by Jake Needham
They sipped their whiskeys and weighed the implications of what they both now knew that they had not known a few moments before.
“Everything about the assignment was exactly as it always has been,” August said. “The post on the Chess Board. The CryptoCat messages about the messenger’s schedule. And the messenger’s arrival. Nothing was any different except that the messenger was a woman I didn’t know.”
“That didn’t make you suspicious?”
“Why should it? I don’t know all the Band’s personnel. I know almost none of them. And that’s as it should be.”
“The Band doesn’t have a woman messenger, John. Lawrence of Princeton delivers all the assignments for me.”
In spite of himself, August smiled. “How did you know I call him that?”
“Because we all call him that.”
August chuckled, but his amusement faded quickly.
“Well, fuck,” he said. “Somebody has our communications protocols and used them to set me up.”
“It would seem so.”
“That’s worse than a leak, Conductor. The Band has been completely compromised.”
The Conductor nodded thoughtfully, but he didn’t say anything.
Suddenly a limb of the tree in the middle of the Conductor’s garden rattled and shook, and when August glanced over he saw a red-brown squirrel with a sprinkling of white on his bushy tail leap from the tree limb to the top of the brick wall that surrounded the garden.
The squirrel edged toward them along the wall, taking a few steps forward, freezing to see what would happen, and then taking a few more. After a bit, the squirrel apparently decided the two men posed no threat to him and he strode confidently along the wall until he came to the point that was close to where they sat. Then he settled back on his haunches, sat down, and examined them with evident curiosity. He clearly couldn’t understand what the two men were doing, sitting there together silent and unmoving, and the squirrel turned his head first to one side and then to the other as if that might somehow improve his comprehension.
August could easily understand why the squirrel was having difficulty deciding what the two men were likely to do next, since August himself had no fucking clue.
“Maybe this was personal,” the Conductor suddenly spoke up. “Maybe someone was targeting you and this has nothing to do with the Band.”
At the sound of the Conductor’s voice the squirrel started in alarm. He leaped off the wall into the neighbor’s garden and disappeared. August wished he could do exactly the same thing.
“I don’t think so, sir. The bomb was evidently triggered by a proximity detector, but then there was a time delay built in as well. We think the purpose of the delay had to have been to make certain all of us had time to enter the room before the bomb detonated. Whoever set it to trigger that way intended to kill us all, not just me.”
“It’s possible they just wanted to make certain you were in the room and they didn’t know how many people would enter or in what order so they allowed a little extra time, to be sure they’d get you.”
August nodded. Maybe. He supposed that was at least possible, but it didn’t feel right to him. If somebody wanted to kill him, there were an awful lot of far easier ways to do it. Why go through the elaborate set-up of faking an assignment that would pull his entire crew into that hotel room in Hong Kong and then rigging the room to blow up? You would only do something like that if you were trying to land a knock-out blow on the Band, not simply kill John August.
“Are the other teams all secure?” August asked the Conductor.
“Yes, as far as I know. On the other hand, twenty minutes ago I would have said your team was secure, too.”
“Perhaps you should stand everyone down for a while.”
The Conductor looked distinctly unenthusiastic about that, and August could easily understand why. It would doubtless cause all sorts of disruptions in ongoing operations that August didn’t know a thing about. And he wasn’t about to ask.
“Any ideas about who it could be, sir?”
“Not unless it’s one of your old girlfriends, John.”
August didn’t bother to laugh and the Conductor didn’t look like he expected him to.
“Have there been any recent operations that might have triggered someone to look for revenge against the Band?”
The Conductor shook his head.
“Any threats? Problems? Blown operations?”
The Conductor was silent for a long while. After a bit he lifted his whiskey glass automatically and seemed surprised when he put it to his lips and found it was empty.
“Almost no one even knows the Band exists, John. You know that.”
“But there are some people in the government who know it exists, and some of them don’t like what we do.”
“Enough to start killing my people? They don’t do that.”
“We do that, sir.” August thought of Billy Fang, assuming he existed, and he thought of some of the others who had posed a danger to the country and whose danger the Band had put an end to. “We kill people when they’re a threat. If someone thought we were a threat, why wouldn’t they do the same thing?”
The Conductor shook his head, but he said nothing.
Out of the corner of his eye August caught a sudden flash of movement and turned his head in time to see that the squirrel with the white sprinkled tail had returned. It sat motionlessly on its haunches on top of the garden wall and silently watched the two men. After a minute or two, it scampered down the wall, built up its momentum, and launched itself into a graceful bound back into the tree in the middle of the garden. A limb shook, then another and another, until finally silence returned and the squirrel was gone.
August watched it disappear and he envied its complete freedom and its utter autonomy. If the Buddhists were right, and our souls lived endless cycles of life in different forms, August decided he could do worse the next time around than put up his hand to come back as a squirrel.
“If someone is trying to take down the Band, sir, this doesn’t end here. We may not have much time before they hit us again.”
