Weaponized (25 page)

K
yle shows Lara her laptop and points to the screen.

“Behind all the codes is Li Bao’s security detail for his entire trip. I’m not sure who the recipient of the flash was supposed to be, but it sure wasn’t Robinson.” He points at different entries. “Look…fucking car routes, Li’s arrival and departure times, the number of guards on duty. It even has physical, personal, and political breakdowns of his entire security detail. Li’s areas of vulnerability at several locations indicated by percentages. This is heavy calculus.” Kyle shrinks that window and opens another. “Here’s a list of known dissidents in the surrounding area that Li could potentially meet with. What you have here is a complete bio-power breakdown of Li Bao for the next few days.” Kyle turns away from the screen. “This flash is holding millions of dollars’ of intel.”

Lara stares at the screen and the blood drains from her face. “I…I can’t believe this.”

“What part?”

“This is someone’s whole life. His whole life boiled down to charts, graphs, and statistics. That’s all he is to someone. That’s all he means to someone in charge.” She involuntarily shudders. “It feels so wrong.”

Kyle points to the screen. “I think Robinson’s going to use this location. Li’s going to be in Siem Reap to meet with a group of supporters. Other dissidents, some local politicians.” He drums his fingers on the keypad. “That’s why Robinson’s been in Cambodia all this time. He’s prepping.”

Lara’s silent, stunned by the information overload.

“Lara…we have to stop Robinson. We have to.”

“No way. No,” she says. “I need him. How is not having Robinson helpful to me in any way?”

“Stop being so selfish.”

“My life is on the line because he ran.”

“So is mine.”

“I’m not dying for this guy.” She motions toward the computer. “I don’t even know who the fuck he is. All I know is Robinson owes me a bunch of jobs, and people want to collect. If he pulls this off, he can come back and work.”

“If we let Robinson do this, there’s going to be a total breakdown in China. Or worse. In fact…probably much worse.” Kyle tries to convince her. “If Li gets killed, the Chinese workers are going to lose all hope. They will riot and more. And the CCP will not hesitate to crush them. We’re looking at something much worse than Tiananmen Square. Tiananmen was a tragedy but considered a local event. China wasn’t integrated then. They were just coming out of their shell. Now the world is watching. Killing Li would be truly revolutionary, but in the worst way possible for the people Li is trying to help.”

“I’m not helping you get Robinson. I’m not,” Lara says. “He will come home to me when he’s done.”

“No, he won’t,” Kyle says. “This is a suicide run.”

Lara focuses. “Look. Just call Li Bao’s people and tell them you have reliable intelligence of an assassination attempt on their boss. They’ll take precautions.”

“And when they ask who I am? Or when they trace the call? Because they always do.” Kyle rises, frustrated with her. “Don’t you get it? I’ve dealt with security forces before. Chandler owns dozens. They investigate calls only if they come from a reputable source. Someone threatens to kill Chandler every week. I need to get to Li’s people. I need to explain this to them. They need to understand how much danger he’s in from Robinson.”

Lara struggles with the raw reality of what Kyle’s saying. “No…I’d be betraying him.”

“If you care about Robinson, if you want to see him again, you can’t let him do this. This is too hot even for him. You’ve got to save him from himself.”

“Stop manipulating me. He can handle this—”

“You’re lying to yourself. I’d stop him myself, but I can’t. I know it. If you tell me you can stop him, I won’t go to Li’s people. But you be fucking honest with me. Are you good enough to stop him?”

Lara hesitates, then finally has to come clean. “No way. Not close.”

“Then either come with me to find Li’s people or let me go. ’Cause one way or the other, Robinson’s not doing this.”

Lara rises from the couch. “You’re not backing down from this?”

“No way,” Kyle says.

“Not for nothing, but why do you care about Li Bao so much?”

“I’ve got enough sins on my plate,” he says. “I’m not adding Li Bao to the list.”

“You know the minute the Chinese figure out who you are, they’re gonna deport you? They’re not gonna thank you for the information.”

