Midnight Empire (13 page)

They told Daniel to apply for a permit. Peach was willing to lend him whatever kind of large-frame autoloader he might need.

The History Channel was playing. Moore said that he was yet to talk to his wife about the murders. ‘What will knowing do for her?' he asked. ‘She'll go to work and she'll worry. She'll pick up the kids and she'll worry. Going about her business. It's not fair that she be scared out of her wits by existential threats.'

‘International,' Peach corrected him. ‘Intercontinental. Intercultural.' ‘I stress my kids out enough,' Moore continued. ‘Moods I get in. When I get bad they know don't say boo to Daddy. Clarice especially. I catch myself and I think, What the fuck? Just imagine if their mom started to act like that too.'

‘It makes me glad,' said Peach. ‘I hope it's them, I really do. I want them to fucking bring it. I want to have it out on the streets of proper fucking America for a change.'

‘I signed on to fly planes,' said Moore.

‘You signed
on
,' Peach told him.

‘I left using the back door this afternoon. I was carrying a SIG P226 Blackwater Tactical with a fixed contrast sight.'

‘The Blackwater?'

‘A gun I paid for out of my own pocket. I go to war twelve hours a day and I protect myself and my family on my own dime.'

‘You want the Rail over the Blackwater. Even the X-Five or the SCT.'

‘What I
want
is to be housed on barracks. What I
want
is not to have to drag my life into this shit.'

‘Get over it. The situation is what it is. Come to terms.'

‘My wife goes shopping. She's supposed to watch for terrorists?'

‘At least they're using small arms. That's a fact I can respect. Consider if they were using explosives, putting bombs in our trash cans or under our cars.'

‘Are we sure it's even them?' said Daniel. ‘I mean, it isn't certain.'

‘Apply for a permit, Daniel,' Peach said. ‘Meanwhile, do you want my old snub-nose? It hardly counts as a gun.'

Finally, the Toyota was on the move. It was an hour before sunup in Peshawar and they weren't yet in the air. Dupont rang and they launched quickly, hoping it wouldn't get away before they lost the GPS signal.

The drone took off in darkness. Caught bursts of radio traffic over the hills, small triggers of voice, what Ellis said were Taliban commanders speaking in code.

When they arrived, Peshawar was a carpet of weak light, a glow that was soft, as if the city was plugged to a failing battery. Ellis worked to plumb the GPS signal from the airwaves, the howling noise above the city. Eventually, they found the tone and it led them to the car: it was in the south, parked in an empty market, its engine (in the infra-red) warm and running.

A man was inside, and after some time another man came to it from a place nobody saw. Then the car pulled onto a main road, headed further south. By the time the sun was up, it had left the city's limits and was travelling a long road that connected Peshawar to a few satellite towns, and, eventually, to the hot landscape of insurgent activity known as South Waziristan. They followed. There was a lot of new construction, large homes that wouldn't have been out of place in any American town. The Toyota overtook tractors and jingle trucks and slowed for animals blocking the road. It wasn't driving at speed and it didn't seem to be taking precautions. The arc of their view changed with the movement of the sun. After an hour, the car turned off the main road and began to go west, towards the mountains and in the direction of Afghanistan. Wide valleys and green light, lush farmlands, houses like compounds nestled in segment after segment of cultivated fields. The Toyota was driving on dirt roads now; past men on bikes and over small bridges across channels. Finally, it came to one of the houses, a large-walled yard, several buildings within it.

A boy came to the front gate and opened it and the car drove in. The driver got out then. He was wearing a white taqiyah and shalwar kameez; he and his passenger, who emerged similarly dressed, started smoking. Soon, two men came out of one of the buildings to greet them. Neither was Abu Yamin. As the four men stood talking a group of children were running around what looked to be a stable out the back, hurdling something, playing games.

Raul had Ellis give a GPS reading. He searched for the location in some kind of database but found nothing.

There were women now; two moving by the children.

‘Family farm?' Moore said.

