by D. F. Bailey
“Are you wired?”
When Marat failed to respond, Sochi stood up, tipping his chair backward as he rose. The hollow frame crashed onto the patio with a metallic clatter.
“You’re fucking wired, aren’t you?”
Marat stood and stepped away from the table. This time Sochi grabbed the Russian’s arm. In an instant, Marat swung his free hand behind Sochi’s wrist in a swift judo countermove that released Marat’s arm. He then snapped his fist forward with a brisk chop to the center of Sochi’s throat. Sochi dropped his laptop and doubled over clasping at his neck, gasping for air.
“What the fuck?” Sochi wheezed as he tried to breathe.
Eve saw the altercation and ran along the upper promenade, down the staircase and across the patio. When she reached Sochi, she eased him into a chair and began to massage his neck and throat.
From where he stood next to the fruit stalls, Finch tracked Marat’s movements as he scuttled back through the south gate of the Marketplace. When he saw the Russian plunge through the crowd Finch ran through the gate after him.
※
The open market flowed into the bottle neck of the south gate, an enclosed space lined by dozens of trinket stalls and food kiosks. The crowds immediately swallowed Finch, forcing him to slow his jog to a brisk walk. Twenty feet ahead he could see Marat slipping through the crush of pedestrians, each of them pausing to consider earrings or necklaces, stir-fried rice or sushi. The Russian disappeared, bobbed up and down, an abandoned buoy bouncing among the waves of shoppers, tourists and merchants.
Then a shock of recognition brought Finch to a halt. Thirty feet ahead Damian Witowsky was approaching. Finch shuddered when he saw the determined look on the cop’s face. He realized that Witowsky had corralled Marat between himself and Finch, and that the Russian would have to decide to squeeze past Witowsky or turn and face Will. Marat’s head briefly rose a few inches above the crowd and then submerged again. Then Finch heard three muffled pops — pup, pup, pup — a deep howl of pain and the cries of several women.
A moment later Witowsky pressed through the crowd towards the open plaza where Sochi and the Russian had exchanged flash drives moments earlier. Witowsky’s mouth knotted into a dark snarl when he saw Finch. At first Witowsky glanced away, but as the crowd stumbled backward from Marat’s corpse, the cop crashed against Finch’s chest.
“Get the fuck outta here,” he barked into Finch’s ear. His voice carried a hard, uneven edge. When he stepped back, Finch saw the veins in Witowsky’s neck tighten into long cords. Everything about him seethed with adrenalin. “Grab Eve and the tech geek and get the fuck back to Frisco.”
“What?”
Witowsky swept past him without another word. Finch turned and saw a dash of blood sprayed along Witowsky’s shirt sleeve and shoulder bag. He called after him, but the cop disappeared in the chaos.
At first a ring of bystanders edged forward to stare at Marat sprawled on the ground. But as the gravity of the crime weighed on everyone, they tore themselves away, many of them running with a hand across their mouths to stifle their screams.
After a few moments the crowd had almost dispersed through the south gate corridor. Ten feet ahead Finch could see Marat stretched out on the concrete floor. Finch limped forward as if he’d been struck in the knees. As he approached the Russian, he saw Marat’s shirt ripped open above his chest. Marat held a flap of the shirt in his left hand; he must have torn the shirt away thinking he could staunch the bleeding with his hand. Through three separate holes next to his heart a gush of blood pulsed onto the ground in an ever-widening pool. Beside his right foot lay a small-caliber revolver with a torn gray rag bound around the pistol grip. A paper carton of fried noodles lay beside his head. His jaundiced eyes were frozen in a look of surprise, his head turned at an awkward angle toward the floor boards of the merchants’ ram-shackle stalls.
Finch knelt beside him and pressed two fingers to Marat’s carotid artery. Nothing. If Marat wasn’t dead already, he soon would be. “Christ,” he whispered. He drew his cell phone from his pocket and dialed 9-1-1.