“I know that. I know they’re gonna send me home.”

“And you still want to do this?”

Kyle bites his lip. “I do.”

“All right.” She takes her Walther from the coffee table and puts it down her pants. “There’s a parking garage two blocks from here. We’ll pick up a new car from there.”

L
ara cuts between the numbered parking spaces in the basement-level garage. Kyle follows behind her, examining the assortment of European luxury cars. They walk between red and white concrete pillars, past blue arrows directing them to the entrances and exits in three different languages. There’s an oil leak underneath one of the cars, and in the puddle, a chemical rainbow has formed. Lara stops to stare at the cosmic image. She turns back to Kyle and says, “King me. That’s what we used to say when we were kids and saw a rainbow.”

She spots a chrome Aprilia Shiver motorcycle between two luxury SUVs. “This is the one.” She kneels next to it, inspecting. “Cops take notice of a stolen car here because it rarely happens. Most thieves can’t afford gas. We’ll stick out less with this. Also, we get in a tight spot, we’ve got a lot more room to play than in a car.”

“Good,” Kyle says. He walks to the front of the motorcycle and rests his arm against the handlebars while Lara works.

He looks to the ceiling and becomes transfixed by a flurry of moths congregating around a flickering overhead fluorescent light. His mind goes blank. He forgets his body, forgets his arm resting on the bike’s handlebars. He focuses on the moths, losing himself in the first moments of quiet he’s had in days.

A figure emerges from behind one of the luxury SUVs. He wears no shoes, just striped silk socks. Shoes make too much noise on this surface.

Before Kyle has a chance to react, the figure’s hand secures Kyle’s wrist against the bar of the bike.

He tries to shout, but the figure silences him by tracing a thin stiletto blade against the brachial artery of Kyle’s upper arm, then continuing on, not breaking skin or ripping clothes, clearly an expert with the weapon. He stops at Kyle’s jugular vein, holds the blade there, presses gently, pricking the skin but still not drawing blood.

Then he draws Kyle close by the waist and whispers:

“There’s my shadow.”

Before Kyle can even process this, Robinson knees him in the kidney, throws him face-first onto the gravel floor, and starts kicking him. Then he stops suddenly and laughs.

“Know what, Kyle?” he says, breathless. “This hurts way more than you think without shoes.” He curls his toes, cracks them back into place, and resumes kicking.

Kyle rolls over and screams, “
Run, Lara, run.
He found us.”

Robinson mockingly echoes Kyle. “Yeah, Lara, run…Run and don’t look back.” He turns his head. “There you are.”

Lara’s standing behind Robinson. Her face is a blank screen waiting for Robinson to start the show. She’s back under his control. He takes her hand and kisses her fingers, more proprietary than affectionate. “You’ve been magnificent. Truly.”

Kyle’s been conned by Lara, probably from the first moment. The anger rises in his stomach and explodes out his mouth in a scream.

“I know,” Robinson says. “It always hurts. No matter how many times it happens.” He kneels down, puts his hand on Kyle’s chest, which is heaving with anger. “Everyone’s betrayed you. It doesn’t seem to stop. I know. Life’s been the same to me.” He rises and offers Kyle his hand. “But now you’ve got to get up and walk with me.”

Kyle slaps it away. “I’m not helping you kill me.” He gets up on his own.

Robinson takes Kyle by the neck, points to his car. “I’m right over here,” he says. Then he punches Kyle in the face, knuckles first.

Lara winces.

Kyle collapses onto the floor, curls into himself.

Robinson leans against a red pillar, lights a cigarette, and watches the pain play out on Kyle’s face. “All right. Up. We’ve gotta roll.” He says, clapping his hands.

Lara goes over to Kyle, kneels next to his beaten body. “You’ve got to get up.”

Kyle shakes his head. “You fucked me. Why? Why’d you do it?”

“It’s what I do.”

