by Matt Rogers
‘More or less.’
‘I assume you’ll be hitting us with the important details later tonight.’
‘Yes. We’re still compiling all the intel we have available. You’ll be staying at the Dhanyawad Boutique Hotel in Kathmandu tonight, and then setting off in the morning to Phaplu.’
‘That’s where Parker is?’
‘Yes. He’s laying low with the guide from the trekking company. He’s taking all the proper precautions, because his security detail is now non-existent.’
‘If it’s the porter,’ King said, ‘then should we trust the guide?’
‘It’s not the porter.’
‘Glad to hear you’re so confident.’
Violetta scowled. ‘We’ll speak later. I’m not giving you details just yet.’
‘So we rendezvous with Parker tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to arrange a flight from Kathmandu to Phaplu. You’ll meet him at one of the teahouses and do your best to reassure him before you set off.’
‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘We’ll talk to him,’ King said. ‘But we won’t be nice.’
Slater looked across and nodded.
Violetta said, ‘May I ask why?’
‘Because we’re walking bullshit detectors,’ King said. ‘And I don’t trust anyone involved in this.’
9
The SUV banked hard to the right and shot down a narrow dead-end alley choked with dust and rubble. It swerved around a beggar, avoided a collision with a departing rickshaw, and then coasted through a pair of half-open steel gates manned by a uniformed guard.
Necessary precautions for anything that constituted a luxury hotel in Kathmandu.
Slater didn’t need luxury. He took one look at the three-storey building forming a U around the pleasant courtyard in the centre and shrugged. Acceptable. It’d do. He wasn’t fussy.
His mind was elsewhere.
Staff in smart buttoned-up white shirts opened the car doors for them and collected their bags. They hurried around with the same urgency as the hustlers at the airport, but they were far less intrusive about it. It was included in the service. Slater slipped out of the vehicle, stretched his limbs, and glanced at King.
Who was staring down at his phone.
The screen read: Violetta LaFleur.
‘You going to take that?’ he said. ‘Seems like she wants to talk again.’
King slipped it into his pocket. ‘Not now.’
‘Everything okay between you two?’
‘Yeah,’ King said. ‘Just a weird dynamic. You know…’
Slater shrugged. ‘I’ve never been in that sort of situation.’
‘Ruby was…’
‘Was,’ Slater said. ‘She’s not around anymore. In case you didn’t notice.’
King stared. ‘I noticed.’
He left it there, and Slater was grateful. Sometimes they irritated the shit out of each other, but each knew their boundaries. He wasn’t entirely over Ruby Nazarian. She’d been something unique in the midst of his monotonously violent existence, and he’d honestly thought it could have led to something permanent down the road. They just … clicked. For the first time in a long time, he’d hoped to end the emotionless womanising and try something more stable.
But life’s not a fairytale, and she’d bled out on the streets of San Francisco, fighting alongside Slater and King to prevent the worst mass shooting in history.
She’d died a hero.
Which meant nothing if she wasn’t around to hear the praise heaped upon her.
King said, ‘You okay?’
‘Yeah,’ Slater said, but he placed a hand on the side of the SUV to steady himself.
Utsav noticed, and dashed forward. ‘Will, are you—?’
Slater held up the other hand, stopping him in his tracks. ‘Fine, Utsav. Thank you.’
The guide nodded, sensing his presence wasn’t desired, and melted into the background.
Slater battled down something very close to misery and steeled himself. Then he adjusted his jacket against the evening chill and followed King into the reception.
They were given a pair of simple two-bed rooms on the third floor. Utsav asked if they needed anything, and they both shook their heads. The guide knew the general gist of why they were here, but details had been kept sparse for obvious reasons. He knew not to push it. This wouldn’t be an ordinary trek. They would need to set a pace that not even a seasoned Nepali guide could maintain, so he’d help them get to Phaplu and then see them off at the starting line.
It’d push Slater and King to their physical and mental limits, but they’d spent most of their careers operating on the outskirts of those limits, so what was a little more pain other than a simple inconvenience?
King disappeared into his own room with the muttered promise to meet in the courtyard an hour from now, and Slater trudged into his own quarters, alone with his thoughts.
Just the way he liked it.
There were miniature bottles of spirits in a bar fridge underneath the small desk.
He dumped his bags down, eyed the alcohol, then took out the two small bottles of whisky and emptied them into a plastic cup. He swirled the amber liquid around, sipped at it, and sat on the edge of the bed.
He should be apprehensive. There was foul play afoot in the mountains, and a violent kidnap involving murder and betrayal was nothing to scoff at. But that was the issue, and Slater knew King would be quietly grappling with the same problem. In small circles amidst the upper echelon of the U.S. government, they were considered the premier operatives in the country. The best of the best, and their orders were filtered accordingly. They were tasked with matters of the utmost priority, and this just wasn’t that. In all likelihood it was the case of a bodyguard who got greedy and figured a remote inaccessible hiking trail would be the perfect location to stage such a risky stunt against his employer. That was bad, but it wasn’t King-and-Slater business.
