Kingmaker (7 page)

“Don’t wait up,” the king tells his men with a grin that shows the gap in his teeth.

Ki is simply and plainly dressed in a pair of white shorts, a tight, pink cotton top with ruffles, and small white tennis shoes. By the time they reach the boarding ramp, her arms are crossed and she is shivering. There is a man at the base of the stairs who watches with his hands clasped in front of him. He motions with his head for them to ascend, and the king lets Ki go first. They are greeted just inside the plane by another man in a suit and oversized tinted glasses.

“We’re in a bit of a hurry,” the guard says. “We need to wrap this up as quickly as possible.”

The king is adjusting his coat and straightening his tie. He uses his fingers to brush back his hair. “That works for me.”

The guard hands Ki a brush, but addresses the king. “The less said in there, the better. You’re not here for small talk. You two aren’t pals. He’s going to evaluate the product, and if he likes what he sees, he will pay you, and then you will turn around and leave. That’s it. Don’t ask him about his day. Don’t ask him what his favorite team is, or what he thinks the stock market is going to do. Right now, you’re just a delivery boy. Understand?”

“I’m not an idiot,” the king says.

“That wasn’t the question. The question was whether you understand what I just told you.”

The king takes a moment to compose himself before he responds. “Yes.”

Ki is finished with the brush and hands it back to the guard. The guard leans into the lavatory and secures the brush in a pocket beside the basin. The boarding ramp has been withdrawn, and Ki watches the guard from behind as he carefully extends himself out over the runway and reaches for the tether dangling from the hatch. His feet are on the edge of the opening and Ki sees that it is only the grip of one hand on one small rail that keeps the man inside the plane. She looks at the king and then back at the guard as he pulls the heavy hatch closed and seals it.

“I’m not going to search you,” he says as he seals the door, “because you couldn’t possibly be stupid enough to be carrying a weapon. Right?”

“People like me don’t carry weapons,” the king says. “That’s why we hire people like you.”

The guard looks down at the king through his wide tinted glasses. His hair is barely long enough to be called stubble, though he does not appear to be balding. The king is significantly smaller than the guard, but he is unmoved beneath the larger man’s glare.

“And it’s a very good thing for you that you do,” the guard says. “Through there. All the way back.”

There is a single button beside an intricate wooden door whose interlocking triangular panels come from multiple species of trees with grains of differing characteristics. The guard leans around the king to reach the button and the door slides noiselessly to the side. The king waits for Ki to enter first.

The conference room is empty. Dark plush leather chairs are arranged around a table with an active surface on which some sort of heat map of the world is currently displayed. Whatever the map is quantifying, there seems to be more of it in West and Central Africa than in the rest of the world. The door slides closed behind them, and Ki is not sure whether the action was automatic or initiated by the guard. There is a similar door ahead and the king steps around Ki to touch the button.

The rest of the plane is a single long and surprisingly wide compartment. There are islands of blond leather chairs around tables with active displays. The back of the plane ends in a glass staircase leading up to a second level, and beside it is a man sitting on an L-shaped couch with an
old leather book in his lap. The various screens along the walls show the same map as the display in the conference room. The floor is slightly translucent, and Ki can see several vehicles parked end-to-end below them. One reflects several points of light from an abundance of highly polished chrome; one is sleek and angular and an angry shade of red; and at least one is heavily armored and openly weaponized.

Ki is surprised to see that there is another girl on the plane. Her legs are folded beneath her in a big reclining chair, and she is playing a puzzle game on the interactive surface in front of her. Before Ki looks away, she sees that the girl appears older than she is, with long red hair, creamy skin, cool blue eyes, and full red lips.

The man in the back of the plane closes his book and leaves it on the table in front of him as he stands. The leather-bound volume is an anachronism among the glass surfaces and active displays around them. Ki glimpses the Vs and Rs and Ks of a Russian name imprinted along the spine before her view is obscured by its curator.

