by David Stone
“Why, Corporal Ahmed. I thought you’d never ask.”
24
The Intercontinental Hotel, Singapore
“Will she die?”
Naumann did not answer. Time passed, and still he said nothing. Dalton and Naumann were standing at the pillared railing around the Piazza Garibaldi in Cortona. It was a warm summer afternoon, and the light across the checkerboard valley far below was honeyed and rich, the timeless light of Tuscany. Naumann was wearing a pale tan summer-weight suit over a soft-blue, open-necked shirt. He seemed to have recovered from being dead, since he now had quite a decent tan and his pale blue eyes were clear. He looks the picture of health, for a dead man, thought Dalton. For that matter, Dalton knew many men who were still alive who didn’t look half as good as Porter did. Naumann was staring out across the valley toward Lake Trasimeno, apparently lost in thought. Dalton sipped at his glass of pinot for a time, willing to let Naumann be lost in thought. In his heart, he wasn’t ready for an answer to his question. Let it be a beautiful day for a while longer. And it was a beautiful day. The swifts soared and wheeled in the luminous air, their formation tight and nimble, their wings catching the light as they dipped and rose. The air smelled of cedar and oleander and green vines heavy with ripe fruit. Dalton no longer wanted his answer. But Naumann had not forgotten it.
“Will she die?” said Naumann finally, watching the swifts as they disappeared into the blue distance. “I did warn you, didn’t I?”
He held out his glass.
Dalton filled it with some pinot and topped his own.
“Yes. You did.”
Naumann turned to look at Dalton. The sunlight lay bright on the side of his cheek, and a single ray of it caught the lens of his right eye, making it shine like a little blue diamond. The left side of his face was in shadow.
“Yes. She will.”
Dalton’s chest clamped up, and his breathing became difficult.
“You know this?”
“I know she’ll die. So will you.”
Dalton gave the matter some thought. Asking questions of the dead had its risks. The dead tended to be Delphic.
“Well, we’ll all die, won’t we? You did.”
“Yes,” said Naumann, granting the point. “That’s true.”
“But she might not die from this? This attack in Florence?”
Naumann appeared not to have heard him. His expression was remote, his mind elsewhere. He came back after a time, looking puzzled.
“Yes. That’s true. She might not.”
“Good. Fine. I can live with that.”
Naumann smiled.
“Can you?”
“I can. How are you?”
“Me?”
“Yes. You’re not really here, are you?”
“In which sense? Mentally? Spiritually? Ectoplasmically?”
“I mean, you’re absent. What are you thinking about?”
Naumann’s face darkened.
“I’m not sure I’m allowed to speak about it.”
“Allowed? By whom?”
Naumann made a gesture with the hand that held his wineglass, a wide, sweeping arc that took in all of Cortona. The afternoon sun blazed in his glass as he turned with it, and little diamonds of refracted light—tiny prisms—flickered across his haggard face and glittered in his pale eyes.
“By Cortona, I think. I can’t seem to leave here.”
“Leave Cortona? But you were all over the States with me. That safe house near Missoula. In Carmel, after Laura died. Now you can’t leave Cortona?”
“Yes. Everything’s changed. I can’t remember how long I’ve been here. And the clocks are . . . odd. It’s always about four in the afternoon. Or late evening. The whole thing is giving me the creeps. You get the idea you’re not alone. And things move that should not move. You hear voices. Whispers. Around the far corners. In the empty squares. Down the alleys. You can be in a crowd of people in the square, everyone talking and moving in the light. Close your eyes for a moment, and, when you open them, you’re alone. The city is either empty or too damn crowded. Sometimes I know the faces. Other times, they all look . . . inhuman. Dead faces. I’d leave if I could, Micah. If I could figure out how. This place is old, Micah. Older than any other place on the earth. The whole mountain is a tomb. I’m beginning to feel . . . out of place . . . here. Resented. But I don’t know how to leave. I don’t know the way out. Do you understand me?”
“Resented? By whom?”
Naumann merely shook his head, his eyes bleak.