They were the last-minute cavalry, the stone-cold killers sent into a salvage a situation that had been deemed unsalvageable.
They didn’t do this.
So he’d get drunk tonight. He was already halfway there, and the whisky helped him right along. That way he wouldn’t need to mull over the details for hours on end, pensively wrapped up in his own thoughts until the doubts threatened to eat him alive. He’d just succumb to the pleasant dullness of the alcohol, and deal with the consequences in the morning.
He didn’t realise he’d been sitting on the edge of the bed for close to an hour until he glanced up at the clock. He put down the empty cup, shook himself out of the semi-trance, and went downstairs.
King was there, in a change of clothes, sitting around one of the circular tables by the bar. He’d showered and shaved, and there was a pint of beer in front of him.
Slater felt strangely unclean as he joined his friend and closest ally.
King said, ‘You realise there’s showers here, right?’
‘I’m a little distracted.’
‘By the job?’
‘Trying to distract myself from the job.’
‘It’s worrying you?’
‘The fact that it doesn’t worry me at all is worrying me.’
‘Been there,’ King said.
‘You talked to Violetta?’
‘Briefly.’
‘What’d she say?’
‘There’s works at the airport preventing us from getting a flight to Phaplu. Looks like we’ll be in a jeep all day tomorrow.’
‘How long’s that going to take?’
‘Around ten hours if we make good time.’
‘Bumpy ride?’
‘I’d bet on it.’
‘Did she tell you anything else?’
‘No. She’s still putting the report together. She wants to hit us with all the information at once instead of drip-feeding it to us. We’ll have all the time in the world to get the details to
morrow.’
‘You really think Parker’s up to something?’
‘I don’t know him,’ King said. ‘I’m not ruling anything out.’
Slater shrugged.
King motioned to the beer. ‘You want one?’
‘Better not.’
Slater could sense eyes on him. Boring into him. Drilling deep.
King said, ‘Been hitting the minibar?’
Slater drummed his fingers on the table, and didn’t answer. Then he lifted his blurry gaze to meet King’s. ‘Do you think I have a problem? Be honest. I want to know.’
King looked at him in the same way. Drilling deep.
He said, ‘No.’
Slater kept tapping his fingers. ‘I’m starting to think I might.’
‘Given what we do, I’d say it’s understandable. I’m starting to think I’m the one with the problem for having a grip on it.’
Slater nodded. ‘Do you think about what we’ve done? What we’ve been through?’
‘All the time.’
‘Does it affect you?’
‘How wouldn’t it?’
‘I always thought you were the shining example of how to deal with this life.’
‘I’m the shining example of how to mask your problems,’ King said. ‘I wouldn’t claim to be much more than that.’
They sat back and watched the scene around them. There were groups of tourists dotted across the tables, laughing and drinking and eating, eagerly anticipating the beginning of their various treks. There was nervous excitement in the air. Slater could understand why. Live an ordinary life with an ordinary office job and the prospect of hiking through Nepal seems exotic, extravagant, otherworldly, mysterious. Live a life like his own, or like King’s, and hiking through Nepal seems banal.
He wondered which group had the issue.
He thought he knew the answer.
These people were enjoying themselves.
He was restless and miserable, questioning every aspect of the operation.
He nodded goodnight to King, got up, and went to bed.
10
The next morning, Utsav ushered them into an off-road jeep built to handle the treacherous roads between Kathmandu and Phaplu.
Weak light had crept into the sky, but it was still practically dark. They’d set their alarms for four-thirty in anticipation of heading off at five. Downstairs, they’d wolfed eggs and bacon and sausage and spinach into their mouths to fuel them up for the day, and downed a couple of coffees each to get the juices flowing.
King knew the reasoning behind Violetta keeping information at bay, but he didn’t like it one bit. He stewed silently over breakfast, until Slater finally piped up when they clambered into the jeep.
‘Now you’re the quiet one.’
King looked across. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What else would I mean?’
‘What do you want me to be talking about?’
Slater pointed an accusatory finger in King’s face. ‘You’re acting how I was last night. Did I pass my bad mood onto you?’
King didn’t respond as Utsav got in the passenger seat and nodded to the driver, a thirty-something Nepali man with wrinkly skin weathered by years of exposure to the outdoors. The guy backed out through the steel gates, and they plunged back into the relentless traffic.
King said, ‘Headphones on, Utsav.’
It was an already-established request, passed on by whichever bureaucrat in the government had liaised with the guide and his trekking company. Utsav fished a pair of noise-cancelling headphones out of the footwell and slipped them over his ears. Even from the rear seats, King could hear the music blaring.
He tapped Utsav on the shoulder, and pointed surreptitiously to the driver.
Utsav shook an open hand back and forth across his own throat.
No English.
King nodded, then turned to Slater and said, ‘Remember all those problems we had in New York with the way information was passed along? I guess I’m not satisfied with that just yet.’
