T
hey’re no more than a few feet into traffic before the cops arrive and start chasing them. Apparently, even in Cambodia, you can’t kill people and riddle a dock with bullets without someone calling the police.
Kyle has to laugh. The notion of a car chase on one of Cambodia’s highways is absurd. There’s more than enough potential automotive apocalypse to go around without the addition of high-speed flight.
Lara weaves, speeding through endless motos and tuk-tuks transporting tourists and locals who stop and stare or hurl profanity or pull out their phones to preserve Lara’s wild ride for posterity.
“Okay,” she says to Kyle. “Here’s our problem.”
Kyle’s relieved she’s boiled this unholy clusterfuck down to a single issue.
“They’re behind us. Which means I can only drive ahead. I can’t defend. We need to be behind them. We need to not be the ones being chased.”
“How?”
“I go in reverse.”
Kyle shakes his head. She can’t be serious.
“I’m serious,” she says. “Get in the back. Take the gun. And be my eyes. Once I start, we’re gonna lose the mirrors and then some. Shoot at whatever you have to so I can get behind those cars.” She tosses him the Walther.
The cops pull alongside Lara in a cratered Oldsmobile, and the driver motions for her to pull over, using his gun for emphasis and punctuation.
Lara responds by giving her car more gas.
Kyle crawls into the back, peers through the window, and takes in the state of the chase. Honestly, there’s so much chaos,
not including the cops,
it’s hard for him to tell what their biggest concern is.
“Tell me what you see,” Lara says.
“Three cop cars,” Kyle says. “One’s behind us. The second to your right. And the third flanking the second. And according to your plan, we need to get behind all of them?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay,” Kyle says, breathing in.
“Make me space. And if they don’t move, you shoot.”
“There’s a shitload of normal people. Riding bikes…motorcycles…tuk-tuks. I’m supposed to fucking shoot at them?”
“I’m not asking you to kill them. I want you to
move them
. I’m going.”
“Wait, wait…”
Kyle rolls down the window, sticks his head out. “Okay.
Go,
” he yells to Lara, and then grandly gesticulates to the drivers and pedestrians to get out of the way.
“Move. Move!”
He’s screaming over the shriek of tires.
Everyone on the highway stares at him in confusion.
Lara puts the car in reverse, swerves and mashes her way between two lanes of traffic, and starts traveling in the extremely limited available space, making room as she tears off other cars’ mirrors, bumpers, door handles, paint, and pretty much anything in her way.
Sparks fly, tires smoke. They lose both side mirrors, plus a door handle.
Kyle has to fight his instinct to close his eyes as drivers and pedestrians scream and careen into one another.
For a while, Lara’s plan works.
Until they end up stuck between two cars stopped in traffic. One of which happens to be the cops’.
Fuck.
Not enough room to squeeze past or between them. Lara’s sure as hell trying, but she’s boxed in.
The cop smiles at his good fortune, points a gun right at Kyle, and motions for him to get out of the car.
“We’re stuck. And this cop is gonna shoot me,” Kyle shouts to Lara.
Lara grinds in reverse but she can’t get out from between the two cars. Reek of ruined rubber. Black smoke from bald tires.
Drivers have evacuated their smoking, wrecked cars and are surveying the damage, shaking their heads in commiseration with one another. Some of them pull out cell phones, presumably to call in more police.
Everyone’s honking. Total standstill.
Lara drums the wheel with her fingers.
Kyle yells, “Whatta we do? Whatta we do?”
Lara tries to move the car forward but just kisses side doors and throws off metal sparks.
The cop pulls back on his safety and motions that Kyle should get out of the car or he’s going to use the gun.
“Lara,”
he yells. “This fucking guy’s going to shoot me.”
“Start shooting when I tell you,” Lara says. “We gotta go forward again.”
She guns the engine, builds up energy, then throttles the stick and throws the car into drive. “Shoot.”
The pent-up force rockets them out from between the two cars, leaving behind most of their car’s bumper.
But they’re free.
All of Kyle’s shots missed the people in the cop car, but he managed to disable the vehicle by obliterating the windshield and punching several holes through the grille.
Also, Kyle’s learned an intriguing new fact about himself: Apparently, when he shoots, he screams at the top of his lungs.
