Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (31 page)

“Soldiers?”

“Not officially, no.”

“CIA?”

“Civilian contractors. Doing work on behalf of our government.”

The man handed Arthur a tablet displaying three photos and a list of names, along with their height and weight. There was no other information.

Arthur glanced at it. “On behalf of what branch?” The man didn't answer. Arthur asked, “Well, can I ask what they were doing, at least?”

“Preserving freedom and looking out for American interests abroad.”

Arthur grunted and said, “‘Will Blackwater'? That's about the fakest name I've heard. You can't let operatives pick their own aliases, Randy. You wind up with a bunch of guys named ‘Max Strong' and ‘Nathan Steel.'”

“The three are scheduled to be transported to Pyongyang at oh five hundred hours tomorrow, and then will be publicly executed. We intend to get them out of there before that happens. And that of course is what brings you here.”

“Why do you need me? Just call in an air strike.”

“The United States of America is not officially involved in the Korean insurgency in any way, and will not officially get involved until the moment a North Korean soldier, aircraft, or artillery shell crosses the demilitarized zone.”

“Ah. Of course.”

They had reached the other end of the hangar. Out back, a pillar of black smoke was still billowing from a crater in the pavement, underground fuel tanks that had probably been burning for months.

Arthur said, “Well, I have a vessel.”

“I know. At Ongjin. A glass-bottom submarine you've dressed up like a fishing boat. Very cute.”

“Bring your people to the docks and, for a reasonable fee, we'll ferry them down to Incheon or wherever you want them.”

“I'm afraid it won't be that easy. We have negotiated an exchange, under the table, with the officer in charge of transporting the prisoners. The three of them will be ‘killed' in an escape attempt, but the bodies he presents to his superiors will be substitutes.
His
fee is that he wants his daughter back.”

“You're saying that like I know who his daughter is. Do I?”

“Sixteen-year-old girl named Choi, you transported her out of the country six months ago.”

“Oh. Well, then, at this very moment she's probably currently in a club in Utah, pretending to be a geisha and laughing at some American salesman's terrible jokes.”

“So you know where she is, then. We have less than twenty-four hours. You need to get her on a plane, bring her back here, get her across the border, and back into the hands of her father.”

“That would be the very father she just risked her life to escape, in the country that's about to be torn apart by war.”

“It is unfortunate for her, to be certain. One of a million unfortunate fates that are going to be met within the borders of this godforsaken patch of land, no doubt.” The man glanced around at the carnage of the ruined airfield. “You know, my great-grandfather died here. Truman should have let MacArthur drop the nukes, like he wanted. Do we have an arrangement?”

“What happens if I say no?”

“If you say yes, you will have the gratitude of the United States government. Something a man in your position is bound to need between now and the day he is laid to rest.”

“Interesting how you turned that question around.”

“These three operatives are close colleagues and friends of mine. They've been doing extremely high-risk work in-country for the last year. If I have to stand by and watch them be executed on state-run television because you didn't want to give up one of the pieces of meat you buy and sell like a street vendor doling out kebabs…” he shrugged. “I'm not officially here. You're not officially here. And people disappear from this place on an hourly basis. Your fate will go unrecorded by history.”

Arthur glanced around at the cavernous, ruined building, thin shafts of light slicing down through the bullet wounds above them.

“Do I even want to know where you're going to get three substitute bodies to stand in for your dead prisoners?”

“I forgot to mention. We'll also need you to find us three bodies roughly matching the build of the three operatives.”

“Jesus.”

“Freedom isn't free, Mr. Livingston.”

In the end, the choice was no choice at all. Arthur made his phone calls. A lie had gotten the officer's daughter, Choi, onto a private plane at Salt Lake. When she realized where she was going, she started screaming. It took three men to restrain her. She tried to get off the plane when it landed to refuel in Los Angeles. She tried again in Tokyo. She talked about what her father had done to her, and what he had promised he would do to her if she ever tried to leave. None of that mattered, of course. The market is a machine, and these are just the noises the gears make when they turn.