‘Weapons cache,' said Raul. ‘Staging point at the foot of the Khyber Pass.'

They looked. It seemed that it was time to eat. The four men sat in a rough circle by the door of the building, passing something around. Raul got the code list and decided that their passenger was Echo, from the Wahhabis' house. Ellis wasn't so sure.

Half an hour passed while the men did nothing but sit. Then the visitors were off. The same boy opened the front gate and the car pulled slowly onto the road.

Moore made for the controls to follow it.

‘No,' said Raul. ‘Just wait.'

The children had gone now, somewhere off in the fields. The sun was high so the drone was more or less directly over the house, hardly a shadow to be seen. One of the men came out and smoked, staring into the fields. Daniel wondered what they grew there, who it was sold to. He thought about economics and transport and how everything modern relied on movement, on shrinking distance.

Raul went outside to make a phone call.

‘What are we doing here?' Ellis said to the others quietly.

‘Give a man a hammer,' Moore said, ‘everything looks like a nail.'

He won five hundred and four dollars, three hundred and ten then three hundred and fifty-five in a series of sessions, all of them at the Bellagio. He went there directly from Creech. He alternated between its car parks, or he used the car park of the Aria or of the Paris across the street.

He knew the regulars. He could pick the tourists and whether they could play and most of the time he made the right move in the right situation, and that was all it took to win, he'd decided—you didn't need to be some grand master of the game.

When he cashed out, so, usually, did Ania. If she wasn't there when he arrived, it worried him. He liked going to her room because they showered together now, washing themselves a kind of ritual, though whether it was pre-sex or post-poker, he couldn't tell. He also liked going to her room because it wasn't his place. He thought this made his movements unpredictable.

He didn't tell her about the murders. He wasn't sure why he didn't want to tell her, he only knew that he didn't like the idea of mentioning it, of
admitting
it. There was something about the fact of the killings that felt like failure. She'd make a thing of it. He wasn't someone who had to tell his partner everything.

She wanted him to smoke. She wanted him to take vodka in his martini instead of gin. She didn't want any harm to come to him because, well, maybe he was what made it bearable in this town.

The dawn light was white and welcoming. He was always asleep before her and he was always awake before her.

‘Why don't you change rooms? Something different,' he said.

She shook her head. ‘The room is comped,' she said as if that explained it.

They played blackjack for a joke. They played roulette and won; pai gow and won. They looked disdainfully on these games and anyone who played them because they were games that in the long term you were guaranteed to lose.

She took him to what she said was the saddest place in the city, the rollercoaster ride at New York New York called the Manhattan Express. The hotel comprised twelve miniature skyscrapers housing thousands of guest rooms that stood behind replicas of the Grand Central Terminal and the Statue of Liberty. They stood in front of this, the rollercoaster travelling through the skyline above them. He thought they were going in but it seemed that Ania only wanted to quietly stand and look at the buildings. He got it after a while. Next to the Empire State and the Chrysler Building and the Liberty Plaza and the Century, there was no World Trade. He wondered how that might have happened, a replica of the greatest city but this icon unsummoned. Ania appeared to be affected and he agreed it was slightly haunting, but he didn't put too much stock in it. This town was skin deep and the answer was probably that building that particular façade had been too expensive. But then Ania was leading him past the Ellis Island Immigration Building to the foot of the Statue of Liberty. There, set in stone, was a display, a collection of what he mistook for memorabilia.

‘People brought hundreds of things,' Ania said. ‘T-shirts and rescue badges and flags and flowers. Poems, handwritten notes.

The tragedy itself occurred two thousand miles away but this was where they brought these items on that day and they did it with no sense of irony—how could they have?'

He looked at the skyline without the World Trade.

‘How did the designers know?' she said. ‘I mean in their hearts. Why didn't they build it? What type of creeping foreknowledge did they have that said leave it out?

‘And now,' she said. ‘This place. This is the place in the city that doesn't feel illusory or enacted, that is sad with real power, that has somehow become authentic. It means something. This and nothing else has found resonance in this God-awful town without history or art.'

