Ruthless.Com

Chapter Five

FROM THE STRAITS TIMES:

They had been following the woman for two days. According to their information, the American would likely appear tonight. And it would be tonight that they struck. Otherwise, it might be another week before they had their chance, a week during which the investigation of the Kuan Yin hijacking would broaden and escalate into a manhunt, and the assumed identities of the ship's crew would become increasingly useless to Xiang and his men. They wanted to be long gone from Singapore by then.

The guest house they had been staying in was a shuttered, run-down building crammed between two other dilapidated structures in a twisty l. Arong not far from Fat B's. They had booked three rooms at a cheap rate, and though the accommodations in each were limited to a few sagging cots, a shaky corner table ringed by some equally lopsided chairs, and a washbasin with a dripping faucet, the out-of-the-way location and sordid atmosphere discouraged tourists and other meddling transients from seeking the place out, which was Xiang's only real requirement.

In fact, comfort was the last thing on his mind this evening.

His tattooed chest bare, he sat with both arms on the table, having wedged a small piece of cardboard under one of its legs to steady its irritating wobble. On its surface before him was a photograph of Max Blackburn. To his right was a candle he had set to burning in a flat metal ashtray. Beside the candle was a long, thin needle with a round ceramic handle. Across the room from Xiang, two of his men, Sang and Kamal, had pushed their cots to one side and given themselves space for the supple, tiger-style martial arts exercises of karena matjang. The shades were drawn and the electric fixtures in the room were off, and the candlelight projected their weaving shadows onto the walls and ceiling.

Thrown loosely across one of the cots were the clothes they would be wearing when they took Blackburn and the woman later on that night. Nondescript khakis, denims, and long-sleeved cotton shirts. The clothes of soft, weak people who lived safe and easy lives.

I suggest you get something to wear that will let you blend in, the peacock at the bar had said. His advice had been well taken, though he'd thought Xiang too witless to detect the mockery behind his neutral expression. Perhaps assuming size and stupidity went hand in hand. It was a mistake people often made in dealing with the Iban. And it only played to his advantage.

Now Xiang reached out with his large right hand, lifted the needle off the table, and held its carefully sharpened end into the flame. Let the others practice their kata. He had his own special method of preparation, of steeling himself for what lay ahead of them.

He waited silently, holding the needle out by its handle, watching it heat up. When it was red-hot he pulled it out of the flame, then raised his left hand in front of his face, his fingers straight up and close together. He stared at it for several moments, his eyes slitted with concentration, almost as if he were reading his own palm. The glowing needle was still in his opposite hand.

Now he brought the needle horizontally toward his left hand, aligning its tip with his little finger just below the upper joint. His lips pressed tightly together, he slid the needle into the finger, piercing the soft flesh behind its pad, pushing it through until the tip came out the other side with a little squirt of blood.

Perspiration filming the wide expanse of his brow, he drove the needle further into his hand. It penetrated the fourth finger below the knuckle, cauterizing his flesh as it lanced on through and then exited again, its point emerging to prick his middle finger.

Xiang continued pushing in the needle until it had skewered all of his fingers except his thumb, rotating it once or twice to avoid nicking bone. There was an almost trancelike absorption on his face.

Slowly, then, he curled the hand into a fist around the needle. A minute went by, two, three. His fist tightened. He felt the needle's heat and pressure blaze across the inner joints of his fingers. Blood greased his wrist and went splashing down onto the photograph of Max Blackburn. The more excruciating his pain became, the harder he squeezed down on the invasive metal, causing the skin of his fingers to stretch and bulge around its length. The dribble of blood quickened and intensified, slicking his forearm, covering the image on the photo. His fist tightened some more. The pain was a wave to be ridden and crested by sheer force of will, and he did not want it to stop.

He sat there with glazed and unblinking eyes, oblivious to the other two men as they continued their ritual exertions, their shadows slipping back and forth across the room, integrating and drawing apart in the liquid patterns of their millennium-old fighting techniques.

