Kill Chain

by Meg Gardiner

“Jakarta. Kit. Would you like tea?” she said.

  “Does it come with sympathy?” Jax said.

  “It comes with a whole new life.”

  18

  The teapot was empty. So were the bowls of pad thai that Pete had rustled up for us. Daw jogged down a flight of stairs at the back of the workshop and handed Jax an American passport, a California driver’s license, and two credit cards. Jax took the passport to the large magnifying glass at Daw’s worktable. Flipping on a desk lamp, she examined it.

  “New cover, nicely bent in a couple of spots. The photos look good.”

  I walked over, took a look, and huffed. “Kathleen Rowan Larkin. Didn’t you think I could remember an entirely fresh name?”

  “Making things simple. Nobody will ever guess it incorporates the name of your protagonist.”

  “Exactly why it’s so insulting.”

  “The point, as Daw and Pete will tell you, is that this passport will fool all but the most expertly trained of eyes.”

  Daw said, “Not even Immigration should pick up on it.”

  Jax turned it under the light. “The holograph is excellent. And the ink. Print method?”

  “Perfect,” Daw said. “One plate for each color used.”

  “Watermark?”

  “Simulated but visible under UV light.”

  “Good rainbow. Excellent.” Satisfied, she gave her a nod and turned to Pete. “Got the key?”

  He stared at his computer screen. “I have the algorithm and the time stamp.”

  “Good.”

  He ejected a disk and gave it to her. Daw handed me the driver’s license.

  I smiled. “Thanks for turning back the clock on my birthday.”

  Looking up, Pete said, “Pleasure, darling.”

  Jax said, “Tell him about your run-in with Rio’s goons today.”

  “That.” I described the goblins: twelve-year-olds’ height, faunlike figures, with ropy musculature and creepy eyes.

  “Diminuendos?” Pete said.

  “How would Rio do it?” Jax said.

  He ran a hand over his shaven head. “She would have needed to induce hypopituitarism in childhood. Stop production of growth hormone to stunt their growth and physical maturation.”

  “How would she do that?”

  “Drugs, surgery . . .” A look of distress came upon his face. “Jakarta, growth hormone is a boon. It can be life changing for children with congenital growth problems. To think that Rio would disrupt it . . .”

  Realizing what they were suggesting, I felt a deep sense of nausea. “It also means that these people have been working for Rio Sanger for more than a decade.” I looked at Jax, remembering her warning on the Riverbend video: Rio still has those girls.

  Jax glanced at me. “I told you to watch out.”

  Pete looked at us anew, no longer interested solely in commerce or ancient spook loyalties. “Whatever you’re doing to stop them, I hope that I’ve been able to help.”

  Daw came forward. “I hope things turn out for the best. And that Tim will be with you next time we meet.”

  “Me too,” Jax said.

  Christian paced on the balcony. Down the hill below him, Los Angeles was a throbbing grid of lights. This was the best time of night, predawn, postcoital, paycheck time, but he couldn’t stand still. Finally Eden came out, phone in her hand.

  “Shiver tossed Delaney’s room at the backpacker guesthouse. No luck.”

  “Nothing? Fuck.”

  He felt so cold. He rubbed his hands together to warm them.

  Eden moved as though her kidneys hurt. Fortieth-birthday boy had given her a few energetic hits with the police nightstick.

  “Don’t worry. She and Bliss will track Delaney down,” she said.

  He paced past her. “How? It’s Bangkok.”

  “They’re resourceful.”

  She said it slowly, as though he were a child. His chest squeezed, that sudden tightness. Again he got the feeling that Eden regarded him as a weakling. This whore, her body stunted into a parody of adolescence, more and more treated him like the runt of the litter.

  From the house came the click of heels. Rio swept onto the balcony. “Status?”

  He shoved his hair back from his face. “We’ll clear nineteen five tonight.”

  “Good. What about the Delaney girl?”

  “Shiver and Bliss are tracking her,” he said.

