Beloved Enemy (15 page)

They passed a small window on their right, covered in grime and soot, before they reached the landing. Jack could just make out a narrow alley, strung with so many electric and telephone lines the pavement below was encased in eternal night.

Four doors marked apartment entrances. Connaston’s was the last apartment to their right. They went silently down the dreary twilit hallway. Jack put his ear to the door, listening for any sounds from inside. He heard nothing.

The lock was one of those so easy to pick it took him less than fifteen seconds. When he heard the tumblers turn over, he grasped the knob and, with a quick toss of his head at Jaidee to move her back, he opened the door no more than a sliver. He heard nothing, no movement inside the apartment. The air was stale, smelling of abandonment.

Standing to one side, he pushed the door, letting it swing wide until the doorway gaped at them. He went in then, still cautious, feeling Jaidee close behind him. He had expected the apartment to have been gone over by a police forensic team, but the place had clearly been tossed. Sofas and chairs were upended, their cushions punctured, the stuffing pulled out in handfuls, pictures hanging every which way, their backs slit open. In the bedroom, the wallpaper had been forcibly stripped back and now hung down like fillets of flesh. Drawers had been pulled out, their contents strewn across the floor. Connaston’s bed had been overturned, the mattress completely in ribbons. Nona’s information had been correct—the police investigation had been short-circuited so that Naresuan 261 could implement their own.

“Who did this?” Jaidee said, her voice sounding very small.

“Special Branch, I think.” Jack, standing in the middle of the chaos, could find no sign of sheets or pillows. Had the officers of Naresuan 261 taken them away, perhaps for DNA analysis? “What could they have been looking for?”

Jaidee shook her head, but Jack wondered whether he already had the answer in the slip of paper that Connaston had secreted inside the gold heart he had given Jaidee just before he went to his fateful rendezvous. Did Connaston suspect he was going to die that day? He must have had an inkling, to take the precaution he did. But for what purpose? For whose benefit? Did Connaston plan for someone to meet with Jaidee to get it in the event of his death?

Jack had come to Bangkok searching for Legere, but now found himself in the midst of a larger puzzle. Connaston had told Jaidee that he was bound to Pyotr Legere. Legere was doing more than running a bookshop out of Moscow. Connaston had been the key that opened the door to Legere’s business. If that were so, Jack’s next stop needed to be Zurich, but not until he discovered whether Legere was still in Bangkok.

“If Legere was in this apartment,” he said, “he certainly isn’t now.” And Nona’s mysterious contact surely would know if Legere had been picked up by Naresuan 261, so either he was still in the city or he had somehow slipped through the antiterrorist cordon and flown the coop. Coming here was a dead end.

At that moment, he heard the buzzing of a fly, and turned. Jaidee, on her haunches, was poring over what was left of the contents of the wardrobe, picking through slashed clothes as if she wanted to take them home with her.

The fly should have been batting itself against the windowpane, but it wasn’t, and now Jack heard a more consistent sound, as other flies made their presence known. He saw them then, a small black cluster, whirling like a miniature galaxy. One of them peeled off, vanishing into the bathroom. Others followed.

Picking his way through the debris, Jack stepped into the bathroom, which was far less of a mess than any other room in the apartment. At first, he assumed it was because there were fewer things here to pull to the floor. But then he saw where the sheets and pillowcases had gone—they were in the bathtub, set up like a bed.

He called Jaidee’s name, and she appeared almost at once. When she looked at him, he pointed to the makeshift bed. The flies were settling onto the pillows, ingesting the minuscule bits of hair and skin shed by the occupant while he slept.

“Someone was here after Special Branch left.”

“Pyotr Legere?”

Jack nodded as he went over to the small window, which looked out on the same alley as the window in the stairwell. The glass was cleaner here, giving him a better view of this small section of the city, forgotten and forlorn.

Turning away from the window, he approached the tub. “Once the police had left, they’d be unlikely to return. This was perhaps the safest place in Bangkok for Legere. Your hunch was a good one.”

Brushing the flies away, he bent over and sniffed at the pillow. The scent of a masculine body was still fresh. He turned, then, saw the toothbrush and half-empty tube of paste on the rim of the sink. Also, a bar of soap that was not new.

