Ruthless.Com pp-2 Page 17

  A lifelong city dweller, Zhiu nevertheless felt pressed, hemmed in, and that feeling was becoming more intense as he went along. It was as if he'd been bumped backward millions of years to some prehistoric epoch, a setting to which men like Xiang seemed as plainly suited as he himself was to the streets of modern Beijing. Trailing behind the giant as they crossed the stream, he recalled the moment he'd first seen him in the Thai's hiding place, guarding the door to where the prisoner was being held — his eyes staring with an impassive watchfulness that seemed to take in everything around them, yet let nothing escape their surface. Though that look had chilled him, Zhiu had not fully understood it, not then, not even after what Xiang had done to Max Blackburn. But here, in this old and alien forest, he did. Here, he had come to recognize it as a look with origins beyond human memory, a look of primordial jungle and swamp, a look which belonged entirely and exclusively to the cold-blooded, pitiless hunter.

  Zhiu waded on. Though his shoulder pack contained only rations, water, and a first-aid kit, the passage through moving water had tired him, and he could see his men approaching exhaustion under the heavier weight of their burdens.*

  He was glad when Xiang finally mounted the stream bank and led the party back onto the forest floor.

  It took another twenty minutes before they reached the camp, a cleared area with a group of temporary thatch shelters in front of a spoon-shaped limestone outcropping. Zhiu peered through the foliage screening the perimeter, and saw Kersik and five or six others near one of the hooches, all except the general carrying ported combat rifles — battered Russian AKMs from the looks of them. Like Xiang's pirates, the men wore jungle camo fatigues, but that was the extent of the comparison. Their training and discipline were evident at a glance, making them far more similar to his own team.

  These were experienced soldiers, no doubt chosen from the KOSTRAD Special Forces divisions Kersik had commanded before his retirement.

  Zhiu raised his eyes to the arched ceiling of leaves without tilting back his head. He could not see the snipers guarding the perimeter, but knew they must be hidden somewhere up above him, ready to pick off unwanted intruders from their firing positions.

  "Ah, Zhiu, you've arrived," Kersik said, spotting him. He came forward and parted the brush. 4 4Our cause brings us to meet in unusual spots, don't you think?"

  "Yes," Zhiu said, stepping past Xiang to take Kersik's offered hand. "This one, I confess, breathes down my neck with its heat and humidity."

  Kersik smiled a little. "I suppose being a native of the islands makes me impervious to their effects." He gave Zhiu's men an estimating glance, then nodded in apparent approval, as if impressed by what he saw. "Come, you all must be tired. I'll show you where to put the shipment."

  Motioning for them to follow, he turned back toward the camp and strode to the rock formation behind the hooches. A matting of palm fronds, sun-dried and bound together with rope, covered a large section of the stone face. Kersick called over a pair of his soldiers, gave them a mild order in Bahasa, and waited as they lifted aside the matting to reveal a pocket cave, its mouth about five feet high and equally wide.

  Curious, Zhiu approached the cave, bent over slightly, and leaned his head in for a closer look. The opening seemed to give into a space of some depth — in fact, he could not see to the back of the tunnel. Beetles and other insects crawled in the thick layer of guano covering the rocks beyond the cave mouth. He listened a moment, and heard the faint flutter of roosting bats.

  Unusual spots indeed, he thought.

  He straightened and faced his men.

  "We'll bring the arms in there," he said, gesturing at the cave entrance. He paused, thought of the slippery bug-ridden coat of guano they would have to walk over. "And be careful where you step," he added.

  Anna was sitting on the living room sofa, her legs tucked under her, when Kirsten came in from the guest room after having gotten off the phone.

  "I've just spoken with the police in Singapore," she said. "I gave them my name, told them about the men that went after me and Max, told them where I'm staying.

  They already seemed aware of what happened outside the hotel."

  Anna gave her a look that said she'd expected as much.

  "In a country where chewing gum's contraband and spitting on the street is a crime, a scuffle of that sort wouldn't go unnoticed," she said. "What did they want you to do?"

