Weaponized (10 page)

S
he throws Kyle into the passenger seat of a two-door rental pockmarked with rust, a wounded warrior’s chassis. There’s nothing she can do to this car that it hasn’t been through already.

She starts the car, waits until the engine’s epic sputter turns into a sustained surge, then slams down on the gas.

She gropes around the dash, then reaches under the seat, grabs a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, hands them to Kyle. “Light one for me,” she says, and then laughs, realizing she left the hood on him. “I’m sorry, baby,” she says. “Things happened so fast.”

She takes off Kyle’s hood, grabs the nape of his neck and pulls him close, her nails gripping his jaw, and plants a long, ravenous kiss on his mouth—all the while steering with one hand. Right as she’s slipping Kyle her tongue, she breaks away and throws him off, smack into the door handle.

Kyle winces.

“Who the fuck are you?” she yells.

Kyle’s frozen by nerves and the passion of her kiss. No one has ever kissed him like
that
before.

She pulls a gun from her waistband and points it at Kyle. “Answer me. Who are you?”

He throws his hands up, shrinks into the corner. “Don’t kill me. Christ. Don’t kill me.”

“Who are you?”

“Kyle. My name’s Kyle.”

“Kyle…Kyle what?”

Kyle’s blinded by how fast the car’s moving; his stomach’s doing laps. She’s blazing past throngs of Buddhists off to pray; past tourists snapping photos of temples and markets; past hands pounding on the car windows, hawking DVDs, fruit, and water; past lines of men and women turning the highway into a sidewalk; past banyan trees baking in the sun.

She waves the gun. “Kyle what?”

“You killed those guys. You killed all of them.”

“Want to be next? Talk.”

“Fuck…don’t kill me. Don’t.”

“Where’s Robinson? Why do those guys think you’re Robinson?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where he is.”

She’s screams at him as she floors the gas. “How do you know Robinson? How the fuck do you know him?”

“I don’t know him. I met him. But I don’t know him.”

“How’d you meet?”

Kyle’s reeling, can’t keep up with her questions. “What?”

“Tell me where he is.”

“I don’t know. I swear it. I don’t know where he is.”

“Who do you work for?”

“No one. I don’t work for anyone.”

“Bullshit. Everyone works for someone.”

“I don’t. I don’t.”

She tightens her finger on the trigger. “Who do you work for?”

Kyle screams back at her, “
No one.
I don’t know anything. I swear. Listen to me.”

She looks in the rearview. There’s an SUV with tinted windows trailing them, and closing the gap. She’s got the gas floored. The car’s doing ninety and leaving behind an ocean of oil and brake fluid. The speed is cannibalizing the carburetor; the transmission whistles like air through a bullet hole; the body of the car is shaking.

They don’t have much time before the SUV catches up.

“Goddamn, Robinson,” she says. “Why’d you have to send me to a place with no roads or sidewalks?”

Kyle’s beached in the corner, rubbing his wrists, which are raw and swollen from the cord. His eyes are empty; he’s staring off. “I don’t know anything,” he whispers to the girl he figures has to be Lara. “I don’t.” He’s marooned inside himself.

She checks the rearview again. The car on their ass doesn’t have a license plate. Not a good sign.

Kyle stares at the ornate tattoos on Lara’s upper arm and shoulder. Can’t figure out what language they’re in, thinks it could be Slavic.

In a slightly softer voice, but while pressing the gun right against his forehead, Lara asks: “One last time…who the fuck
are
you?”

“Kyle West.” He nods in affirmation, almost to reassure himself. “I’m Kyle West.”

She presses the gun harder, leaving a mark. “That’s your name. Not
who
you are.”

Two bullets obliterate the back window before Kyle gets a chance to respond.

K
yle throws himself against the door in shock, thinking the bullets came from Lara’s gun. He’s sure he’s shot, searches his body for blood and wounds.

More bullets fly through the car’s exposed back; they lodge in the upholstery and frame, shredding leather and throwing tufts of fabric.

Lara loses control of the car. Smoke overflows from the engine in a furious froth, obscuring her vision. She slams on the brakes, then pumps them, but the car keeps spinning until it ends up in a dead stop facing the wrong way—which is to say, directly at the SUV.