“He’s still here,” Jaidee breathed, “isn’t he?”

Jack shrugged. “Impossible to say.”

“What do we do now?”

“Either he comes back tonight or he’s already out of the country. So we wait.” Jack turned to her. “At least, I do.” He smiled. “There’s really no point in your staying any longer.”

“There’s no point in my leaving, either.”

“You’re losing money every hour you stay away from the spa,” he said only half-seriously.

Her reply, however, was without any irony. “This is not my night to work, otherwise I couldn’t have met you.” The smile she returned was melancholy. “Besides, just now I have no heart for the spa.”

He nodded. “All right, then.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s after midnight. Legere will be coming back here soon, if he comes back at all.”

They returned to the living room, and while she tidied up the snowfall of newspapers, magazines, and broken pottery that littered the floor, he righted the chairs and returned as much of their stuffing as he could. Then they sat down facing each other, occluded by the gloom of the apartment, which was part real and part psychic.

When Jaidee shivered a little, Jack said softly, “You can go any time, if you wish.”

She stared at him, stone-faced.

After a lengthy silence, he said, “I don’t understand why you don’t leave.”

Jaidee’s eyes were half-closed, but she fingered the gold heart around her neck. “Leroy trusted me. Should I abandon him now because he’s dead?” Her eyes opened and she looked at Jack. “You haven’t and you never even met him. How can I do less?”

Her eyes closed and, after a time, her breathing slowed and became regular. Jack rose and made sure the front door was locked. When Legere came back he didn’t want to give away their presence.

He returned to the chair. A glance at his watch told him that it was close to one a.m. He rested his head against the chair back. As was usual in the small hours of the night, he was flooded with memories of Emma, the life he lived too fast, blind to what was going on around him, what he was missing, until it was too late.

Her death had done something irrevocable to him, diminished him in a way he had yet to understand fully. No parent was ever prepared to bury their child; it was a horror incomprehensible until it had been visited on you. At the moment of her death, something was torn out of him, a phantom limb, a certain destiny, a future into which she would have grown, while he watched, becoming, if not contented, then surely a better person.

Destiny had other plans for them both.

There were times, after her death, when Emma had come to him, either as a vision or a disembodied voice. At the beginning, he was certain he was losing his mind, but that was a function of his deep and abiding grief. Talking with her, knowing that she didn’t blame him, assuaged his grief, which, he realized, was underlaid with a terrible guilt.

But she had been silent for a while and he wondered whether he had imagined it all or whether, having fulfilled the task she had assigned herself—to help dispel his guilt—she was now truly gone. What was enduring—what was eternal—was his abiding love for her.

Listening to the shouts and traffic noises from outside, the more muted sounds rising up the stairwell from the apartments below, he wished she would come back to him, even just one last time. It was selfish of him, he knew. He had to let her go, to wherever she was now meant to be. But still, he couldn’t help hoping …

His twilight world must have plunged him into sleep, because the next thing he knew he was started awake by a sound inside the apartment. He sat up straight, instantly alert. When he tapped Jaidee’s knee, her eyes snapped open.

Jack was signaling toward the door when a tinkling crash in the bathroom brought them to their feet. Pushing Jaidee aside, Jack stepped into the bathroom and was immediately struck on the side of the face. Staggering back, he saw the petite figure and cat-like face of the cyclist. She was crouched on the tile floor, amid a welter of glittering shards of glass from the window she had smashed through.

The cyclist made a feint with her left hand, and Jack saw the glimmer of a knife blade. Her right hand, balled in a fist, caught him on the side of his neck, jolting him. Then she came closer with the knife, its point tipped upward.

Retreating, Jack grabbed a pillow from the tub, swung it directly into the path of the knife. The blade ripped open the pillow, embedding itself in the feathers. At once, Jack let the pillow go, and as the cyclist was working the blade out, he slammed the heel of his hand into her nose. She flew back against the wall, trailed by a fountain of blood. He was on her in an instant, jamming his forearm into her throat, pinning her against the wall, as he scrabbled to contain the knife, which she had managed to extricate from the feathers.