Slater said, ‘Then we both have the same issues. I hate this. I hate that there’s probably a dozen things she’s not telling us that aren’t yet important, but might give us a better idea about why we’ve been sent all the way out here.’
‘I just don’t want to sound like a broken record when I complain about it.’
‘They think we’re too dumb to take in information piece by piece. That’s what it comes down to. They want to hit us with all the intel at once.’
‘I’ll give her a call,’ King said.
He dialled, and she answered almost immediately.
‘Yes?’
‘We’re en route to Phaplu.’
‘Good. It’s going to be a long ride.’
‘I think we can handle that.’
There was an uneasy pause.
The driver gunned it around a convoy of mopeds and shot into an enormous intersection, where motorists and drivers roared around the wide dirt track in an eternal chaotic spiral. Then they were on a new road, flooring it through the outskirts of Kathmandu, where the old multi-storey buildings were spaced a little further apart, and the endless grocery stores sporting signs for Tuborg beer and Pepsi weren’t jammed up end to end.
Violetta said, ‘Got something on your mind?’
‘We want details. Now. Same deal as New York.’
She seemed to relent. ‘What do you need to know?’
‘Everything you’ve got.’
‘That’d take too long.’
‘Did you miss the part where we’re in the car for the next ten hours?’
She said, ‘I was about to tell you that we’re still working on an intelligence briefing, but that’s not what you want to hear, is it?’
‘Give me something, Violetta. This is our lives here. We need to know.’
She told him what little information they had to work with.
11
Slater sat in quiet patience as King listened.
For a few beats, he tried to make out what the tinny voice emanating from the phone’s speaker was saying. But amidst the blare of horns and passing shouts of pedestrians and the Nepali music whining out of the jeep’s stereo system, it was impossible to hear anything Violetta was feeding King.
So he turned his attention to the outside world.
What initially had seemed like chaos started to make sense the longer he focused on it. Sure, it was bedlam compared to the First World, but Slater had spent enough time on operations in undesirable locations to understand that most people back home, even those close to the poverty line, had luxuries that those here could only dream about.
But the people here were happy all the same. They laughed and joked and smiled as they trudged down dust-choked sidewalks and hefted hessian sacks full of groceries over their heads and ran across roads at breakneck speed to avoid getting wiped out by a dozen different vehicles. They were at ease in the madness, because it was all they had ever known.
Slater compared that to his own life, and half-smiled.
It was the same thing, all across the world.
You get used to your environment.
That’s what allowed him and King to train like they did every day back home. They needed unbelievable conditioning to do what they did day in and day out, and that took a work ethic that most on the planet would find sick. Certainly, a faction of psychologists would probably diagnose them both with some sort of obsessive disorder.
But that’s who they had to be, and that’s what they had to do.
To them, it was normal.
To them, it would be sick not to put their talents to use.
When King finally got off the phone, Slater said, ‘Update?’
King shrugged. ‘Not as much as I’d hoped to hear. But it’s all she had.’
‘Then that’s why they need us. Because they’re in the dark.’
‘The girl is Raya Parker,’ King said, recapping what they already knew. ‘She’s missing, along
with Oscar Perry and the porter. She doubts the guide or porter are involved, because no one out here knows who or what Aidan Parker really does, least of all the trekking company. He had the bodyguards along with him, but anyone who’s paranoid and has a bit of disposable income can get protection. Violetta says they knew nothing about how truly important he is.’
‘How important is he? What does he do?’
‘That’s where it gets vague.’
Slater raised an eyebrow.
King said, ‘Violetta doesn’t know all the details.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘I believe her.’
‘You would.’
‘Are we going to start down this road again?’ King said. ‘Let’s not fight over everything. We’re not toddlers.’
Slater held up both hands in protest. ‘I’m not trying to start anything. Relax. I’m just saying — don’t you think there’s the possibility you’re wearing rose-tinted glasses?’
‘Why would she withhold that?’
Slater paused, and said, ‘I don’t know. But nothing would surprise me anymore.’
‘We haven’t exactly had the best history with handlers, I know.’
‘Lars, then Ramsay. What is it about power-hungry pieces-of-shit?’
‘Isla was a good handler,’ King said.
‘And look where that got her.’
Killed in Dubai. Shot in the head.
That’s where it got her.
King said, ‘The waters are murky. Think about how little we know about the inner workings of our government. You think Violetta knows everything?’
‘She knows people who would.’
‘Parker himself stays very secretive. Apparently he’s always been a private man. He used to coordinate Black Force operations, but now that division doesn’t exist anymore. He’s been keeping busy, but on what exactly … it’s darts at a dartboard. Some say he’s pioneering new divisions. Some say he’s still working on the same backend stuff. No-one knows for sure.’
‘Does that make you suspicious?’
‘Everything makes me suspicious.’
‘I’m sure he’ll enlighten us on the details when we get to Phaplu.’