  Her perfume wafted between them, soaking into the fabric of his sweater. He was exhausted and wanted to take a shower. The high was wearing off.

  Nothing was working anymore, not the EPO, not the meth, not anything. He had to stay awake and was so tired, so cold, and his mother and Eden were staring at him like they knew something he didn’t.

  “What?” he said.

  Frown lines appeared on Rio’s face. “You look awful. Get to bed.”

  “I can’t go to sleep. Not till we know they’ve got her.”

  She put the back of her hand to his forehead, felt for a second, and exhaled. “No arguments. You’re coming down with something.” She nudged him toward the house and turned to Eden. “What do we know?”

  “There were only a few places Delaney could get off the longtail boat, so they showed her picture in nearby neighborhoods.”

  He walked toward the house. In the plate-glass windows he could see straight through his reflection.

  Eden said, “Shiver found out that a scuffle happened, a fight with a motorbike rider.”

  “That black Texan bitch?” Rio said.

  “I think so.”

  “Then they can estimate where she’s gone to ground.”

  He watched their reflections in the windows. They had to get Delaney. They couldn’t lose.

  The SIG was in the bedroom. He needed to check that it was loaded and in working order. When he stripped it earlier, he had cut his finger reassembling the slide. It bled for fifteen minutes. This time he wouldn’t cut himself. He stared at his hands. They were cold. He needed to busy them, to put everything in order.

  Eden said, “Rivera will go five-star, we figure.”

  Rio nodded. “She would choose someplace where she could count on the hotel staff to have absolute tact. Good. Very good, Eden. Tell them to press it home. I want this.”

  In the reflection Christian saw Eden dialing the phone. Rio put a hand on the back of her neck and leaned down to her ear. “And tell them to hurry.”

  Jax unlocked the door and headed into the suite at the Shangri-La. “Ah. Good.”

  I drew up short, thinking I had stumbled into Santa’s workshop. My new wardrobe had been delivered. Shopping bags were primped on the coffee table, shiny with green and gold and electric blue blouses, a tight-fitting black suit, a black cashmere sweater, and wool trousers. Shoes, belts, earrings, and necklaces. It was a far cry from the jeans and T-shirts I wore at home.

  “Kit Larkin outclasses me by a mile.” Especially in the underwear department. And all the black lace went with my Goth eye makeup.

  Jax booted up the laptop that had been delivered for her. “Kit Larkin is on sabbatical from her job at an advertising agency in San Francisco. She likes to make a splash and is traveling the world.”

  “Yes, Japan, Italy, and Spain in the last six months, according to her passport.” I checked my watch. “And right now she wants to get moving.”

  She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “Cool it. You still have five hours on your computer’s clock to download the Singapore flash drive. I’ll have it decrypted and modified long before then.”

  “Dad may be running out of water and oxygen. I don’t want to wait five hours.” I rubbed my eyes. “Why did you have to set the file up this way, forcing me to run around chasing it?”

  “Insurance. If the right person went after the file, they had to be totally committed to getting it. If the wrong person went after it, I could short-circuit them. Breaking it into pieces bought me time to recover the drives or set an ambush. I knew where they were going
to be, and when.”

  “Yeah, like me.”

  She saw me check my watch again.

  “It’s eight p.m. We’re checking out by nine.” She set my computer on the desk next to her own. “This hotel isn’t a safe house. I can count on the discretion of the staff, but we can’t linger. Now let me do some serious work on your laptop.”

  She inserted the disk that Pete Kongsangchai had given her. My screen blossomed with a picture of deep space, a starlit blue nebula.

  “How did you get access to a secure server at Lawrence Livermore?” I said.

  “Pete worked as a security analyst at both Sandia and Livermore. Our paths crossed over the years.”

  That nonanswer didn’t reassure me. The Lawrence Livermore laboratory certifies the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. The toys it’s invented over the years include the Polaris missile warhead.

  “What’s type one crypto?” I said.

