sent someone to scoop our passports from the hotel. That’s why they held us for an hour and thirteen minutes. They also went through our suite. There’ll be taps, bugs, maybe even a camera.”
“So we go to the Oriental. Or Raffles.”
“No. We’re supposed to be English bankers. Moving out of the hotel would kill that cover. Only surveillance-aware people would do that.”
“Jolly. So we stay. Where do I shower?”
“I wouldn’t.”
Mandy shuddered. Dalton could feel her shaking next to him. He leaned in to her, trying to comfort her. Mandy’s eyes were shining again. She was a good agent, but fieldwork was not her specialty. Why had Cather sent her along? He always had reasons. What were they? Mandy sighed, seemed to gather herself again, smiled and gave him one of her sidelong looks.
“Micah, we’re bloody spies, aren’t we? We could do something all Matt Damon-ish. Overpower somebody and use our top secret thingy-whatsit to gain entry to the hidden whatsa-hoozit and whisk us all to safety.”
“Sorry. The top secret thingy-whatsit is in the shop.”
“So we’re staying?”
“Afraid so.”
“Rats.”
“Rats?”
Mandy nodded.
“Right now, rats is le mot juste.”
Another interlude; two solitudes of dark thought.
Mandy said:
“About Fyke. Do you think your bluff will work?”
“Chong will either cover his ass with Lee and then have us arrested on some sort of bullshit charge or he’ll come back with a face-saving counteroffer. If he does come back, we deal out the Chinese techs.”
“Where’s your money going?”
“Mandy, I haven’t a clue.”
Mandy thought that over for a block. They could see the Intercontinental sign looming over a tower. The sky was clouding up. The monsoon season was about to begin. Mandy let out a long sighing breath.
“One good thing, anyway, Micah.”
“Yes?”
“Whatever they’ve been doing to Ray Fyke, they’ll stop.”
18
The National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland
Nikki Turrin, sitting at an empty table in the Crypto City Starbucks, stared down at the top of her Vente mocha-fratte-latte-whatever and tried not to compare it with the exquisite cup of caffè corretto she had shared with a lovely young Italian boy on a terrace in Lucca on a Tuscan summer’s day that may have happened light-years away. The surface of the Vente whatever was sprinkled with a substance the barista stoutly maintained was free-trade, shade-grown Brazilian chocolate. Nikki, one of the Monitors and therefore of an analytical turn, had examined the material closely and was coming to the unhappy conclusion that it was actually organic carob shavings. Nikki’s heritage was Italian, so she loathed carob as much as she loathed anything even remotely vegan. She pushed the cup aside and turned again to her shell pink Apple notebook, where she had hit PAUSE in the middle of a YouTube video that had her a little troubled.
It was grainy, handheld, a little shaky, and seemed to have been shot from a distance, through a screen of forest growth of some sort. The camera had been trained on a swimming pool, large, not well maintained, but full of clear water. In that background was a villa of a type she had seen on a trip to Bulgaria a few years back, all pillars and turrets and arched windows, none of them agreeing with anything else. The villa gave the impression of vulgar wealth. In the foreground, a party seemed to be going on, not the kind of party she would have enjoyed. Hookers and thugs, was the impression she got as the video rolled, lots of skinny girls getting naked and being manhandled by beefy, beer-gutted men wearing too much gold.
One fellow stood out: a very large, bald-headed hog of a man with a tattoo that covered his entire chest, perhaps an eagle—an American eagle—with a lance through its chest and some kind of flag or banner attached to the lance. The action unrolled, turned greasy, then nasty, and ended with what appeared to be the horrible choking death of everyone who got into the pool. It had been posted on YouTube by someone who identified himself as YaanMonkey223. YaanMonkey223 claimed to have copied it off an Internet video site in Finland, but in the world of YouTube no serious questions were ever asked about the source or reliability of content. What counted was hits, how many times it had been viewed, and this video showed some signs of going viral, since it had spread as far as her Apple computer in Maryland.
The video troubled her because it wasn’t an obvious fake, a setup, as were most of the terminally tedious clips posted on YouTube. This one had a terrible plausibility. Something about it suggested a real place and real deaths. YaanMonkey223 had added a short description of it, calling it a promo tape that had been deliberately leaked in order to create a cyberspace buzz for somebody’s upcoming flick. Nikki was not convinced. The deaths looked real, and the quality of the foot-age—blurry, handheld—reeked of covert surveillance. Before coming to the NSA she had worked for a prosecutor’s office in Pittsburgh; she’d seen a lot of surveillance footage during a protracted investigation involving thefts from a container yard.
She played it twice more, thinking it over. Then she copied it to her hard drive, inserted a small Sony Micro Vault into a USB port, and copied the video onto that. She disconnected the Micro Vault and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. It felt warm against her thigh, almost radioactive.
