Weaponized (20 page)

F
owler walks into the cafeteria at the Royal University of Phnom Penh and makes his way around the lunch line, past the stacks of trays and students calling out orders to cooks sweating through paper hats.

Fowler cuts between dining tables that resemble plastic spiders, a large circle with six sprouting connected legs.

He keeps walking until he finds an eighteen-year-old sitting by himself and reading a textbook on C++. The kid is named Ricki, and it looks like he hasn’t started shaving yet.

The first time Fowler met Ricki—whom he calls Rick—he told the kid he looked like a school shooter: camouflage shorts, hoodie, shaved head, and weight-lifting gloves. Fowler liked him—the kid had a certain tropical Dickensian flair—and he threw Rick a few bucks to buy some decent clothes. Even though Fowler was there to arrest him.

Fowler pulls out a chair, gets comfortable, crosses his legs.

Ricki freezes. “The hell you doing here, Fowler?”

“It’s okay. I’m not on official business.”

Ricki, like many industrious kids in the third world without money or parents, found solace on the Internet. Unfortunately, his hobbies included setting up sharing sites for music, movies, and porn. This wasn’t Fowler’s problem—those small sins fell into ICE’s wheelhouse—but Ricki decided not to stop there.

Fowler
did
have to get involved when Ricki started an online casino site and the government ordered it shut down because their kickback money was drying up. Ricki had cornered the market on their turf. When Fowler broke down Ricki’s door, he found a sixteen-year-old kid worth two million dollars.

Hun Sen’s government was more than happy, jubilant even, to settle with Ricki and not press charges. All Ricki had to do was forfeit every cent of his ill-gotten gains directly to the treasury. After that, Ricki “retired,” and Fowler made a few calls to get him enrolled in the university.

Fowler folds his arms on the table and tries to sound like a concerned parent. “Studying hard, I hope.”

“I knew all this shit when I was twelve,” Rick answers. “Got a cigarette?”

“Why you reading it, then?”

“Book is filled with mistakes. I’m writing them all down. Send it back to the publisher. Tell them they’re fucking idiots. Ripping off the school.”

Fowler slides him a cigarette. “I need your expertise on something.”

Ricki lights the butt. “What?”

Fowler puts the laptop on the table. “I need you to open this thing up for me.”

“First thing you do is press power.”

Fowler smiles. “You’re such a prick. Now, listen. I didn’t exactly come into this”—he motions to the laptop—“in a clean manner. So I can’t have our guys look at it. This is strictly a you-and-me kind of thing.”

“Better you came to me. Your guys couldn’t open it anyway.”

“They caught you.”

“Nope. I read the records. You guys got tipped off. You never would have found me otherwise.”

Fowler tries to sound paternal again. “Everyone gets caught.”

“No, they don’t.” Ricki opens up the laptop, presses the power button, and faces the password encryption.

“Can you get through that?”

“Don’t know yet.” Ricki tries a quick work-around he uses for unsophisticated encryption. The computer immediately freezes, then shuts down. “Yeah. This could take some time.”

“How long?”

“Depends on how good it is.”

“How good is it?”

“Well, thing is, this fucker looks homemade to me. He took the shell of a PC and cleaned out everything from the ground floor.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you’re not dealing with someone looking to illegally download porn. I’ve got to look under the hood, see what makes her tick.” He runs his hand along the side of the laptop as if it were the small of a woman’s back. “She’ll talk to me eventually.”

Fowler laughs. “Ever do that to a girl?”

“Sure,” Ricki says. “Your mom, last night.”

“Ouch. Defaming dear Mrs. Fowler like that. It’s almost like you know her.” Fowler reaches across and takes Rick’s sandwich off the tray.

Ricki looks down at his empty plate. “Help yourself, by the way.”

Fowler chews. “I can’t leave this thing with you. It’s evidence. You got someplace we can work on it?”

“Yeah. My place.”

“Let’s hit it.”

“I drive,” Ricki says. “I hate it when you drive.”

“Why?”

Ricki rises, slings his backpack over his shoulder. “Because I don’t think you care if you live or die. And as your passenger, it concerns me.”

K
yle’s in the shower trying to scrub off the sticky sheen of Protosevitch-induced perspiration. He rests his arms against the jade-tiled wall and lets the water run over his hair and shoulders.