Kyle turns to Robinson and watches him shake the violence out of his hand, opening and closing it until the numbness fades. He can’t look at Lara. He knows he never should have trusted her, and maybe he never did, but it doesn’t make her betrayal hurt any less.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I am.”

Robinson tosses the cigarette, claps his hands together again, a demonic father on a road trip. “Come on. We gotta go. Kyle, either you get up on your own or I’m coming over.”

Kyle hoists himself up and holds his head in his hands, cupping his bloody nose. He can’t get over how much his face hurts. This seems to be the take-home lesson of his sentimental journey through Cambodia as Robinson: There are a myriad of ways you can get hurt, and they all
hurt
more than you’d think.

Robinson tosses Kyle into the passenger seat of his SUV, then slams the door shut. Lara comes up alongside him. “Go easier on him. He’s really hurting.”

Robinson nods. “Noted.” Then he smiles, and it looks the prelude to a viper’s kiss. “It’s your fault, though. You shouldn’t have fucked him. The way he screamed out. That wasn’t just pain. There was pride in there too.”

K
yle sways in his seat as Robinson steers the car into the swirling vortex of motos and tuk-tuks.

Kyle lifts his head. Blood streams out his nose in parallel rivulets. He uses the tail of his shirt to wipe it.

Robinson starts to sneeze and can’t stop. Seven or eight in a row. “I’ve been on a lot of public transportation, so of course, I got a cold. All that recycled air. The curse of travel in a globalized world.” He wipes his nose with the cuff of his sleeve. “We’ve never been closer together. Right? Never had more of a chance to share our thoughts…and germs. Only thing is, there’s very little of the former and a whole fuck of a lot of the latter. But that does seem to be the truth behind most revolutions and breakthroughs, doesn’t it? Industrial revolution. Information revolution. Unfettered freedom and access…then the viruses come.”

Kyle’s head is pounding; he’s seeing double, and that combined with Robinson speeding spins his stomach.

Robinson hacks. “God. The pressure is right behind my eye. Pushing right on it. Do you know what that feels like?”

“Just kill me. Just get it over with.”

Robinson keeps his eyes on the road. “I can’t kill you in the open. We need to be near water. I can’t have anyone finding you for a few days.”

Kyle mops more blood from his upper lip. “Why me, man? I was some stranger to you…just some innocent fucking stranger.”

“No. You’re not some
stranger.
And you’re not innocent. No one innocent ends up where you were. No one innocent ends up in Phnom Penh. You and I were able to meet because the universe brings people like us together. Some artists are criminals, some write code for private concerns, but all artists come together eventually. That’s what we both are.” Robinson slaps his hand against Kyle’s arm. “You think this means anything? Skin. I
borrowed
you. That’s it. Names are just sleeves for identity. Bodies are receptacles.”

“So life means nothing to you?”

“No. It means a lot. The name and the body mean nothing.”

Kyle rests his head back, finds a tissue in his pocket, stuffs it up his nostril.

“Don’t pack that,” Robinson says. “Use pressure. Packing will just jam things up.”

“Why’d you pick me?”

Robinson points to his own face, then Kyle’s. “You mean, outside the obvious?”

Kyle nods. “Yeah. Outside that.”

“The Chinese got on me. Li’s people. Then Li’s people called their friends in the secret service in. I knew I couldn’t prep with that kind of heat. They are a tenacious group. I needed a believable diversion to buy me time to do a few
errands
of my own.” He laughs. “
Entrez vous.
I needed you to send everyone in one direction while I went in the other.”

“That’s it? I was a diversion ’cause I look like you?”

“I needed you for two very specific things, and Kyle…you sure didn’t disappoint. I left you a trail to follow so you’d make all my personal appearances. I had to. Unfortunately, like most institutions, mine is still inherently misogynistic. Personally, I’m a gynocrat. Give the ladies a whirl, I say. But the world hasn’t caught up with me yet.” He flashes Lara a smile in the mirror. “People needed to see me in person. For that kind of deal, it would have been inexcusable for me not to see Protosevitch. If I’d just sent Lara, it would have been an insult. And from what I hear, you and he got along famously. And the courier. Well, Lara handled him. But I needed his people to see you there…to see me there. Clearly, I can’t be in two places at once. Kyle, the Chinese are so fucking lost right now. They have no idea where I’m going to pop up next. We’ve stayed ahead of them the whole time. You’ve been magnificent.”

