Sins of the Father (2 page)

Miranda came up behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist.

“It is,” she said in his ear, her voice a husky whisper. “Do you want to try it?”

“Oh, you’re a naughty girl,” he said. “I’m not really into toys, though. Make a man feel inadequate.”

“How about a little bondage instead,” she said, tugging the silk scarf from her neck and wrapping it playfully around his own. “I’ll let you tie me up. Have your way with me.” She slowly pulled the ends of the scarf tighter, tugging playfully at the ends.

“Now that,” he said, turning to face her, “is something I can get into.”

“So glad you approve.”

“I do, though it’s a bit tight there, luv. Loosen up a tad, would you?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” she said, yanking hard on the ends of the scarf, making him gag. The silk bit into his throat, and he pushed at her—tried to knock her away—but she wouldn’t budge. It was as if she was made of stone.

He clawed at the scarf, kicked at her, tried to pull away, but nothing he did helped. She pulled the ends of the cloth tighter and tighter, shrugging off his blows as if they were puffs of air.

He slumped, and she followed him down to the floor as he went to his knees, holding tight onto that damned piece of silk, which was choking the air out of him. His vision fuzzed, going black at the edges until soon there was nothing but her face.

Then even that disappeared. A final thought passed through his mind as the blackness took him.

At least there won’t be any more goddamn Gilbert and Sullivan.

FRANKFURT 2008

He’d had many names before today. Miranda Stallings, Evan Beetner, Nathan Wallace, Jaclyn Herera, and on and on. He changed identities the way some people changed their clothes, each new name bringing a new face along with it.

And now he was Richard McCoy, a British citizen in his mid-fifties, late of the London theater scene. A has-been actor, publicly disgraced. Well known in certain circles, but not too well known outside of them. A man with a face and a history and a paper trail.

Just the way he needed to be.

The abandoned factory outside Frankfurt had been used to manufacture dolls, an irony he was never quite able to wrap his mind around. Was it a joke? A metaphor? A flair for the dramatic? He was never sure, and it had always bothered him.

He stepped past broken porcelain limbs and cracked plastic heads left half-painted on rusting machines in the outer rooms. High-vaulted ceilings let in sunlight through shattered skylights, illuminating the drab, gray walls, the piles of concrete dust and rat and bird droppings that littered the floor. He made his way through the bleak corridors and down rusting stairs, flicking on a flashlight as he descended into the basement levels. He’d been in the factory many times before, but never as Richard McCoy.

He stopped at an aging fuse panel next to some unused steam pipes, flipped a convoluted sequence of switches and waited for a long spike to pop out of a recess. He hated this part. But the automated security didn’t know him on sight, not in this body, and if he didn’t verify his
bona fides
they’d cut him down with machinegun fire.

He put his hand in front of the needle and it shot forward, puncturing the skin and drawing a small amount of what passed for blood in his body. He waited for the process to complete, a green light indicating safe passage, and then used a handkerchief to wipe away the silver liquid from the prick in his hand. He closed the panel and continued on his way.

He followed the steam pipes to a room with a series of large, industrial boilers, rusted hulks that were barely worth the cost of scrapping them. Behind one of these he found a metal trapdoor set into the floor. He wondered—as he always did when he came down here—if the automated systems actually had recognized him.

Moment of truth.
He pulled on an iron ring set in the trapdoor. It popped open on oiled hinges. No gunfire. No hail of bullets. He’d passed.

Then he let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Of course he’d passed. He
always
passed. He’d been spending so much time in these skin suits he’d started picking up their damn neuroses. He went down the steps deep beneath the factory, the trapdoor closing behind him as banks of LEDs sprang to life, illuminating his passage into a thoroughly modern laboratory facility.

His mission was going to be active the minute he got through decontamination and changed into his chemsuit. Once the airlock opened, he was confronted with gurneys loaded with body bags, lining the hallway outside the main lab.

Several technicians were pulling a dripping body from one of a dozen clear, horizontal cylinders filled with a cloudy liquid. It was the last one. The rest were all empty. From the state of the body, this experiment had failed, too.

The corpse looked half-formed, sexless. The skin was barely there, a thick slurry that sat on top of the muscles like the jelly in a can of Spam. The veins were visible, but where blood should have pumped through them, they were clear, with no sign of activity.

“Ah, Richard is it?”

“It is, sir,” McCoy said, turning to see the man he took his orders from, David Robert Jones. Even in a chemsuit, the man had presence. “Richard McCoy. As you asked.”

“Excellent,” Jones replied. “I saw him on the stage in Brighton some years ago. He had a modicum of talent. Where did you find him?”

“Doing dinner theater. Gilbert and Sullivan, of all things.”

Jones shuddered.

“Poor man. Did him a favor, then. Well, he’s perfect for our uses. A bit of theater is exactly what we’ll need.”

“Are we on to Plan B, then?”

Jones said nothing for a long moment. He watched the technicians hauling the corpse into a body bag, ready to join the others in the hallway. As the techs lifted it out of the cylinder, the right hand separated at the wrist and dropped back into the pool of cloudy slime with a loud plop.

“Yes,” Jones said. “We’re on to Plan B.”

BANGKOK, THAILAND 2008

Peter Bishop sat on the edge of the creaky double bed in his cramped box of a room at the Sweet Orchid Hotel. There was a pervasive smell of mold and cigarettes in the claustrophobic space, and every surface was damp and slightly sticky. The cheap mattress felt like a bag of soggy boiled rice beneath him.

