Weaponized (30 page)

He knows exactly where he’s going to land. He’s floating toward a metal embrace with the roof of Li Bao’s limousine.

Feetfirst,
he prays.
Feetfirst. Or at the very least, let me land on my knees. Either way, I’m breaking something on impact. It’s just a question of how high up on the leg.

And landing on his knees it is.

The alarm system in the limo goes into overdrive upon his crash. Something internal has gone haywire and it keeps repeating the same sound, like a concrete symphony, and in true city fashion, this gets all the other car alarms involved in a furious dialogue, an orgy of squawking, signifying nothing.

Even though Li’s limo is bulletproof and armor-plated, a grown man who falls twelve stories and lands on it is going to leave behind some serious dents. Accordingly, upon Kyle’s impact, the roof caved in and curved like a government statistic. The windows spiderwebbed. The undercarriage—already hanging low—went right to the ground. Oil is streaming out, and the smell of gas is everywhere.

“The fucking thing might blow!” screams one of the guards.

Kyle can’t help but smile. His plan worked.

Li’s security men immediately pull the wife and kids out of the backseat, rush them to the other side of the street, throw them to the ground, and ready themselves to be shields.

Once they’ve settled the family, the agents look up, note what window Kyle dove from, and open fire on Robinson.

Robinson turns to the side of the window, using the angle to his advantage. Bullets rip up the surrounding area, shredding the walls, launching clots of rotted wood and decades of moldy files from Mr. Vibol’s desk.

When there’s a break in firing, Robinson peers outside and sees Kyle on the limousine roof, still on his knees, unable to move, holding his side and looking like a Pre-Raphaelite sculpture testifying to the nobility of suffering.

Robinson smiles, an anarchic riot across his face; even his cheeks and eyebrows get involved, because, let’s be honest, this denouement is far more to his liking. Sure, the people who hired him to kill Li are going to either kill
him
for this or place him in indentured servitude for years. He knows it.

That said, they’ll have to find him first, and that gives him a reason to indulge in his favorite activity: going liquid. He wasn’t created for a rooted world; it stifles his creativity. His line of work has always been an excuse for him to have the life he wants.
Other people’s lives.
Hundreds of them, all in different places.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t have any more time to admire Kyle’s reshuffling of the deck; he’s got to get out. Not only has Li’s security reloaded, but Fowler’s run through the front door to get him.

Robinson leaves the rifle by the window, darts to the closet, dives back into the tunnel, and leaps the last few ladder rungs. Once below, he pulls plastique and charges out of the duffel bag and leaves the rest behind.

He tightens the loosened rifle strap around his neck and attaches the handheld television to the cord. He needs to watch Fowler to know when to activate the charges.

He barrels down the tunnel, forced to run a five- or six-minute mile in a space with no air. It’s going to hurt; he’s going to feel every foot of it.

Fowler explodes into the office, gun drawn, and lets off several warning shots. There’s no return fire. The room is empty. The fucking guy is gone.

He sees Robinson’s rifle still at the window. The guy left everything behind and ran. Ran where?

The window Kyle launched himself from is the only one in the office. Obviously, Robinson didn’t escape that way, and Fowler banged on every other door in the hallway and Robinson hadn’t run through to dive out one of their windows onto the street.

No, Fowler thinks. Somehow he’s got to still be in this room.

Fowler tosses the desk on its side, does the same with the filing cabinet. Nothing. Water-stained carpet and mildew. He moves to the closet, rips all Mr. Vibol’s clothes off the rod, kicks over the boxes, pounds against the walls and floor, looking for an opening.

Nothing. Where did this guy go?

He steps out of the closet and stands in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips, breathless, furious. Robinson isn’t getting away from him.

When Robinson shoots, he listens to his heartbeat. When he runs, he sings under his breath to keep time. Speeding through the tunnel, his sides splitting, phlegm pushing against his throat, he decides to go with Johnny Cash.

Fowler goes back into the closet; something’s bothering him about the spot. He pounds on the floorboards, drops to his knees, and sees a small slice in the corner of the rug.

He follows the cut, rips up the carpet, peels it back, and finds the steel cover.

While Robinson pastes more plastique, he checks the handheld and sees Fowler fussing with the lid.

He starts sprinting, pushing himself harder. His calves and quads shake with effort.

He spits out the running residue coating his tongue, wipes the sweat from his eyes, and increases the length of his stride.

Fowler pulls off the steel, peers inside, and sees the ladder leading to the dark hole.

“Son of a bitch,” he says, then punches in the number for Li’s security on his phone. “Robinson used a fucking migrant tunnel. Get anyone you can spare up to the office on the twelfth floor. I’m going down after him. We gotta move. He’s got a good head start on us.”

Robinson reaches the end of the tunnel, glimpses the ladder back to the surface, pastes one more plastique bomb, and lays in the charge.

He scales the ladder and pulls out another disposable cell phone that acts as the trigger.

He has to slap himself hard across the face until his cheeks flush. He’s about to faint from oxygen deprivation, and this is not the time for him to pass out.

