No Way Back (25 page)

NIGHTS HERE ARE SOFT AS VELVET, THE AIR ALMOST
too rich with scents of frangipani and bougainvillea. I sit easily on a sandy patch up among the rocks of a natural little redoubt above the beach, watching the faint lights of slim fishing canoes flicker like fireflies far offshore. That’s my reference anyway; fireflies don’t exist in these latitudes. When I look up, I see the glimmer of mostly unfamiliar constellations, and that crooked Southern Cross. I can hear the whispering lap of sea against shore when there’s a pause in the clatter and whoops of the jungle behind me.

It’s almost peaceful. But provisional. Too often I’m back on that tramp freighter. Really back, hi-rez, sight and sound and feeling. Just me on the dark foredeck with a woman I knew as Nadya, one I knew as Allison. A gesture, so fluid yet so very swift and sure. Then it’s just me, there on the deck.

Allison coming toward us, Nadya and me moving to her. Allison saying, “Excellent. Great work, really,”
when we’re close enough to touch. “Well, of course!” Nadya replying, something small and silver sliding from her sleeve into her palm, palm flowing toward Allison’s neck, the small silver thing just brushing the tender spot behind the jaw. One pop, no louder than a kid’s cap. Allison’s eyes widening slightly, body toppling as if her legs had been scythed out from under her.

Nadya looking then at me, the small silver thing in her hand a .22 revolver, derringer-size and style, not even a trigger guard. The weapon favored by the best mafia hit men, the ones cold enough to work so close. Little hollow in the forty-grain lead bullet filled with candle wax, it penetrates soft tissue an inch or so, expands and fragments. There’s a tiny hole that scarcely bleeds just beneath Allison’s ear. But the thing splayed awkwardly on the deck is not Allison anymore. A fist-size piece of her brain has been shredded.

I’m about to die.

Then Nadya tosses the .22 over the bulwark. There’s hardly a splash when it hits. She opens my attaché, dumps the Korth and the grenades into the oily harbor waters. She hands the attaché to me.

“I know you’ve got a Company backup passport. Best not to use it, though,” she says. “I’m quite sure you’ve also got your own emergency one in there, name and nationality known only to you. You should take it now, Terry.”

I rip the lining, grab the passport, slip it into the breast pocket of my suit.

“Why? Why Allison?”

Nadya gazes at me with those canted, arctic-blue eyes. “Don’t know, actually. Compromised by Westley perhaps? Operation a bit untidy? Too many loose ends? She was in charge, after all.” A shrug. “My orders were to clean up.”

“And me?”

She laughs silkily. “You, darling, seem to have escaped and evaded. One of your specialties, I gather. They’ll expect that of you.”

“You, Nadya?”

“Heading home. Long way round, I’m afraid. Via Moscow. Can’t be helped. One never goes out the way one came in.”

“They teach you that at the Farm?”

“Well of course!” She clicks a plastic buckle, removes a fanny pack. “You’ll be put ashore in Fukuoka. If I were Terry, I’d go somewhere by air from there. Though not too far! Then I’d go quite far by other means.”

Nadya throws the fanny pack high. When I make the grab and look back, she’s gone.

Escape and evade.

Smart enough, I figure, to buy a ticket from Fukuoka to Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific, which keeps first-rate passenger manifests, but fly out four hours earlier to Manila on Garuda, which keeps none. Easy enough, in the pulsing human anthill of Manila’s domestic terminal, to secure a first-class seat—under a name I invent but don’t have to document—on a Philippines Air island-hopper to Davao City. Simple enough to travel nameless by bus, jitney, and taxi a few hundred klicks of jungle and mountains to Zamboanga.

The hundred thousand euros in the fanny pack Nadya tossed me is only down maybe two thousand, even after I buy a nicely maintained CAR-15 and ten thirty-round magazines from an ancient man with skin like an old shoe, his stubs of teeth stained red from chewing betel, in an airless tin-roofed shack on the Zamboanga waterfront. He seems disappointed I won’t take the time to haggle down the price.

Another five hundred and I’m skimming the calm Sulu Sea in an Evinrude-powered outrigger piloted by the ancient man’s grandson, who’s a part-time pirate and occasional fisherman. Two-fifty at a village built on stilts in the shallows off northeastern Borneo gets me another outrigger ride up to the very tip of Sabah, to this village fronting the Balabac Strait. It’s two hundred klics from Kota Kinabalu, heavily jungled four-thousand-meter mountains between the international airport there and here. No roads over that green hell to here, no airstrip. Accessible only by sea.

The headman has heard of European adventure tourists, though none have ever come here before. A hundred euros gets me a bamboo hut with a thatched roof, three meals a day, and honorary membership in his clan for six months. Once every month or so, an old steamer comes by to trade simple goods for dried fish, maybe bring back one of the village’s young men who went to Kota looking for work, or take one away. The headman seems proud of this.

He understands I do not want my presence known when the steamer comes. It has to anchor five klicks out, the water’s too shoaled, reefed, and shallow for closer approach. The villagers go to it in their outriggers. No one, he promises, will ever mention me. No one wants any attention from the authorities in Kota. Because most of the villagers are smugglers as well as fishermen.

So I live. Some dawns I go with an outrigger and help a man fish. I doze in a hammock most afternoons when the sun’s brutal. I swim in the waning day. Evenings, I sit here in my redoubt, the CAR in my lap, watching my imaginary fireflies, my unknown constellations.

I never doubt Nadya made it back. I’m sure Company craftsmen have forged and mailed a postcard or two to Annie, from Honduras or Salvador perhaps. Luther’s
probably written that he’s decided to stay south for a while, to postpone his return to Baltimore. It is not in the Company’s interest for a cop named Luther Ewing, who took a road trip to the Yucatán, to be reported missing.

So I’m here. If they want me, they will find me. Six months? A year? Doesn’t matter much. If they come hard, they’ll get hit hard. That’s what the CAR is for.

But for now, I’ll just sit quietly. I did the job, I got paid. Contract completed. Maybe they’ll bring me in easy. Maybe one day a little boat will beach and I’ll see a small figure walking toward me, shimmering in the heat haze. Hear Nadya, calling clear. “Terry, darling! Ready to come home? Well of course you are!”

Sure. It will be Nadya. Real as the sound of the sea in a shell held against your ear.