Paying Back Jack (42 page)

CASEY'S PHONE RANG until an automatic message played. Calvino stood in the corridor outside Casey's unit. He switched his cell phone to a second SIM card and dialed again. He had his ear against the door and could hear Casey's phone ringing. It had one of those standard, default rings that people with no sensitivity about sound left on because it never occurred to them that they could change it.

Casey answered on the third ring from the second SIM card. The ringing on the other side of the door stopped.

“Open the door, Casey.” Calvino unbuttoned his jacket and reached inside, his hand resting on his .38 caliber police service revolver.

“Calvino, I'm not dressed. Nor is the girl next to me. Come back in an hour and we can talk.”

That constricted catch in the male voice that identifies he's a sexual bunny thumping inside the rabbit hole wasn't in Casey's voice. Instead, the voice was deliberate and measured; a soldier's voice.

“Ball's told the police what happened with Nongluck. I could call them now if you want. Five minutes tops and they're here. Or you can open the door and we can have a talk.”

“You want money?”

Calvino drew his weapon and held it barrel-down with both hands as he stood away from the door, his back to the wall. He looked up and down the empty corridor. That time of the morning, most people were at work, or if they were the type who didn't hold down a job, they were still in bed.

“Read the newspapers, Casey. You've got the American congress, the American military, and the Thai police all looking to talk to you.”

“And the CIA, the FBI, and the DEA,” said Casey.

“The whole alphabet.” Calvino listened for movement. It had gone quiet inside Casey's unit. “Or I could make a call and let the Thai police know where they can find you.”

The cylinders in the deadbolt lock clicked with the solemn brevity of a hanged man's last dance. The door slowly swung open. When no one appeared, Calvino moved forward and looked around the corner, both of his hands gripping the .38. It was no more than a side glance into an empty doorway. He pulled back, thought about Casey's special-operations training.

“Casey, let's talk.” He hesitated before stepping further inside. From the corner of his eye, he registered something moving, like a bat flying down from a rafter.

Casey, his right hand coming out of nowhere, smashed against Calvino's hands in one swift move. No words, nothing but the physical blow. The force of it dislodged Calvino's .38, which scuttled across the hardwood floor till it struck a chrome leg of the coffee table and started spinning like a top in front of the TV. Before Calvino reacted, Casey slammed his boot into his chest. The kick caught him with sufficient momentum to briefly lift him off the floor, knocking him against the door jam and drawing blood from the back of his head. Casey dragged Calvino half-conscious across the floor and dropped him in the middle of the room. He retrieved the .38 and stuck it in his belt. Then he stood over Calvino, looking down, holding a nine-millimeter Colt handgun a couple of inches from Calvino's head.

Calvino looked at the barrel of the gun; there was no silencer. “That's gonna make a lot of noise,” said Calvino.

Casey smiled, his finger on the trigger, his eyes hidden by sunglasses. Lifting the gun away, he walked across the room and closed the door, locking it. “You think I am going to shoot you?” he said. “Why would I do that? That'd be a crime, wouldn't it?”

Calvino didn't like the tone in Casey's voice. Whatever the idea was, Casey made it sound positively lethal. With his free hand, Casey removed a pair of handcuffs from a leather pouch clipped to the side
of his belt. “Roll over, put your hands behind your back, and stay very still.”

“Is this part of your job description?”

“I've seen a lot of guys like you full of wisecracks. They're the ones who usually cry out for their mother to come and rescue them.”

He cuffed Calvino's hands behind his back and wrapped duct tape around his ankles tight enough that the bones crunched together. Then he tore off more duct tape, using it to wrap Calvino's upper arms close to his body. He lifted him from the floor and pushed him into a sofa chair next to a bank of windows. The blinds were drawn shut.

As Calvino looked around the room, he spotted the rifle and telescopic scope on the table, the barrel pointed at the balcony window. Casey sat in a chair behind the sniper's rifle, hands folded behind his head, grinning like he'd heard a joke or won a poker jackpot. He picked up Calvino's .38 from the table and pointed it at him.

