Beloved Enemy (18 page)

“Again,” Jack said.

“Twenty-four, zero—”

“Stop,” Jack said. He opened his eyes and looked at her. “How do we know Legere meant twenty-four, zero, and not two-forty.”

Jaidee shook her head. “We don’t.”

“Well,” Jack said with a sly grin, “maybe we do.” In his mind’s eye, he saw the numbers in three dimensions. “Going forward gives us twenty-six, eighteen, eight.”

“Or one eighty-eight,” she pointed out.

“I don’t think so.” He had already parsed the puzzle. “Let’s suppose this is a simple substitution code, numbers for letters. Twenty-six, eighteen, eight would give us what three letters?”

Jaidee counted on her fingers. “ZRH.”

Jack’s grin widened. “Do you know what those three letters stand for?”

When she shook her head, he said, “It’s the airport code for Zurich.”

She gasped. “The address on the slip of paper in my gold heart.”

“Correct,” Jack said. The train slowed, entering Nana station. “Now the first three numbers, two-forty, make sense.”

“A time!”

He nodded. “A flight time boarding here in Bangkok, going to Zurich, Switzerland.”

“But how can you be sure?”

He took out his mobile and brought up Orbitz. After a bit of hunting, he said, “There’s an Air India flight that left Bangkok at two-forty this morning.”

Jaidee’s face fell. “While we were waiting for Legere to come back to Leroy’s flat—”

“He was on his way to Zurich.” Jack looked around. “How do I get to the airport from here?”

“We change at Phaya Thai for the Airport Rail Link.”

He shook his head. “No, Jaidee. This is as far as you go.”

Her eyes grew wide. “But I know I can help.”

“You’ve already helped, more than you know.” He took her small hands in his. “Jaidee, the best thing you can do for me now is to keep yourself safe. Is there somewhere you can go, where you will be absolutely out of harm’s way? Your mother’s house, maybe? That’s where your child is.”

“I don’t want to be near her until I know everything’s back to normal.” She considered a moment. “I’ll go to my brother. Rangsan is a cowboy. He works on a ranch.” She ducked her head, as if abruptly ashamed to meet Jack’s gaze. “He has many ties to powerful people in the underworld. He won’t let anything happen to me. I’ll be safe with him.”

“All right then,” Jack said. “It’s settled.” He watched her clutching the gold heart around her neck. “I’m sorry about Leroy.”

“He was a good man.” Her voice could scarcely be heard above the sounds of the BTS traveling along its tracks. “When he was away from Bangkok, maybe not. But when he was with me…”

Her voice trailed away. Jack understood. There was nothing more to say.

Ploenchit and Chit Lom came and went, and then the train slowed for the Siam stop.

“This is where I get off.” Jaidee stood. “Phaya Thai is two stops farther on. You’ll see signs in English for the connection.”

He nodded. “Good-bye, Jaidee.”

“Good luck,” she said, before stepping off onto the platform, where she was swallowed up by the crowd even before the doors closed and the BTS continued on.

Jack took out his mobile and accessed the packet of information on Connaston. The swimming letters took some time to resolve into words, then phrases, and finally sentences.

It took him two minutes before he came across evidence of Connaston’s involvement with the Syrian. At that moment, he knew everything had changed.

*   *   *

The moment she reached the street, Jaidee pulled out her mobile and punched a number on speed dial.

“Well?” the voice on the other end said.

“We were attacked.” Jaidee was jammed in the ribs by an old woman with knife blade elbows. “Twice. You were right, Dandy was involved … yes, I said ‘was.’ She’s dead. No, I didn’t recognize the man with her.” Jaidee went on to describe him in detail.

“I know him,” the voice said with a grating of ice against ice. “Continue.”

“Nevertheless, everything went as planned. Your man is very, very smart and very, very resourceful.” Jaidee moved back into the doorway of a building, removing herself from the jostling throng filling the sidewalk to overflowing. “I fed him the story about Connaston and the gold locket, but it was difficult with him staring into my face. I couldn’t risk him becoming suspicious.” She kept her eyes moving this way and that along the street. She preferred to be a moving target; that had been another of the man’s suggestions.

“Yes,” she said in answer to a question, “he found the paper you wrote and folded up inside.”

