Flowers in a Field of Evil is a rather trashy little adventure romance written in the spirit of old fashioned comic books. It is available for publication, as is its sequel, Passion in an Improper Place, a tale of Amazonian adventure.
Copyright: Glenn Cheney 1997
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Ysa sat in her rented Oldsmobile in the parking lot of the Chelseatown Savings Bank, right next to the spot reserved for the handicapped, as near as she could get to the bank door. She breathed the way the Buddhists had taught her in Burma. As she inhaled, she brought in calmness. After holding it for a second, she then turned it around and exhaled tension. She inhaled more calmness, exhaled more tension, inhaled more calmness, exhaled more tension. All the breathing got the car windows all foggy as her breath and sweat cooled in the early spring air.
Should she leave the engine running, she wondered, when she went into the bank? If not, should she leave the keys in the ignition. Or should she take them with her? With a deep sense of foreboding, she realized she had not thought this out well enough. She had not prepared herself sufficiently for the robbing of a bank, not even Chelseatown Savings.
On the other hand, people far dumber than she had robbed banks far larger than this. High school dropouts had done it, and for much the same reason: She needed the money. She needed fifty grand, maybe more. Squirreling it away from her nurse's salary wouldn't work. As soon as she got a certain phone call from a certain friend in Burma, She needed to have cash in hand. Fifty thousand smackeroos. With a little luck, the Chelseatown Savings might have half of that. It was a practice bank. She'd move up from there.
Despite her inexperience, Ysa knew an AK-47 would do the trick. She pulled the long, heavy flower box from the back seat, trying to make it look light, as if it held long-stem roses. A nice man in a bow-tie, smiling, held the bank door for her. Inside, she laid the box across the chest-high counter in the middle of the room.
"Excuse me," she said to a young woman who had to move her purse, baby and deposit slip out of the way. The baby slept in a plastic basket contraption with a handle over the top, a cross between a picnic basket and a car seat. Ysa kept her head down so her neck-length corn-husk hair hung around her face, hiding it from the bank's three video surveillance cameras.
"No problem," the woman tittered cheerfully. "Who's that for?" She tipped her head at the long, white flower box.
"I'm afraid it a little hard to explain." Ysa let her soft voice caress the woman. She lifted open the box. The woman peered in, her face bright with the hope of smelling roses, From beneath her black beret, Ysa rolled a black nylon stocking down around her head. The little mother, still looking down, noticed nothing amiss until Ysa folded back the white tissue. Where roses should have lain, her nasty little machine gun crouched like something evil. "Please believe me," Ysa said to the mother. "It's for a good cause."
The young woman's breath stopped short and her eyes bulged from their sloppy circles of eyeliner. Softly, as apologetic as she could, Ysa said, "Please, lie down."
The woman remained frozen until Ysa snapped the banana clip in place and jerked the chamber back to bring up the first round. With the butt of the gun tight against her hip, she aimed the weapon at the ceiling. She had never done this before, not with an AK-47. All she expected was noise. She did not like noise, and she did not want to pull a trigger, but she did. She yanked it, and the staccato thunder surprised her as much as it did everyone else in the bank. The weapon jumped and jerked as if alive, roaring as if angry beyond all control. Ysa, shocked by its power, wrestled to keep it in her grip and aimed upward. She kept her finger on the trigger until the clip had emptied. The five seconds of thunder gave her time to wonder if maybe that was what an erection felt like. The suddenly empty clip brought her back to the bank. She knew what to do next. She hollered, "Everybody on the floor!"
The weapon did indeed do its trick. Before the last shell tinkled to the faux marble floor and rolled to a rest, the half-dozen people in the little bank had dropped from sight. In the sudden silence, the slow swirl of fuzz from shot-up ceiling tile looked like the last gasp of a snow shower. The air reeked of gun smoke.
The young woman lay on the floor, her baby beneath her. "No, please, not my little girl," she sobbed. "No, God, please..."
The next step in traditional bank robbery called for a quick emptying of the cash drawers and an assault on the safe. But the woman on the floor looked so scared and pathetic. Ysa dropped to one knee beside her, her leg bending easily in her loose camouflage fatigues. "Hey kid," she said soothingly, setting a hand on the woman's shuddering shoulder blade. "Don't worry. I wouldn't hurt you. And certainly not a baby." The baby's eyes looked like they couldn't decide whether to cry or laugh.
Why did he have to pick that moment to come through the glass doors from the parking lot? The blue-eyed Jock himself, looking so dumb and innocent, so casual in his plain vanilla sweat suit. "Oh, gee," his blue eyes seemed to say. "What is this? A bank robbery?" His hands rose as far as his waist, gingerly yet with a hint of confidence.
The blue-eyed Jock - the only guy at the Olympic Gym whose eyes never slurped over Ysa's Lycra-sheathed thighs and chest. The only guy who might have finished high school and gone on to learn to breathe through his nose, the only guy who ever thought to mop his sweat off the Rowmeister, the weight bench, the sit-up mat, the only one who ever went to the big screen TV and asked her what she'd like to watch. He'd looked at her that time, straight in her Dutch-green eyes.
And now here, again, forty miles away, in the Chelseatown Bank, he was looking straight through her mask and into her Dutch-greens again. What were the odds? To her surprise, she suddenly associated him not with the stench of a gym but with sweet essence of a soap that slinked through the gunsmoke. From inside her stocking, he looked shaded, distant, unreal. Still, it seemed he could see right through it to lock onto her eyes.
Any half-professional bank robber would have dropped him on the spot, erased the only witness who could ID her. She knew that. She'd thought about it, had planned what to do about it...planned up to the point of actually having to do it. She'd figured she'd know what to do when the time came. She had not figured what to do if she had already run out of ammunition. So she stood there looking and feeling like an utter idiot.
And he stood, looking like an old buddy wanting in on the joke. He didn't turn and run. He didn't fall to his knees and beg for mercy. He just looking at her with incredulity until his face shifted to a look of urgency and he said, "Well, don't just stand there. Get the money."
Oh yeah: the money.
"Down on the floor, Meatball!" She roared it the way she'd practiced, going for form the way her father had always taught her. The Jock would have to assume she still had a few rounds in the clip.
"Finger off the trigger, Airhead!" His voice, fearless, echoed hers but in a convincing, military baritone.
Oh yeah: the trigger. She still had her forefinger curled so tight around it that her knuckle shined white. She hadn't noticed; he had. Not your average Jock.
"Just don't move," she said, almost requesting it but still keeping the machine gun trained on him as if it still held some threat. She moved around to the little gate that led to the teller area, stepped over it and saw three women - two tellers and at best an assistant manager - lying face down on the linoleum. She also saw the big red button at one teller station. A little red light glowed in the center of it. That meant state police on the way. In a village like this, they'd take at lest five minutes to arrive, but surely no more than eight or ten.
Ysa ripped open the cash drawer. The smell of old bills blossomed up - the sour smell of ones and fives, not the crisp scent of hundreds. She snatched up short stacks of twenties and fifties and a couple of hundreds, altogether not enough to cover the cost of a used machine gun. She stepped to the next drawer. Locked, and by the hollow sound of it, probably empty. She stepped to the next. More hundreds but still less than a grand. She wished her father had taught her to swear. She knew the word she would have said, but her father had taught her well. She could not utter it, not even when she heard the bullhorn outside: "POLICE! YOU ARE SURROUNDED. DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!"
She looked out through the drive-up window. Outside, in the parking lot, a town cop stood alone behind a dark blue Ford Galaxy that had seen at least a decade of hard service.
Why at that moment did she turn to the blue-eyed Jock? Why did he have to look so apologetic? Why did she want to surrender to him, to his arms, to hand him the whole stupid mess and let him deal with it while she slept? "Now what?" he said, seemingly sorry.
She didn't know. She just looked at him. Below her, between the boots of her widespread feet, a teller wept. Ysa wanted to weep, too, to just lie down and weep. She forgot, for a moment, why he'd decided to rob a bank. Then she remembered: Soong Tan. The doll-like face materialized before her but faded instantly.
An ambulance came hooting into the parking lot, lights flashing in a jittery panic, as nervous and eager as a puppy.
With his eyes the Jock locked onto her attention. His forefinger pointed at her and curled to call her over. "Stay down!" she ordered the people behind the counter, and she moved toward him.
He whispered quietly enough that the blubbering young mother on the floor could not hear. "I think I can get us out of this," he said.
Us? she wondered. Since when had they become partners? She felt torn between hating this man for his presumptions and loving him for offering a way out. She didn't know if she'd prefer to surrender to him or to the police.
She lowered her gun and all resistance. What else could she do? She had no exit, no ammo, no ideas whatsoever.
He moved quickly, pulling the white tissue from the flower box and folding it into a long, sloppy rectangle. From his pocket he pulled a black Swiss knife. It's blade, the little one, looked as sharp as a razor. "Only for you, sweetness," he said, and with a quick, short movement slit into the tip of his pinky. His face showed no sign of pain as his bright red blood dribbled onto the tissue. As soon as the paper had sopped up an ugly red puddle, he whispered, "Lie down."
"But..."
"Now," he said more firmly. "Unless you've got a better idea."
She had no ideas, better or worse. She lay on her back at his feet and didn't question it when he took up her machine gun. Barely daring to move, she watched as he set the gun in a teller's window, the barrel pointing into the room as if aimed by someone. When he knelt and lifted back her nylon mask, he seemed to emerge from another dimension, turning from shades of gray to full color. His blue eyes were flecked with tan the color of new canvas. He had a tiny dimple - or was it an old scar? - in the center of his chin. The blood on the tissue almost looked candy-sweet as he laid it across her forehead and half her face. The sweetness of his soap blended with stiff smell of blood. The combination soothed her.
"This is a long shot," he said. "Real long. Can you look dead for me?" He said it the same way she told her little patients to say Ahhh.
Look dead? No problem. She lowered her eyelids, pulled them down like shades, gave herself to the darkness. She heard the glass doors open and the Jock shout, "Da Silva! FBI!"
Oh, God. How stupid! Airhead, indeed. She'd handed herself and her weapon to a federal agent. But what kind of federal agent bleeds for a bank robber? She looked up past her forehead at the door. The Jock held his open wallet so the cop outside could see.
"We've got one wounded in here!" he shouted. "They'll let you send in one man with a stretcher. Better hurry!"
He returned to her. His icy blue eyes didn't seem to see her. They kept moving, darting around as if searching for urgent information. "Dead," he said. "Look good and dead."
She heard the stretcher bang into the glass doors. The Jock - Da Silva? He looked more Swedish than Portuguese - opened the door and said, "Be cool. They've got a gun on us. There's the victim. Head wound - don't touch it."
Two pairs of hands wiggled beneath her. She knew the feel of his. She'd seen them in the gym, the sinuous arteries curling under a light fuzz of transparent hair, and she had imagined them beneath her. But not like this, not lifting her onto a stretcher. She shifted her urge to giggle into something close to a grimace and shudder of pain. "I've got the back," the Jock said, lifting his end of the stretcher. "Let's move it."
Then clean air washed over her and sunlight played across her eyelids. When they slid her into the ambulance, she stayed good and dead though she could smell him beside her. The ambulance took off with a squall of hoots and blasts of the air horn. "Faster!" the Jock called.
Cold nervous fingers - not his - pulled up her sleeve. A blood pressure cuff tightened around her arm, then slowly loosened. "That's odd," the EMT said in a snively voice. "A hundred and eighteen over eighty-nine. Perfectly normal."
"Probably hyped up on coke," the Jock said. "She probably can't feel a thing."
She cracked open her eyes as if semi-conscious. How could he think so fast, she wondered. No doubt a compulsive liar. And here she lay, trusting him with her life.
"Hold on sweetie," he said. "We'll make it."
She let her eyes close. Of all the ridiculous things to remember, she saw herself at the age of six, wrapped in her father's arms, the back of her head against his chest, her ears warm in the down of his ski jacket. Hold on, sweetie. Death stretched before her, the long, long ramp of a ski jump, miles long, it seemed, almost straight down to an abrupt, upswept end. Far, far below, the slope of snow raced into a valley that seemed to end in a misty thicket of evergreens. Her skis, parallel between his and so short in comparison, pointed toward the plunge. There, then, at the age of six, barely old enough to read, she saw, with certainty, the proximity of her death. It awaited her, as soft and vague as the fog at the bottom of the valley. She would fly into it, locked in her father's strong arms, secure, happy, accepting. If her father said die, she would die. No problem.
But she didn't die. "Form," he reminded her, his Dutch accent softening the vowel and smoothing out the r. His arms tightened as he tipped forward to begin the slide downward. "Form. Hold ze form. It iss everysing."
The form: the skis even, toes out in a vee, tips raised slightly, and you have to lean forward, lean into your death, into the emptiness you are flying through. Everything inside you screams, "Stop! Turn around! Scramble back!" But that, of course, means death. To hold your form, your courage, and to fly full-force into what you've started, that is life and the only way to live.
She did it. At the age of six she knew what some people don't suspect until they reach the age of rickety joints and bowel problems. And now, lying in an ambulance, looking dead but feeling more alive than ever, she understood how she'd gotten into this fix. She understood how she'd dared. She'd have thanked her father if he still lived, but more important she'd ask him what to do now. As she felt a strong, gentle hand on her shoulder and a soothing lying voice say, "You'll be all right, you'll be all right," she could almost feel her daddy's hand and hear him telling her to hold her form and lean into it.
The Jock, too damned smart to let the ambulance take them to the hospital where the state police - real police - no doubt waited, directed the driver to a walk-in clinic. They rushed the semi-conscious victim inside and transferred her to an examination table. The Jock slipped the EMT an impressive wad of cash and sent him on his way. Within two minutes, Ysa had the traces of blood washed from her forehead and the Jock had phoned for a cab. The two of them, talking fast and making little sense - something about a drill, the wrong clinic, sorry for the inconvenience - apologized their way past a confused doctor and her bevy of curious staff.
Ysa felt the most terrifying moment of the day just after the Jock directed the driver to West Broad Street and Main. With a note of parental admonishment, he said, "I hope you didn't rent that car in your own name."
She hadn't. But how did he know she'd rented the car, the one back in the bank parking lot? No doubt he also knew she'd left her Porsche at the train station, among the commuter's cars, the final step of a perfect disappearing act. If a certain somebody hadn't butted in, she would have thought of a way to slip out of the bank and speed off in her rented Olds. She'd have driven three miles to a mall parking lot where she'd put the original plates back on the rented car, then drive calmly to the train station to return the car to the friendly rental agency. From there she'd take her own car home, just in time to change and get back to work after a long lunch break.
Except a certain somebody had gotten in the way. And obviously not by coincidence. And now he had her on her way to the busiest corner in downtown Pleasant Hills, Virginia, when all her instincts told her to head for the deepest, darkest hideaway she could find.
His eyes examined her face until he said, "I guess we have some talking to do." They lingered long on her lips, which she'd painted black for her brief fling at crime. She couldn't tell if he looked at them with desire or disgust. She genuinely hoped the latter.
"Yes," she said, lifting one eyebrow to a critical angle. "At least you need to do some talking."
"Me?" he blurted loudly enough to draw the cabbie's eye in the mirror. Jock shifted tone to something closer to a hard whisper. "Me? You're the one robbing a goddam bank!"
With an incisive tcht she turned her head and crossed her arms over her chest. She didn't need this guy, and she didn't need to do any talking for his benefit. For all she cared, he could go back to his gym and sit in a puddle of somebody else's sweat until kingdom come. What did he want from her? Why did she have to do the talking? All she'd done was rob a bank. He'd walked in on it. By coincidence?
Most certainly not.
Though looking out the window, she felt him watching her. He said nothing until his right hand reached out to float above her lap, palm up. "I guess it's time I introduced myself," he said. Hs hand waited for hers. It hovered too close to ignore. To get rid of it, she gave it a cold, perfunctory shake, then dismissed it like a dead thing. Still turned toward the window, she said, "Don't tell me. Da Silva, right?. FBI."
He chuckled. "McCracken. Kit McCracken. Former FBI."
That turned her around. Again he had the apologetic look, his lips pulled back taut, forcing dimples into his cheeks not unlike the one in his chin. They formed a perfect equilateral triangle. "That Da Silva stuff," he admitted. "I just made it up."
Whatever he made up, past, present or future, she'd believe it. She knew that now. She knew smooth when she saw it, and she knew herself defenseless before it.
"OK, Kit," she said, making it perfectly clear that she neither believed nor disbelieved that name. "Now tell me how you happened to walk into my bank."
With an urgent gesture of the hand she'd just shook, he hushed her down. "Your bank?" he whispered harshly. "I suppose you own it?"
"I did for a good two minutes. Till you showed up."
"Look, I'm sorry. But I was worried. I had a feeling you were going to do something stupid."
Former FBI? Who did he work for now, the CIA? Did he know her every move, her every thought? God help her if he knew her thoughts. She didn't even know them yet, though she recalled a few from the gym. And if he did know her thoughts, he already knew about Soong Tan and Burma and her father and that bastard Hans Liszt-Schmidtmeister and her desperate need for fifty thousand dollars. She needed it far more than the bank did, and if it took an AK-47 to separate the bank from its cash, well, she had better words than stupidity for it. Granted, she might have picked a bigger bank, one with a little loot in its drawers. Next time she would. And further from home, too. Further from him and the rest of the clods from the gym. Yes, she'd rob another bank, and she'd do it right. As soon as she saved enough for another machine gun.
"That little assault rifle of yours," he said, a dubious grin on half his face. "That's a really very dangerous item."
"Thank you. I thought I chose well." What an utter jerk, she thought. What else was a Russian machine gun if not dangerous? How stupid did he think she was?
"You didn't choose well when you chose to shoot up the ceiling back there! Where do you think those bullets went?"
"Up?"
"Right. Then down. Then off the walls, off the floor. You're damned lucky you didn't kill yourself. I knew that weapon was going to get in trouble as soon as I saw it..."
"And just where did you see it?"
His face shifted, withdrawing itself for a moment of tactical reflection. With a nod of OK, I'll tell you, he said, "I'm sorry. I saw it in your closet. I attached a tracking device because I just knew..."
"IN MY CLOSET! JUST WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU..."
"Shhh-shhhh-shhh." His hand motioned her voice downward. She caught the cabbie checking her in the mirror again. She regrouped, got hold of herself, clammed up tight and twisted hard away from him.
He took her hand. He merely set his strong, tan, blonde-haired hand atop hers where it rested on her thigh, but her hand felt taken. Though his lay only lightly upon it, it could no more pull away than she could dive out the taxi cab door. "I have much to explain," he said in a deep whisper. "You'd be wise to let me."
She felt half raped. If he'd searched her closet, God knows where else he'd stuck his idiotic Jock face. Her diary. Her letters. Her underwear drawer. The bastard. What right did he think he had? She had half a mind to call the police, but the other half stepped in quickly to give her a couple good reasons why not. Instead, she wished she had a big brother with a big gun and a couple of big friends. She'd get this guy one way or the other.
"OK," she said, her voice rancid with bitterness. "Explain."
"This is hardly the place for it, and we hardly have time. He looked ahead through the windshield, spotting landmarks. The cab had just one more traffic light before the corner of West Broad. "How about lunch?"
"No way."
He removed his hand from hers. Cool air settled onto the moist warmth he left behind. "Look," he said, visibly nervous - maybe mad, maybe hurt, maybe just frustrated. "OK. I don't blame you. I understand. But...we're going to have to talk. But before we do, I need to know something."
She didn't care what he thought he needed to know. She needed to know a few things herself. Like what the hell he was doing in her closet? Like what the hell difference did it make to him what she did with her machine gun? Like who the hell did he think he was? As much as she wanted to get out of the cab and walk away and never see this man again, she also suspected she really did need to know what he wanted to tell her.
"Try me," she said. "You get one question. Then I want some answers."
"I have a lot more questions than one, but let's start with the obvious. Why was a nice nurse like you robbing a bank?"
"I needed the money."
"That's the usual reason. I don't suppose you thought of applying for a loan?"
"I need the money now. Today. Fifty grand. I don't have time to wait for some loan officer to think about it."
"What's the rush?
She pulled away from him, turned to look out the window. But then she turned back, and without knowing why, blurted out, "I need to buy a kid."
McCracken turned and tilted his head. Elongated crevices appeared at the corners of his lips. She could see how somebody might think he was cute. Maybe too cute. She didn't trust too-cute men. She knew what they could do to her.
"You need to buy a kid," he repeated pensively. "I can see how that might make it hard to get a loan. There's always that question of collateral. Is this any kid in particular or will any kid do?"
"You wouldn't know her. She's in Burma."
"Burma! Funny you should mention that. That's exactly what I wanted to talk about. But tell me about your kid."
"She's not my kid..."
"Right. Not till you dig up the asking price. I understand."
"Do you? I suppose you've never heard about the slave market in Burma? You can take your pick of kids. A little girl, perhaps? Perhaps something in a little boy? For whatever purpose you desire."
"Fifty grand? That's the highest price I ever heard."
Ysa looked at him suspiciously. He'd spoken with a calm, knowing seriousness. Kit McCracken knew Burma, she could tell. "Fifty grand," she confirmed. "You pay extra if she's got green eyes."
Did she see a thought flicker through his eyes, which were looking directly into hers? He nodded for her to go ahead.
"Her name's Soong Tan. I happen to know she's being held somewhere in Burma, and the asking price for a girl of that age happens to be about twenty grand in U.S. dollars. I've heard she's on the market for a lot more. I have to get her before somebody else does."
"Go on."
The cab pulled up to the curb at the corner of West Broad. With an overwhelming sensation of stupidity, she realized she'd spilled her beans without extracting a word of explanation from him. "That's enough," she said. "You don't need to know about Soong Tan. You need to do some talking."
'Yes," he said. "I do. But I want to know more about Soong Tan. Maybe we can help."
Ysa, felt faint with breathlessness. She wanted to kill this man. She had almost decided that. She also knew she'd fail if she tried, as surely as she'd failed to rob the most pathetic little bank in the world. She'd fail and he'd pick her up and apologize, damn him, for her failure. Dizzy from lack of air, she felt herself swirling toward him, and she might have toppled into him if the cabbie hadn't growled, "You gettin' out or what?"
"From here you should take a cab to somewhere near to but not at the train station," Kit murmured. "Walk casually. Drive carefully. And don't worry about the rental car. It will be taken care of." Without a word of sarcasm he slipped a twenty into her hand. She took it the way she'd have taken a death sentence. She felt the simultaneous resignation, gratitude and crushing regret of a bank robber accepting fare for a getaway cab.
The cab and Kit floated off, and Ysa van der Meer, former bank robber, floated off in another cab and then into her own car and then somehow, as if in a dream, to her own home and then, with blessed relief, onto her bed, there to convulse with tears that would not come. Her stomach jittered with abdominal sobs, and her face felt the numbness produced by a good cry. But cry she could not. Something stopped her, something mysterious and instinctive, a gut feeling of something good about to happen - that or something very, very bad.
She slept deeply, awakening only hours later and quite unsure of the difference between what she'd dreamed and what she'd really done.
That man - he'd been inside her. He knew everything. Still on her bed, not yet alert, she let her mind wander her house while she watched what it found. It poked through her cabinets and saw an amazing collection of Asian china and Polish crystal, no two pieces matching, each a work of art in itself. It grazed through her refrigerator, noting the abundance of oriental vegetables and Scandinavian cheeses. It raided her medicine cabinet to check the brands of her toothpaste, her aspirin, her pills, the scant ingredients of her essentially natural beauty. It rummaged through her closet, smelling her clothes, examining her shoes, flipping through old letters from friends of yore, receipts for everything from motor oil to hotel rooms, canceled checks made out to the light company, Greenpeace, Granta magazine, Save the Children, cash. It pawed through her undies drawer, noting her bra size and preference for underwire support, her panties in every color of the rainbow plus a few others, her tutti-frutti gym clothes, her winter socks, her astounding assortment of southeast Asian jewelry made of bamboo, bone, stone, seeds, feathers, beads of unimaginable source, and in just the right spots, studs and flecks of ruby, emerald, amethyst, aquamarine, diamond. Her wandering mind flipped through her scrapbook to gaze at pictures of her father on the gangplank of a riverboat on the Irrawaddy, his wide, puffy Dutch cheekbones aglow with intelligence; her mother at a picnic outside of Zurich; herself, no more than eight years old, on a yak in Tibet; the newspaper clipping from the International Herald Tribune reporting the atrocity of child slavery in Burma, Thailand, Laos, quoting her father, Karl van der Meer, Ambassador to Burma, vowing to stop at nothing to do away with the most barbarous business in the world.
He did not mention Soong Tan in that article, but Ysa knew who obsessed his mind - that little girl, just five years old at the time, reported snatched from her mother in some rural province, sold to a trader, sighted here and there, identifiable by her green eyes, the inheritance of a European sailor or soldier of fortune from generations back. Ysa's father had told her where his obsession came from. In little Soong Tan's eyes he saw his own daughter, and nothing in the world, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing horrified him more than to imagine his little Ysa traded like a used car as she passed from pimp to whorehouse to pornographer to sweatshop, the rounds of Hell through which thousands of kids passed each day.
"Picture a black boot coming down on tiny wildflowers," he said to Ysa one early evening on the embassy veranda. They were drinking mango juice with Finnish vodka. "The little flowers are the children, and the boot is Rok Mon. I just can't turn my back on that."
He so desperately wanted to find the little girl. He had the embassy's CIA operative on the look out. He had friends pose as porn merchants checking out the Burmese meat market. He himself went into the jungles along the Irrawaddy and into the mountains of the north, into the slums of Rangoon. He offered rewards to the men who controlled the underground traffic in heroin, opium, arms, children, slaves and prostitutes. He went in helicopters with Marine escorts. He went in buses and river boats, alone. The State Department told him not to go tromping around the country like some kind of a hippy, but he kept going, kept getting wind of his little Soong. Apparently she'd become quite the investment, her price rising as she traded hands and approached adolescence. Rumor had it that her virginity remained intact. Those who bought her might have desired it, but they also saw its resale value.
"She has become too expensive to consume," he said that night on the veranda. "And she's too risky to keep. She'll keep trading hands until someone very, very rich takes possession. Rok Mon's my bet. He will consume her, and then she will begin the long spiral down."
Rok Mon was the king of all Asian underworld kings. He owned the Burmese government. His powerful fingers reached into the palaces and parliaments of a dozen countries. He had rocket launchers that would shoot down any helicopter entering his air space. He had armies that would stop the ambassador's Marines a hundred miles short of Rok's bunker.
So Ambassador van der Meer went alone, armed with nothing but the confidence that he'd think of something when he got there and that somewhere, way back there, he had the United States government behind him. When he failed to return, a contingent of Marines went out in three Blackhawks secretly flown in from Thailand. They found the charred skeleton of the car. A peasant led them to a shallow grave. The Marines transferred the dismembered remains to a dark green body-bag. Tests confirmed them the property of a sole survivor, Ms. Ysa van der Meer. State paid for a modest funeral, awarded Ysa a modest settlement, and blamed the murder on bandits of no political persuasion.
Ysa added her shovel of dirt to his grave at Arlington Cemetery some five years before her fruitless attack on Chelseatown National. At the age of 22, an orphan, she plunked her settlement down on a used Porsche 911S and an ante-bellum farmhouse embedded in a hundred and twenty acres of old forest in the hills of Virginia, ten miles from a town with sidewalks and a full day's drive from Arlington. In twenty-seven years she'd have the mortgage all paid off. From the outside, the house seemed mostly roof, its high slant cut by dormers and reaching high enough to cause snow to slide off before it built up. Inside, the house had a European coziness. The living room, the downstairs bedroom and both upstairs bedrooms had little fireplaces. The eight-pane windows, swathed in heavy linen curtains, let in soft, indirect light muted by the surrounding forest. The wide chestnut floorboards had warped into a landscape of angles. The interior doors, too, had warped, so the bathroom door needed to be kicked to get it closed and yanked to get it open, and the bedroom door wouldn't stay shut no matter how hard she kicked it. But she rarely had visitors besides little Jimmy, the paperboy, who so far had not needed the bathroom, and she didn't care if the bedroom door stayed open wide enough for her ferrets to slip in and out.
It took Ysa a good two years to realize that although her father had died, Soong Tan still lived. His obsession grew within her. Her pleading with old friends - friends? Ha! - at State led nowhere. In fact, they told her that if she ever returned to Burma, they'd have her arrested at Rangoon International, her passport confiscated, and her return to the U.S. made one-way and immediate.
Her head still drowsy with tears, Ysa rolled off her bed and headed for the refrigerator to drown her sorrows in a bowl of lo-fat granola. She noticed the blinking light on her answering machine. She hesitated. Did she want to hear a message from anyone, anyone in the world? No. Did she want to hear a human voice? No. Did she want to hear miraculous news of Soong Tan? Yes.
She touched the Play button and first heard the distant white-noise of an overseas phone call, but it lasted only long enough for one syllable to come through, just a "...-lo-..." and then it died. Before she finished wondering which of a hundred overseas acquaintances it might have been, the answering machine went on to a message from her friend, Susan, who lived not in another country but in a condominium just a few miles away. Susan didn't need a foreign country for adventure. She lived in her own personal soap opera, most of it of her own making, much of it just in her mind:
"Ysa you won't believe what happened this guy Peter I was going to go out with but then didn't because Moi read my numbers and said I better wait for a full moon, did I tell you that? That's what she said, a full moon, which isn't until next month, if you know what I mean, but anyway, it was good because Chuck - remember Chuck? - called and he was crying and he said he loved me except I think he was stoned on something because that's how he gets so I go 'Love, Chuck? Love? What's that? What's that got to do with anything?' and he goes 'It's got everything to do with everything.' and I go 'Yeah well maybe but not for us.' Can you believe I actually said that? Well then he says he wants to borrow my car and I says, 'Borrow my car?' and he says, 'Yeah,' because he wrecked his, and he gave me some bullshit about how it wasn't his fault he wasn't drunk or anything and I thought oh yeah right since when in the last five years haven't you been drunk so I said 'No of course you can't borrow my car,' and he said, 'Pleeeeeze,' and I said, 'No,' and he said, 'Pleeeeeze,' and I said, 'No, no way!' and he goes, 'Why not?' and I go, 'You know I really don't need this,' and you know what I did Ysa? I hung up. Just like that. Boom. No more Chuck. I know, I know: again. Well, this time it's for real. I mean really real as long as I can make it to the next full moon and then go out with Pete. Maybe I should say as long as Pete can make it to the next full moon, which is why I called. Could I trust you to go out with Pete until then? Moi says that might work. She says I can trust you, which of course I always did, but now Moi says I really can so I really do. So, like, could you just kind of keep him busy for a couple of weeks, string him along, just keep him from going out with somebody else - like that Irene witch who was at the bar when I met him and who was all over him even though he just kept looking at me and looking at me like he was in love or something. Is that possible? Can a man really fall in love? Or are they just trying to get into your pants? And the one that you want to get into your pants, how come he always falls in love with somebody else? I don't know why I'm asking you, you never fall in love with anybody, which is why I'm trusting you with Pete. I don't get it. God gives you the best legs in the world and the tits of a goddess and you stay home very night reading books. I just don't get it, I just don't get it, but if you want to out with Pete for me and I can trust you, could you call me right back? How come you never call me back except when I'm not home? Good-bye."
Halfway though her granola Ysa began associating Susan's voice with every lo-fat food product ever produced. She couldn't finish. Though hungry she could eat no more - of anything. She left the milky leftovers on the floor for Roger and Hammerstein, her ferrets. She hadn't actually seen them in days. They usually came in at night and lapped up whatever she left for them, then crawled into bed with he, burrowing beneath the covers and her flannel nightshirt in search of a warm place to nest. One tended to favor the soft plain of her stomach or the rounded ridge of her hip. The other - she didn't know which; they were both the same - nestled between her breasts, his little black nose gently huffing against her carotid artery.