  “Our ultimate encryption method. It’s a code generated by recording static from outer space. Pulsars, X-ray bursts from black holes . . .” She flipped between programs, typing staccato. “The key to unbreakable encryption is to encode your information using a truly random number. Type one crypto captures space noise and runs it through an algorithm to generate that number. To decrypt, you need the algorithm and a time stamp pinpointing the exact moment when our satellites captured the noise.”

  “E.T., phone home.”

  She hit the keyboard with a manicured nail. “Who says SETI didn’t pay off?”

  “Please tell me you’re going to stop the clock that’s ticking down on all these flash drives.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “I just loaded the decryption key onto your computer. Now . . .” She jacked the Singapore flash drive into my laptop. “I’m going to decrypt the flash drive, delete some information on it, and edit the rest. Then I’ll load the revised Riverbend file onto a disk you can give to Rio.”

  “Excellent.”

  She cued up a video grab on my screen. It was a shot from Rio’s cathouse, with the two girls thanking their customer the morning after. She refocused the shot and zoomed in on their faces. “Are these the Children of the Corn?”

  “Holy mother.”

  The Asian girl was the thing who had leaped on me at Wat Po. Beside her stood the blonde who had attacked Tim in Los Angeles. In the intervening years their facial structure had barely changed. Only their eyes, and the wear and tear, gave them away.

  “Why would Rio deliberately stunt their growth?” I said. It was not only horrible, but perplexing. “Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to kick them out and replace them with real teenagers?”

  She looked up. “That’s the most ruthless thing I have ever heard you say.”

  Embarrassment came and went. “Know your enemy, Jax.”

  “I presume these creatures had developed skills that real teens didn’t have.”

  “Value added. And not just in the bedroom.” My gaze lingered on the girls’ young faces. “Turn it off.”

  She did. With all the emotion of a stone, she went back to typing.

  My gaze remained on the screen. “In your video narration, you said there were three.”

  “Yes. Rio kept three close to her, took them everywhere with her. They all had ho names. One was Bliss. The Thai . . .” She typed. “I think it was Shiver.”

  “You said to watch out for three of them. Where’s the third?” I crossed my arms, waiting for a response that didn’t come. “The little girl on the Riverbend video—the one perched in the tree. Is it her?”

  She looked up. “No.”

  “Who is she? You said on the video she was a lost girl.”

  She continued typing. I was tired of this.

  “Jax. That little girl in the tree. What’s her ho name?”

  Before I could breathe she was out of the chair and in my face. I put up my hands and stepped back, saying, “Hey.”

  “Do you see her around here anywhere?” Her gaze was searing. “She’s one more life that Riverbend ended up turning inside out for good. She’s gone, all right?”

  Jesus, was she about to cry? “What did Rio do to her?”

  For a second I thought she was going to tell me, or smack me. But she shook her head, raised her hands, and backed away. She sat down and began stabbing at her keyboard again. I stood, arms helpless at my sides.

  “Stop staring,” she said.

  Off-kilter, I wandered to the coffee table and stared at the pile of Christmas goodies.

  Whether through training or emotional dystrophy, her voice turned flat. “I need to make a phone call. Go out on the bedroom balcony and take in the view.”

  “I have to call Jesse.”

  She pointed at the shopping pile. “There’s a new cell phone for you. But keep it short. You’ll be calling in the clear, unscrambled. Thirty seconds, no more.”

  “I can’t do that to him.”

  “Then hook up the Webcam and talk online. The camera’s that pinhole device.”

  I found it and the phone. Hesitantly I approached the desk to get my computer. She stopped typing but didn’t look up.

  “When are you going to let Jesse put a wedding ring on your hand?” she said.

  “That’s the least of my concerns tonight.”

  “Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.” She leaned back. “Get married. Make a home with your man and have his babies.”

  Heat seeped from my throat down through my body. She didn’t know about the child we had lost, and it felt like a fresh wound.

  “You should have a big family, and thirty-four means you should get to work. Don’t wait. The perfect time won’t ever come.” She let her hands drop to her lap. “I waited for that and I screwed it up badly.”