Robinson pauses, pushes in the car lighter, waits for it to eject, then fires up a cigarette and coughs.

“And most important, I needed you because I knew if Lara could keep you alive long enough to get the intel for me, you could crack the Chinese encryption. I mean, hell, you wrote most of the encryption the Chinese ripped off from us. You gave me the final key. You signed Li’s death warrant.”

“Who was the courier? Why’d he have to die?”

“He was just some CCP underling with a gambling problem. Needed cash. The Chinese secret service has a whole document worked up on Li’s little trip here. There’s a war in the CCP, Kyle. Li has people loyal to him in there. They’re watching him too. They don’t want anything to happen to him, and I needed to know if Li’s people changed his schedule after his security spotted me. So this little courier got industrious. Swiped the plans from the CCP and scheduled a rendezvous with me. But I’ll be damned if I’m paying someone like him.”

Kyle’s torn between rage and despair. “Why Li? Why does he matter to you?”

“He doesn’t,” Robinson says. “Someone paid. That seems like enough to me.”

“Who paid?”

“People who can. Why do I care?”

“Small-time…you’re small-time.”

“It’s a small-timers’ century, Kyle. And this one belongs to me. You think the past ten years have been a sad speed bump on the way to a better world? The post-Wall euphoria—
that
was the speed bump to where it was all heading; 9/11 was the starter’s pistol. Game on. Whole world’s up for grabs again. Last century was the devil’s century. Top-down totalitarian. Hell on earth. Big management. And it failed. This one…act two…belongs to the
small-timers.
The technocrats. The damned middle managers and entrepreneurs. People like us. No more grand blueprints and narratives. Just a bunch of small-timers making a go of it.” He sounds a little disappointed. “You and I could’ve played it together, circumstances being different, of course. It could’ve been great. But spiritual cousins end up enemies in this thing.”

“Thanks for those two bodies you left for me in your hotel room. The CIA has me on the hook for those.”

“Oh, them. Li’s private security people have been merciless about tracking me. Sorry about that. You understand, right? I was in a rush.”

“So the people who picked me up at the airport?”

“Li’s people. Private security. Same as the ones in the hotel room. Those two were so young, I felt bad killing them. Young startups always want a chance at someone like me. It’s their best shot at fast advancement. You take me…you write your own ticket to the sky.” He smiles, like a man reminiscing about an illicit one-night stand. “I turned on the lights. We saw each other. There they were in the light. I was better; I took them both apart. But they fought me till the bitter end.” He drags off the cigarette. “Knowing the Chinese, they were probably underpaid for what I put them through. And the CIA…don’t worry about them either. I had that taken care of.”

Kyle focuses his rage, focuses his pain, starts to think. “Wait…back in Phnom Penh, those weren’t Chandler’s people trying to kill me. Chandler’s people would never have let me get away. They were yours. You needed me to come back to you. You needed a reason to force me to take your passport.”

Robinson turns to him, cigarette clenched between his teeth, like a shark with a small fish. “Now you’re getting it.”

Kyle turns to Lara. Her face is remote.
What is she thinking?
he wonders. Can he make out the signs of struggle? Is she torn between her lover and her new friend? Was he ever a friend in the first place? Did she really play him the whole time? Because it hadn’t felt that way.

Kyle turns back and increases the pressure on his nose. He knows Robinson screwed him, but it was only possible because of Kyle’s refusal to avoid taking responsibility for his guilt. Everything spread from there. He can admit it now. His desire to evade reality unleashed Robinson, belched him from his own unconscious like some secret sharer to liberate and punish him. And now Li Bao’s going to be the next person to suffer because of him.

