“What do you make of the muscle?”
“Gotta be North Korean. They're the only country who get their suit patterns from old Dallas episodes. Get a load of those shoulder pads.”
I heard Rossi snort in a delicate Eurasian-beauty kind of way. “You should be on the stage, Cooper.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, the first stage out of town.”
“We should pass on the positive ID to Ratipakorn so that he can do his thing,” I said.
“No, not yet. You know he'll just charge straight in there.”
“Isn't that what we want?” I asked.
“We first want to make sure everyone's present and accounted for. We don't know yet whether Mr. Big is there.”
“No, we don't,” I agreed. “Who's Mr Big?”
“The guy they're waiting around to meet.”
Rossi paused to take another look through the scope. “Like I said, it's my watch. You've been at this four hours now. Why don't you catch a little sack time, Cooper. If anything happens, I'll wake you.”
I didn't need to hear the suggestion twice. “Okay, the Starship Enterprise is yours.” I got up and stretched. Then I left the veranda, leaving behind the food. I needed sleep more than I needed noodle soup. I lay back on the double bed fully clothed and counted the lumps in the mattress…
* * *
My eyes came open with a start.
I tried to lower my arms and realized I couldn't. I tried to pull them down but all I got was the sound of a rattling chain. “Hey, what the … Have you cuffed me to the bed?”
“See what happens when you bring sex toys to a stakeout,” Rossi said as she walked out of the bathroom. I moved the cuff chain around the headboard and realized pretty much immediately I wasn't going anywhere in a hurry. Shit! I wished I'd followed my own advice not to take this woman for granted. The darkness hung like coal soot in a bunker. I couldn't see Rossi but I sensed her presence nearby. A small flashlight came on, its bloodred light peeling away the blackness in a cone in front of her face. She was kneeling on the floor, the flashlight in her mouth. I noticed she'd changed into black, urban assault-style gear. She didn't even glance in my direction and was leaning over a rectangular box that I didn't remember seeing among her gear. Rossi opened it, unfastening two clips, and pulled out a long length of pipe—a barrel, in fact—and began to assemble a rifle.
“What are you doing?” I said, asking the first truly dumb question of the day. I knew it was dumb on a number of levels, the least obvious being that I suddenly knew this was Rossi's mission—to kill.
“My job,” she replied, not looking up.
“Then what was mine?” I had believed—or been led to believe—that it was to assist the Thais in taking Boyle, Butler, and Dortmund into custody, so that they could then be extradited to the States to face an array of charges, and then spend the rest of their miserable lives in prison. Instead, I would be a witness to a state-sponsored execution.
“Probably not what you think.”
“Then set me straight.”
“Positive identification. You'd actually met the package. You pointed him out to me—confirmed the target's ID. That was your job. Mine's to show him the exit.”
“I didn't realize the CIA was still in the assassination game.”
“Don't use that word.”
“What, assassination?”
“No—game. My mother's maiden name was Tanaka. Ring a bell?”
Yeah, it did. “Dr. Tanaka didn't have a daughter.”
“No. But he had a sister,” said Rossi.
“You were his niece?” I tried to remember the briefing in D.C. What had Chalmers said about Rossi? That she had an Italian American father and a Japanese mother?
“As part of my briefing, I got a look at your case notes on the investigation into Hideo's death. Uncle and I—we were close. I think I was the only person he had any kind of relationship with. He had a problem with people. He liked fish.”
“What sort of problem?”
“It's not that he didn't like people. He just couldn't handle them. Some sort of phobia. You probably wouldn't understand.”
“Try me.”
“He would sweat, feel sick—look, I don't have time for this now.”
A people phobia. That didn't stack up against Dr. Spears's claim that she and Tanaka had been buddies. “Did he ever mention anyone aside from Professor Boyle at Moreton Genetics? A Dr. Spears, maybe?”
“Who? Not that I remember.”
Killing people in cold blood for a paycheck isn't easy. It helps if the killer is a psychopath, or a religious fanatic, or if the target has somehow been dehumanized. None of these profiles fit Rossi. But if she knew how her uncle had died and who'd helped him on his way… well, revenge was also a powerful motivator when it came to killing someone. And the CIA was a master at leverage—it would use whatever it could get. I watched her mate the barrel to the trigger mechanism with oiled proficiency. They came together with a click. Rossi was no novice.