  She looked up. “You’ve got something. Grab it with both hands and hold on for dear life.”

  I found that my throat had gone dry. Her brown face was blotchy, her knuckles pale with tension. If she’d been anyone else, I would have put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Jax, Tim’s going to be all right.”

  “No, he’s not. Not for a long time, anyhow. And if . . .” Pain came and went on her face. “Tim is my partner. He’s my core. But he’s not the one I loved.” The pain edged into bitterness. “I blew it. Don’t you do the same thing.”

  She ejected Pete’s DVD and handed me my computer. “Go outside. Let me work.”

  When I stepped onto the balcony outside the bedroom and shut the door behind me, she was staring vacantly at the computer screen.

  19

  When Shiver walked up to reception at the Shangri-La, the young woman behind the front desk smiled softly and offered a graceful wai. Shiver set the envelope on the counter.

  “Will you please deliver this to your guest Mrs. Rivera?”

  “Of course.”

  Shiver kept her fingers on the envelope. “She may be registered under a married name. But she’s American, a black woman, very bold in everything. Your staff would remember her.”

  The girl nodded. “Yes, thank you. We’ll deliver it.”

  “Kop khun ka,” Shiver said.

  She walked out into the muggy night, where children were bobbing in the pool. She’d already been to the Mandarin Oriental, the Marriott, and the Peninsula. By the process of elimination, they were closing in.

  Back inside the lobby, Bliss sat in an upholstered chair, listening to ballroom music. Scratching her arm, she watched the girl at the front desk take the envelope, consult with a colleague, and call to a bellboy. The girl gestured upstairs and handed the envelope to him. He headed for the lifts.

  She stood up and followed him, dialing Shiver’s phone as she went. “They’re here. Get down to the phone room.”

  On the balcony, the humid night air cocooned me. I set my laptop on an end table and hooked up the pinhole Web camera. The noise of the city burbled far below, motor scooters on bridges and longtail boats on the water. The river was a sinuous black artery gold-lit
with reflected light. Orchestral music floated up from a hotel ballroom. Below me, kids splashed in the swimming pool.

  Heart drumming, I dialed Jesse’s number. He picked up on the first ring.

  “This had better be you,” he said.

  “I’m okay. Hook up your Webcam; I’m going online.”

  “Give me two minutes. And your phone number. And don’t you damned move until we talk.”

  I told him the new phone number, hung up, and turned to my computer. My palms were sweating.

  Inside the suite, Jax was pacing back and forth between the bedroom and living room, phone to her ear. She had turned on the television to mask her conversation, and over her shoulder I saw a frenetic Thai soap opera. She cut her eyes in my direction. I turned away to give her privacy and gazed over the electric gold leaf of the city lights.

  My computer chirped and the video screen opened. Through all my nerves and exhaustion, I found myself, unaccountably, smiling.

  Jesse was sitting at his kitchen table, hair disheveled, blinking himself awake. Through the windows behind him, I could see a blue dawn tracing the outline of the mountains.

  “Are you still in Bangkok?” he said.

  “Yeah, but not for long.”

  He adjusted the focus on his camera. The view turned so sharp that I could practically hear the surf breaking outside his house, smell the sea air, taste the salt that always lingered on his skin after he swam. The lights were low, dragging shadows across his face.

  “What did you do to your hair?” he said.

  “Ran with scissors.”

  “Very Chrissie Hynde. Sit still and listen to me.”

  His tone was disconcerting. “Have you heard something? Is it Dad?”

  “No. There’s no word.”

  I felt that ghostly fist tighten around my windpipe. “Then what is it?”

  His face looked sober and intense. I wanted to reach through the screen and wrap myself in his arms.

  “First thing. I checked out those phone numbers you e-mailed me from Boyd Davies’s phone. You were right about him being hinky. He wasn’t who he claimed to be.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He wasn’t with Immigration and Customs. He ran the Davies Bail Enforcement Agency of Las Vegas, Nevada.”