“Christ, will you stop screaming,” Lara says. “It’s over. Okay? It’s over.” She grinds the gears between second and third, hurtling between lanes of traffic. “We lost them.” She checks the shattered shards of the side mirror. “We did.” There’s no one coming, and she’s left enough vehicular carnage behind that no one’s getting through.
All true.
Lara did manage to elude the cops; however, other adversaries have been biding their time, and they now decide to make their presence known. A Dodge Caravan that’s been driving in front of Lara brakes suddenly and then reverses into her.
Then, from behind, a Toyota rams them.
They’re sandwiched. The chassis of Lara’s car is screaming as if somehow the metal has become conscious, and aware of the abuse being heaped upon it.
A shadow behind the Dodge’s tinted windows kicks out the frame and shows himself, gun-first. He’s Chinese. He unloads a few dozen shots from an AK-47 into the front of Lara and Kyle’s car.
Kyle screams. Then screams some more.
Bullets tear up the hood, shred the steel, and lodge in the frame. The windshield spiderwebs at several impact points, and air seeps inside through the fissures.
Lara looks front, then back, appraising things. “I can’t go up against the Dodge. But I can take the Toyota.”
“What?”
Her hand grips the clutch. “I’m gonna take him. We weigh more.”
“What?”
“We’ve got to try to lose one of them.”
Lara jerks the car into second, gets room to build momentum by pulling right up to the bumper of the Dodge, and then, in one wrist snap, she reverses into the front of the Toyota.
The trunk, the left rear tire, and the remains of their bumper are gone.
But the Toyota gets the worst of it.
The Toyota’s driver loses control, and, since he isn’t wearing a seat belt, he’s hurled through his own windshield, a spraying, speeding projectile whose impromptu flight climaxes with him landing in the middle of the road, causing several cars to wreck as their drivers swerve to avoid the man’s corpse.
The Dodge returns to finish the job. The Chinese gunman emerges from the back window again and unloads a partial clip into what remains of the hood of Lara’s car.
The hood can’t withstand the assault. First it pops up, blinding Lara, and then, under the continued fire, it flies off, spins, and crashes somewhere in the center of traffic.
The gunman opens fire again, and this time he hits the fuel line of Lara’s car.
And now they’re fucked. The exterior has caught fire.
The fire wraps the car in a quilt of flames, spreads inside, engulfs the dash, and—Kyle’s legs catch fire.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Fuck.”
He starts shaking them out.
Lara keeps one hand on the wheel, stretches into the backseat, grabs her blazer, and throws it atop Kyle’s legs. “Pat them down,” she says. “Pat them down.” He does. Smoke rises through the fabric.
“We gotta bail,”
Kyle screams. “Right now.”
Lara doesn’t answer. She switches to first gear, keeps accelerating, faster and faster; errant pieces of the car fly off into traffic.
She screams out to Kyle:
“Jump!”
He wraps the blazer around his hand, throws open the flaming door, and lands in the middle of the highway. And he is now certain,
fucking certain,
that jumping out of a moving vehicle is the most painful thing he will ever experience.
But Lara’s plan worked.
The Dodge didn’t have enough time to swerve from the path of her vehicular Molotov cocktail and is engulfed in flames.
Lara walks the highway, dazed, screaming out Kyle’s name.
Kyle raises his hand. “I’m here.”
She stops short, catches her breath, and stares at her handiwork. Sections of the Dodge are melting off, collecting in puddles of liquefied metal and steel; the sun streams across the surface, leaving a rainbow.
She reaches Kyle, leans in close, extends her hand. “Come on.”
He rises and balances against her until he can stand on his own. “Is the flash drive still intact?”
She checks her pocket, pulls out the flash drive—it’s still in one piece. “Can you move?”
Kyle nods. “Yeah.”
“Good. We’re gonna walk up a little farther and get a new car.”
Kyle, who is becoming quite conversant in Lara-speak, understands that this means she’s going to force someone out of a car—probably at gunpoint—and take off in it after rendering the former occupant unconscious.
PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA
M
ost men Fowler’s age have a houseful of memories; some even have to rent storage space for all the memories they can’t fit in the current house.