"It will be done," he hissed under his breath. "It will be done."

His fist tightened, tightened, tightened.

A half hour later, Xiang pulled the dripping needle from his flesh.

He was ready.

The second time they'd been together — the first was that crazily exciting weekend in Selangor, when Max Blackburn swept into her life like a whirlwind, swept her into bed before she had a chance to think about what she was doing, or even ask herself whether anybody was at the wheel in her swoony little head — the subject of Marcus Caine's business ethics had come up in their conversation. Actually, Max had brought it up. Over dinner at a Thai restaurant on Scotts Road, she recalled.

They had finished their meal, and were on their second bottle of claret, and a half hour later would be grappling breathlessly in Max's suite at the Hyatt, the clothes they had shed leaving a scattered trail to the door. In between, though, they had drunk their wine and discussed her employer. Briefly, it was true. Very briefly, because they'd both been looking forward to more delightful activities than talking shop. But long enough to touch off a sequence of events that would eventually turn her world inside out.

The workday over, alone except for the cleaning woman out in the corridor, Kirsten Chu sat in the quiet of her office knowing that she was about to blow her career, and perhaps her entire life, to smithereens. Maybe sometime in the future, just so it would make clear and easy sense, she would convince herself that it was done out of conscience, moral indignation, and her refusal to become a passive accessory to acts that went far beyond the boundaries of international law. A woman of principle. Yes, that assessment by way of fuzzy hindsight had a nice ring, and would make her feel good about her decision in the reflective moments of her dotage. But right now, running an internal truth check, she could find only one overarching motive for what she was doing.

Of all the damn reasons in the world, it was out of love and longing for a man she barely knew anything about.

How bloody romantic.

Kirsten glanced at her wristwatch and saw that it was five-thirty, almost time to be off; Max was meeting her outside the Hyatt in half an hour. She popped the disk that would be the instrument of her professional demise out of her computer's CD-R drive, and for several moments afterward just sat there shaking her head, staring at the lethal circle of plastic, remembering that conversation at the restaurant as clearly as if it had occurred only yesterday.

Ah, Max, Max, Max. The question he'd posed to her was fairly indelicate, and probably would have been off-putting if it had come from anyone else. But that was the essential Blackburn, wasn't it? He had a way of saying things to her that other people couldn't, not without instantly and appropriately causing her defenses to harden. Indeed, she had felt vulnerable to him from the beginning.

He somehow turned tactlessness into a disarming quality, perhaps because he knew it worked for him, and took such confident pleasure in his knowing.

What he had asked, seemingly out of the blue, was whether she had any strong feelings about her employer's "underhanded corporate tactics." As if it were an obvious given that there was something wrong with the manner in which Marcus Caine did business. The sky is blue, the sea is wide, Marcus Caine is an unscrupulous crook. Elementary, my dear Kirsten.

At first she hadn't known what to say, had just looked at him over the rim of her wine glass, wondering if he really expected her to say anything. And he had just waited, letting her know that he did.

"I think," she'd replied finally, still hoping to avoid the subject, "your question is in violation of our declared truce."

"Nope, I've checked the rules, and they're very clear that it's acceptable," he said, that self-assured, damnably engaging look in his eyes. "Feel free to answer without risk."

She had not understood why his question made her so uncomfortable. Not then, and not for a while afterward. She had not yet been willing to admit, either to Max or herself, that he'd touched upon an already raw nerve. That the financial irregularities she had been noticing at Monolith — irregularities, ah, yes, she'd always thought of them like that at the time, always trivialized the significance of anything suspicious that crossed her desk — could be routinely explained away.

"Well, I'm sure that's his reputation among sour-grapes competitors, and his adversaries in protracted political battles," Kirsten said, more sharply than she'd intended. Charming as he was, Max's cockiness had irritated her. "Otherwise…"

"Actually, I was thinking of the class-action lawsuit against him a couple of years back," Max said. "You remember it?"

