At the top of the stairs, she was confronted with two doors — one of which had a sliding bolt locked in place from the outside. That would be the children. She took three silent steps towards the other door, and her gloved hand softly turned the knob, wary of making any sound.
Light from outside filtered through the sheer curtains that framed the window, and Jet could just make out the mama-san’s sleeping form. Her eyes roved over the squalid quarters, stopping when they fell on a pair of ceremonial swords in scabbards affixed to a plaque on the far wall.
The guards looked up from their card table, startled by a rattle at the back of the club. Probably a cat trying to get to the garbage. The younger of the two made a lewd comment, and both men laughed, and then the rattle disrupted their game again.
“Go look to see what’s happening, Alak. Could be trouble,” the older man ordered. The younger threw down his cards with an exasperated exhalation of smoke. “When have we ever had trouble? Come on. Nobody would dare look crooked at this place with the old man’s reputation. You’re just trying to cheat me out of another hundred baht. I’m onto you.”
“Nobody forces you to play. Now go see what that’s all about while I take a leak.”
Both men rose, the younger taking the lead as they strode down the long hall at the back of the club to the restrooms and entertainment suites.
The older man entered the bathroom and hit the light switch. The overhead fluorescent bulb sputtered to reluctant life. He was unzipping his fly with a sigh of relief when he heard a muffled thud from outside.
“Alak? What the hell are you doing?”
There was no response.
Torn by the pressure on his bladder and his duty, he called for his partner again.
“Alak. Don’t screw around. What’s going on out there?”
He was growing annoyed when the light flickered off.
He hastily drew his weapon as he neared the door in the complete darkness, feeling along with the toes of his shoes until his gun barrel knocked into the wall. He swore silently and took a deep breath, then pulled the door open.
The hall was equally dark, the only light a sliver of dim illumination from the rear alley exit. He peered along the corridor and could barely make out an inert form on the floor. His startled recognition of the younger man’s corpse was accompanied by a whistling as the razor-sharp sword blade swung at his neck, neatly decapitating him before he could raise his pistol. An expression of puzzled surprise froze on his face for eternity as his head tumbled to the floor and then rolled halfway down the hall while his torso collapsed lifelessly at Jet’s feet, blood still pumping from the neatly severed stump of his neck.
The air was heavy with the gamey scent of blood as she leaned down and wiped the sword on the guard’s suit before returning it to the scabbard strapped across her back. A creak sounded from above, and she spun, returning to the stairs.
Jet waited, willing her breath to a near stop, listening, senses tingling from adrenaline. Another creak and then shuffling footsteps above.
The barrel of the mama-san’s gun preceded her as she descended the stairs. Jet waited until she was standing in the hall before leveling a brutal strike at her wrist, forcing her to drop the weapon and grip her arm in agony. The woman looked up at her through tears of pain, and then her features twisted with hate as Jet pulled off her mask and spoke.
“So, you bitch, how does it feel when you’re on the receiving end of the hurt?”
“You dead when Pu find out about this,” she spat in broken English.
“Pu’s dead. I danced in his blood. He cried like an old woman when I killed him.”
The mama-san screamed in rage and threw herself at Jet, who easily parried her frenzied attempts to claw at her face, then grabbed the woman’s head and gave it a brutal twist. Her spine snapped with an audible pop, and she sank to the concrete floor, her life seeping from her lips with a gurgle.
“Rot in hell,” Jet muttered and then, gazing around, stepped over the woman and opened the breaker panel before flipping the master back on. She made short work of dragging the bodies into the nearest room, trying to minimize the gore in the hall, then paused, listening, before moving to the stairs.
The club was silent, except for her footsteps as she ascended the steps and approached the locked door.
The bolt sliding open sounded like a rifle shot. She pulled the door towards her and edged forward, feeling for the light switch as she heard the rustling of bodies on the floor.