It hadn't occur to her before, but Roger's and Hammerstein's origin might have hinted at her future as a bank robber. She'd rescued them from the Beauville dog pound. According to the story in the newspaper, someone had turned in a neighbor who had been raising these "wild and unpredictable animals." Apparently any animal not a standard house pet was considered either a wild animal or a farm animal, neither of which was allowed within city limits. So a sheriff showed up at some little girl's house and demanded her ferrets, who at that point were still named Softie and Smoothie. The newspaper reported that they would be "put to sleep" within ten days if no court papers were filed. On the tenth day, Ysa took a tour of the pound, supposedly in search of a nice dog. The warden let her wander alone among the rows of cages. Dozens of captive dogs whined and pleaded, standing up against the chain link walls, their front paws frantically digging, their long pink tongues dripping with desperation. She wanted to take them all home, but she had come for ferrets.
As she had hoped, she found them in a chicken wire cage at the back of the kennel, visibly terrified by all the barking and the putrid smell of dog droppings. The little scissors on her Swiss army knife were enough to snip the thin wire in just a couple of places. The ferrets, true to their fame, were slim enough to slip through, and they offered no resistance when she tucked them into a gunny sack tunnel she'd tied around her waste, under her blouse and sweater. She walked right out - cool, far cooler than she'd been in the Chelseatown Savings.
Maybe the difference between a dog kennel and a member of the FDIC was the same as the difference between her and a real bank robber. The thought, with that image, was depressing. Ysa looked deconsolately at a container of Swiss double dark chocolate ice cream in the freezer, wondering how she could so strongly not want even a spoonful. She didn't want ice cream or Susan's problems or Pete or all the money in the Chelseatown Bank. She wanted to sip mango juice and vodka with her father on the embassy residence veranda at sundown. She wanted to find Soong Tan and take her by the hand to the grave at Arlington and say, "I found her. She's with me. She's OK." She wanted to go back to sleep and forget everything. She couldn't think of a thing she didn't want to forget. Not even the mango juice at sundown. Its absence left the deep pit of a strip mine in her heart, a hole too deep to fill.
Hoping the early evening air might clear the sad cobwebs from her mind, she strolled down her long driveway to the mailbox. Spring's birds and crickets had not returned from winter yet, but the smell of skunk cabbage seeped through the chilly air. She would look for budding perennials in the morning, she thought, her tulips and crocuses, the first timid colors breaking up through the cold ground. She thought she might get down on her shins, like an Arab praying, and touch her lips to a crocus bud, just to feel its tenderness and taste spring before it officially arrived.
The mail box yielded little. She flipped through it on her way back to the house: junk, junk, junk, bill, junk, junk, bill, bill, junk, junk, junk, Gourmet, The New Republic, International Herald Tribune.
Back in the kitchen, Gourmet offered nothing but impossibly beautiful desserts. The New Republic offered a headache of campaign analyses and financial interpretations. The Trib offered the usual baloney about the global economy, the results of European elections, and an article reminding folks that over half of the heroin in the world came from a triangle in the interior of southeast Asia. Now the Russian mafiya had its finger in the pie. Cargo planes flew tons of heroin into former Soviet republics. Truck routes coursed across Asia to the Middle East and Europe. U.S. dollars - billions in cash - flowed back into the triangle. If the so-called Black Triangle were a corporation, the article said, it would rank among in the Fortune 50. At the top of this multinational agro-industrial company, stood a man Forbes magazine ranked as third richest in the world - Mon Rok. His assets included not only a personal jet, a fleet of work planes and a few helicopters, but a small army as well. The governments of Burma and Laos operated at his pleasure, it was said, and the Burmese army contributed to his arsenal, which in all likelihood included at least one submarine, an unknown number of Stinger missiles, chemical weapons, anti-aircraft systems and heavy artillery.
This was the man her father had hated with a passion unbecoming of an ambassador. He had reported the growth of Rok's group, warned of the link to the Russian mafiya, detailed the connections to an international prostitution ring and network of white slavery and child pornography. The State Department never acknowledged his reports or took any action. Mon Rok was not a country, just a criminal, and the United States would not stoop to deal with him, not even after he'd murdered an ambassador.
The next day's newspaper featured a blurred video frame of a mean-looking bank robber, anonymous in black nylon, who had disappeared after escaping in an ambulance. The police refused to discuss leads, but an eye witness had described the felon well enough to inspire an approximate portrait. After regaining her ability to breathe, Ysa settled into a sense of insult and relief. The portrait bore no resemblance to her whatsoever.
She half expected a flock of reporters and TV cameras when she arrived at Dr. Fishbinder's pediatrics office. Instead, she met the usual array of runny noses, bleary eyes, coughs, fevers and mysterious tummy rashes. She wanted to take each child home and tuck little him or her into bed. Most of them needed nothing more than a mother's warmth and some hot chocolate, but for eighty dollars Dr. Fishbinder would prescribe a few doses of cough syrup and, just in case, a battery of tests worthy of a geriatric guinea pig. Until the good doctor arrived, she dispensed thermometers in the waiting room and jotted down symptoms. For her personal pleasure, she laid the back of her hand across each child's forehead.
Dr. Fishbinder played well the benevolent uncle, a man of salt-and-pepper hair on his way to grandfatherdome. Kids trusted him to poke their tummies, peer down their throats, probe their ears and reward them with a tax deductible lollipop. Their mommies melted under the warm glimmer of his light brown eyes. Dr. Fishbinder had all the clientele he could handle, and Maryann, who handed his billing, said he raked in more dough than any single man could spend.
"He needs a wife," she intimated to Ysa over tuna-on-toast in the back room where they ate lunch. "He needs somebody to help him pump those funds back into the economy."
Had Maryann known how to smile occasionally and bathe on a regular basis, she might have had a shot at the job. But Dr. Fishbinder liked his legs long and thin, and if he manifested his admiration for Ysa's slender assets one more time, she had plans for dismantling him. Arm's-length admiration she didn't mind, but when a man's hand too often found itself accidentally sweeping across her thigh or reaching around her waist or bumping up against her bottom, well, such a man lacked dignity and deserved whatever she might dish out.
"Are you looking at me?" she asked Maryann, her sandwich poised for another bite. "Why in the world would I offer myself to a pair of handcuffs?"
Maryann tilted her head left and right as if to get a thought settled into place. "Twenty-four carat diamond-studded handcuffs?" she suggested. "I wouldn't mind. I don't care how old he is. It beats watching TV with a cat."
Ysa didn't say so, but Bachelor Fishbinder had already proposed to her a dozen times. Most recently, less than a week ago, he had leaned over her while she worked on a stack of insurance forms. He touched her hair lightly with the back of his fingers. "How do you keep it so soft?" he asked in a dreamy voice. He sounded like somebody in a commercial.
Ysa moved her head away and said, "No."
His hand came to rest on her shoulder, the edge of a finger connecting with the bare skin of her neckline. "I'm serious," he said. "We could get married next week or next year on a hillside in Tahiti or a church in Paris or down at town hall. All you have to do is say yes."
"No."
"How about maybe? Hmmm?" As if sent by heaven, Maryann suddenly filled the doorway and charged into the room with a question about a urine sample. Then she just as suddenly disappeared. No one but Dr. Fishbinder himself could solve this particular urine problem, so he gave Ysa's shoulder an affectionate, revolting squeeze and said, "Think about it. "Without looking up, she knew he had winked and shot at her with a little gun formed by his thumb and forefinger.
That was last week. Now Maryann kissed the last crumbs of toast from her fleshy lips and said, "So what's bugging you, anyway? You sit there like you got a secret disease or something." She licked a trace of tuna grease from her pinky. "Where were you yesterday? You never came back from lunch."
Ysa almost said, "I tried robbing a bank," just to see how absurd it sounded, but it didn't seem absurd enough to risk. Maryann had a way of seeing through things, so Ysa gave her the truth: "I felt terrible so I went home and fell right asleep."
Nice lie, she thought. What a terribleness she had indeed felt! She'd come within inches of a federal penitentiary, and unless the Keystone Cops did the investigating, a hair or a fingerprint would give her away. Could Jock McCracken get her out of prison?
"You went home? And went to bed? In the middle of the day?" Maryann looked hurt, as if her friend had just left her out of a juicy secret. Gathering up her Tupperware and trash, she added, "That doesn't sound like you."
"And what, pray tell, sounds like me?"
"You really want to know?"
She didn't, but Maryann didn't let the silence stop her.
"You've got a secret lover. A married guy. You went to a motel and he ravaged your body so bad you couldn't get off the bed. Am I right?"
The left side of Ysa's mouth lifted to half a smile. "Close," she said, proud of a sudden inspiration. Maryann swung back into her chair to focus in for more detail. "Close," Ysa said, "except it wasn't a motel." She faked a shy giggle.
Maryann inhaled sharply. "You're kidding. You? A boyfriend?"
"Shhh!" Monica gestured her down close to the table. "Don't tell anybody. I ate lunch here, with you, yesterday. Ham and cheese on rye. Got it?" Maryann agreed with a quick sequence of tight little nods. "He isn't really a boyfriend," Ysa said. "He's just..."
Maryann finished the thought with an emphatic whisper, "...a lover."
"You could call him that."
"So what's he like?"
Ysa hadn't intended to describe Kit. Any decent alibi should have described someone not at the scene of the crime. But, unpracticed at the art of lying, she described a lover with crystalline blue eyes, reddish-blondish hair, six-foot and maybe an inch, strong, intense, intelligent, with hands that had the strength of a plumber's but the delicacy of a pianist's, and lips with the nubile tenderness of Concord grapes.
"Sounds nice," Maryann admitted with blatant understatement. "He wouldn't have a brother by any chance, would he?"
"You can have the original as soon as I'm done with him."
"You're wicked, Ysa. Did you know that?"
Ysa produced the wickedest slit-eyed grin she had and said, "Just don't tell anybody!"
Maryann sucked in her lips in and shook her head. By a movement of her eyes she indicated a presence behind Ysa: Dr. Fishbinder. A spear of depression shot through Ysa's chest. She couldn't rob a bank right. She couldn't even fib.
But apparently he'd heard nothing. "If I might interrupt you girls for just a moment," he said, irony piercing beyond need, "there is a gentleman on the phone for Ms. van der Meer if she just happens to be available - which by all appearances she does seem to be. In a manner of speaking."
Maryann shot Ysa a look, and Ysa shut her eyes in silent pain. She knew no gentleman who had her work phone number, but she could guess who had access to it.
And it was him. He dived into the conversation. "Ysa? Don't say my name..."
She wouldn't have. Dr. Fishbinder, out of either male curiosity or professional authority, was nearby, engaged in a complex surgical operation on a file cabinet he had never in his life looked into.
"Hello," Ysa said as noncommittally as she could.
"Is anyone nearby?"
"Yes."
"Then just say, 'Fine, thank you."
She said it, but it came out as a question.
"Good," he said. "Look, we'd like to talk with you. Tonight. Don't write this down, just remember it. 55-50 Enterprise Row. Do you know where that is? Just say yes or no."
"Yes." It ran through an industrial park outside of town.
"Good. 55-50. Tonight. At nine. Alone. OK? Say yes or no."
"...Yes."
"Good. Now say, 'No, I've already got a long distance carrier, thank you,' and hang up."
She said it and did it, slamming down the receiver with convincing irritation. Fishbinder rolled the file cabinet shut. "What pests," he said. "He told me he was an old friend. I didn't think they were allowed to do that. He sounded real."
"If he calls back, " Ysa said, "tell him to go to Hell."
Ysa went to 55-50 for Soong Tan and she went in fear of jail. McCracken had her. She knew that, and no doubt he knew it, too. She didn't like thinking how much he could exploit the situation. At the very least she could go along with his request, though she had a feeling more requests would follow it. In the chilly dark of nine o'clock, she turned onto Enterprise Row and prowled for 55-50. The businesses and light industries had vague, haughty, semi-descriptive names like Dynotex, Thermoframe, Northeastern Fluids, and all had closed up for the night. Their low, wide buildings hunkered in the shadows beyond the brown gloom of parking lot lights.
The 55-50 address called itself American Refinement. She drove around the building twice. The front door looked too dark and locked to bother trying. The only other possibility was a gray steel door in back, beside a loading dock, the kind of door that hadn't opened since the Jurassic Period. It didn't even have a door knob. On the second time around the building she wondered why she saw no cars. Had she found the right place? Had she remembered the number right? Was it 50-55 or 55-50? Had he said Enterprise Row or Enterprise Road? Or Way? But as she came around to the loading dock, the steel door opened. The unmistakable figure of Kit McCracken stepped out, one hand in a pocket of his jeans, the other held out in a signal of welcome, a friendly hand emerging from a plaid flannel sleeve. The Band-aid on his pinky glowed unnaturally in the side-lit darkness.
He met her as she came up the concrete steps beside the loading dock. As naturally as an old friend, he brought her in for a slightly tight hug. She did not resist, and she suspected, without certainty, that if he'd come in for a kiss, she'd have let him. She would have welcomed his arms around her, and if his hands had explored her bottom, she would have pressed herself against him even harder. She would have returned the favor, grabbing hold of the hard, round hunks of his buns. God knows what would have happened after that. But he managed to hug from a certain distance, and she was glad of it. The hug, buffered by her chamois bomber jacket, conveyed the warmth of old buddies reunited.
"I'm so glad you came," he said.
"Did you doubt I would?"
Answering with a shy smile, he set a hand lightly on her shoulder and guided her through the door. The anteroom, a mere chamber, looked as cold and poorly lit as any loading dock entrance. But by the time the steel door thumped shut behind her, Kit had opened an interior door, releasing an eerie glow of several unmixed, unnatural colors. As she came through the door, Ysa felt herself stepping into another world.
The room stretched across half the length of the building. No overhead lights illuminated the low, dark scene. Rather, a maze of dividers, curtains and low-slung acoustic tiles sectioned the room into blocks of cubby holes, cubicles, alleys and relatively open spaces. Each cubbyhole glowed with the low, private light of high intensity lamps, computer screens, and for all Ysa knew, radar screens, electronic read-outs, EKGs, and every other high-tech source of light known to modern man. With a sweep of his arm Kit gestured across the room and said, "Welcome to the biggest little secret in the world."
Ysa shook her head slowly, unsurely. "Do I really want to know this secret?" she asked. She wanted to turn around, leave, forget it all, go home and read a book in a tub of hot water and herbal suds.
"We won't tell you any more than either of us wants you to know," Kit said through a hint of a smile.
"Don't I already know too much? I mean, if this is American Refinement, I'm Barbara Bush."
"We're confident you can keep this part of the secret. After all, you and I have a few secrets, too, haven't we?" He paused for a gentle, knowing lift of one eyebrow. "And anyway, if anybody comes to investigate, our receptionist has a fine packet of information to hand out, even an annual report. And the Chamber of Commerce can vouch for us."
"And in the back room you coordinate the allied forces of the Western world?"
Kit had such a nice smile. It all but invited wry remarks. "We have enough trouble just coordinating ourselves," he said. "Too many projects, not enough hands." He led her across the vast room. At least half the cubbyholes had half-lit geeky-looking characters analyzing electronic graphs, waves, formulas, maps, patterns and displays of data on computer screens. No one spoke, not on a phone, not to Kit or Ysa, not to each other.
Kit opened the door of a room and let her enter first. The florescent lights shocked her eyes into a squint, blurring the figures of several people who sat around a conference table. The table had nothing on it, not even a sheet of paper or pen. No pictures hung on the plain, beige walls.
Kit closed the door behind him and said, "Folks, I'd like you to meet...Barbara."
Ysa smiled sweetly in the general direction of three men and two women who nodded in return. Apparently they did not know her name, nor did Kit want it known. Given the rules of that kind of game, she wondered what Kit's mother had really named him.
He mentioned her to a chair but himself remained standing at the head of the table. She wondered if he was the one in the room wearing very cheap cologne. "Skipping further formalities," he said, "let me dive right into an explanation. Barbara..." - a twitch of the lower rim of one eye signaled a mutual understanding - "... I wish I could tell you what we are, but we're so secret we haven't even given ourselves a name. I should say first that we are not connected with any government or law enforcement agency, and we sure hope no government or law enforcement agency knows about us. Needless to say, we'd like to keep it that way."
Ysa nodded to agree.
"Let's just say...we're problem solvers." Kit's definition brought a few quiet smiles around the table. One man, the youngest in the room, nervously fidgety, smiled back and forth, at Kit, then at Ysa, then Kit, then Ysa, while his fingers toyed with the bottom of his forest-green tie. Ysa didn't quite know how to interpret his odd movement and intense look-at-me smile. His eyes begged attention, and his neat, curt, ruddy, mustache perched above his lip like a mask meant to portray elfish fun. His back-and-forth smile either aimed to attract attention and favor or to coax agreement between Kit and Ysa. She felt an inexplicable urge to set a hand on his arm to calm him down or tell him not to worry so much, that everyone loved him. Then maybe she'd see if his mustache felt as soft as it looked.
Kit continued. "Given recent incidents involving Barbara and me, I think we can respect each other's secrets." He phrased it like a question, and again, Ysa simply nodded consent.
"The current problem we're trying to solve involves Burma."
Her head snapped back as if slapped. Everyone in the room had their eyes trained on her as if through the sights of a gun. Ysa pulled her mouth shut and took the kind of breath she normally used to start meditating. In the time it took to exhale, she restored calm to her body and mind. If these people knew Burma at all, they knew they had a tough problem to solve. Nothing happened easily in that part of the world. No one went in and came back without paying a certain kind of dues. Her father had played the Burmese game well but had pushed it too far. From what Ysa could already deduce about these people, they, too, had intentions of pushing things. If they wanted her to push, too, she would say no. This she had already decided. She was the last member of her family. She wasn't going to die trying to do something stupid, something hopeless, on the other side of the world.
"We understand you have some expertise in that area," Kit said. "I've seen your dossier, but my colleagues have not. Could you review your background?"
Ysa felt herself in a chess game against a panel of experts. Instinctively she recognized information as the chief weapon in this game. How much of it should she give away? She knew nothing of these people except what Kit, who had smoothly lied his way through a bank robbery, had told her. How could she tell if he was lying now?
He seemed to sense her unease. "No need to part with secrets," he said, his voice flowing on a bed of gentleness. "Just tell us about yourself."
Hell, he'd already ransacked her apartment, even knew when she'd left the house with her machine gun. He most certainly knew of her past. If she didn't tell the others, he certainly could. So, to wrest a bit of advantage from the situation, she looked at him and said, "Fine. But I expect a few answers in return." Echoing her earlier nods, he granted her silent consent.
She took a deep breath to start things off. "My name..." She looked at Kit. With a nod he told her to go ahead if she wanted. "...is Ysa van der Meer. My father was Dutch, my mother Norwegian, both active in the underground during World War II. They were just teenagers then. Both became Americans a few years after my birth."
"Thus your passports," Kit injected.
She glanced at him without turning her head. Was he just showing off? Did he know about all her passports? "Yes. I have American , Dutch and Norwegian passports," she said. Discounting the importance of that, she moved on. "For reasons never explained to me, my father, Karl van der Meer, was named U.S. ambassador to Burma in 1979. I received my early education there and thus learned Burmese. I grew up speaking Dutch with my father and Norwegian with my mother as if every family did it that way. They both switched to English on my tenth birthday. I attended high school in Zurich and started medical school at Sorbonne."
The young man with the ruddy mustache interrupted with a flick of a finger, quickly withdrawn. Kit flashed him a look of minor irritation and said, "Yes, Frank?"
"You said you only started medical school?" Frank asked.
"Yes. I had some...personal problems and decided to take employment at the embassy in Rangoon, Burma. I worked in translation services." She said it as coolly as she could, wondering if Kit already knew that translation services fell under the Intelligence department. No, he couldn't possibly.
"So you lived almost half your life in Burma." Kit said, obviously trying to get her back on track.
"Well, yes, in an in-and-out sort of way."
"But you understand the Burmese culture."
"As well as an Westerner, I suppose. Which is to say not much."
"I see," said Kit. "Please continue."
"Well, I don't know what else...I'm a nurse now..."
Kit cut her short with some heavy nods and a raising of his hand. "Back to Burma. Um...your father...I understand he..."
She knew what he hadn't said. "Yes. He was murdered." Eyes around the table dipped, probably more in embarrassment than reverence.
"So I hear," Kit said. "Or assumed. Now apparently...please excuse me...I don't mean to open old wounds."
"I assure you, they are neither old nor closed."
"Yes, I'm sorry. Please bear with me. We've a reason for getting into this. Apparently your father was searching for a man named Mon Rok." Kit paused for he reaction. All eyes swung from him to her.
"Not exactly. He was after a young girl. A child. Soong Tan. She'd been kidnapped. He'd heard she was up in Rok's territory."
"The Black Triangle," Kit said to his colleagues. They nodded with understanding.,
"So he just set off in his Land Cruiser. All alone. No bodyguards, probably no weapon. He never carried a weapon. He said you think better if you're unarmed."
Frank signaled confusion. "A U.S. Ambassador went alone into the most notoriously criminal territory in the world and he didn't take a gun? He's entitled to Marine escorts...and he goes alone?"
"You have to understand my father. He did not recognize fear...or rather, he didn't bow down to it. He wasn't stupid. He didn't seek danger for thrills. He simply assessed risk and accepted it as long as he thought he could control the situation." The memory of Frank and his chickadee flashed into her mind. Her father hadn't ever had to prove that he could be brave. Not that she knew of.
"And he thought he could control Rok Mon?"
"Obviously he thought he could get in and get out. And he obviously thought he could get Soong Tan out, too."
"Did he contact Rok?"
"I don't know. I suspect not. He didn't get very far."
Frank said, "What can you tell us about Rok?"
Ysa regarded the request with suspicion. Surely these people had done some research. Surely they knew about Rok. Why, then, did they want to hear her explain what they already knew? Most likely, she thought, they only wanted to know how much she knew. "Mon Rok's reputation is a matter of public record," she stated. "You can read about him in any major publication. I can add that he is ruthless beyond all morality. I truly believe he is evil. Evil. His empire of drugs and child slavery and sex is not an end in itself. I've always believed that. He wants and empire because of the power it gives him and because of what he can do with that power."
Frank's eyebrows leaned in toward each other, raising deep lines of concern across his forehead. "And what does Rok want to do with that power?" he asked.
"So far, the course of his business has satisfied his urge for suffering. How many drug addicts have fallen under the whip of his heroin? How many lives has he ruined by forcing girls and boys into prostitution? How many had he infected with AIDS? How many children labor in factories for no more than the cost of gruel?"
"Yes, but...beyond his business?" Frank, jotting something on a small pad of green paper he'd taken from his shirt pocket, looked up and over at Kit as if for permission to probe further. Kid dipped his head just enough to tell him to go ahead. "What would he like to do with his power?" Frank asked.
Ysa's head shook only slightly, but of it's own volition, a spasm of uncertainty. "I don't know," she whispered. "Maybe nothing. I don't know. But I always felt that if he had the chance, he'd kill every person on the face of the earth. If he had a giant meat grinder, he'd be glad to drop each and every one of us into it."
The image held everyone in silence. Only after several moments did their eyes and attention wander back to the present and gravitate to Kit McCracken.
"I hate to tell you how accurate your fear is," he said to Ysa. "We, too, have come to a similar conclusion." He nodded toward an intelligent-looking woman at the far end of the table. She looked about forty years old, with short-cropped hair, small oval glasses, thick eyebrows, and lips that could use some touching up. "Myrna here is our staff psychoanalyst," Kit said. He gestured for her to speak.
"Yes," she said. "He seems to be a most dangerous person. Psychotic about violence and power. Close comparisons would be Sadam Hussein and Idi Amin. The difference between those two, of course, is that Amin never had the power to make trouble outside his country. Sadam did. Now Rok Mon seems to be feeling his oats. Southeast Asia isn't big enough for him. He controls Burma, God knows, but he'd like to wield influence in bigger pastures. Obsessed as he is, he won't quit until he's forced to."
Kit picked up her train of thought. "We have evidence of him setting up organizations in China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines. Those countries, in case you weren't aware, account for almost half the world's population. Can he control their governments? To a certain extent, yes. In some cases, he can have his people installed in high office. In others, he can induce officials to carry out his will. He's got the tools: sex, drugs, violence and money. Not many people can resist that."
"Why don't you just kill him?" Ysa asked in a calm and nonchalant tone. She knew the correct answer, but she wanted to hear theirs.
Kit's face puled back on one side in a smile that cut back across long, soft creases that draped his left cheek. "It's interesting that you think we might be in that business," he chuckled. "But at any rate, to do that would merely create a vacuum in a bad situation. However bad his evil machine, his absence wouldn't make it any better. Less efficient, perhaps, and maybe less evil, but in all probability, even more deadly than it is. At least if he controls it, it's controlled."
That was the right answer. Ysa had heard it from her father, the same principle that allowed the world's dictators to live. They didn't owe their continued existence to the mercy of the CIA or any American lack of ingenuity in the art of assassination. They owed it to a wise respect for the dangers of chaos - the uncontrolled situation. You had to dismantle the situation, not merely decapitate it.
"Very well," Ysa said. "That's what I know about Rok Mon. And I gather that you have intentions of doing something about him."
"Simply put, yes," Kit said. "And we'd like you to help."
Ysa said yes. She said it with the instinctive, gut-level, unthought reaction of a yelp of a stepped-on toe or the gasp at the peak of orgasm. She did not know what she'd meant by yes. She certainly did not mean she'd parachute into Rok Mon's backyard. But at the very least she'd tell the folks at 55-50 some of what they wanted to know.
They slid her questions as if dealing seven-card stud. Upon hearing her answers, they exchanged knowing glances. No one took notes. They asked her about Burma. They wanted to know the boat traffic on the Irrawaddy, the diet of the mountain peasants, the practices of Buddhist monks, the personalities of Christian missionary nuns, any rumors she'd heard at the U.S. Embassy. They wanted to know the name of just one honest man in the Burmese government.
Only at that last question did Ysa hesitate. In the Burmese government, the crime of honesty often led to capital punishment, normally by late-night death squad, occasionally by surface-to-air missile, and not rarely by poison, by involuntary overdose of a heroin, by starvation in an unnamed prison, by car bomb, by ejection from a helicopter 5,000 feet in the air, falling blindfolded, thumbs tied together, down into the Bay of Bengal. The Symbians had no shortage of ways to dispose of glitches in their perfect system.
Ysa knew one such glitch. Colonel Pham Trang. He'd risen up through the Burmese military via the usual route, accepting pay-offs for the usual military assistance to the usual rogues, forking over pay-offs to the usual superiors and government officials, minding his own business, doing what he had to do, getting by, earning a handsome living and not getting shot. Obeying the unwritten internal rules of order, wiggling upwards, unobtrusively slipping into vacancies in the ranks above, he gradually rose to the rank of colonel. At around the same time, his son reached the age of sixteen and discovered the comforts of heroin. When his father, the colonel, found out, he cut off the boy's supply of money and told him to go live in the streets until he thought things out. But heroin doesn't give up its lovers as easily as fathers give up their sons. The boy discovered the quick cash of the sex business. He rented himself to men, mostly foreigners who came for the child-like faces of the southeast Asians and the unregulated pleasures of the sex bazaar. Inevitably, he contracted HIV and soon the symptoms of AIDS. He went home. His father accepted him. As the colonel later reconstructed the case, the boy's pimp came looking for him, tempting him with heroin to ease the pain of slow death. The boy could not resist. The colonel had the pimp eliminated by a squad of off-duty soldiers. Then somebody had the boy killed - mutilated, horribly, as a message - by no one knew whom. The colonel, having a daughter of fourteen, drew a truce with the underworld. They were even. It would stop there. Tit for tat, end of war.
Ysa knew of this man through her father. The colonel had come to the embassy like a converted heathen to the Vatican. All the evils of the Burmese way of life had focused on his family. Within him, some faint, forgotten ember of morality had risen into a flame. He wanted to make amends for his role in the monstrous, immoral machine of the military, the government and the underworld. He now knew what it meant in human terms. But he feared for his family, especially his lovely and ever-so-innocent daughter, who stood at the edge of the minefield of adolescence, a tempting prize for anyone who snatched her or tempted her into the chains of addiction. Pham Trang came to Ambassador van der Meer in utter despair.
Now far from Burma but still filled with the place, Ysa knew the deadly seriousness of speaking the colonel's name before this group of strangers. Revealing his identity could very well mean his death. The seven people around the conference table said nothing during her long hesitation. She looked at them one by one, searching their faces for signs of treachery. Rok Mon had enough money to buy the soul of almost anyone. Whom could she trust? Kit bore a certain sincerity in his eyes, even if they'd rifled her closet and drawers. Frank shined with the shy eagerness of a child. Dr. Myrna seemed to have the warmth and understanding of an older sister. The other two had not spoken a word or shown anything but thoughtful interest. Could she trust these people with the name of an honest Burmese?
With an electric heat surging around her heart, Ysa stated in a controlled blurt, "Colonel Pham Trang." She spoke the name with the same just-do-it, lean-into-it attitude her father had taught her. If she wanted to find Soong Tan and maybe do something for the many good people of Burma, she had to take a chance. She had to cooperate.
"Pham Trang," Kit said for the sake of the others. "We don't have much on him, but he's in the military, as I recall, a cog in the machine. Ysa, what makes you think he's honest?"
She told them the story. As she became comfortable with her decision to reveal it, she told them how Pham Trang had worked with her father. The colonel had fed information into the embassy, his identity guarded with a complex mechanism of masking and protection. Kit's ignorance of him hinted at how successful he'd been. Ysa had a feeling Kit knew everything, and certainly more than he'd ever let on.
Frank's head tilted to one side with the look of a curious puppy. "Do we have access to the information he provided? Do we have his code name?"
"We have some of that information, yes," Kit said, "though it's all been digested and reformulated beyond any recognizable identification with its source. As for the code name, it's restricted to a need-to-know."
Frank turned both hands palms-up in a look of innocence. "But she knows," he blurted, sounding a little like a boy pleading no-fair.
"And she knows how to keep a secret," Kit said. Frank put on a scowl that shifted into introspection.
With that, Kit wrapped up the meeting. They had "homework to do," he said, and Ysa no doubt had other plans for the evening.
"I had plans for learning what all this is about," she said, setting aside her earlier plans to get some sleep that night.
Kit looked at her with fatherly eyes. "I'm sure you understand the importance of secrecy," he said. "We need to decide how much you should know."
"You also need to decide how this is going to lead to Soong Tan."
"Yes," Kit said with a serious nod. "She will figure into it. Don't worry. We have a common goal, you and we."
Frank escorted her to the door. He said nothing along the way. Rather, he walked with his head down, his fingers pinching at the bridge of his nose. To Ysa he seemed like a shy boy trying to think how he'd move in for a kiss at the end of a date. He even had the body of a teenager, a varsity wrestler just a tad shorter than she, meaty in the shoulders, tight at the hips, his neck heavy with muscle. Did she see a bunch of subdued pimples on his cheek? Or was it a slight blush? She wondered how his trim, ruddy mustache would feel against her upper lip.
In the cold little anteroom he looked up at her, then back at the door they'd come through, then back at her. "We have to talk," he said. "Not here." His dark eyes pleaded with the sincerity of a boy. "It's important. Can you be at the Grand Hotel Lounge at eight tomorrow night?"
