Dark Time: Mortal Path (30 page)

“And that is?”

“Making me disappear.
Poof.
New identity, out of the country. Before whoever got to Lewiston and Kosiorek comes after me.”

“What makes you think I can help you with something like that?”

Cocomo’s eyes kept moving around and he swiveled his head. His hands were jammed in his pockets to keep them from shaking. He took off walking again, and she hurried to catch up.

“You and I have a mutual friend, a private investigator named Hound. I use his services every now and then.” His voice steadied for a moment. “That’s classified.”

Hound does classified work for the government? Gee, something else I didn’t know about him.

“My lips are sealed.”

“I’m serious. You’re taking this all too lightly. It’s my life we’re talking about here.” His voice was strained. If he was in private, he would probably be crying.

“Sorry. I’m listening. What have you got to offer for this favor?”

“Do we have a deal?” His feet moved mechanically, his pace a little faster as he got closer to the kernel of truth of their meeting.

“Because I trust Hound, that’s a tentative yes. I can arrange your disappearance. First you have to tell me what you know. What’s your bargaining chip?”

“The two dead coders in the news worked on the same project that the senators and I did. That’s four people dead, and those are the ones I know about. It’s a cleanup operation. Everybody who knew about the project is being eliminated.”

“I asked before and I’ll ask again now. If you don’t spill it, we’re not going any further and I wasted a trip to D.C. What’s the company involved? What’s the project?

“Shale Technologies, in Chicago. Have you heard of it?”

“Oh, yes.”

Cocomo tilted his head sideways and looked at her, picking up something that wasn’t neutral in the way she answered.

“Gregory Shale?”

“Yes. I know him.”

He blinked rapidly. Fear radiated from him like heat waves off hot asphalt. “You’re not working for Shale, are you? Here to kill me?”

She put a hand on his arm. “No. If so, you’d be dead already.”

He stopped walking. Her touch on his arm was a comfort, a switch that turned off the compulsive movement of his feet and steadied his eyes and voice.

“We all worked on Project CESR, C-E-S-R. It’s…”

A streak of motion, and blood spattered the entire front of Maliha’s sweater. Cocomo, a look of shock on his face and a gushing slash on his throat, sank to his knees and then pitched forward.

She knew there was nothing she could do for him. Maliha moved away, hoping that no one had seen them together enough to identify her. As she was moving, she pulled the sweater carefully over her head and dropped it in a trash can. At first glance she didn’t look like she’d just slaughtered something.

Someone had slaughtered the deputy secretary of Homeland Security.

In the pandemonium, she looked for a center of stillness, someone too calm, too familiar with death to react with horror to a slashed throat. She spotted him across the plaza—Subedei. She raced toward him and he waited for her.

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As she approached, his hand moved at lightning speed, and she felt a sharp flash of pain high on her right thigh. A throwing star was deeply embedded there. She yanked the star from her leg and threw it back at him. By the time the throwing star reached the spot where Subedei had been, he was gone from the plaza. His mocking laughter lingered in her ears.

He was toying with her, and enjoying it. It was going to take all of her cunning just to stay alive. Her determination to defeat him solidified.

Back off? Never.

She let her rented Taurus take her to the airport, driving on automatic as she mulled over the unusual experience of having someone within arm’s length drop dead, and she hadn’t done it.

G
reg was in the dojo practicing forms when Subedei walked in. The Mongolian watched him for a time and then made some suggestions and went through a few throws with him. Subedei took down a couple of swords from the weapons wall and put Greg through a short but intensive lesson.

Greg bowed, and they were ready to talk about how things had gone in D.C. Everything went smoothly and the deputy secretary was dead. When Greg was alone again, he used his cell phone to call Fawn and tell her to meet him in the dojo.

Fawn had an official job as his personal assistant, but he didn’t even know where she spent her time in the building. Her real job was to be ready for him whenever he called her, which lately was often. And to perform unsavory tasks such as delivering bribes, where there was a direct risk of being caught. She arrived in a few minutes, and his eyes devoured her.