Fowler drops to the dirt floor of the tunnel and freezes when he realizes how narrow and air deprived it is. There’s no way he can catch Robinson under these conditions. He’s got to swallow his pride and wait for Li’s security to arrive.

Robinson hits the top of the ladder, pushes up against the steel grate.

He punches the detonation number into the phone and waits to surface. He wants to hear the seismic rumble that presages the blast.

He loves to listen when he makes things explode.

Fowler hears the roar from the back of the tunnel. Heat and smoke swell toward him. Destruction follows its own immeasurable clock, but in Fowler’s experience, it always arrives faster than you’d think.

“Fuck me!” he yells, and he scrambles up the ladder, two rungs at a time, back into Mr. Vibol’s office.

Fowler surfaces and tries to get the steel cover back on in an attempt to contain the damage to the tunnel itself. But the fire has other plans.

Before Fowler can secure the lid, it flies off from contained force, nearly decapitating him, and lodges itself into the wall, quivering with unspent energy.

The floor begins to heat up and crumble.

He’s got to get the hell out of there.

He rises, darts through the office, jumps over the desk and filing cabinet he tossed aside. Flames punch through the walls; the floor growls and hisses as sections come loose and collapse.

He makes it into the hallway, sees Li’s security heading toward him, and yells:

“Turn back. Get the fuck back. He blew the tunnel. This place is gonna go.”

They don’t need to be told twice, take off back in the direction they came from, Fowler on their tail.

The door to Mr. Vibol’s office flies off, and flames—with crackling blue tongues—froth into the hall. Inside the office, the heat mounts; the wallpaper bubbles and explodes, the wall underneath follows, and the fluorescent lights pop and dump their contents into the fire.

Robinson walks through the woods, already aflame from deforestation, already a future ruin when his inferno joins in. He couldn’t be happier to contribute, couldn’t be happier to overflow the heavens with the acrid afterglow of his destruction.

He throws his head back, luxuriating, savoring, breathing in his true métier.

T
he problem with being your own boss, Neil O’Donnell has come to realize, is that the productivity of your day is solely in your own hands, and right now, his hands are occupied, first pouring gin and tonics, and then sliding off Katya’s—his newest intern’s—jean shorts.

Neil takes a drink, clenches an ice cube between his teeth, and starts running it down Katya’s torso, neck to navel, with some stops in between.

Katya entered Neil’s hallowed employ last week. Things with Katie, his earlier intern, didn’t pan out and only reinforced a lesson Neil’s college writing professor tried to impart almost twenty years ago:

“Don’t starting sleeping with your students. Ever. They eventually want you to read their work. And you never want to do that.”

Neil’s cell phone rings. He doesn’t recognize the number, but it’s eleven in the morning, and people call him at that hour only with dire emergencies.

K
yle stands at a pay phone, slouching against the metal shell, and winces in pain. His side is still taped up, stapled, wounded, and draining. He had to lose his spleen and some semi-crucial inches from his small intestine.

“Hey,” he says, voice cracking. It’s still a strain to speak.

“The fuck have you been?” Neil explodes. “It’s been weeks. I thought you were dead. What number is this?” He tries to control his word flow. “You have no idea how pissed off I am at you. I was actually going to ask the government for help to find you. You know how scared I was if I was even thinking of involving the fucking government.”

“Calm down. Okay? I don’t have much time.”

“Okay,” Neil says. “Okay. Sorry.”

“Remember you said if I wanted to come home, you’d have a lawyer waiting for me when I get off the plane and that you’d run an exclusive?”

“Of course I remember.”

“Well,” Kyle says, “you’ve got about twelve hours or so to make that happen. I’m at the airport.”

Just when Neil had started recovering from the shock of hearing from Kyle, he gets hit with this. “What?”

“I’m coming home.”

“That’s…that’s fucking fantastic. I’ll get working right now. I’ll start making calls.”

“Look,” Kyle says, swallowing hard, “before you do that, there’s something you need to know. You need to read between the lines a little, because I’m not sure how…secure this call is. You get me?”

“Yeah, man.”

“When I talk to the lawyer and I talk to you…you’re…you’re gonna find out some stuff about me you’re not going to like.”

“Like what?”

“Like I didn’t run for exactly the reasons I told you I did.”

“Oh, that,” Neil says. “Yeah. Well, I kind of figured.”

Now it’s Kyle’s turn to explode. “What?” he says and feels the sting in his side.

“I sort of suspected but suppressed it. But when you didn’t come back even to avoid being held in contempt, I kinda knew. I mean, if the threat of going to jail wasn’t enough…”

“You suspected me?”

“Had no choice.”

“And you still kept talking to me?”

“Well…it kinda made me like you a lot less for a few months, but then I just missed you—and whatever you’d done, I wanted you back around,” Neil says. “You’re still my best friend, no matter what, right?”

Kyle’s caught in the sensory limbo between smiling and crying. “I don’t know what to say.”

“‘Thank you.’ That’s a good start.”

“Thank you so much.”

“Wow,” Neil says. “You put a little extra on that.”

Kyle laughs, sniffles. “I’ll see you real soon, okay?”

“Yeah,” Neil says. “I’ll start making calls.”