The man is compact, handsome, and very well dressed, with wavy dark hair and eyebrows that arch in a way that gives him a naturally friendly demeanor. He leans down and picks up a wide leather case which had been stowed beneath the table. From the way the man must compensate, Ki can see that its contents are substantial. He watches Ki with a wide, thin smile as he approaches.

The man nods almost imperceptibly at what he sees before him and motions with his finger for Ki to spin. As she turns, she can see that the other girl’s feet are now on the floor and her hands on the arms of her chair. When Ki turns to face the man again, his smile is significantly broader.

“You will call me
papa
,” the man says with a heavy French accent.

Ki performs a combination of a nod and a bow. The man offers the case to the king, who accepts it with poorly concealed anticipation.

“Lucy will show you to your room and explain the rules,” the Frenchman tells Ki. “When I am ready, I will join you. Now be a good girl and say goodbye to our guest. It is time for him to go.”

Ki turns to the king. She lowers her head and bends her knees in a deep and reverent curtsy, then launches herself off the floor to augment the momentum of her strike. There is the simultaneous hollow thud of Ki’s fist striking the king’s trachea and the crunch of the rings of cartilage
compacting. Since the majority of the impact was absorbed by the king’s windpipe, he is not knocked off his feet, but instead takes a single step backwards before dropping the case and falling to his knees. He is entirely silent as he gropes with horror at the deep and darkening depression in his throat. The crater is sized to Ki’s knuckles, and combined with the swelling and internal bleeding, it prevents oxygen from reaching the king’s lungs and air from activating his larynx. His blond curls quiver and his eyes bulge behind his gold-rimmed glasses as he asphyxiates.

Ki turns and begins moving toward the man who wishes to be called
papa
. The arch in his eyebrows which once conveyed benevolence now communicates shock and terror. His hands move up to protect his face and he steps backwards, which gives Ki even more space to build momentum behind her kick. Her heel strikes just below the man’s sternum, crushing his solar plexus and sending his diaphragm into spasm. He heaves as the air is expelled from his body, and he staggers forward directly into Ki’s palm strike. The cartilage of papa’s nose is shattered and compacted into his sinuses and nasal cavity, and as his head snaps back, the smooth white ceiling is misted red. He collapses with his hands pressed to his face and does his best to scream, but can produce little more than a gurgling wheeze. Ki carefully threads her foot with its clean white tennis shoe through the space between the man’s arms and his neck, falls back onto the floor, and locks her heels. Whatever sounds the man was able to produce before immediately cease. He punches and scratches frantically at Ki’s thigh, and then the blows slow and weaken until his arms fall limp. His eyes are wide, and there are bubbles of blood beneath his nostrils and red foam escaping from one corner of his open mouth.

When Ki stands, she is both exhausted and surging. The crotch of her white shorts is bright red, and her thighs are slick with papa’s blood. The hair she had carefully groomed only moments before is now tangled and falls across her face, blown outward with her heavy breaths. She turns to the front of the plane and sees that the guard has just entered. He levels his pistol at Ki with one hand, but his other hand is over his mouth as he looks down at the two fresh corpses. When he looks up again, Ki can see the horror in the man’s expression. She can see his fingers shaking as the hand over his mouth joins his other hand on the pistol in an attempt to stabilize it. He opens up his stance and bends his knees to steady himself, and as he begins to squeeze the trigger, a small quick foot swings
up between his legs from behind him and crushes his testicles against his pubic bone.

The guard fires a single shot on his way down and Ki hears it whine past her face. The hollow-point frangible round disintegrates as it embeds itself in the acrylic glass staircase behind her. Lucy is looking down at the guard and watching him writhe and then vomit across the semiopaque floor. His glasses are gone. The girl squats down for the pistol, stands, and the man’s eyes widen as she fires a shot through his forehead and into the floor. The guard relaxes and seems to watch impassively the wave of blood from the back of his head push against the pool of yellow bile before him.