As one among an army of publicists who'd worked to stem the tide of bad press arising from that affair, Kirsten had remembered it all too well. Because Caine's new operating system was second only to Microsoft Windows in popularity — and catching up fast — it was common practice for software manufacturers to provide Monolith with pre-release versions of their products for compatibility trials. This was a mutually beneficial, even crucial, arrangement, since an operating system was useless without programs that could run within its graphic environment, and a program was dead on the shelf unless supported by one of the three standard operating systems.

The problems occurred when Monolith began patenting and marketing software that the developers claimed was nearly identical to the beta programs they'd sent out for evaluation. Their charge was that Caine's techies had lifted their intellectual properties, made minor changes to their graphic interfaces and proprietary architecture, and then stamped a Monolith logo on the retail packaging. In essence, that Monolith had rapaciously stolen their products and sold them as its own.

Sitting across from Max in the restaurant, Kirsten had put down her glass and leaned forward, her arms folded on the table.

"You certainly must know the matter was resolved out of court," she said.

"With a huge cash settlement from Caine."

"That isn't the same thing as an admission of guilt.

When you're a public figure, it's sometimes worth a great deal to get an issue out of the spotlight. Especially when the alternative is to let it drag on and become an impossible distraction."

Max had spread his hands. "There are other bones to pick with Caine. His flagrant disregard of the OECD anti-bribery convention, for instance."

"You just said it yourself, Max," she said. "It's an international convention, not a formal treaty. Meaning that it has no teeth. It's hardly a crime or a sin for Marcus Caine to exploit the gutlessness of its signatories… especially the French and Germans, who until last year were giving tax deductions to companies that exchanged cash payoffs for foreign contracts."

She paused, took a breath. "For God's sake, I'm not going to sit here and defend everything my boss does professionally. Nor can I vouch for what he's like personally. But he's the first man to own a truly interactive cable television network with affiliates on four continents, which makes him an entrepreneurial genius from my standpoint. If his competitive methods are occasionally ruthless, than so be it. What counts to me is that they're legal—"

"Or at least have never been conclusively proven to be illegal"

"— and that he pays his employees very, very well," she'd gone on, speaking right through his interruption.

"I'd point out that there's real merit to the old cliche about money not being everything, but that would be kind of a cliche in itself," Max said. He gave her a tight smile. "Wouldn't it?"

She looked at him with an odd mixture of consternation and amusement.

"Tell me, Max," she said. "Do you extend your services to UpLink for free? Troubleshooting around the world like a knight errant in Roger Gordian's holy crusade to link all of humanity with cellular phones and wireless faxes?"

If not for Max's frank, earnest look, what he'd said next might have caught her altogether by surprise. As it was, it instantly made her regret her sarcasm.

"Roger Gordian is a great man, and I would lay down my life to protect him," he'd said simply.

Whammo.

Now, looking back at that night, she recalled nearly being blown off her seat by those words. Somehow, their incredible strength and conviction bulldozed through her remaining emotional barriers, and caused her feelings for him — feelings she'd believed, or wanted to believe, consisted overwhelmingly of physical desire — of lust, leaving aside the delicate frills and flowers — to soar toward honest-to-God romantic love at warp speed. That had been a new and startling emotion for her, and she hadn't quite known how to handle—

A voice from the doorway suddenly intruded on her thoughts. " Wah! Excuse me, Miss Chu. Thought everybody go home. Come back later or not?"

Kirsten had identified the cleaning woman by her Singlish even before she looked up to see her head poking through the door. When she'd first returned to Singapore after completing her education at Oxford, Kirsten's ears had been forced to undergo a crash readjustment to the local patois, an idiosyncratic hodgepodge of English, Hokiien Chinese, and Indian phrases that jangled unharmoniously in the air wherever she went, and seemed especially favored by working-class immigrants from neighboring islands and the Philippines.

