Weaponized (9 page)

“So where am I going?”

“Southeast Asia.”

And Fowler perks up; tons of radical Islam there. “Indonesia?”

The DCI laughs. “Right…Indonesia.” He laughs some more. “You get a respected cleric tortured for a year, and we’re gonna send you to the most populous Muslim country on earth.” He pulls a manila folder from his briefcase. “You’re going to Cambodia.” He stares at the tattoo on Fowler’s forearm. “Your first field of action, right?”

“One of them.”

“Two benefits, Tommy. One: It’s a nonextradition country, so it’ll shut the Italians up…”

“So I am a pariah to the administration.”

“Of course you are. Right now. But no one stays one forever. Plus the other benefit…”

Fowler taps his foot. “Malaria? Done that one.”

“The girl working under you is a right fucking tart.” The DCI tosses the folder to Fowler. “Rebecca Harris. Her cover is that she’s an ethnomusicologist. Know anything about Khmer music, Tommy?”

“It’s all sad.”

“Right, a lot of oral archives of atrocity.”

“Isn’t most music these days?”

The DCI laughs. “Rebecca was stationed in Ukraine. But she got too close to one of her agents and he burned her back. There were rumors of a relationship of a…sexual nature. She can thank the Clinton administration she’s still got a job. We didn’t have enough women or fags for their taste, so now it’s impossible to fire either a woman or a fag.” The DCI motions toward the folder, and Fowler takes out Rebecca’s photo. “Nice, right?”

“Sure.”

DCI points to the picture. “Doesn’t do the tits justice.”

Fowler gives him a fake smile.

“See, you’re both exiles. Guy she bedded down with in Ukraine was a fifty-two-year-old professor—sorry, the guy she
allegedly
bedded down with.” He makes a face of disgust. “I have to remember my corrective training.” He recovers and smiles. “Maybe you two can be allegedly homesick together…”

Fowler bites his lower lip.

“They’ve already put your name on the door. It’ll be your first executive placement: You’re chief of station. And you ship out tomorrow morning.”

So Fowler gets to Cambodia and meets Rebecca Harris and takes her out for drinks and she’s giving Fowler the lay of the land when he bursts out with:

“I know this place.”

“Yeah, but a lot’s changed since you were here.”

He raises his drink to his lips. “They got a few high-rises…a few hotels…they threw some paint on a cemetery. The Vietnamese still run this place. Nothing’s gonna change until they don’t.”

“Still harboring some old prejudices.”

“It’s funny how your generation thinks
facts
that don’t fit into their view of the world are just old prejudices.”

“Right.”

“How’d you end up here, anyway?”

Rebecca smiles. “Like you don’t know.”

“Why don’t
you
tell me?”

“I was burned by my agent. Everyone thinks I let my guard down because we were having an affair.”

Fowler says this one slowly, because his chances of an office romance hinge on her answer. “They shouldn’t think that?”

“No. ’Cause I told them no. It’s just…neither agency, theirs or ours, can imagine a woman not being blown away by the chance to mercy-fuck a sad crony Communist teaching agriculture.”

“So you didn’t do it?”

“And he burned me because I wouldn’t.”

“Why didn’t you fight harder?”

“I did. They put me here. That was considered…generous.”

“Why didn’t you just quit? Fuck ’em.”

“Because I am a goddamned good agent, and wherever they put me, I’m going to try to do good.”

“You gonna ask how I ended up here?”

“Already know.”

“Right,” Fowler says. “Everyone knows. And?”

“What do
I
think?” Fowler nods, and she goes on. “I think what most people like me think: you’re a menace to civil liberties and our standing in the West.”

“Civil liberties don’t matter if you’re dead.”

“What if I’d rather be dead than live in that world?”

“You mean that?”

“I do.”

Fowler
really
likes this girl; shame his chances of a torrid affair seem null and void at this point. “So you think I’m shit?”

“Not at all. I think the policies you enforce are shit. I don’t know
you
from anything.”

“That’s fair.”

“Still like me?”

Fowler smiles. “Whaddya mean?”

“Come on, Fowler. You’re an Agency guy…you were hoping these drinks would just be the start of the evening. I have a reputation.”

Fowler sucks on his right cheek when he’s embarrassed. “Yeah. I like you.”