Ysa didn't want a date in a saloon. She'd been that route. A nice man spills his guts, tries hard to get her to spill hers, then asks her to spend the night with him because he loves her. Did Frank have the same intention? Something about his seriousness implied that he really had something to tell her. Something told her she should listen. So when Frank's strong, oversized hand reached out to take hers, and he said, "Please, it's important," she couldn't say no. It wasn't a standard handshake. His hand took hers in a gentle little clench, his warm thumb to her knuckles, his warm forefinger inside her palm, just those two spots touched, He had her, for the moment, at his mercy. She said yes and instantly sensed she'd regret it.
* * *
The Grand Hotel Lounge occupied half the ground floor of the Grand Hotel in a downtown section that other businesses had long since abandoned. The stalwart building stayed either out of tradition or because no one would buy six stories of real estate between a pawn shop and a package store. Its brick facade hung heavy with grime and missing pieces, not unlike the faces of the men who tended to fall asleep not inside the hotel but outside on the sidewalk and the nearby alleys. The doorman, an elderly fellow in a threadbare uniform, kept them out of the lobby, though the occasional friend would step in for a smoke. The bellhops at the Grand Hotel did not hop, and the matre'd at the desk regarded all visitors with suspicion.
Ysa regarded the hotel itself with suspicion, but the experience of a man in a uniform holding a door for her brought back warm memories. She had booked into worse hotels, she reminded herself as she perused the lobby. The green carpet had warn through to dusty gray strands. The couches looked dangerous with sinkholes, booby traps and disease. When Ysa asked the doorman for the lounge, he walked her across the lobby, his white-haired head tilted back with an air of pride and possession. As he swept open the door of the lounge, he bowed with both obeisance and dignity.
Though it might not have pleased the health department, the place appealed to her. As she stepped into its muted and muffled atmosphere, she felt herself entering a grand old world. She half expected to see Humphrey Bogart behind the bar or her father in the low candlelight of a corner table, nursing a glass of ice and Irish whiskey while jotting notes, reminders and thoughts in a little notebook. When a piano awakened with the opening chords of "Some Enchanted Evening," it sounded the way her father played it. But the piano man looked like the doorman's older brother, a mellowed old man who wore the duskiness of a bar like a favorite shirt, or maybe an only shirt. Having her choice of any seat in the room, Ysa choose a semi-circular booth near the piano and against the wall so she could watch the door. The bartender, in black pants, white shirt and black vest, nodded approval when she ordered a double Jameson's on the rocks.
Ysa liked Frank a little more not only for having chosen this place but for knowing about it. She detested the two extremes of modern American bar - the slovenly beer joints of bikers and tradesmen, and the sanitary, thematic place pretending to be an English pub, an eatery of the gas light era, a sports temple or a stainless steel rocketship. She liked a bar that imitated nothing but itself. At the Grand Hotel, the piano played nothing she'd heard on the radio in the last ten years, and the pianist tried to keep the music as subtle as the atmosphere.
Frank arrived in a navy blue blazer and open-collar shirt. He didn't just walk in. For a crucial second, he held the door open with one shoulder while he scanned the whole lounge. He did it in the way of a policeman, a single sweep for his eyes searching every person, penetrating every nook, identifying every possible suspect. She would not have to keep her back to the wall in any room she shared with this man. He had things under control. His eyes barely paused as they swept past Ysa, but they quickly returned to her, and they smiled. Ysa felt good.
He shook her hand with both of his, then thanked her for coming, and took a seat - or rather, it seemed to her, took up a position - in the booth, neither beside nor directly across from her. With a minimal gesture to the bartender, he ordered a double Finlandia, neat, and another whiskey for Ysa. She silently vowed she would not touch it for a while. She took an extra-heavy sip of her first drink, however, and felt better for it.
They had little to work on for small talk. Ysa let Frank lead, and he led nowhere until after a few nervous pulls off his vodka, He homed in on business. His first words came as tentative tip-toes, as if unsure of the ice.
"I want you to know what you're getting into," he said.
"As a matter of fact I was wondering." She meant it two ways, referring to not only the Burma issue but the issue of herself sitting in a bar with a good-looking man next to her and a candle on the table and the piano now playing "The Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and her second whiskey now cooling her hand with dew.
Frank continued: "I mean,...this group. I can't tell you much about it. But it's not like whatever you're thinking."
That struck her as odd...especially under the influence of a bit of whiskey...odd enough to inspire an involuntary giggle." And what," she asked over the rim of her upraised glass, "do you think I think?"
He needed some thought to answer that, and only after a moment did he counter with, "Well, what do you think?"
Ysa shot from the hip. "I think you're some kind of secret government agency, a think tank or something, trying to dream up some kind of totally useless way to suck up a few more tax dollars." She did not add that she thought he probably had bedtime on his mind, that he'd probably make his move that very same evening - unless shyness got in his way. Had he never had a drink with a woman before? He seemed so nervous, as if urgently avoiding a secret issue.
"Thank you for sharing that with me," Frank said through a wry smirk. "I'm happy to inform you that you're wrong on all counts except the 'secret' part."
"You're not with the government?"
Frank just shook his head.
"Mafia, then?"
He snickered at the idea.
"A multi-national corporation?"
He kept shaking his head. He looked like a child playing a guessing game while hoping for a tickle attack.
"Well what else is there?"
"How about just a bunch of people out to save the world?"
"Great! Just dandy." She reined in the words before they burst out in a guffaw. "I've been recruited by the Boy Scouts."
Frank obviously liked the humor of it. He tilted his head as if she hadn't missed the target by much. Dumping the last of his vodka down his throat, he noted Ysa's forefinger absentmindedly circling the rim of her empty glass. He signaled the bartender for refills.
"Ysa, this is the craziest outfit I've ever worked with...and I've worked with some doozies."
"Like what?" She found herself liking this man, this short, muscular boy scout.
"Well, most recently, Green Beret intelligence. We were the guys who went in to see if was safe for the regular special forces. Or maybe just adjust somebody's foreign policy a bit. We visited places like Ruanda, Nicaragua, Angola, Vietnam, Afghanistan. Nice places to die." He looked down into his vodka. His fingertips melted spots in the frost on the glass. He seemed to remember something he wasn't going to talk about.
Ysa let another dollop of whiskey slide down her throat. "OK. That qualifies as a crazy outfit. Now what about Kit? He goes with you?"
"Nope. Kit's FBI. Former FBI. Vietnam, too. Got the boot from the Bureau for trying a little too hard. he seems to think there's something all-important about goals - never mind how you get there."
"And the other people?"
"Same types. A shrink who I could swear can read anybody's mind. A biologist they dragged out of some secret basement of the Pentagon, a pilot who can fly anything, a weapons guy who says he could make a nuclear bomb if he had a pound of plutonium. A couple of CIA guys, a couple of National Security Agency guys. I should say former CIA and NSA guys because they all got kicked out, too. Seems like the only way to get into this organization is to get kicked out of some other one."
"And does that apply to you?"
Frank hesitated. Through pursed lips, he finally said, "Yeah, Me, too. But I'd rather not talk about it."
Ysa had the distinct suspicion that vodka affected Frank faster than whiskey affected her. For a man in the intelligence business, he had something to learn about keeping secrets. Lesson one: if alcohol loosens your tongue, don't drink it.
Lesson two, if alcohol loosens someone else's tongue, let him have all he wants. Frank had a loose tongue, a tongue also prettily pink and cold-clean and slick with the residue of Finnish vodka. She wanted to pry a little information more out of him.
"So what you've got," she said, "is a bunch of patriots who don't like following rules."
"That's a good way of putting it. We're a bunch of Boy Scouts except for one thing."
"Which is?"
"Boy scouts have their law. Trustworthy. Loyal. Helpful Friendly. All that stuff. The difference is, we don't."
The piano trickled to a maudlin silence. No other sound took its place, and nothing, nobody, moved. Even the piano man seemed lost in the mood he had created, a mood he now had to think about, a mood crossed-bred with memory. So when Frank finished his thought, the silence underscored it. "The boy scouts have a law," he said again, turning his black eyes up at her. "The trouble is, we don't."
Ysa had no question simple enough to put into words. She couldn't let herself say, "Whaddya mean, no law?" So she waited. Frank clearly had some ironing out to do in his own head, some last-minute work on an unfinished thought. She waited while he looked down at nothing, swished vodka around in his mouth, wrinkled his forehead and figured out how to say what he meant.
"We...are...above...the...law," he stated, putting equal stress on each word, clipping them as if with semi-colons.
Ysa remained silent, waiting.
"Don't get me wrong," he said, raising his fingers as if to show her his fingerprints. "We aren't doing anything bad. We're doing some very good things. Things that governments and law enforcement agencies can't do. Things that have to be done."
"Like what?"
"Like...things you don't see on the evening news. Like when Ono Banu - in Africa, remember? - suddenly resigned and disappeared after killing, what, a quarter of his population? That was us behind the scene. Cambodia and Laos, right after the war in Viet Nam, we were all over the place looking for POWs. When a freighter full of cocaine happened to sink in the Caribbean...of course it never made the news, but that was us. The fire that destroyed Muamar Abdul's secret fertilizer factory in the Sahara Desert? That was us...and it sure wasn't a fertilizer factory."
Ysa, amazed, fascinated and a little scared to know these things, could barely begin to imagine the power and connections and money that this group must have. And she knew she should do no more than imagine. To know too much could only lead to trouble. She almost wished Frank would stop right there, but she had to know more. She had to see the Burma connection. She had to know how all this would lead her to Soong Tan. "So you guys just go wherever you want," she said, "killing people and blowing things up..."
"Killing the right people," Frank injected. "Blowing the right things up."
"Right...yes...of course. The right people and the right things. And in Burma - let me guess. Rok Mon is the right person and you're going to blow up half the country and half the countries around it."
"In a certain sense, yes." He leveled his eyes at her, their intensity saying. "OK: Now you know."
Now she knew. But...in a certain sense? What did that mean? How did one blow something up in a certain sense? How could anybody blow up an area the size of Texas? And who would do it just to kill a bunch of poppies? How many people would die in order to save the lives of junkies?
"What do you mean by in a certain..."
He cut her off with hand that almost reached to her mouth. "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies," he sang.
"But..."
"Don't worry. You'll find out. You'll probably be sorry you did, but when you know, and when they ask you if you want to help, remember what I told you. They recognize no law, no God, no moral authority but their own. And once you're involved, there's no way out."
He looked dead serious. His eyes carried more weight than his words as they looked deep and hard into her own. Ysa studied his dark universes of his irises, noted the reflection of candlelight that danced in them like the northern lights, distant and cold.
No moral authority but their own. The same applied to the government and the mafia, her first two guesses. Where did Kit's crusaders get the idea they could do it, too? How did their above-the-law attitude apply to Burma? Burma had no law to be above! Its government acted as a subsidiary to the Asian mafia. Who needed moral authority in such a place?
With a quick, resolute snap of his wrist, Frank downed a full shot of his vodka. A gentle nod ordered another round.
"May I tell you something personal?" Frank asked.
"If you really want me to know it." She wouldn't admit it, but she did want to know. She hoped he'd reveal what act of rebellion had gotten him kicked out of Special Forces Intelligence.
He nodded pensively, breathed in around the sides of his teeth. "Yes. This relates but it goes back a long time. Back when I was a kid. My father...he was what you could call a very strong man. Strong willed. Strong muscled. Strong emotioned. I mean he had his emotions under tight control. He was not a cruel man, but he could do something that appeared cruel without a flinch of feeling."
Frank's lips were clenched in a stiff, thin line parallel with his straight-edged mustache. The flesh above his chin knotted tightly. Ysa hoped he did not start crying.
"Two things he did," Frank stated. "One was courageous and kind. The other...I don't know."
Ysa did not speak as the waiter unobtrusively set two fresh drinks before them. Frank's hand went straight for his and wrapped around it as if he needed to cool his blood. Ysa waited.
"One thing he did was kill our dog. Pitsy. Best damned dog that ever walked the Earth. A mutt, but God how that dog loved me. We slept in the same bed for the first nine years of my life. But when we were on vacation, we stopped at a rest area so Pitsy could go for a walk. We weren't even stopped yet when he leaped out the car window, and bam, got run over by another car. I couldn't believe it. One minute she was in my lap. A second later she half dead on pavement, all...all busted open and bleeding. But not dead. My father just cursed and slammed on the breaks and got out. He didn't hesitate a bit. He wrapped his big hands around Pitsy's neck and choked her."
As Frank dipped his head for a sip of vodka, Ysa said, "To put him out of his misery. That's all." She wanted to caress his face.
"Yes," Frank said. "Exactly. He did what he had to do. It looked cruel, but it wasn't. It was necessary. And he didn't flinch." Frank twitched his head in unconscious admiration.
"Surely you don't hate him for that," Ysa said.
"No. And I don't even hate him for what he did next. You know what he did? He picked Pitsy up and carried her over to a trash barrel and dropped her in. Just like that."
Ysa, taken aback, did not know what to say. The only words that came out were, "Just like that?"
"Yep. And then he said, 'Anybody got to go to the bathroom?' Needless to say, nobody did. And off we went."
The story nudged Ysa's heart. She wished she hadn't heard it. The image of Pitsy, dead and bloody in a trash barrel would stay in her brain like a bad smell for a long time, she knew. Obviously the same had happened to Frank. He'd been thinking bout it for over twenty years.
"You said this related," she reminded him. "I don't get it."
"Wait...I'm not done. That was just the first incident. It was after Pitsy died, maybe a year or two later, I don't know. I caught a bird in a little trap I made out of popsicle sticks. I think it was a chickadee. Just a little bird. And I went running home to show my father. 'Look at the little bird,' I said. 'I trapped it.' He was working on the lawn mower at the time, in the garage. He had the whole thing taken apart and spread all over the floor, and I guess it wasn't going to well. He didn't want to hear anything bout a bird. So without a word he took it from me and held it in his first with the little bird's head sticking out the top. And he started squeezing. The little bird's mouth opened up. I could see it's little tongue in there, all white and pointy. I could hardly believe what he was doing, and all of a sudden his thumb thrust forward across the back of the bird's head. The head snapped right off. Bird blood squirted out. And then he just handed it to me. It wasn't even a bird anymore. It was just a mushy bunch of feathers."
"God , Frank." She took a deep drink of her whiskey. The poor kid. How different his father was from hers. did he have any idea the psychological wounds he'd left in his son?
"Wait," Frank added. "I'm not done yet."
He was going to start crying before this was over. She was almost sure of it. And she was going to have to comfort him. And then he was going to invite her to bed. Which at this point as far out of the question as any possibility could ever be. Not tonight, anyway.
"You know what I did?" Frank asked.
Ysa just rolled her eyes.
"I went and I trapped another bird. This was a few days later, after I'd thought about it. You know what I was thinking? I was remembering Pitsy and how Dad had done what he had to do. And then I thought about the bird, which he didn't really have to do, except it was a message to me. It said, 'Leave me alone, son. I'm working on the lawn mower.' A message I very clearly understood. So I trapped another bird. A sparrow o something, I don't know. Know why? Because I wanted to be as strong as my father. I wanted to be able to do what I had to do. I wasn't going to kill our new dog, even though it was just a poodle my mother'd got at the pound or something. I was going to kill a little bird. The same way my father did."
He took more vodka, swished it around in his mouth before swallowing it. He was waiting for her to ask, but she wouldn't. If he wanted to tell her, it would be because he wanted to.
Finally he said, "So I did it." With his fist above the table he showed the movement, the forward snap of the thumb. " I did it. And you know what? It didn't make a damned bit of difference. The world still turns. Life goes on."
Ysa couldn't help but ask, "And you're proud of it?" She silently hoped that if she ever got drunk enough to tell a story like that, someone would stuff a sock in her mouth and take her home.
"No," he said, "I'm, not especially proud. The point is...what was the point? Now I don't remember."
"Something about being above the law."
"Right. The point is, sometimes you just have to do something even if it seems cruel. You can kill your dog for the dog's own good. You can kill a bird just to prove to yourself that you can do it."
"And why would you want to prove that?"
Frank's face beamed. "Exactly," he said. "Exactly my point. You prove it because someday when it really counts, you might really need to do it...something like it. And you need to know you can.'
"And that's what we're going to do in Burma."
"Bingo.'
She didn't like the sound of that, but in a cold, distant, almost imperceptible way, she thought he might be right. She was after Soong Tan. What would she do to get her? Just about anything. Decapitating a sparrow was nothing compared with what she would do. The question, of course, was whether she would actually do whatever needed to be done. Frank, in his sad and maybe sick way, had proven it to himself, but she did not know about herself.
She was surprised but greatly relieved when all of a sudden Frank glanced at the piano, and asked, "Do you dance?"
She did. Or rather, she once had. The opening bars from the piano sent her reeling back to the last time, in Paris, during an event at the U.S. Embassy ballroom. She had foundered in a tidal swell of love. The son of the Chancellor of Austria, a fellow student at Sorbonne, swirled her around the room in a waltz as overwhelming as thunderous orgasm. She'd learned to waltz at an early age, but her teacher had taught it as if it were a dance for robots, a mechanical process measured in clapped out downbeats - ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three. Then, years later, her head all a'swirl in Champagne and bris, handsome Hans Lizst-Schmidtmeister led her to the dance floor, embraced her with military rectitude, and proceeded to show her how they do it in Vienna. Despite his formal posture and European formality, he smeared the ONE-two-three into a smooth, sweeping singularity, a movement as indigenous to the cosmos as to the soul. They moved around the room like the bubbles in a spring, like the branches of the willow, like the spirals on certain sea shells and galaxies. She and Hans made love on the ballroom floor - made it in the way of creating it, generating it much in the way of magneto generates electricity. Like electricity, this new and sudden love pulled them together like positive and negative forces yearning to reach each other and complete themselves. Only when the music stopped did they gain sufficient composure to do something about the sea of love that had enveloped them.
They did it upstairs, in a library, on a Victorian divan where Europe's leaders had decided the course of history, There Ysa and Hans made love, this time not like electricity but like animals beyond all self-control. Beneath the nebula of a crystal chandelier, Ysa enveloped him with the passion possible only the first time a young girl falls in love. He held her with the power of a father and the desperation of a child. She let the man have his way with her heaving, over-heated body, and she mastered the boy to bring him under the wing of her desire. At that young and tender age, she had no defense against the touch of his lips to her ears, her throat, down her cleavage, to one breast, one nipple, then the other, disrobing her from the shoulders down, bringing her passion to the boiling point. Her body was his more than hers. He went where he wanted to go, and she opened herself to his explorations. Bit by bit she gave it to him, every little spot brought to local orgasm by nibbles and licks. And she returned each favor with hot enticements that dragged him over the frontiers of human decency. The tiny white teeth she had inherited from her mother took little bites of his face, shoulders and chest, extracting moans of glee from the first man who had ever taken her as a full-grown woman. She was his master and his slave, helpless under his hungry hands and defenseless to his tongue and lips as she overpowered his very will.
So when Frank asked her whether she danced, the hot wine of her heart would not let her answer. The horror of the chickadee story disappeared behind the fog of the memory of the dashing young Hans when he was still young and dashing and innocent. Watching her lips, Frank rose and took her hand. She followed. He did not assume the formal, straight-spine posture of a European. Rather, he looked like a schoolboy in a dance class, looking down at his feet - but when he stepped into the dance, Ysa came up against him more closely than the European way. Too limp with whiskey, memory and something else, she could not hold herself away. She leaned into him, passively resistant against his confident, mechanical ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three. Memory took control of her legs. They remembered. They remembered the ballroom dance and they remembered the Austrian they had held. Knowing the waltz the way they do it in Vienna, they resisted Frank's awkward legs, gradually slowing them down, smoothing out their movement, reining them to her own rhythm, coaxing them into the spirit of the waltz.
Frank went along. His waltz joined hers as they entwined themselves around and around, the Grand Lounge, just the two of them in the company of a bartender and a piano man. The piano man, apparently sensing the moment, let The Blue Danube spawn The Vienna Woods and then Swan Lake, each a little slower than the one before, until Frank and Ysa stood nestled together, warm and floating as if asleep.
Only the next morning did Ysa notice the light blinking on her answering machine. Playback revealed three calls from people who hung up without a word, a call from a modem shrieking with frustration, a call from a fax machine beeping with monotonous persistence, and Susan, with her continuing saga:
"Ysa, it's me and I need to speak with you. Like urgent. It's Pete. He's driving me nuts. He just won't pop the question! I know he's just dying to get his hands onto my body, but he's like so shy. And guess what: he's a state cop. He told me like he's ashamed of it or something. I had to drag it out of him. I never would have guessed. I just can't imagine him running around with a gun and pulling people over for speeding and stuff. God, if he ever pulled me over for speeding, I think I'd faint. He's so cute. He's got these big brown eyes that remind me of a fawn lost in the woods. And I'm the long-lost mother he's been looking for, I just know it. And he knows it...but something's holding him back. Maybe he had a bad experience with some bitch who abused him. Maybe he thinks his dick's too small or something, like I couldn't care less. So what do you do with a guy like this, Ysa? How do you get him to make the first move without assaulting him? I can't even get him drunk. He knows his limit! Have you ever met a guy like that? He knows when to stop. He just says, "Not for me. I've had enough." Can you believe it? Mr. Perfect or what? And if I don't get him into bed pretty soon, somebody else is going to and she'll have him under her whip so fast he won't know what hit him. I know this kind of guy. He's a sitting duck. I think he's already called me a couple of times but hung up as soon as I answered. What do I do? You probably never had a problem like this, slut that you are. What should I do? Maybe I should write to Ann Landers. Whatdya think? Call me, Ysa, would you? You never call."
Ysa's head hung over the answering machine, heavy with the burden of Susan's problems and the obligation to call her back. Pete sounded a lot like Frank, except she really didn't want to get Frank into bed. At least she didn't think so. No...she was sure. She didn't. She didn't need a lover. She needed her father. She needed something to do with her life. The last thing she needed was some guy to keep happy. And keeping Susan happy was just about as hard. She liked Susan all right. Susan had a good heart and, in the rare cases when she shut up for a while, she had a sympathetic ear for Ysa's problems. But Susan lived in a absurd soap opera that never rose above petty problems, and her love affairs seemed to include more fantasy and desire than actual action. Ysa had never had the courage or benevolent cruelty to tell her friend that fifteen pounds off each thigh and bun would solve most of her problems in the romance department, or at least raise them up to a higher level.
She vowed she'd call Susan that night after work. At the moment, she just wanted to fill the hole that the whiskey had left in her stomach, and to irrigate her parched throat. Half a quart of grapefruit juice and three bales of Shredded Wheat with honey did the trick.
Before work she cranked up her computer to check her e-mail. She found two messages - one strange, the other completely unexpected. The first message consisted of nothing more than a period. A dot. Not a word, not even an incoming name or address. She tried clicking on "Reply" to see where a return message would go, but the computer simply said, "Bitfork socket code unknown," a typically cryptic and useless piece of information. Ysa called the computer stupid and moved on.
The second message may have explained the first. It came from Emanuel Rodriquez, a mail clerk at the embassy in Rangoon. She hadn't thought of him since leaving the country. Before she'd left, however, they'd reached the brink of a very close friendship. Though employed to shuttle mail around and help with filing, he carried a certain quiet intelligence. Like many people not born into financial security, he said little and listened a lot. The cock of his eyes hinted that he analyzed every bit of information that came to him. His family had somehow sneaked into the States from El Salvador, and somehow they had seen him through high school and two years of community college. Her father had often called him The Brains of the Outfit. Emanuel Rodriquez could debug a computer, tinker with the copier, remember details from years ago, pick a lock, wire electrical outlets, charm secretaries with a flash of his smile and his big, Mayan eyes. Sometimes he'd drive the embassy limousine, and he came to know of Ambassador van der Meer's hunt for Soong Tan. He may have known more about the Soong Tan situation than anyone besides the ambassador himself and maybe a couple of the geeks in Intelligence.
Despite fond hugs of farewell and maybe a tear or two, Ysa hadn't expected to hear from Emanuel again. Now, suddenly, impossibly, by the miracle of the Internet and no doubt a little help from the in-house computer hacks, an electronic message appeared in Ysa's e-mail. The subject heading said, "URGENT."
Not daring to breathe until she'd retrieved and opened the message, Ysa fumbled with the mouse, double-clicked on the wrong spot, closed the message window, thought for a deathly second she'd lost it, then quickly opened the window and the message, which read, "Y: Urgent news here. Reply to ERod.71762.355 @ STATE.GOV. Use your daughter's name to confirm receipt of this message, then DELETE THIS MESSAGE IMMEDIATELY!"
Her daughter's name? She had no daughter...unless...yes, he meant Soong Tan. He wanted it to confirm that she, not someone else, had received the message. Typing with almost spastic speed, she rattled off her confirmation, clicked on "Delete" and then on "Send"...
...but no...no...only a fool in the swamp of a hangover would delete the message before noting the address, before sending the reply. In a fraction of a second, Rodriquez's message, that fragile state of electricity, blinked out of existence, and Ysa's message sat there waiting for someone to type in an address.
Fool, fool, fool. She lowered her forehead to the desk, pressed it there for a while, denying the reality of what had just happened. A tear leaked from each eye. They fell away like little bombs to form two wet craters on the floor. Then she raised her head and smacked herself on both temples as if the shock might sober her up or discombobulate the universe. Fool. His address had disappeared. She tried to remember the address. ERod-something. A number. 707-something? She couldn't bring it into her mind any more than the computer could re-create it from thin air.
The phone - she could call. But why hadn't he done that? Security reasons? Maybe...but she would call anyway. Tearing through her address book to find the long overseas number of the embassy in Rangoon, she worried that Kit's people would know she'd dialed Burma. They might even hear the conversation. She didn't care. Let them. What could they do? Their silly political games could wait. Soong Tan had top priority. Besides, she and Rod could talk in a code they 'd work out as they went. She'd mix up a little Spanish with a little Burmese and talk fast and let it leak that she'd lost his letter, so to speak. She'd say, Erod come again, which flight please? 707-something? What time? He'd get it; eavesdroppers wouldn't.
Sweat pumped through the palms of her hands as she pressed the receiver to her ear and listened to the distant hoot of a ring in Asia. But then the detested three-tone, off-key announcement of a phone company message interrupted the call. "We are sorry. Your call cannot be completed at this time. All circuits are busy." She'd heard it before. Burma's phone system still worked on kite string and tin cans. She tried three more times but got the same message. She knew she'd have better luck in the afternoon - after midnight in Burma. She'd try after work.
Work! Another day of dealing with little kids' body fluids, wiping noses, checking blood, checking urine, sopping up tears, plugging the leaks of lacerations. She felt a little like a kind of plumber, a plumber of love. She loved the kisses on the boo-boos, the caresses of the phlegm-filled chests, the peak-a-boos into the ears. She loved to probe their bellies and hear the giggle as she felt around their plump, firm livers, stomachs, intestines. She liked to thump their kidneys and feel the echo of their youthful vitality. She loved to hear their hearts k-thubbing under her stethoscope, to feel the heat of their fevers beneath the back of her hand. She loved to peer down their little throats as if to see the life that filled them and made possible all the laughings, cryings, dreams and fears of childhood. When she injected them with vaccinations, she thought of the irony that such a painful, invasive, uninvited thing delivered the gift of life. She thought of Soong Tan and all the other children pressed into prostitution, receiving not the loving hands of medical help but the hateful hands of men who cared only for their own sick urges. How sad and sick, she thought, that the act of sexual love could happen as a hateful thing.
She thought this as she drove a hypodermic needle into the upper arm of a carrot-topped five-year-old boy who needed a polio vaccine far more than he needed polio.
"Very good," said Dr. Fishbinder, watching over her shoulder. "Couldn't have done it better myself."
Damn right she thought. He used a syringe as if trying to squeeze money out of it. In her opinion, he treated kids like little robots whose feelings meant nothing until they graduated from college. To him, they didn't have sniffles and coughs and boo-boos. They had medical conditions. Ysa didn't recall him saying to them anything more than "Hiya kid, howya doin'?" He never spoke to them like human beings. He performed competently but coldly. Dr. Dollars. That's what his staff called him.
Dr. Dollars gave nurse van der Meer a patty-pat-pat on her pert little fanny as they left the examination room. Nurse van der Meer responded with a wild jab at his solar plexus with her pert little elbow. But she missed full impact, and the jab came off as a playful swipe. His hand stroked the place where she'd touched him. He liked it.
Now more angry at herself than at him, Ysa marched away quickly, spine straight, head high, without looking back. She felt his eyes on her backside. She wanted to turn around and smack him in frustration. Even the act of walking away gave him pleasure. For a fleeting moment she considered porking out on beer and potato chips for a couple of months. She'd build up an overcoat of blubber that would defend her from his hands, eyes and mind. But he'd just find someone else to suffer his attentions, and she'd be stuck with the blubber.
He followed her into the prep room, closing the door behind him. While she divied up sterilized instruments into drawers, he stood behind her, hands in pockets, too close for her comfort but not quite touching. Far enough to avoid an elbow to the gut. He seemed to have learned that much. He smelled of after-shave and antiseptic soap.
"You like children," he commented in a warm and gentle voice. "Haven't you ever thought of having your own?"
She felt like telling him she had a daughter in the sex business in Burma. Instead, she slammed instruments into drawers hard enough to express irritation. But Dr. Fishbinder didn't take hints. He pressed on through her silence. "A pretty girl like you...you could have such beautiful children. I really think you're wasting your time in a job like this. You could be caring for your own kids, doing the mommy thing, not worrying about money."
She had a scalpel in her hand, sterile in its tight plastic wrap, the sharpest cutting instrument in the world. Made for human flesh. She could remove it from the bag, she knew, with a swift twist of her wrist, and almost as quickly she could remove, say, someone's liver. She's say, "Whoops, sorry," and hand him the organ of her choice. He'd look at it, dumbfounded. Speechless. Then he'd understand.
"Don't you have a boyfriend" he continued. "Hmmm? No sweetie-pie to tickle your nesting instinct?"
Still saying nothing, she dropped to a squat to check the inventory in the lower cabinet. She felt her white pants pull taut across her thighs, and she knew he saw. The smell of fresh bandages and alcohol blossomed up from the drawer.
He kept on: "So what is it with you? I mean, like, do you have a girlfriend? I mean, like..."
She knew what he was about to say. Her hands decided for themselves what to do about it. They opened a roll of gauze and unwound about a foot of it and made to rip off a piece
"...like...it would be fine with me. The three of us could...OOOOOOMPH!" As the bandage snapped and Ysa's fist shot back, the doctor curled downward in classic groin-worshipping position.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Ysa gasped with extreme apology, retracting her fist and the tail of bandage that it held. "Are you all right Dr. Fishbinder?"
He said nothing, didn't even nod, as he straightened a bit, turned and took baby-steps to the door. He left without a word.
* * *
That, she soon knew, had done it. He sat alone in his office, the recovery room, as it were. Ysa handled the clientele. She didn't need a doctor to take a culture for strep throat, to suggest cough syrup for a feverless cough, to take a blood sample to check for Lyme disease. All the while, she imagined Dr. Fishbinder sitting sadly behind his desk, his pants opened so he could comfort his swollen, throbbing buddies down below.
And apparently he did some thinking as well. Late in the afternoon, he called Ysa in. From behind his desk he said, "Close the door, please."
She hesitated. How could he have the nerve? Seeming to recognize her hesitation, he made dipping, conciliatory movements of his head and gestured for her to go ahead and close it. She did, but when he motioned for her to take a seat, she remained standing. Near the door.
"Ysa," he finally said, somewhat sadly, "it has occurred to me of late that you aren't entirely...happy here..."
She already knew what would follow. Faced with the choice of argument or silence, she chose silence, at least until he'd dug himself a hole.
Seeing no reaction from her, he continued. "We're afraid your...how shall we say it...your attitude just hasn't worked out the way we'd hoped, and we're afraid it's, well, been reflected in the quality of your work."