  "They tried persuading me to return to the island and meet with an investigator, but I said I wouldn't. That I felt it was too dangerous to go back unescorted. When they realized I wouldn't budge, they said they'd have to arrange something with the police in Johor and would get back to me."

  Anna nodded sympathetically. "How do you feel?"

  Kirsten wondered how to reply. She hadn't been to her own home for almost a week, was hiding from men who had been trying to abduct her or worse, and was still waiting to hear from Max after having left several unreturned messages on his answering machine. All of which left her very frightened and confused.

  Furthermore, she felt vaguely as if she'd betrayed him by calling the authorities after he had specifically told her to wait for him to contact her, and had tried giving her the name of someone else to reach if he didn't. But he'd never finished getting it out of his mouth — either that or she hadn't heard him clearly from inside the cab — and though she was guessing the person might be someone at UpLink. her sister and brother-in-law had advised her not to call there, insisting it wouldn't do until she had a clearer idea of what Max had been into. For all she knew, they'd repeated endlessly, the Americans had dragged her into some kind of dishonest business. And without evidence to the contrary, it had been impossible for her to dismiss that possibility without seeming unreasonable.

  Which left her with Anna's question. How, then, would she describe her psychic and emotional state? How to express the incommunicable?

  She looked at her sister from the entryway, thinking.

  "I feel," she said at last, groping for words, "as if the sky is upside down and world is in the wrong place. The wrong place, you understand?"

  Overwhelmed, Anna started raising her hand to her lips in a gesture of mute distress, but caught herself at the last moment and let it drop back onto her lap.

  "I'm trying, Kirst," she said in a dry, scared voice. "Please believe, I'm trying my very best."

  "Truly, I consider the orchid to be the embodiment of our Asian heritage," Fat B was saying. "Lasting yet delicate, its success, its flowering, dependant upon an exacting set of conditions."

  "Is that so?" Commander Sian Po of the Singapore Police Force said.

  "Truly, truly," Fat B said. "Nurtured in the rich soil of their evolution, orchids thrive in abundance, generation upon generation draping our hills, blanketing our heaths and gardens. Change what is essential to their natural state… go too far trying to cross cultures.. spoil the purity of their time-honored lineage… and they wane like homesick souls. And while you may call me eccentric, I have always held to the belief that their colorful blossoms are inhabited by the spirits of our ancestors."

  "There is a widespread fancy that certain varieties may actually steal one's spirit, you know. That their sublime beauty, drawing its energy from the feminine principle, may entrance a man and capture his essence, drain his very yin.''

  "No, no, I think that is ridiculous."

  "Well, I do, too. For that matter, I think this is all a pile of shit, so let's drop it. You arranged this meeting. If you have something to say, say it."

  Fat B glanced at him and nodded.

  They were looking out over the rail of a walking bridge that spanned a koi pond in the orchid gardens on Mandai Road in the north of Singapore Island, admiring the darting fish and the silver-tinged purple brightness of the bamboo orchids planted near the pond.

  "Do the names Max Blackburn or Kirsten Chu mean anything to you?" Fat B asked.

  The commander shook his head. "Should they?"

  Fat B hesit
ated. "There was a disturbance on Scotts Road last Friday evening. Surely you're aware of it."

  The commander did not shift his gaze from the orchids. A short, heavy man with rather mashed-looking features, he had arrived here for their clandestine appointment sans badge and uniform, not wishing to be identified as a police officer, let alone one of high rank. It would, he knew, be very bad indeed if he were seen consorting with a disreputable character like Fat B.

  "Scotts is Central… 4A' Division," he said. "Not my jurisdication."

  Fat B found his brevity curious. He leaned forward with his elbows on the rail and gazed past the pond to where the flowers were quivering in a light breath of breeze, their glow in the copious sunshine surpassing even that of the hand-painted butterflies on his shirt.

  "Your Geylang command encompasses thirteen neighborhood police posts and over three hundred officers," he said. "The incident to which I am referring involved a scuffle on the street in front of a large hotel. A very busy location. My information is that there were witnesses. Do you mean to tell me there were no reports? No departmental bulletins?"

