Livia Lone

58-NOW

Less than thirty-six hours later, Livia was in Bangkok.

She’d flown back to Seattle from San Francisco, emailed the people at the Krav Maga academy to tell them she wouldn’t be able to teach for the next few days, and called Donna to tell her the same-a few days for a personal matter. She’d never before asked for personal time, and was less concerned that the request would cause an administrative problem than that it might attract suspicion. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything other than Nason.

She didn’t bring a gun. She didn’t have time to figure out what regulations would govern US law enforcement trying to bring firearms into Thailand, and even if it had been possible, she didn’t want the attention. Nor did she bring the Vaari, which was big and intimidating, and therefore might raise eyebrows if someone searched her bag at customs. She decided instead on a Boker Plus Subcompact-about four inches extended, two folded. Small enough to clip to a bra. Sharp enough to cut to the bone. And the kind of thing a careful female tourist might be expected to carry on holiday. She considered what she might be up against, and decided to bring a pen-sized pepper spray, too. Not police issue, but one of the quality civilian versions. And one last item-a six-inch, injection-molded nylon Kubotan impact weapon, about the size of a large marker pen. Unlikely any of it would be found in a checked bag. If it were, she’d deal with it. On balance, the risk felt worth taking. She made reservations online, packed a bag, grabbed her passport, and caught a post-midnight flight through Taipei, landing at Suvarnabhumi Airport a little before noon local time.

Passing through the airport was strange. Seeing so many Thais, hearing the language, smelling the food. Even as a child, she’d never felt Thai-she had always been hill tribe, Lahu. And now she was American. Even the rudimentary Thai she’d learned as a child was mostly gone. So why was being here making her feel so… what, mournful? Nostalgic? She wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, she hadn’t been prepared for it.

She caught a cab to her hotel-the Anantara Riverside Resort. She’d found it online, and it seemed like the kind of place a “tourist” like her might choose. Moderately priced; lots of pools and bars and restaurants; close to the Grand Palace and other attractions. And big enough to offer a comfortable degree of anonymity. She’d taken a course with Narcotics, where one of the instructors, a CIA veteran, explained that you had to live your cover. Not just because the cover might get probed, and so needed to have as much depth and breadth as reasonably possible, but because the more you lived your cover, the more you would feel it, and the more you felt it, the more you would look it. “If you want to fool, you have to feel,” was how he put it. And while there was only so much she could do on such short notice to prepare and inhabit a cover, having the right hotel reservation when she arrived was a no-brainer.

The cab ride took over an hour. It wasn’t far, but the roads were colossally jammed-honking cars, gear-grinding trucks, buzzing tuk-tuks, motor scooters with engines that sounded like chainsaws and with two, three, sometimes even four people perched on them. Even on a full-sized motorcycle in America, you never saw more than a single passenger, and witnessing how much these people could do with so little made Livia feel a pang of remembrance for her childhood in the forest.

As they drove, she glanced back and forth through the left and right windows, taking in as much as she could. Had the city always been so dense, so teeming? She had never been here, and had only caught glimpses as they passed through during that nightmare trip in the white van. But no, there couldn’t have been this kind of noise back then, and construction, and energy. There was so much money now. She could see it at work in the high-rises sprouting everywhere like freakish mushrooms, the glitzy façades of shopping malls, the smartly dressed women carrying fancy bags. But there was so much poverty, too-beggars, children who looked like they lived on the street, people practically in rags. What had William Gibson said? The future is already here-it’s just not very evenly distributed. That’s what money felt like in Bangkok. It existed. But only for a few.

She was surprised at how many people asked if she was Thai-the customs officer at the airport, the cab driver, the hotel receptionist. She didn’t think she looked Thai. Not even Lahu. She didn’t feel it, not anymore. But there must have been some vestige. She wasn’t sure what that meant. Or how she felt about it.

The room was pleasant and functional. Not that it mattered. All she needed was a bed. She’d been too keyed up to sleep on the plane, and had spent most of the trip reading a couple guidebooks she’d bought at the airport, trying to learn as much as possible about the city, gaming out approaches, gambits, when/then scenarios. She needed to know the layout, the clothes, the customs. She needed to be able to move without disturbing what she moved through. In America, that had become easy. In this new place, it was going to be a challenge.

She bolted the door, showered, dried off, and lay down. Her mind was still racing, but she’d been awake for over forty-eight hours and her mind quickly lost to her body. Her sleep was black and empty at first, but then there was an awful dream where she had found Nason but there was something wrong with her-she was dead, but somehow Livia had brought her back to life, and Nason was saying, “Why, Labee? Why?”

She woke with a groan and sat up, looking groggily at the bedside clock. She’d been asleep for almost four hours. It was already evening.

She rubbed her eyes and tried to shake off the dream. She’d had many like it when she was a teenager, but the last one had been a long time ago.

She’d left the air-conditioning on too strong a setting, and the room was cold. She shivered. What was she doing here? How could she get away with this? A United States senator? What was she thinking?

She realized that something about being in Thailand, about facing the past, was making her feel like that long-ago little girl. She’d thought the girl was gone, that to the extent the girl lived on at all, it was only as a shadow, a distant memory.

But no, she’d been wrong. That little girl was still here.

And she was scared.

Come on, Livia. We can do this.

Because she wasn’t that little girl anymore. That little girl had grown into a champion wrestler and judoka. A self-defense teacher. A cop. A killer. A dragon. And it wasn’t the girl who was going to face Ezra Lone. It was what the girl had become.

No. That was the wrong way to put it.

Ezra Lone was going to face her.