“Where is he now?”

“On his way to Zurich.” Jaidee wet her lips. “But there’s something else, something you didn’t anticipate. Legere had scrawled something on a pad he had hidden. Even though the top sheet had been torn off, McClure was able to trace the imprint on the next sheet. Pyotr Legere somehow managed to slip through the cordon here. He left this morning at two-forty.”

“Where is he headed?”

“Also Zurich.”

A string of flavorsome Russian curses filled Jaidee’s ear just before the connection was severed.

*   *   *

The instant Caro saw the red light flashing at the bottom right corner of her screen she knew everything had changed. For four hours, she had been laboring to run a trace on the program seeking to infiltrate her firewalls. And after all that time she and the intruder program were at a stalemate. Somehow her recent activity within Connaston’s and the Syrian’s servers had been flagged. Though it had not been traced back to her, neither could she find a way around the program to get to its source.

She stared at the computer screen like a general surveying a battlefield, searching for the path, no matter how circuitous, no matter the cost in lives, to victory. She made some hurried notes, then shut down her system completely, taking it off-line.

Stepping over to one of her tall windows, she glanced down at the Place des Vosges where laughing children played, lovers lounged on benches, members of a Japanese tour group in long white cotton gloves snapped photos incessantly, and grandpas and grandmas, cheeks flushed, turned their faces into the lowering sun. For several minutes, she watched a heavyset man in a ratty overcoat and scuffed boots without laces feeding pigeons bits of stale bread from a creased paper bag.

She turned away from the window, snatched up her coat, and went down to the square, mingling, matching her pace to the leisurely stroll of those around her. She circled one of the fountains in which a boy was sailing a tiny plastic pirate ship. Was that Johnny Depp at the helm?

Eventually, she sat down on the bench where the heavyset man was feeding the pigeons.

“Hello, Elady,” she said in Russian.

“Please,” Zukhov said with a wince. “My French is quite good enough.” He threw out a couple of crumbs to the fat pigeons, who began their squabble all over again. “Look,” he said, “just like politicians.” He chuckled, his multiple chins wobbling. “And what have you done to your hair?”

“Dyed it black,” Caro said, switching languages. “Don’t you like it? It suits my mood.” She had a beautiful Parisian accent, which was more than she could say for Zukhov, whose French, though fluent, marked him indelibly as a foreigner.

Zukhov leered at the fat-breasted pigeons. “Girl with your looks, the color of your hair doesn’t mean squat.”

“These pigeons look like they’re about to explode from all the food you’re feeding them.”

“This is bread from Poilâne. Only the best.”

Caro decided it was time to get down to business. “I need help.”

“Did I teach you nothing?”

“You taught me everything. Almost.”

“Almost,” he repeated. “Like any master worth his copper.”

“Nevertheless, now I’m at a loss.”

“Sooner or later,” Zukhov said, brushing crumbs off his stained pants, “it happens to even the best of us.”

“To you?”

“Please,” he said. “Not to me.”

Caro watched the Japanese tourist group climbing like good soldiers into their hermetically sealed bus. “How often do you come here?”

“As often as I can,” Zukhov said vaguely. “I am inspired by the magnificent symmetry. Also by that young countertenor who sings under the arches like an angel fallen to earth.”

“You Russians,” Caro said. “So poetic, so melancholy.”

“We can’t help it.” Zukhov continued to dole out the stale bread for the pigeons’ insatiable appetites. “It’s in our blood.”

“Along with cabbage and vodka.”

Zukhov laughed shortly. “Do you want my help or not?”

He was the only person she had ever met who could scowl while laughing.

“I do.”

“Speak, then.”

A blue ball sprinkled with big white stars came merrily bouncing her way. She stopped it with her feet, bent, and threw it back to the little boy to whom it belonged.

“The Syrian is looking for me.”

“This is news? He’s been looking for you ever since you left him.” Zukhov grunted. “Why d’you imagine I really come here so often?”

The watery light of afternoon had thickened, like flour and water, the slanting sunlight already tinged with evening lavender.

His admission left her momentarily at a loss for words. On her own since she was fourteen, she was decidedly deficient in accepting others’ caring for her. She cleared her throat of confusing emotion. “I’m on a job, searching through the servers of a man named Leroy Connaston.”