Still looks damn good to me.

Fawn had been his point of contact with the two computer consultants, to keep Greg a level removed. She’d done everything right, although he still wondered if she’d slept with Nando. He was quite certain she hadn’t slept with Hairy. The girl did have standards.

He went up to Fawn, put one arm around her shoulders, and unbuttoned her blouse with his other hand. He had her clothes off and she was doing her part, untying his black belt, pulling down the loose pants of his karate uniform, rubbing him with her hands, whispering the things he wanted her to say. He pushed her down to her knees on the mat and let her pleasure him. Before he came, he stopped her and told her to get down on all fours. She did her cat stretch that he liked and he kneeled behind her.

As he entered her, he flashed back to a time when he’d been doing the same thing he was doing now and Subedei walked in on the two of them. It was the first and only time he’d seen his bodyguard angry.

The Mongolian had picked Greg up while he was putting it to Fawn and thrown him across the room like a child might do to a stuffed animal, yelling that it was disrespectful to the dojo. Subedei ordered Fawn out, and she was happy to skip out in a hurry and leave Greg to face whatever was coming alone. Dealing with a pissed-off, mountainous bodyguard wasn’t in her job description.

Subedei hauled him to his feet, tossed him a stick and demanded that he fight. Greg was still naked, and Subedei pressed him hard, landing blows carefully controlled for maximum pain and bruising, while not breaking bones or knocking Greg’s head open. The bodyguard avoided all of Greg’s angry attempts to score a hit, as though Subedei were sparring with a six-year-old student.

Subedei had thought the lesson would outlast the pain, yet here Greg was again, in the dojo, enjoying Fawn and thumbing his nose—or his prick—at Subedei.

Of course, Subedei wasn’t there to see it, and things were fine as long as it stayed that way.

When he finished, he told her to stay where she was, that he liked the view. She was obliging; where else could she earn ten thousand dollars a month as an assistant something-or-other? Greg had a knack for finding women he could manipulate. To be honest, he was well aware that Marsha wasn’t one of those.

She’d be a conquest of a different sort, one that would involve violence or trickery or both. He wasn’t fooling himself that a donation to Marsha’s charity would get her on her back.

Greg went to the weapon wall, took down a sword, whirled it around feeling powerful, and brought it down on Fawn’s neck.

Fawn couldn’t be allowed to live. She was a link between him and the dead coders, so she was part of the cleanup. He’d known it would end this way with her from the start, but he’d had a good run with her.

It was his first kill with the sword. Appraising the results, he thought he did a good job. He could only 101 z 138

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get better with practice.

M
aliha was cautious on the way back to her home in Chicago, but the trip from Washington, D.C., after the murder in the plaza went smoothly. She arrived in the early hours of Sunday morning. On the way up in the elevator of her building, she felt a touch on her shoulder, Yanmeng saying hello from the astral plane. She stuck out her tongue in greeting.

She jabbed the button for the thirty-ninth floor instead of heading for her private rooms higher up, where she’d been anticipating unwinding.

Amaro greeted her at the door of her place wearing boxer shorts and several days’ growth of beard.

She looked around her formerly neat living room and sighed. Amaro had pulled some tables together and made a work area for himself, on which he’d planted two laptops.

“Yanmeng will be here in a few minutes,” he said. “He went out for Chinese food.”

“You two have taken over my place. You might as well invite Rosie to stay with us, too. How’s she doing?”

Amaro looked pained. “She says it’s a boy. She can tell by how hard he’s kicking her. She wants to name him after me.”

“What an honor. I’m sure she doesn’t take that lightly.”

“In her current state, she doesn’t take anything lightly. Yesterday she called and yelled at me for fifteen minutes because she couldn’t find her slippers. Turns out they were on her feet.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

Yanmeng arrived with a large brown paper bag. Delicious smells arrived with him, but it was hard to pull her thoughts from the events in Washington.