He missed, and the blade swept through layers of clothing, drawing blood from his chest. He slammed her, hard. The back of her head bounced off the wall, her eyes momentarily glazed over, and he wrenched the knife from her grip, slamming the hilt against the side of her face. She fell backward into the tub. Her insensate body dislodged something that had been hidden in the bedclothes.

Jack snatched it up and was pocketing it when he heard Jaidee’s shout. Without another thought, he turned and sprinted out of the bathroom, through the living room in time to see Jaidee gripped by an unfamiliar man. Behind them, the front door sagged open, its top hinge busted off its spindly pin.

Jack led with the cyclist’s knife, but the man swung Jaidee around, slamming her against the right side of his body, which he presented to Jack. Jack could already see him preparing to deflect the blade he expected to come from his left side, could see how the man would spin, disarming Jack in the same motion.

Sometimes the best offense was extreme offense. Jack feinted to his right, appearing as if he was, indeed, coming at the intruder from the man’s left. Jack saw him shift his weight for his spin, and, at the last moment, Jack transferred the knife to his left hand, lunging in toward Jaidee and her captor.

She screamed, which was all the better for Jack. It distracted the intruder, freezing him while Jack pushed the knife blade in under Jaidee’s armpit, through to the intruder’s side. He got his arm inside, but Jack twisted the blade, deepening the wound.

Jack peeled Jaidee away from the intruder.

“Watch—!”

The cyclist crashed into him, climbing onto his back. He swung himself around, but she clung to him tenaciously. Her fingernails were clawing at his eyes. For an instant, he saw the wounded man trying to find the grip of a gun holstered in his left armpit. The gun was slicked with his own blood, but it would be only a matter of seconds until he drew it out.

Jack raised his arms, slammed the palms of his hands against the cyclist’s ears. She screamed in pain, lost her grip long enough for Jack to grasp one of her wrists and sling her off him and into the wounded man.

As they crashed against the wall, he grabbed Jaidee and ran out of the apartment, down the hall, and into the stairwell. He could hear the sharp echoes of footsteps behind them and knew, while they might outrun the cyclist and her partner, they would never outrun his handgun.

They were trapped, finished.

T
EN

“O
NE DOWN,”
Jonatha said into her mobile as she walked toward the waiting national security advisor.

“Rogers?” Krofft said in her ear.

She laughed. “That meeting’s about to happen. No, Dicky shanghaied me in the middle of Constitution Avenue, if you can believe it.”

“That man really is a dick.” But Krofft was laughing, also. “Nothing would make me happier if you discovered he was rotten, along with McClure.”

“Don’t influence me, Robby. You know better.”

“I’m encouraged you’re taking your assignment so seriously.”

“How else should I take it?” Seeing Rogers looking in her direction, she raised an arm, signaling him. He nodded in return.

“Arclight is the most public assignment I’ve ever entrusted to you,” Krofft said.

“When have I ever let you down?”

“That’s one of the reasons I chose you.”

“That and my unique resource.”

“Ah, yes, Ripley—your mysterious hacker contact,” Krofft said. “Has she finished devising the psych tests?”

“The psych tests are my dominion, Robby. Ripley is ferreting out any anomalies in our suspects’ financials.”

“But we have our own people—”

“They can’t dig the way Ripley can,” Jonatha said. “Trust me when I tell you that Ripley can massage out any money trail, no matter how well hidden.” She was only steps away from the national security advisor. “I have to go. Rogers is waiting.”

“Keep me up-to-date on what Ripley finds.”

“Always.”

*   *   *

Jack saw the window to their left. If the cyclist could do it, why couldn’t they?

“Jump!’ he shouted to Jaidee.

“What?”

“Cross your arms over your face!” Taking hold of her hips, he hurled her through the glass, then, amid a blizzard of glass shards, followed her.

As he had seen, the narrow alley was thick with cables and wires, strung from wooden poles anchored in the ground. Jaidee had both arms around a cluster of these, and Jack followed her lead.

They were four stories above the ground, but all they needed to do was get to the pole just ahead of them and they could shimmy down. The problem was Jaidee was paralyzed with terror.