“For whom?”

“The important thing is one of those servers is jointly run by the Syrian.”

“The Syrian, the gift that keeps on giving.” Zukhov reached into the paper bag, which lay on his more than ample lap. “I’ll bet a month’s salary the moment you breached the firewall on the Syrian’s server a nasty little netbot came looking for you.”

Caro watched the young boy tossing the ball into the air. His thick hair was thrown back. The white stars kept spinning. “No bet.”

“I’m sure not,” Zukhov grunted again. “Did it find you, this little vermin?”

“Of course not. We’re in a Mexican standoff.”

Zukhov shot her a look. “A Mexican what?”

“Stalemate.”

“Well, that won’t sit well with him. He’ll sent a second netbot, and then a third, and on and on, until one of them breaks through.”

“We can’t let that happen.”

“Naturally. So you want something to eat the vermin.”

“No,” Caro said with some vehemence, “I want something to turn his netbots against him.”

Now Zukhov’s laugh was genuine. “Are you sure you’re not Russian?”

*   *   *

“Fuck,” Redbird said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“Hold still,” Farmington said. “You’ll rip the stitches and start bleeding all over again.”

Redbird didn’t care. Dandy was dead, and it was his fault. He dearly wanted to know who the fuck the man was with Jaidee, the cowboy’s sister. And what were they doing in Connaston’s apartment? It was true enough that Dandy had botched the snatch, which, considering Dandy’s skill, should have been a snap. But that man had interfered. Now Dandy was dead, his upper right arm was dog meat, and he was no closer to finding Pyotr Legere.

He sat on Farmington’s surgical table at Dickinson’s Bangkok safe house. Farmington was Dickinson’s agent-in-place. He was eyes and ears only, not a foot soldier. Though lacking a degree, he had a great deal of medical experience. Over the years, Dickinson’s people had needed a great deal of patching up; the violence in and around the city was at an astonishingly high level.

Even when Dennis Paull was running homeland security, Redbird was Dickinson’s man in the field. They were tied together by a particular strand of rope Redbird would prefer not to think about, though he was quite sure Paull knew nothing about his commissions. What he did for Dickinson was so far outside the bounds of legality, even by federal government standards, Paull would never have approved. Dickinson was corrupt in a way all of Redbird’s clients were—with a sense of entitlement and a license to commit havoc.

A sudden searing pain in his right arm caused his muscles to involuntarily twitch.

“I told you to hold still,” Farmington said, still working on the stitches. “Whoever delivered this knife wound knew what he was doing.”

Redbird’s ruminations were simply a way for him to stop thinking about Dandy. He had contacts in virtually every major city in the world, but she had been far more than a contact. He had crossed a line with her, had come to see her as a real person, rather than a thing to help get him from point A to point B. More fool him. He knew better than to involve himself in the lives of his contacts, who were, by definition, if not quite cannon fodder, then expendable. That included Dandy. He knew that, but he had refused to acknowledge it. Now he was paying the price. Her death weighed heavily on him, as did the thought of revenge on the man who had caused her demise.

“This commission is different,”
Dickinson had told him at the outset.
“You are to find one man, but as you’ll see, the commission could turn out to be a complex one.”

He hadn’t been exaggerating.

He winced again, said, “How much of the muscle is damaged?”

“The muscles in your arm are both dense and outsized,” Farmington said, threading another stitch, further drawing the edges of the wound together. “Your muscles are what saved you from an open fracture, which would have put slivers of bone through your skin. That would have been beyond my skills.”

“Fuck that,” Redbird snapped. “How bad is it?”

“That depends,” Farmington tied off the last stitch, “on how much pain you can tolerate.”

Redbird shook free of him and, cocking his arm, punched a hole in the wall. “How’s that?”

Farmington tried and failed to not look impressed. “Okay, given that demonstration, I’d say you can do whatever the hell you want. It’ll hurt, and the longer you continue aggressive action, the worse the pain will get.”

“Not relevant.”

“But the bleeding will be. Here, take these.” He handed Redbird two capsules, along with a glass of water.

“What’s this?”

“Antibiotics.” He placed a small vial on the table next to his patient. “Two a day. Ten days’ worth. No alcohol. Clear?”