“Bang,” said Casey. He laughed as he examined the .38. “No one uses a thirty-eight except in the movies. It's a good number if you're talking bra size, but as a weapon for stopping someone from drawing down on you? Nah, you wouldn't want to take it into a den of lions.”

“What's with the rifle?”

“Big game hunting,” Casey said. He closed his left eye and, with his right against the telescopic scope, sat with the silence of a cat watching its prey.

“You've got a lot of people looking for you,” said Calvino.

“I'm not in the country.”

Calvino looked around the condo. It was neat and clean. Not a shirt or a pair of underwear on the floor. No magazines, dishes, food or bottles, empty or full, in sight. The furniture polished, the floor swept, the smell of pine cleaner.

“Who you planning to kill? Anyone I know?”

Casey sighed, rose up from the rifle. His smile reappeared as he looked past Calvino. “That's the wrong question, Calvino. You should be asking me who is going to kill you, if it ain't gonna be me.”

Calvino moved his head slowly. His chest felt like a stampede of buffalo had just passed over it, leaving the pain of hundreds of
thundering hooves. He glimpsed another scoped rifle on a table no more than a foot away. He reminded himself of one of his laws: You are never as safe as you think you are.

“Your beef is with Somporn,” said Calvino. “Maybe you special-forces guys specialize in trick shots, but I know that even you can't hit him from this window.”

“You're the guy who followed Cat. So you have inside information.”

“What's the game, Casey?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I thought your job was to get people talking. Or are you going through a career change?”

Casey sat straight in his chair, arched his back, and stretched his arms over his head. “You had McPhail follow me. What underground school did that boy attend to learn surveillance one-oh-one? I'd like to see McPhail's report card. Let me guess. Straight Fs, for fuck-up. He keeps on my tail across town. Not once does he lose me. Shouldn't that have rung a bell? I'm following a guy who has spent a lifetime following people and would pick up a tail in a minute. But no, of course he thinks it's his skill. He's convinced that old Casey wouldn't ever spot a tail. He thinks he's Sherlock fucking Holmes, and he reports to you about seeing me go into an eye clinic. Jet, the girl behind the counter, she gives you my address. What did you think, it was your charm? No, you thought, I have the element of surprise. Casey's not expecting me. What third-world detective training manual have you been reading?

“Let's play it the other way. I invite you to come here. And you think to yourself, Casey's planning something nasty. I'd better ask my friend the Colonel to come along.” He stopped as if a silent bell had rung and looked through the scope again. “Not yet,” he says. “Modern society has forgotten the distinction between a predator and a voyeur. The doer and the watcher. To be a successful sniper requires that you must be both.”

“Why kill Nongluck?”

“Did she wave when she dropped past?”

Calvino tried working the handcuffs behind his back. This pair wasn't bought off a vendor's table in Patpong. “Why not just kill her?
Why go to all the trouble with a room upgrade so you could frame me for her murder?”

“What would you do if your dead son's girlfriend was screwing his killer for money?” Then his mood changed.

“That doesn't really answer my question,” said Calvino. “Why make me take the fall for Nongluck?”

Casey had another look through the scope. The sniper's rifle smelled of fresh oil, and the shiny barrel caught the light. When he looked up at Calvino, he rolled his head from side to side and exercised his jaw as if the air pressure inside an airplane cabin had suddenly changed.

“Operational convenience,” said Casey.

“But Somporn is the mission objective.”

Casey smiled and lowered his sunglasses. “You're not so stupid. I needed to settle some accounts. Nongluck's account is settled. You know how bookkeeping works. Assets and liabilities have to balance. You were part of the accounting.”

“There's more accounting,” said Calvino.

Casey grunted. “Ain't that the truth. A couple of more books get balanced. I can never turn down killing two birds with one stone. It's what I like to call a special bonus. But it's not easy to make happen. You got to plan and anticipate what your enemy will do. What he's thinking. You can't underestimate his capability. In my line of work, you search through another man's secret life, find out the things he can't admit to himself. That's the place where he's most easily killed.”

