A Knife Edge

FIFTY-ONE

I was wrong about the world having frozen over. In the town of Mae Sot, a flyspeck up on the western border Thailand shares with Burma, the night air was hot, moist, and heavy, like inhaling soup. It had rained earlier, a rain so heavy it could have been a shower of polished nickels. Now the rainwater was evaporating, the eternal cycle on the upswing. I took a deep breath and caught the scent of lemongrass. I gave my eyes a rest from the monochrome picture presented by the SpecterIR scope and glanced up at the night sky. It was the color of black coffee and starless except for a constellation of flickering orange stars that reminded me — if I was to get poetic about it — of a snake coiling languidly.

“Beautiful, aren't they?” said Rossi, putting a bowl of something on the table, which explained the smell of lemongrass in the air.

“What are?”

“Those lights. They're candles carried up there by bags of hot air. The adults send them up as a tribute to Buddha,” said Rossi. “The kids do it for fun.”

I made a noncommittal noise in the darkness that surrounded us. In this business, I found it was sometimes easy to forget that most people actually did lead normal lives.

We had around ten minutes of moonlight left. Once it set, darkness would be total. I turned the scope back on the villa across the valley. If Mae Sot wasn't the last place on earth you'd expect the fate of the world could be decided, there weren't too many below it on the list. “Do you have any thoughts on why here?” I asked.

“Why here what?” she replied.

“Why would they choose this place to make the exchange?”

Rossi thought a moment before answering. “It's not really so unlikely. Not far from here is the Freedom Bridge. Across it, over the Moei River in the Burmese town of Myawadee, I'm told several high-ranking North Korean army officers have estates given to them as payment for helping Rangoon modernize, train, and arm their military. Our intel says one of these North Korean officers might be brokering the deal.”

“Okay, but why couldn't it be hammered out in Bangkok, or Seoul, or even Pyongyang?”

In the receding moonlight, Rossi was rapidly becoming no more than a faint gray shape. I could imagine her shoulders rising and falling with a shrug, but I couldn't see them. “Maybe Butler or Boyle or one of the Koreans doesn't like Bangkok. Or maybe it's not suitable for the same reason Seoul isn't — too many agents from the wrong side hanging around. And as for Pyongyang — if I had something the North Koreans wanted badly, I wouldn't go anywhere near the place, at least not until the terms of the deal had been thrashed out. Those North Koreans don't play fair. And then there's the fact that this area is famous for gem and drug smuggling. People here don't see a thing and haven't done for years, if you know what I mean. Or maybe I'm wrong on all counts. And why ask me anyway? I just work here.”

In my opinion, Rossi had made fooling people into believing she didn't know much into an art form. It was an effective disguise. I warned myself not to take her for granted.

“Well, I believe it's time for my watch,” she said. “And I bought you some food. Any movement over there?”

“No,” I replied. “Do we know yet who owns that villa?”

“Some big-shot local fisherman has his name on the paperwork — rented out two weeks ago to a dummy company in Bangkok owned by a South Korean import/export corporation, which is probably a front for North Korean interests.”

“Sounds sketchy,” I said.

“Yeah,” agreed Rossi.

The reality was that we weren't sure who was in that villa. The local CIA station believed it had spotted Boyle, Butler, and another Westerner, who could have been Dortmund, at a Muay Thai tournament in Bangkok two days before. But supposedly positive identifications of Boyle, Butler, and Dortmund had also since been made in Belfast, Rio, Mexico City, and Hong Kong.

“What does the colonel want to do?” I asked.

“Storm the place. Or bomb it. Or maybe bomb it then storm it.”

Colonel Samjai Ratipakorn from the Royal Thai Airborne Regiment was ostensibly in charge. It was his country, after all. But he'd been leaned on heavily to take advice from CIA — Rossi and Chalmers. Ratipakorn didn't like it, especially given that Rossi was a woman and Chalmers was an asshole, but he didn't have much choice. At least Chalmers hadn't made the car trip up from Bangkok — according to Rossi, Chalmers was strictly a rear-echelon jackass.

Colonel Ratipakorn headed up the Thai antiterror forces. He stood about five and a half feet tall in his boots and had less fat on him than a Thai free-range chicken. I knew this because his uniform fit like a seventies body shirt. He never removed his Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses, even at night. I hadn't seen him smile, either, and he didn't so much talk as yap. Like most Thais, he was Buddhist. Maybe in a former life, he was a chihuahua.

The hut Rossi and I were occupying was one of half a dozen scattered around the valley. It wasn't the closest to the villa we were staking out, but not the furthest away, either. It was small with an enclosed veranda, a bedroom with a double bed and two singles, a kitchenette, and a bathroom barely big enough for a generous Western-sized butt. A squad of Ratipakorn's heavily armed antiterror specialists was standing by, suited up and ready to roll three hundred yards up and over the ridge be hind us.

“Hang on,” I said. “Movement.”

“What you got?” asked Rossi, moving catlike across to the other side of the window and settling behind the thermal camera.

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“Do what.”