“I thought Hellfire missiles were the preferred assassination weapon these days,” I remarked.
“Burma stopped throwing ordnance across the border at the refugee camps here years ago. Langley figured a bullet would be easier to hide.”
“I was told you learned your skills in the Marines.”
“Two tours in Iraq.”
“I didn't think the Marines used female snipers.”
“They don't, not usually. But then, I'm not usual.”
I didn't buy the Marines legend, although I was sure she would have all the right paperwork to support it. Nope, Rossi was a Company creation, through and through.
She slid a five-power day/night scope onto the rail, pulled back the bolt, cocking it, flicked the safety off, and checked the action. The firing pin smacked into its seat with a metallic ring that seemed to hang suspended in the darkness beyond the red spill of the flashlight. I watched her feed the magazine into its slot after checking each round.
“So what about all that crap you gave me about waiting for a Mr. Big?”
“There's only one Mr. Big here—Boyle. His is the only scalp the Company wants. You can't un-invent technology, Vin, which is why Boyle's secrets have to die with him.” Rossi stood. “No one wants this genie of his let out of the bottle. No one wants what he's selling in anyone's arsenal—not even ours, not anymore.” The rifle was almost as big as she was, but Rossi had its measure—resting it comfortably balanced in the crook of her arm, muzzle pointing toward the ceiling. “You're probably wondering what's going to happen here—to you.”
I was. “Now that you mention it.”
“In the morning, Ratipakorn's people will find you. You'll be handcuffed to the bed, which weighs a ton, by the way.”
“How does Chalmers think this will play when I get back to the States?”
“Think about it, Cooper. Boyle is already dead, remember? He died in the fire at the Four Winds. Deputy Station Chief Chalmers told me you were there when he took possession of Boyle's wallet. No one will seriously believe that whole mess in San Francisco was merely a smokescreen created by Pakistan's new revolutionary government to cover Boyle's disappearance. And no one will believe that he died twice, either. As for the North Koreans, they won't make a peep. And the Thais are on our side. Why do you think they're pulled back behind the ridge? Nothing happened here. This op is as black as it gets.”
Jesus, the damned wallet. I kicked myself for not putting it all together sooner. The lump of charcoal that was supposed to be Professor Boyle, his lightly charred wallet found beneath it. I'd known it wasn't Boyle from the start, but that wallet's presence had been a real puzzle. The Pakistanis couldn't have planted it there. That had to have been someone else's doing. Now I had a pretty good idea who that someone was.
“This operation falls under the subhead of mopping up.” Rossi pulled a ski mask over her head, stuffed two extra magazines into thigh pockets, and threw a small pack over a shoulder. “Gotta go. Duty calls.�
�� The flashlight beam disappeared, and she with it. A handful of red and orange floaters drifted downward in the blackness. I strained my ears to hear her moving around, but heard nothing. I suddenly felt her lips brush light as a feather against mine, her breath sweet like cinnamon. “Bye, Vin,” she whispered. “It's been real.”
I saw the door open and caught her silhouette move against the black and grays of the night beyond the hut. The door closed and I was again dipped in total darkness.
“Fuck, shit, fuck!” I said, frustration dialing up the volume on those words so that they escaped louder than I'd intended. I rolled off the bed onto my knees beside it. I used my teeth to push the button on my watch, to illuminate the face. The time was 0505. The predawn light would soon throw a pink blush into the clouds.