Fowler doesn’t have that problem. Over a lifetime, he’s adopted the living patterns and conditions of the guerrillas he used to train and hunt.
He rents a one-story stucco sandcastle close to the water. The inside is functional, shorn of any aesthetic frill. He has no photos, no cherished childhood items, no secret stash of love letters, nothing personal. This is the way he prefers it. Dostoevsky once said that hell was perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair. To Fowler, that sounds like home, and he lives accordingly.
Fowler’s standing by the sink finishing yesterday’s coffee when his cell phone rings. “Talk to me, Rick.”
“I’m going to be famous.” The kid is gushing. “I mean, really fucking famous. Like the hacker hall of fame. They’re going to have a dinner every year in my honor.”
“The point.”
“Do you have any idea whose computer you jacked?”
“I didn’t jack it.”
“You straight jacked it. And you know whose it is?”
“Obviously not.”
“Kyle motherfucking West. Kyle West. Fowler, I just hacked Kyle West’s computer. Do you know what this means?”
“Not a clue.”
“You don’t know who Kyle West is?”
“Maybe…vaguely.”
“You’re a fucking idiot.”
“Better men than you, Rick, have called me worse.”
“Kyle West created Christopher Chandler’s computer network. He’s been missing and presumed dead for a year. He’s considered by many, me included, to be the Heisenberg, the von Braun of the network age. He created something we can’t even process yet. Don’t you watch the fucking news, Fowler?”
“Not since I was starring in it most nights.”
“Fowler, no matter what you got up to in Milan, you are small-fucking-fry. I haven’t even begun to crack this thing yet. All I could do was get into the finder box. And that took me hours. It would take weeks to strip the rest of this. And even if I had the time, I don’t think I could. You don’t understand what this guy can do to a computer.”
“Kyle West,” Fowler says, almost interrogative.
“You have to let me keep this for a while. You have to. Just for reasons of pride.”
“You cannot tell
anyone
about this.”
“No one…but do you have any idea what I’ve done?”
“I do. And that’s why I’m saying tell no one. No one.”
“How can you ask me to hack Kyle West and then keep it a secret?”
“Rick, you tell a soul, a single fucking soul, I will drop you in a cell until you shrivel.”
“That’s just mean, Fowler.”
“I am mean.”
Ricki’s a kid at Christmas. “Can I keep working on it? Please. Can I keep going?”
Fowler waves it off. “Fine. You get a few more hours. But I’m coming for that thing soon.”
Kyle West,
Fowler thinks.
Kyle West. I know the name, a vague recollection.
He wants to call Rebecca and ask, but he knows even her infinite patience might be tested if she finds out he doesn’t know someone Rick compared to Heisenberg, a person Fowler also doesn’t know but who, since the name sounds German, probably did something terrifying to the very fabric of reality itself.
Fowler sits down on his couch, lights a cigarette, and boots up his computer. It’s Rebecca’s old model; she gave it to him when she upgraded. He signs on to Google Video, enters
Kyle West,
and ends up getting more hits than the last time he visited a porn site and typed in
kinky brunette.
He settles on a CNN news stream from a few days back and takes another drag while the episode loads.
The stream covers Christopher Chandler returning after a long weekend to continue giving testimony before a Senate judiciary committee.
There’s ominous drone music followed by the standard stock shots of Chandler, the images the news always deploys when trying to make him look sinister: Chandler getting out of a limo with sunglasses on, his bevy of bodyguards hiding his face; Chandler sitting at a round table with Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, caught midsentence; Chandler standing behind a podium at a corporate function; Chandler sipping coffee with the president of Azerbaijan; Chandler walking through a hotel lobby in the UAE with the sheikh of Abu Dhabi holding his hand.
For the rest of the running time, the stream’s focus switches to Kyle West, and pictures of him fly across the screen.
Fowler pauses the stream, stares at the photos.
Darken the hair, take off a few pounds, and I’ll be damned,
he thinks.
This is the guy I chased down in Robinson’s hotel room.
A reporter is shown standing in front of Kyle’s postmodern loft in Maryland; next, he’s at Chandler’s office being turned away by security.