“Good. Then let’s get out of here.”

“Sorry?”

“I wasn’t interested in fucking
the professor,
Fowler.”

And Fowler’s not a kiss-and-tell guy, but the girl is worth getting burned for. They’re not exclusive, they both play around, but there’s real warmth between them—the first time Fowler’s ever felt that. She’s the smartest agent he’s ever worked with. She’s insinuated herself into the Khmer community in a way he can’t.

They see that tattoo on his forearm and they know he’s one of their ghosts come home.

R
ebecca bursts into Fowler’s office without knocking. “I got something,” she says, holding up a printout of an e-mail.

“No knock?”

“Please, Fowler.” She sits down in front of his desk. “When your door is closed, you’re doing one of two things. Lifting weights or sleeping.” She smiles, indulging him but never coddling.

Fowler sits behind his desk, lights a cigarette.

“I thought you stopped,” Rebecca says with a slight shake of her head.

“You can smoke in elevators and hospitals here. This is my last chance to smoke with total impunity. I mean…the kids here smoke.” And Fowler’s about to start in on how half the diseases and ailments in the first world are because of people’s luxury and boredom, as opposed to the
actual
epidemics in the third world, but he decides to keep quiet, because he can see Rebecca can’t wait to talk. “What have you got?”

“Strange things going down at the airport.”

“Usually are.”

“Even stranger today.”

“Locals’ turf,” he says. “We’re here by the good graces of people who don’t like us to stick our noses in over there.”

“Right, but it’s not sticking our noses in,” she says. “See…we have due cause. There was a guy on a no-fly list.”

Fowler perks up. “Say more.”

“And by order of Langley, we have to—”

“I know all that. Say more. No-fly guy…”

“Yeah. Name is Julian Robinson. He’d been grounded.”

“Know why?”

“Not yet.”

“Did we ground him?”

Rebecca shakes her head. “Not us. No. Not the Agency. Someone did, though.”

“Name like that. Julian Robinson. Two to one, it’s money laundering. He doesn’t pass my Muhammad test. Guys named Julian Robinson aren’t gonna show up with a bomb in their underwear or shoes. Get a guy named Julian, and he’s been laundering diverted UN money for a third-world despot.”

“You’re a caveman.”

“Start asking around back home. But it’s not strange yet. Just a no-fly guy.”

“’Cause you never let me finish anything. He’s
gone.
”

“Gone? Didn’t security detain him?”

“Robinson goes to speak to someone about his ticket. Customer-service rep. She tells him he’s no-flyed. Then three guys come and pick him up. Girl assumes they’re security, so she thinks nothing. Then a minute later,
actual
airport security shows up, responding to the initial alarm set off by the boarding-pass kiosk. And no one can find Robinson anywhere. He’s gone, and no one knows who these guys are who took him.”

That’s all Fowler needs to hear. He stands up, slides a blazer over his heavily worked-out shoulders. “First thing we need to figure out, did Robinson get carted away by friend or foe? ’Cause it obviously wasn’t airport personnel.”

“Right,” Rebecca says.

“I’ll call you from the airport.” Fowler looks for his car keys. “Start checking around, see what Robinson was grounded for in the first place.”

K
yle wakes.

A series of hard slaps across the face, then a variation in tone, a few gentler ones, and then a final belt across the cheek.

Someone rips off the hood, and Kyle immediately wishes he had left it on.

His interrogator shakes out his hand; that last crack left him with some bodily feedback, a hand vibrating with violence.

The strobe lights are throbbing, suffocating. Kyle can’t find an image to hold on to. Everything blends into an amorphous pulse that churns his stomach.

He’s in a warehouse. That much he’s sure of.

In between the strobe flutters, he tries to make out his surroundings. The windows are blacked out, boarded shut. Rain damage has pulped the walls. Industrial ooze drips; smells like sulfur, moves like grape jelly. Exposed wires everywhere, coiled insect antennae.

“Robinson!” a voice shouts. Chinese, but not a heavy accent; the voice’s owner has spent years abroad. “Robinson, give me your eyes.” Fingers snap. It’s the guy from the airport, the leader of the crew that kidnapped him. “Give me your eyes right here.”

But Kyle can’t do that.

