Off the Edge (The Associates) (4 page)

“You coming down with something?”

“I don’t know,” Macmillan whispered.

Rio tipped up his head. “Top two floors are where they’ve got the players—the 17th and 18th, and it’s where everything will happen. High security, manned at all time, halls guarded at two sides. They’re keeping the 16th floor vacant. Stairwell is no-go. It’s going to be a bitch to get ears up there.” He went on about the Sawadee Palace Hotel across the street where most of the Associates were staying. It wouldn’t do to have them trotting through the Bangkok Imperiale Hotel des Roses lobby. Rio turned to him and smiled. “We could have Associates fan out and listen for people to say
vim and vitriol.
How about that?”

“Hah.” Jazzman had used the phrase
vim and vitriol
several times on the conference call, his own personal variant on the idiom
vim and vigor.
“Not a bad thought, except I could see other dealers using it now. As a callback, an inside joke. But did you notice the emotional charge Jazzman had around it? You heard the call—he sounded proud of switching the words.”

Rio gave him a look. “I didn’t think it at the time but…yes.”

“It is, for want of a better word, a
thing
for him,” Macmillan said. “Altering idioms. It’s something he wants people to notice. My money says he alters idioms all the time. That alone won’t identify Jazzman, but it’s a damn fine thing to listen for.”

Onto another song.
You in the dark alley next to the McDonald’s. Paper bags at your feet. You dirty and alone outside the dry cleaners, eyes wild.

The song was crafted to sound like it was about a down-and-out friend, but Macmillan got that it wasn’t about a friend at all. Something else. When he listened to what was actually there, he got that she was talking about dragons. Specific dragons, in fact. He’d walked this neighborhood a lot over the past month and he’d seen them, too, eroding quietly between chain stores and noodle shops. Up on signs. Stone, plaster, lacquer, paint on brick.

It was a little puzzle, this song. So she’d been in town quite a while. Rambling around alone, judging from the degree of observation. Or maybe it was vigilance. Fearful people tended to notice more.

It was clear that she related to the dragons. He suspected that she was a dragon, broken and alone, squeezed into an out-of-the-way place.

Another song—with a shout-out to the 18th century poet Byron, nestled in like an Easter egg. A line from one of his favorite poems way back when he was optimistic, naïve, vulnerable Peter Maxwell.

It was here he came up for air. How long had he been ignoring the arms dealers? He had a job to do.

He forced himself to groan. “The sophomoric shout-out to Byron. Can this night get any more magical?” Macmillan knew he should shut up, but he couldn’t. “Tell me she isn’t here every night. Please.”

Rio adjusted the cuffs of his silky shirt in a way that suggested he was holding back comment.

“What?” Macmillan demanded. “It’s just a bit much.”

“Why not ignore her like everybody else does?”

Movement up at the front tables. A man in a blue suit approached a group at the center of the cluster. A Somali, he guessed by the way he moved his mouth and jaw as he greeted another man. Language often shaped a person’s facial muscles; Macmillan could sometimes tell a person’s nationality by how they held their lips between utterances. Could Jazzman be a Somali man? The conversation up there was really flowing, especially between songs. They’d be speaking English—that would the common language.

If only he could be that potted palm.

He and Rio discussed ways to get speech samples. They could wire up some Associates and plant them at intervals across the front of the place before the show tomorrow night. A few of the female Associates could try to get themselves invited into the inner circle, which was 99% male. Associates could fan out and shadow known dealers as they went about their daily business. But they needed more than coffee orders; they needed conversations.

Once Jazzman was identified, the Association would abduct him and get him to reveal the whereabouts of the TZ prototype and blueprints. They had to identify him before he sold.

Jazzman, unfortunately, had a talent for sniffing out agents. The CIA’s agent in the New Tong out of Texas had been killed. Interpol’s network across the former Soviet states had frayed, the Russian Associate on the original conference call had been killed, as had their China connection. There was nobody friendly inside that auction.

It was up to Macmillan.

Laney was onto another song—a young girl making dinner for her man.
Cookbook full of wishes.
If the scruffy little dog moving his legs like he was running in his sleep, or mama’s Irish lullaby didn’t get you, the cookbook full of wishes would.