The harsh glare of a single incandescent bulb illuminated a scene out of hell. Three children huddled together on the floor in a space the size of a broom closet, a metal bucket their toilet. The stink was overpowering, and Jet retched, fighting back the urge to vomit. She forced herself to smile as the three children’s faces stared up at her in apprehension. The boy was a little older than Lawan, with an adult air about his adolescent face, and the other girl was already aging in an ugly way, years of abuse and disease leaving dark rings under her eyes, her features unhealthy looking and starved, but her eyes calculating.
Lawan’s face brightened with recognition, and she leapt up and hugged Jet, tears rolling down her face, her body shuddering with sobs. The other children watched uncomprehendingly as Jet stroked Lawan’s hair with her left hand and gestured to them with her other.
“Come on.”
The two exchanged glances and rose. Jet led Lawan down the stairs, guiding them to the rear exit in the darkened hall, their feet squishing in the blood underfoot. She hesitated for a few seconds, then twisted the deadbolt and threw the back door open. Peering outside, she stepped out into the alley with Lawan, the boy and girl following her. She motioned for them to come with her, but the boy shook his head and then took the girl’s hand. Jet nodded and fished in her pocket, retrieving a thick wad of baht. The pair’s eyes widened at the money, and then turned to shocked surprise when she peeled a few notes off and handed them the rest. The girl snatched the money away and took off at a full run, the boy trailing her as they escaped their past and bolted into an uncertain future.
She watched them disappear and then turned Lawan’s face to hers, crouching down so they were at eye level. They exchanged a long look, Lawan’s eyes brimming with tears, and then Jet stood and took her hand, leaving the club’s door open to the night predators, and walked with her towards the long shadows at the alley mouth.
Lawan stood in the hotel shower for a half hour, washing away the horror with a stream of warm water and a shrinking bar of soap. Jet let her take her time, knowing that she needed to process that she was free, safe from the ugliness that had defined her last week. Hopefully over time, she would put it behind her, as Jet had surmounted the ugliness of her past, although she knew all too well that the scars never fully healed. She wished that she could communicate with the little girl, tell her that it was all going to be okay, that she would never need to go back to the club and that nobody would hurt her any more, but Jet had to be satisfied with whatever her eyes and touch could convey. There would be time in a few hours, when morning came, to hear her story and tell her the news. Matt would help — he’d promised her that he would as part of their bargain, but also because she sensed he was trying to make amends for his associate’s sins, even if he hadn’t participated in them.
Eventually, the water shut off, and Lawan emerged from the bathroom with a towel draped around her tiny frame. Jet had bought a change of clothes and an oversized T-shirt for her, which she gratefully pulled over her head. Jet balled up the filthy rags she’d been sleeping in and threw them into the trash. Lawan gave her a shy smile.
The neon dawn outside the window flickered at the curtains as they lay together on the bed, Lawan’s wet head snuggled against Jet’s shoulder as her eyelids fluttered and she drifted to sleep, her breathing soft as a lamb’s. Jet stroked her hair absently while staring into the void, and then she, too, shut her eyes and quieted her thoughts, secure in the knowledge that for the moment, at least, t
hey were safe.
Chapter 30
“That’s not good enough,” the voice on the phone raged. “I want to see you. Twenty minutes.”
The line went dead, and Arthur stared at the scrambled cell phone with dread.
He had spent years climbing to a point of dominance in the hierarchy of the group that controlled so much of the international drug trade, but he still had to answer to one man. A man who represented powerful interests — interests that were anonymous to all but the most senior in the group — Arthur being the second highest ranking of the CIA group members, and the most active in the day-to-day operations.
He remembered the early days, when he’d been recruited into the scheme by the then number-two man in the agency, who had explained to him why it was necessary for global peace and America’s interests to control the worldwide supply of narcotics, and had invited him to become part of the elite within the elite. Arthur had gladly joined and had pursued his new duties with a vengeance, becoming a trusted confidant to the top brass, and then when they had gotten out of the game or moved on to even more elevated offices, to their replacements.