“Move without making a sound?”

“I float,” she said.

I watched as a huge Asian guy in a shiny suit opened a shutter on a double window, and scoped the trees from left to right. Behind him, I caught a glimpse of another sumo-sized guy, also in a polished suit.

“Shit,” I said. “There he is.”

“There who is?”

“The man seated with his back to us. You ever seen a worse haircut in your life? That's Sean Boyle.”

Rossi answered by reeling off a couple of dozen snaps for the CIA photo album, and then said, “Jesus, that's really him, isn't it?”

“Yup.”

“You sure?”

“No doubt in my mind.”

“What do you make of the muscle?”

“Gotta be North Korean. They're the only country who get their suit patterns from old Dallas episodes. Get a load of those shoulder pads.”

I heard Rossi snort in a delicate Eurasian-beauty kind of way. “You should be on the stage, Cooper.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, the first stage out of town.”

“We should pass on the positive ID to Ratipakorn so that he can do his thing,” I said.

“No, not yet. You know he'll just charge straight in there.”

“Isn't that what we want?” I asked.

“We first want to make sure everyone's present and accounted for. We don't know yet whether Mr. Big is there.”

“No, we don't,” I agreed. “Who's Mr Big?”

“The guy they're waiting around to meet.”

Rossi paused to take another look through the scope. “Like I said, it's my watch. You've been at this four hours now. Why don't you catch a little sack time, Cooper. If anything happens, I'll wake you.”

I didn't need to hear the suggestion twice. “Okay, the Starship Enterprise is yours.” I got up and stretched. Then I left the veranda, leaving behind the food. I needed sleep more than I needed noodle soup. I lay back on the double bed fully clothed and counted the lumps in the mattress…

My eyes came open with a start.

I tried to lower my arms and realized I couldn't. I tried to pull them down but all I got was the sound of a rattling chain. “Hey, what the … Have you cuffed me to the bed?”

“See what happens when you bring sex toys to a stakeout,” Rossi said as she walked out of the bathroom. I moved the cuff chain around the headboard and realized pretty much immediately I wasn't going anywhere in a hurry. Shit! I wished I'd followed my own advice not to take this woman for granted. The darkness hung like coal soot in a bunker. I couldn't see Rossi but I sensed her presence nearby. A small flashlight came on, its bloodred light peeling away the blackness in a cone in front of her face. She was kneeling on the floor, the flashlight in her mouth. I noticed she'd changed into black, urban assault-style gear. She didn't even glance in my direction and was leaning over a rectangular box that I didn't remember seeing among her gear. Rossi opened it, unfastening two clips, and pulled out a long length of pipe — a barrel, in fact — and began to assemble a rifle.

“What are you doing?” I said, asking the first truly dumb question of the day. I knew it was dumb on a number of levels, the least obvious being that I suddenly knew this was Rossi's mission — to kill.

“My job,” she replied, not looking up.

“Then what was mine?” I had believed — or been led to believe — that it was to assist the Thais in taking Boyle, Butler, and Dortmund into custody, so that they could then be extradited to the States to face an array of charges, and then spend the rest of their miserable lives in prison. Instead, I would be a witness to a state-sponsored execution.

“Probably not what you think.”

“Then set me straight.”

“Positive identification. You'd actually met the package. You pointed him out to me — confirmed the target's ID. That was your job. Mine's to show him the exit.”

“I didn't realize the CIA was still in the assassination game.”

“Don't use that word.”

“What, assassination?”

“No — game. My mother's maiden name was Tanaka. Ring a bell?”

Yeah, it did. “Dr. Tanaka didn't have a daughter.”

“No. But he had a sister,” said Rossi.

“You were his niece?” I tried to remember the briefing in D.C. What had Chalmers said about Rossi? That she had an Italian American father and a Japanese mother?

“As part of my briefing, I got a look at your case notes on the investigation into Hideo's death. Uncle and I — we were close. I think I was the only person he had any kind of relationship with. He had a problem with people. He liked fish.”

“What sort of problem?”

“It's not that he didn't like people. He just couldn't handle them. Some sort of phobia. You probably wouldn't understand.”

“Try me.”

“He would sweat, feel sick — look, I don't have time for this now.”

A people phobia. That didn't stack up against Dr. Spears's claim that she and Tanaka had been buddies. “Did he ever mention anyone aside from Professor Boyle at Moreton Genetics? A Dr. Spears, maybe?”

“Who? Not that I remember.”

Killing people in cold blood for a paycheck isn't easy. It helps if the killer is a psychopath, or a religious fanatic, or if the target has somehow been dehumanized. None of these profiles fit Rossi. But if she knew how her uncle had died and who'd helped him on his way… well, revenge was also a powerful motivator when it came to killing someone. And the CIA was a master at leverage — it would use whatever it could get. I watched her mate the barrel to the trigger mechanism with oiled proficiency. They came together with a click. Rossi was no novice.

“I thought Hellfire missiles were the preferred assassination weapon these days,” I remarked.

“Burma stopped throwing ordnance across the border at the refugee camps here years ago. Langley figured a bullet would be easier to hide.”