She left the Vente whatever on the table, nodded to some coworkers, gathered up her Apple and her purse, and left the cafeteria.
Somebody needed to see this video.
She wasn’t sure who.
She wasn’t sure why.
But somebody needed to see it.
19
The Intercontinental Hotel, Singapore
When they pulled up under the portico of the Intercontinental, a liveried doorman had the cab doors open before it had come to a complete stop. A dashing Sikh about seven feet tall gave Mandy a
dazzling smile and welcomed her return to the hotel in such convincing tones that Mandy wondered if he was a long-lost cousin. Dalton was left alone to extract himself on the starboard side, almost colliding with a lean, wolfish-looking young man with fine, shoulder-length black hair that shimmered like silk, very tan, absurdly handsome in a hard-cut, slightly Hispanic way, resplendent in a superbly executed navy blue lightweight suit and a crisp white shirt that might have been made by Pink’s. Their eyes met briefly, as he stepped back and waited for Dalton to get out of the cab; although he was obviously in a hurry, his open, friendly regard caught Dalton’s attention because his eyes were a shade of pale green that Dalton had never seen before. The man—the boy—was slender, looked very fit, and had a kind of hardness under the charming smile that wasn’t visible unless you knew what to look for. The man’s smile grew wider.
“Forgive me,” he said, bowing slightly. “Don’t mean to push.”
His accent was . . . odd. French, perhaps, but not exactly. Educated.
“Not at all,” said Dalton, returning the smile.
Gay? thought Dalton. Decided no. But something was there, a kind of friendly but critical attention, as if Dalton was being appraised by a potential buyer. He yielded the cab, and the man slid into it with an easy, athletic grace, closing the door without another glance at Dalton.
The cab pulled away, and Dalton was looking at Mandy across the empty space. She was watching the cab merge into Singapore traffic with evident interest. She realized he was looking at her and, in spite of her mood, flashed him one of her electric smiles, pulling her sunglasses down and looking at him over the rims:
“Oh my,” she said.
“BACK WHERE YOU just came from, please,” said Lujac. The driver twisted around to look at him.
“The Home Ministry, sir?”
“Yes, the Home Ministry, please.”
The ride to the Parliament grounds took about thirty minutes through thickening afternoon traffic. On the way, Lujac pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number in Odessa, got a beeping tone, hit the pound sign, followed by a nine-character, alphanumeric pin number, and waited. Not long.
“Black Sea Freight Forward.”
“Hello, Cabbage.”
“Kiki. What do you need?”
“I got into the room. There—”
“How?”
“Pardon?”
“How did you get into the room?”
“How is this your business, Cabbage?”
“If you were clumsy, it will be Daddy’s business.”
Lujac glanced at the driver. He was—or appeared to be—talking on a cell phone and paying no attention to his passenger. Lujac spoke softly.
“I knocked on the door. I was holding an empty FedEx envelope so that if somebody was in the room, I could ask for the wrong guy and apologize. Just trying to find the right guy to give this to. Somebody opened it. A Chinese man with a face like a frog. Bad suit and heavy shoes. An obvious cop. He looked nervous. I said I was there to assist Mr. Dalton. I asked him to identify himself. He said he was from HSBC. The bank. Like hell he was. I said Mr. Dalton may have left some papers in the room and that I had been asked to retrieve them. He looked at the FedEx envelope and thought about it and then let me in. There was another guy there, a short, ratty-looking Malay with a bruised eye and a bandaged hand. Another cop. They looked like they had been tossing the room. They watched me as I wandered about the suite. Looking for the papers. No papers. There was a cell phone on a charger by the house phone. I pretended to use the phone to call Mr. Dalton. While I did, I palmed the cell phone—”
“What would you have done if no one had been in the room?”
“I have a random-number generator; looks like a Palm Pilot. You stick the slide card in the slot and it unlocks almost every hotel door in Christendom in thirty seconds. Why? Are you taking a night course in illegal entries, Cabbage?”
“Why didn’t you wait until there was no one there? Now you’ve been seen.”
“Life is risk. You take it on the hop. I liked the rush, too, with those two cops right there.”
“They know what you look like.”
“Of course they do. So what? They’re gonna call Dalton up, say, Hey, while we were tossing your room, this handsome young blade came to the door asking for you?”
“Aren’t they going to be afraid you’ll tell Dalton they were in the room?”
“This is Singapore. Cops do whatever they want in Singapore. They wanted to toss his room, they tossed it. Maybe they care if he knows, maybe they don’t. Frankly, Cabbage, I don’t give a shit either way. I’m not here for the waters, am I? I’m here to find out why Dalton came to Singapore and then kill him. Kill him a whole lot. This will all be over in twenty-four. The real question is, these are supposed to be two Brits in town for some kind of banking party. Why were the cops in the room in the first place?”