The watch's illumination switched off automatically after ten seconds. I bit down on the button again, and used the glow to assess my situation. The bed's headboard was steel pipe, painted, with warts of rust poking through here and there. I used my weight to try to drag the bed across the floor toward me. It was a heavy fucker, but I was able to shift it a few inches. The legs squealed against the concrete floor like stuck pigs. The watch's blue glow went out. I sparked it up with another bite. I noted that the base and headboard were not bolted together. One slotted into the other, and the joins were caked in balls of rust. The light went out again, but I didn't need it on to know what I had to do. I pulled the bed out as far as I could from the wall. I got down low and lifted it up like I was doing a clean and jerk. After a couple of tries, I managed to get it up so that it pivoted around the legs on the far side, and held it on the balance point. Feeling with my fingers, I made sure the chain between the cuffs wasn't going to get hung up on anything and break my wrists when I pushed the bed over. When I was satisfied, I let it fall. The bed crashed hard against the wall and floor simultaneously, pulling me with it, and, despite my caution, practically jerking my arms out of their sockets. I toppled blind into a tangle of screeching metal, barking my shins and head-butting something with an edge on it.
I lay on the floor, dazed, listening to my breathing, tangled up with springs and braces, the copper taste of blood in my mouth from a cut somewhere on my head. The sound of crashing metal echoed in my ears and through my brain. Silence closed around me in waves and, when it finally arrived, the hum of a lone mosquito came with it.
Though surely no more than a minute had passed, a little morning light had managed to push through under the eaves and turn the room into a collection of shapes that shimmered like images in old grainy black-and-white photographs. Bottom line, I could now at least see the outlines of things. My wrists were still cuffed to the headboard, which had separated from the rest of the frame. I stumbled to my feet, feeling vaguely nauseated, and hoisted the headboard out of the wreckage.
FIFTY-TWO
I didn't have much time. Rossi was working with the dark. I had to get to her before the sunlight did if I was to stop her killing Boyle. I wanted him arrested and behind bars, not dead. The bush was coming alive with the sound of various unseen animals sparking up to embrace the new day. I noticed when Rossi had assembled the rifle that it was suppressed. Even so, it would still make a muffled crack when she sent a round humming toward Boyle's skull. So far, I'd heard nothing of that nature.
As I moved, I thought about where Rossi might set up. Logically, she'd take a position that'd provide an unobstructed view of the villa, as well as cover. That meant the high side of the valley. I had nothing else to go on. I worked my way around, climbing, hoping to stumble across her, wrestling the headboard through what was mostly scrub, alternately dragging, ripping, and carrying it through the dense foliage.
After fifteen minutes of this, through a small clearing up ahead I saw a ledge formed by an old fallen tree. I scoped the area down to the villa. It was an obvious hide for a sniper, providing a clear, unobstructed line of fire to the target 2300 feet across the valley. Fish-in-the-barrel distance for a trained sniper like Rossi. I took the last hundred and fifty feet slowly and quietly, coaxing some cooperation from the hundred pounds of steel pipes tucked under my arm. What I found when I finally arrived at the ledge didn't make my list of ten-things-most-likely.
Two Koreans—one I recognized, one I didn't—were standing in the small clearing. They'd swapped their suits for Adidas warm-up pants and T-shirts. I thought maybe they were out for their morning jog or something. I wondered where Rossi was. Perhaps this wasn't such a great hide for a sniper after all and she was elsewhere lining up Boyle in her crosshairs.
Then one of the Koreans, the one I recognized, did something that seemed odd. He took a turnip out of his pants. At least I thought it was a turnip—it was long, pale, and thin. That's when I saw Rossi. She was lying at his feet, the rifle kicked off its bipod. The other Korean rolled her over onto her stomach with his toe like she was roadkill. Her head lolled to one side. She was unconscious. The Korean kneeled and began cutting off her jumpsuit with a pocketknife, slitting the seams up the inside of her legs.
The Korean holding his turnip glanced over his shoulder and spotted me even before I began to move. There was no time to consider strategy. I charged forward out of the bush into the clearing, dragging the headboard. The man on the ground kneeling over Rossi went for a gun I saw tucked in the small of his back. I spun around like a discus thrower as I stumbled forward, and swung the headboard. It strained at the Smith & Wessons as it accelerated through the arc, rapidly gaining speed and momentum. Perhaps they'd never been assaulted by a man wielding half a bed before, because both men were standing openmouthed with surprise when the collection of rusting steel piping caught them full in their faces. The crunch of breaking teeth and bone was underpinned, if I wasn't mistaken, by an almost perfect middle C.