With a flicker of betrayal in her eyes, Ysa's mind raced back to the scalpel she'd toyed with a few hours earlier. She should have demonstrated her true attitude right then.
What did he mean the quality of her work? He'd just let her do half an afternoon's work for him while he and his sad scrotum sat sulking in his room. The patients loved her, and if she'd ever made a mistake, he'd never mentioned it. And what did he mean by that anonymous we? Did he lack the guts to come right out and say, "Because you have just slugged me in the testicles..." Had she hit him that hard?
Still she said nothing.,
"In view of recent...shall we say events, we think it might be best if you tendered your resignation and perhaps moved on to somewhere where you might be a little happier?"
How sweet. He ended his sentence with an audible question mark. Did he mean to give her an option? Could she respond by saying no, she preferred not to accept termination?
She responded by saying, "You can't do this, you know. It's sexual harassment."
He snickered. "And my attorney tells me that little incident in the prep room constitutes assault. And just between you and me, I can generate a few memos and warnings about your reckless performance as a nurse. You've ignored medical procedures, refused to follow the instructions of a physician; in short, you've endangered the well-being of children. If you'd like to have all that come out in court, well, it'll be your word against mine, and your attorney against mine - you do have an attorney, I assume - and no matter who wins, I assure you you'll never work for another doctor in the state of Virginia."
She did not say a word. Her father had taught her that, too. In a situation where arguing will achieve nothing, don't argue. Change the subject or change your location. Retreat. Regroup. Reload. Redress. In other words, don't get mad; get even.
So she simply turned and walked out. She did not say good-bye to Maryann or anyone else; she did not tell them what had happened; she did not imagine that Dr. Fishbinder's world would collapse without her.
She didn't go home. She liked to think in her car, while driving, and on that particular afternoon, her Porsche fit her mood. With some aggressive shifting through town traffic, a few toodles of her horn and a little luck as she slid under traffic lights that had turned just a little red, she broke free from traffic within minutes. Keeping the tachometer over 3,000, pushing it toward the redline in the lower gears, she hit state route 632 at double the speed limit and kept accelerating.
She knew the road well. It rose fast into the Appalachians, cutting upward across mountainsides, switching back in hairpin turns, banking inward enough to counterbalance centrifugal force created by her speed through curves. The exhaust system droned at a pitch between purr and growl. At high revs it had a certain feminine seriousness to it, not shrill but not weak. It spoke for all the power of German engineering and all the strength of a woman who knew what she wanted and how to get it. Gripping the wheel at 10:00 and 2:00, her forearms tense, she pushed the car as hard as it could go without crossing a certain margin of certainty. She shifted fast and hard, stomping on the clutch for only the split second it took to upshift, a technique she and her father had learned in an anti-kidnapping course they'd taken. Without really needing to, she practiced the heel-and-toe technique of simultaneously breaking and accelerating to keep the revs high as she downshifted into a tight turn. The exhaust screamed with a maniacal combination of anger and delight. She powered through the curves, listening for the initial squeal of rubber that warned of a rear end about to break away. The wind sucked at her hair from the open roof, tousling it like a lover with a fetish. The cracks in the asphalt, remnants of the mountain winter, jostled her against the lateral supports of the seat. She hated to admit to herself how much she loved the power and the speed. Sighting down the sloping hood of the Porsche as the center line of the road zipped below, she felt sexual inklings which no doubt men felt even more. Coming out of a second-gear curve, feeling the centrifugal force lessen, she pushed the tach to the red line, slammed it into third and popped the clutch. The tires caught rubber with a quick chirp under the crescendo roar of the exhaust. The hard thrust pressed her back into the seat as if under the weight of a man. With the next curve at the end of a half-mile straight-away, she kept her right foot to the floor, and as she passed the point where normally she'd brake and downshift, she kept accelerating, counting one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi with agonizing precision, and then hit the brakes hard and snapped the gear into second. The deceleration heaved her against the seat belt, but the car held steady, screaming with the rage of a jaguar bringing down game, aiming straight into the apex of the curve. She came out of it at full acceleration and whooshed up an incline at 120 mph.
She pressed on at that pace until she reached the destination she hadn't even thought about until nearly there - Rosie's Roadhouse.
Rosie often joked that she ran the Roadhouse as a volunteer effort to provide an essential service. High in a mountain pass above the southern border of West Virginia, shrouded in fog and hemlocks, the Roadhouse offered the only public access to whiskey and decent beer within a hundred miles. In fact, the only other public meeting places within an hour's drive had steeples and pews and rather strict rules of behavior. The Roadhouse had none of these, though behavior did have to fit within the liberal limits of the local deity, Roselinda Kolakowski.
Rosie ran a good bar. Unless you looked like a federal agent, she'd serve you homebrew of her own concoction or a corn mash whiskey from a nearby village. Unless you worked at a pretty eclectic college radio station, you probably wouldn't recognize any of the songs in her jukebox, but you wouldn't have to because it never stopped playing on its own accord. Whether it set the mood of the hour or somehow read the mood and reacted to it, no one knew. Somehow it sensed the need for weeping mountain fiddle or mysterious cosmic sitar or gut-pounding African drums or a jubilant big band jitterbug.
Rosie lit the place with kerosene lamps and served slow food - pot roast, ribs, lamb stew. The big stone fireplace always crackled with a fire; even in summer, the clouds rarely broke long enough to warm the notch where the Roadside stood.
Rosie had two shots of Kentucky dew on the broad rock maple bar before Ysa came through the door. As usual, she had no customers, but that could change by the time the sun set.
"I heard ya' coming down Winslow Mountain," she chortled. "I knew you'd need two just to come in for a landing." Ysa loved Rosie's blushed, chubby cheeks. At the age of forty-four she already carried the odd aura of a jovial grandmother crossed with a feisty college kid.
"Oh, yes," Ysa said, tossing down one shot. "Yes." And she tossed down the second. She imagined her flaps lowering as she descended onto an emotional runway.
"It's tough out there in the real world, ain't it?" Rosie had a way of making the most serious situations sound like a subtle joke.
"Oh, Rosie, you have no idea."
""Mmmm...I wouldn't be too sure of that."
True, Ysa thought. Rosie had spent a few years in a federal pen for something she'd done during the war in Vietnam, something she didn't want to brag about. Ysa had gleaned that it involved LSD, some draft dodgers and an explosion that may have cost the federal government quite a bit of money. Rosie's checkered past included some shady dealings in Mexico, a love affair either in Russia or with a Russian or both, a brief stint in a nunnery, and a variety of other experiences that would not appear on the average curriculum vitae.
"Anybody who comes down Winslow Mountain in third gear has a man problem," Rosie said, and the jukebox launched into a blues number featuring a sobbing steel guitar.
"Not man," Ysa said. "Men. What's your homebrew these days?"
Rosie handed over a mug of amber brew with a low, steady tan head, the malt equivalent of a fine French wine. Ysa didn't mean to quaff it with an audible slurp, but she didn't mind, either. The beer tasted of sweet malt and the essence of hops flowers. It settled nicely on the double whiskey still hot in her throat. At that point she knew she would not drive home that night.
"Three men," she said to Rosie, who had planted her elbows on the bar and rested her chin on two thumbs. "One's an utter asshole with a medical degree to prove it. One's kind of seems nice, a kind of take-charge type, which is OK if you're the type to be taken charge of."
"Which you're not."
"Right. And the other guy's kind of cute and kind of short and kind of I don't know what."
"Not another take charge type?"
"Nnnnooooo...not really. But maybe I haven't figured him out."
"Let me know if you ever figure any man out," Rosie said. She lifted her chin from its nest of fingers. "Just when I conclude there's a bunch of dumb beasts with their only thought dangling between their legs, along comes a handsome prince. And just when I think they all have the innocent souls of puppies, I get bit."
Ysa didn't want to get bit. She'd had that experience. The most rabid, infectious bite had come from Hans Lizst-Schmidtmeister, the Austrian she'd met in Paris. He had waltzed her into heaven and foxtrotted her body to the gates of Nirvana. She had found her prince, a man so debonair, loving, respectful, attentive and beautiful that she suspected he had something to do with God. Her father had liked him, too, had all but given him the key to the embassy. He might as well have. Ysa had the key to Hans apartment on R. LaCourbe and practically lived there. Her father, understanding in the ways and joys of youth, seemed to assume she lay in good hands. He said nothing about the affair.
All of that changed in one moment of one day. On her bed at home one afternoon she found a video tape in a manila envelope. On the envelope, her father, who had just left for Washington, had written, "You may want to keep this. Emanuel Rodriguez got hold of it. Let's hope it's the only copy. And please understand that I'm very, very sorry."
Wondering what in the world Emanuel might have found that would make her father feel sorry for her, she fed the tape into her bedroom VCR. The program began not with titles or music but with the sudden appearance of a woman taking a shower. The shot came from down low, down near her ankles, looking upward across the woman's soapy thighs and torso, her face slightly out of focus in the upper distance. Steam cast a soft focus over the lens, and drops of water sprinkled spots of clarity. It looked like artsy pornography. But then a splash of water washed the fog away, and the woman bent low to work lather between her toes, and Ysa saw that the woman was herself.
As the video rolled, Ysa choked up with a swelling horror. Her handsome valiant prince must have had the whole apartment hooked up with video cameras. Calculating the angles of the shots as they focused on her in different parts of the apartment, she gradually understood why he had had mirrors in the shower, over the bed, even on the wall of the living room. Gullible fool, she'd thought he just liked to caress her naked body in front of a mirror so he could see both sides of her.
Like a voyeur with a peephole into a bedroom, she watched as he stood behind her, his groin pressed against her backside, his hands waltzing across her breasts and belly. She saw her own nipples harden and arch as his fingers played with them, and she knew exactly what she had felt beneath her blonde mons pubis long before he touched it. In fact she remembered that particular time. She'd knelt before him, arousing him, watching with fascination and rapt desire as he grew into a monument of passion. But now, instead of exciting her, the scene on video gagged her with revulsion. The act of love had degenerated into the ugliest of smut. The next scene looked down on them from the mirror above the bed as they made love again and again, barely stopping to compose themselves, drink a bit of cognac, then lick cognac off each other and again start down the winding road toward the next orgasm. She remembered how he had coaxed her into positions she'd never dreamed of in her fantasies, positions of interwoven legs, of impossible clutches, of weightlessness as he lifted her, held her as he wanted her, positions bringing the most scintillating parts of her body to his lips. She'd never known she had that body, had never felt it quiver with such insane pleasure, had never imagined craving the male body the way a dog craves a bone. Looking down on them as they lay in bed, she atop him, his head between her thighs, she then saw, on the video, what he'd seen as he looked upward into the mirror. He looked into the lens and through the TV screen into Ysa's eyes. She remembered how a lick of her tongue had torched off a cataclysm of bucking and moaning. He did the same to her, exchanging volleys until they both exploded.
But then, as she watched it, horror tainted the pleasure. She all but vomited with the thought that her father had seen this, that it had passed through other hands, no doubt, on its way to him. Even Emanuel...
How astounding, then, that her father could talk about it rationally, calmly, with detached assessment. She almost hated him, for a moment, for his ability to remain detached, as if he didn't care, as if men did these things all the time and shared a secret bond of understanding and acceptance. He told her that Emanuel had gotten hold of the tape, actually stolen it from Hans. And with good reason. He had seen it at a stag party at Hans' place. Ysa could imagine the howls of male laughter and drunken declarations of lust.
"He told me he did not vatch," her father said of Emanuel. "Not after he recognized you. If it vere anyvun else, I'd not beliefe it."
"But you watched?" she suggested, unsure if she should ask, almost hoping he would make her suffer more. She wanted to suffer, as if she had done something wrong.
He knew the cut of her eyes at that point, knew the thoughts behind them, the seething hatred. "Don't get mad," he said. "Get even. Let me know what you'd like done with him and I'll help you do it right."
She thought that maybe a car bomb would teach him a lesson. His car. With him in it. Her father read her thoughts again and said, with a lilt of humor, "Not murder. Think of something subtle. Something he'll have to live with."
It seemed so long ago, so distant from the years in Burma that followed, and now, almost absurdly, the safety and warmth of Rosie's Roadhouse. The memory took only a second, no longer than the quick stab of a dagger. Ysa doused it and returned to Rosie's blooming face. "Rosie..." she said, shifting to the tone of a confession.
"No, wait...let me guess...another draft!"
Rosie always did that, transmogrifying the maudlin into merriment, putting the problem into perspective before settling into discussion. She pulled two tall, conical ice-coated Pilsner glasses from the freezer and filled them at the tap. "Pilsner," she said. "I had the yeast smuggled in from Prague. Drink a little before you tell me life's too hard to tolerate." Rosie took a pensive sip herself, assessed it with her tongue, then swallowed. "Damn that's good," she gasped.
Ysa sipped, too. Life did have pleasures that made some pains worthwhile. At least for some people some of the time. But she wanted to talk about Soong Tan, who at that moment certainly did not have a cold pilsner in her hand or the sweet taste of the good life on her tongue.
The door of the Roadhouse opened. Ysa felt that strangers had just walked into Rosie's living room. But Rosie's round, childish face lit with cheer. "Yo!" she shouted as two men in plaid jackets stepped into the glow of kerosene lamplight and lifted their caps. Only then did Ysa notice the eighteen-wheeler idling outside. Somehow they'd driven the beast over a road that had challenged a Porsche, presumably at a somewhat saner speed.
"Two quick brews!" one man called out.
"Coming right up!" As she drew two drafts, the truckers threw their legs over their chosen barstools, nestling into them like long-missed saddles. Rosie chatted up some small talk, then left them to their beers and a bowl of peanuts.
"One each won't hurt them," Rosie said to Ysa. "But you're staying the night, right?"
"Much obliged." She thought how much she loved Rosie, her whole attitude toward life, even if life had chased her to a lost wayside in the mountains. She wondered if Rosie would make her usual offer.
"So what's bothering you, kid?" she asked again. "Besides guys."
"Remember I told you about Soong Tan?"
"Rosie nodded heavily. An indentation of sad seriousness formed between her eyes. "Still no sign of her?"
"No, not really, except...damn!" She'd completely forgotten about the message from Emanuel Rodriguez! She smacked herself on the forehead. She'd meant to call. And of course she hadn't brought the his home phone number with her. It was well after midnight in Burma.
"What?" Rosie asked.
"Never mind. Just a strange e-mail I got today. But that's not the problem. The problem's that I've been...I don't know...contacted by this weird group."
"Weird? You mean like foot-fetish types or something?"
"I mean like super-secret types. Like secreter than the CIA."
"How could anything be more secret than the CIA?"
"Well, you've heard of the CIA?"
"Sure."
"But you've never heard of these guys. They don't even have a name for themselves."
Rosie's face opened with amazement. She leaned over to draw herself another beer. Ysa held onto her own half-full glass.
"OK," Rosie said. "A bunch of super-secret weirdo's have contacted you. Did you get the license number off their UFO? Was Elvis there?"
"Rosie, I'm serious. And it's not that they're weird..."
"Don't tell me you're the weird one!"
"Rosie..." Her voice dropped to a whisper as she leaned in close. "I held up a bank."
Ysa had never had a fine amber pilsner spat in her face before, and Rosie hadn't really mean to do it, but the shock of the statement had surprised her. The truckers looked over as Rosie apologetically blotted off Ysa's face with a clean bar rag, then wiped off her own dripping chin.
"If it was anybody else," Rosie said, "I wouldn't believe it."
Ysa continued wasing her face as Rosie handed her wet napkins soaked with warm water. "If it was anybody else who spit beer in my face," Ysa said, "I'd be mad."
"I'm going to kiss you as soon as those truckers leave."
"The hell you are. Give me another shot of that lightning."
Rosie poured the shot, handling the jug as if it weighed nothing. She left it on the bar. "OK," she said. "You stuck up a bank and these secret agents contacted you, so you sped right over here in your hot little Porschee to get drunk with a convicted felon. This is all beginning to make sense to me."
"Right...yes...but when you put it that way, it sounds crazy." Ysa held her head in both hands, trying to focus on the wood grain of the bar. She saw the wet rings her glass had left, saw the constellations of golden droplets, thought it all terribly beautiful, terribly cosmic in a close and personal way. "But it's not crazy. It's happening. And I'm in the middle of it. They're going to rescue Soong Tan. I think they said that."
She felt the inside of her face filling with tears. When they came, they'd pour. She knew that. But they welled up like water behind a dam. She'd had one whiskey too many, she knew, and she wanted one more. One more to break the dam. "All I wanted was to be a nurse and take care of children and maybe have a daughter someday and raise her...raise her..." - the salty water edged up to the rim of her eyelids. The bar below her face swam in swirling ripples. "I just wanted to raise her not to be like me!"
Rosie's warm, pudgy hand came over the bar to caress Ysa's head. It smoothed her silky yellow hair, moving it back from her face. Ysa did not move or resist. The hand felt like a mother's love. "I don't know what they want me to do," she said, her voice floating unsurely on huge bubbles of subterranean tears. "They're going to ask me to do something I can't do. I just know it. They're going to tell me Soong Tan's right over there...behind some bushes or something...and all I have to do is go on in there and get her. They won't do it, but they'll want me to do it. I know their type. Football players.. They work up some big powerful strategy and then execute it. And somebody out front gets pounded. And do you know who it's going to be, Rosie? You know who's going to be a pawn in their goddam football game? Me, Rosie. Me and little Soong Tan."
She just let Rosie's hand stroke the straight, slick curtain of hair that hung around the sides of her face. "There, there," Rosie said. "It's all right. It's all up in your head. You're just torturing yourself."
Then the tears welled out. They dropped to the bar and they drizzled cool lines down her cheeks. "I want my father," she said, all but blubbering. "I want my daddy. I want my daddy..."
She felt Rosie's lips press against the top of her head, and then her cheek nuzzled the same spot. "No more daddy, kid," she said. Somehow the words sounded calm and soothing. "You're your own daddy now. He made you what you are. You do what he'd do. He'd want it, and you want it, too."
Sweet Jesus Himself could not have spoken with more love, certainty, confidence and truth. Ysa lay her head upon the bar as if upon a pillow, a cool nesting pillow of linen and down.
* * *
She slept in down, in an embrace as warm and secure as a papoose. The anesthesia of tears wrapped around her like an old quilt. She imagined the quilt, remembered it, really, the way her mother used to tuck it in just so, muttering "tuck-a-tuck-a-tuck-a-tuck-a-tuck" as her fingers wiggled the quilt around Ysa's neck, shoulders, ribs, belly, legs, calves, feet. Tucked in tight and safe like that, she would lie without moving, a little girl alone in the dark but as safe as if in her mother's arms and her father's arms around them both. The quilt dissolved and became the slick, down-filled ski jacket arms of her father at the upper lip of the ski jump. The infinite plunge stretched before her into the mist of the alpine valley. His strong, soft voice said, "Just lean into it, sweetie. Hold your form and lean into it."
She did it. She entwined herself into his life force as they freefell through the icy air of the teeth of death. They raced through death with the utter, gut-deep confidence of unleashed life. He clung to her, and she leaned into the weightlessness of speed. It swallowed her as she plunged down, down, and then suddenly floated, floated upward, heavy yet as free of solidity as a soul. And she sang a single note, the light, weightless moan of ineffable freedom, the coo of a mourning dove rising in the dawn. She held the form in a state beyond consciousness. As her father relaxed his embrace, she flew alone, inches from him but without contact, without weight, without choice beyond that single overwhelming decision to lean into the momentum and the wind-filled openness before her. She held the form and let the air surround her in its rushing hug.
She descended into hot chocolate laced with schnapps. That, too, tucked her into a numbness of subtle joy. As if on the waves of South Pacific swells, she rose and settled, rose and settled, until she lost any sensation of up and down. The amniotic brine of a dream, a fluid quilt of down, pressed a warmth to her, and she slipped from sleep into something deeper.
She awakened gently, lost but not caring, curled into herself under a down quilt, only gradually joining the world. She became conscious of the distant ring of a phone. It whimpered downstairs in the bar, a lost memory crying for its owner. The warm weight around he waist was not a ferret. It was Rosie's arm. Her limp, pudgy hand cupped her lower breast. She felt herself breathing down through the collar of her own nurse's blouse. Unsure of the softly throbbing feelings lingering within her, she moved to slip from under Rosie's sleepy arm. Rosie barely moved, barely edged to the brink of sleep. The cool air of morning washed around Ysa's bare legs. Rosie, still in a dream, mumbled something from a secret realm, maybe Arnold, come home, maybe I'm all alone, maybe Answer the phone. Ysa, barely awake, confused, leaned across the bed, hesitated in the blossom of motherly odor, and briefly pressed her lips to Rosie's warm and musty jaw.
On her way out, the phone just kept ringing and ringing, louder and louder as she came down the stairs and stepped into the bar. What kind of idiot let a phone ring and ring at dawn, she wondered. What a rotten thing to do to a bartender. Ysa reached into the phone booth and lifted the receiver just enough to cut off the call, but then, on second thought, she brought it to her ear. After a moment of silence, she said, with a bit of pissedness, "What?" She didn't get the click and dial tone she expected. She got a man's voice. He didn't introduce himself. He didn't need to. He said, "Ysa, something's come up. We need you here. Please...hurry.
"Oh, Ysa, thank you for coming," That's what Kit said first as he opened the heavy steel door at the rear of 55-50. He looked worried but also relieved to see her. His hand pressed to her shoulder blade as he moved her through the anteroom. "I'm afraid we've got a bit of an emergency here."
"I sure hope you don't expect me to solve your problems," she said, not exactly kidding. The activity in the wide room of cubbyholes and computer banks seemed much more intense than the last time she'd visited. People moved around, hustling with serious looks on their faces and always something in the hand - a bunch of papers, a roll of blueprints, a computer disk. They talked in hard, curt whispers.
"It's gotten very serious," Kit said, leading her across the room. People got out of his way. They looked at him as they passed, and they looked at Ysa. He opened a door at the far end of the room and motioned her through.
She would have believed it the War Room at the Pentagon except for its temporary, low-budget, jury-rigged look. A projected map of southeast Asia filled one entire wall of the mostly dark room. Half a dozen people wearing earphones worked at large computer screens. In the darkness she couldn't see their faces, but she heard them speak softly, authoritatively, into microphones as they coaxed information onto their screens. Then she saw Frank. He simply nodded to her. He looked very worried. She looked to Kit.
"Our man Rok," Kit said. "Looks like he wants to play hardball."
"So what else is new?"
"I mean real hard. Ysa, it looks like he's got himself a nuclear device."
Before she could absorb the impact of that news, she saw Frank shoot Kit a wicked look. Kit shot a look right back and snapped, "She has to know. We can't be fooling around now." Frank turned away, visibly unconvinced, his jaw at an angry angle. Ysa hoped he never turned that jaw on her. She also hoped the two men didn't draw Stilettos and settle their differences right then and there. She'd never sensed such powerful, spoken animosity between two people. They looked calm and controlled, but some silent secret charged the air.
"How the hell did he get a nuclear weapon?" she asked. "Don't they keep those things locked up?"
"Not in Russia. At least that's what we assume. We sent an overflight over Rok's territory a week ago and picked up some radiation. Certain sources detected similar radiation on an Aeroflot flight into Berlin last month. It disappeared before Interpol got its act together. We'd heard rumors of several metric tons of raw smack coming into Chechnya on a transport plane out of Kazakhstan, and major movements of money into Zurich indicate something big happening. It wasn't your average dope deal."
Frank turned back to face Kit and Ysa. "It isn't all that certain," he said, his voice seeming to accuse Kit of stupidity. "We're working on assumptions. Guesses. We're basing things on rumors. For all we know..."
Kit cut him off. "We're assuming the worst. This isn't radiation coming off a glow-in-the-dark watch. It's plutonium."
"But not necessarily a bomb."
"It doesn't have to be a bomb. Plutonium's bad enough by itself. You could pack a teaspoon of the stuff inside a hand grenade and contaminate half of Manhattan for a hundred thousand years."
Ysa knew enough about plutonium. The intelligence department of the embassy in Paris had dedicated a lot of its resources to tracking nuclear materials leaking out of the former Soviet Union. Small amounts of radioactive isotopes had turned up at customs checks in virtually every country in Europe. Some had come from the spent fuel rods of nuclear power plants - highly toxic materials that could permanently contaminate anything it touched. Other materials - plutonium-239 and uranium-235, the isotopes used as atomic bomb fuel - had obviously come from military sites or nuclear weapons plants. But officials had never discovered quantities sufficient for a bomb. Officials assumed that these small quantities merely served as samples, proof that the seller had access to the several kilos needed for a low-tech bomb. No one knew for certain that no actual bombs had made their way onto the black market. No one believed that the Russian mafiya lacked the power to lift a bomb or two. They had billions of dollars in cash at their disposal and a reputation for violence that made the Italian mafia look like sissies. If they wanted a bomb, they could certainly arrange access whenever they wanted. Ysa's father had called this the biggest short-term problem in the world. Sooner or later someone would get hold of a bomb, or even a few pounds of terribly toxic bomb fuel, and would use it to hold a nation hostage. Now, as Ysa stared at the big map of southeast Asia, she saw the inevitability of the first rogue bomb or radiological weapon turning up in Rok Mon's hands. He loved power as most people love life. He'd pay any price for the world's most powerful weapon. And once he had it, he'd have to use it, and he'd surely find a way to get his money's worth out of it.
"Yes," Ysa said to Kit. "Assume the worst. Assume the absolute worst. And you can assume he'll think of something even worse than that."
Kit nodded heavily. "If he's anywhere near as diabolical as we try to be, he's figured out how to make one bomb look like several bombs. In fact, he doesn't even need one. All he needs is evidence that he has one...a little plutonium proves it within reasonable doubt, and we know he's got that. And not a little, not if we picked up gamma waves from fifty-thousand feet up."
"So what do you think he's going to do?"
Kit nodded to Frank. "For openers, we expect extortion," Frank said. "He might threaten Singapore, Hong Kong, maybe even Japan. He'll give them an ultimatum. Very quietly, of course. The world will never know. A deal will be struck. But all of a sudden you'll see heroin in the streets at bargain basement prices, and the police won't have the foggiest idea what to do about it. Rok's after market. He wants to get his foot in the door and then move in with everything he's got. He can carry out the same threat all over Asia. Who's going to say no to a man with an atom bomb?"
Kit continued. "It's only a matter of time until he moves full-force into Europe and the United States."
"But hasn't he already got the market sewed up?" Ysa asked.
"He'd like to get every human being in the world hooked on the stuff. Don't you think he'd like to get it into food supplies? Maybe a little in every bottle of Coca-Cola? A bit in cigarettes? All he needs is a few key government people to look the other way."
Ysa's mind darkened with depression. She'd lived under Rok's evil, all-pervasive influence in Burma and its neighbors. She knew the irresistible power of big money working as a carrot while the threat of horrendous cruelty served as a stick. He could easily drag other countries into the same pit of moral bankruptcy where he'd dragged Burma. Burma's borders would certainly not contain him if he felt like expanding his area of control. The thought of the whole world running under the same rules as Burma made Ysa feel the way she'd felt in the bank. She just wanted to close her eyes and forget it all. She wanted Kit to take control of the situation and solve the problem, the way he'd done in the Chelseatown Savings Bank. But this time it was him calling her to the rescue. In a way, she liked the feeling. The table had turned. He needed her.
"So Rok wants to take over the world, and you want me to stop him," she said, looking back and forth between Kit and Frank. "Maybe I should find a cure for AIDS while I'm at it."
Kit smiled but Frank didn't. "You're not as far off base as you might think," Kit said. "Rok isn't about to take over the world, but we do see a pretty bad situation with the criminal organizations of the world."
"A pretty bad situation?" Frank snarled. "That's putting it rather lightly. Between the Italian mafia, the Colombian cartel, the Russia Mafiya, the Chinese Triads, the Japanese Yakuza and Rok Mon with a supply of plutonium, I'd say we're looking at the end of Western civilization. They have enough power and enough money to bring the whole thing down."
"But what about the police?" Ysa said, almost pleading. "The FBI? The CIA? Can't they do anything?"
Kit and Frank both looked at her, Cynicism practically bled from their eyes. She felt stupid for asking. "They can't even bust a street-corner dope-dealer," Frank scoffed. "What are they going to do about the most powerful criminal in the world?"
"So there's nobody," Ysa said.
Kit smiled in his shy way. "Well," he said. "There's us."
Frank leveled his eyes at her. If she read them correctly, they said, Remember what I told you. They are above the law. For the moment, however, she didn't care. Her old, seething hatred of Rok Mon had boiled up to the surface again. The law seemed unimportant. Irrelevant. She said to Kit, "So what do we do?"
With a tilt of his head, Kit directed them to a computer screen. He hit a combination of keyboard keys to bring up a map of most of Asia. It included all of southeast Asia and southern China. A cancerous red blotch reached across most of it - Rok's territory. Beneath the red, international borders faded into insignificance. Kit explained the symbols and colors that indicated poppy plantations, landing strips, fortifications, roads, towns and settlements.
"Nobody goes into or out of this territory without Rok's permission," Kit said. "Rok himself rarely leaves, and only in absolute secrecy. We suspect he flies out through China, possibly slipping into Hong Kong or Korea. The entire population within his area is either loyal to him or unwilling to resist. Government troops enter only with permission, usually to deliver weapons - financed by the World Bank and the Unites States, to name a couple of his friends - or to pick up some dope for delivery elsewhere, or maybe to put on a show to please some concerned dignitary. His bunker is an entire mountain, inside and out. Nobody comes near the place but his very best friends."
"And I suppose there's no shooting a missile in there and knocking him out that way," Ysa said.
"We'd probably just get him mad," Kit said. "His empire, his machine, would be in tact. Even if we killed him, plenty of people would love to take it over."
"So you'd have to kill everybody in the area."
Neither Frank nor Kit said anything. Ysa, not believing her sudden suspicion, said, "You wouldn't do something like that. You couldn't."
Frank seemed to hold back until Kit answered. "They're all part of the machine. If they aren't working directly for Rok, they're growing poppies or processing the heroin."
"Or cooking lunch for the people processing the heroin," Ysa said, shocked. "Or watching their children. Or planting rice or fixing cars or catching fish...most of those people are just peasants who don't know heroin from a hole in the ground! They're just trying to get by. How many people live in that area? A million?"
"Nobody knows," Kit said in a tone of apology. "And we aren't going to kill everybody. But yes, a lot of people are going to die. A lot. But I think we can contain it to his mountain, his inner circle."
She looked to Frank. He seemed the more concerned of the two, or at least the more cynical. Kit, too, waited for him to say something. Finally, with a tortured look, he said, "Look, we might be wrong, but we're less wrong than Rok."
Kit turned back to the map. "Look here," he said, pointing to a minuscule dot. "The Mission of the Sisters of Charity. Ever heard of it?"
Ysa had to laugh. The Sisters of Charity. The embassy had pleaded for them to pack up and move out of Rok's territory. No one could understand how the group of nuns managed to survive in their mountain top monastery. Rok Mon hardly considered himself a member of the Catholic flock, yet he let the Sisters remain. They ran an orphanage. Peasants brought them the children they could not afford to raise. The Sisters offered the only local alternative to selling unwanted children on the black market. The children tended to arrive as infants and leave as soon as they could support themselves in the outside world. In Rok's territory, that usually meant service in his army, his brothels or his poppy fields.
"I suppose you want to rescue the nuns before you kill everybody else," Ysa said.
No," Kit said. "The Sisters will be safe. And so will most people. But this is where it starts." He pressed the tip of his finger to the dot of the monastery in the Kumon mountain range. "This is where we trap him. And you, Sister van der Meer, are the bait."