  The commander turned his head toward Fat B and gave him a phlegmatic look.

  "Assuming there were," he said, "what connection do you have to the occurrence?"

  "None, I assure you." Fat B shrugged. "Like yourself, I try not to stray beyond my own purview. But on occasion people ask me things, and I do my best to give them answers."

  "And how generous are these people in their gratitude?"

  "Very."

  The commander inhaled, then let the air rush out his lips.

  "Something odd did happen outside the Hyatt, and maybe inside as well," he said. "Exactly what, I'm not sure. But CID's involved."

  "Criminal Investigation?"

  "Yes. And more than one line element. Rumor has it that both the Special Investigation Section and Secret Societies Branch have their noses in this."

  "Tell me everything that is known about the incident."

  "There isn't much. Or if there is, the CID hotshots are keeping it to themselves." Sian Po shrugged. "I've heard a bystander gave us an anonymous call, and it was corroborated by another report. There was a confrontation at a taxi stand involving a quai lo, a woman, and some others. The woman rode off in a cab, and the white man stayed behind and is supposed to have been followed into the hotel lobby. We don't know what happened afterward, but it was all over by the time a patrol car arrived. Everyone involved seems to have vanished, and few bystanders admit to having seen anything. But that's the way it is."

  "Nobody wants trouble, lah."

  The commander nodded, and released another sigh.

  "Even so," he said, "trouble comes."

  They were silent a while. Fat B's eye caught a compressed medley of color flitting under the surface of the pond — a large rainbow koi. It darted into the shade of a water lily and stopped abruptly, its long body hovering in perfect stillness.

  "Should Missing Persons reports be filed on either the quai lo or the Chu woman, I would very much appreciate being apprised of their sources," he said. "Also, my inquisitive friends would find any clues I could pass along about the woman's present whereabouts to be of special value."

  Their eyes met.

  "Your friends," the commander said. "What will they do if they locate her?"

  "I don't ask."

  The commander looked at him for a full minute without saying anything, then slowly nodded.

  "I'll see what I can do," he said.

  Fat B grinned with satisfaction. "And I'll make it worth your while."

  The commander lingered on the rail another moment, then turned to leave. Fat B didn't move. He did not think Sian Po would be inclined to stroll from the garden in his presence.

  The commander took two steps up the bridge and paused, motioning toward Fat B's shirt with his chin.

  "Those butterflies are quite splendid," he said. "They are of the Graphium species, are they not?"

  Fat B nodded.

  "I've heard they survive by sucking the piss of higher animals from the ground," the commander said.

  Fat B controlled his reaction.

  "Thank you for sharing that with me," he said. "Outwardly we are very different types of men, you and I, but love and knowledge of nature is our bond."

  The commander looked at him and grinned unpleasantly.

  "The money helps," he said, and strode away.

  Chapter Seventeen

  SAN JOSE/PALO ALTO

  SEPTEMBER 25/26, 2000

  "This," Noriko cousins said, "is one amazing room."

  Nimec reached for the little blue cube of chalk on the bridge of the pool table.

  "So people tell me," he said, rubbing the chalk on the tip of his cue stick with a circular motion. "It's where I come to loosen up, get my thoughts right."

  They were in the billiard parlor on the upper level of his San Jose triplex, a painstaking recreation of the smoky South Philadelphia halls where he'd spent his youth ducking truant officers, while pursuing an education of a sort that certainly wouldn't have moved them to reexamine his delinquent status. But in those days Nimec had only cared about one man's approbation, and in attempting to gain it had been a most attentive student… or, as he liked to put it, if SATs and grade-point averages could measure one's aptitude at bank shots, combinations, and draw English, he'd have been a shoe-in for a full college scholarship.

