Kill Chain

by Meg Gardiner

  She stopped beneath a cool portico, and a doorman came smiling forward to welcome us. Awkwardly I climbed off the bike, legs chattering. Jax pulled off her helmet and strode toward the entrance.

  “Wait,” I said.

  She swept into the lobby. I followed on her heels, seeing marble, chandeliers, and orchids. Behind the front desk, slim young women put their hands together in that prayerful gesture and greeted her, “Sawatdee.” The view out the windows showed coconut palms, a sparkling swimming pool, and the river. I wanted to sit down and stay forever.

  It was air conditioned. Blissfully, extravagantly, Norwegian-fjord cool. Forget karma—take my soul. Just give me thirty more seconds here.

  Jax strode to the desk with breezy élan, as if hard-assed African-American women roared up to this place on a 500cc bike every few minutes. She gave a gleaming smile, spoke about five words, and came away with a key card.

  “Walk with me,” she said.

  Somewhere a grand piano was playing. Any moment I expected to see Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr sweep down the grand staircase and break into a waltz.

  “And take that hayseed out of your mouth,” she said.

  Upstairs, she let us into a suite overlooking the river. It was every inch as opulent as the lobby, all gilded silk and lustrous teak. White orchids seemed to drip from the walls. At the wet bar by the door, expensive whiskeys were lined up. On the coffee table sat a lavish bowl of tropical fruit, a bottle of wine, and a lovely note from the manager, welcoming us. Who knew that some hotels provided hospitality beyond vending machines that dispensed stale candy bars?

  Jax stripped off her leather jacket. She was wearing a skintight black top, and her shoulders looked angry where she had skidded along the pavement after the crash.

  “You have sixty seconds to explain why you went to the red-key box at the music archive in L.A.,” she said.

  “Why’d you give me that Crouching Tiger karate kick?” I put a hand to my ribs. “You knew it was me.”

  She got two bottles of water from the minibar and tossed one to me. “Fifty seconds. Then I really start whipping your ass.”

  “Hell, no—I need to catch a flight to Singapore. I have less than ten hours to get the next flash drive. But then, you already know that.”

  “The information in that file is not meant for you. You’re not involved.”

  “Not involved?”

  She tipped the water bottle to her lips, swallowed voraciously, and ran the back of her hand across her lips. “One thing about Bangkok. Watch your gut. Don’t—”

  “Drink the water. Got that.”

  She had no idea, I realized. None at all.

  I touched a hand to my forehead. I was going to have to tell her. All of it.

  “Jax ...” All of it. “Dad’s been kidnapped by the Sangers. They want the Riverbend file as ransom.”

  As if a switch had flipped, she ceased movement. Even her breathing seemed to pause.

  “She’s tracking.” Her gaze withdrew. “How did you get the address for the music archive?”

  “Tim.”

  Suspicion rose in her eyes. “Tim doesn’t know about the archive.”

  Oh, brother. Heat prickled along my arms. Tell her.

  “Tim deciphered the clues that led to the address. The R-and-B stuff. He’s the one who found the red key.”

  “That’s improbable.”

  Tell her. “He thinks you’ve been kidnapped too. You didn’t check in with him. He came to me to try to find you.”

  Her gaze clicked off to the side, as though assessing that. Her expression was opaque. “It still doesn’t compute. Why are you here when . . .” Eyes back to me. “What’s happened to him?”

  A ball of emotion rose up my throat. “He’s been shot.”

  She breathed, twice, and stilled so completely that she might have turned to slate. Sunlight limned her eyes.

  “Is he dead?” she said.

  “He was alive when I left L.A.”

  Despite all efforts, my voice cracked. For a second longer she held my gaze, and then she closed her eyes and tilted her head back. She kept her face neutral, but her chest heaved. I felt riven.

  “Jax.” I touched her arm. “He took a single shot to his side. He managed to call somebody to come and help him. He—”

  She grabbed my wrist. “You left him?”

  I spoke perhaps the hardest single syllable I’d ever had to pronounce. “Yes.”