Lara tosses her hair off her forehead, breathes in, and picks up her gun from the floor.

On impulse, Kyle decides to seize the chance to flee. Throws open the passenger door and takes off running across the road.

Lara sticks her head out the window. “Where the fuck are you going?”

But he doesn’t look back, doesn’t answer. He’s running to freedom or, at the very least, away from the crazy bitch who pointed a gun at his head.

Lara slams the car into reverse and floors it while unloading a fresh clip in the direction of the SUV.

Kyle crosses the road, streaks through dirt clumps and gravel that are surrounded on all sides by slum housing in a state of semicollapse. He’s running hard, sucking in air, holding his sides since he’s still in pain from his earlier beating. The shoes, Robinson’s Ferragamos, are tearing up his soles and ankles.

Just keep moving. Do not stop to think.

Kyle looks back and sees the doors of the SUV open. Two Chinese guys wearing wired-up earpieces surge out in pursuit. One of them yells: “Robinson. Stop. Get in the car!”

Kyle picks up his pace, his chest and throat burning, then makes a right into the slum suburb and immediately regrets it. This place makes the shanties of Phnom Penh look like something out of a brochure begging for a wide vista shot.

He strips off the Ferragamos so he can move faster. Not a great idea, considering he’s about to step in raw sewage.

He hops over a lake of indigo goo, something septic, and rips through an endless succession of clotheslines, strung up to both dry rags and separate makeshift housing.

No one he encounters pays much attention to this heavy-breathing American. They all seem to have other things on their minds—probably how happy they are he’s not a government-sponsored bulldozer razing their homes, gobbling up the land, and displacing them even farther from the city.

He cuts into a corridor separating residences, pushes aside some naked children, and is about to fuck up a game of dice some locals are playing when bullets explode a few inches from his head. In response, the gamblers pick up their dice, avoid eye contact, and disappear into the shanty labyrinth.

“Robinson,”
one of his pursuers yells. “Robinson. We need to talk to you.”

Kyle keeps running, sees a clearing ahead, sees a street. He thinks he can make it.

The bullets are tearing up dirt in clumps around his feet.

“Stop,” one of his pursuers says. “Goddamn it. Stay put.”

Kyle does the exact opposite, makes a lung-shredding dash straight into the open road without looking—and is nearly crushed by Lara’s car, which is smoking like a nineteenth-century steam engine.

“Get in the fucking car,”
she yells to Kyle.

He turns back and sees the two guys screaming into their headsets, their guns fixed on him, a few hundred feet behind.

Kyle closes his eyes, prays for insight in the dark.

These people are going to kill me,
he thinks.
This woman might kill me.

“Get in here now,” she says.

Okay. Play the odds.

He rips open the car door and jumps inside.

Lara floors it, and the radiator responds by belching fluid across the windshield.

F
owler stands amid the crowds in the bustling airport. Just as he’d feared, he spent the past half hour on the phone with the police demanding a translator be sent over.

“Why wasn’t one here in the first place?” Fowler asks.

Fowler’s got the chief of police on the other end of the line, a man who’s trying to placate him but who has a long memory of colonialism that he can’t quite keep out of his voice. “Mr. Fowler, sir, the manager of the airport speaks English. Mr. Suong, I believe.”

Fowler paces around a boarding gate. “Yeah, well. Apparently, Mr. Suong has left for the afternoon.”

“
Our
translator will be back in the office at seven thirty tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll have shot someone by then.”

“I understand your frustration.”

“You seem to speak English pretty well.”

“Thank you, sir. Not much choice in the matter.”

“How about
you
come down here? Help me out.”

“Looking into missing persons isn’t what I do, Mr. Fowler.”

“It’s a crime, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re police, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What
do
you do, then?”

“Major crimes, sir. I report directly to Hun Sen’s chief of security. Our translator will happily accompany you to the airport at seven thirty tomorrow morning.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t do any good to remind you who I am.”

“I could say the same to you, Mr. Fowler. People like you come and go, but I live here. Good day.”

Fowler strolls over to the customer-service area and sits in front of Mai’s desk, holding her police report.

“Speak English?”

Mai giggles. “Some.”

Fowler offers her his hand. “I’m Tom Fowler.”

“Mai.”

“You’re the one who helped Mr. Robinson when he had difficulty getting his ticket?”