Frank didn't seem to like it when Kit asked him to take care of something that didn't sound particularly important, then guided Ysa to an adjacent room. He kept his firm, gentle hand on her elbow. When the door closed behind them, he didn't let go. At first she thought she must have walked into the wrong room, but with a gentle strength he brought her around to face him. His other hand came to her waist. She could barely bring herself to inhale as found herself leaning into him, up against him, as his arms came around her, and then her arms, moving by their own will alone, went up around his broad torso. She had not known how much she wanted him. His eyes burrowed deep into hers as his taut, rugged face came in close. As his lips came to her mouth, she thought maybe she should turn her head aside, accept a kiss on the cheek, but she couldn't turn away. She wanted his lips, his mouth; she wanted entry to him. She wanted his nose nestled into her cheek and his tongue looking for hers.
With his strength, she was powerless, helpless - trapped, except that she only craved to be deeper within it. His hard thighs lay against her like beams of timber. She did not care that his left hand cupped her bottom, carressed it, lifted it, petted it with respectful tenderness. She told herself to push his hand away, that it was going too far too fast, but her hands were gripping his shoulder blades and woul dnot let go.
His kiss, strangely enough, did not go deep. It remained at the lips, a tender pressing, a superficial nibble, a sensuous graze, wholly heart-felt but something less than lust. She nibbled back, clung to him with a hunger for more. Though he pulled her against himself with irresistible strength, he parted the kiss and laid his head against hers. He smelled of baby powder. She pinched his neck with her lips, then pressed her cheek against the spot.
"Oh, Ysa," he whispered directly into her ear, "You are so beautiful...and we will need so much from you."
She sensed dread in his words. Fear, maybe - maybe regret or guilt. "What, Kit?" she breathed into his ear. "What do you need from me?"
He pulled back enough to look at her. His hands, warm and strong, came to either side of her face. "It's going to be dangerous," he said. "We want to send you into the middle of it. We have no one else who can do it. I wish it weren't you."
She wanted him to kiss her again, but his hands held her head immobile. He would have a kiss when he wanted it, not sooner. For the kiss, for him, she would go anywhere he asked. "Where?" she asked. "What do you want me to do?"
He hesitated, then released her to put a hand to his broad, strong jaw. It looked like he had a toothache, but she knew the ache came from deeper within, an ache of hard decision. "We're sending you into the heart of Rok's territory, into the only safe place we know of. But then we're inviting Rok in. To see you."
"But why me?"
For one thing, you know Burma. You speak Burmese. We're hoping you'll know how to handle him and how to talk to him."
"Yes, but...why me?"
"Well, reason number two, you're... beautiful." He blushed to admit it. She felt herself blush, too, perhaps for his reticent shyness. What conflicting forces tortured him inside, she wondered. Why did he look guilty to call her beautiful? How could he thrust himself upon her for a kiss, then back off just as she opened herself to him?
"We know Rok well enough to guess that he could not resist you," Kit said, suddenly detached and business-like. "He likes Caucasian women, and he's obsessed with virgins. Hookers just don't tickle his fancy. Either he rapes children or he waits for that rare adult woman who still has what he desires. So what do you think he's going to do when he finds out a green-eyed virgin has just dropped into his territory?"
Green-eyed virgin! Ysa reeled as she realized what Kit was talking about. She turned a shade of red she could only imagine. He had just given her a kiss hot enough to melt titanium, and apparently he thought no one had done so before. "Mr. McCracken," she said as demurely as she could. "You don't know me as well as you think!"
Kit smiled up the right side of his face, bringing his dimple on that side to full bloom. She had the horrible feeling that he'd seen Hans Liszt-Schmidtmeister's video. But she got that paranoid feeling every time she met a man who looked interested in her. It haunted her. Once she'd even dreamed that it had popped up on a cable TV station.
"Oh, I know you well enough," he said. "But Rok doesn't, and we're betting we can fool him."
With a key from his pocket Kit unlocked a file cabinet and pulled out a fat file folder. He sat Ysa at the conference table and began with a map from the folder. "We're going to fly you into the capital with a false passport," he explained, pointing out Rangoon on the map. "We certainly can't let anybody see the name van der Meer. Now this is where you're going..." His finger slid over to the monastery in the hills to the north. "We want you to go in by bus and truck, the way anyone else would travel in that part of the country. You know what transportation's like there. Can you handle it?"
She knew, and she didn't mind. She liked the close humanness of an overpacked bus loaded with country folk and their market products. She loved the peasants and their simple concerns over the weather, the health of their chickens, the strength of their children. The rickety old buses and trucks of the Burmese outback hauled a form of humanity that more advanced nations had long since lost to the homogenized culture of network television. Ysa loved to sit squeezed in among a mother with three small children, one at the breast, and an ancient grandparent, a bundle of firewood, a sack of rice, a bouquet of chickens tied together at the ankles. She liked to buy food through the window of the bus when it stopped and villagers held up pots of rice and steamed vegetables or mangos already sliced and spiced with curries. She'd always buy something and share it with the people who sat around her, and they'd share the fruits and breads they'd brought in their gunny sacks. She'd take that trip before a seat in the first class cabin of an airplane any day. "No problem," she said. "But why take the slow route? The embassy could arrange a car, maybe even a helicopter."
"You're not working for the embassy," Kit said with a sly smile. "This time, you're a nun."
Ysa exploded with a shocked guffaw. "A nun! Are you serious?"
Kit's wry smile and half-closed eye admitted his seriousness. "Yep," he said. "A nun. Can you handle it?"
She tilted her head to on side and tried to imagine it. The image of her fifth grade teacher swelled into her mind, Sister Madeline, a short, beefy tank of a woman who took no nonsense from children. She wore the traditional black and white habit with a large gold cross that swung back and forth across her chest as she limped on sore legs between the rows of desks in the classroom. Her ankles swelled up from heavy black shoes that resembled, to little Ysa, the shoes that the Pilgrims wore. Sister Madeline believed that knowledge of Latin and prayer would get her young students over the obstacles of life. With a deadly yardstick in her hand, she whacked out Latin phrases on desks, on her fat thighs, and sometimes on the backs of recalcitrant hands. Students of that class learned little in the way of science and post-Biblical history, but they could probably outpray the Pope. Ysa, raised a Lutheran, saw little need of Latin, but some of the phrases still echoed in her mind, and her image of nuns still reflected the painful personality of Sister Madeline.
She looked skeptically at Kit's skewed smile and said, "What kind of nun?"
He seemed to like the question. "You can be a cool nun," he said. "No need to wear a habit or anything. A navy blue skirt will do. A crucifix, I guess. Just a small one."
"And the crossed legs of a confirmed virgin."
"Right. If you can behave yourself for a couple of weeks."
At the moment she didn't want to behave herself at all. Kit's smile had melted her heart into mush. He already had her imagining herself a nun...a very sleazy nun, the kind who takes advantage of a closed door to plaster herself against a man and thrust her tongue into his throat until she brought him down to the floor.
But Kit stuck to business, as if he had forgotten about the kiss. He continued with his plan. Ysa would enter the country as a Sister Gertrude Walligurski, a medical specialist with the Sisters of Divine Charity. Her passport would bear that name and her own photo. Very official. She was assigned to help the Sisters of Charity.
She liked the idea of gaining entrance to Burma. Once in the country from which the State Department had prohibited her, she could continue her search for Soong Tan. She cut Kit short and said, "If you can get passports, I want one for Soong Tan. If I find her."
Kit hesitated, then nodded. "Yes," he said. "If you find her, that can be arranged. May I continue?"
She knew by the way he said it that he didn't expect to have to worry about another passport. He didn't think she'd find Soong Tan. He was probably right. But she believed she could hold him to his word. "O.K." she said. "I come into Burma as Sister Mabel Walligurski..."
"Gertrude Walligurski," he insisted. After arriving in Rangoon, She would take whatever transportation she could find to the Mission of the Sisters of Charity. The Sisters would expect her, having already exchanged extensive correspondence with the fictitious Sisters operating out of the cloisters at 55-50 Enterprise Row, also known as P.O. Box 284. Gertrude's mission: to train the Sisters in rudimentary vaccination in order to prevent an expected epidemic of a new and deadly strain of the Siamese flu. She would begin by vaccinating all the orphans in the Mission and any other locals who wanted it.
"Siamese flu? That's a new one on me."
Kit chuckled. "Actually, we made it up. By the time you get there, we'll have blitzed the area with leaflets, radio broadcasts, the works. Everyone will be most eager to get vaccinated."
"And what am I supposed to do?"
"Well, the easy part will be to vaccinate a few dozen orphans."
"With what? Sugar water?"
"Actually, you'll be inoculating them against measles."
"OK," Ysa said, her head wavering. "That's the easy part. What's the hard part?"
"Well, we'd like you to give Mr. Mon a little injection, too."
Ysa blurted a laugh. "Yeah, right!" she said. "We'll just have him line up with all the other orphans waiting for their measles shots. Roll your sleeve up, little boy. This isn't going to hurt a bit!"
Kit smiled. "It isn't quite that easy, and it sure won't prevent measles. You'll be injecting him with a boutique virus. Very nasty little bug. We got it from some friends inside the National Defense Biological Lab."
"And that will kill him better than a bullet would?"
"In way, yes. Because it won't just kill him. He'll take it home and spread it around. Everyone he comes in contact with for the next twenty-four hours will contract the disease, too.
"And they'll die, too?"
"Right."
"And what's to keep it from spreading all over the world?"
Kit brought her to a chair at the table, grabbed a yellow legal pad and sat down next to her. "I don't know if you're aware of what they're doing with viruses these days, but it's gotten to the point where they can just assemble the organism they want." With a pencil he quickly drew a something that looked like a piece of elbow macaroni. He squiggled in some DNA and tapped it. "They've spliced together a very deadly little fellow, called Nabakov-123. The only thing good about it is that its DNA is programmed to evolve into an unsurvivable form. Look, here's a red blood cell..." His pencil drew a little loop. "Here's the molecule that latches onto the oxygen in the lungs. Trouble is, if you've got this virus in your bloodstream, the red blood cell is going to latch onto the virus. When the blood cell latches on, it changes the molecular structure of the virus's DNA." Kit's pencil drew a series of connected circles. It looked to Ysa like a bunch of grapes. "Each time it reproduces, the oxygen molecule knocks out one element of the DNA. Don't ask me how; it just does. And when it does, it releases a toxic substance which attacks all the red blood cells it touches. Basically, the victim dies of asphyxiation. The virus can't reproduce without being picked up by a red blood cell, but each time it goes through this chemical recombination, it becomes weaker. Within twenty-four hours, no matter how far it's spread, it can no longer reproduce." Kit's pencil finished slashing through the circles of the bunch of grapes. "The virus is dead and the epidemic is over."
"And how many people are dead?" She remembered Frank's warning: These people are above the law. Did Kit really intend to condemn a given population to death?
"We estimate two or three thousand," Kit said, no compassion in his voice, as if merely guessing the price of a used car. "We're going to do enough damage to their runway that nobody can leave the area for a couple of days. Collateral damage should be negligible."
Collateral damage. She knew what that meant. People who got in the way of war. And how guilty were the two or three thousand who were dealing with Rok Mon? She contained her outrage to sharp sarcasm "No trial, I suppose? You just let the virus decide who lives and who dies?"
Kit's strong, sinuous hand reached out to lightly touch her knee. Its dry warmth seemed to speak of a desire for understanding. "We've thought about that," he said softly. "Believe me, we've thought about it a lot. We've figured out that Rok's people kill thousands of people very day, directly or indirectly, if not by direct murder then by the diseases of prostitution or the corruption of heroin. The way we figure it, this virus will reach only Rok's inner circle, the people in the immediate vicinity of his headquarters. The whole area will be... cleansed. It's isolated enough that the virus should remain within his fortified perimeter. If it does leak out, it won't leak far."
"But aren't there women and children in the area...innocent people?"
"Not really. Within his headquarters - and we're talking ten square miles here - pretty much everybody is either in his army or involved with the processing of heroin. Frankly, I don't think the world will miss them."
Kit stopped talking when he saw Ysa shaking her head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. "No," she said. "Not only is this totally immoral, but it'll never work. Too many things can go wrong."
"Immoral? To blow a hole in the world's heroin business? To completely disrupt the world's biggest market in child slavery? To give Burma a chance to recover its decency? No, Ysa, that is not immoral. It is immoral to do nothing. To hide in suburbia and hope the problems stay in the inner cities and the other side of the world, that's immoral. You're immoral if you don't join us."
Ysa couldn't look at him. She just looked down and to the right, trying to sort things out. He had a point, one which her father had stated more than once. Inaction is an action. Nondecision is a decision.
On the other hand, ten square miles of dead people would be a mighty big burden to bear.
"How's this going to solve Burma's problems?" she asked, hoping to find some reason to back out.
"I can't tell you exactly how the rest will work, but we will engineer a quick little coup in the capital. General Dien goes out, and Colonel Pham Trang, Mr. Clean of the East, steps in. With a little help from the friendliest embassy in town, he purges the army and sends a team in to take control of Rok's territory. They mop up whoever's left, hit the poppies with some herbicide, and destroy the infrastructure. And that's the end of that."
"It sounds a lot like war."
Kit nodded gravely. "I'm glad you understand that. Yes...it's war. And war is neither easy nor beautiful nor safe. They say it's the worst thing in the world, but sometimes it's better than the alternative. And if we don't act fast, it's going to be a nuclear war. A small one, as nuclear wars go, but it could blow a mighty big hole in a city. Ten square miles at the very least."
Ysa saw the logic. Rok Mon had been waging war against the world for over twenty years. The death toll, including every addict and every person murdered in related crimes, plus all the related AIDS victims, the total no doubt reached into the millions. No one had ever fought back, not really. All the drug busts and customs checks in the world amounted to nothing but scattered resistance. Kit's intended to solve the problem the American way: storm in and destroy the place - maybe not the most just way of handling things, but you couldn't argue with it. Rok Mon had to go. She recognized that, and she wouldn't mind being part of the terminal kick-in- the-ass he deserved.
She had her doubts, however, about the men she'd be working with. Both of them. She said, "I'd like to know what it is about you guys."
"What it is? What what is?"
"You got kicked out of the FBI. Frank got kicked out of Special Forces. I'd like to know what you guys did."
Kit sank into a chair, crossed his forearms along the edge of the table and looked down into them. His forehead revealed the conflicting thoughts that wrestled in his mind. He was always so pensive, Ysa thought. Everything had to be pondered. He saw no quick or easy answers. Either that or he was assembling a good lie.
"Well," he finally said, leaning back and briefly exposing the palms of his hands. "I can talk about myself. I'm not so sure how much I can say about Frank. I got booted out of the Bureau for blowing the whistle on some rather shady practices."
"Shady? The FBI.?"
He snickered at her irony. "Oh, yes; oh, yes. I was in the fraud department. We were working on a case involving suspected fraud in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They were helping utilities cover up problems in their nuclear power plants. Trouble was, we couldn't quite pin it on them. So the guys I was working with started fooling around with some documents. Falsifying evidence. I reported it to somebody higher up. She told me to cool it. I told a senator. he thought about it for a few days and then told me to cool it. So I went public. I talked with a reporter. And that was the end of my job."
That didn't sound like much of a lie. She'd never heard anything good about the NRC, and the FBI certainly had a reputation for bungling and covering up. For some reason, Kit seemed like the kind of man who would blow the whistle on fraud. he also seemed like the type to join in the fraud as long as it was for a good cause - not unlike waging biological warfare even if it killed a few innocent people. But at least he'd told her the truth about that.
"OK," she said. "And what about Frank."
"I'm afraid I really can't comment on someone else. Talk with him."
"I did. He told me it was something bad but wouldn't tell me what."
"So...there you go. Who am I to go against his wishes?"
"You're the boss, that's who. And if you expect me to entrust my life to you guys, I want to know who I'm dealing with. I'll tell the same to Frank if you want me to."
"Maybe you'd better," said, his voice confident with logic.
"But he'd lie to me, wouldn't he."
Kit had to think about that one. He didn't come up with an answer.
"So tell me," Ysa demanded. "Tell me or show me the door and I'm out of here."
He had to think about that for a while, too. She let him think all he wanted. She was serious. If he doubted that, he'd find out he was wrong.
As if confessing something, Kit opened his hands as if his palms needed fresh air and light. "OK," he said with resignation. "I'll tell you. All I ask is that you reserve judgment. Bear in mind that I wasn't there. I don't know what really happened. All I know is what I heard, and what I heard was pretty weird."
"All right," Ysa said, beli3ving he would tell the truth. "No judgment."
Kit took a moment to figure out how to tell the tale. "It was in Nicaragua," he began. "He was sent down there to help the Contras - you know, those ex-Somoza supporters who were trying to oust the Sandinistas, who were just too, too communist for Ronald Reagan."
"I vaguely remember. It wasn't among the issues I followed. I believe I was in Burma at the time."
"Right. Well, these Contras were every bit as bastardly as your basic communists, but at least they were our bastards. Somebody at State was worried that they were getting too murderous, which would have played havoc with our foreign policy, so they had to send somebody down there to teach these guys a little something about respecting civilians."
"Let me guess," Ysa said. "They sent Frank."
"Bingo. Frank and a couple other guys, all them guerrilla warfare specialists. They take a helicopter from an Army base in Honduras into the Contra camp somewhere along the border, I don't know how they went about educating those thugs, but I guess it didn't work so well. Frank was supposed to fly them into a cattle co-op in Nicaragua. The idea is to show the peasants that the Contras are a real big deal, with their own helicopter and everything, and that they're there to help liberate them from the Sandinistas. But it seems the peasants didn't want to be liberated. They were doing just fine. They had their farm and a lot of cattle and everything. The last thing they needed was free enterprise showing up in a gunship.
"Well it turned out they weren't your average peasant farmers. They were peasant farmers with AK-47s, and they started shooting. A couple of Contras gets killed or something, and the rest of them go berserk. They start trashing the place. They shoot all the cattle and burn the barns and then they decide they want to rape a few girls and then they start killing people and then they start mutilating them and I don't know what-all. As I heard it, there were decapitations. They were gutting people in front of their families, that kind of stuff. Very, very ugly."
Ysa thought it odd to hear Kit talking about this in an almost casual way, as if chatting about the time he had to change a flat tire on a rainy day. She guessed his casualness was the natural result of witnessing such things in half a dozen wars, not liking it but getting somewhat used to it. As Kit paused to imagine the ugliness of the situation, she said, "Don't tell me Frank was part of it. I can't believe that."
"Well, no, as a matter Frank wasn't part of it. But what happened was even more unbelievable." Kit shook his head with vague confusion. "Frank was in the helicopter," he continued, his eyes focused on the distance, as if here imagining the incident. "He was right in the middle of it all, sitting in the pilot's seat, watching."
"Watching?"
"Watching and...I don't how best to put it...watching and....well, playing with himself. Know what I mean?"
"You don't mean...like...he was..."
"That's right."
He might as well have punched her in the jaw. It was hanging down to her collarbone, and her eyebrows were hoisted halfway up to he scalp. She couldn't say a word. She tried to imagine it, Frank in khakis and helmet, his pants open, his... thing straight up in his hand, stroking it, looking out the windshield, watching the bloody scene, breathing hard. It almost sounded like a joke. She could not say a word.
Kit, having let the full effect soak in, went on. "Playing with himself," he said, nodding once, deeply, as if the motion were forcing him to speak the words. "Masturbating in the middle of Hell."
It took quite a bit of effort for Ysa to speak. Trying to deny the scene, at least to herself, she said, "But how do you know this?"
"Well, apparently somebody saw him. One of the Contras, I guess. Because a few days later, in a bar in Tegucigalpa, Frank overheard somebody laughing about it in a bar. He saw them imitating him and laughing. So he went over and started beating on whoever it was. Beat him pretty bad. The guy ended up dying."
The whole thing was too bizarre to understand. What kind of sick mental connection could derive sexual excitement from a massacre? Had he gone temporarily insane from the horror of it all? Or did he seek out the excitement of combat because it stimulated him? Was it a single incident resulting from a single trauma, or was it deeper, a character flaw? She couldn't believe that the man who had waltzed with her would succumb to such a sick thrill. He had warned her of Kit's organization's lack of respect for rules. Sex at a massacre just didn't fit in.
"That doesn't make sense," she said. "It couldn't have happened that way. We're missing a piece of the picture. There's something we don't know about."
"That's my feeling exactly. Otherwise I wouldn't be working with him. Believe me, I've researched him. I've uncovered nothing that would indicate he's that type, if you know what I mean, and I've never seen him do anything weird like that. But you wanted to know why he got kicked out of Special Forces. That was it. He killed a guy in bar in Honduras. Period, and as far as I'm concerned, end of story."
"Yes," Ysa agreed. "Good. I'm glad. I'm sure he's not that type. The guy in Honduras probably deserved what he got."
"If he was part of that massacre, he sure did. I suspect that's the real cause of the whole incident."
She didn't say so to Kit, but she wanted to talk to Frank about it. It sounded like the kind of story that had many sides to it, many complications. Maybe if she probed she could learn more about him. She remembered the dance at the Grand Hotel. She'd liked it very much.
Kit left her to her thoughts for a moment, then asked, "So, now you know Frank and me better than our mothers knew us. Let me return to the original question. We're going after Rok Mon. Are you going with us?"
She did not relish the thought of going into Burma with either Kit or Frank. They were from a different world. How would she be able to work with them? She wasn't used to solving problems by invading and wiping out an enemy. They weren't used to solving problems by talking them through and working out a peaceful agreement. Still, despite their differences, they had a plan for nailing Rok Mon. If their plan would allow her to continue her search for Soong Tan, she'd give it a try. She said, "OK."
"O.K.?" he inquired, not understanding.
"O.K.," she said. "Let's do it."
Ysa came home to nothing more inviting than the blinking red light of her answering machine. It was Susan again. Ysa cringed at the first sound of her voice, but then the message took an unexpected turn.
"Ysa, it's me. Who is this Emanuel guy? He called me - from another country, I think. Puerto Rico or something, it sounded like. Have you got a boy friend in Puerto Rico? How do you get guys calling you from foreign places? Are you in heat or something? This Emanuel guy sounded sooooo cute! And so, so desperate. He said you're never home, you don't answer you e-mail or anything, and I said, 'Yeah, tell me about it, I've left a hundred messages on her machine and she never calls back. She could be dead for all I know, and then he said the weirdest thing. He asked me what made me think you were dead. He sounded, I don't know, like he was panicking or something. It sounded like he was in a phone booth. I could hear honking in the background, and trucks. I said, 'I don't think she's dead, what makes you think I think she's dead? She just doesn't return messages, that's all,' but of course it got me to thinking. Are you dead, Ysa? Please don't be dead. Maybe I should call the police and tell them to bust down your door and go in there and see if you drowned in the bathtub or something. I don't know. This Emanuel guy was shouting into the phone and practically crying. I could barely hear him. He said he has to talk to you. It's very important. I think he said he has a good tan. Something about a tan. I couldn't really hear. I just don't get it. You find a pale Puerto Rican and you give me my phone number so he can call if he ever gets a good tan. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I wish you'd explain. What do I have to do to get you to call me? What am I supposed to do if Emanuel calls back? Can I proposition him? I don't care if he's got a tan or not. You better call me or I'm going to make up a lie about you and tell Emanuel and that's the last you'll ever hear from him. And me. Good-bye."
Ysa listened to the message with her face in her hand. It was too much to believe, too much to accept, too much to understand. All she could figure was that Emanuel had something important to say about Soong Tan and that after he hadn't reached her at home he got the Intelligence guys in the embassy to find out who called Ysa the most, so he ended up calling Susan. But why from a phone booth? It could only be for need of absolute secrecy. Or maybe it was just a bad overseas connection.
It didn't matter. She dialed the embassy switchboard but got the same message she got at any daylight hour: "Circuits busy. Try again later." She tried a dozen times with no better results. In desperation she called Western Union and sent a telegram. that just said, "What? Call or try e-mail again. Y." The operator said it would arrive in Burma within a few hours.
Ysa broke out a bottle of brandy and a snifter the size of a bowling ball. What the hell was going on? How had she gotten herself into this situation? She was going to illegally enter the most corrupt nation since ancient Rome. Disguised as a nun she was supposed to murder the biggest murderer in the world. All she really wanted to do was find a little girl with green eyes, but she couldn't even make a phone call to a goddam embassy.
She poured a hefty dose of brandy into the snifter, forced herself to pause for a deep breath of the bouquet, then drank the stuff as if it were nothing more than coffee. It burned going down but spread a moderate warmth throughout her belly. She poured more and sank into her easy chair, nestling the snifter against her chest with both hands, letting her warmth enhance the bouquet. As if on call, Roger and Hammerstein loped into the room, rose up on their hind legs, looked around, sensed Ysa's sadness raced across the couch and leaped over to her lap. Holding her brandy in one hand, she lifted each ferret and kissed him on the head, then stroked them until they settled into her lap.
Contrary to its usual effect, the sweet sensation of brandy in her head brought her a bit down to earth, down from the unreal situation she'd gotten herself into. She had hardly concerned herself with the fact that she'd just lost her job. She supposed she could easily find another. Nurses had little trouble finding work. But still she'd have to type up her resume, study the classifieds, line up interviews, try to figure out which doctor was a serious professional, which a dirty little version of Dr. Fishbinder. She thought maybe she ought to just go back to school and get her medical degree. Or maybe she ought to go live in Paris. Or for that matter Tahiti or New Zealand. She wondered why she couldn't ask Kit's group to maybe pay her a little for risking her life on what sounded too much like a suicide mission.
She wondered if she wanted to sleep with Frank. He seemed so nice, so boyish in such an urgent, serious way, like a Little Leaguer obsessed with his batting score. She had an urge to cuddle up with him and ask him what had really happened in Honduras. But did she really want to get seriously involved with him? Maybe. That's all she could conclude. Maybe. If he made his move and suggested something, well, maybe she'd think about.
And Kit? No, definitely not Kit. Too grown up. Much too serious. A tough guy barely under control - either that or a pussycat playing the role of tough guy. And in either case, not real tough. More like rough and ready. If she ever robbed a bank again, she'd do it with Kit. Maybe Frank could drive the getaway car. Thinking about it, she remembered lying in the back of the ambulance, her eyes closed, playing dead, her body and soul entrusted to Kit McCracken.
Roger and Hammerstein snoozed in her lap in a miraculous position that allowed each to use the other as a pillow. It was a perfect way to sleep, she thought, tucked up against your own species, warm and secure.
She drank deeply of the brandy, inhaling its fumes from the vast snifter. She wondered if a person could fill a snifter like that and drink it all without dying. She wondered if that might not be the best way to go. She wondered what would happen if she didn't come back from Burma. Who would get her house? Who would take care of Roger and Hammerstein? How long would it be until someone noticed her missing? Maybe it would be Susan who finally called the cops and had them bust down the door.
Susan. She owed the poor girl a call even if it meant an hour or two lost to her rambling off-the-wall conversation. She was funnier than any sitcom but rambled on longer than a feature film. A conversation with her was as exhausting to the ear as to the mind. Susan collected problems the way some people collect stamps. She looked for them the way archeologists look for bones, digging deep, looking carefully, letting no possible complaint escape.
Ysa was floating in the vast foggy sea between bliss and sleep when she was jerked awake by the movement of two ferrets dashing from her lap. Then she heard the faint knocks on her front door. To groggy to be suspicious, barely registering the fact that it was two o'clock in the morning, she scuffed on over the door. Before she opened it, she unconsciously put a foot just inches from it so it could not be forced inward. Her sleepy face to the door frame, she opened it just a crack.
There stood Kit McCracken, silent, looking a bit sheepish, his hands in the pockets of his baggy corduroy pants, his arms draped in the sleeves of a heavy shepherd's sweater. He did not say a word, he just looked into her eyes. She, too, had no words for the moment. She only sensed that they were thinking the same thing, the thing which he finally said: "I want you."
She did not need to answer. She pulled him in by one sleeve, softly shut the door, turned and let herself be swallowed by his woolen arms. They wrapped around her with a warmth as comforting as a father's. As one of his strong hands slid up her shoulders to the back of her head, she tilted her face up to him. His lips came to hers, at first gently, almost beyond the perception of touch, and then with a nuzzling motion, then tender bites with his lips, then a pressing and rubbing. Her tongue teased his lips and went searching inside him. Their tongues met like lost lovers hungry for each other, for company, for love. Her arms climbed up under the back of his sweater, pulled at his muscles, dug at his skin. She writhed as his lips slid across her cheek and his tongue wiggled to her ear, playing with her lobe, exploring inside, filling her with his hot, desperate breath. She had not known how much she wanted him, and now that she had a taste, she wanted him whole.
Her nipples hardened and stretched as he tore at the buttons on her blouse. His sweater came off in a smooth instant.
"Oh, Kit," she moaned. "Kit...please hold me, Kit."
He did not answer as his face probed her neck, her chest, her breasts. She almost cried tears when his lips, so hungry, tugged at one nipple, then the other, bringing them to full attention. "You are so beautiful," he whispered as if talking to them. "Come close to me."
She held his head and torso as they lowered themselves to the floor, not quite falling but not going fast enough. She smeared herself atop him, unbuttoning his shirt while succumbing to the pressure of his hands. She attacked his chest, rubbing her face into the golden fuzz that covered it like a vest of fleece. He held her so tight she thought she might break. She wouldn't mind if she did, as long as she broke within the strength of his fingers and the safety of his arms. He bucked beneath her, swelling up against her, moaning inside the confines of a kiss which she could not break off. She wanted to go deep down inside him, down his throat, down to his inner-most embers of desire. Her tongue wrestled his for the privilege, for dominance, for right-of-way. There was too much of him. She wanted him all at once but could not bypass the smallest detail. His left front tooth, the corner of his lips, the shallow dimple in his chin, an ear lobe, each sinew along his neck.
They floated as if on waves that rolled them around, now he atop her like a quilt, now she on top, her legs around his hips, his hands below her, lifting her as their faces dwelled deeply within each other. The brandy in her head swirled around like volcanic mist, and time passed as if in a dream. When the phone rang in the dining room, it sounded as distant as church bells. Ysa, all but weeping with desire for the man in her arms, let the answering machine handle the call. She barely heard the voice, could hardly understand the words, but they slowly magnified and reformed themselves in the hot blood of her brain, and she realized it was the voice of Emanuel Rodriquez.
As if Kit had never existed and were not lying half-dressed and breathless on her living room floor, Ysa leaped away and rushed to the dining room. Grabbing the receiver, she screamed "Emanuel!" before it even came to her mouth. But she had arrived too late. Only a dial tone spoke to her, a single word droned in monotone: too late.
Kit arrived a moment later, pulling his clothes together, a look of something like terror in his eyes. "What happened?" he cried. "Who was it?"
"A friend," Ysa said weakly. "From Burma. The embassy..." For a moment she felt the same despair she'd felt so many times in the last few days, but as her mind recovered and shook itself off, she realized she had the message on her machine. She pushed the button.
"Ysa!..." The voice was far away, muffled in a cloud of distance. "This is Emanuel. I've found her! Do you understand? I can get her! Two hundred grand, Ysa...she's become quite the hot item. The embassy can't help. I..." and the line went dead - a moment of dial tone punctuated by the beep of the machine as it rewound and prepared for the next call.
"Jesus," she said. "Oh, God. He's got her. He's got her. Kit..." She looked up at him, her eyes imploring his.
Kit brought her into his arms. She laid herself against him for his warmth and his solidity. He was a warm rock in a cold river, and she clung to him as if for life. His hands stroked her shoulders and hair. She would have cried if her mind hadn't been working so hard and fast. Now she really needed to get into Burma. She needed money and two passports: one for a girl whose photo she did not have, one for herself in a different name. "What do I do, Kit?" she asked against his chest, almost but not quite weeping.
"First thing, tell me what's going on."