“But surely, since they failed in their first try—”
“They don’t know that. They think they succeeded.”
A quizzical expression crossed the Conductor’s face. August realized he hadn’t really focused on that part of the story yet.
“They missed getting us only because of Woods’ instincts and a bit of sheer luck,” August continued quickly. “Even if they were watching the hotel, they almost certainly don’t know we survived and slipped away in the chaos. I doubt they know they failed. They think they succeeded.”
“It is then your conviction that they’ll feel emboldened by that perception of success and keep coming.”
“Yes, sir. If it were me, and I wanted to destroy the Band, I’d finish the job before you figured out what was really happening.”
The Conductor folded his arms and looked away. August imagined he was seeing sights he would rather not.
“Maybe I’m wrong, sir. Maybe there’s another explanation.”
“Do you have one?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
They sat quietly after that for a bit, each teasing out his own thoughts. When the Conductor finally spoke again, it was in a voice so soft that August might almost have missed it.
“What do you think we ought to do, John?”
“We need to fix this quickly. I’m going to do that the way I usually fix things. I’m going to find the threat and eliminate it.”
“You’re going to kill whoever is behind this.”
It wasn’t a question so August didn’t give the Conductor an answer.
“It may not be easy this time,” the Conductor said.
“It’s never easy, sir. I don’t do it because it’s easy.”
“If you’re right, if somebody really is trying to destroy the Band, how are you going to find who it is? You’ve got n
othing to work with. You’ve got no place to start looking for them.”
“But I do. That woman who came to Secrets posing as a messenger from you set us up. That’s where I start. With her.”
The Conductor nodded slowly, but he didn’t say anything.
“How many people know about our security protocols, sir? How many people know about leaving a message on the Chess Board and then communicating the messenger’s schedule through CryptoCat?”
“Maybe ten.”
“And how many people know about me and about Secrets?”
“Fewer. Perhaps four or five.”
“That’s why the messenger is the place to start. She’s got to be connected somehow to someone who knows about Secrets.”
“I’m one of those four or five people, John.”
“Yes, you are. That’s why I’m here. I needed to eliminate you first.”
“You thought I might have betrayed you.”
There was no anger in the Conductor’s tone, no resentment. He was simply stating a fact.
“It wasn’t personal, sir. It was just math. The number of people who know about me is small. They each have to be eliminated no matter who they are.”
The Conductor nodded and thought for a moment.
“You’re not an investigator, John. Your strength is—”
“I know what my strength is, sir. When you give me an assignment, you always leave the details to me. That’s what you need to do here, too.”
The Conductor nodded slowly again and thought about it. He didn’t have to think for very long.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll give you a week. But that’s it. If you don’t get to the bottom of this by then, I’m going to have to get at it another way. What do you need from me?”
“First, stand down the other teams so that they can’t be pulled into a set-up the way we were. And do nothing at all to suggest you have the slightest interest in the explosion that occurred at the Cordis Hotel in Hong Kong.”
“All right.”
“And I’ll need a list of all the people who know about Secrets and about me, and I need a list of everyone who knows what our communications protocols are.”
“I can give you that now.”
“You have some burner phones, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Here?”
The Conductor nodded again.
“Give me a number that’s never been used and that will only be used for communication between us.”
“Fine. Do you need any logistics support?”
“I’m dead, sir. How could I possibly need any logistics support?”
The Conductor chuckled slightly. “John,” he said, “I’m beginning to get the idea you like being dead.”
“You have to admit there is a certain sense of freedom to it, sir.”
August thought for a moment of telling the Conductor about the squirrel, but then he thought better of it and let it go.
August felt like he was right in the eye of a storm and he couldn’t see the whole of it yet.
He knew the Conductor was right to say he wasn’t much of an investigator. He did the down-low stuff when it needed to be done, not the visible stuff.
The painstaking rooting out of facts and their transubstantiation into something like awareness was a different affair altogether. He would need help for that. He would need help to grasp the dimensions and depth of the storm, to determine where it originated and where it was going.
And August knew just the guy who could do that.
III
Progressio
Chapter Twenty-One
It was a few minutes before sunrise. Tay watched Singapore slide by outside the windows of the taxi taking him to Changi Airport. In the gray half-light of a false dawn, he saw heat lightning flashing silently behind banks of clouds massed to the south over the Singapore Strait. It looked as if a naval duel was being fought far out on the ocean, some place too far away for him to hear the sound of the guns.
August must have been confident Tay would help him because he already had everything organized. A ticket on Singapore Airlines, a booking at the Pattaya Hilton, a pile of Thai currency, and a local contact Tay could trust if he needed him. August had also given Tay a prepaid phone which he insisted on calling a burner. Tay was familiar with the term, of course, but only from spy novels and the movies. The kind of villains he had dealt with in Singapore just made do with their own phones and didn’t seem to be overly worried about being tracked by sophisticated electronics. Singapore was a small place. You didn’t need to track a phone to find somebody. You just asked around among the uncles and aunties, and somebody could tell you where to find almost anybody.