Lara opens the shower curtain partially and pokes her head in. “I want to get out of here soon. How much longer do you need?”

“Not much. Where are we going?”

“I want to get to a hotel closer to the ferry. I need time to scope out the site and not have to deal with traffic.”

“How are we gonna pay for a room? I can’t use Robinson’s cards or my own. The Chinese are probably watching your accounts.”

“There’s this amazing invention called cash. You give it to people here, and they don’t care where it came from.”

“Yeah.” Kyle laughs. “That was stupid.”

She runs her fingers along the scalloped edge of the curtain. “You said the CIA guy saw your face in Robinson’s hotel room…”

“Right.”

“Did he say his name?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I mean…you were there. It happened so fast.”

“See, that bothers me. He’s CIA. Why has there been no media coverage? Why has no one released any photos of you? There were two dead bodies, and you were in the room. Someone’s keeping this a black-ops thing. That means I don’t want to stay in the same place.”

Kyle respects her logic. “I understand. We’ll go.”

Lara closes the curtain but stays in the bathroom. “You did a good job today.”

“Was that a compliment?”

“Don’t get carried away. I said
good.
”

He laughs, shuts his eyes, and works shampoo into his hair with his fingertips.

Lara pulls open the shower curtain and steps inside. She’s naked and has her hair back in a ponytail. “Is this a problem?”

He can’t eke out more than a nod and a “No.”

She moves closer. “Get the shampoo out of your hair before it goes into your eyes.”

He turns around, rinses off quickly while she finds some room under the nozzle and washes her face.

After he finishes, Lara holds him by the back of the neck, pulls him in close, and kisses him until they both have to stop because they’re out of breath.

Kyle backs up, spinning.

“Know how I knew you weren’t Robinson, even before I saw your face?”

“How?” Kyle says, still recovering, beads of water running down his face, dropping off his chin.

“You kissed me like you needed it. Like it was the most important thing in the world. Robinson’s never done that. Ever.” She runs her hands up and down his chest and stomach. “Do you do everything like that?”

“What about Robinson?”

“He lets me do whatever I want. He’s more interested in hearing about me fucking other guys. The stories turn him on more than fucking.” She kisses his earlobe, works her tongue down his neck. “You don’t need to worry about him.”

“Do you want to do it in here?”

Lara looks up. “That was the plan.”

Kyle can respond only with “Wow.”

She laughs. “Thankfully, your body is quicker than your brain.”

She moves in close again. The water cascades over their kiss.

Kyle stares at her face. “Your eyes are two different colors.”

“Yeah.” She laughs. “My body can’t seem to make up its mind about things.”

She switches positions with him, leans against the wall, and wraps her right leg around his waist. He moves in response, buries himself against her body, holds her breasts in his hands. She runs her leg across his back, rubs herself all over him, back and forth. It feels like velvet. She teases him with the prospect of getting inside—back and forth—but not letting it happen yet.

Kyle leans his head against her neck.

Lara smiles. “Still okay with this?”

R
icki works at his shitty plastic dorm-room desk surrounded by the tools of his trade. He uses a multiblade precision screwdriver to poke around inside the laptop’s hard drive while his own computer simultaneously streams through data.

The stereo blasts Scandinavian death metal. Fowler’s slouched in a junked chair—probably rescued from the street—that has zero traction and beer stains on the armrests. He’s zoning out, teetering on sleep, and shocked he doesn’t entirely dislike this music. He can’t put his finger on it, but he suspects it’s the primal screams. They sound like someone begging not to be born.

Ricki pokes around the circuits, a confounded scientist confronted with a new species.

Fowler’s pocket starts to vibrate; he looks at his cell, and it’s Grant calling from Indonesia.

Fowler walks over to Ricki’s stereo and turns down the volume.

“What’s the matter, Fowler?” Ricki says. “Can’t take a little music while you work?”

“I gotta take a call,” Fowler says.

“Cool.” Ricki points at him with the screwdriver. “Gimme a cigarette.”

Fowler answers the line, hands Ricki a smoke. “You should quit.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I’m broke.” Fowler speaks into the phone. “Hey, Larry.”

“I got some preliminaries back from the samples.”

“Okay.” Fowler frantically searches Ricki’s junked-tech graveyard for a pen. Ricki, frustrated as hell, finally slaps Fowler’s hand and gives him what he’s looking for. “Okay. Go ’head.”