Ten minutes later an ambulance arrived followed by two HPD squad cars. One cop busied himself surrounding the zone with crime-scene tape. Once the CSI team completed their assessments, the ambulance attendants bundled Marat’s corpse onto a gurney and into the rear of their van. A second cop, heavy-set, balding — an old hand, obviously weary of it all — approached Finch and led him to a take-out booth where they found two chairs and sat.
“You call this in?” He opened a note pad and with a glance, tried to take stock of Finch.
He nodded.
“Your name.”
“Finch. Will Finch.”
“Did you see what happened?”
“No. Not until everyone cleared away. I just tried to help.”
“You live around here?”
“No. San Francisco. I’ve been here three days.”
The cop made a series of notes as he spoke. “But did you see the shooting?”
“No.”
“You know him?” He tipped his chin toward the pool of blood on the floor.
Finch shook his head, paused to study the cop’s shield: Officer White. A black cop named White. He could imagine the taunts.
“Is that a no?”
“Sorry. Guess I’m a little shaken.” He tried to think his way through the coming questions, the traps to avoid. “I saw him before, but no, I don’t know him.”
White cocked his head. “You’ve seen him, but you don’t know him. How’s that?”
“Back in the market.” Finch pointed over his shoulder. “I was standing on the plaza near the fruit stands. I saw him sitting at one of the tables. Next to the Buddha statue.”
A skeptical look passed over White’s face. “And you remember him?”
“Yeah. I’m a journalist. San Francisco eXpress.” He shrugged. “I remember things.”
White made another note on his pad. “What exactly was he doing that made him so memorable?”
This is where the clever traps lay. Finch raised his eyebrows and glanced about. The vendors and tourists had all disappeared. A faulty overhead lamp buzzed sporadically.
“He was sitting at a table, working on his laptop. It seemed odd. Everyone else here is a tourist. This guy’s working on a spreadsheet or something.”
“You saw what he was working on?”
“No. Just a guess.”
Another look of doubt. “All right. This will all go on the file. We might have to talk to you later. Depending on how things shake out, you may have to file a sworn affidavit. Depending on the DA, likely you could do it from Frisco. You got a card?”
Finch dug a business card out of his courier bag and handed it to the cop.
White was about to turn away when a thought struck him. “Mr. Finch, you said he had a computer. But I don’t see a laptop around here. And none of the chasers or the CSI guys took one in the ambulance. You sure about that? Sure he had a laptop?”
“Yeah. I’m sure.” Finch pulled a hand over the top of his head as he scanned the length of the empty mall corridor. The crowded market had become a deserted mausoleum. Despite the shock of seeing the Russian’s corpse so raw and graceless, Finch now realized that Marat had been robbed before Finch arrived at his side.
The GIGcoin software and one launch key. Both gone.
※
Sochi felt rattled. The news from Finch — that Marat had been shot three times in the heart and left for dead — didn’t buoy his mood. He felt as if something unimaginable had happened to him personally. He was the last person Marat had spoken to, the last person he’d touched, the last person who’d looked into his godforsaken eyes. Sochi had become a last outpost, a final call on another human being’s journey into ... what?
He had no vision of what might lie beyond his own life, except for emptiness. If the question is, is there a life after death? Sochi’s answer remained agnostic: None that I can see.
; And that conclusion troubled him. Troubled him in his guts, in his heart, in the complex circuitry of his thoughts where he’d managed to answer almost every other question he’d ever encountered.
“You all right, Sochi?”
Eve studied Sochi’s pale face as he pulled the strands of his beard under his chin and massaged the bruised flesh where Marat had driven his fist into Sochi’s throat.
“Yeah,” he coughed. He turned his head to one side and saw a wave of tourists flood through the airport entrance and stream toward the departures concourse. He tried again: “I’ll be okay in a day or two.”
“I saw it happen. All of it,” Finch said and gathered his boarding pass and bag in his hand and guided everyone toward Gate 11. “For a guy who looked so wasted, Marat hit you pretty hard. Make no mistake, he knew what he was doing. At some point Marat did some serious fight training.”