He’d become a wealthy man in the process, capable of any life he chose. But his physical attributes had made him reclusive, and other than a twice-monthly visit with a five-thousand-dollar-a-night escort, he limited his enjoyment of the finer things to rare wine, wristwatches and antiques, season tickets to the ballet and opera, and his palatial townhome in Georgetown.
But some of his responsibility outside of the official duties he performed for the CIA was to ensure that the business he’d inherited and later built into a powerhouse remained viable, and that any complications were resolved in a timely manner. He’d been sorely tested in the mid-Eighties by the Iran-Contra nightmare but had emerged as a star, the group’s participation in the arms-for-cocaine scheme covered up with a baffling barrage of complex explanations. He recalled the director of the CIA, his superior not only in the agency but also in the group, joking with him one day that even he couldn’t tell what the hell the whole ruckus was about after the press and Congress got done mangling the facts.
That was part of the art that Arthur brought to the table — an ability to hide in plain sight and make even the most obvious indiscretions seem unfathomably convoluted. He’d long ago discovered that the public had no patience for details or complexity, preferring simple sound-bites of easily-digestible spin, so whenever they had a crisis, he engaged what he thought of as his complexity engine, and soon something as simple to grasp as a ton of cocaine stopped in Miami with a CIA asset handling the distribution became a labyrinth of detail and unknowable tangents. Eventually, everyone moved on to something that was easier to grasp, and nobody asked the painful questions he didn’t want answered. He’d watched many a hearing where a simple inquiry from a Congressman was answered in a ten-minute rambling dissertation that would put even a speed freak to sleep. It was a skill. One he’d mastered.
He was also chartered with handling the messier aspects of the trade, including coordinating wet jobs disguised as CIA missions, money laundering, and managing the group’s supply chain. The trading of weapons for diamonds had been a masterstroke. Every wild-eyed despot in Africa wanted bigger and better weapons, and Arthur could supply whatever they wanted, through middlemen, in exchange for blood diamonds. The drug trade profits went to the middlemen who laundered them through Panama and Miami, then bought weapons from U.S. companies with the newly sanitized money, which then went to Africa in return for diamonds that Arthur exchanged for heroin.
In Afghanistan, the laundering and payment mechanisms were different, but in Asia, diamonds were a drug lord’s best friend, and the scheme had worked flawlessly until Hawker had figured it out. If there was a fault in any of it, it was Arthur’s failure to have him killed the second he’d started nosing around, rather than trying to brand the trade as a legitimate op. He’d hoped that he could rely on Hawker’s strong sense of duty to continue as before, but he’d misjudged the lengths to which he would go to discover the truth — a rare quality, fortunately, in his field staff members, who typically followed orders without question.
Arthur punched the intercom and told his secretary to have his car waiting, and then trudged down the long halls to the main parking lot, where his driver sat ready for his instructions. Arthur slid into the rear seat and told him to head to the mall a few miles away, where he would be taking an early lunch at his favorite Chinese restaurant.
Once inside the sprawl of the mall complex, he ducked into a franchise coffee chain and ordered a frozen blended concoction — one of the guilty pleasures that he could manage with a straw. The place was nearly empty at eleven a.m., so he had the lounge area to himself, Billie Holiday crooning over the loudspeakers as truculent youths with multiple facial piercings and flamboyantly dyed hair wiped down the display cases while sneering at passing shoppers.
Arthur watched a heavyset man in a long overcoat move to the register and gruffly order a cup of drip coffee, then flip a bill at the cashier before dropping his change into the tip box and moving to where Arthur sat.
“Explain to me why we haven’t recovered the lost merchandise and put an end to the problem yet,” Briggs said by way of greeting, sitting in an overstuffed chair facing Arthur.
“We’re waiting for more detail.”
“What the hell does that mean? Don’t give me doubletalk. Let’s start with the tracking device that was supposed to lead your secret weapon straight to him. Where is it?” Briggs demanded.