Mai’s face is a blank.

“Trouble. Mr. Robinson had
trouble
with ticket.”

She nods. “Yes. I did help.”

“Good. And how would you describe Mr. Robinson?”

Mai shrugs.

“Was he nervous? Angry? Guilty?” Fowler has a face to go with each emotion.

“Oh—angry. Very angry.”

“Okay. So you tried to help him with his ticket, and then security showed up? Is that right?”

“Yes. I tried to help.”

“How long was Mr. Robinson with you before security arrived?”

“Long?”

“Minutes. How many minutes did you speak with Robinson for?”

“Very few. Very few. One, two, maybe.”

“Did you know the security guards? Recognize them?”

“No. But change often. High rate of turnover.”

Fowler smiles. “Good. That’s good.” Mai’s well versed in human resources–speak. Nice to know American corporate euphemisms for termination transcend native tongues.

“Okay.” Fowler taps the top of her computer. “I’m going to need Robinson’s credit card info, Social, ticket number, all of it. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You have security cameras here?”

“Excuse?”

Fowler makes the motion for a camera lens near his eye. Mai nods her head enthusiastically.

“Can you take me there? Help me find Robinson on the tape?”

“I’ll try,” she says.

Fowler gives her a warm grin. “All I can ask.” He gets up, takes in the layout of the airport. “What direction did security escort Mr. Robinson?”

Mai looks around the airport and points.

“Okay.” Fowler follows her finger. “And where is the security office?”

Mai points in the opposite direction.

Fowler gets part of the answer he was looking for. “That doesn’t look right, does it?” he says, more to himself than Mai, who shrugs.

F
owler watches the tech guys scroll through footage while Mai stands at his side, keeping a lookout for Robinson on the screen.

Fowler and Mai are drinking tea; Mai because she wanted tea, Fowler because he couldn’t get her to understand that he wanted coffee.

Mai taps one of the techs on the shoulder. “That’s him.”

And there’s a man standing at the kiosk struggling to understand why it won’t print out his ticket and then assaulting the inanimate device.

Fowler squints. “Scroll forward. See if you can get me a frontal facial.”

The camera follows the man from behind as he heel-toes it toward Mai’s desk escorted by the security guard. Then he sits down, and his face comes into full view.

“Freeze there. Can you isolate that?”

Tech guys shake their heads in confusion. What?

Fowler looks to Mai. “I need a picture of him. Can you tell them that?”

She does, and they nod in response.

“Keep going on the archive,” Fowler says. “I want to see if I can get a look at the security guards.”

Fowler motions to the tech guys to move the tape ahead, and he watches as the three security guards approach the man, then lead him through the boarding area and completely out of the range of the cameras.

Fowler knows one thing:

These guys have done this before. They’ve been trained to get out of the camera’s radius immediately. Even freeze-framing the images provides nothing but shadows and smears of gray suits.

Fowler moves away from the terminal, nods in thanks, turns to Mai. “Tell them I need a PDF of Robinson’s picture e-mailed to these two phone numbers.” He tears apart his cigarette pack, writes the numbers on the cardboard, and hands it to her. “Do you know what I want?”

Mai nods, and Fowler hopes she gets it. She’s impeccably polite, but her eyes call to mind the famous saying “There’s no
there
there.”

Fowler steps back into the airport proper, sits in the departures lounge, and calls Rebecca.

“Hey there,” he says. “You get the Robinson card info I sent?”

“Got it.”

“You’re gonna get a PDF of his face in a few. Run it through our system. See if it hits anyone we’re watching.”

“Fowler, I know how to do this.”

“I’m sorry.” And he is. He still hasn’t adjusted to having someone smarter than him under his command.

“Anything at the airport?”

“Locals had already taken prints when I got here,” he says. “Fuck knows what they picked up or smudged away. They aren’t delicate when it comes to forensics.”

She breathes deep in agreement. “I have some potentially good news. You know the airport manager you asked me to locate, Mr. Suong? I found him. Can you take down an address?”

Fowler gets ready to use the other half of his cigarette pack. “Yeah.…Go.”

“Fowler, don’t leave me working pics and card info while you run around. I can do more.”

“I’ll call you after I talk to Suong. Just see what you can do with the credit cards.”