  Her fingernails dug into my flesh. “Alone?”

  “Tim told me I had to get the file. He said if I failed, we’d never see you or my father again.” I kept myself from flinching at her grip. “Do you understand? He insisted—for you. So help me get to Singapore. We’re running out of time.”

  “No. The one thing you cannot do is turn the file over to the Sangers.”

  “What?” I practically saw stars. “Why not? What’s in the file, the blood of Christ?”

  “This isn’t about ransoming your father. It’s about Rio punishing him, and me.”

  “Jax, she’s already taken Dad. She’s shot your husband. And I’m wanted by the police. What do we have to lose?”

  Shoving me loose, she raised her hands. “Shut up. Let me think.”

  She clenched her fists and began pacing. If she was trying to compartmentalize the news of Tim’s injury, she was failing.

  “We have to alter the file. If we delete some information and change other parts to mislead Rio, it will work.”

  “Mess with the file? Forget it. I don’t care about your agenda. I want Dad back.”

  She kept pacing. I checked my watch.

  “Dammit, Dad doesn’t have time for me to chase around Asia collecting these things like Easter eggs. He has forty-one hours left.”

  She stopped, absorbing that. “Then you have to do it my way. You go where I tell you and do exactly as I say. Otherwise, I’ll make sure you never get the flash drive. Can you handle that?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll be hard as hell. You’re going to have to bring your A game.”

  She looked as combustible as detonator cord. Her gaze was a challenge.

  “Jax, I drove your husband bleeding out of Santa Barbara after a gunfight. I got the flash drive, eluded the LAPD, flew halfway around the world, and outran the Children of the Corn on the river. I even managed to knock you off your bike. And I had the guts to tell you about Tim,” I said. “Bring it on.”

  She held my gaze. I stepped toward her.

  “But bring it now. We can’t afford to waste another second.”

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she nodded.

  “So, are you going to take me to Singapore?” I said.

  “No.” She unzipped a pocket in her leathers, pulled out a flash drive, and held it up. “This is it.”

  Neon, beer, sequins, and chili: Bangkok after dark. Jax and I strode past tourists and party seekers on a street near Patpong Night Market, illuminated by flashing lights advertising everything from sarongs to emeralds to girls to girls. Amplified music and multilingual chatter rained sound on me. Under the gaudy blue shine of a nightclub marquee, Jax’s brown face took on the luster of sharkskin. She had never looked so much her age, every day of her forty-five years.

  She wasn’t speaking. Since leaving the hotel she had seemingly gone into a trance. I suspected that her meditative state was working not toward Zen but retribution—that it would resolve not with a beatific vision, but a bullet.

  She rounded a corner and led me down an alley. Cooking smells hung in the air and laughter echoed from kitchen windows. A sickly odor crawled up to me.

  “What is that stink?” I said.

  “Glue.”

  Between buildings I glimpsed men squatting on the pavement under bare bulbs, tools in hand. She glanced at them idly.

  “They’re sticking labels into the Gucci bags they just counterfeited. Don’t worry; the stuff I’m getting you is much higher quality.”

  I gave her a look. “An
d what’s that?”

  “Your new passport.”

  I couldn’t say I was surprised. Getting passport photos taken half an hour earlier was sort of a giveaway. We were building the new me.

  Here in the market we had been shopping. In forty-five minutes Jax had managed to get me not simply new clothes, but measured for a new wardrobe. Thanks to an aggressive seamstress, I now knew my crotch-to-ground measurement to the millimeter. Then Jax found me a hairdresser. Fifty-one minutes: dye job, chop, scalp massage, mousse, and blow-dry, and I was a chocolate brunette. Punk rock lived. On my head. SpecWorld set me up with colored contact lenses and a pair of Eurotrash glasses. A discount chemist provided the makeup. Jax had lavished it onto my face.

  Examining the passport photos under the alley lights, I perused the results: kohl and sleep deprivation gave me gothic eyes. “Will it work?”