“Fingerprints came back nada. Those two weren’t in our system. I’ve sent copies to a few select people I know at Interpol, but until I hear back, consider that a dead end. Sent out dental, nothing so far. But let’s be honest…wasn’t much left on that front, so it’s gonna take some time. Here’s the part you’ll be interested in. The two guys—Chinese, obviously. But I had some of the clothing samples analyzed. Everything those two had on down to their drawers was custom-made from African cotton. The clothes were local. They weren’t whacked with all the synthetics you get on the open market. And our two were tanner than you’d expect Chinese to be. It’s why I thought they might be local at first. These guys hadn’t spent much time home. So why would Chinese muscle be spending most of their time in Africa?”

Fowler knows this one. “Guarding Chinese third-world interests. Oil and farmland. You think they were military?”

“Can’t tell. There were no tats or markings to indicate military. My guess is they were private security.”

“Thanks, Larry. This is good.”

“I’ll call you if I hear anything about the fingerprints.”

Fowler hangs up.

Ricki’s been bursting to speak the entire time Fowler’s been on the phone. “Fowler, I don’t know where you got this, but this has got to be the sweetest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. You have no clue. It’s like Fort Knox, man. This should be fucking studied. Then hung in a museum.”

Fowler leans over Ricki’s shoulder and examines the insides of the laptop. “Chinese hired muscle. Supercomputers. The hell is going on in my city?”

“Sounds good to me. This city needs some excitement.”

Fowler begins to massage Ricki’s shoulders with his grizzly-like grip. “You know, Rick,” he says. “Well…you know how much I like you, right?”

Ricki is withering under Fowler’s hands.

“I consider you a friend,” Fowler says. “And a friend is someone you can trust.”

Ricki bunches up his shoulders, tries to make like a turtle in defense. “Christ, Fowler…you don’t want me to blow you or something, do you?”

“Rick.” Fowler continues kneading the poor kid’s shoulders and neck like a sadistic baker. “I’m going to have to leave you for a while with a valuable piece of illegally obtained evidence. That’s a level of trust I don’t place in anyone.”

“Christ, you
are
gonna make me blow you.”

“After you find what I need to know, you are going to reassemble this thing and give it back to me directly. And I don’t want you to consider keeping any souvenirs for yourself, either for your own study or to sell to any of your little friends.”

“Okay,” Ricki says. “Okay. Just stop. Stop.”

Fowler tightens his hands. “Promise me, Rick.”

“I promise. I promise. I do.”

“Not one single fucking thing.”

“Just like it was. I won’t keep anything.”

Fowler ruffles Ricki’s hair. “I’m glad we understand each other. I really am.”

U
pon entering the hotel room, Lara immediately closes all the curtains, blotting out the semiotic seizure of neon from the street.

The room could charitably be called functional. However, if one was feeling uncharitable, then blighted with bugs and stains and having a rank smell emanating from the walls—a scent generally associated with advanced decay—would also apply.

Lara slams the door, checks the locks—none of which work—and shakes her head. She moves the sad carcass of a floral lounge chair over, tries to jam it under the doorknob, but it doesn’t fit. “That’s not promising.” She moves the chair back and continues her security check in the bathroom.

Kyle watches her, lost in her lithe movements. Even her most casual motions have a feral fluidity that’s hypnotic. He feels the fear rise and push against the wall of his stomach. It’s terrifying to be this close to your object of desire, especially when said object can actually kill you.

“Let’s get a drink,” she says. “I’ll kill myself if I have to do more than sleep here.”

All the black lights not presently in college dorm rooms next to Led Zeppelin posters have ended up in this bar. The place is bathed in carnival tones of blue, orange, and green. The bottled alcohol looks like something a witch would give you for potency problems. The polka dots on the cocktail napkins are surreal children’s vitamins.

Kyle’s gin-based drink glows green. He takes a sip and notes a distressing fact about black lights: They don’t reflect anything. They don’t throw off any shadows. They siphon off all the objects around them and give nothing back. It’s a vampiric form of lighting. Cancels out all chance of duality.

“What is this place?”

“All the expats hang here. That’s why I chose it. Westerners don’t stick out.”