“It’s approximately fifty miles inside Myanmar, in one of the most remote stretches of jungle hills on that continent. Hasn’t moved for four days.”
“So doesn’t that tell you that’s where the bastard is?”
“Not necessarily. I repositioned a satellite over the area and have studied every inch, but all I can make out is the overgrown roof of an abandoned temple.”
“So he’s hiding in the temple. Send in a full team and get it over with.”
“It’s not that simple. We don’t want to just mow him down. We want the merchandise back. It’s more delicate than that.”
“Bullshit. Go in, kill ’em all, then hang him upside down and work him over with a blowtorch. Do I have to break this down into fine detail for you?”
“Well, there are a number of assumptions in your statement. First, it assumes that he’s there. The tracker was on his Bangkok partner’s wrist. Just because the partner’s there, doesn’t mean our boy is. Second, it assumes that the partner didn’t figure out somehow that he was being tracked, or alternatively, that he didn’t get killed by any of the dozens of factions in the region. Third, it assumes that I could quickly get a heavily armed team fifty miles into Myanmar without being detected. And fourth, it assumes that our boy would be anywhere near the site when they got there.” Arthur slurped noisily at his beverage then blotted his mouth with finality.
Briggs sipped his black coffee and frowned.
“You’re paid to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. And if it does, you clean up the mess. Now we’re facing the KGB’s grunions negotiating for our heroin, and they’re willing to pay twenty percent more than we are. Worse yet, they’ll sell it for half the price on the street to turn it over.”
“I understand. I’m working on putting together another shipment of rockets and ordnance to our friends in Africa. But it will take time for them to come up with enough rocks to trade. In the meantime, I’d suggest we just figure out how to get a quarter billion in cash into Myanmar.” Arthur held up his hand as Briggs began to protest. “I know, it’s messy, but we may never see the diamonds back. I’m hoping that we do, and I’m confident that our woman will get them if it’s possible, but there are a hundred things that could go wrong. Hawker could get wounded and die before she gets the merchandise. They could have already been transferred elsewhere and converted into cash. She could get killed.”
“I thought you were confident.”
“I
am. She’s the best. But it’s impossible to guarantee anything with hundred percent certainty. So, I’d say we write this one off while we wait. As far as the money goes, I know it’s painful for all concerned. But realistically, it’s a drop in the bucket, long term.”
“Perhaps, but it’s a large drop.”
“Quarter billion is nothing. It’s barely a few decent tanks. Aren’t hammers now about a quarter billion over in your shop?”
“Fair points, but it’s caused a lot of headaches, and now we have a much larger problem.” Briggs frowned. “Arthur, we’ve been around the block a few times, and we’re not kids anymore. This is a shitstorm we don’t need. Have you heard anything from her?”
“Negative. She’s gone dark. Which doesn’t mean much. She’s secretive. And it could easily take three days each direction to get in and out. Could be that she’s waiting for the target to appear. Could be that she’s planning. I don’t know. I’m already thinking about a contingency, but as with all things, it could take a while. What I’m suggesting is that whether or not she’s successful, we should prepare for failure on this one, and then if we win, it’s a bonus.”
“This is the largest loss we’ve ever sustained. It’s not going to be popular.”
Arthur swallowed the last of his beverage. “I understand. It affects my cut, too. Look at the bright side. The dollar is only worth ten percent of what it was when we started forty-plus years ago.”
“Very funny. I’m sure the others will be equally amused.”
“Briggs. Don’t bust my chops. I’m on this, doing everything I can. But I think it would be best to go in, seal the deal with the suppliers while we can, and ship them a container of C-notes or whatever else they want. Gold. Swiss Francs. Whatever.”
Briggs rose, tossing back his coffee. “I’ll pass this on. But I think it’s safe to say if you don’t fix this, you won’t be seeing any Christmas bonus this year. Not that I think you care.”
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