Meanwhile, Arthur paid a local man to provide him with the three stand-in bodies, and he delivered in less than twelve hours. Arthur didn't ask where they came from, or whether or not they were alive when the man found them. It was a war zone, and the price of life had dipped into negative territory—many of the citizens were simply worth more dead. The market is what it is.

The “attack” on the convoy transporting the American hostages occurred right on schedule, though maybe “attack” shouldn't be in sarcasm quotes considering that, as far as Arthur could tell, thirteen real people had been killed in the assault, and ten more had been maimed. One guy got his legs blown off. Arthur assumed that none of the victims knew that their deaths were intended to be a form of very convincing method acting to carry out a CIA ruse.

After all of that, when the deadline for him to set sail arrived, no one showed up at the docks. It would be nearly five hours before the three American captives showed up to be hustled onto Arthur's submersible “fishing” vessel, two of them with serious wounds that he did not have the equipment on board to tend to. And so as they sailed away, a gruff Texan named Budd tried to put pressure on a spurting artery that had drenched his left leg, while the blue-eyed “Will Blackwater” was wearing a shirt doused in his own blood. As the vessel sank under the waves, a strapping young black man with a goatee and big brown eyes watched nervously as the water covered the windows and said, “It's supposed to do that, right?”

Will sat next to Arthur at the controls, holding a compress against a freely bleeding head wound, and shook Arthur's hand with fingers that were slick with fresh blood.

Arthur stared down at his blood-smeared palm and said, “Pleased to meet you.”

The man said, “When we get a free moment, I want to know how you managed to pull this off.”

“You don't want to know.”

“Yes, I do.”

Arthur thought for a moment, and tried to tally up the dead bodies and ruined lives that had pried this group loose from the People's Republic of North Korea, and lost count. He surely didn't know about all of them anyway. And it didn't matter. He had a job, that job was going to get done, and that was that. You get sentimental and you might as well walk away. Go sit in a cubicle and run out the clock until you die.

Arthur stared into the murky waters churning outside the portal window, wiped off blood onto his three-hundred-dollar slacks and muttered, “There is always a way.”

So anyway, no, Arthur couldn't tell you how many of the girls he squirreled away from the Korean peninsula and other parts of the world either never made it to America, or if they did, never made it to old age. Statistically, the moment a woman accepts money for sex, her chances of being murdered shoot up five thousand percent—a woman who stays in that line of work has a life expectancy of thirty-four. But, he would say, would any of them have been better off where they were? Whether they were born in Pyongyang or Pennsylvania, they didn't wind up in that life unless they were out of prospects, and Arthur kept them clean and comfortable right up until the day they stopped being profitable. The market is the market, and it's not his fault the market says young women are cheap and plentiful and spoil faster than green bananas.

And as for Zoey Ashe, well, it simply wasn't all that unusual to find a twenty-two-year-old female dead on the pavement outside some Livingston property. It just didn't happen on this particular day.

 

THIRTY-ONE

Zoey fell, the freezing air rushing past her ears, waves of mortal panic and terror crashing through her nervous system. Limbs trying to climb through the air, uselessly grabbing for purchase that she knew wasn't there.

Just a few seconds.

An eternity.

Her last thought was “I'm going to die with a hot dog wrapper in my pocket” and then,

WHAP!

Zoey impacted pavement that was much softer than she had expected.

Her face was crammed into something that felt like rough canvas, and then she was sinking, gently being lowered until she was resting in what felt like a gigantic hammock. A split second later Armando landed five feet away from her and sent a jolt through the cloth that sent her bouncing. Zoey thought for a moment they had lucked out and landed on an awning, but Armando was laughing when she sat up and saw it was some kind of massive inflatable trampoline thing, which Zoey believed stuntmen used when jumping off buildings for movies. This one seemed to extend forever in both directions, covering the sidewalk and part of the street. It was black, with huge yellow letters printed on it that said simply “
DROP
.”