  “With enough attitude. Sophisticated security will catch your voice or stride pattern. But persona you can affect.” She led me out of the alley onto a broad boulevard. “The key thing is learning your legend. It’ll be simple, but you have to know it cold.”

  She stepped to the curb, watching the traffic rip by, searching for a taxi.

  “Jax, it’s time for you to start talking. There are things I need to know.”

  “You don’t need to know. You simply want to know.”

  “Why did you say that Tim and my dad hate each other?”

  “Want to know.”

  “Is it because Dad was involved in the operation that led to Hank Sanger shooting you?”

  “Want to know.”

  “When you were sleeping with Sanger, did you know he was married to Rio?”

  “Common law.” She hailed a taxi. “Get in.”

  I hopped in and waited for her to slam the door. “Why did you say that Riverbend is about lost children?”

  She leaned toward the driver and gave him an address. We pulled out into traffic.

  “What do lost kids have to do with Rio Sanger’s blood feud?” I said.

  “Your father and I took some of Rio’s girls away, got them to the police or sent them home. She regarded that as thievery.”

  “That’s not enough to set her off on a vendetta.”

  “Let me tell you about Rio,” she said. “American father, East Asian mother. She grew up in Bangkok, started hooking as a young teen, met Hank, had a baby at eighteen, her precious Christian.” She watched the city blare by. “She used a sugar daddy to get her out of Asia. Other men got her to Europe and the Americas. She treated them as plane tickets. But she always came back to Hank. That’s how she ended up running a club in Medellín, followed him down there. And then here again.”

  “I saw Hank shoot you.”

  “I turned my back. Never turn your back.”

  I was quiet for a minute. “What did you have to tell Hank about Christian? What was wrong with him?”

  “I was trying to save myself. I would have said anything.”

  “What are you going to alter in the Riverbend file?”

  “How’s the writing coming?”

  My scalp tightened. “I’m not doing your memoirs. Ever.”

  “No, your novel. Is your guerrilla chick coming back for this one?”

  “Why did you leave the agency, Jax?”

  “Rowan Larkin, I like her. Wish I could kill by telekinesis, the way she does. Very cool.”

  I hunched down in my seat, staring out the window. “The phrase direct answer has no meaning to you, does it?”

  “Keep talking to yourself; I think you’re getting the picture.”

  I crossed my arms. “I know why you keep turning up in my life. It isn’t because you worked with Dad. It’s because you have no friends.”

  Her mouth drew taut. She barked at the driver. He pulled over.

  She paid, hopped out, and marched off along a swanky street of designer shops. I caught up. Her chin was in the air.

  “The agency. Mediocre pay, lousy canteen. Office politics, expense reports, random drug testing,” she said.

  Crowds of shoppers strolled along, chatting and laughing, shopping bags swinging. Shop windows shimmered with red and blue silk.

  “Fieldwork was better. Exotic travel and fine, fine weapons. Boffing for the USA was great, bringing down the narco kings or some rogue comandante through the power of positive shagging. But by the time I left, half the analysts at Langley had more contacts at the New York Times than they did in Peshawar.” She scanned the shop windows. “This planet is scummy with dross. At Langley I was one more nodding head around a conference table. On my own I am like a refiner’s fire. You don’t like the way power works? Go home and read Noam Chomsky and howl about it online.”

  “Jesus, and I thought Jesse was a cynic.”

  “I really am the badass you feared I was.”

  She pushed open a door and led me into a shop. I felt a chill that didn’t come from the air-conditioning.

  I looked around. This wasn’t a clothing boutique but something closer to a sculpture gallery. Under recessed lighting, we stood surrounded by fossils.

  Slabs of sandstone hung on the walls, embedded with prehistoric ferns and small lizardy skeletons. A display pedestal bore the tusks of a woolly mammoth. On the mahogany-paneled wall at the back of the shop, a discreet logo read MESOZOICA—DINOSAUR VENDORS.

  The gallery was hushed, spare, and, apart from us, empty.

  I approached a varnished object on a display pedestal and leaned in to examine it face-to-face. It was the skull of a saber-toothed tiger. It was sublime.

  “Unbelievable,” I said.