FIFTY-THREE
I stood panting and sweating, the Koreans and Rossi all tangled at my feet. Rossi was beginning to stir. She rolled slowly onto her back with a groan. Her left eye was bruised and swollen and there were two rivulets of blood flowing from both nostrils. The asswipes had busted her nose. She spat blood. Said asswipes also began to move, and that was a surprise. After the clout I'd given them, I fully expected them to be counting stars for another half hour at least. I figured they were either a couple of tough hombres, or stupid. I tossed a mental coin on the question and, based on the theory of no-pain-no-brain, came up with stupid.
Situation awareness dawned on Rossi slowly at first, and then with a rush when she saw the Korean's naked, spotty, twig-plastered butt and her pants sliced up. She stood uneasily, trying to find her balance, her fists clenched into tight balls, the skin on her knuckles white with the pressure.
“Rossi,” I said, hoping for some acknowledgment. I got none. My instinct was to ask her whether she was OK, but I knew she was OK so that would have been trite. I'd come to the conclusion that Rossi only looked like a woman, a handy disguise in her line of work. A millimeter below that feminine exterior I believed she had all the warmth of a razor strop. “The keys. Where are they?” I asked her instead, holding my cuffed wrists toward her.
I didn't need to be a clairvoyant to see Rossi wanted to kill someone, maybe even me. Her eyes were flat, and it wasn't with shock. I didn't even think she'd heard my question. Her small pack was at my feet, so I picked it up, undid the zip, and shook out the contents: underpants, toiletries, a little makeup, and a couple of keys attached to a familiar Michelin Man key ring. My keys for the S&Ws. I unlocked the cuffs and transferred them to the Koreans' wrists. One of the men was attempting to sit up. He was groggy and spitting bits of tooth, gum, clotted blood, and mucus onto the ground between his legs. He was still a long way from giving trouble. I patted him and his buddy down. Both had binoculars, walkie-talkies, Colt. 45s—my personal favorite—and a couple of spare magazines to go with them. I examined the pistols quickly. Their front sights were ground off and the magazines for both were full. I stuffed one of the weapons in the back of my pants and the other in a pocket with
the spare magazines. Stupid they may have been, but I had no doubt these guys were professional enough to have radioed their observations back to base before approaching Rossi's hide too closely. I stomped on the walkie-talkies. The sets were no more than kids' toys and they shattered into chunks of plastic and printed circuit board.
“Borrow these? Thanks,” I said, taking a pair of binoculars and not waiting for permission to be granted. I brought the lenses into focus on the villa. The image of Sean Boyle danced and shook with my adrenaline-charged breathing. I caught the last moments of my target being stuffed into the back of a black Lexus 4−4 by a clone of the two boys by my feet who, I noted absently, were now easily distinguished from him by the orthodontic work I'd just performed with what turned out to be a hundred-and-twenty-pound tuning fork. “They've made us,” I told Rossi. “Boyle is on the move.” I wasn't too concerned. There was only one road out. Colonel Ratipakorn would head them off at the pass, access blocked by a couple of Humvees topped with Mr. Browning's gift to the world—big, black fifty-caliber machine guns. Through the binoculars, I followed the vehicle as it bounced and rocked over the rough dirt road hacked through the bush on the valley floor. But where the ribbon of gray dirt cut through the green scrub and turned left, the 4−4 went straight ahead, cutting its own path. No. More likely, it was following a private road that wasn't on any map. “Shit,” I said.
Behind me, I heard Rossi shout something I didn't recognize as being English. I turned in time to see her point the rifle at one of the Koreans' feet. I saw the barrel recoil and heard the bang and a couple of the guy's toes disappeared in a spray of atomized red mist that drifted across his buddy. The big man screamed. Rossi slid back the bolt like she had all the time in the world and then moved it forward, chambering another round. The injured guy rocked back, screaming in an animal kind of way, holding his shattered foot in the air. His tracksuit pants slid down his leg, revealing skin that had gone white with shock, the black hairs raised. His foot didn't start bleeding right away. The muscle fibers in the exposed flesh quivered.
A Knife Edge Page 35