Both girls spin toward the door when they hear it open. A helix of smoke from the pistol is turning lazily in the light and the air tastes metallic. The pilot stays just inside the conference room. She is small with straight black hair that stops right at the patches on her shoulders. The look on her face is neither alarm nor terror. She makes no attempt to turn and run, and Lucy does not raise the pistol.

“You have two choices,” Ki tells the pilot. She is still breathing heavily, but she is in control. “You can either come in and join them, or you can take what’s in that case and fly us out of here.”

The pilot looks up from the floor, then shakes her head. “The case is yours,” she says with remarkable composure. “Now, where do you two want to go?”

One entire wall of Alexei’s Los Angeles office was a screen. When it was in standby mode, it defaulted to an interactive map which panned and centered on the locations of whatever new incoming events matched his filters, presenting key metrics and algorithmically derived synopses beside geographical points of interest. It also recorded all ambient noise in the room in a small buffer, which it analyzed using a multidimensional neural network. If it found patterns consistent with Alexei’s voiceprint, it attempted to distinguish requests or questions by matching certain acoustic properties—inflection, intonation, modulation, and pitch—with a specific set of predetermined keywords. Whenever the computer was sufficiently confident that it was being addressed, it went from
hearing
what was being said in the room to actually
listening
.

“Emma,” Alexei prompted. He used a plasma torch to light a long black cigarette, plucked a tobacco shaving from the tip of his tongue, then tossed the lighter back onto the desk.

The voice that emanated from the wall of well over a hundred million quad-color photoelectric acoustic pixels was that of a pleasant and unassuming British female.

“Yes, Alexei?”

“Center the map on West Africa. Sierra Leone.”

The map panned and zoomed until the West African coastal nation filled the wall. Thick smoke wafted among Alexei’s whiskers as he spoke.

“Show me real-time human population density.”

A heat map overlay emerged. The cities of Bo, Kenema, Koidu Town, and Makeni were warm, but the majority of heat was in the westernmost region between the Sierra Leone River estuary and the coast of the North Atlantic.

“Center on Freetown.”

The image didn’t move. “Are you referring to Old Freetown, now officially known as New Guangdong?”

Alexei looked at the screen with mild irritation. “Obviously.”

The map panned to the New Guangdong peninsula.

“Center on the most densely populated coordinate.”

The hottest region was eased into the center of the screen.

“Zoom in… Zoom in… Tell me what I’m looking at.”

“Xi Jinping Square.”

“Show the real-time satellite feed.”

The view that emerged looked to Alexei like blurry, multicolored static. It took him a moment to understand that the undulating pointillism was the top-down perspective of a mass of humanity.

“Give me recent keywords associated with this region.”

“From which sources, please?”

“All international news feeds.”

“How recent?”

“Let’s start with five days.”

“Protest. Demonstration. Occupation. Strike. Resistance. Civil disobedience. African Spring.”

“How many people are contained in the present view.”

“Approximately 1.8 million.”

“How many people were in this same view one month ago?”

“Approximately 1.6 million.”

“Two months ago?”

“Approximately 1.47 million.”

“How many people do you predict will be in this view sixty days from now?”

“Approximately 1.9 to 2.2 million.”

“Graph population density in the selected region over the last six months.”

Alexei absentmindedly rubbed his scalp with the tips of the fingers in which his cigarette was clinched. As he studied the positive slope, he felt
his ring vibrate. He paused as the sensation continued and determined that the pattern was not familiar. When he pulled his handset out and checked the screen, he saw that there was no available information: no name, no image, no domain, no affiliation, and no location. He stepped forward and touched the soft silicon surface of the wall with his other hand, and the call was transferred, but rather than a video feed on top of the map, the call box showed a generic human silhouette. The column of data beneath read “Unknown” all the way down.

Alexei’s tone was guarded. “Yes?”

“Am I speaking with Alexei Drovosek?” The name was grossly mispronounced. Alexei could already sense self-importance and arrogance in the young man’s voice.

“Who’s this?”

“It doesn’t matter who I am. What matters is the friends we have in common.”

“And who would that be?”