“Sometimes, in the middle of the sunlight, I’m looking at the cobblestones, in the really old part, on the Via Janelli, and I’ll see this . . . smoke . . . coming up out of the stones. Gray. You can see through it. But the wind never moves it. It just drifts up into a shape and hangs there. Hangs there and looks at me. I can feel the emotion coming off it. The emotion is resentment. Makes no sense. Can’t figure it out. Wish I could leave, Micah. Really do.”
“Porter, do you believe you’re dead?”
Naumann looked at him for a while, his face set and stony.
“No. I guess I don’t. Do you?”
Dalton stared at him for a while, trying to find an answer. There was a rush of music, a deafening crescendo, that seemed to be coming out of the blue Tuscan sky itself, massed strings behind a liquid, sensuous melody of brassy horns, familiar but without a name. Naumann looked up at the sky, his face changing as he came back to Dalton—a ferocious, warning look.
They’re here!
Mandy Pownall was shaking him by the shoulder, her face pale and her hair in disarray. He looked up at her. Her robe had fallen open. He could see her full, round breasts, as pale as pearls, and her erect nipples, a deeper rose color inside an aureole of shell pink; her flat, white belly.
“Micah. The desk just called. The police are on their way up!”
Dalton struggled out of his dream, sat upright in the chair. He was in the suite at the Intercontinental. The plasma screen was rolling the credits for Lady from Shanghai. Somebody had turned the theme music up very loud. It filled the room. Mandy stood up and looked down at him, gathering her robe in tight and crossing her arms under her breasts.
“Christ. What time is it?”
“It’s four,” she whispered, a hoarse croak, straining to be heard over the music, her eyes a little wide. “In the morning.”
Dalton got up out of the chair, fully awake. Mandy was watching him, uncertain but steady. She was a tough woman, but she did not need to be here. Why Cather had insisted was still a mystery. But one thing was clear, now that it looked like the bluff had failed and Chong Kew Sak was going to play rough: two agents locked up in Changi was a lousy tactical deployment. Dalton knew there was no way she would have pulled out of the field, if given any time to think about it. But he had thought about it. A lot.
“Mandy, I need you to do something for me.”
“Yes. Certainly. What?” A hoarse whisper, barely audible over the soundtrack music.
“I need you to scarper.”
Doubt flickered across her face and her mouth tightened.
“Now you want me to scarper? Now? Bloody poor timing, Micah.”
“Yes. I’m changing the tactics. You need to be on the outside.”
“Lovely. And how do we arrange that, with the bloody wolf kicking at the bloody door?”
“Go to your room, Mandy. Get some clothes on. Your bedroom suite connects to the Ambassador Suite next door. That suite’s empty.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m a spy. Plus I reserved it the morning before we left for Milan and I paid for it when we got here. I like to have an evasion strategy.”
“Paid? With what? Your platypus card? The cops will know that.”
“No. I used one of the Agency’s cover cards.”
“Whose?”
“Jack Stallworth’s. He’s dead, he won’t mind. Here’s the key card. Get yourself in there. Take the encrypted cell. Plug in the cha
rger and keep the phone charging. Get on the line to the duty desk at Langley and keep them on the line. Do not get disconnected. You understand me? Stay on that line, and don’t open the door to anyone.”
“You sure this is Chong?”
“Who else?” he said, looking at the door and then back at her. She had the two small red spots on her cheekbones now, and the glitter in her eyes, the look she got when she was about to dig her stilettos in.
“No. I’m not running away.”
“No. You’re not. You’re staying loose. Operational. They take me, I’ll need you on the outside . . . When I’m gone, get Langley to send over someone from the U.S. Embassy. Go straight there.”
“No. I’m not leaving the field and hiding in the bloody Embassy.”
“You really want to be in a jail cell alone with Chong Kew Sak?”
Mandy worked on it but could not hide the way her irises narrowed, blinded by the incandescent now. There were voices out in the hallway, and now a loud, rapid pounding at the main door. The knocking accelerated. Muffled voices in the hall; stern, official voices. The moment was on them. Mandy nodded once, pulled him down and kissed him very hard, put everything she had into it. Dalton felt the kiss burn through him.