A moment later Andre, knees drawn up in a cannonball, landed nearby, sending another ripple through the bag. It rolled Zoey into the dent in the canvas where Armando was lying, and she rolled on top of him and giggled and poked him in the chest.

“That was some real good bodyguarding you did there, buddy! You just let somebody push me off a roof!”

“I knew this was down here. Otherwise I would never have let you get so close to the—”

She kissed him, right on the mouth. She didn't even know she was going to do it until she did it.

Armando didn't kiss her back, but was very gentle in the way he pushed her off.

Very sternly he said, “Zoey. No.”

“Okay, okay.”

He sat up, trying to figure out the quickest way off the high-fall bag.

He said, “Don't be embarrassed, this is a very normal reaction when you have had the kind of experience that—”

She started crawling away from him while he was still muttering his explanation and stumbled/rolled toward the edge, finding she was still six feet off the ground.

A piercing horn sounded and suddenly there was a rain of people falling from the ledges of the buildings along the park. They fell, landed on the bags, rolled off, and ran into the buildings to go back up and do it again.

Zoey rolled awkwardly off the bag. Andre was already standing in the street, which was covered in a soft mat that she assumed was there to catch people who accidentally fell off the edge of the bag on impact. He had a ridiculous grin on his face. Zoey shoved him and laughed and Andre put on an innocent look.

“What, nobody explained to you what a Drop party is? You ain't felt adrenaline until you've jumped off a tall building and seen the ground flyin' up at you. Arthur kept wanting to set it up around Livingston Tower but that's way higher than what these bags are rated for.”

Zoey brushed snow off her skirt while Armando attempted the impossible task of dismounting from the high-fall bag gracefully.

She said, “Ugh, I'm all wet now.” She said to Armando, “Take me back home, you need to get me out of these wet clothes.

“
Zoey
…”

“Calm down, grumpy pants. I'm just joking. But seriously, these tights are cutting off circulation to my legs and you may have to take me to the hospital if I don't get them off.”

Andre said he had three prospective ladies waiting for him back at the party, so he excused himself while Zoey and Armando made their way to the waiting car. Armando checked it from stem to stern to make sure there wasn't a bundle of dynamite strapped to the engine, despite the fact that it hadn't been out of the sight of four armed guards for the entire night.

Armando slid in first, and as Zoey climbed in the passenger side he shook off his suit jacket, and unbuttoned the top tree buttons of his crimson shirt, revealing a gold cross on a chain, and a square Band-Aid on his chest, as if he'd cut himself shaving his body hair.

As Zoey settled in she said, “It's that tea, right? It makes you feel like you've got a fever or something.” The second Zoey's door closed she said, “Turn your head,” then kicked off her shoes, hiked up her skirt, and shoved the tights off her legs. She wadded them up and stuffed them into her pocket along with her hot dog wrapper.

“That's better. And I'm—wait—yes, I am wearing underwear. Whew.”

Armando sighed, pulled them out into traffic, and hesitated as if trying to formulate his words.

“Zoey … I have had a lot of female clients, this sort of thing, it comes up more often than you think. It is actually covered in training, during licensing. The client is under stress, in a vulnerable place, coming down off a rush of adrenaline. They start misinterpreting their feelings. The reaction is chemical, nothing more.”

“Okay, okay, stop lecturing me. I'm blaming the tea all the way.”

“I cannot continue with the contract if it is going to be like this. Even if it was mutual, it is strictly forbidden by our code of ethics.”

“You're right, and using the word ‘forbidden' definitely doesn't only make it hotter.”

“Zoey, this is not a joke.”

“I get it. You're a handsome Latin action hero. I'm a trailer troll with the wrong eating disorder. Stop freaking out about it, you can surely resist the temptation of little ol' me.” She shrugged out of her blazer. “Even if I'm not a hundred percent sure I can make it home before I have to get these clothes off. Are these windows tinted?”