Weaponized (28 page)

T
he guard posted outside the interrogation room hears two shots explode in quick succession. He bursts inside, gun drawn, and sees Kyle holding Fowler in a headlock and pressing a Glock against his temple.

“This man is my hostage,” Kyle says. “Do you understand that?”

The guard looks down, sees powder burns on the floor and the remnants of Kyle’s handcuffs rearranged by bullets.

“Against the wall now,” Kyle says to the guard. “Turn around and face the wall.”

The guard doesn’t appear to understand a word Kyle says.

Fowler repeats the instructions in Khmer, then looks up to Kyle. “Go easy on the neck. Hurt it years ago.”

“Sorry,” Kyle says.

“Stay in character. You’re doing fine.”

Kyle marches Fowler into the hall, gun barrel still against the side of his head. Officers spring from behind their desks, scramble, unsure how to react.

“Do not reach for your guns,”
Kyle shouts. “Do not move. Everyone, sit down right now.” He gets louder. “Now. Sit down now.”

The officers obey. They clearly have no interest in heroics.

Kyle watches Agents Di and Lai rush in, draw their guns, and block the front door.

“Drop them,” Kyle says, spinning around to face them. “You are not taking me to China.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Di says.

“No. You are,” Kyle says. “Drop them.”

“Look at this from our perspective,” Di says.

“Shut up and drop the guns, for fuck’s sake!” Fowler yells. “This guy’s serious. And I’m not taking a bullet.”

“You get in touch with the American embassy, and you get in touch with”—Kyle motions toward Fowler with the gun—“this guy’s bosses. You tell them I’ve got one of their senior officers as a hostage and I want to talk. No one’s taking me anywhere. I go where I want and on my terms. You get that?”

“We can’t let you do that,” Lai says.

“You want the death of a CIA agent on your heads? Think the CCP will like that one? You let this man die, your next job’ll be rounding up Uygurs.”

Fowler whispers to Kyle, “Make your way to the door. Don’t hesitate. They’re not gonna shoot. Trust me.”

Kyle inches closer to Lai and Di. “Out of my way. Out of my way
now.
”

“Okay. Okay.” They acquiesce. “How do we find you once we’ve met your demands?”

“You won’t,” Kyle says. “I’ll find you.”

“You’re only making this worse for yourself,” Di says.

“You can’t be serious. Now, get out of the way.”

“Move it,” Fowler says. “Out of the way. I’m not taking a bullet, I told you.”

Di and Lai drop their guns, step to the side.

Kyle marches Fowler out of the station, gun against his head, and doesn’t speak until they’re out of earshot. Then he says, “You’re gonna have to tell me which one is your car.”

“First you give me back my fucking gun,” Fowler says. “You may not be Robinson, but I still don’t know who the hell you really are.”

F
owler’s floored the car, but even a judicious application of speed can’t compensate for the fact that traffic here doesn’t play by linear rules. Horns punctuate the pressure building inside the cars.

“Fuck,” Fowler says, slamming on the wheel. “Fuck. Do you know how Robinson plans to do Li Bao?”

“I know where Li’s going to be when Robinson takes his shot. I
don’t know
where Robinson’s going to try to make the shot from.”

Fowler sticks his head out the window, scopes out the traffic. “This won’t do.”

“Li’s gonna be in a conference room. Robinson’s gonna have to try to take him from one of the surrounding buildings. Or a roof or something, right?”

“Hold that thought,” Fowler says. He gets out of the car and walks between the gridlock, keeping out of the way of the motos that have the same idea as him.

He stops by a police car stalled in traffic and motions for the cops to roll down the window. “I’m CIA,” he says, then hands them his ID and waits for their general confusion to pass.

It doesn’t.

Fowler takes his ID back, examines the siren on the roof, checks that it’s portable, and then rips it off. “I have to borrow this for an ongoing op,” he says to the cops. “You’ll get it back. Thanks for your cooperation.”

Fowler activates the police alarm, slams it atop the hood of his car, then jumps inside. “We’re back in business,” he says to Kyle, and proceeds to take a severe right, hop the side of the street, and drive between traffic and street vendors, the siren blaring the entire time. Pedestrians scatter and scream.

“You know it doesn’t help Li Bao’s cause if you kill us before we get there.”

“Fuck you care?” Fowler says. “Half an hour ago, you were about to get on a plane to Beijing.” He smiles. “Don’t worry. I’ve been waiting years for this.”

“For what?”

“For
something.
”

Fowler brings the car to a screeching halt and double-parks on the main street of the Central Business District, where the past sixty years of Cambodia’s architectural history can be viewed in a chronological clusterfuck. A sleek gym and a swanky lunch spot share the block with a dragon-themed hostel and a colonial hotel.

Kyle points across the street to a high-rise that’s an awkward mix of Confucian grace and prison surveillance. The central tower is curved, recessed back from the street, and constructed from thousands of individual windowpanes. “That’s it,” he says. “That’s where Li’s taking his meeting. Twelfth-floor conference room.”