Sochi nodded with a feeble grimace, unable to engage in further conversation. He grappled with his duffle bag as they strolled toward the gate. Then he paused and crooked a thumb toward the entrance to the men’s room. “Later,” he mumbled.
“Sure.” Eve smiled sympathetically and took Finch’s free hand as they continued along the airport corridor.
Sochi made his way to the end of the row of closed stalls and pushed on the last door. It swung open. The toilet looked clean, the seat unstained. A ten-inch length of tissues dangled from the toilet paper dispenser. He closed and locked the door, pushed his duffle bag to the side and took the toilet tissue in his hand. He wiped his brow. Surprised by the dampness, he took another band of paper, wrapped it around his fingers and patted his face dry. Then he squatted on the toilet seat and gazed at the facing door. No graffiti. He wondered what he would write if he had a sharpie with him. He dismissed the first impulses: fuck, shit. Then something slightly more imaginative came to mind: What am I doing here? Another question he could not answer.
He sat gazing at the emptiness for another four or five minutes until he heard a flight announcement: “Qantas Airlines flight 121 to Fiji, now commencing boarding from gate 5.”
Fiji. Fucking Fiji. As a child growing up in Arizona, he’d often fantasized about Fiji. The beaches, the tropical breeze, the native women, their innocent nakedness, the complete idleness of life lived through the flesh from day to day to day…. In an instant, he realized that Fiji provided an answer to the unknowns in his life.
Q: What are you doing here?
A: I’m on the way to Fiji.
Q: What follows life in this world?
A: A good death in Fiji.
“Go tell Moscow and Arbat,” he whispered aloud. He stood up and unlocked the stall door, tugged the duffle bag over to the row of steel sinks arrayed beneath the washroom mirrors. He could probably exchange his ticket to San Francisco for one to Fiji. Today. Right now. Why not? As he washed his hands, he studied his face. He decided he would cut his hair, shave his beard. Throw away his cell phone. Stop working with computers. “And start living again!” he shouted through the sharp rasp in his throat.
As he dried his hands under the blower, four men entered the washroom, each going their separate ways to the urinals and stalls. One — burly, thick set, dark hair cut tight, tattooed arms — bumped into Sochi as he backed away from the hand drier.
When he felt a deep pinch on the cheek of his ass he turned to confront the bastard. But too late. The bull had come and gone in an instant. Disappeared. He heard a light clatter on the floor tiles leading out to the main concourse. When he looked around the corner he saw another man lean over and pick up a discarded umbrella lying next to the wall.
“This yours?” he asked.
Sochi’s right buttock stung and he grasped it in the palm of his hand and tried to massage the glute muscle. “No,” he gasped and limped out to the concourse in search of Gate 11.
By the time he joined Eve and Will he felt disoriented. “Someone pinched me,” he complained to Will privately. “In the ass.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” He waved a hand and hoped that by ignoring the pain it would dissipate.
“Look, I’ve got to tell you both something.” He pulled Eve by the elbow and led Will to the far wall.
“What is it?” A look of concern crossed Eve’s face.
“I think I might have done … something crazy,” he confessed with an anxious laugh. A brief shudder coursed through his body.
“Hey.” Eve took his hand. “Don’t worry about it.”
“No. Listen.” He squeezed her fingers and released them. “The software. I spiked the software. The copy I gave to Marat. To the Russians. It won’t work. I spiked it.”
“Spiked it. What does that mean?”
“You mean like a cannon?” Finch felt a ripple of fear sink through his stomach. This could only lead to something very unpleasant.
“Yes.” He wiped a smudge of perspiration from his forehead. “I spiked both locks on their copy of GIGcoin. Neither of the keys can launch the software I gave to Marat.”
“Sochi … why did you do that?” Eve’s voice faltered and she glanced away.
A wave of confusion swept his face, as if he couldn’t possibly explain the rationale for his actions. “Because of what they did to us. Because of the spy cams.”
The overhead speakers announced their final boarding call and Sochi adjusted his shoulder bag strap and nodded toward the gate. “Let’s go,” he muttered. “I have to sit down.”