The old, asthmatic air conditioner was struggling valiantly, but it was no match for the humid swelter. Tied to the air conditioner’s dirty grate were three pink plastic ribbons that fluttered listlessly in the ineffective breeze. When Peter had complained to the apathetic maid that the air conditioner wasn’t working, she had pointed to those ribbons as a silent rebuttal before going back to vacuuming the hallway without further comment.

The room itself was barely large enough for the double bed, rickety desk, and padlocked bar fridge—key available for an extra fee. A bulky television the size of an old-fashioned toaster offered a rotating selection of adult movies, also for an extra fee. Peter had easily picked the padlock and liberated several bottles of Chang beer from the fridge, but the TV wasn’t worth the effort.

In a cheap frame above the bed was a photograph that looked as if it had been cut out of a magazine, of a purple
Phalaenopsis
orchid. On the bedside table there was a “gentleman’s guide” to the local red-light districts, translated into seven different languages. The crude map on the back and the vaguely Thai design on the polyester bedspread were the only clues to what city he was in this week.

Well, those and the girl.

She’d said her name was Katy. She was petite and slender, with a feathery bob haircut that had been dyed an odd reddish brown. Her face was wide and heart-shaped with a tiny, thin-lipped mouth. Earlier in the evening, she had used fuchsia lip liner to make that anime mouth twice as big, but it had quickly worn off over the course of their… encounter. Her heavy makeup didn’t quite cover the scatter of acne on her cheekbones and forehead.

She’d looked a lot better under the multicolored bar lighting.

“Finished?” she asked, sitting up in bed behind him.

“Yeah.” He ran his fingers through his sweaty hair. “Finished.”

He watched her squeeze into her colorful scraps of clothing and jam her blistered feet into plastic platform heels. When she was dressed, she shrugged, slung her glittery purse over her shoulder, and left without saying goodbye.

* * *

Alone again, Peter found his mind wandering. He had been with a lot of different women from all over the world, but had a hard time making anything resembling a real, lasting connection with any of them. The few times he’d actually tried, it had inevitably gone wrong—sometimes horribly so. Eventually, he’d given up trying and resigned himself to perpetual bachelorhood.

With the occasional temporary company as needed, of course.

Most of his relationships had been so brief that he had little memory of them at all. With one exception—a girl he had met when he was just a kid. A blond girl who’d had something to do with his father’s research in Florida. Even she was a blur, but he remembered her green eyes, and her drawings, and how she didn’t really seem to fit in.
That
was something he could understand.

And something about tulips, a field of white tulips…

Where did that come from?
he wondered, shaking his head as if that would dismiss the fleeting memory. Peter stood and padded over to the bathroom. It was cramped, windowless, and fully tiled—including the ceiling, which made it look kind of like a combination shower and toilet stall.
Or a tiled coffin.
There was a drain in the middle of the floor and a shower nozzle sticking out of a seemingly random spot on the wall.

If he angled that showerhead correctly, he could wash his hair while sitting on the john.

Instead, he opted for a more conventional, standing shower, his third since around noon, local time—when he’d awakened with a brutal hangover. It didn’t seem possible to take enough showers in Bangkok. Before he could finish toweling off, though, he was already sweating again, the gritty, toxic breath of the city settling back into his pores like a houseguest who wouldn’t leave.

He grabbed his knock-off Rolex from the nightstand, slipped it around his wrist and checked the time. Just after 1 a.m. He had a little over an hour and forty-five minutes to get everything in place, and get his ass where it needed to be for the 3 a.m. meet.

Once he was dressed in respectable but comfortable, unrestrictive clothes and his favorite high-end running shoes, he slid a pair of identical briefcases out from under the bed and set them side by side. He checked the contents of both cases several times and made a few minor adjustments to the weight, then snapped them both shut and headed out into the steamy Thailand night.

* * *

The Sweet Orchid Hotel was located right around the corner from the Soi Cowboy district. As he hit the street, Peter’s brain was blasted with euphoric multi-sensory overload. Visually, it was a fever dream of throbbing neon signs and mirror-ball glitter, painting exposed skin and leering faces in eye-searing, unnatural colors.

His ears were assaulted by a dozen competing Thai and American pop songs all playing simultaneously, warring against the thumping, bass-heavy dance music that was blaring from the doorways of bars.

A miasma of clashing scents filled his lungs, sweat and perfume and spilled beer mingling with the meaty smoke and exotic spices, wafting from mobile grills serving late-night street food.

As he passed, bar girls in skimpy club wear tried to lure him in, waving English signs advertising cheap beer. Flushed and grinning Caucasian men reeled from bar to bar with their sunburned arms slung around each other’s necks. Competing club touts called out in a variety of languages while stone-faced, silent bouncers broke up a sloppy, half-assed drunken shoving match and gave the bum’s rush to a pickpocket who should have known better than to mess with the geese that laid the golden eggs.

Because Soi Cowboy was, for all its lurid tease and titillation, really just a sanitized and benign amusement park for foreign men. If you wanted a real walk on the wild side, there were plenty of sleazier, more dangerous areas in Bangkok where you could get your freak on. This place was relatively safe and non-threatening—an utterly artificial environment created solely for the purpose of separating tourists from their baht, yen, euros, or dollars.