The rollercoaster went shattering by, moving through the skyline, a few tourists on it but they weren't yelling, weren't screaming or shouting, weren't making any noise he could hear. He looked at Ania. He'd never seen her this solemn. He went to the box and read over the messages, the names. When he looked back, Ania's eyes were red and she was wiping her face, but he thought it must be something else she was crying about. It couldn't be this.

At the end of that week, Ania's husband found her. She wasn't sure how it was possible, but he had. She said it was a sinking feeling but at the same time she felt weightless; his cold, threatening voice on the telephone in the middle of the night.

‘I don't know where he is,' she said. ‘Whether he's in Port Mallory, whether he's come here. I've embarrassed him a great deal. He is a strong man physically but in the head he is very weak.'

He'd quoted her room number, she said. He'd quoted the name of her hotel. She'd thought about it for half a second then she'd gathered her passport and was gone.

‘It's eight months since I left him,' she said. ‘Easily, he was toying with me from a distance and easily he is here in the city now.'

This had all happened last night. Now they were in the bar section of Buck's Steakhouse inside the Aria Resort.

‘What will you do?' asked Daniel.

She looked at him, cocked her head to the side. ‘I am going to move in with you,' she said.

He'd obviously not been able to hide his surprise. She was soon smiling at him in a funny way. ‘Ah,' she said. ‘It will be alright, Daniel. You don't have to worry. I promise it will only be for a few days. I need to find out what is happening. Where he is. How he found my hotel. Whether he can manage it again.'

‘You'll stay in Vegas?'

‘I am not done here.'

‘The Bellagio,' he said.

‘Yes, I can no longer play there. That is not a matter of kowtowing to a stupid pig. There are plenty of casinos in this city and it's a gamble that I do not have to make.'

She waved a hand to their waitress. ‘So are you taking a woman in or are you not?'

He looked at her. He was certain that it would be against the rules. No way was he allowed to have someone live with him, even temporarily. He probably wasn't even supposed to have guests. There'd be the attendant to contend with. He opened his mouth. He thought about the six-person dining table and the empty bedrooms. Ania was examining him, a vunerable look in her eyes.

‘Of course,' he said, as if he hadn't had to think about it. ‘I'll have to smuggle you into the building,' he added. ‘I'll have to keep you out of sight.'

‘It'll be covert,' she said.

‘Just to be safe,' he replied.

He stood in a corridor at the Bellagio, holding Ania's room key, red and gold carpet beneath his feet. He'd purposefully gone the wrong way from the lift when its doors had opened. Then he'd doubled back, checking to see if anyone was there.

Her room was as it always was, her clothes folded neatly on the chairs, the bed unmade. As she had described to him, her suitcase was in the rack above the closet, and he set about his task, packing Ania's ‘articles' (her term): jeans, a few dresses and blouses, underwear and items from the bathroom, tweezers and hairpins, small samplers of perfume.

It was an odd task, and he slowly realised how intimate it was, collecting these womanly things. The thought of it actually began to excite him. A beautiful and complex woman needed help and she had turned to him.

In a drawer, he found clothes he'd never seen her wear—bland T-shirts, pale, stone-washed jeans and what looked like ten-dollar sunglasses. In the bathroom, he found a foil sheet of capsules, Inderal, and he memorised the name. In the drawer of the bedside table there was more than a thousand dollars in cash and a copy of Nabokov's
Lolita
.

More surprising, he thought, was what he didn't find. Photographs. Any kind of documents. By the time he was done, the suitcase bulging, zipped on the bed, he realised it was possible that he knew nothing about Ania, who she was. What he knew for sure was that she was an American citizen and she played cards. Anything else, she might have invented. In fact, for all he knew, the psycho husband was her own creation. People did that. Travelled using rented or invented lives. Remade themselves in places like Las Vegas. Was it such a stupid, improbable idea?

He let the phone ring for a long time before he answered it.