Suddenly, he has an urge to do something destructive, something to put an end to it all. If he’s going to die, he refuses to die passively.

“Look at you,” Robinson says. “You’re on fire.” He laughs. “It’s no fun killing someone submissive. But I can’t have you boiling over; believe it or not, you bleed more that way. And I don’t want to have to hurt you.” His smile has a tinge of sadness. “It’d be like hurting myself.”

Kyle concentrates his anger in his left arm, raises his elbow to the passenger-side window, and bashes it. One crack and the glass spiderwebs. He gives the glass one more shot, and seconds later, the window shatters in his lap.

Robinson swerves the car. “Shit—”

From the backseat, Lara struggles to stop Kyle.

Kyle grabs a jagged shard, slicing his own hand in the process, and jams it into the meaty area between Robinson’s shoulder blade and neck. Blood spurts, a steady fountain, the sanguinary consequence of slitting skin in a sensitive area surrounded by nerves and vessels.

Robinson takes his hands off the wheel, tries to wipe all the blood from his eyes while steering the car with his knees.

Lara tries to squeeze herself between the divide separating the two seats.

Kyle reaches over, slams down on the door panel, unlocks the passenger side, and jumps from the moving car.

He lands hard on his side, then gets up and takes off in a dead sprint.

The car screeches to a halt on the side of the road. Lara jumps out of the backseat and joins Robinson in the front. He turns to her, blood spurting, and hands her his gun. “Stop him,” he says, furious.

Lara runs to the middle of the road, tries to set up a clean shot.
“Kyle, stop,”
she yells. “I’ll shoot. I will.”

Kyle doesn’t turn around. He’d rather take a shot in the back than slow down.

He reaches the pier, takes a running dive into the river, and starts swimming past the limits of his body, muscles burning and aching.

Lara gets back into the car, gun at her side. “He jumped.”

“I noticed.” Robinson looks at her, his neck spurting, more annoyed than anything else, and says like the ultimate disappointed parent, “He’s your problem now. Get out. Go get him, and don’t miss this time.”

Kyle swims through the thick dregs of the Mekong.

He wades for a few seconds, then catches his breath and floats through a patch of pollution. Planks of diseased wood, pockets of redolent food—mealy fruit, rotten meat, hundreds of bruised UN-donated potatoes—and strange sci-fi vegetation, stems and vines, rising from an unseen source. He’s going to need one hell of a tetanus shot after slogging through this sun-spangled septic tank.

He swims through an assortment of corroded hubcaps and floats over to the rickety deck of a moored houseboat. Two children wearing nothing but torn cloth diapers watch him with a mix of awe and fear as he hoists himself onto the boat’s deck.

Kyle beaches himself on the wooden planks, rolls onto his back, and breathes in. He’s strained the limits of his lungs; his chest feels like there’s a hot coal in the center. His arms and shoulders tremble.

The children don’t move, just stare at him like he’s some mythical object dredged from the depths of the sea.

Kyle shakes off the water, walks the length of the boat, and rips a threadbare towel off a rope acting as both a drying line and substitute sail. He wraps it around his wounded hand, holds it tight.

He walks to the edge of the houseboat and makes the jump from the boat to the shore. It’s farther than he thought. He goes down on one knee upon impact and allows the rest of his body to follow. He’s overcome; he still can’t catch his breath.

He hobbles across the shore until he hits the main road.

Hitchhiking isn’t an option. No one, no matter how many good Samaritan impulses that person is harboring, would pick up someone in his condition. His only hope is to walk until he finds a stand where he can rent a moto.

He sticks to the side of the road and walks with the traffic. He runs his hand along the sleeves and shoulders of his suit, swats away any refuse left over from his plunge.

He weighs his options. Surrender is the only viable one he can come up with. Try to find someone to turn himself in to and tell him Robinson’s plan. The problem is, who is he supposed to surrender
to
at this point? Why would anyone believe him?

He looks down, and his hand is seeping through the towel, leaving a trail of crimson blots behind. He needs to get somewhere and change the dressing.