After he boarded the plane and found his seat, Sochi suspected that the stranger had injected him with something. When the 737 to San Francisco reached thirty thousand feet he limped over to the washroom, pulled down his pants and swung around until he could glimpse a bright red pimple the size of a pea on his gluteus maximus. It looked like an insect bite. A sting of some kind.
※ — TWELVE — ※
ON THE FLIGHT back to San Francisco, Finch and Eve found themselves sitting ten rows ahead of Sochi. Although Sochi didn’t object to his seat assignment, whenever Will turned around he noticed the worried expression on Sochi’s face. His rising anxiety suggested he regretted everything to do with Finch, Eve and GIGcoin. Maybe it’s even worse than that, Finch concluded. Much worse.
“I can’t believe what he did,” he said to Eve as they unbuckled their seat belts following the crew’s all-clear announcements. “Something’s wrong with him.”
“No, everything’s wrong.” She fixed him with an angry look. “Marat’s dead, Sochi betrayed Malinin, and you and I were filmed screwing our heads off. Tell me, Will, which part of all that went right?”
The shrillness in her voice turned him away and he gazed through the cabin window onto the Pacific. The ocean was heavy with rolling waves and white caps that dotted the dark surface.
After a moment he said, “Look. We got the three things we set out for. You got the first key that unlocks the GIGcoin software. I got an interview with Malinin. And now we know who holds the second key. The other stuff, that’s the price that had to be paid.”
“The other stuff? You mean shooting Marat?”
He studied the frown on her face. Was it remorse — or fear? “Eve, you’re going soft.”
“Soft?” She narrowed her lips as if she might be assessing the aftertaste of cheap white wine. “No one’s ever said that to me before.”
“No. I can’t imagine anyone has.” He shrugged and set his laptop on the fold-down dinner tray.
“You know what the worst part is?” She crossed her arms and clenched her fists.
He shook his head.
“I can’t stand that Witowsky stole from us.”
“You mean Marat’s laptop?” He tapped the keys and opened a new text file.
“That and everything else. Don’t you see it? That string of coincidences was an elaborate ruse. He played on my fears to reveal where we were meeting with Malinin. Then he shot Marat to steal his computer after Sochi gave him the GIGcoin software. Jeezus, he’s been playing us since he came
to interview you about Fiona.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t actually see Witowsky shoot Marat. I didn’t see who threw the pistol to the ground. And I didn’t see what happened to Marat’s laptop.”
“All right.” She took a moment to weigh the options. “So anyone could have it. Malinin, Witowsky. Some kid who snatched it off the ground.”
Finch was pleased to hear her talking like a cop again. “Right. And there was nothing I could do to save Marat. Nothing I could tell the Honolulu police that would help him. Or them.” He felt as if he had to justify his actions. Not that Eve or Sochi had accused him of abandoning the Russian. Nonetheless he felt a kind of guilt by association.
She sighed and nuzzled her chin onto his shoulder. “I know. I know how these things are.” She took his hand into her own.
As the plane banked to the left they were offered a view of the Pacific below. They peered through the window, absorbing the magic of this life: the vast expanse of the ocean, the modern marvel of a 737 lifting them above the world from one destination to the next. Somehow it all seemed impossible, yet absolutely necessary. A perfect moment.
The plane leveled again and Finch pulled away from Eve. “I need to get to work.”
“I guess you do.” She glanced down the aisle. Sochi sat in the chair in front of the emergency exit. “You know, he doesn’t look that well.”
“Maybe you should walk over and see how he’s doing.” His voice grew distant as he began to type a line of words.
“Okay.” She pulled herself from the seat. A few moments later she returned.
“He’s got a fever,” she said.
“A fever?”
“I asked an attendant to bring him some cold compresses. Maybe he’ll feel better by the time we land.”
Finch peered over the seat back. He watched the attendant pass two damp face clothes to Sochi. “I think he’ll be okay. I’ll check on him in an hour or so.”
“Good.” She pulled a blanket over her torso. “I’m going to nap.”