He feels like he’s just been born and is learning the world. His hands and feet are bound, and he’s seated on a metal chair that’s been bolted to the floor. The strobes’ rate picks up, an epileptic’s heartbeat. He cranes his neck, sees rats scamper across a bare mattress that’s a mass of electrical wires hooked up to an enormous battery. The apparatus hugs you close and gives you a charge.

Kyle sniffs the air. Scorched skin and fear-sweat.

Flicker. Flicker.

Kyle sees several belts and pairs of shoes by the mattress. People who came in and never came out. He can feel the pain haunting this place.

“Robinson…listen to me. Look at me.”

Kyle whispers, “I’m not Robinson. I’m not.”

“Who are you?”

“Kyle West.”

“That what you’re calling yourself
now.
’Bout time. You always were too attached to being Robinson.”

A new voice. “Wasn’t healthy.”

“Why are you in Cambodia?”

A different voice. “Who is your target?”

Kyle can’t stop turning his head. “What? What?”

“Who is your target?”

“I don’t…”

“Why are you in Cambodia?”

“Who is your target?”

Kyle tries to answer but keeps stumbling, slurring out sentence slivers. “You’re the same guys from the airport…the guys who…I’m Kyle West.”

Another guy kneels down before Kyle. “Robinson.” His voice is different, still Chinese, but he sounds like a mellifluous date rapist with an Ivy League degree. “Sorry, I mean Kyle. Know what…I can’t get used to that one. You’re Robinson to me.”

Kyle’s about to mumble
I’m not Robinson
but changes his mind.

“Say something?”

Kyle shakes his head no, focuses. There’re three guys in here. Three he can make out.

“We both know what we’re capable of doing to you. But, see, we don’t have time to be so gentle. We don’t have months to rebuild you. Don’t have time for sensory deprivation and hydrotherapy and electric behavior modification and hypnosis.” Date Rapist smiles, and his teeth are white bricks against the strobes. “We don’t have time to break you and make you love us at the same time. Your specialty.”

“Please,” Kyle says. “Please. I’m not him. I’m not. I swear. I’m Kyle West. I’m Kyle West.”

“Then why do you have Robinson’s passport? Why do you have his credit cards? Why are you wearing his clothes?”

Kyle looks for a break. “I can explain…I can…Just give me…”

“I know you. I know who you are. I know your face.”

“Robinson. You’re among people who know you,” another guy says.

The third guy laughs. “So just tell us who your fucking target is.”

Kyle asks, “What target? Who? Listen, I’m Kyle West…”

“Why won’t you just let us make this
quick?
”

“Quick…make what quick?”

“Tell us what you’re doing here, and you won’t feel a thing.”

The other voice. “Tell us who hired you.”

And then the third. “Who hired you?”

Kyle stumbles. “I don’t know…I don’t…”

“Yeah, you do.”

“I don’t…I don’t know…”

“Why are you making this harder?”

“I’m not, I swear. I can’t tell you anything. I don’t know anything you want.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“I want to,” Kyle pleads. “I do. I want to talk to you.”

“Then do it. Let go.”

“But I don’t know anything. I swear it. I swear,” Kyle sputters, starting to tear up. “I swear.”

“All right.” Date Rapist rises to his feet. “This has to move forward.”

O
ne of the guys kills the strobes. Kyle tries to readjust his vision; tears sluice down his face.

Someone comes over and rests a laptop on Kyle’s thighs.

Date Rapist talks again. “See, Robinson, I know something no one else does. You told it to me once. Years back. Right before you did this exact
thing
to someone else. I’d been sent there to learn from you.” Those white teeth again. “I know that whatever we do to you, you won’t care. The more pain we give you, the more spite you’ll feel…the more you’ll make
us
suffer. The more you’ll hold out. ’Cause in your case, you live for anger. And if we show you any mercy, you’ll hate us for it. And we don’t have time to play that game.”

And Kyle thinks,
Thank Christ for small favors. They’re not going to torture me.

“So we had a special friend follow Lara from the airport. This is a friend you know. You know his work well.”

“Lara…”

“Yeah,” Date Rapist goes on. “And you’re going to watch while he tears her apart. You’re going to watch her suffer. And, more to the point,
you’ll
suffer. Because I know the thing that scares you most. I know her body is your body, because you love her. And I’m going to make you watch him destroy it.”