“It looks like the inside of a clown’s stomach,” Kyle says. “Tell me something. What exactly is our plan for tomorrow?”

“Robinson is going to show up to get his intel at ten thirty. And we’re going to meet him there.”

“You’re sure he knows.”

“The way Andrei talked to us about it, Robinson knows. He’ll be there.”

“What if he doesn’t show?”

“Then he’ll send someone. He’ll send his own courier to meet the guy. We just need to watch for the Chinese holding the intel. He’s the key. We find that guy, we find Robinson.”

“Then what?”

“If Robinson shows, problem solved. If not, we grab whoever Robinson sends in his place and force him to take us to Robinson.”

“We don’t know what the guy holding the intel looks like. He’s going to be an Asian guy just hanging out by the harbor. That’s not an odd sight in Cambodia.”

“You did a great job today. But don’t get ahead of yourself. I’ll make this work. This isn’t the part you’re supposed to be good at.”

“Okay,” Kyle says.

“Really?”

“What choice do I have?”

“Now tell me something,” Lara says. “How’d you get into tech stuff?”

“You want to hear about Chandler again. It’s okay. Everyone does. He’s our generation’s Howard Hughes and I was behind the curtain.”

“I don’t care about Chandler. I want to know about you. How’d you get into tech?”

“You really want to know about me?”

“We’re sitting in a bar together, relaxing, drinking. Isn’t that what people do? Talk about their careers and stuff?”

Kyle nods. “Yeah. They do.” It’s been so long that he’s forgotten. His only friend and drinking buddy for the past year has been Armand, and their whole relationship is predicated on the fact neither of them ever asks the other anything directly personal.

“I got into tech because of my mother,” Kyle says. “She was a revolutionary. A
social revolutionary,
to use her exact words.”

Lara laughs. “Your mom was a Commie?”

Kyle nods, laughs, sips his drink.

“You’re like half of Russia,” she says. “A tech geek with an anarchist in the family.”

“When I was a kid, she saw this news special on home computers. It really blew her away. She was all excited, said technology was going to be the path to the new revolution. She made my dad buy me a computer the next day. I’ve been programming and writing code ever since.”

“What’s your mom doing now?”

“Everyone’s gone. I got sent to live with my grandparents when I was fifteen.”

“So your parents were social revolutionaries and you ended up working for Chandler. How does that happen?”

“It’s…it’s like, when you can’t rebel against your parents, when they’re more out there than you, the only thing you can do is embrace sanity. You…you become a square. Become a corporate drone. You become me and go to work for Chandler.”

“Why’d you get sent to live with your grandparents?”

“It’s a long story.”

“It’s a long night in general.”

“I’m gonna need more gin.”

“Not a problem.”

He finishes off the drink. Lara flags down a waitress, her black hair gone arctic blue under the light, and orders another round.

Kyle begins. “In the late sixties, my mom was going to Columbia. Total hotbed of radical student activity. SDS, all those guys. Her sophomore year, she was an exchange student in West Germany. Met my dad there. He was German. Mom had always been a radical…her folks were Communists. She was one of the original red-diaper babies.”

Lara’s riveted, moves her hand to pick up her drink but forgets about it halfway through the motion.

“Mom got involved with the second generation of the Red Army Faction while she was in Berlin. It was a natural step for her. My dad fell in with the RAF too, but that was because he was trying to fall in with my mom. The whole goal of second-generation RAF was to get the first generation of fighters sprung from prison. So my mom and dad’s cell teamed up with another cell from Palestine and kidnapped an ex-Nazi industrialist. They released videos. Said they were going to hold him hostage until their comrades were let out of prison. The state wouldn’t give in, called their bluff. So thirty-something days later, the RAF killed the industrialist. Dumped his body in a field. My parents were murderers now. No going back.”

Lara nods, not in response but in commiseration. Kyle’s life feels achingly familiar. Failed revolution, family on the run, death and the state.

“So my folks ran to Palestine,” he continues. “I was born there. We moved around a lot, lived in a bunch of revolution-friendly countries. Mozambique, Syria, Iraq. Then, out of the blue, two Stasi agents show up in Baghdad looking for my mom and dad. They
invited
us to come live in East Germany. Mom and Dad were considered model fighters for the Communist cause, and the German worker state would be happy to protect them. So I ended up living in East Berlin.”