Ysa smeared him with a kiss, then peeled her breasts from his naked torso. "I'll make coffee," she said.
"A little brandy in mine," Kit said with a wink. She knew he'd tasted it in her mouth, that he was hungry for more.
They sat on the couch as she told him everything about her father and Soong Tan, about the brotherly goodness of Emanuel Rodriquez, about her loneliness with both mother and father passed away and no brothers or sisters to call family. Her nearest relative was an uncle in the Netherlands, a bank executive or something; she didn't recall meeting him. "You can imagine what Christmas is like around here," she said. "Me and a couple of ferrets. Whoopty-doo."
But she felt like she had a daughter or a little sister over in Burma, poor little Soong Tan. Ysa talked through tears as she tried to express the pain the little girl must be in. Emanuel had her now...except he sounded so desperate, as if his hold on her might break loose. For some reason she pictured the two of them crouching in a phone booth while thugs with guns slinked around looking for them.
Roger and Hammerstein hopped up onto the couch in rapid succession, each freezing as he saw the man sitting next to Ysa. Without a word, Kit simply extended his open hand, palm up. The ferrets didn't bolt, as Ysa would have expected. With tentative sniffs, they checked out his fingers, touched him with their little black noses, then forgot that he existed. They went straight for Ysa's lap, where they snuggled down to received the comfort of her hand.
"Animals are great, aren't they?" Kit said. "I'm always amazed that we let them into our homes and love them and get love in return."
"The more I know my friends, the more I like my ferrets."
After a long, thoughtful silence, Kit said, "I know how you feel about your parents. My parents died when I was eight. I spent ten years in a foster home of some people I can hardly remember. Entwhistle was their name. I think they were just doing it for the money the state gave them. I had a brother somewhere else, but he was only three. The Entwhistles had an older kid named Edgar. He didn't pay much attention to me. I just remember how he used to cheat at cards and Scrabble and anything else he could talk me into playing. I haven't heard from him in almost twenty years. The day after I got out of high school I went right into the army. Somebody told me my brother was killed in the Gulf War, but I was never able to confirm it. Not that it mattered. But that's when I quit the army and went into the FBI. That lasted a few years but didn't work out. It seems I get a little too carried away with my work. Then I hooked with this outfit I'm in now. It's a great job but...there's just no time for social life."
"You've never been married?"
Kit shook his head slowly, heavily. "No...I can't do that. I wouldn't even know how to do the family thing. I'm just not the marrying type. I get too wrapped up in my work, and frankly, I don't want to be afraid to die. I don't want to worry about leaving someone behind."
His words flooded Ysa's heart with hot wine. She wanted to take him in her arms like a little boy, to mother him, sister him, yes, even marry him. She knew she shouldn't but she also knew, in a moment of fantasy, that she probably would. But he wouldn't ask. Kit was in control of himself and his emotions. He had more important things to do than be a husband. But after a few thoughtful moments, he said, "One thing I've always wanted, though, is to have a kid. Sometimes I just sit back and think about it. Going camping. Ball games. Helping with homework. I don't know if I'd be a good husband, but I'd be one hell of a dad. Either that or I wouldn't know what the hell to do."
"I bet you would. And I'd make a pretty good mother, if I do say so myself." She hoped her words didn't sound too much like a come-on, but she had a powerful feeling he was seeing them as such and maybe even thinking about the obvious possibilities.
But she wouldn't marry a man like this, a man whose job sent him into the most dangerous places in the world. She'd stop him if he got carried away and asked. He wouldn't, though. Kit McCracken was not one to get carried away by common emotions.
Then she heard herself saying, facetiously, "If we can get Soong Tan out of Burma, maybe we can...take her to a ball game or something. Show her what Cracker Jacks are all about."
Kit smiled. "Sounds good to me. I'm going to see what we can do about getting a passport and finding Rodriquez. Maybe we can get somebody in the embassy to cooperate a little. Frank might know one of the spooks in Intelligence."
"And how soon do I get to go?" She found herself surprised at the eagerness in her voice. She was thinking of Soong Tan when she spoke, not of facing Rok Mon and somehow convincing him to accept an injection and to keep his hands off the virginal nun that she would be.
"Ysa, we're moving faster than you might think. We were really just waiting for your okay. If you can come in to start training tomorrow morning..."
"You mean this morning? It's almost dawn, you know."
Kit shook his head as if dispelling sleepiness. "Yes, I guess that's what I mean. If you can grab some shut eye and get down to the office sometime before lunch, we can get you going. I think we might have you on a plane early next week."
She had one more question, but couldn't quite get it out. "Kit..."she started.
"Yes, Ysa? What?"
"Suppose this whole thing doesn't work?"
"Then...we start over again. We think of something else. I don't know. We won't give up. Not while I'm alive."
The training session didn't strengthen Ysa's confidence. They simply sat at the conference table while Kit explained things and Frank filled in the details. Kit looked worried; Frank looked eager-beaver, snapping his fingers, tapping his feet, all but panting with urgency. She'd thought they would have everything step figured out, exactly where she'd be when Rok arrived, exactly how she'd make sure he'd get the right injection, exactly how she'd avoid getting raped, mutilated and sent home in a Glad bag.
According to the plan, she'd get to come home, or at least away from the monastery, in a helicopter. But she had to go in on a bus full of peasants, chickens, piglets, gunny sacks of crops, then transfer to one of the small river boats that plied the Irrawaddy. Once near the monastery, which stood high above the river in the Pathet Mountains, she'd have to rustle up whatever transportation should could find - maybe a motor scooter, more likely a water buffalo cart, at worst a day-long hike. She'd have money to hire someone to carry the thick, isoprene cooler that would hold two hundred and one syringes packed in dry ice. The one, the deadly one, would have an unobtrusive white dot on the side.
"You realize it'll take at lest three days to get in there," Ysa said. "That's if the bus doesn't break down, if there happens to be a boat leaving around the time I get there, if the road isn't washed out, if there's no bandits, if it doesn't rain too terribly hard."
Kit looked mildly concerned but remained silent. Frank said, "You'll have four days before the dry ice burns off. If that happens, you'll have to arrange some ice. Rok's virus injection can tolerate about one day at room temperature, probably less under Burmese conditions."
"You're going to have to use your head," Kit added. "That's one reason why we're sending you. If anybody can find ice in the Burmese interior, it's you."
"Like I can just snap my fingers and have the concierge bring ice."
"Whatever it takes," Frank said.
"The real problem," Kit said, "will be to get the right injection into Rok's ass..."
"His what?"
Kit and Frank exchanged a smile. It occurred to Ysa that they'd never done that before, never looked at each other with anything less than a glare.
"Sorry," Kit said. "I meant to tell you about that before. The virus has to be injected into fatty tissue."
"You mean..."
Kit beamed. "That's right. You're going to have to get Rok to drop his drawers."
The image that sprang to mind gave her a flash of nausea. She'd have to squeeze a handful of his gluteus maximus into a tight, dense target, then insert the needle and slowly squeeze in the viral fluid. She hated to imagine his possible reaction to the request that he lower his pants. She'd put on rubber gloves and a gauze mask first, unmistakable clues that she had strictly professional intentions. Still, she knew how to make it hurt a little more than it had to. Maybe she could put up with the butt-end of a the world's most obnoxious male if she got to take advantage of his weakness. Especially if it would kill him.
"OK," she said without joining in the men's ribald appreciation. "I give Rok his injection. Then what?"
Kit and Frank exchanged a look, as if each were hoping the other would answer. Apparently the responsibility fell on Kit. "I suggest you do whatever's necessary to get away from him. I mean like before he's got his pants back on. Slip out the back. Jump out the window. Hide somewhere. We can't predict what his next action will be. Best we can figure is, once he's had a virgin nun pinch his ass, he's going to be one horny camper. He's not one to forego a pleasure. He could get violent."
"If he so much as winks at me I'll cut out his liver."
Frank enjoyed that one but warned her, "Unfortunately, he's got to live long enough to get home. If you remove something, make it something he can live without."
"I'll give that some thought," Ysa said. "But first, tell me how I'm getting out of there. Not in an ox cart, I hope."
"Nope," Frank said. "Once we get a signal from you that you've given Rok the injection and he's left the monastery, I'm coming in to get you in a chopper. All you have to do is get out to the soccer field when I come in."
Kit spoke up. "There's just one little problem, Ysa."
"What's that?"
"If you don't inject him, we can't come get you. We can't let him have any idea that he was walking into a trap. Once word gets around that you left in a chopper, Rok will find out, and he'll know you weren't just a nun. But as long as he's been injected with the virus, it doesn't matter what he knows. He's a dead man."
"So if I don't inject him, how do I get out?"
"Same way you got in. Slowly. Actually, that might be safer. He'd have no idea where you were."
"What about Soong Tan?"
After a heavy silence, Kit said, "Right. Soong Tan. As soon as you're of there, we find her and sneak her out of Burma."
Ysa shook her head hard and wide. "No," she insisted with inalterable finality. "First we find Soong Tan."
"Any problem with that, Frank? You're the tactical director for this operation."
By the way Frank drew himself up into an apologetic position, Ysa knew that he would not agree. "Ysa," he said slowly . "We know how you feel about Soong Tan. I, personally, feel the same way. Please understand that we're trying to save a thousand Soong Tans. That's our mission. We can't risk everything to save one girl."
Ysa's face exploded with feral anger. "Risk! Don' talk to me about risk! You want me to go shove a needle up the ass of the world's deadliest animal, and you can't risk picking up a ten-year-old girl? Give me a break."
"Trust me, Ysa. Soong Tan's too close to the underworld. If we go for her too soon, Rok could smell a trap. The whole mission could fall apart. Believe me, it wouldn't make your job any easier, or safer, at the monastery."
Trust me. Believe me. Her father had warned her about people who said that too often. Through a squinted eye she assessed Frank. He didn't seem to be lying about the mission taking priority. In fact, he was being honest about it. Whether Ysa liked it or not, the mission came first; Soong Tan came second. She didn't like it, but at least she could believe him. Still, she didn't like his judgment. If their little secret spy organization could spirit people in and out of countries so easily, they could surely whisk Soong Tan away before setting sights on Rok Mon.
"You'll have to trust me," she said. "We'll have to find a way to snatch Soong Tan without Rok knowing. That shouldn't be too hard for smart guys like you."
Frank shook his head. "Too complicated. Too far off track. Ysa, I think you'd better leave the tactics to us. What seems easy to you isn't necessarily easy at all. Believe me."
He was talking to her as if she were some off-the-wall dingbat who ought to be home vacuuming a carpet while her muffins baked. With the life of a child at stake, all he cared about was his goddam mission. Because he was the man and she was woman, things had to be done his way.
But not this time. "I'm sorry," Ysa said. "First we take care of my business. Then we take care of yours."
Kit looked uneasy. With his forearms on his knees, he kept his head down, avoiding eye contact with both Ysa and Frank. Something about him hinted that he knew the right decision but had to wait for Frank to make his own pronouncement.
Frank spoke first. "Kit, if she insists, we may have to find someone else to go in there for us."
The words kicked Ysa in the heart hard enough to make it skip a beat. These men held the key to Soong Tan. With them, she could get the girl out of Burma. Without them, she was back to her hopeless search for two hundred thousand dollars. By the time she got it, Emanuel would lose Soong. She felt like she was playing chicken with professionals. They'd push her as far as they could before they gave in. Men were good at that. It had something to do with testosterone. It didn't make them right. It just make them gutsier. But they hadn't been raised by the Honorable Karl van der Meer, Ambassador to Burma. She could stand up to a risk as well as any man. Her face did not betray her fear as she waited for Frank and Kit to digest her demands.
Kit finally gave Frank a slicing, cynical look. "Don't try to bluff her," he said. "Unless you know somebody I don't, she's all we've got."
Frank didn't seem to like being handed a decision. He had the slapped-down look of a little boy whose first attempt at self-affirmation had been rejected by a grown-up. He also looked a bit miffed. So Ysa was not entirely surprised when he said, "No bluff. As tactical director of this mission, I think searching for an orphan at its inception creates a risk I'm not willing to take. We had other candidates for this job. I suggest we contact them."
Dumbfoundedness hanging from his face, Kit just shook his head. "I don't recall being impressed by any of them."
"What about the one who'd been with the NSA? She had experience. Two years of overseas work."
"In Bermuda," Kit spat. "She didn't have the brains for this kind of work. Nice fingernails, but I wouldn't want to count on her in a tough situation."
"We'll have to discuss this. Meanwhile, Ysa, I'm afraid it seems that this just isn't going to work out. If we hear anything about Soong Tan, we'll let you know. Otherwise, well, if you can keep our secret, we can keep yours." He gave her hand a cursory shake but didn't look her in the eyes until he said, "And I advise you to stay out of Burma until this is all over. Don't even think about going."
* * *
She barely heard Kit as he escorted her to the door. He spoke in apologetic tones, saying that it was beyond his control, he'd see what he could do, he was sorry, she shouldn't take it personally, good luck with Soong Tan, good luck and good-bye.
As she wandered toward home, she vaguely wondered if Kit had gone back in and punched Frank in the nose or had merely sat down with him to discuss the other candidates and alternative plans. She vaguely wondered what alternatives she herself had now. If she couldn't get into Burma, maybe somehow Emanuel could get Soong Tan out. Maybe she still had time to raise two hundred thousand dollars. She could rob ten banks. Or a couple hundred gas stations. Or sell her house for a pittance as long as someone could provide the cash within a week.
She didn't know what to do. She couldn't think of a thing except to bury herself up to her neck in a bathtub full of very warm water and herbal suds. She cried a bit and drank a bit of brandy as she soaked. She wondered why in the world she had ever let herself get dragged into something with a bunch of men. They thought like football players, their eyes on the goal and their values determined only by the means they would need to reach that goal. They were as logical as bulldozers and every bit as inhuman. If a little girl got in their way, well, that was just too bad. The goal was the important thing. The victory. It didn't matter what happened along the way. If she wanted to save Soong Tan, she'd obviously have to do it herself. If bank robbery wasn't her forte, well, she'd have to think of something else. Maybe she could go out and get herself bitten by somebody's dog and sue the bastard. Maybe she could try a little high-price prostitution, go into Washington and lay the U.S. Senate at two thousand dollars a head, then extort a little extra from them for her silence. She tried to imagine that and realized that she'd probably have better results with a home equity loan.
Running her hand along her suds-oiled skin, Ysa wondered why Kit hadn't defended her. She'd really expected more from him. He'd kissed her. He'd come to her house and all but made love to her on the floor. They'd practically raped each other in a torrent of passion she did not yet understand. Then he abandoned her, let her slug it out with Frank, watching as she wiggled herself into a corner from which she could not escape. Kit knew about Soong Tan, knew how much she meant. Why hadn't he come to the rescue? Why hadn't he offered a word of support?
She knew why. Because of some male thing with Frank. The two of them behaved like a couple of mountain goats ramming their horns into each other to establish dominance. Or like college boys drinking themselves sick to prove who's the bigger man. Or dogs who rip each other's fur out to determine who gets to be first in line with the bitch in heat. Kit and Frank had lost all track of reality. They were no more interested in defeating Rok Mon than they were in saving Soong Tan. They just wanted to dominate each other. They just wanted to win.
She resolved to have nothing to do with either one of them. They could play their stupid, suicidal, pointless, painful, egoistic game till it killed them. She was going after Soong Tan, and she'd find a way to succeed. She and Soong Tan would live happily ever-after. The men could pursue their sacred mission all the way to Hell's furnace.
The phone rang. She let it ring, figuring she'd wouldn't get it unless it was Emanuel. When the answering machine picked up, she was glad she'd stayed in the safety of her tub. It was Susan.
"All right, Ms. Smarty-pants, where are you now? Out gallivanting on a Saturday's afternoon? With your tan Puerto Rican? Not! Not if he's in Burma! But before we get to that, young lady, I have some news for you...."
Ysa exploded from the tub, dashed to the phone, snatched it from the hook. Herbal suds slid down her naked body as she pressed the receiver to her face. "Susan," she cried. "Susan!"
"Ah-ha! So there you are! Long time no hear-from. I'd ask what you've been up to, but I know you wouldn't tell me. So I'll tell you what I've been up to. You won't believe it. I ran into this guy..."
"Susan! Susan! Stop! Listen to me!"
"Not just your ordinary guy but a guy in a 1958 Corvette Stingray. Bam!..."
"Susan! Stop!" She pictured her friend sprawled across her couch, smelling of garlic and oregano, with chocolate on her pudgy lips, a pudgy bon-bon in her pudgy fingers,
"What? Don't you want to hear this?"
"Susan...I need to hear about Emanuel. Please...what did he say?"
"He said he was calling from Burma and your phone's tapped, that's what he said. And I said I ran into a guy in a 1958 Corvette Stingray. A red 1958 Corvette Stingray. Need I say more?"
"No, Susan, you really don't. I'm happy for you. I'm happy for him. You'll make a lovely couple. Was he wearing cool sunglasses?"
"Yes he was! How did you know that? I don't believe you knew that. How did you know? Don't tell me you know this guy! Don't tell me you got to him first!"
"No...no, I don't know him. But they're all the same. I'm sure he's very nice, very cool."
"And very in the hospital!"
"The...Susan...wait. What did Emanuel say? He's in Burma. What else?"
"First you tell me what a tan Puerto Rican's doing in Burma and what that's got to do with you."
Ysa, naked and wet, trembled with cold. Her suds had condensed into itchy spots that smelled of dead geraniums. She couldn't tell whether Susan was purposefully making her suffer or whether she just didn't understand the seriousness of the situation. "Susan!" she said, stamping her bare, wet foot with no audible effect. "I need to know. What did he say?"
"He said you've got forty-eight hours. Okay? Now will you tell me what's going on? Forty-eight hours till what?"
A tremendous headache descended into Ysa's skull. She held her forehead with one hand, almost afraid it was about to fall off. She almost wished it would, to let the pressure out. She had too much inside her. "Susan," she moaned, almost delirious with pain and desperation. "I need two hundred thousand dollars. Have you got it?"
"No, but Roger does."
The tiniest pinpoint of light came to life in the darkness inside Ysa's throbbing head. "Roger?" she asked despite her instinctive fear of asking. "Roger who?"
"Roger the guy in the red 1958 Corvette Stingray. You didn't let me finish. Not only is he better looking than Robert Redford, but he's richer, too. He didn't care that I wrecked his Stingray. He's got another one."
"You wrecked it?"
"Yeah, I told you. I ran into him. Or actually he ran into me. On the exit ramp. Bam! Totally destroyed his car and mine. Mine, of course, is no loss. He's got to buy me a new one, and you can bet your sweet tush it isn't going to be another Rabbit."
"And he's got two hundred thousand dollars?"
"Oh, I'm sure."
"To spare?"
"I guess. I'll ask him. I'll tell him I've got a friend who's in love with a tan Puerto Rican in Burma. As soon as he gets his eyesight back, I'm sure he'll be glad to write out a check."
"As soon as he gets his eyesight back!" Ysa just wanted to cry. She wanted to end this stupid conversation and hang up and get back in the bathtub and drown herself in geranium suds. But maybe Roger really did have two hundred thousand dollars to spare. No...of course he didn't. Susan was insane. But Ysa had nothing else to cling to. Everything in her ocean had sunk except this Roger guy.
"Well if you'd just let me finish! I was going to say...when I backed into him on the exit ramp..."
"Wait a minute! You said he hit you." Ysa wondered how in the world she was actually getting dragged into this conversation.
"Well, he did. But I hit him, too. Sort of."
"Backing up the exit ramp."
"Yeah, I was on my way into Bethesda when all of a sudden..."
"Never mind! Skip Bethesda! Susan! Please! What happened to Roger?" Roger...this man she didn't know and who surely did not have two hundred thousand dollars.
"Roger's in the hospital. He got glass in his eyes. He's going to have an operation tomorrow. Then he'll have a bandage on for something like a month. But don'tcha see what that means? Roger hasn't seen me yet! He doesn't know what I look like. He felt my face and said I feel like I look like Sophia Loren. Can you believe it? Hey Ysa..." - Susan slipped into an intimate whisper - "...have you ever had your face felt?"
The doorbell rang. How perfect! Ysa wanted to kiss the feet of whoever it was - Pete, the paperboy, no doubt, wanting his weekly pay. "Susan," she said.
"I know...the door. I heard it. I think somebody just drove in my driveway, too. Will you call me back?"
"I promise." But I didn't promise when, Ysa thought with a wicked little smile as she set the receiver down. Before going to the door, she grabbed he purse and wrapped a big cotton towel around her. Jimmy wouldn't care if she came to the door in a towel. He was only nine.
But it wasn't Jimmy. It was Frank.
Ysa slammed the door as soon as she saw his face, the half-grin below his curt red mustache. He caught the door before it closed and swept it open.
"Get out!" she hollered, almost afraid. "Go away!"
"Ysa, we have to talk." He sounded insistent yet humble.
"Nothing to talk about," she snapped as she spun on her heels and huffed off to the bedroom. The smell of his cologne followed her. She slammed the bedroom door hard, but as usual it bounced open a bit. If he came through that door, she thought, she would kill him. She had Mace spray that would knock him down, and then she had a billy club with which she would knock him out. Then she would get the scalpel from her medical kit and decide how to finish him off.
No footsteps followed her. She pulled on a denim shirt and grabbed the nearest pair of jeans. She was going to have an argument with this guy that he would not soon forget. Then, as she sat on the bed and leaned back to pull on her jeans, she saw him looking. Through the crack of the slightly open door, she saw his face - at a distance but with his blue eyes directly focused on the naked length of thing between her belt and her belly. Gasping, she leaped out of sight, snapped and zipped her pants, and, though terrified, came out shouting and stabbing at him with her forefinger.
"WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? I DID NOT INVITE YOU IN HERE, AND DID NOT ASK YOU TO LOOK IN MY BEDROOM DOOR. AS OF THIS AFTERNOON WE WERE NO LONGER DOING BUSINESS TOGETHER. YOUR DAMN MISSION HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ME, AND I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU. I WANT YOU OUT OF HERE NOW OR I'M CALLING THE COPS!"
Looking just as innocent as a pup, Frank raised his hands to expose his palms to her wrath. He backed up toward the door where he'd come in. "Hey," he cooed. "Ysa, relax. Relax. I just wanted to talk. I didn't mean to look in the bedroom. I...I wasn't sure where you'd gone, didn't know if I should follow..."
She didn't exactly spit, but she sensed froth at her lips. He seemed sincere. She'd told him to get out, but only once. It wasn't his fault the bedroom door didn't close. And could she blame him for looking? She would have looked at him.
Her father, the kind of diplomat whose career had begun with him parachuting behind Nazi battle lines at the age of fourteen, had taught her a thing or two about diplomacy. He told her never to forget, to be slow in forgiving, and to keep listening to anyone, no matter how much an enemy.
"O.K., talk," she said, hands on hips, head high, lips clenched, jaw at a tough angle. "And the first time you say 'trust me,' you can turn around and start walking."
Frank stopped backing up. "Look, I'm sorry. I really am. That's what I came to say, and now I have to say it twice over. Ysa... We need you for this project. We don't have anybody else. It's you or it's nobody, and if it's nobody, Rok Mon continues on his merry way."
"I want Soong Tan," Ysa growled. "That's why I'm doing this. For one person. A human being. A little one. The only reason I'm going to help you nail Rok Mon is because he happens to be in my way and I think I owe him one for my father. But I want Soong Tan and I want her first. First we save her. Then we nail Rok. Can you live with that?"
Frank swallowed and nodded. "Yes," he stated in the tone of an oral contract. "We get Soong Tan. We put her in a safe place, and then you're on your way to the monastery."
"Suppose it costs two hundred thousand dollars?"
Frank's mouth turned up at one end, tilting his mustache so far it looked like it might slide off. "I'll bet there's a way around that. I stand by my words. We'll get Soong Tan. We'll put her in a safe place. Then you do what you have to do. Deal?"
Despite herself, his outstretched hand reached all the way to her heart - or almost all the way. She had nothing to gain by spurning his offer. After hesitating, she said, "Deal," and gave his hand a quick shake with a slight pause at the end.
And then they stood there, unsure what to do next. Ysa didn't know if she wanted him to leave or not. He didn't seem to know what was expected of him. Ysa offered the universal compromise: "Coffee?"
With a shy smile and a bow of his head, he accepted the invitation. "Have a seat," she said, indicating the couch, and she went to brew some decaf. Through the kitchen door she saw his ruddy hair illuminated by the late afternoon sun. The low angle of backlight cast a scraggly golden halo across his head. It seemed to explode where it hit his frazzled, windswept cowlick. He tilted his head and looked into the kitchen much as he'd looked into the bedroom. His smile, tight and lopsided, seemed to share a little secret. Ysa turned away and busied herself with the coffee machine.
Did she like this guy or not? She still didn't know. He seemed nice, if maybe a little self-absorbed in his nervous urge to get things moving, but still, nice. If he'd just calm down, he could be fun to be with. She didn't know how far she'd like to go with him, but certainly they could be friends. They could share a cup of coffee. She'd have to know more about him before anything really developed. One big question was what had happened in Nicaragua. It wouldn't be an easy one to ask.
So once they'd settled into their coffees - black, unsweetened for both of them - at opposite ends of the couch, Ysa asked, "So what is it with Kit, anyway?"
Frank took a thoughtful sip of coffee, and Ysa let him think it out before he said, "Kit's a good man. I can't argue with that. God knows he's dedicated to his work."
He thought some more. Ysa filled in the silence with, "Yes, he seems to be." Her first sip of coffee mixed with the smell of Frank's cologne - not a pleasant combination. Why did he wear so much of the stuff? Did he think he had an odor problem?
Frank almost dumped his coffee on the ceiling when a pair of ferrets scrambled up the back of the couch and appeared at his neck. He leaped up and backed off as if under attack by giant rats. He managed to keep most of his spilled coffee in his saucer.
Ysa giggled. 'Hey, you guys, be careful," she said to her pets as they bobbled across the back of the couch to the safety of her arms. "You don't have to worry about him. He's on our side."
Frank looked a lot more upset than she'd have expected. His coffee sloshed and dripped as he tried to keep the cup and saucer under control.
"Sorry," he said as soon as he'd caught his breath. "They caught me by surprise. There's something about animals..."
"They aren't animals! They're Roger and Hammerstein. Ferrets. More like a mink than a rat. Very friendly, I assure you."
Frank whistled with attempted relief. HIs hand was still shaking. "They all make me nervous," he said. "Dogs, cats, you name it."
"Really? How interesting. A big, brave man like you. Were you bitten as a child or something?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact I was. I barely remember it, but when I was three or four, a cat bit me and ran off. Nobody knew whose cat it was, so I had to get rabies shots. In the stomach. A big long needle. That's what I remember most." He shuddered with the memory. Before continuing, he poured the contents of his saucer back into his cup. "But ;subconsciously, I guess I remember the cat, because I never like to have them touch me. Ditto for dogs. I got bit by a dog, too.'
Poor Frank! Ysa imagined him as a little boy - not a hard image to conjure up - getting nipped in the ankle by a Pekinese and crying, crying, crying, not only with pain but with the frustration of getting bit by somebody's companion animal.
"So you never had a pet?" she asked, feeling very sorry. Her family had always had a dog or two and some cats and a bird of one sort or another. These animals accompanied them as they traipsed about the diplomatic circuit.
"Well, yes, actually I did," Frank said. He released a funny little grunt through his nose. "I had a snake. A boa constrictor."
Ysa suppressed the urge to say yuck. She'd never understood why anyone would raise a pet that wasn't warm to the touch. Frank didn't seem to understand it, either.
"It was weird," he said. "It lived in an aquarium. I don't recall ever actually touching it. The only time it moved was once a month or so, when my father would make a big deal out of feeding it a mouse. He'd make sure my brother and I were there to watch. We'd have our faces right up to the glass of the aquarium. It was almost like we were in there with the snake. The mouse would hit the ground in a complete panic, and the snake would wake right up. That's what we called it: The Snake. I don't think it had a name. Anyway, it would wake right up and go after the mouse. The mouse had nowhere to go, of course. It scampered around the aquarium, trying to bash through the glass, but there was no way out. The snake took only a few seconds to pounce on mouse and wrap around it and squeeze it to death. My father...he really enjoyed this. He'd have his wet little cigar in his mouth and be smiling with his big yellow teeth. 'See that, boys?' he'd say. 'Reality. You can be a snake or you can be a mouse. No matter which you pick, there's no way out and you gotta do what you gotta do.."
Frank didn't sound entirely proud of this father. In his reflection, he seemed to recognize the inherent cruelty his father was teaching his sons. Be a snake or be a mouse. Could he see no options in between? Could one not be a courageous mouse or a kind snake? For that matter, could one become a mongoose and kill the snake? Or, say, a ferret and stay out of the fight altogether? Apparently not. One did what one had to do. There was no way out.
"Do you believe him?" she asked gently. She wanted very much to hold his head in her lap and stroke his hair. Something about him seemed terribly wounded.
"I certainly believed him then," Frank said. "Today...I don't know. Look at Rok Mon. Now there's a snake if I ever saw one. And look at his money. Tons of it."
"Yeah but it's filthy."
Frank grinned and twitched one eyebrow up and down. "Filthy, maybe, but eagerly accepted in the finest of commercial establishments. I can assure you that Mr. Mon is always treated with great respect."
Ysa didn't feel like arguing this matter. Frank wasn't really advocating the life of crime as the path to happiness. He was just trying to make a point which she did not want to hear or feel obliged to refute.
"Kit," she said to change the subject. "You said he's good. Is he a good snake or a good mouse?"
Finally Frank continued. "He's good, but he's got this insatiable need to dominate. To be in charge. He'd never take an order from anybody, not one he didn't believe in himself. And when he gives an order, he's sure he's right."
"And is he?"
"Usually, yes. But no one's right all the time. Everybody should be open to suggestions. And nobody can micromanage every detail of every operation. The good leader delegates authority and lets others make decisions."
"I see," Ysa said. And she did. From Franks' words she knew as much about Kit as about the person who spoke them. She sensed the rumble of internal politics, of a competition, a struggle. Kit wanted to be in charge and not have anyone telling him what to do. Frank probably envied him and also didn't want anyone to tell him what to do. She wondered how much more she could milk from Frank. "I wonder why he's that way?" she mused.
"I think he had a pretty rough childhood. He was an orphan most of his life, and I understand the foster home that took care of him wasn't the nicest place."
"That can destroy some people," Ysa said.
"Damned right it can. But the survivors are tough. Kids either knuckle under or they rise above."
"And Kit rose above."
"That's the way I see it," Frank admitted. "He's one tough cookie, I've got to give him that. But I sure wouldn't want him for a roommate."
"Maybe all he needs is a little love."
"That or a lesson in respect."
When the phone rang, Ysa knew who it was. Frank, seeing her cringe, asked, "Aren't you going to get it?"
"I'm pretty sure who it is. She's got a dump truck-load of problems that I really haven't got time for right now."
The answering machine picked up. It was exactly whom Ysa was expecting.
"Ysa! Ysa! You better pick up!" She screeched like someone under torture. "What the hell is going on? The FBI was here! They looked..."
Ysa leaped up to grab the phone. Frank, close behind, stopped her hand as it reached. He pinned it down against the phone while they listened.
"..they looked all around," Susan continued, her screeching breaking down into sobs. "They listened to my answering machine. They asked me all about you. They asked about that Emanuel guy! I said, 'I don't know, I don't know! He's in Burma, that's all I know!' I didn't tell them anything about you. I just said I haven't seen you for months. Then they left!"
Then Frank released Ysa's hand, but as she snatched up the receiver, the line went dead. No Susan, no dial tone - nothing but dark silence.
She looked to Frank for some kind of explanation. For two seconds a pained intensity streaked his face, a frozen confluence of anger, fear and reflection. Then he said, "Come on. We'd better get out of here."
