Eye Of Heaven
Marjorie M. Liu
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Other books by Marjorie M. Liu
Copyright
About the Publisher
WATCHED
“You always like to spy on girls while they sleep?” Iris asked the darkness. The shadow moved and walked toward the pen.
“I’m sorry,” said the man, quiet. “But I was only trying to help. You shouldn’t be here. Not like this.”
“And you’re my protector?” Iris tilted her head. “I can take care of myself.”
She thought he smiled. “I guess that means you’re bulletproof then. Nice talent to have.”
“Yeah,” she replied, standing. “I’m remarkable that way.”
He was lean, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, garbed in clothes with dark clean lines that looked highly tailored and expensive. Good taste, if nothing else. A man who was primed and ready for a night in a high-end yuppie club, a martini—shaken, not stirred—in his large elegant hand.
“A lover doesn‘t figure the odds.”
—Rumi (1207–1273)
CHAPTER ONE
The package sat on the damp concrete of the Jakarta alley for almost thirty minutes before anyone inside the warung food stall made an attempt to retrieve it. Smaller than a lunchbox, brown, and completely unassuming, placed just beside a stack of dirty pans that no one inside the plastic tent felt like washing, it was passed over, ignored, and forgotten by everyone except Blue. A fact that made him very uneasy.
It was the rainy season—miserable and humid, the damp only worsening the terrible suffocating heat inside the tumbling slums of Indonesia’s capital. No cool showers, just dirty water hurtling from the sky in terrible sheets, pounding the blue tarp roof and tied-down walls of this transient eatery—here today, gone tomorrow, to another alley or parking lot or street corner; the tables at which Blue and others sat would be easy to fold and load into the three-wheeled cart parked behind the portable stove at the back of the tent. The owner, a thickset woman only a shade browner than Blue, worked furiously over a cutting board, wielding her cleaver in hard bursts of frantic chopping. No knife fights with her; Blue knew who would win.
He also knew better than to complain about the food. Easier just to ignore the paper plate of nasi goreng sitting in front of him. The fried rice was too greasy, the shreds of chicken unquestionably raw. Blue had an iron gut—which was currently growling and hungry—but no time for stupid risks like making himself sick on a toilet. If he could even find a toilet. His hotel was on the far side of town, a fine and glittering oasis just begging for his return. Cold air, cold showers, cold bottled water …
Stop it. Get your head in the game. You didn’t come here for a vacation.
Right. Because if Blue had wanted a break he would be in Colorado on some mountain, sitting his ass down on a cliff to watch the sun dip low on an empty, silent world, instead of here now in Jakarta, surrounded by thirteen million people scratching out an existence in an impoverished city that teetered constantly on the edge of racial and religious unrest. And he would not be sitting in a dirty transient café, sweating, filthy and tired, risking his life, his sanity, for just one glimpse of a quite possibly fruitless clue, some connection that would finally set him upon the path of a man who needed to die.
Yeah. All in a day’s work. Too bad he had a conscience. Even worse that he was in a position to follow his conscience. Being a good person was a hell of a hard way to live, though he could not truly complain. He had chosen this life for himself, after all. And as an agent of Dirk & Steele, he had the resources and skills to go where others could not—to be an asshole of mighty proportions when the bad guys got out of hand. No trading that privilege for the entire world.
Like now, when he was so close. It had taken money and patience for Blue to cultivate his current network of informants; the latest had given him the time and date of a drop-off—promised that it would be a special delivery, straight to the hand of the big bad man himself.
Plastic rattled; Blue tilted his chin, and from the corner of his eye watched as a woman ducked into the tent, rain dripping from her face. His breath caught when he saw her—she was just that unexpected: a tall drink of water, leggy, wearing a sweat-soaked tank that showed off her sinewy arms, smooth skin tanned to a deep gold that was almost as rich a color as her short blond hair. Large sunglasses obscured most of her face, which was strikingly angular and sharp. A little too sharp for his taste—far too hard—but oh, what a body. She stood out in this crowd—and that was a problem.
It was damned hard not to stare as the woman passed his table, but self-preservation limited Blue to nothing but a quick glimpse. That was more than enough to revise his first impression. From a distance he had guessed she was in her thirties; up close, he saw the wrinkles around the blonde’s mouth, the leather of her taut skin, the streak of silver hiding in her hair. Fifties, maybe. A really great fifty.
She took a seat near the food cart, easing gracefully onto a collapsible plastic stool that wobbled on the uneven alley concrete. Her pants were loose, her feet clad in sandals. She acted too confident to be a mere tourist, but her clothing was inappropriate for the locale; Indonesia was predominantly Muslim, and though Jakarta claimed to be cosmopolitan, women—foreign and local—were encouraged to be … modest.
But the woman seated in front of Blue did not appear concerned, and not one of the men in the warung paid her the slightest attention. Again, odd. Besides himself, the woman was the first foreigner Blue had seen on this side of town all morning, and in this area, with her looking the way she did, people would have almost no choice but to stare. No way around it. Hell, even he got looks, and he was trying to blend in.