He rubbed his eyes. “Good lord, woman, if you miss your alcoholic hoarder Mama that much, go back to Florida.”

Rio turned to him. “That’s what she’s singing about?”

“More or less. And all the bit about dinner—the cornpone mama meaning so well. The whole Mama song is infused with classic child of alcoholic thinking. It’s probably the reason our poor Laney up and married that controlling husband.”

Rio stared at him incredulously. “I’ve been listening to these songs for three nights, watching the tables. They’re just…lists of things. You can’t be getting all that meaning from lists of things.”

“English Lit 101. A poem is rarely about one thing. A rose is more than a rose. A cigar is more than a cigar.” Macmillan had always had a soft spot for the poets. Back in his life as Peter, anyway. He broke off a bit of cake. “My guess is that she’s on the run from that controlling husband.”

“Seriously?”

“Trust me. It’s all in there.”

“Well, if she is on the run, she’s a fool,” Rio said. “That hat.”

“I know. She may as well tack a sign on her back.
I am in hiding. This is my disguise
. She probably doesn’t even realize it.”

Rio shot him a warning look.

“Don’t worry. I don’t do damsels in distress.”

“There’s always a first time.”

Macmillan sniffed. “Let her set herself on fire up there. I only have eyes for Jazzman.”

Rio stirred his tea in a
no comment
way.

But Rio didn’t get it.

Sure, Rio understood on an intellectual level why Macmillan wanted to stop the auction, but he didn’t understand it on a gut level. Rio didn’t know what it was like to dig through piles of bodies that were no longer human. Rio couldn’t know what it was like to recognize the person you loved more than anything in the world from a barrette clasped to a bloody bit of hair and scalp. Rio couldn’t know the horror of grabbing somebody’s hand, thinking to pull them out of the wreckage, only to come away with the hand itself, attached to nothing. Rio couldn’t know that a severed hand weighs roughly the same as a tennis shoe, or what it feels like to hold such a hand while your world falls away.

Macmillan wished he could stop going back to that goddamn hand. The memory was surfacing too often these days. It was the situation with the TZ, bringing it all back, reminding him of that night ten years ago. The idea of innocents dying, caught in something larger. Back then he’d been a mere civilian. A powerless passenger. But he could do something about this threat.

He would do anything, become anything, to stop the TZ.

An hour later, Rio left for a meeting across town. Macmillan stayed to finish charting the dealer movements.

Her show ended a bit after midnight.

The crowd began to disperse soon after. He took the opportunity to wander around, catching fragments of language in the air like a hound dog on a scent. He followed a pair of Moroccans and a German through grand brass and wood doors and on into the elegant Hotel Des Roses lobby. He trailed them loosely across the gleaming, pink marble floor under a dark wood ceiling studded with tiny lights like stars in the night sky. Ornate brass banisters marked wide, rose-carpeted staircases up to the reception areas, but the dealers went to the gift area and fell to examining postcards on a spinning rack. Silently. Then, when the conversation started back up, it was Spanish. He needed to hear Jazzman speaking English. That would happen in more widely mixed groups.

He wandered back out to the courtyard. The tables stood mostly empty now except for a few couples in the back and an old man off to the side, puffing on a last cigarette.

And there she was, talking and laughing with a pair of young Thais near the potted palm. She’d pulled the face-concealing net up over the top of the hat to reveal amber eyes that looked bright under lavishly dark lashes and brows. A smattering of freckles covered her nose and her smile had just a bit of the devil in it.

And she took his breath away.

One of the young men spoke in rapid Thai, and Laney clearly followed along. So she’d been there long enough to learn Thai.

The other young man fussed with a leaf on the potted palm. He began to unwrap a wire from its trunk.
A wire.
A microphone. Connected to a laptop.

Macmillan’s pulse pounded.

They’d been recording the music! A recording device in the potted palm.

Could it be so easy?

He settled down at a nearby table and pretended to focus on his smartphone. Between the recording and the charting, he would be able to get a speech sample from nearly every dealer who had been out there. He’d be able to rule them out. Or rule one of them in. He’d know if Jazzman had been out there.