Then she pushed him off, her face pale, sent him a last anxious look over her left shoulder and was gone down the hall, her robe flaring wide as she ran. Someone in the front hall was using a boot on the door. Down in his lizard brain, something a little like a crocodile opened one slitted green eye. He felt his blood rising, anger coming up fast. He hit the remote and killed the picture, throwing the suite into an ominous silence punctuated only by the aggressive pounding on the door.
He threw on his suit jacket, glanced around the suite, controlled his aggression, letting it work for him and not against him. He gatheredup his wallet and his cell phone, slipping them into his pocket as he walked to the main door, waited a moment with his hand on the latch, lowering his adrenaline, and then pulled it open. Sergeant Ong Bo was standing there, apparently in the same cheap black suit, his rubbery lips pulled tight and his black eyes hard. Two uniformed cops, both thick-necked and bull-bodied and dull-eyed, barely out of their teens, were standing behind him. The little Malay cop, Corporal Ahmed, was nowhere around. Ong was holding up a worn leather badge case, flashing tin, with his best Hollywood war face on. Dalton figured he practiced it in the mirror.
“Mr. Dalton. You must come with us.”
Dalton went back to his Brit banker persona, edged it with some steel.
“Bloody hell I will. It’s four in the goddam morning.”
Ong tried to peer around Dalton’s shoulder, but he filled the frame.
“Where Miss Pownall?”
“Out. Hours ago.”
Ong had a problem. The only way he could argue this was to admit that they had the place miked.
“Why she move?”
“Why she move? Because you feckless hammerheads searched the entire fucking apartment, including her goddam panty drawer.”
Ong, in spite of himself, facing Dalton’s rage, stepped back a pace, and then another, until he had backed into one of the uniforms behind him. Dalton was pleased to see it, partly because Mandy was getting the seconds she would need to open the door to the next suite. The loss of face made Sergeant Ong get all hissy.
“She must come too. Where is she?”
“The British Embassy. To file a formal complaint.”
It gave Dalton some hope when Ong went a little green at that. He believed it, or, at least, believed it was possible. Which meant their mikes had told them nothing since Dalton had put on Lady from Shanghai. It also meant that he’d been right: there were no cameras. And no surveillance in the lobby or on the street, because he’d have known she hadn’t left the building. They trusted their mikes. Careless. More lousy tradecraft.
In a word, mooks.
Ong was looking a tad downhearted. Not even Chong Kew Sak could get Mandy Pownall out of the British Embassy. This was not going according to plan. But Dalton was still here. That much he could save.
His round, rubbery face, as much as it could, became set and hardened. He turned to the two guards, said something urgent and ugly in Hokkien that apparently meant Search this pompous asshole’s suite right now. Galvanized, they pushed past Dalton, the muscular boy on the left aiming a hard shoulder butt that Dalton saw coming, steeling himself for it. The kid cop bounced off him and slammed into the wall. He came right back at Dalton, red-faced, boiling with the indignant outrage of a totalitarian cop when faced with the slightest civilian affront; hand up, palm open, a wide, sweeping strike to the side of Dalton’s head. This ill-advised action on the part of the kid cop put a variety of factors into immediate play. Dalton’s grip on his temper had always been a little slippery. It was four in the morning. He was slightly hungover. Okay. Not slightly. He was a train wreck. The kid was trying to bitch-slap him. Dalton did not like being bitch-slapped. Not one little bit. Plus he was brutally hungover. This may have been mentioned previously, but it bears repeating. So, the situation being what it was, at the end of the day, in the fullness of time, and in the half nanosecond that it took for all these various factors to kick in, Dalton lost it.
In one snaky, fast motion, he caught the kid’s incoming right wristbone with his own right hand, jerking him forward and off balance, turning the wrist around as he pulled the kid’s arm downward along his right side, using the kid’s own momentum, until the kid was almost on his knees, his right arm fully extended, palm twisted sideways. At the same moment, Dalton braced his left hand on the back of the kid’s elbow and jerked the kid’s forearm upward with his right. This had the intriguing effect of snapping the kid’s arm at the elbow joint, which tends to sting a bit. The sound of the joint giving way was a little like somebody twisting the turkey’s leg right out of the joint at Thanksgiving, a muffled, sinewy grinding followed by a short, sharp snap. The kid’s forearm had now assumed an angle in relation to the upper arm that was anatomically quite novel, if not unique. This all happened in less than two seconds. Two seconds that changed the kid’s world. The kid’s immediate response to having the basic geometry of his right arm radically revised was a contralto shriek, followed by a precipitous upward glissando into frequencies only audible to Nancy Pelosi. A moment later, Dalton not surprisingly, was looking down the black muzzle of Sergeant Ong’s Glock service pistol, held out the full length of Ong’s arm, the knuckle of his trigger finger showing pink, then white, as he pressed on the blade.