So she lives here. The people are used to seeing her.
Or perhaps Blue was paranoid for a good reason.
The woman did not look at the menu written in permanent marker on the tarp behind her; she simply sat drumming her fingers on the table. She did not speak; nor did she appear to make eye contact with anyone inside the warung. Yet, less than a minute after her arrival, the elderly owner of the food stall delivered a glass of teh talua, yellow with egg yolk and batter and sugar. The blonde woman did not thank her. She did not smile. She did not pay. She picked up the glass and tossed back the drink in one long swallow.
A painfully skinny boy dressed in shorts and nothing else ducked around the back end of the tent. He was soaked, dripping—but the owner, who had gone back to her cutting board, did not spare him a glance. Instead, her gaze flicked to the blonde, whose fingers still drummed, unpainted nails click-click-clicking on the plastic, like a drumbeat to a song.
Same as the blonde, the boy did not speak or place an order. He stepped near the dirty pans—careful, hesitant, his bare foot nudging the brown paper package. Testing the waters. Blue did not react. No reason—not yet, not until he was sure. The hunt had already been difficult enough without mistakes; he could not afford impatience, haste.
But Blue’s hand was forced all the same. The boy kicked out his foot, the package popped into the air, and quickly
, almost a blur, he caught it in his small palm and turned on his toes, whirling like a dancer on the run, and Blue thought, Good, that’s good, kid. You run. Run, run, run. All the way to your boss.
And the boy did. For all of two seconds. The elderly owner of the warung, who up until that moment had completely ignored him, stepped out from behind her workstation and slapped the flat of her cleaver against the boy’s chest, spraying garlic and onion as she stopped him cold. The child cried out, staggering backward …
… right into the blonde, who’d shot up from her stool, moving with incredible speed across the small confines of the warung to catch the boy as he fell away from the cleaver. He tried to escape her touch—moved like it burned—but she held on tight. The boy cowered, staring up into her sharp, tan face with his eyes rolling white, mouth all twisted like he was ready to scream or cry.
The woman’s lips moved. Blue could not hear her voice, but the child dropped the package into her outstretched palm and shuddered. Game up, game over.
Blue got ready to move, but the woman did not hurt the boy. She pushed him away—a shove toward the fluttering plastic exit—and the spindly child ran as if death were on his heels, a big, bad death, and Blue thought he just might be right.
He did not allow his gaze to track the child. He watched the woman instead, studying with new eyes the lines of her body, checking for any bulges beneath her clothing that might be something other than muscle or bone. The woman saw him watching and tilted her head. A smile played along her lips and it was sharp like her face, with just a hint of teeth. Blue did not allow his gaze to falter, but all around him he felt movement: men sliding quietly from their seats, sidling away from tables and unfinished food, slipping like ghosts from the damp shadows of the warung.
Time for the reckoning. Blue did not blame them for not wanting to stick around. He wanted to run like hell. Run far and hard, away from the nightmare of this place that had already sunk too deep into his skin—like a tattoo, like the worst kind of mark on his soul. The things he had seen in this city, the things he had seen that had brought him here …
The woman did not approach Blue, but she held up the small brown package, perching it on the tips of her fingers. Her nails were extraordinarily long.
“So,” she said, in a voice that was softer than her face, with a gentle lilting accent that Blue could not quite place. “You thought this was cleverness, yes? You, here, tracking this small bit of nothing?”
“I suppose,” Blue said. He was alone now. Even the warung’s old owner had disappeared, though her cleaver now rested on the work surface directly to the woman’s right. Blue thought of his pistol, holstered at the small of his back. He was not comforted.
You should be. Forget the gun. You could stop her heart if you wanted to. Just one thought, and dead, gone.
Not that he would ever really let himself consider that possibility.
The woman tossed the package to Blue. He caught it with one hand, but it was heavier than he expected, and he had to fumble to keep from dropping it. The woman laughed—again, soft, oh, so gentle—and said, “Did you really think we would not notice that someone was making inquiries? Did you truly believe we would lead you to our employer or send anything of importance to this place, knowing that you were tracking us?”
“I’m losing my touch,” Blue said, staring into her sunglasses, fighting for his poker face. He set the package on the table. “I wasn’t always this obvious.”
“Perhaps,” said the woman. “But I am very good at my job.”
“Protecting an animal. You know what Santoso does, how his entire family makes their fortune.”
“Flesh.” The woman’s smile did not fade, but it turned brittle. “Flesh and blood and the sale of such things. Yes, I know.”
She unzipped the bag hanging at her side. As she lowered her head, Blue glimpsed a hint of the eyes beneath the rim of her sunglasses. Large, full of shadows. Maybe beautiful, maybe not. It did not matter either way.
“I believe this is what you think you are looking for.” The blonde removed a small steel canister from her bag. It was just a little larger than her hand, and almost the same size around. A digital display blinked at one end. Like she had with the little brown package, she perched it on the tips of her fingers like a jewel or bauble. Blue wondered just how strong her hands were.