"But Frank..." He had her by the arm. His irresistible strength moved her to the front door and out. He reached in to lock it, then closed it behind them.
"Sorry," he snapped. "We can't wait. We'll see what happens and maybe come back. But I don't think we've got two minutes before something happens."
Still gripping her arm in his strong hand, Frank opened the door of his Camaro and all but forced her in. the door hinges grunted with age as he forced the it shut. He practically vaulted over the hood to get to his own side. As soon as the motor started when he revved it high and slammed the gears into first. The back wheels spun all the way down the driveway, throwing up a spray of gravel and sand. The tires screeched as they bit into the asphalt of the road, and the car tore forward. Frank needed a new muffler, but his motor was obviously well tuned. Grim determination held his face at a tough angle as he raced each gear up near the redline.
"That was trouble," he said as soon as he reached a cruising speed about twice the limit. He voice was surprisingly level and calm.
"What was?" Ysa asked, feeling dumb for saying it but still wondering what he meant.
"The FBI getting into this, if it was them, which I doubt. And then the phone going dead. It wasn't coincidence that it happened just then. They had a tap on it. A Groenster, would be my guess. Out on the road, at the juncture box. Groenster's have a way of cutting off the line for no good reason. You'd think the FBI would use something made in America."
"But why would the FBI tap my phone? And why would they bother Susan?"
"This I do not know." Frank pronounced the words with hard crispness tinged with a bit of anger. "It could be someone in the State Department suspecting you're up to something. It could be that they're on to us and our operation. I don't know. It sure as hell isn't a good sign. It could have been your little bank robbery. They don't often let people get away with that, you know. Kit was supposed to have used his contacts on the inside to bungle up their investigation, but you never know."
Ysa leaned back in the soft leather seat, closed her eyes and exhaled a long, slow sigh of suppressed agony. Kit had never said anything about the FBI getting involved. She had assumed - stupidly, it seemed - that the problem in Burma would stay in Burma. "So where are we going?" she asked Frank. "What are we going to do now?"
Frank hesitated, checked his rear view mirror, swallowed, tightened his lips and said, "I guess we have to tell Kit. I have a feeling you're leaving for Burma a little sooner than we expected."
They went directly to Kit's house. To Ysa's astonishment, he lived in a log cabin. It wasn't Abe Lincoln's one-room log cabin, not by any means - Abe never had a solar energy unit and two satellite dishes on his roof - but tucked among towering magnolia, hickory and sycamore, backed by a field of sprouting hay, it certainly passed as rustic. It had wide, low, multi-paned windows across most of the second floor. A massive creek-stone chimney rose at the northern gable. Kit, in khaki pants and plaid shirt, stood at the front door before Frank and Ysa came around the last bend in the driveway. No doubt he'd heard Franks rusted muffler. He didn't say a word, not even after Frank said, "They're onto us."
While the cabin was by no means messy, Ysa noted the lack of any feminine touch besides the very pleasant smell of something cooking. The broad cathedral living room was starkly furnished, with a leather-covered couch and a single leather easy chair. A maple dining room table at one end of the room had no signs of recent meal, but a laptop and attendant papers waited there as if recently interrupted. The stack of split logs and circle of bark litter near the fireplace definitely indicated the absence of a woman. Still, it looked more quaint than messy. Given the warmth of the fire, the isolated chaos of the logs was fully justified. While Frank and Kit discussed the situation, Ysa stood near the fire, keeping to one side as Kit adjusted with the fuel. As if not listening to Frank and barely aware of Ysa, he said, "Excuse me," and reached behind her to grab a poker. His forearm brushed the back of her legs.
"I think we'd better move this operation toward Burma," Frank said as he paced a short back-and-forth path. "Just get it out of the country. We can duck out of sight over there more easily than we can here."
"We still don't know that they're after us," Kit noted. "I'll bet they're just looking for a bank robber."
"All the more reason to get her out of here."
"On the other hand, it could be Rok reaching all the way into Virginia."
"How's he going to do that?" Frank looked almost angry as he said it.
"If I were him, I'd put my grip on the U.S. Embassy people. I'd offer them a nice little six-digit carrot, and I'd threaten their families with a .45 caliber stick. An offer they couldn't refuse. They'd tell me the daughter of the former ambassador was looking to come back to Burma. They'd put me onto Soong Tan's track. I'd grab the kid, first thing. Then I'd have my agents in the U.S. go look for Ysa. I'd track her down through the phone system. Either through Embassy intelligence or right through the goddam phone book."
"My number isn't listed," Ysa said with a snideness she hadn't expected.
"Right," said Kit. "Not listed. So they surfed around on the internet until they found a listing of unlisted numbers. Ever gotten a sales call during dinner?"
"Well...yes..."
"You're listed. But it sounds to me like they followed you through Susan. Which means they followed you through Emanuel Rodriquez. Which means they're on to him. Which means they're on to Soong Tan."
"Which means we'd better hurry," Ysa said. But something harsh and hot was gripping her by the back of her brain, reaching around to the upper corners of her jaw. She didn't want to go to Burma. She was very, very scared.
But then Kit slipped her a little wink and said, "It's either that or the FBI thinks she tried to rob a bank."
She couldn't believe how unconcerned Kit seemed when he suddenly suggested they have some dinner. Ysa again became conscious of the smell of food. "Grab some bowls over there, " he said, pointing at the chest-high bar between the kitchen are and the main room. "Frank, get some wine glasses and a bottle of...hmm, what goes with lamb stew?"
At the mention, Ysa's stomach scraped bottom. "A bottle of burgundy would be nice," she suggested.
"Yes," said Frank, peering into a low cabinet on the other side of the bar. "Perfect."
It wasn't just lamb stew but lamb stew with herbal dumplings. Kit brought it to the table in a bubbling cauldron. Then he brought a loaf of rye bread from the oven. Within three minutes they had the wine open and poured. Kit held out his glass for a toast.
"To the glory of the good," he said as the crystal glasses touched and sang with a single note. Looking into Ysa's eyes, he added, "To Soong Tan."
At that, Ysa melted. She barely got the wine glass down to the table as she collapsed into great, sobbing tears. She held her head in both hands filled them with salt water. What chance did that poor little girl have? Rok Mon was after her, and Ysa van der Meer was supposed to stop him. It wasn't going to work. It was too much to ask of her. It was a job for men. She hated herself for thinking that, but it was a job for men. They should go in there and solve the problem with all their goddam guns and weapons and leave Ysa home cooking something.
Like lamb stew. She felt hands come around her shoulders, and she knew they were Kit's. He stroked her hair a couple of times, said, "It's all right, Ysa. It's going to be all right." And Frank's hand came across the table and patted her hand.
She felt better, then - supported - and after a moment she pulled herself together with a giant sucking sound. "OK, gentlemen," she said firmly. "That's the last you'll see of that."
She was silently, and deeply, thankful when Kit said, with sudden liveliness, "Good, I'm starved."
They chuckled and dug in. Kit made a damned good stew. She detected the smoky flavor of cumin, the bite of chili, the sweetness of basil that had been properly ripped by fingers, not cut by knife. She tasted surprising bursts of...fresh cilantro! Kit was a culinary rascal. She liked that in a man.
Frank breathed through his mouth while he ate, inhaling around the sides of his teeth and enunciating his words around chunks of meat. "We get extra pay for this job, right Kit?" he asked. "For the danger?"
"I don't know. I'll have to ask the trustees."
"Tell them your project director needs a raise. Maybe they can skim a tenth of a percent off of Rok's bank accounts after he's dead."
"Wouldn't that be nice," Kit said, obviously not considering it.
"I'm serious. My muffler's busted, my tires are bald, I need dental work and it's time I started a retirement fund."
"Retirement fund!" Kit blurted, almost laughing. "What are you going to do, buy a condo in Florida? You wouldn't last ten minutes in retirement."
"No, I wouldn't, not in Florida. You know what I've always wanted to do? Take a nice little pile of money down to Brazil and buy a house on the beach and just sit there all day drinking mango mai tais."
"Like a rich guy," Kit added. "Dream on."
"Seriously. Wouldn't you want to, Ysa? If you had the chance?"
"Oh, I don't know. I like Virginia." And she hated to talk business over a meal.
"Brazil's cheaper, and you can disappear there, be nobody, just a rich gringo. I mean, when you think about it, how come only rich people get to do that? We risk our lives for our country, and some rich guy gets to drink mai tais on the beach."
Kit winked and said, "Frank, if I didn't know you better, I'd think you've got socialistic tendencies."
"I'll stick with burgundy," Ysa injected, trying to change the subject. "Isn't this a fine burgundy, Frank?"
Still chewing, Frank sloshed her another glassful, then chewed his way over to the bar to open another bottle. They finished that one, too, washing down all the stew they could sop up from the pot. Then they just sat back, immobile with overstuffed pleasure. That's when Kit said, "Well, that ought to hold us for the better part of an eighteen-hour plane flight."
"Whew," Ysa sighed, not yet getting what he meant. "When's that?"
"Well, if Frank's car can make it in one piece, we ought to be at Dulles International within a couple of hours. I believe a flight leaves tonight at eight-something."
"Tonight?"
"Yes, I'm afraid so. It seems there's no time to lose."
"And who's going?"
"You and me," Kit said. "Frank follows in a day or so."
"But...I haven't packed. We have to...where's the...the virus? I mean, are we prepared for this?"
"We are. Don't worry. You're packed. You're a nun, right?" Still talking, he rose heavily from his chair and walked into another room. "We'll send the virus in by FedEx. Frank will wrap up things here. We've got someone in Burma already, lining things up."
Kit emerged from the room with a suitcase. "Here you go, Sister Gertrude. The best habit you'll ever have."
She opened the suit case. It held the most conservative-looking navy blue clothes she'd ever seen not on an actual nun.
"I hope a medium fits you well enough," Kit said. "We're going to have to arrive at the airport in costume."
"We? Don't tell me..."
"Yup. Father James Keenan, S.J.," he said with heavy Irish lilt. "Pleased to make your acquaintance, Sister Gertrude."
She could only laugh. She tried on her nun's outfit in the privacy of Kit's bedroom. It was a busy, lived-in bedroom that seemed to serve as an office, too, but free of the dirty socks and underwear she might have expected, and his bed was made with military precision. Decked out in the nun's outfit, she looked a bit military herself, except for the silly black-and-white head piece. Navy blue was not her color, and calf-length skirts were not her style, but as she maneuvered a dresser-top mirror to see herself in various sections, she only felt grateful that she didn't have to wear the full-blown black-and-white habit. Feeling slightly hypocritical to have a relatively large gold crucifix around her neck, she let it dangle inside her blouse where no one could see it.
She was still looking, moving the little mirror around and trying to piece together the various parts of herself, when she heard a tender knock on the door. Kit called out, "Are you decent?"
"Too decent," she laughed, and the door opened. Kit stepped in with a silly grin, or maybe it was a leer. He didn't close the door. He walked right over, wrapped an arm around her, pulled her waist against his and said, "There's something I'd like to take care of." And he latched onto her mouth with a kiss that came straight from the gutter. He massaged her lips with his, smearing her mouth with a desire as hard as that of an animal. His tongue snaked out and against her teeth, licking them, probing, finally persuading them to open, and then it went inside, a wine-and-cumin invader devouring her mouth, it seemed, sucking on something inside her, eating it, consuming it, whatever it was; she didn't know. She just knew she wanted him to have it.
But as soon as her arms rose in surrender and reached around him to his hard shoulders, he stopped. He pulled back, released her mouth, gently removed her body from his, and again with that silly leer, he said, "I've always wanted to do that?"
"Kiss me?"
"Kiss a nun. Like that."
"That's an odd desire. Was there perchance some special nun in your past?"
"Well, as a matter of fact there was. In the sixth grade, to be exact. St. Anthony's Elementary School. Sister Andi, we called her. Prettiest damn nun you ever saw. And nice. She liked me. Unlike Sister Hilda, in the fifth grade, who really wanted to see me crucified on a blackboard. If I'd had any real parents at the time, I think they would have had her thrown in jail for child abuse."
"Now I get it! I'm just here to fulfill your fantasy! You creep!"
He took it as the joke it was. Frank seemed to push it even further when he leaned into the room and said, "Are you guys having fun in here or are we about ready to go?"
"Let me get changed and we're on our way."
Ysa and Frank hung around the fireplace while Kit packed and turned himself into a Jesuit. "So how are you getting into Burma?" she asked him. "As a rabbi?"
"No, no, certainly not that. It wouldn't take them long to figure out I wasn't Jewish. I'm going as an executive from Coca-Cola. My card..." He flipped open his wallet and handed her one. It said "Frank Smith, Manager - Asia," with a phone number in Atlanta. "Keep it, he said. That phone number, without the area code, is where you can reach me in Rangoon. Just ask for Frank."
It was then Ysa realized that nuns had no pockets, at least not the Sisters of Divine Mercy. Nor did she have a purse, having left it at home when she and Frank rushed out. She held it in her hand until Frank turned to poke at the fire. She slipped the card into her bra.
Kit came out looking like the kind of priest who splits his own firewood and competes in triathlons. His broad back stretched at his black shirt. But his little white collar looked cute, she thought. Somehow the uniform made him look passive, kind, intellectual and serious. The two suitcases in his hands, however, merely made his muscles bulge, giving him the appearance of a bodyguard. He didn't look especially happy in this get-up. He just said, "Let's go."
Frank drove fast indeed, but Kit seemed totally confident in his driving skills. He gave orders and reminders all the way to the airport. He was to check Ysa's house for evidence of break in and to hide or remove anything that would raise suspicions. He was to verify delivery of the virus capsule and the inoculation units to headquarters and to follow the package's progress as Federal Express rushed it to Burma, though customs - "Better be there for that," Kit added. "Just in case." - and from there to its final destination. Until he got on a plane, he should stay in touch with Intelligence at the U.S. Embassy and be ready to report any developments to Kit. He should monitor Kit's and Ysa's entrance into Burma. If anything went wrong, if they didn't make it through customs or seemed to have disappeared, he should take whatever measures were necessary to either continue the operation or clean up all signs of it and be prepared to deny any knowledge of it.
At the airport, Sister Gertrude Walligurski's and Father James Keenan's passports worked well enough to get them onto the plane. He nudged her with his elbow as the plane prepared to take off, then crossed himself as if he'd done it a thousand times. She, long ago a Lutheran, thought she did a pretty awkward job of the same gesture. She'd never realized how many ways there were to do it wrong. Did you go up and then down and then left and then right? Or down and then up and then right and then left? How far down did you go? How far up? Wasn't there a little kiss of the fingers in there somewhere, or was that optional? And when did one cross oneself? Anytime one felt the urge? Or only when passing a cemetery or diving off the high dive or taking off in an airplane or receiving communion or hearing of a death? Could one do it when a plane landed? If so, what was the appropriate moment? When the pilot made the announcement? When the wheels touched the ground? When the plane successfully stopped rolling? Suppose the oxygen mask dropped down?
"I'm going to get caught at this," she said. "I just know it."
"Worst case scenario, make like you can barely speak English. Oh, and one other thing. I suggest you never-ever let on that you understand Burmese. Not even on the bus or the boat or anything."
"Why's that?"
"For one thing, you don't want to blow your cover. For all we know, Rok's people know about you, or at least about your father. For another, it's a big advantage to know what others are saying without them knowing you know. Sometimes they'll reveal secrets right in front of you."
"Kit...I'm worried."
"Good. You should be."
"I'm serious. I'm not a spy. I don't know how to do these things." Her voice almost cracked. A raspy sensation in her throat warned her that she might break down and cry.
"You're a lousy bank robber, too," he said. "Did I ever tell you that?"
God damn him. God bless him. She just wanted to press her face to his neck, put her lips to the pulse of his jugular. But the couple hundred people on their Air India jet no doubt included a few Catholics. She couldn't even hold his hand. She wondered where they were going to sleep in Rangoon. Kit would decide that as he had decided everything so far. She had not brought a penny of cash or a single credit card. She'd sleep where he told her to.
The pathetic excuse for dinner arrived in plastic dishes wrapped in plastic. Ysa sucked the curry sauce from a chunk of beef, then pushed the tray as far away as she could. She ate the little bun and tiny wedge of cheese and drank the little bottle of oak-tinged California zinfandel. Courageous Kit ate the desert, a pineapple ring with a blob of whipped cream in the middle and a cherry on top.
With her forehead tipped to the plastic window, the dark, invisible sea six miles below, a vague sheen in the moonlight, Ysa decided what she wished. She wished Kit were her brother. Her big brother. The closest possible buddy, a man on whom she could depend absolutely. A man with whom she could entrust a secret, a feeling, an insight, or any other intensely personal thought. A man she would not have to suspect of ulterior motives.
Not that she suspected Kit. Not much, anyway. She only wondered why - and how - he kept such emotional distance from her. Had his childhood been all that cold and loveless?
"Tell me about your foster family, Kit," she said, surprising herself with her directness.
"I can't say they were bad people. But I honestly can't remember ever having a conversation with my father - the man in that family, I mean. He never showed me how to hold a bat or make a campfire or use a saw. Funny...I do remember him showing me how to open a bottle of beer. This was back when they used bottle openers. He thought it was the funniest thing. He'd have me do it in front of people. He'd say, 'Kit, go get your father a cold one,' and I'd go feel all the bottles of beer in the refrigerator and bring him the coldest one. And I'd squat down by the coffee table and open the bottle for him. He'd say to his friends, 'See that? That's my boy. Haw!'"
"And your mother?"
"She was a pretty sheepish woman. I think she had some kind of mental problem. I never saw him hit her, but it seemed like he didn't have to. I mean, she was in a constant state of cowering down. She did whatever he told him. I don't remember them talking very much. He talked, but she didn't. And she dominated me the way he dominated her. I never got away with anything in that house, that's for sure."
"No brothers or sisters?"
"They had a kid who'd already left home. He was working up in Canada or something. I vaguely recall him being around one Christmas, but he didn't stay long."
"I had good parents," Ysa said, "but I never had a brother or sister. I wonder what it's like to know somebody for your whole life, from Day One, somebody who knows things that only you two know."
"Like what?"
"Oh, you know...the secrets of childhood. The magic thing that children see and grown-ups can't. Your can share that with brothers and sisters but not with parents."
Kit looked a little sad and reflective. "I try not to think about those things. Families are for other people. I try to stick to my work."
"You'd make a good priest," she joked.
"And you'd be an awesome nun."
"Nuns and priests - brothers and sisters, right? What a pair."
He smiled and patted her hand in a priestly way. She really wished he would hold her hand, but if other passengers saw such a move of affection, the report would sweep across Asia like a typhoon.
But then the lights went out so everyone could sleep across the Atlantic. It occurred to her that she and he really were going to sleep together, in a sense, even though sitting up in a public place. At first she merely pretended to sleep, letting her head loll against his shoulder, where she could smell the not unpleasant odor of fresh sweat inside new clothes. She could hear him breathing through his nose and the occasional soft moan from his throat, a purr of unconscious contentment. She wanted him very much. She let her hand slip around the armrest far enough for a finger to press lightly against his firm thigh. She could feel strings of muscle beneath the cotton of his black priest pants. It was enough to calm her. She slept.
Maybe it was the soft hush of the plane that made her dream, yet again, of rushing down the ski jump, her father's omnipotent arms around her, the air swooshing by, her chest inflated with the terrifying thrill of speed and weightlessness, her sensation of impending disaster countered by utter confidence in the man who held her.
This time, she thought in a state of semi-sleep, she would not have a man's arms around her. She would go into Rok's territory quite alone, quite cut off from all assistance. She would not be depending on men; they would be depending on her. She would do what her father had trained her to do. She would not let fear break her form. She would do it, and she would do it right all the way. She would succeed, and she would bring Soong Tan home.
Kit's seemingly supernatural power to control situations proved true through Burmese customs at Rangoon. Her passport - Sister Gertrude Walligurski's passport - featured a photo of herself which she had never seen before. She'd been born in Guam, "the daughter of missionaries," Kit said, sotto voce, as they crossed the oven-hot tarmac from the plane to the terminal. "Don't forget."
"Am I supposed to know Latin?" she whispered.
"I'm sure you know it better than anyone in the great nation of Burma," Kit said. "Don't worry. Just be cool. Remember your name and make up the rest. If anybody asks, we just met at the airport for the first time. Coincidence. We don't know what each other are doing here."
Be cool? It was over a hundred degrees on the runway and every bit as hot, plus stuffy, in the airport. Ysa dripped with sweat. It trickled down inside her clothes and seeped from her forehead into her eyes. She had never minded the Burmese heat before, but she had never gone around in a long skirt and a blouse with long sleeves and buttoned to the collar. To her immense relief, the customs official took only a cursory look at her passport, whacked one page with a stamp and handed it back as if nothing could be more worthless. But just before she took it, he pulled it back an inch and shot her a suspicious look.
"Have you been in Burma before?" he asked in Burmese.
And she almost answered. Her eyes may have revealed her understanding, she thought, but she was quick enough to give him a dumb look and say, "Pardon me?"
That answered his question. He handed her the passport and waved her through with a disdainful side-tip of his head. She wondered if she was leaving a visible trail of sweat as she followed Kit to a taxi in front of the lobby.
"Nice place," Kit commented as the taxi wrestled through the traffic of downtown Rangoon toward the InterAsia Continental Hotel. The city smelled of rotten vegetables, diesel fumes and the greasy smoke of spicy food. As usual, the traffic was a fluid mixture of pedestrian mobs, clots of pedicabs, draft animals pulling carts, and small trucks loading and unloading. Ysa loved and loathed the place. She loved the exoticness and already had some very spicy meals in mind. But the chaos depressed her. This was a country that simply never moved forward. She'd never understood how the people could identify a problem with their society - anything from a pothole or smoldering pile of garbage to a corrupt politician to the benefits of a sewer system - yet never bother to solve the problem.
But she had learned to just accept Burma for what it was: Burma. It had some of the best food in the world - spicy curried vegetables, fish stews, hot chutneys, steamed rice, candied fruits. Burmese folk, the peasants and people in the streets, were among the best in the world, people who had accepted the Buddha's principles and lived lives of kindness and giving. The music, a whining, rhythmic cross of Indian and Chinese, entranced her. But the taxi driver was listening to the radio. Like the other two stations in town, it played almost exclusively Western top-forty pop or bleating Burmese imitations of it. It was a terrible invasion, she thought - Western values marching in, replacing what was beautiful about the country and replacing it with the kind of instant culture manufactured by Hollywood and the music industry. Still, the invasion would also bring Western order and organization, perhaps for the better. She didn't know, but it did occur to her that she and Kit were part of the invading force. They had come to cripple one of the ugliest parts of Burma, however, the drug, slave and sex industries. Burma could certainly get along without them. Burma would get along just fine.
With great relief they stepped into the refrigerated air of the InterAsia Continental. Kit paid cash for two adjacent rooms on the fourth floor. In her room, Ysa explored the contents of her suitcase. She had a nice, black Bible - suspiciously new, she thought - and a mahogany rosary, which she hoped she'd never have to operate in the presence of a real Catholic. She had a nun's outfit identical to the one she'd worn on the plane, and to her great relief, a pair of denim overalls and a few dark T-shirts.
She also found a set of industrial-strength underwear - just what she'd expect to find on a nun, though she'd never thought about it before. Then she realized what she was wearing - rather minuscule black panties and a filmy black bra. In theory, no one was going to have access to that fact. It occurred to her that if she'd been body-searched at customs - no an unlikely possibility - she would have had some difficult explaining to do. Her imagination seized that image and watched it flare into a realistic fantasy of Rok Mon finding out and deciding that she was no nun. His reaction, as her fantasy played out, was a flavor of rape she did not want to know. She would wear the iron-clad undies Kit had provided, and she'd make a point of asking where he'd done his research.
The suitcase also contained a manila envelope full of neatly stacked cash: twenty thousand Burmese kyat, a little over three thousand U.S. dollars. It was plenty enough for a couple of weeks in Burma, including a few bribes along the way, yet not enough to arouse suspicion. She divided it between a money belt and a pouch that hung around her neck.
She also found a Swiss pocket knife, an extendible, flexible steel-shank baton that looked like it could break a bone, a canister of Mace, and a few odd items that she just couldn't figure out, and thought best left alone. Kit would have to explain why a nun was going to need such stuff. As far as she was concerned, weapons were in the same category as lacy underwear - more likely to raise alarm than solve a problem.
* * *
The plane trip had taken twenty-eight hours. Ysa was relieved that Father Keenan had booked his own room and did not propose an immediate visit. She was exhausted, reeking of jet fuel and sweat. She spent a good half hour showering the journey from her skin. She kept the water cold, a welcome relief to the soggy heat of Rangoon. And then she slept. She set the overhead fan on low, lay her exhausted body naked across the clean top sheet of the bed, and sank into a deep, defenseless sleep. In her sleep she felt the gentle float and hum of the Boeing as it soared through the night. She saw stars in black sky, silver waves on black sea. She felt Kit's solid warmth beside her. Still floating in a dreamy dusk, she felt a man's full weight upon her, hot, perspiring, breathing, his muscles working, his lips nibbling on her, creeping across her skin like a hungry young animal. She could not see him in the dark, and she did not care to see him. She just wanted his weight and his lips and his fullness within her. In her dream, as if standing nearby and seeing herself, she wrapped herself around him and held on as they floated to the same rhythm, the rhythm of a small boat in huge swells crossed with waves and currents that tossed them in ways they could not foresee. But then, as magically as he appeared, he drifted away, dissolved into dark weightlessness and disappeared.
She awoke with a start, unsure why, for a moment unsure where she was. Semi-conscious, she reconnoitered her surroundings, her strange double bed, the strange street sounds, the strange blue clothes in the strange suitcase that was not hers. Then the phone rang a strange ring, a polite little chime, and she realized it was not for the first time. She groped toward it, found it only on the third ring. Only as she brought the heavy, ancient receiver to her head did she remember that she was in Burma. The voice on the phone, as distant as another planet, was Kit's. He said, "Sister Gertrude, we've got a problem.
"Oh," she mumbled, not quite yet aware of what a problem meant under her current circumstances. "OK."
"Are you awake? I'm coming right over.
"Mmm."
By the time she realized that "right over" meant from the room next door, he was already knocking. She pulled on a khaki T-shirt and her denim overalls and opened the door.
"Bad news, " he said. stepping in. "Real bad. Start packing. We've got to get out of here."
"Where are we going?"
"Pack. We're ducking underground for a while."
"But what..."
"Pack."
He was serious. She didn't exactly perceive fear in his voice - she doubted he was capable of feeling enough fear to let it show - but his voice carried the hard edge of concern. She moved fast, throwing things into her suitcase, pulling on a pair of sneakers that looked like black deck shoes, and snatching up her things from the bathroom. He held the door open while she zipped the suitcase. He took it from her as his other hand guided her out of the room.
In the elevator she asked, "So what's going on? Don't tell me Rok Mon's on to us already."
"Frankly, I don't know. I'm assuming the worst. I called the embassy, looking for Emanuel Rodriguez. They wouldn't tell me anything. They were very suspicious that I was asking. I finally got through to the head Intelligence guy."
"Bob Noir?"
"Nope. A new guy. He's heard of you, but you don't know him."
"And?"
"And...he told me Rodriquez is dead."
Kit delivered this message just as the elevator opened onto the hotel lobby. By the looks on the people waiting to go up, Ysa knew she had turned a deathly white. She was thinking about that as her legs disappeared and she swayed slowly toward the floor like a leaf from a dying tree. Kit's arm saved her, and then she was waking up on a leatherette sofa, a Burmese bellhop fanning her with a brochure, Kit holding water to her lips, and a small crowd of concerned citizens looking down on her.
"How do you say 'Scram' in Burmese?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said, her voice a thin squeak. " I don't speak Burmese."
"Very good," Kit whispered at he side of her face. Then he looked at the crowd, gestured with his free hand and said, "Back off! Please..." And they did.
"Emanuel..." Ysa moaned. "Oh Emanuel...no..."
"Gertrude, we have to get out of here." He spoke with absolute calmness but with clear urgency. "Can you walk?"
She could. Unsteadily at first, but she walked. Out the door. Into a cab. Down the street, Kit's hand behind her, cuddling her shoulder blade. "Are you OK?" he asked.
She nodded. "Good. Tell me if I do this right." And he turned to the taxi driver, a man who looked too young to hold a license, and said, in credible Burmese, an address.
"Not bad," Ysa said. "Where'd you learn that?"
"The embassy guy. For all I know it means Take me to your leader."
"It doesn't. It was Emanuel's address."
"Right. Good. How far is it?"
"Not too. Why are we going there?"
"We'd better check it out. Look for clues. It seems a bit coincidental that it just happened yesterday."
"What about Soong Tan?" Ysa asked. "Did they say anything about her?
"They said they knew nothing about a girl. Emanuel hadn't been in to the embassy for about a week, so they sent a couple of Marines over. Apparently the place is a real mess."
And it was. A lone Burmese policeman stood guard at the house, which stood behind a standard suburban wall topped with barbed wire and the jagged glass of broken bottles cemented along the top. Kit said, "Ten minutes," in English to the cab driver, held up ten fingers and tapped his watch. The driver understood. It was harder to explain to the policeman that Kit was a priest, Emanuel was a Catholic, that he had to go in. In the end, it was twenty U.S. dollars that got the door open.
Inside, the place had been ransacked. All the furniture had been tipped over, books, tapes, records and clothes covered the floor like dunes, and in the bathroom they found the blood. It had dried on the tiles after flowing across the floor, under the sink, behind the toilet.
"Knives," said Kit. "He bled to death right here." His face indicated a blackened area that had not quite dried.
Ysa covered her face with both hands and sobbed. No one had ever treated her as kindly as Emanuel had. No one else had worked so hard to find Soong Tan. Apparently he had succeeded, and it had cost him his life. They had stabbed him. He had bled to death on the bathroom floor.
"They've got her," Ysa said with a burst of visceral intuition. "The bastards found out where she was and came and grabbed her. God only knows what they've done with her. Oh, God!" She could not control herself. She wept with great heaving sobs. Tears wet her hands and trickled down her wrists. She felt guilty, responsible for what had happened. Maybe if she had just let things be.... When Kit's arm came around her, it felt as warm and safe as a quilt.
"Get hold of yourself, kid," he said. "We're going to get those bastards. That's what we're here for. Let's just be cool. Methodical. We're smarter than they are. We'll get them."
"Oh, Kit. Poor Soong Tan. We have to save her." The words came out in a thin, choking moan. They sounded as weak as glass.
"We'll see what we can do. I can't promise anything. Right now, we'd better get out of here."
She was still crying when they took the cab to another address. She didn't see where they went. Moaning and crying into her hands, she barely felt Kit's hand stroking her. Emanuel had never done anything but help people. No better man had ever lived on this earth. For nothing more than money, thugs had taken him from the world, and now they were going to milk Soong Tan for everything they could get out of her. It would almost have been better if they'd killed her, too. But her death would be a long one. She'd be a tattered rag before they were done with her.
She did not know where they were when Kit hustled her out of the cab, across a rubble of sidewalk and quickly into a house. They were in a part of town that smelled of sewage and old garbage. "Where are we?" she asked as Kit locked the door behind them. The room had no furniture besides a ratty single bed in an otherwise empty back room. The windows had security bars over them. The floor was bare concrete
"Safe house," Kit said. "Frank arranged it for just such an eventuality. He'll know we're here. No one else does. I'm worried that somebody in the embassy isn't on our side. Somebody high up. So until Frank gets here, we just sit tight."
"I have to lie down. I think I'm going to pass out." She just wanted to collapse. Kit and Frank would have to figure out what to do next. She wasn't a spy. She was a fake nun in charge of deadly medical aid. Until her time to act, she just wanted unconsciousness.