Perhaps, she thought wryly, this was because they enjoyed watching upscale kiasu suffer migraine attacks while deciphering the latest term that had been added to the mix.

"No, Lin, that's okay." She clicked her computer into its preset shutdown routine and turned it off. "I was just wrapping up here."

The door opened wider and Lin clattered in with her cart.

"Why you work so late, lah? Is Friday night, should go out, get away from office." She winked. "Where your handsome American?"

Kirsten smiled, reached for her briefcase, and put the CD-R into an interior pocket — right beside the digital audio recorder on which Max would find a little something extra that was bound to make him ecstatic.

"Actually, the handsome American and I are planning to meet at his hotel and then dance away the night at Harry's," she said. And, as far as she was concerned, drink it away too. After turning the information she'd uncovered over to Max, information that might bring down a company that had been more than generous to her with its professional advancements, and that the group-centered Eastern traditionalist in her insisted was deserving of her loyalty, come hell or high water, she would need a whole lot of something potent to wash away the bad taste in her mouth.

"You have nice time," Lin said, a grin breaking across her broad face. "Promise tell me about it Monday, lah?"

Kirsten snapped her briefcase shut.

"As much as I can without shaming myself," she said.

Blackburn hastened up Scotts Road toward the Hyatt, his shoes slapping the pavement, navigating his way through thick city traffic, hordes of department store shoppers, and countless tired and slightly buzzed office workers making their post-cocktail-hour migrations home. It was seven o'clock in the evening, but the sun was only beginning to lose some of its solid-feeling intensity. Perspiring heavily, his shirt already wet as a sponge, he felt in desperate need of a shower… ah, yes, great way to start the weekend. Worse, he had arranged to meet Kirsten at six, and while he had called her on his cell phone to let her know he'd be late, it bothered him that he was running even later than anticipated. That she would be alone with the hottest of hot potatoes in her possession, waiting for him to show and take it from her hands.

She deserved better from him.

Most frustrating for Blackburn was the fact that he had started out with ample time to spare, having caught a lift to the bus terminal in Johor Bahru with a member of his security team, and then hopped the JB-Singapore express heading across the causeway. In the past, he'd found this to be a fast and hassle-free means of transportation from the mainland — far better than driving one of the company Land Rovers — since the buses had their own designated lanes and normally bypassed the customs posts where trucks and automobiles would get bottlenecked for lengthy stretches of time. However, tonight everything on the bridge, including public and private buses, had been subjected to exhaustive checkpoint procedures, causing delays in both directions. And though no one conducting the inspections had bothered to explain the reason they were taking place, many of his fellow passengers were convinced they were tied to the Kuan Yin affair that had been monopolizing the news broadcasts all week. With nothing to do but wait out the extended stops, they had noisily formed a consensus that officials were searching for the cargo ship's hijackers, or for confederates who might try slipping across the border from Malaysia to assist in their getaway.

Max didn't know about that; he had been too preoccupied with a security analysis at the ground station to follow the story's every sensational development. Still, he had noticed men in the epauleted uniforms of the Singapore Police reinforcing the usual contingent of customs bureaucrats, and assumed something very much out of the ordinary was in the air.

Of course, he'd had other things pressing on his mind as the bus continued fitfully over the Johor Strait and then onto the Bukit Timah Expressway, skirting a lush, carefully managed flourishing of parkland as it bore south to Ban San terminal. If Kirsten had finally dug up the evidence he'd been hoping to obtain from Monolith's computer databases, then the shadow play he'd initiated the day they met was about to reach its conclusion. But at what cost to her? She would be finished at Monolith. And the hard, cold truth was that he would be nearly finished with Kirsten.

Yes, she deserved better, much better, than she was bound to get from him in the end.