“And don’t spare any expense.” Kyle cradles the phone between his chin and shoulder. “I’m gonna need one hell of a good lawyer.”

Neil laughs. “Done.”

Kyle hangs up the phone, picks up his cane, which is resting against the booth, and drags himself back over the café area on a broken ankle still encased in plaster.

K
yle joins Fowler at a plastic oval table.

“Everything good?” Fowler says, pushing a cup of coffee over to him. “You make your call?”

“Yeah,” Kyle says. “We’re good.”

Fowler dips into his blazer pocket, pulls out a flask, dumps several shots’ worth of whiskey into his coffee, then grabs Kyle’s cup and does the same. “For the road,” he says. “Long flight. And I don’t have the budget for us to drink the whole time.”

Kyle nods in thanks. “Can I mix this with painkillers?”

“I recommend it,” Fowler says. “I can’t afford the duty-free shop either, so I picked that up in town before we left.”

Kyle tastes it, suppresses a gag. “What is
that?
”

“They call it Old Crow.”

“Yeah, they do,” Kyle says. “Does it get better at any point?”

“No. Not at all,” Fowler says. “But it doesn’t get any worse.”

Kyle raises the cup to his lips.

“It works better if you don’t smell it,” Fowler says, and then pulls a plastic bag out of his pocket and slides it across the table.

Kyle’s passport.

“You’re gonna need this,” he says.

Kyle unzips the bag, removes his passport, and flips through. He’s Kyle West again.

“Use it more wisely in the future,” Fowler says.

Kyle forces down another slug of Old Crow. “So I know what
I
get for going back: I get to go to jail and be let out periodically to testify. What do you get for being the guy who brings me back?”

“Oh…probably jack-shit,” Fowler says, laughing. “They put me out to pasture a while ago. I wasn’t made for the current incarnation of the Agency.”

“Maybe they’ll let you go back home too,” Kyle says. “Maybe you can use
me
to get that for yourself.”

Fowler takes another sip. “I’m not all that sure I want to go back. I never liked the States much.”

“Why?”

“I don’t…I don’t really relate to anyone there. You send me out to dinner with people my age, I don’t have anything to talk about. I fell in love with Southeast Asia when I was a teenager. It’s too late for me to go anywhere else.”

“After my prison term is up, I may join you. I got to like it there too. And the States isn’t exactly going to be bursting with opportunities for me.”

“You come back, you know where to find me.”

“Any news about Robinson?”

“We’re trying to trace whoever hired him through the money. He didn’t leave us much of a crime scene to work with. And he’s somehow managed to stay entirely off the grid. I mean
entirely.
”

“Money come up with anything yet?”

“Nah. We can’t investigate most of the suspects. Either they’re already under investigation and we’d be intruding on another operation in progress or they’ve been shut down and the files destroyed.”

“He’s gone. And you know it.”

“Everyone gets caught eventually.”

Kyle raises the Styrofoam cup to his lips. “Do they?”

“I hope so.” Fowler smiles. “Nothing in my experience leads me to believe it, though.”

Over the PA system, Kyle and Fowler’s flight is announced.

“Gate forty-six,” Fowler says. “Finish up your coffee.”

“I think I’ve had enough Old Crow.”

Fowler looks at him, lowers his head a little. “Back at the hospital, I told you that you did good. You probably don’t remember. You were busy dying. I’m sure you had other things on your mind. But I meant it. And I still do. You did real good back there. You saved Li, and you saved his family.”

“Thanks,” Kyle says. “And you’re right. I don’t remember.”

“Maybe you won’t have to go to jail. Li Bao’s been singing your praises to the Americans for weeks.”

“No.” Kyle laughs. “I’m going to jail. Li Bao can hold a parade in my honor and they’re still throwing my ass in jail.”

“Maybe…”

“I embarrassed Congress. They don’t need any help in that department, and I kept it up for a year. They’re sending me to jail out of spite. Also, you’re forgetting one thing…”

Fowler looks at him.

“I did wrong.”

Fowler pushes in his chair and helps Kyle get to his feet.

“Thanks,” Kyle says. “I’m still not quite operational.”

Kyle and Fowler hook a right, step onto the escalator, and descend toward the boarding gate.

“You know, you’re not quite the asshole I thought you were,” Fowler says. “Someone does what you did, invents a more efficient spying program for Chandler, I gotta think the guy’s a championship asshole.”

“Don’t get too sentimental. You didn’t know me a year ago.”

They hit bottom, and Kyle gets his passport ready, leans his weight on the cane, and walks as best he can, supported by Fowler’s hand at his waist.

“You’re lucky you’re alive,” Fowler says while they walk. “Few people survive major surgery in Cambodia. Most people drown in their own blood before they even make it to surgery. First thing you do when you get home is find someone to look at that.”

Kyle approaches the attendant at the gate, hands her his ticket and passport.

“Washington, DC. One way,” she says, inspecting both.

Kyle nods in affirmation. “That’s right.”
Home,
he thinks,
home, to be subject to the vicissitudes of fate and, even scarier, to the byzantine American legal system and Congress.

At least I’ve got my name back.