Dalton stared at Ong’s wet face over the vibrating pistol, aware of the black hole of the muzzle as it wavered left and right. Stared hard into Ong’s right eye at the far end of a long narrow corridor. Waited for the shot, thinking that, so far, the score here in lovely downtown Singapore was Snobbish British Bankers 2 and Pushy Local Noncoms 0, and that, if he had it to do all over again, he would have broken Ong’s arm instead.
At Dalton’s feet, the kid cop was busily throwing up something lumpy, gray, and apparently inexhaustible on the plush Oriental carpet in the foyer. The other cop was standing out of the firing line, his flat face stunned, waiting for Ong to shoot the ang mor. Everybody in the hall was waiting for Ong to shoot the ang mor. Hell, even Ong was waiting for Ong to shoot the ang mor. Ong did not shoot the ang mor.
FIVE MINUTES LATER, Dalton was in the back of the same armored-up limo with the bulletproof glass, sitting alone on the black leather bench seat and looking at Sergeant Ong’s rubbery face, shadowy in the downlights from the overhead mood lighting, watching Ong watch him back with a carefully blank expression that did not hide the rage in him. The kid cop with both arms working was driving the limo. The kid cop with the backward right arm that looked sort of funny and didn’t work at all was on his way to the nearest military hospital in an unmarked EMS van. Dalton figured the kid was still screaming so loud, the driver wouldn’t need to use the siren. Outside the tinted windows of the limo, Singapore unspooled like a long neon hallucination
, the streets deserted, the lamps glowing in the damp tropical haze, the tires drumming on the blacktop. The limo smelled of leather polish and Turkish tobacco and the unwashed body of Sergeant Ong. As far as Dalton could determine, they were headed east through the Malay cantonment of Geylang. The last road sign he had been able to pick out of the gloom was Changi Road. Changi Road led, eventually, to Upper Changi Road, which led in its turn to the gates of Changi Prison.
Jolly good work, thought Dalton. Only on the ground for eighteen hours and already you’ve found a way to infiltrate Changi Prison.
The limo rolled on through the steaming Asian night, but it did not roll all the way to Changi Prison. After about a half hour’s travel through darkened apartment blocks and shuttered strip malls of eastern Singapore, the streetscape opened up into rolling green space. A few sago palms appeared, and the homes got more expensive; and now, through the palms, Dalton was getting slices of a broad starlit sea. A street sign said NETHERAVON ROAD where they turned, and cruised along through an area that looked and, when Dalton rolled the window down, smelled of the sea. Dalton knew the area, a dense, tree-shaded residential area north of Changi Village, a pricey resort section of eastern Singapore with a view across the channel to Malaysia and Pulau Ubin. In a few minutes, the limo came to a stop under the marquee of a softly lit mahogany-and-teak hotel structure half hidden in palms and bougainvillea. It looked large and pricey and exclusive, more of a sanctuary than a hotel; enclosed, walled, a cloister offering a Zen-like simplicity. The parking lot was empty, and no one was moving around in the grounds. A sign, in fine brass letters, said HENDON HILLS GOLF AND COUNTRY CLUB. Under this sign, a temporary-looking notice had been attached to the wall.
It read: CLOSED FOR PRIVATE FUNCTION.
Sergeant Ong, who had neither spoken one word nor taken his flat reptilian stare off Dalton during the entire trip, grunted a command that Dalton took to mean Get out. Dalton tried the door. It was unlocked. Dalton got out, a little stiff, leaving the door open behind him. Sergeant Ong made no move to follow him. He leaned forward, grabbed the interior handle, shot Dalton a look that said Someday, and pulled the door closed hard enough to rock the Home Ministry tank a little on its fat, bulletproof tires.