  At any rate, he'd captured every detail of the old place — at least as filtered through the subjective lens of his recollection — from the cigarette burns on the green baize tabletops to the soda fountain, swimsuit calendars, milky plastic light fixtures, and Wurlitzer juke stacked with vintage forty-fives circa 1968, a machine he'd picked up for a song at an antique auction and which, after some minor repairs, could still shake and rattle the room to its ceiling beams with three selections for a quarter.

  Right now it was belting out Cream's cover of the old blues standard "Crossroads." Clapton's improvised guitar lead slipped around Jack Bruce's bass line like hot mercury, taking Nimec back, conjuring up a memory of his old pal Mick Cunningham, a few years his senior and newly back from a hitch in Nam, bopping between rows of regulation tables, raving about Clapton being fucking huge in Saigon.

  Mick, who'd had a problem with junk, which had also been fucking huge in Saigon, had been shivved to death in a prison exercise yard in '75 while doing a nickel for attempted robbery, his first offense, a heavy sentence by anyone's standards.

  "One ball, over there," Nimec called, waggling his stick at the left corner pocket in the foot rail. He had won the opening break.

  Noriko nodded.

  He leaned over the side of the table and set the cue ball down within the head string, just shy of the center spot. Then he placed his right hand flat on the table's surface and slid the cue into the groove between his thumb and forefinger. Sighting down the length of the stick, he stroked twice in practice, then drove for the cushions on the opposite rail, giving the cue some left English and follow. The ball banked off the cushion at a slightly wider angle than he'd intended and hit the one thin, but still pocketed it neatly and scattered the triangular rack, leaving him with a couple of easy setups.

  "You know what you're doing," Noriko said. When he'd shot, she thought, his eyes had shown the steely concentration of a marksman.

  "I ought to," he said. "My father was the sharpest hustler in Philly. Shooting pool is what he did. His dream was that I'd carry on the family trade after he was gone, and I worked hard at learning it."

  "Your mother have anything to say about that?"

  "She wasn't around, maybe wasn't even alive. Blew the nest when I was three or four. Guess she wasn't impressed that I could count all my toes and fingers." He took his stance again. "Three ball, center pocket."

  He aimed and shot, kissing his ball off the eleven. It pocketed with a solid chunk-chunk-chunk.

  Noriko looked at him with mild wonder, waiting, twirling her stick vertica
lly between her palms, its butt end on the floor. Nimec had always seemed the epitome of the straight-arrow cop — or ex-cop as the case happened to be. The side of her chief she was seeing was a revelation.

  "If you don't mind my asking," she said, "how'd you wind up wearing a badge?"

  Nimec faced her and shrugged.

  "There was no dramatic turning point, if that's what you're curious about," he said. "Besides playing pool, our other favorite sport in the old neighborhood was hanging out on street corners and getting drunk and starting fights. Everybody wailed on everybody else, seven days a week… grown men pushing teenagers through windshields, teenagers pounding on little kids with trash cans, kids smashing bricks down on alley cats. It was hierarchical like that." He shrugged again. "I got tired of it after a while, and suppose the structure and the pay and the benefits of being a police officer appealed to me. One very typical day I took the exam and passed. A few months later I got my appointment, figured I'd see how it went at the Academy."

  "And it went well," Noriko said.

  "Yes," he said. "It did. And sort of killed my budding career as a pool shark."

  He turned back to the table, called his next shot, and put it down the chute. On the juke "Crossroads" ended and Vanilla Fudge's rendition of "Keep Me Hangin' On" keyed up. Noriko waited.

  "You know Max Blackburn?" Nimec asked, his eyes moving over the table.

  "Only by reputation," she said. "He's supposed to be the best at what he does. Ever since Politika, everybody's been talking about him like he's Superman."

  Nimec saw a possible combination rail shot at the eleven ball, and lined up for it.

  "Max is a good man, no question," he said. "Enjoys connecting the dots to solve a problem, which is why I often use him as a troubleshooter. The past six months he's been assigned to the Johor Bharu ground station, taking care of a range of things, some of which were, shall we say, not for the record. And dicey." He looked over his shoulder at Noriko. "Almost a week ago he dropped out of sight in Singapore, and nobody's heard anything from him since."