“We start here, then,” Fowler says. “Get them to check their security footage. Then we track every building on this street that faces into the conference room’s window.”

Robinson sits inside the closet, steel cover close to his left hand.

In his palm, he cradles the handheld television. He hasn’t stopped watching it for four hours, entranced by the miniature images punctuated by arrhythmic shocks of static. Finally, he feels like he understands the popularity of reality television. It has nothing to do with the digital aesthetic, the raw presentation, the fly-on-the-wall excitement of delving into a particular family or subculture. Reality television gives you something narrative can’t. The lure of reality television is that
something real
could happen.

Now, the stroke of genius is that
nothing
ever happens, and that’s purely by design. It’s the same thing with advertising. The product can never actually deliver what it’s supposed to. Television used to show you your dreams; now it tells you what to dream.

Robinson keeps one eye trained on the screen while he pulls his rifle close and drops two bullets smeared with accelerant into the chamber.

Fowler and Kyle luck out. The high-rise’s manager—Mr. Lay—is on-site and speaks English. Fowler meets him at the security desk, shakes his hand, moves him into a corner bursting with natural light and artificial trees sprayed silver, and shows him his ID. “You may have a security crisis in your building,” he says. “We believe this man”—he pulls out his BlackBerry and shows Mr. Lay the résumé photo of Robinson—“may be somewhere inside your building and about to commit a crime.”

“Tell me how to help,” Mr. Lay says, adjusting his cuff links, silver and sleek, like he’s melded with his office building.

“Couple of things. Is this place open twenty-four hours?”

“No,” Lay says. “We close at ten. Reopen at six.”

“I need you to go over all your security tape since six this morning. I need a list of every single tenant in this building, and you need to find out if any of them called in sick today. If someone has, I want the name. Do you have a sign-in sheet or do you just scan ID?”

“Scan for tenants. Sign-in sheet for guests.”

“Do you hold on to the guests’ IDs?”

“No. They just need to sign in.”

“I need a list of all guests too. How many people work security here?”

“Six. Rotating shifts.”

“If they can’t have it done within the next half hour, I want you to call in the second shift. Understood?”

Mr. Lay nods. “I will do anything I can to preserve the building’s reputation.”

“Good. And don’t wait until you have everything covered. Text me constant updates.”

Fowler nods at Lay and then walks over to Kyle, who has been waiting at the security desk. “We go across the street, do the same thing there. We need to be sure he hasn’t accessed a building directly. With the buildings that aren’t modern, we’ll do a house-to-house.”

Kyle motions toward Mr. Lay. “You think he can get this done?”

Fowler shrugs. “Yeah. No one wants an assassination in his building.”

“Look…I’m already fucked. Why don’t you just call the CIA and bring them in? We need the help. I don’t care if they take me in.”

Fowler pulls a cigarette from his front pocket and lights it. “I appreciate your selflessness,” he says mockingly through the smoke, “but it’s entirely unnecessary. CIA in Cambodia isn’t much bigger than the two of us. Plus I got orders from Langley not to investigate Robinson. Even if we stop an assassination, they’re still gonna be pissed I disobeyed orders. They’re big on orders.”

Robinson checks his watch. Not yet. He’s dying for a cigarette but knows he can’t leave any traces behind, like his saliva on the filters.

He rolls up his sleeve, rips the nicotine patch off his upper arm, dips into the duffel bag, pulls out a fresh one, and affixes it. Then he pops two pieces of Nicorette into his mouth and chews. He’s dying for something to do with his mouth. A gun may substitute for a flaccid penis, he thinks, but nothing can take the place of a cigarette.

He rises from the floor, stretches out his cramped arms and legs. He’s been bunched up, ready to make a quick dive down the tunnel, but he’s feeling secure now. Not safe—something can always go wrong—but secure enough to move around. Who could know he’s here? Cocooned in the anteroom of a third-world lawyer’s refugee escape hatch. Well, someone still might. Chew your gum. Stay mobile.

He rests his rifle against the wall, shakes his limbs.

Kyle waits in the corner while Fowler finishes talking with another building manager and then gives him a shoulder slap and sends him a text with his phone number. The manager smiles; he’s obviously excited to be part of Fowler’s project and entrusted with such responsibility.

Kyle can tell that Fowler has led men before, and led them well. He carries an air of confidence that assures his subordinates that he’s got this under control, that they just need to follow him. It’s the hallmark of an older generation, Kyle thinks, one that actually believed in centralized power.

Kyle could never lead anyone, could never boil instructions down to their essence. He relied on other people intuiting through the clutter of his monologue that there was a streak of genius in him and then hopefully letting him act on it. Alone.

In fact, Kyle thinks it’s a failing of his entire generation.
We can’t communicate anything—power, authority, desire—face to face anymore. We communicate only through pulsating pink boxes in the corners of screens.
Every encounter is so fraught that it’s easier never to meet, to let the encounter occur in a tiny shell that’s controlled by two, free from baggage, free from flesh.

Men like Chandler and Fowler don’t have that problem. They don’t care about subtext or history. They only want others to follow orders.