Strong enough to hurt you, he told himself, and let down his mental shields. Just a crack, a fracture, a tear inside his head—
—and the city roared through his mind, dripping with power, razing his skull with hard currents as every surge of electricity within a half-mile radius touched him for one brief, blazing moment. An old pain which was part of his gift: Blue’s ability to control electronic devices simply by focusing his thoughts.
He bit the inside of his cheek, tasting blood, and that was enough to keep him from being overwhelmed by the initial rush of power. He rode the fire of Jakarta’s electronic soul, feeling the burn in his buzzing bones, and though the pain dulled to a simmer, a stream of cold sweat broke out between his shoulders, and he wondered—don’t look back, do your job, live for now or nothing—how long he could keep doing this and stay sane, whole, healthy—because the heart ran on electricity, too, and one day his was going to give the hell out.
Blue focused on the canister. He sent his mind through its metal surface, sinking into that place where his eyes could not follow, searching electronics, tasting voltage, the thrum of heat in current and wires, and there—familiar—he found the pump, the heartbeat, and he imagined fluids sloshing, hypothermic perfusion sending that chemical solution into the central chamber like blood, and by God, it was small—the smallest such device on the private market, easy to mistake for a bomb.
Blue had seen something similar only once before: in an illegal backwater operating room in Cairo, where a small boy lay near death on a kitchen table while some butcher with a medical degree removed both his kidneys. And there, a transport container like this one, or its larger cousin, had been the first and only clue that had brought Blue on a hunt around the world. Something so distinctively ingenious could be designed by only a handful of people. Parts, too, had to be bought. Manufacturers hired. Paid.
So. Three months searching, requiring long trips overseas, tapping wires, conducting surveillance, bribing people to talk face-to-face. Blue’s own private mission—and only because he could not stand to see such terrible arrogance, such blatant cruelty—could not bear to stand by when it reminded him so much of his own flesh and blood.
His diligence had paid off, though, leading him straight to Santoso Rahardjo, the richest man in Indonesia. So rich, in fact, that his family owned the national bank. And, by extension, the government.
Which was exactly why, against the better wishes of his boss, Blue had come here without a partner. Too dangerous. More than one foreign man asking questions would certainly draw attention.
Although, apparently, Blue had managed to do that just fine on his own.
So why am I still walking free? It would be easy enough to bribe the police to arrest me, to haul my ass down to some prison where an inmate could stick a knife into my gut the moment I step into a cell. Problem solved. No more questions asked. At least, not by me.
Though the other agents at Dirk & Steele would certainly take matters into their own hands. They would swarm like a sign of the Apocalypse, because hell had no fury like gun-wielding psychics pissed off and hungry for revenge. Not where his friends were concerned.
God. He loved his life.
“What you think you are looking for,” Blue repeated, the memory of the woman’s soft voice distracting him from his mental search of the canister. “Carefully chosen words.”
The blonde smiled and, in an astonishing show of agility, twirled the canister on the tips of her fingers like a basketball. She walked toward him as she played with the transport device, and Blue fought the distraction of spinning steel, keeping his focus on her face, on her free hand, which hun
g close to the open mouth of her bag. He stood slowly from his stool and stepped back, placing the table between himself and the woman. Her smile widened.
“You act as though I am dangerous,” she said, the canister still dancing over her fingers. It looked as if it were floating, but Blue could feel the faint charge between her skin and the steel. No magic, no telekinesis. Nothing more than impossible reflexes.
Blue did not return her smile. The woman stopped at the edge of the table and placed the canister back into her bag. She pulled the zipper tight and let her hands hang loose and empty at her sides. Sweat glistened over her skin, softening the hard lines of muscle. A burst of wind cut through the warung, shaking the plastic tarp, making her tank top cling even tighter to her perfect body. Blue watched a strand of silver hair touch the corner of her mouth.
“You want me,” said the woman. “I can see it in your eyes.”
“I’m a man,” replied Blue. “But don’t mistake attraction for action. Or trust.”
“Oh, never.” Her smile faded, her gaze flickering to the brown package sitting between them on the table. Blue spread his focus, widening the crack in his shield, and was not entirely surprised to find an electric current hidden beneath the simple paper wrapping. He had anticipated another kind of transport device. Only, after a moment, he realized this felt slightly different. Less complex than that canister again resting snugly inside the woman’s bag. Less complex but more dangerous. Blue’s breath caught.
“You see,” said the woman, narrowing her eyes as she backed away. “I knew you would. Consider it my gift to you. My warning.”
Blue watched her turn slowly, as if the air around them were thick as tar, as if she were begging for capture, and though he wanted to follow, to run and run and never mind the questions and answers or that enigmatic smile, he did not. He watched the woman disappear around the wrinkled tarp and closed his eyes, closed them tight, and threw his mind into the device in front of him.
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