He would follow that recording.

The friends left. Laney stayed, zipping the equipment into bags and cases.

She’d take it home.

Well then, she’d take Macmillan home, too.

His eyes fell to her crazy sexy knee-highs. The prospect of seducing her filled him with excitement, guilt, delight, dread, and lots of emotions he couldn’t name. Since when could he not name something? It was this fierce sense of push and pull he felt with her—it had him all turned around. Or maybe it was the fever.

He’d do what it took to get alone with her computer. He could copy her entire hard drive in a matter of minutes and she’d never know. He’d seduced dozens of women to get access to secrets. She was just another.

He thought of her up there alone, singing in the background every night being completely ignored by the audience. She had something to say and nobody heard; he found himself annoyed on her behalf on top of everything else.

He needed to disengage. This was about the TZ. He’d be the most despicable gutter dog if it meant getting his hands on the TZ.

He would charm her and steal from her. End of story.

In his mind, he went back over her songs, flipping through them like a Rolodex of her heart. She’d revealed so much; she would be easy to seduce.

He came to the dragons.

Oh, yes, he’d use the dragons. He pushed away a pang of guilt about that. There was a dragon she hadn’t mentioned, one she wouldn’t know about, right in the neighborhood.

And the poetry—that would be another way in. There was the box in the back of the used English-language book stall at the all-night bazaar, the best place in all of Bangkok to get old editions of classic poetry. A colleague at the university had told him about it. The box wasn’t on display; you had to ask for it, like in a speakeasy. You couldn’t find this stuff in Bangkok. She’d go crazy.

But seducing a poet wasn’t all about lofty ideas and starry nights—that would be the mistake most men would make with her. No poet worth her salt didn’t love carnality. A bit of dirt and teeth.

Macmillan was impressing even himself now. It was as if he had a direct line to her.

He stilled when he realized why: Laney was the kind of girl he would’ve picked out in his pre-spy days, back when he lived as Peter Maxwell. She was Peter’s type.

Macmillan’s throat felt thick.

Sure, during the last ten years he’d played Dr. Peter Maxwell in and out of lecture halls. He’d played Peter Maxwell the author. But never once had he played Peter Maxwell the man. Not since that night on the train.

He sucked in a breath. He’d do what it took. He’d court her as Peter, get her to take him back to her room. He’d take her to bed if he had to. He’d use every tool in his arsenal to get the TZ under his control. Sex was nothing but a highly useful tool. He himself was nothing but a highly useful tool, a means to an end.

He needed to keep his feelings out of it.

He looked down and flexed his fingers. He could still feel the hand in his palm. The weight of a tennis shoe. The hand, connected to nothing, to nobody. The memory crept over the edges of his mind.

He shut his eyes, fighting the undertow.

Laney had watched him all night, way in the back in the dark. She’d told the waiter to light his candle, just so she could get a better look at him, but he and his friend didn’t want it lit. Still, the torches had lit him enough.

He put away his phone and looked at his hand, moving it just slightly. Was something wrong with his hand?

He wasn’t one of the conventioneers, she’d known that right off. The conventioneers were all dense and dark and grunty, and he was quicksilver bright. Shiny in a way she couldn’t explain. It wasn’t just his light hair, it was the feel of him. He sat quietly in his chair during the show, focusing hard on the audience—anywhere but her. Sometimes he’d lean forward with something apparently important to say to his friend. His skin was kind of burnished gold, as though he spent a lot of time outside, maybe walking the streets. He wore a light linen sports coat, sort of a tropical colonial deal. Best of all, he wore a T-shirt underneath his white buttoned-down shirt. She liked a man who wore a T-shirt under his button shirt, even in the heat. It showed a certain decorum.

His glasses had just a touch of gold on the rim and sides; it brought out the gold in his hair, which was long enough to be tucked behind his ears. He was so cool, so dapper, so together, she just wanted to kiss him and mess up that hair. She imagined him disheveled, wet with sweat. Hair hanging over her face. Brushing against her cheeks. Back and forth…