“I’ll tell you. I will,” Kyle pleads. He doesn’t want to watch this. “Please…let me help you.”

“Too late,” Date Rapist says. “She’s gonna have to hurt a little, ’cause you made me wait.” He punches Kyle hard in the mouth. “You shouldn’t have made me wait.” He powers up the laptop. “We told our special friend to make sure he’s got the camera aimed right at her face.”

Date Rapist goes to a secure site, passes through four stages of encryption. The screen fills up with the interior of a hotel room.

The bedroom.

Date Rapist turns to Kyle. “Can you see?”

“Please…whatever you’re doing, don’t. Don’t,” Kyle pleads.

“Can you see?”

Kyle nods. He can see.

Date Rapist uses the cursor to scroll around the room.

The lamp is shattered, green glass against the white carpet. There’s a torn pair of black lace panties balled up beside the bed.

He keeps scrolling, and there’s a pool of blood and a broken champagne bottle.

One of the kidnappers says: “Looks like our friend couldn’t wait to get started. Problem with a man who loves his work.”

The other one laughs. “Think he fucked her up, boss.”

Date Rapist doesn’t talk, just keeps scrolling.

He leaves the bedroom, makes his way to the bathroom. The shower’s running.

There’s more fresh blood en route.

Kyle’s nauseous, swallows back fear. “No. Turn it off. Please, turn it off.”

Date Rapist doesn’t look at Kyle, just says, “Should’ve talked sooner.”

“Please, turn it off.…Turn
it off
.”

The camera’s getting closer to the shower. More blood, and a woman’s blouse in tatters. Date Rapist is getting pissed off. Seems like his friend got too enthusiastic too early.

He zooms in on the shower, and his face starts to turn ashen.

He scrolls around faster and faster. Something’s not right.

The shower curtain is open. Bloody handprints are smeared all over the sink and medicine cabinet.

The shower stall is in full view.

And before Kyle can figure out what’s going on, Date Rapist rises in a rage, yanks his phone out of his pocket, and finger-pounds the keypad.

“What happened?” someone says.

Date Rapist fumes. “Shut the fuck up.”

Kyle looks down to the screen. It’s not a woman in the shower, not anyone who could conceivably be named Lara.

It’s a man.

He’s Chinese and bearded and muscle-bound, and his throat has been sliced so deeply that his head is attached to his neck by only a wing and a prayer and a bit of cracked bone and cartilage.

Date Rapist throws his phone against the wall. “Fucking bitch.”

The two guys run over. “What the fuck? What happened?”

Date Rapist storms over and kicks Kyle in the head, then turns to his boys and says: “Fucking cunt killed him. Tore his throat out.”

Both of the guys say in unison, “
She
killed him?”

Kyle reels, spits blood and part of a tooth, and throws up a little in shock.

Date Rapist barks to one of the two, “You. Get him ready to move. This place is blown. You”—he points to the other one—“get on the phone and call for backup. Who knows what our friend told her before she killed him.”

The hood goes over Kyle’s head again. He listens to someone scream muffled orders into a cell phone.

Darkness. Complete as the day before Creation.

Kyle squirms in his seat.

Seconds later, he feels the moisture of lips against his ear and then hears the words “Don’t worry, baby. It’s me.” A woman’s voice, deep; the accent sounds Russian, but from the outer provinces, nowhere near Moscow. Kyle can’t help hoping he lives long enough to see what kind of body contains a voice like that.

Then the bullets start, a saturnalia of shells.

Kyle hears his kidnappers suffer, hears them slam into the wall, fall directly to the floor. Someone heaves like he’s breaking open inside. Guttural gagging, murmurs without the strength to become a scream, limbs fluttering against linoleum. Kyle feels fluid collecting around his feet.

His savior scampers to the other side of the warehouse. She flips on the lights.

He swivels his head. Back and forth. Back and forth. He can pick up sense impressions, can feel movement.

He hears his savior’s footsteps get closer and closer, and then he recoils, feels the cold of a blade against his skin, tries to bounce away on the bolted chair.

“Stay still, baby,” she says.

Kyle’s words are muffled. “What are you doing? What are you—”

She saws away at the cords on his hands and feet, frees him.

“We gotta go,” she says, taking his hand, and they rocket down several flights of steps.