Blackburn had discharged the matter from his thoughts for the remainder of the trip in. Upon reaching the station on Arab Street, he had switched to a city bus and ridden it into the center of town, where traffic had once again slowed to a crawl, this time due to typical rush-hour congestion. Convinced he could make better progress on foot, he'd gotten off on Orchard Road and strode hurriedly west past the sleek, glass-fronted shopping centers lining the street like modern crystal palaces, their facades reflecting hard-pointed sun-darts that stung his eyes in spite of his dark glasses.

Now he swung right onto Scotts, squinting into the glare toward yet another exclusive shopping strip and the high tower of the Regency beyond.

Kirsten was waiting at her usual spot beside the main entrance, her hair pouring loosely over the shoulders of an eggshell-colored dress, looking out into the busy oneway thoroughfare, probably expecting him to arrive with the steady stream of cabs and buses moving past the hotel. As he approached her, Max instantly felt the mingled guilt and desire that always swelled up in him when they met. She had given herself to him without inhibition, and in its own way his craving for her was equally fierce, but Max did not love her as she had come to love him, and he had told her that he did only because it forwarded his selfish objectives. And though his lies and manipulations had profaned even their moments of greatest intimacy, he knew that he would keep leading her down the garden path until he got what he wanted.. and that it wouldn't even be that hard.

No, God help me, not hard at all, he thought, stepping quickly toward where she was standing.

Xiang sat behind the dashboard of a panel truck outside the Hyatt's service entrance on the uphill side of Scotts Road. Less than half an hour earlier, the truck's original driver had been delivering fresh linens to the hotel. Now his naked corpse was in back, wrapped in a red-stained tablecloth from the very pile of linens he had been unloading when the Iban stole up behind him. Blood trickled from the ear through which Xiang had inserted his six-inch kanata needle, rupturing the man's eardrum, driving the needle up into the soft meat of his brain via the auditory canal, killing him instantly and silently.

The white uniform blouse that had been stripped from his body had smears of blood on the collar and was almost impossibly snug on Xiang, but he felt confident no one would notice it while he remained in the truck. Still, he was growing anxious. Where was the American? He could not stay parked at the loading ramp indefinitely without arousing suspicions.

Wrestling down his impatience, Xiang dipped his head slightly to look as if he might be resting behind the wheel. And waited. With luck, the murdered driver would soon have company.

Back on the street, the rest of the strike team had assumed various positions around the hotel, two covering its doors, a pair in front of the Royal Holiday Inn complex across the street, another four dispersed between the north and south corners of Scotts Road.

The men were similar in general appearance. Black-haired and stony-eyed, with angular features, skin the color of sunbaked clay, and compact builds over which the muscles were strung like taut leather cords. Each had concealed a weapon of one kind or another in the loose-fitting, casual clothes that allowed them to troll unnoticed among the hurrying crowd.

The swarm of people posed no hindrance to them. Nor did the remaining daylight. It would have been riskier to strike in darkness, when the street was emptier and activity along its sidewalks would be less frenetic. At night their movements would draw the eye like sudden ripples in a still pond; now the noise and confusion of pedestrian traffic would camouflage them in plain sight.

The woman had been standing at the Hyatt entrance for some time, looking out at the street as if she expected someone to join her at any moment. And, of course, that was exactly the case. They had been stalking her for days like wolves on the hunt. Tonight she would draw their real quarry into their circle, and they would do the job they had been paid to do.

Now the woman chanced to look in the direction of Orchard Road and her eyes widened.

The watchers took note. She smiled, waved, her expression pleased and a little excited.

The watchers observed this as well.

They turned in the direction she was facing, their eyes keenly anticipant, tracking the path of her gaze. Finally, they thought as one. Though the man walking toward her wore aviator sunglasses, he was easily recognizable as the individual in their photographs. He raised his hand in an answering wave and stepped up his pace.

"Max!" she called, descending the hotel steps.

The watchers moved in to take them.