“I was told you learned your skills in the Marines.”

“Two tours in Iraq.”

“I didn't think the Marines used female snipers.”

“They don't, not usually. But then, I'm not usual.”

I didn't buy the Marines legend, although I was sure she would have all the right paperwork to support it. Nope, Rossi was a Company creation, through and through.

She slid a five-power day/night scope onto the rail, pulled back the bolt, cocking it, flicked the safety off, and checked the action. The firing pin smacked into its seat with a metallic ring that seemed to hang suspended in the darkness beyond the red spill of the flashlight. I watched her feed the magazine into its slot after checking each round.

“So what about all that crap you gave me about waiting for a Mr. Big?”

“There's only one Mr. Big here — Boyle. His is the only scalp the Company wants. You can't un-invent technology, Vin, which is why Boyle's secrets have to die with him.” Rossi stood. “No one wants this genie of his let out of the bottle. No one wants what he's selling in anyone's arsenal — not even ours, not anymore.” The rifle was almost as big as she was, but Rossi had its measure — resting it comfortably balanced in the crook of her arm, muzzle pointing toward the ceiling. “You're probably wondering what's going to happen here — to you.”

I was. “Now that you mention it.”

“In the morning, Ratipakorn's people will find you. You'll be handcuffed to the bed, which weighs a ton, by the way.”

“How does Chalmers think this will play when I get back to the States?”

“Think about it, Cooper. Boyle is already dead, remember? He died in the fire at the Four Winds. Deputy Station Chief Chalmers told me you were there when he took possession of Boyle's wallet. No one will seriously believe that whole mess in San Francisco was merely a smokescreen created by Pakistan's new revolutionary government to cover Boyle's disappearance. And no one will believe that he died twice, either. As for the North Koreans, they won't make a peep. And the Thais are on our side. Why do you think they're pulled back behind the ridge? Nothing happened here. This op is as black as it gets.”

Jesus, the damned wallet. I kicked myself for not putting it all together sooner. The lump of charcoal that was supposed to be Professor Boyle, his lightly charred wallet found beneath it. I'd known it wasn't Boyle from the start, but that wallet's presence had been a real puzzle. The Pakistanis couldn't have planted it there. That had to have been someone else's doing. Now I had a pretty good idea who that someone was.

“This operation falls under the subhead of mopping up.” Rossi pulled a ski mask over her head, stuffed two extra magazines into thigh pockets, and threw a small pack over a shoulder. “Gotta go. Duty calls.” The flashlight beam disappeared, and she with it. A handful of red and orange floaters drifted downward in the blackness. I strained my ears to hear her moving around, but heard nothing. I suddenly felt her lips brush light as a feather against mine, her breath sweet like cinnamon. “Bye, Vin,” she whispered. “It's been real.”

I saw the door open and caught her silhouette move against the black and grays of the night beyond the hut. The door closed and I was again dipped in total darkness.

“Fuck, shit, fuck!” I said, frustration dialing up the volume on those words so that they escaped louder than I'd intended. I rolled off the bed onto my knees beside it. I used my teeth to push the button on my watch, to illuminate the face. The time was 0505. The predawn light would soon throw a pink blush into the clouds.

The watch's illumination switched off automatically after ten seconds. I bit down on the button again, and used the glow to assess my situation. The bed's headboard was steel pipe, painted, with warts of rust poking through here and there. I used my weight to try to drag the bed across the floor toward me. It was a heavy fucker, but I was able to shift it a few inches. The legs squealed against the concrete floor like stuck pigs. The watch's blue glow went out. I sparked it up with another bite. I noted that the base and headboard were not bolted together. One slotted into the other, and the joins were caked in balls of rust. The light went out again, but I didn't need it on to know what I had to do. I pulled the bed out as far as I could from the wall. I got down low and lifted it up like I was doing a clean and jerk. After a couple of tries, I managed to get it up so that it pivoted around the legs on the far side, and held it on the balance point. Feeling with my fingers, I made sure the chain between the cuffs wasn't going to get hung up on anything and break my wrists when I pushed the bed over. When I was satisfied, I let it fall. The bed crashed hard against the wall and floor simultaneously, pulling me with it, and, despite my caution, practically jerking my arms out of their sockets. I toppled blind into a tangle of screeching metal, barking my shins and head-butting something with an edge on it.

I lay on the floor, dazed, listening to my breathing, tangled up with springs and braces, the copper taste of blood in my mouth from a cut somewhere on my head. The sound of crashing metal echoed in my ears and through my brain. Silence closed around me in waves and, when it finally arrived, the hum of a lone mosquito came with it.

Though surely no more than a minute had passed, a little morning light had managed to push through under the eaves and turn the room into a collection of shapes that shimmered like images in old grainy black-and-white photographs. Bottom line, I could now at least see the outlines of things. My wrists were still cuffed to the headboard, which had separated from the rest of the frame. I stumbled to my feet, feeling vaguely nauseated, and hoisted the headboard out of the wreckage.