A silence from Larissa’s end of the line. Lujac could hear her thinking it through. She was quick. He’d give her that. A monstrosity but quick.
“Something drew their attention. The cops. If I had to guess, I’d say that when we hacked into the Intourist system to find out where they were staying, we left signs.”
“That’s what I thought too. Did you run a string that would have flagged those two particular names?”
“They were the only ones checking into the Intercontinental. So maybe that would have . . .”
“Not so smart, Cabbage. Now we have cops all over the job.”
“We don’t know that. There could be other reasons.”
“Doesn’t matter now. Got to play it out.”
“Do you still have the cell phone?”
“No. Of course not. All I wanted was a minute with it.”
“Why?”
“Trade secrets, Cabbage. Trade secrets.”
The cab was slowing, moving into the gate area of a massive Victorian pile straight out of Wuthering Heights. Uniformed guards in bug-eyed sunglasses were tensing up and scowling at the car. Lujac snapped the phone shut without saying good-bye, handed the driver a fistful of Sing dollars and got out of the vehicle, putting a puzzled tourist expression on his face as one of the guards moved forward to intercept him at the gates.
“No get in,” said the guard a bit redundantly, given the machine gun and the thuggish scowl, in the pidgin Malay Chinese dialect called Singlish. Lujac went for upper-class Brit Twit, one of his favorites.
“Dreadfully sorry. This isn’t the Parliament?”
“No Parla-men. This Home Ministry. You have note?”
“Note? You mean, appointment?”
“Yes. Appoin-men.”
“No. Just breezing through Singapore. Thought I’d see the sights. What is this building again? The Home Ministry? Lovely old pile. What does the Home Ministry do?”
Direct questions are considered rude in Singapore, but the guard tried to bear up. He was used to Brit Twits. They were thick on the ground in this part of the world.
“Run all Singapore. Run prisons.”
“Prisons? Really. Are there prisons in Singapore?”
The guard was a slab-faced, blocky youngster with a unibrow like a big, fuzzy black caterpillar and a deep furrow between his flat-black eyes. Lujac’s question made the guard’s brow furrow much deeper. He looked a little like Bush thinking. George Bush actually thought pretty well, but it was the bane of his political life that he didn’t look good doing it.
“Yes. All prisons run from here. Changi Prison run from here.”
“Really. Can one visit Changi Prison? Are there tours?”
“Tours? Lah. Go stun now, ang mor. You a bit the blur. No tours.”
“May I tour this building?”
“No. Private. Must have note. Good day, now. You look-see maybe Arab-town town. Look-see Cheena-town town, can. Good day, lah.”
The guard turned away, muttering something in Hokkien that may have been a slur on Lujac’s ancestors. Lujac waved him off, and wandered a b
it, looking for a hawker stand or maybe an open café. He found one not too far away, settled in under an awning, ordered a pint of Singha, a plate of stingray and a bucket of unshucked raw oysters, leaned back into the chair, twitching around a little to get comfortable. He sipped at the Singha—it was chilled delightfully, right down to the core—yawned, blinked, focused his attention on the gates of the Home Ministry.
And waited.
AS SOON AS he entered the suite, Dalton knew it had been tossed. Mandy waited in the front hall, trying not to look for cameras and mikes, feeling that talking herself into this field trip may have been unwise. Dalton went through everything, the entire suite, inch by inch, his motions economical, even graceful. He moves a little like a crocodile, she thought, watching him. Slithery and boneless. She sat on a chair in the entrance hall, leaden and depressed, and desperately in need of a shower.
But she wasn’t ready to go farther into the suite yet.
Just wasn’t . . . ready.
Dalton went through the place quickly, his choices based on bitter experience. He came to a halt, like a short-haired pointer, at two distinct locations: a large Zen garden sandbox, complete with ebony rocks, that sat in the middle of the black lacquer coffee table; and, again, in the master bedroom, the long rosewood campaign chest that sat at the foot of the four-poster bed. He came out of the bedroom, his face a little harder than normal, and walked back out to the entrance hallway. He was holding Mandy’s cell phone. He held it so that Mandy could see the screen and typed in some text.
2 mks 1 coffee table 1 chest my bedrm
Pretty sure no cam
Mandy took the phone.
Fk pretty sure
B dam sure
Dalton smiled, took the phone back.
Am dam sure
Have a shower
Lots of steam
Fog any lens
Mandy considered it, looking hard at Dalton. She had wanted a shower ever since Chong Kew Sak had given her his dung beetle roll around back at the Ministry.
“I think,” she said, trying not to sound theatrical, “that I will have a shower. I’m absolutely beat. Why don’t you mix us some drinks? If you want to call the Head Office, use my phone. The phone charges here are ridiculous.”