In a voice-over, the reporter summarizes the history for those unfamiliar with Kyle’s disappearance. The unofficial story is that an ethically affronted employee of Chandler’s passed incriminating documents to the newspapers that outlined all the salacious details of Chandler’s live tap and listed Kyle’s breakthroughs in filtering that had made it all possible. Those documents offered undeniable proof to the American people that all the conspiracy theorists and civil-liberties tub-thumpers were right: they were all being spied on.
The flashback portion wraps up with the reporter back in front of Kyle’s loft, saying:
“Two days before his disappearance, Mr. West was subpoenaed to appear before a Senate judiciary committee headed by Raymond Kuo to respond to allegations stemming from the leaked documents. The committee was to determine two things: whether the documents were authentic and, if they were, whether any federal funds had been allocated to the project.”
The stream then cuts to the reporter sitting across from Senator Arthur Diamond, Democrat from Illinois, who’s built like a greyhound but who barks like a Rottweiler. When questioned about Kyle’s disappearance, Diamond has this to say:
“We would love nothing more than to speak with Mr. West. Without him, Mr. Chandler is in a position of superior deniability. We have documentation of his alleged crimes, but no one to back any of them up. We have leaked documents, but no whistle-blower. Right now, it’s a case of the report-says-this and Chandler-says-that. Mr. West is the architect of the system…without his testimony, this is another in a long line of PR disasters for Mr. Chandler, but nothing, judging by his long history, that he’ll be unable to recover from.”
“Where do you think Mr. West is?” asks the reporter.
“Unfortunately, at this point, we have no choice but to imagine the worst.”
The video ends with that line, then cuts to credits, backed by the recurring ominous drone score.
Fowler picks up his cell, speed-dials Rebecca. “Hey. Where are you?”
“Home.”
“We’re not after Julian Robinson,” Fowler says. “We’re after Kyle West. He’s the guy in the airport photo. He’s the guy I saw in the hotel. Pang wasn’t lying to me…I can’t believe I just said that.”
“Why the hell would someone like Kyle West have Robinson’s passport?”
“West was looking for clean documents. He was desperate. My guess…he and Robinson look alike; West kills Robinson for his passport. West’s bathroom had hair dye, shaving gel, razors. He was changing his appearance. He was making himself look like Robinson.”
“And, what—West shows up at the airport and finds out the guy he killed was on a no-fly list? And speaking of which, I still haven’t been able to figure out who put Robinson on a no-fly or why. This guy is a ghost. He’s just a résumé floating in cyberspace.”
“West took this guy’s identity.”
“We are talking about the same Kyle West, correct?”
“Yeah,” Fowler says. “The guy tied in with Chandler.”
“Fowler, that guy doesn’t strike me as a killer.”
“Who does? It’s never the ones you expect.”
“Kyle West is a network nerd. Come on…he didn’t kill Robinson for his passport.”
“I’m not as sure as you are.”
“Maybe someone sold the passport to him. Maybe he didn’t know what he bought. He tries to make himself over so it works…”
Fowler’s getting frustrated. She’s making sense, too much sense for his taste right now. He wants forward motion, not evidence deconstruction. “The motive isn’t the point; the point is that Kyle West has Robinson’s passport. And I saw West with two dead bodies in a hotel room. And he got away. That’s the point. How he got the passport is not important. He
has
it. And he is running around as Robinson.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“I want total media saturation. Either West is a murderer or, going with your theory, he’s in completely over his head. Bottom line, I need to find him and talk to him before anyone else does. Blanket the media with his photos. Say he’s wanted for questioning regarding the disappearance of Julian Robinson and in connection with two other missing persons. Then post a reward for information. Bounty goes up if he’s captured because of that information. Leave the amount undisclosed. Just level a reward on him.”
“What about Langley? They’re gonna be furious.”
“They told me not to go after Robinson. I’m not. I’m going after Kyle West, who happens to have Robinson’s passport.”
“That sounds pretty evasive.”
“It is. It’s extremely flimsy and
evasive,
but I need to smoke out West, force him into the open. Put money on his head, and someone will cough him up. I can’t imagine he’s got anyone all that loyal to him. You don’t go on the run for a year if you do.”
Fowler hangs up, and he’s crushing out his cigarette when two bullets shatter his living room window and lodge themselves in the couch, sending clots of stuffing soaring.