August was leaving it to Tay to find out who had tried to kill him in Hong Kong. He told Tay he figured it was better for him to stay dead for a while so he had gone completely dark. He thought that whoever was responsible for the bomb in Hong Kong would doubtless be less wary if they believed the operation had been successful and that August and his team were dead. That made sense to Tay, so he hadn’t argued. Besides, truth be known, he really preferred going it alone.
Besides, how hard could it be? August had told him what he knew about the woman who had come to him pretending to be a messenger for the Band, and that sounded to Tay like as good a starting point as any. If he could identify her, then everything else would fall into place from there. Well… probably it would.
Pattaya wasn’t a very big town, and Tay’s guess was that not a great many women traveled there, certainly not attractive ones who were on their own. The way August had described this woman, his guess was she would have been noticed by a fair number of people. What he had to do was find some of them.
Having the exact date and time she had gone to Secrets was a good start. That gave Tay a nice, tight little window to work with. If he could pinpoint the woman somewhere in that window, he could begin to trace her movements around Pattaya, maybe find out how she had gotten there and how she had left, and where she had gone other than to Secrets to meet August. If she had stayed in a hotel, that meant a registration, and a registration meant a passport and a credit card. They both might well be fakes, of course, but even fakes told you something about the user’s identity, and something was more than they had now.
Naturally, the big win would be to find the woman had been caught somewhere on CCTV and get a picture of her. With a picture and some minimal information about her, he was sure August could use his intelligence contacts to ID the woman, and once they knew who she was then everything would begin to unravel.
It would be simple, Tay told himself. He really hoped he was right about that. He wanted this over as soon as possible so he could go home. He had never been a keen traveler. He thought all that business about how you broadened your mind when you visited other countries was nonsense. When you visited other countries mostly what you discovered was how good you had it at home.
In the predawn gloom, Singapore felt empty, desolate. The darkened buildings and the metal grates pulled down over the shop fronts made it seem as if he and the cab driver were the last two people left alive on earth.
For just a moment, Tay found himself wondering if he might be seeing Singapore for the last time. He wasn't sure why that thought occurred to him right out of nowhere, but once it had, he wished it hadn’t. Singapore was his home, the only one he had ever known. He did not know what would become of him without it.
Yet, if he was being entirely honest with himself, he had to admit he had developed strangely mixed feelings about the city. Singapore had been a place he had loved unconditionally once, but that was a long time ago. He didn’t really love Singapore like that anymore. He wished he did, but he didn’t.
When he was a child, Singapore had been a place of wonder for him. It had been a paradise then, a serene and sweet-tempered place where the warm breezes rattled the palm trees with a sound that came back to him with absolute clarity now, even after almost forty years. Sometimes
Tay thought he could close his eyes and see everything again just as it had been then, back when he was eight years old and Singapore was thrilling to him, but he wasn’t absolutely sure anymore he really could. Was he seeing something he actually remembered, or was he only seeing something he wanted to remember? The older Tay got, the harder it was for him to tell.
As the years had passed, his city had begun to break his heart. Singapore had become a place he hardly knew anymore, a place he really didn’t want to know. The city in which he grew up, the city of shaded laneways warmed by the tropical sun and cooled by the ocean breezes, was gone, as gone as if it had never existed at all. It had been fed by mindless bureaucrats into the merciless grinders of progress, and it had emerged without its soul.
Somewhere along the way, the city he had loved for the whole of his life had turned fat, ugly, and mean. Maybe it wasn’t just Singapore. Maybe the whole world had turned fat, ugly, and mean, but Tay only lived in one small part of it so he couldn’t be sure whether it had or not.
Perhaps, he sometimes thought, it wasn’t the city or the world that had changed so much. Perhaps it was just him. As he had grown older, Tay had noticed time beginning to fold back on itself. His oldest memories had become brighter and more vivid than his newest. Perhaps it was only natural when one had no future that the past came alive with newfound intensity. If he could live in that past again, he thought he probably would.
Tay saw the headlights of another car crossing the road somewhere far in front of the taxi and he felt a sudden rush of relief. He and the driver were not the only two people still alive in a landscape of desolation. There were other people out there. But then abruptly the lights vanished and the other car was gone, as gone as if it had never existed at all, and he and the cab driver were alone in the darkness again.
Tay hadn’t realized his airline ticket was first class until he got to the airport. It was a nice surprise to be conducted past the long line of people waiting to check in and taken into a private area furnished with comfortable couches and chairs where neatly uniformed women waited behind desks to make his life as easy as possible. Still, he felt a little bit guilty relaxing in an overstuffed chair with a cup of coffee while someone else took his ticket and passport and dealt with the minutiae of sorting them out and checking his bag. He hadn’t finished even half the cup when a smiling woman returned, gave him his boarding pass and luggage check, directed him to the private immigration desks, and told him how to find the first-class lounge.