“Damn,” Lara says. “You grew up crazier than me.”

“It’s all subjective.”

“Keep going.”

“Things were quiet for a long time. My folks got state jobs and housing. Mom was a teacher. Dad worked in a lab. Then the Wall came down, and the security services crumbled with it. The Stasi was liquidated. There went our protection. All the Stasi records were turned over to the reunified Germany. My folks were still wanted for murder in the West. The records gave everyone away. All the terrorists the state was protecting.”

The waitress drops off their drinks. Kyle takes a long sip.

“My folks never made it to trial,” he says. “They…they killed themselves. Utopia had finally been dismantled.” He keeps his emotions in check. “That’s the hardest thing, I guess…I mean, for me. The thing I’ve never been able to work past. I hoped I’d have been reason enough for them to stay around. I mean, even if the dream was dead, at least they still had me. But I suppose I wasn’t.”

“I’m sure that’s not what they were thinking,” Lara says. “I’m sure they
weren’t
thinking.”

“Twenty years later, every fucking morning I still wake up and think,
I’m an orphan.
Even on a day like today.”

Lara smiles. “It’s kind of ironic, if you think about it. I mean, you and your parents. They spend their whole lives rebelling against the state. You go and work for the state. I mean, Chandler is basically the state. And you both end up running. The state always gets you. Whether you rebel against it or serve it, it fucks you in the end.”

Kyle returns her smile. “Fair point.”

“Or maybe you just got so used to running, you were looking for a way to keep going. Working for Chandler certainly fits that bill. You’re just like me and Robinson. We’ve lived everywhere and still have no home.”

“I thought Robinson went where the money took him.”

“I don’t think it’s ever been about the money for him.”

“What, then?”

“He’s terrified of quiet. I don’t think at any point in his life things were…
calm.
He doesn’t talk about his family, ever. Which means it must have been terrible. People who can’t shut up about their families aren’t nearly as fucked up as people who never say a word.” She laughs. “He can never be still. Ever. He only seems alive when someone wants to kill him. Love certainly never did that for him.”

“What did it for him, then?”

“Planning. He loves to plan. I always tell him he should have been a director. He loves to set stages. Before he’ll even engage you, he has to make sure the lighting in the room is right, has to check his hair.”

Kyle thinks back to his brief time with Robinson, and what Lara’s saying adds up. When he visited Robinson’s hotel room, everything down to the ice cubes seemed selected for maximum effect.

“Before I meet anyone for him,” she says, “he has to bathe me, pick out my clothes, fix my hair for hours. But there’s not any affection in it. We’re all his props. He blocks us how he sees fit. You know that as well as I do.”

“But
you
love him, right? You’re together.”

“That’s right.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. You told me…you said he abandoned you. Hung you out to dry with a bunch of contracts. Left you with a price on your head. But you…you’re still…you’re still out here loving him and
looking for him.
”

“Robinson and I are a matched set. Don’t get in the way of that.”

“Why don’t you walk away?”

“I can’t. Look…subtracting my feelings for Robinson, I owe a hell of a lot of money because of him.”

“Then get someone else to do the jobs.”

“People pay for Robinson, they want Robinson.”

“Take away the money, then. Just take that off the table for one question. Why else are you looking for him?”

“Kyle,” she says sadly, “don’t start getting ideas about what you don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand. Because it doesn’t seem to me like he loves you. Nothing you told me makes me think that.”

“What? You and me are gonna walk off into the sunset together when this is over?” She takes a drink. “God. I fuck you once in the shower, and your brain gets shot to shit. You think you can take Robinson’s place? Be my partner? Think.”

Although she’s absolutely right, Kyle’s still hurt.

“When you talk about me and Robinson,” she says, “you’re not talking about sex and love and commitment. You’re talking about something bigger than that. You’re talking about identity.”

“I don’t understand.”

She smiles. “Then you’re lucky.”

Kyle looks around the bar, at the clusters of expats partying under the psychedelic lights, at servicemen and -women—mostly American and Israeli—blowing off steam, dropping drugs on their tongues, and dancing.

“It doesn’t mean
we
can’t have fun,” Lara says. “You had fun before, didn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Then stop asking questions you don’t want answers to and let’s do something more constructive.”

She leans over the table and kisses him. Their talk is over.