Why couldn’t I have stopped Cocomo’s death? Am I that pathetic compared to Subedei? I should
have thought, should have done, something different. His life slipped through my fingers and I don’t
even know much about him, except that he knew Hound.

She wasn’t looking forward to telling Hound.

Maliha excused herself and went into her bedroom. At least that area looked just as she’d left it. In fact, the door to the bedroom had been closed, as if to give the room itself privacy from the two men.

She called Hound’s phone number.

“Yeah.”

“A man you worked with is dead,” she said, without preamble. “Goes by Cocomo. I was with him when he was killed. You’ll read about it in the news.”

“Cocomo. Damn it, what happened?”

“He called me to D.C., saying he knew something about Nando and Hairy. I was talking to him in a plaza when his throat was slashed.”

“Fuck! You okay?”

“I’m okay.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute and she wondered if he was going to blame her. When he spoke again, he’d put aside whatever grief he felt for another time, a private time.

A medic couldn’t cry in the field.

“What did you learn about the coders?” he asked.

She told him everything she knew, which wasn’t much, and asked him to look into Project CESR. He didn’t ask who did the killing, and she didn’t volunteer. He didn’t express surprise that Cocomo, a man who’d hired him for classified work, had traded his influence for money. That meant he already knew or suspected that Cocomo was, in Hound’s terms, a multifaceted person: adaptable to the circumstances.

Hound surely knew that Maliha fell into the same category, though not for money, and it hadn’t bothered him to work for her.

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He wasn’t aware of her full background. He didn’t know she’d saved him in Vietnam, so there was no problem with him thinking she was a young woman who hadn’t even been alive during that war. For the time being, that’s the way she wanted it. When his aging was apparent and hers wasn’t, she’d have to decide what to do then. With Randy, too. Her girl friend was unaware that the voice on the other end of the phone, and the face across the luncheon table, belonged to someone who wasn’t in her generation, by a long shot.

Or maybe my aging will be apparent sooner than I think. There’s no telling what can happen.

“Be careful poking around on Project CESR. There are some big players in this.”

“I figured that. Cocomo was a fucking big player himself.”

He hung up before she could ask about that.

She took a shower to get rid of the smell of blood she imagined still clinging to her, although she’d washed and gotten rid of her clothing.

I used to tolerate the smell of blood. I’m changing in so many little ways—will I even recognize
myself after another fifty years?

She stared at her face in the mirror.
Will I be here in another fifty years?

A thought flashed through her mind:
Jake and I would have grandchildren by then. Great-grandchildren. Something of me would be passed on.

It wasn’t a new thought for her, but it was the first time she’d linked it to a particular man.

When she went back into the living room, wrapped in a thick terry-cloth robe, she found that the two men had started on the meal without her. The laptops were pushed aside to clear one end of a table. At her place there was a steaming bowl of rice and chopsticks. A teapot sat in the cleared area. When she sat down, she raised her cup and Yanmeng poured tea for her.

She gently tapped the knuckles of her two forefingers on the table, in acknowledgement of his service to her, as he was a senior serving a junior. It was a gentle joke between them, that he was her senior since he appeared older than she did.

It was a tradition that had originated 250 years ago in China. To keep from losing touch with his people, Emperor Ch’ien-lung dressed as a peasant and traveled in the countryside with his guard as his only companion. When the emperor served tea to his guard, the guard wanted to show his respect, but couldn’t fall to his knees because that would risk exposing their identities. Instead the guard placed his two forefingers on the table, as if they were tiny legs, and bent them at the “knee” to indicate that he was kneeling and showing proper respect. Emperor Ch’ien-lung was a popular figure, and the knuckle tap remains to this day as an unobtrusive way to honor someone.

Maliha raised the cup to her face and let the wonderful aroma fill her nostrils. The tea was Lushan Clouds and Mist, her favorite, from a tearoom in California named Teance. The tea grew wild on the mist-shrouded slopes of Lushan Mountain in Southern China. She rested the tea in her mouth and savored its unique buttery taste.