“And you passed these little pieces of wisdom along to your son, Joel. You tortured people in a secret prison. Did he know about your day job? Did you teach him your Chinese-fortune-cookie wisdom about how to interrogate people? Maybe that only works inside a secret prison. Maybe when he applied that wisdom in a Thai family business, it got him killed. He found the secrets. He demanded answers. But you didn't teach him that unless you keep the man in a cell, he could come after you. You forgot that lesson. And it eats you up. So what do you do? You blame Nongluck. That lets you off the hook. Nice play, Casey. After you killed the ying did you feel better?”

Calvino could see from the tension in Casey's arms and neck that he was exercising every power of restraint to stop from crossing over
and killing him. Casey inhaled loudly. “The first lesson is to understand your enemy, and a man who has this knowledge will never be defeated.”

“That's Sun Tzu,” said Calvino. “Only you left out an important part. A man has to first define his enemy and not confuse him with his friend. I get the feeling you got an F on your report card for not being able to pick out bad guys from good ones in the underground school the military sent you to.”

“For a guy who has about ten minutes to live, you should be praying and not worrying about what Sun Tzu said.”

Calvino saw what had been near him the entire time, but he hadn't registered the meaning of until now. It was a second sniper's rifle positioned behind his chair. He strained to look over his shoulder, twisting the best he could on the chair. For the first time, he saw the role that Casey had planned for him. One he walked right into without seeing.

“I'm the decoy.” He turned back and looked over at Casey, the man who had been nicknamed the Ghost.

“Give the man a cigar and a hundred dollars,” said Casey, removing his sunglasses and turning his baseball cap backwards so he could slip on a pair of night-vision goggles. A sloppy grin crossed his face as he examined the .38 in the light, turning it over and laying it on the table. “A hundred dollars for your secretary to give you the funeral you deserve.”

“You know about Apichart and the coffin,” said Calvino, resigned to Casey's ability to unearth the details from his personal and business life. Casey didn't bother to reply. Calvino looked at Casey's profile as he sat behind the sniper's rifle. Fear-makers were what insurgents supposedly called guys like Casey. They have a carte-blanche license to be creative in producing real fear. “They've sucker-punched you, Casey. You're going to be the poster boy for torture. Your face is gonna be on every newspaper, TV, and website as the man who inflicts pain and gets a regular paycheck for it.”

“You ought to spend your last moments on this earth asking your creator for forgiveness,” said Casey. “Leave me to worry about my problems.”

The masters of fear had cut Casey loose, tagging him as the fall guy. Leaving him isolated and with no possibility of escape, they
were giving him his own taste of terror. Every man is a hero in his own story. Casey was no exception. Everyone he'd killed had deserved to die. There had been no innocent deaths on his watch. His service and company record, in his mind, had been perfect ones. He had only one regret, one blemish on his personal record, and that was his son's death. A few hundred dollars had been paid to have Joel killed. Nothing in his life would ever deliver the satisfaction of seeing that stain removed.

TRACER'S EYES CUT ACROSS the night skyline, window after window, swinging the binoculars back into focus on the balcony of Cat's condo. The definition was perfect enough to see the petals on a potted orchid. It was half an hour from the appointed time when the target would appear; every one of those remaining thirty minutes threatened to stretch out into long and thin dimensions, making a one-minute segment into a unit that went on and on. He felt the thump of his pulse in his neck, the blood pumping as he worked buildings outside. He was looking for an infrared scope, which would identify itself with a telltale signature. Tracer knew that signature; he thought of an infrared marker as a squiggly line of thread that blurred into fuzziness. If someone out there had targeted them, Tracer would find him from that infrared signature. He turned up nothing except for the ghostly outlines rising off bodies and objects like steam. But Tracer didn't give up, thinking somewhere in that landscape of heat-generated movement, a signature was waiting to write its name in blood.

“In New Orleans, I knew a guy who had gone to Korea with the army,” he said. “Everyone should live for four years in a country where people eat rats and wash them down with rice wine. Then they'd understand the meaning of hunger, when empty plays the blues inside the guts. All other desires fall away when the belly wails.”