  “Be glad it’s dead.”

  A man’s amplified voice came to us from the ether. “May I help you?”

  Jax spoke to the air. “I’m interested in the world we left behind. This would seem to be it.”

  The voice turned thoughtful. “Remnants of a simpler place and time? Have you seen the compsognathus specimen on the wall?”

  “I’d have to pawn all my hopes to pay for that. What else?” Jax said.

  “How much time do you have?”

  “Not much. I’m leaving on the midnight train.”

  I shot her a look, amazed that spooks actually played this code-word game.

  “One moment,” the voice said.

  Jax stood calmly among the predators. I murmured in her ear.

  “ ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’? If the CIA’s stuck in the seventies, the agency’s worse off than I thought.”

  The mahogany wall at the back of the store began to move. Silently it pivoted, swinging ninety degrees to reveal another room behind it—the guts of Mesozoica, half office, half paleontology lab.

  A man strolled out from behind a desk, where he’d been observing us on closed-circuit TV. He was tall for a Thai, a good six feet, with a gleaming shaven head. He gave Jax a knowing smile. She made the prayerful wai gesture and he returned it. Then he took her hand and kissed her on both cheeks, European-style.

  “How thrilling of you to interrupt my evening,” he said.

  “I’m in a hurry, Pete.”

  “And you’ve lost none of your charm, either.” He turned and offered me his hand. “Petch Kongsangchai.”

  Jax nodded at me. “This is Kit.”

  Which I was, Kathleen being my first name, but hearing the name caused a stab of distress. Only one person in the world called me Kit, and that was my father.

  “What do you need?” he asked her.

  “Do you still have root privileges on the Lawrence Livermore server?”

  I gave her a sharp look. He didn’t answer. Instead he led us into the secret room and closed the wall behind us with a soft swoosh.

  “Pete? I need to access their archives to grab a type one crypto key,” she said.

  He looked peeved. “Nothing else? Perhaps the launch code for the nuclear football?”

  “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t necessary.”

  His expression softened. “Jakarta, what have you done
?”

  “This goes beyond me. It’s . . .” Her rigid control slipped for a moment. “It’s Tim.” She waited for him to say something, but he didn’t inquire further. “And yes, I do need something else. An American passport.”

  He shook his head. “I’m retired from that line of work.”

  “Driver’s license, couple of credit cards as well.”

  “No. My business no longer revolves around simulations of authenticity. I now deal in genuine items only.”

  She held out my new passport photos and a sheet of information she had scribbled down at the hotel. “This is what you need.”

  He declined to take it. She grabbed his wrist. “She’s Phil’s daughter.”

  He turned to me with a new and awful light in his eyes. He took the photos and information from her. “She travels extensively?”

  “Europe mostly. She’s adventurous but green.”

  “Age?”

  “Thirty-four,” I said.

  He scrutinized me. “I can give you twenty-nine.” He examined the sheet of paper. “This will take—”

  “Half an hour,” Jax said.

  He tilted his head. “Darling, when did you develop a sense of humor?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “An hour. And it will be two thousand.”

  Jax glanced at me. “Pay him.”

  I found that much baht in the bottom of my backpack, doing the math in my head. Even jet-lagged out of my mind, I calculated that it worked out to around sixty dollars. This town was bargain city. Maybe I should go back up the street to Glueville and grab some new luggage. And a plasma screen TV.

  Jax put her hand on mine. “Two thousand U.S.”

  Too tired to feel stupid, I found the stash Tim had given me and peeled off a roll of bills.

  Pete turned, but Jax stopped him. “This is vitally important. I cannot emphasize that enough.”

  His pissy jocularity ebbed. “I understand.” He called out, “Daw. Need you.”

  At a worktable in the back of the room, a woman pushed aside her large magnifying glass and stood up from behind the thighbone of a Cretaceous beast. She was swathed in a black turtleneck dress, as sleek as any runway model in Manhattan.

  Jax gave her a wai. “Sawatdee-ka, Daw.”

  The woman glided over. Pete handed her the photos.