Fowler rushes back to Kyle. “All right. This is the biggest building with a room facing the conference room. They’re gonna lock the place down until they finish the search.” He looks at his watch. “How long until Li Bao’s limo gets here?”

“Fifteen minutes. Give or take.”

“Yeah.” Fowler nods. “Time to house-to-house.”

On the block, Fowler scans the remaining buildings. “Brass tacks. Break this down. His cleanest shot is from inside the conference room, right? And Mr. Lay’s guys are looking there for us. Across the street, where we came from, is good, because it has window access. And the people in there are looking too.” He points. “If he’s not in one of those…that’s the only other building tall enough for him to get a shot. Drawback is, it’s a terrible angle to shoot from. He goes farther up or down the block, he can only get a shot from a rooftop. He could…but it’s not ideal. Too many angles and too many people. Shooters are fine with distance, but they hate angles.”

“You’ve done this before.”

Fowler nods. “Yeah. I’ve worked cities before. Never liked them.”

As they stand scoping out Robinson’s potential strike points, Li Bao’s armor-plated limo speeds down the street, so weighed down by heavy metal that it’s practically kissing the asphalt and sending up sparks.

“Shit,” Fowler says. “They’re trying to confuse Robinson’s clock. Have Li show up early…force Robinson’s hand.” He watches the limo. “I gotta flag them down.”

Kyle doesn’t want to see Fowler get shot. He needs him. “Li’s got a ton of guards.”

“Yeah. None of whom have survived encountering Robinson. If Robinson starts shooting up the street, I can help these guys.”

“So what do I do?”

“Go to that building. Check out the twelfth floor. If Robinson doesn’t try to potshot the car, then I’ll move to the roofs, start looking there.” He puts his hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “Just keep in touch with me.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“Take this,” Fowler says and flips his phone to Kyle. “I’ll get one from the guards.”

Fowler takes off toward the limo without an ounce of hesitation. He’s built and primed for moments like this.

Kyle looks toward the building Fowler indicated, eyes the twelfth floor, and counts the windows. There’s only three that could offer any reasonable shot into the conference room, and, as Fowler pointed out, they’re angled shots that don’t provide a shooter any favors.

Robinson slides a black flak jacket over his shoulders and unzips the pockets. A disposable cell phone goes in the right, extra ammo goes in the left. He runs a wet wipe over the telescopic lens, lines up the sights, finds equilibrium.

Time means nothing to him anymore. It’s not liquid, not diaphanous, just simply
not there
. He’s become a bullet, and he exists in bullet time. Pure force, buried in eternity and beyond measurement.

Kyle knocks on the first door and is greeted by a middle-aged Cambodian woman sporting the country’s omnipresent striped pajamas. She doesn’t speak English, doesn’t want to let him in. She whips her head to the corner, calls out to a shirtless man playing with a large blade as if it were a kitten. He completely ignores the woman, keeps up his knife work.

Kyle pushes into the room, and inside there’s a tableau of African illegals—mostly mothers and their postadolescent daughters—sitting at sewing machines. Their feet ride the pedals; their hands hold the fabric straight. They finish one garment, start up the next, never bothering to notice Kyle.

Kyle can’t believe his eyes. What the fuck are African workers doing in Cambodia?

Then he remembers an NGO worker he talked to one night at Armand’s, a young guy, under thirty, and heading back to the States the next day, which was why Kyle felt comfortable with him—he knew he’d never see him again.

The NGO worker told Kyle his organization was so successful lobbying for Cambodian workers’ rights, for more humane conditions and pay raises, that the Cambodian business owners had fired all the indigenous labor and begun importing it from Senegal to save money. The guy truly had to laugh in order not to cry.

He told Kyle that he finally understood that innocence was the worst vice of all, that due to his willed denial of the facts on the ground, he’d managed to fuck two different sets of people.

“Welcome to globalization,” Kyle said.

“Globalization is just the newest euphemism for how we’ve always been. The worse things get, the more polite the terms become. I think when they finally reintroduce forced labor, they’ll actually have the balls to call it a renewed birth of genuine freedom.”

Kyle starts flittering around the sweatshop, looking in closets, opening the window to the fire escape.

The shirtless guy walks over, taps Kyle on the shoulder, and presents him with several new bills wedged between his thick fingers. “No. No,” Kyle says. “I’m just looking.”

The guy nods. “I know. Labor inspection.”

Kyle keeps looking, ignores him. “No. No. You keep it.”

The guy shrugs, confused but thrilled not to have to part with the money.

Kyle’s satisfied. Nothing here. Time to move to the second potential spot.

Kyle exhausts his minimal Khmer—you don’t pick up a language when you’re in exile and afraid to talk to anyone—gaining access to the second room, which is a massage parlor split into two distinct sections. In the outer area, there’s the more Westernized version of a massage parlor: a woman, a towel, and some scented lotion. In the inner area, there’s the Khmer variety, which features heated glass and someone to walk on your back and crack joints into place.