Kit led her into a room with a single bed. He eased her down onto the clean, tight sheet, removed her leather sandals, and lay beside her, lifting her head so it rested on his shoulder. She surrendered to the anesthesia of tears, letting her mind go dull and warm. His hands slid under the back of her overalls and massaged her back with slow, undulating squeezes. The tips of his fingers stroked the small of her back, raising her T-shirt a bit to brush the tender skin just above her panties. His arms felt like a little animal atop her, and soon they went heavy with sleep. His breathing slowed. His heart settled into a slow, confident tempo. It soothed her to hear his heart. She wished she could kiss it. She wished it could beat forever and that she could lie there listening to it. She wished she could hear Emanuel's heart, too. It occurred to her that she never had. Though he would have done anything for her, though he had actually died trying to do something for Soong Tan, she had never lain with him. They had never kissed. Her only recollection of physical contact was a tight hug when he dropped her at the airport. Remembering the hug in detail, she knew now that he'd wanted more. But he was a mail clerk and driver, she the daughter of the ambassador. A hug was already over the line of standard respect, or so he had no doubt assumed.
Now he was dead. Gone. A beautiful soul wiped from the earth. Directly or indirectly by the same man who had taken her father away. The same man who might well kill her, too, if he suspected her intentions. He would kill her, or she would kill him. And the person who would make the difference was asleep beneath her cheek, breathing as slowly as a babe in his mother's lap.
When they awakened, simultaneously, she did not behave much like a nun. Under the control of nothing but hot desire, she slid upward across his chest, pulled the straps of her overalls down, raised her T-shirt and brought her breast to his mouth. Eyes closed, he took it in silence, kissing the nipple, tugging at it with his lips, licking it, taking it into his mouth to gently suckle. His tongue pawed at it, punched it, wrestled with it, brought it to full attention as she moaned into his ear. "I love you, Kit," she said. "I love you so much." But she was thinking of Emanuel, and she almost moaned his name.
His mouth still doing sweet battle with her breast, he said nothing. She wasn't sure she wanted to hear him say it. Men said it too easily. She would not know if he was saying it to her or to her body. She did not care to hear it. She just wanted him, and she wanted him to have her. His hand wiggled beneath her shirt and brought it up to expose her other breast. He went at it as voraciously as he had the other, tugging on her nipple and jostling it like a puppy pulling the stuffing from a couch. "Take it, Kit," she moaned. She wanted him to have it, the whole thing, and her soul, too.
His hands gripped her head and brought her face to his. He gobbled at her lips, licked them inside and out, and she lapped at his tongue with deep hunger. Their tongues lay along each other as their bodies just had, each desiring the other, each afraid to move from the bliss of contact. But as his hands dug at her hair, his mouth moved to her cheek, her neck, her ear, her ear, her ear, oh God - his heat penetrated her to that dark, inner place between her stomach and her spine. She flushed with something a lot like orgasm as her legs straddled his waist and she ground herself against him. His hot tongue blazed passion down the side of her neck, across her throat, and his hands dug into her jeans to cup her from below. They massaged her, pumping desire into her buttocks and then spreading it through her groin and down her thighs. Her hands went down his pants, too, creeping, then galloping across the firm, dimpled hills of his bottom-cheeks. Alive with urgent need, they undulated under her palms, taut, then soft, taut, then soft, as his hips ground against her.
Something about the slam of a car door out front, the way the car took off immediately, warned them of an impending situation. Kit's hands took her at the ribs and peeled her from his very humid body. Within seconds, the door came alive with four slow, heavy knocks, then four fast ones. Kit said, "It's Frank."
And it was - Frank with two footlockers and a backpack. Kit urged him in with hard tilt of the head. He grabbed the footlockers, rushed them inside and kicked the door shut.
"What the hell's going on?" Frank said, his voice as sharp as a gunshot. A predictable flicker of his eyes noted her braless breasts and swollen nipples.
"Her Emanuel's dead," Kit said, keeping his eyes on Frank. "The girl, if he had her, is gone. Somebody at the embassy's on to us. Somebody big. Somebody big enough to tap phones here and in the States, and he's got connections in the FBI."
Frank cursed with a single, spitting syllable. His lips cramped to two, thin bent lines, and he cursed again. "That really pisses me off," he said. "You give a guy a good job in the State Department, and he's got to get greedy. Lets his own man die."
"It was probably a carrot-and-stick persuasion," Kit said. "They offered him a hundred grand for some assistance and threatened to disembowel his kids if he refused. What would you do?"
"I wouldn't have kids in the first place. And I'd disembowel the guy who made the offer. On the spot."
By the look in Frank's eyes, which actually seemed to see a dead hit man on the floor, Ysa knew he would do it. If she got in a tight spot, she hoped Frank would be there. She could count on Kit to think of something, but she could count on Frank to do something. And just as she thought it, Frank looked at Kit and said, "So what do we do?"
Kit must have had contingency in mind before they'd left home. "We have to move things up a little," he said, and Ysa sensed his understatement. "Obviously we're not going to get Soong Tan in the immediate future. And if Rok's got somebody working for him in the embassy, and if he's got an atomic weapon or radioactive materials, the world's in big, big trouble. I mean, think about it: a nuke in a diplomatic pouch. He could send it anywhere in the world."
"He's probably already doing it with drugs," Frank said.
"He probably doesn't even need to."
Ysa couldn't help but speak. "He's got Soong Tan," she all but screamed. Even she noticed the edge of hysteria in her voice.
Frank and Kit looked at her with patronizing eyes. Frank said, with a bit of bitterness, "Yes, that, too."
Kit showed more sympathy. "Looks like he might," he said. "I'm going to get some friends to start sniffing around the brothels here in town. Odds are, one of them's offering her as the special of the day."
She almost slapped him for the way he put it, but he was right. He didn't mean it coldly. He meant it to sound as cruel as it was.
"I want to help find her," she said.
Kit grimaced, and Frank said, "I don't think that'll work. We can't have you traipsing around town. For one thing, they might be looking for you. If they knew about Emanuel, they know about you. For another, you wouldn't speed things up at all. And for another, we've got a job to do. I'd suggest we get on with it, get it done and get out of here."
Kit's kind hand lay upon her shoulder. "He's basically right," he said. "Let's get the guy who killed Emanuel, and then let's get Soong Tan."
She had to agree they made sense. She thought of the blood on the floor of Emanuel's house, imagined him lying there bleeding while thugs dragged away Soong Tan. She hated Rok enough now to really want to see him dead. More than anything. Maybe more than she wanted Soong Tan.
Maybe.
For reasons Ysa did not ask about, the safe house lacked not only stove and refrigerator but also telephone. Frank and Kit had to go out to take care of a few things. She didn't ask what. Before they left, Kit slipped out, soon to return with two bags of groceries, the kind that needed no cooking. From one footlocker Frank took a small semi-automatic pistol in a clip-on holster. "Thirty-two caliber Walther PP," he said, handing it to her. "Loaded. Can you use it?"
She pulled the black gun from its hard leather holster, found and checked the safety, pulled back the slide far enough to see there was no bullet in the chamber, slid out the magazine to see that it held eight rounds. "Yes," she said. "I've done target practice with a nine-millimeter."
"You'll find this one a piece of cake," Frank said. "It's a lower caliber but the bullets are hollow points. One per person. should do the trick. If anybody comes through that door, they're coming to kill you. Don't open the door. Don't ask questions. Don't negotiate. If anybody comes through, give them one bullet each anywhere in the torso. Here's an extra magazine. Would you like a grenade?"
No, she really didn't want a grenade. If fifteen dead didn't discourage the attack, then she'd take the last bullet and...she'd shoot the sixteenth who came through the door. And she'd hit the seventeenth with a certain move her father had taught her. And she might live long enough to teach it to the eighteenth guy, too. "No thanks," she said.
"No, really," Frank said, tossing her one from the footlocker. It was as heavy as lead and it wasn't the cute little pineapple she'd expected - same shape but with a smooth surface. It had the standard pin. She'd know how to work it if she had to. "If anybody starts coming through that door, this other footlocker ought to be destroyed."
"What's in it?"
Frank gestured for her to look in. A isoprene box filled most of it. He pulled open the box, releasing a cold steam of dry ice. Inside, a neat rack held several hundred syringes. "This one," Frank said, pointing to one precisely at the corner of the box. "Near the white dot on the side here...that's the virus. If somebody comes through that door or threatens to, toss the grenade into the trunk, close the lid and run for the back room. You'll have three seconds."
"But won't the virus get out?"
"It would survive in the air at room temperature for only a few seconds. Unless it gets injected straight into the human body, it dies."
"But..."
"Sorry, no buts. We'll be back in a few hours."
Kit continued the instructions. "If you haven't heard from us by nine tonight, become a nun and get out of here. There's an all-night movie theater down the street. Go sit in the second to last row, in the center. If we're not back by morning, well, grab the next plane to anywhere else. Lock up good, would you?" He slipped her wink and, before she could say anything, closed the door behind him.
Hang out in the movie theater down the street? What kind of plan was that? Toss a grenade into a footlocker and run for it? She still held the grenade in her hand. It was heavy and cold. She wondered how easily the pin would come out. Might it possibly just fall out? Suppose it didn't come out when she yanked it? How was she supposed to practice? She sat on the concrete floor, facing the door, her back to the wall. Setting the grenade between her feet, she hefted the Walther. It was heavier than the nine millimeter she'd once practiced with and not as well balanced. It looked like something with a wicked kick. She wondered how long it would take her to get off eight rounds. Holding it in two hands, aiming it at the door, imagined a Burmese soldier barging through. Pow, she imagined. She imagined him flying back out the door, quite bloodless in her mind's eye, but she knew a .32 caliber would barely stop his momentum and that hollow-points would blow a fist-sized hole in any tissue they entered. She laid the gun next to the grenade on the floor.
She gathered Kit's grocery bags and returned to her position against the wall. He'd bought canned meat from China, goat cheese wrapped in a banana leaf, bananas, mangoes, oranges, fried manioc chips, a jar of Polish pickles, several little loaves of bread, something like a salami, a jar of honey from Argentina, olives from Greece, a can of clams from Minnesota and a bottle of fetid rice wine.
Fetid but not too fetid. It went well with olives and cheese. She took it straight from the bottle. The first sip burned like vinegar, but the next massaged her insides. Just as she'd heard peasants claim, it produced a mild sweat which cooled her a bit and lessened her concern for the heat. It wasn't bad at all. She popped olives and gnawed on cheese and swigged off the bottle and wrote an imaginary letter to Susan. "Dear Susan," she imagined with biting irony. "Sorry I haven't called in a while. You won't believe what's happened. I'm eating Minnesota clams in a Rangoon slum with two deadly weapons between my feet and a small pyramid of olive pits on the floor beside me. I'm seem to be living with two men who by all appearances have just walked out on me. In a couple of hours I will become a nun. Unless the local drug lord finds me, I will soon take a bus into the most lawless hellhole in the world, there to administer measles inoculations and kill a few thousand people who deserve to die. Or so I'm told. Odd thing is, I believe it. I believe it as much as I believe they have clam farms in Minnesota."
The ridiculous incredibility of the situation got her to giggling, but the giggles turned heavy and harsh. It wasn't funny. She was walking into a death trap. She would not come out of it alive. She was going to die just as Emanuel had. Kit and Frank were now playing their plan by ear. Their beautifully strategized football game had already disintegrated into a chaotic soccer match in the dark with the ball soaring from one end of the field to the other and the goalie working for the other team. Too macho to retreat, they'd go ahead with their mission. They would insert their pawn behind enemy lines and see if Plan A worked. If not, well, they'd bury Plan A find some other sucker to give Plan B a whirl.
If it weren't for Soong Tan and the possibility of killing the man who'd killed Emanuel and her father, she'd go to the airport right then and take off for home. She'd get another job, if not as a nurse then in a lab or something. She'd live happily ever after. She'd even call Susan and listen to everything she had to say. She'd savor each delicious, simplistic, innocent word. She'd curl up in her easy chair with a bottle of chilled Sancerre and a couple of ferrets and she'd wallow in Susan's petty concerns. Maybe she'd write a children's book about chipmunks or something, whatever it took to get Burma out of her mind.
Except she wasn't going anywhere. She was going to do what she'd come to do, and she was going to die in a jungle monastery.
But first it seemed she had to go down the street and hang out in a dirty little movie theater. It was after nine o'clock and the men had not returned. She couldn't imagine what she'd do if they never came back. They'd told her to just get on a plane and escape, but she knew she couldn't do that. She'd at least have to go to the embassy to report them missing. Maybe she'd inform the local Associated Press agent, too, just in case the embassy tried to cover up the report. Then she'd high-tail it home. There would be nothing else to do.
So she stripped off her overalls and put on her basic nun's outfit, the blue dress, the starched white blouse, the stodgy stub-heeled black shoes, the black-and-white headpiece that came down almost to her eyebrows. She was about to leave when she realized she had to make two decisions.
One was whether to go armed. The other was the virus. Kit and Frank had mentioned neither.
Picking up the heavy, black Walther from the floor, she appreciated the irony of the irony of a nun packing a rod. Yes, she would take it. She tucked it in her nurse's bag. It just fit. Knowing the importance of training, she practiced drawing a few of times. With the bag slung over her shoulder like a purse, she measured out the movements that would be necessary to snap open the medical bag, reach in to put her hand exactly on the grip, pull out the weapon, cock it, aim and squeeze off a shot. She did not cock it, but she left the safety off. In less than one second she could draw, cock and fire.
That was the easy decision. The harder one concerned the virus. Had Frank and Kit really meant for her to leave it behind? If it got injected into someone in Rangoon, it could spread to a million people within its one-day life span. The bombing of Hiroshima would pale beside such a disaster. If it happened because she'd left it unguarded in a room, it would be her fault.
But how would she lug a footlocker full of dry ice and syringes down the street and into a movie theater?
She wouldn't have to. Closely examining the lid of the isoprene cooler, she figured how she could slice off a piece of the outside lip of the lid. The cooler would remain closed. She could hollow it out with her pocket knife, insert a small chunk of dry ice and the syringe, and wrap the affair in her dirty T-shirt.
The contraption worked fine. The dry ice vapor that escaped was minimal. As long as she kept her bag shut, no one would notice. Trouble was, now the gun didn't fit in there.
So she clipped the holster inside the waist of her skirt, under her blouse. It didn't seem to show. She practiced drawing again, jerking up the blouse with her left hand while the right went for the gun. she did it until she'd perfected a smooth, fluid movement. It was plenty more convenient under her skirt than it had been inside the nurse's bag. She felt good about it. She almost hoped she'd get mugged.
But she didn't. No one seemed to notice her or her slightly steamy purse. She bought her movie ticket and took her assigned seat in the second to last row. Only a dozen other people were in there, all men, all alone, some smoking, all watching an astonishingly stupid made-in-China kung-fu movie. The soundtrack swirled with shouts of threat, grunts of pain, whips of feet through the air, the smashing of fists into enemies. The background music, completely out of place, sounded like it came from an old cowboy movie. The supposed fighters just did acrobatics, flipping and twirling about as they assaulted each other and pursued an innocent looking Chinese girl with slightly Caucasian eyes. The movie went on and on, brawl after brawl. In the end, the girl, reduced to tattered clothes, her face smudged, her mostly naked legs criss-crossed with slightly bleeding scratches, escaped with a handsome, young kung-fu champ on a jet ski as the music went into extended orgasm. Then the theater went dark for twenty minutes, and then the same movie started again. The audience remained virtually the same. Most of them looked asleep, drunk or drugged up beyond all sensation. A flea found its way into Ysa's clothes.
In the darkness at the end of the second showing, Ysa imagined herself driving the jet ski with little Soong Tan clinging to her back. Then she imagined Frank driving the jet ski and herself clinging to his back. With forceful fantasy, she wiped the Frank image from her mind and focused on Soong Tan. How was she going to get that little girl out of Burma? Certainly not on a jet ski. The movie made escapes and adventures seem so easy. People got kicked in the face without suffering a bruise. Good-guys dodged machine gun fire. Getaway cars and jet skis popped up when needed. Locked rooms had trap doors. Bad-guys were cruel but dumb, their henchmen just clumsy buffoons.
It would not be like that at the Sisters of Charity monastery. No jet skis, no kung-fu teams to defend her, no idiotic thugs who fall like bowling pins. Too many screw-ups had already happened in Rangoon - Emanuel murdered, no sign of Soong Tan, Kit and Frank gone God knew where, Ysa stuck in a sleazy movie theater like a perverted nun, her dry ice bound to burn off before much longer. Once she was alone in Rok's territory, the screw-ups would be even more intense, and without easy escape. There she'd need to stick a deadly weapon in his bare butt. It was not going to work. It was simply not going to work.
So her panic was totally paralytic when she was chasing the flea up the back of her blouse and a hand suddenly clamped onto hers. It took every bit of concentration just to inhale. Terrified beyond words, she could neither scream nor struggle. The grip held her as tightly as a vice and twisted her blouse at the neck like a noose. Sensing the blade that was about to come around her throat, she tried to reach her left hand around to the right side of her hip to grab the gun. But a second hand reached over her shoulder, across her chest, down to her hand, pinning it deep in her lap. When she gasped for air, the arm tightened between her breasts, and then she smelled the cologne.
"Not funny, Frank," she growled in a hard whisper.
At that, his face came to her neck and his lips pressed against her skin. "God, I'm glad you're alive," he said, relaxing his grip. "What the hell happened?"
"You tell me! Where have you been? Where's Kit?"
"He's lining up a few details at the airport. What happened back at the house? I thought you were dead."
"Didn't you tell me to come here?"
Yes...I guess you just escaped. The door 's bashed in. Everything's gone. The weapons...the virus."
Quite proud of herself, she lifted her purse high enough for them both to smell the cool steam coming off it.
"Oh God bless, God bless," Frank said. His hands came around her head, and he kissed her in at least ten spots before she fended him off. "We're still in business," he said, his eyes sparkling in the dark. Holding her arm, he guided her up the aisle into the street and into a waiting cab.
"Tell him to take us to the airport," Frank snapped.
"Are we going home?" It seemed too miraculous to be true.
"No. Just tell him."
"Yo no hablo Burmeso."
"Just do it, OK?"
She did it and said, "Frank, this isn't going to work. Haven't you figured that out yet? They're on to us. Nothing has worked out yet. Nothing. It's just luck that we're still alive."
Though nervously looking out all windows of the cab, Frank kept his left arm around her shoulders. Though it left a sweaty streak across her neck and back, she didn't mind. As much as she now feared the whole situation, she instinctively trusted his strength. His hip pressed the .32 against her waist.
"Frankly, my dear, I'd be afraid to try to leave the country right now. There's only one way to go. Forward."
"So you expect me to get on a bus now. Alone. And go waltzing my way across Burma with a deadly virus..."
"Nope."
She turned to look at him. His eyes gleamed with an inexplicable joy, and he suddenly pecked forward to plant a kiss on her lips. "Have you ever jumped out of an airplane before?" he asked.
She buried her face in her hand, the one that wasn't trapped under Frank's arm. "Oh, Frank. Frank. Have you lost your mind? Don't you think it's time we just called this whole thing off?"
"We're going for broke," he said. "Rok's got an atom bomb. Do you know what that means? An obliterated city. A hundred thousand people burned to death. And you're worried about yourself?"
She was crying now. Without a sound, she was blubbering into her hand. Never had she wanted so much to just flee. To just break away and run. But she saw that she could not. She wasn't going down a ski jump with Daddy. That situation no longer applied.
Frank's arm held her very tight, and his forehead leaned to rest against her temple. "It's going to be OK, Ysa," he whispered. "We're going to do this and we're get away with it and then we're going home and we're going to laugh about it. The world will never know what we've done. We're going to eat ice cream and drink cold Champagne and laugh about the whole thing."
Somehow her crying turned to an uneasy, tentative laugh. It actually sounded a little like the laugh of a maniac, but it felt good. It tempted her to just surrender herself to it, to let herself sink into insanity. But she held on. She got control of herself, and in a self-mocking way, she said, "No, Frank. I have never jumped out of an airplane. But I sure would like to."
"That's good, Ysa." He held her head with both hands and smooched her cheek. He smooched her beneath the ear, too, sending a secret hot chill to a place in her belly. "That's good. How'd you like to jump out of an airplane in the dark?"
That really cracked her up. She guffawed so hard the taxi driver looked back. "Why not!" she laughed. "Dressed as a nun, I hope."
"You got it," Frank said.
And then they started kissing. They necked like hot teenagers. She was practically lying down across the back seat, her knees up against the left door. Frank held her from above, his chest tight against hers as they devoured each other's faces. She didn't really know what she was kissing. It wasn't as if she were actually kissing Frank. She was just letting passion carry her off, away from the situation. She wanted to love and be loved. She wanted a human in her arms, someone who understood the maelstrom that roared around them. She wanted flesh in her mouth. She ate at his cheeks, his ear, his neck, his skin as salty as sea water, and he returned her passion just as strongly, perhaps even with the same fear and desperation. His head burrowed into her bosom with the eagerness of a puppy seeking its mother's milk, and she found herself wanting to give it to him. Under her fingers his sinuous muscles worked as if they were reaching climax, pulsing and heaving. Then his hand was probing under her skirt, clawing at her thighs, searching deeper and deeper. An alarm went off in her head, an alarm that had been set fifteen years before by her mother. She closed her legs, pulled her face from his collarbone, lifted his head away from her sternum.
"Not yet, Frank," she said. "But soon."
She did not ask where Frank and Kit got the plane. I looked like something the Burmese air force might have set aside for a last ditch stand. It had two huge engines with long propellers. In the dark of the unlit runway, it looked the color of cast iron. She didn't know planes, but she had a feeling this was a DC-3. She remembered a picture of her father, just a kid at the time, standing beside such a plane during World War II, a parachute in his arms and a grim smile cutting across one cheek. At ten thousand feet, the plane droned so loud they had to shout over it. It didn't help to have the starboard door open.
So they could jump out.
Frank flew. Kit sat in the co-pilot's seat until they were airborne. Looking over their shoulders, Ysa perceived they were just learning how to fly it. Just to see how it handled, Frank banked it this way and that and tested its ability to gain and lose altitude. Ysa's stomach felt like a blob in a lava lamp.
But she didn't care. Not in the least. She had resigned herself to death. She felt calm. Whether she succeeded or not, she would die. After that, nothing would matter.
Once they reached cruising altitude, Kit came back to show her how to jump out of an airplane.
"Get that chute on," he said. "Just put it on like a knapsack." He put on his own. She followed his moves with great precision. "Pull the chest strap across tight and clip it." After she had done so, Kit pressed her black nurse's bag to her chest. While she held it, he passed a length of duct tape around it and the chest strap, his hand squirming between her breasts each time he passed the tape around. He didn't seem to notice the intimacy of it.
"Pass these two straps down past your crotch," he shouted. "Clip them to the D-rings in back and cinch them up tight so you don't slip out when the chute opens."
She stopped there, a crotch strap in each hand. "Kit," she said. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm wearing a dress."
Kit froze, his eyes locked on her ankle-length liberal nun's outfit. Frank twisted around in his seat and looked back. She couldn't hear him, but she read his lips as they enunciated, "Oh...my... God."
"Sorry," Kit said. "You're going to have to take it off."
Her mouth dropped open. He had to be kidding. A paratrooping nun was already well beyond credibility. A half-naked paratrooping nun in black panties, a Lutheran to boot, just wasn't going to fool anybody. "Forget it," she shouted. "Let's go home. This isn't going to work." She was kidding with a gallow's nervous humor, but if Kit agreed, she'd go.
Kit scratched his head. "All right, just hoist your dress up and put the straps around your legs."
"But it's still going to look funny!"
"We're adults. We can handle it. This is business"
"But..."
"But nothing." Kit plucked the straps from her hands, yanked up her skirt, passed the straps under her crotch, clipped them behind her and pulled them tight. The straps dug into the flesh of her thighs. Only with awkward pulling and shifting did she manage to get her skirt to cover most of her panties and a bit of her thighs. Frank didn't handle it like much of an adult. He leered from the cockpit, practically drooling on the deck. But she didn't care. She was going to die. Nothing else mattered.
Kit stuck to business.
"Don't do a lot of thinking before you jump. It won't help." He had to shout loud. They were very close to the open door. "You're going to squat at the door and when I say GO, you're going to roll forward, kind of diving as you go. Don't hesitate or you'll miss the landing zone. Just do it. Think of yourself as diving onto a mattress. Your left hand goes up over your head like this. With your right you grab the ripcord. Grab it tight and pull hard. Sweep your hand all the way out and let it go. Any questions?"
"Suppose nothing happens?"
"Think pleasant thoughts until everything goes black."
"Isn't there supposed to be an emergency chute?"
"Not in this case. We're sure this parachute is going to open."
"It wasn't made in Burma, was it?"
"Swedish, I believe."
"And you packed it yourself?"
"Don't worry about it Ysa. After the chute opens, you'll see two toggle straps, one on your right, one on your left. Pull on the right to go right, the left to go left."
She was certain it was not as easy as he made it sound. In fact, it didn't sound easy at all. She remembered that her life insurance policy specifically excluded accidents involving parachutes.
She saw nothing outside, neither stars above nor ground below, just the dark gray blur of cloud. Kit sat on the deck, his legs out straight, his feet to either side of the door. Across his lap he held something that looked like a big, fat shotgun. Frank hollered, "twelve hundred feet! What can you see?"
"Nothing yet," Kit hollered back.
The plane sank. Ysa could practically feel each hundred feet pulled out from under them. Frank sounded just a bit worried as he hollered out the altitudes in hundred-foot increments. Then Kit shouted, "I've got it! There it is!"
It wasn't much to see, but it was definitely earth - a few faint yellow lights, kerosene lamps, no doubt. Neither the village nor the monastery had electricity. Frank dropped the plane lower. "See it?" Kit shouted into the wind.
After a moment Frank said, "Yeah, I got it. Can you see the soccer field?"
"Roger."
"Then here we go."
The plane banked sharply and went into a steep decline. Ysa imagined how it must sound to the villagers below. Kit aimed his big fat gun out the door, leaning out so far she feared he would fall. With the gun pointed almost straight down, he yanked back on the trigger. With a powerful boom a flare shot out and streaked to earth.
"Bull's-eye!" he bellowed.
"Big deal," Frank bellowed back. "You hit the broadside of a soccer field. What do you want, a medal?"
Kit did not respond. He just moved Ysa gently toward the door. The humid wind buffeted her face as the plane gained altitude and banked around for a second pass.
"Keep your eyes on the horizon," he said, easing her into a squat with a hand on each side of the door. "Don't close them and absolutely do not look down."
"What about counting to three?"
"I don't think you'll have time. We're coming in real low. Count to two, quickly, and pull that cord hard. You'll descend slowly. This is a Bertolli. Easy to steer and it sets you down gently."
"Bertolli! I thought you said it was Swedish!"
"Five seconds!" Frank hollered.
Kit placed one broad, strong hand against her spine and the other on her semi-exposed bottom. It was warm and firm. "Don't hesitate," he said just an inch from her ear. "I love you. GO!"
As she tentatively removed her hands from the frame of the door, Kit lifted and pushed her, and out she flew, into the dark wind. It was not at all like skiing down a ski jump in her father's arms. She was alone, and the plane was above her, flying away as she plunged so fast her bowels were tickling halfway up her throat. Her stupid blue skirt fluttered all around her as if angry. Instead of counting she gasped "Oh Jesus-Oh Jesus" twice and then remembered. Her right hand came across her chest, found no rip cord, groped frantically, found something, hoped that it was indeed the ripcord, and pulled it hard.
It was the ripcord. She heard the pilot chute explode from the top of the pack. The crotch straps jerked against her thighs, her bowels snapped back into place, and her dress hung around her like a fluttering dhoti.
She did not look at the horizon. She looked down and was surprised to see how close she was to the land and the flare that glowed bright pink in the soccer field. She saw the steeple on the chapel and was glad to be nowhere near it. She never found the things she was supposed to pull on. The ground came up to her quite suddenly, and then she was simply standing, firm and solid, draped in a black parachute and laughing, laughing, laughing. She was not dead. Not yet. She was on top of a mountain in the middle of Burma in a monastery soccer field, the world all around her as pink as could be, and in the distance, an airplane droned, headed somewhere else.
To Ysa's continuing surprise, things went more or less according to plan. Mother Superior Marie, a French woman who spoke impeccable English, had been expecting her arrival, though not such a dramatic entrance. The other Sisters, an international bevy that seemed to include Burmese, Filipinas, Indians, Africans and South Americans, whispered among themselves as their tall, lanky Mother Superior, kerosene lamp in hand, led Ysa down stone hallways and stone stairs toward her office, a virtual cave inside four walls. The lamp cast bizarre shadows that grew and shrank as the lamp swung past bamboo furniture, iron crucifixes, hanging plants and huge clay pots and vases. The Sisters here wore full black habits. Ysa found it odd to feel out of place because of her relatively liberal garb.
"We are delighted to have you among us, Sister Gertrude," Mother Marie said once they had arrived at her office. Ysa sat as primly as she could, facing Mother Marie, who sat behind her ponderous mahogany desk. She had graying blonde hair and very sharp, small blue eyes. Her face showed the wear of a few decades in the Burmese outback. "We have had no visitors from another religious community for some years now." She spoke very slowly and formally. She bent over, scraped a wooden match across the stone floor and lit a cigarette.
"And how has your apostolic work been going?" Ysa asked.
"We have achieved relatively few actual converts," Mother Marie said. "But we have made quite an impression on the local people. Though they are not yet prepared to give up their Buddhist beliefs, they seem to recognize us as someone who will help them."
"No one else helps them?"
Mother Marie huffed out smoke in a burst of amusement. "Certainly not the government, if that's what you're thinking. And I don't suppose you've heard of Rok Mon?"
Ysa let her eyes search the ceiling. "No," she allowed slowly. "That doesn't ring any bells. Is he from around here?"
"You might say he's the local godhead. He decides who lives and dies. So far, he has allowed us to live, though I've never really understood why. Maybe it's because we keep the people passive. His men come in here now and then and recruit boys for his little army, and girls for his brothels. He's in the drug business, I believe, and prostitution."
"Oh, my!"
"Yes." She blew a long, lazy plume of smoke up toward an iron chandelier of candles that would have been appropriate in a medieval castle. "Yes, Mr. Mon does what he likes and doesn't especially care who gets hurt. I pray for his soul. That's about all we can do."
"Yes, I suppose it is. He lives here in town, does he?"
"No, he has some kind of mansion or bunker or something in the hills. Nobody can get near the place. Now and then he pays us a little visit in his nasty black helicopter. We really have no choice but to let him in."
"He comes to the monastery?" Ysa let her voice express her full surprise at this.
"Yes."
"For devotional purposes, I assume"
The Mother Superior took a final and apparently painful drag on her cigarette, released the smoke and said, "Yeeeeeees...in a manner of speaking."
Ysa said nothing. She knew she would hear the explanation. She had a feeling what it would be, and she was sure, already, that Frank and Kit had already known.
"Rok Mon comes here for my Sisters," Mother Marie said, her voice so blunt it hurt. "He likes Western girls, and he likes to think they are virgins."
Ysa gasped as best she could. "You mean..."
Mother Marie tilted her head to one side as if it contained something heavy and off-balance. "We are still virgins in the spiritual sense. We are devoted to Jesus and married to him. He forgives us for our sin. But Rok Mon has wounded us all."
Maybe she was just tired, and maybe it was the trauma of diving out of an airplane and half an hour later sitting in a medieval monastery, and maybe it was because the Sisters felt guilty about being raped, but Ysa wanted to cry when she heard the Mother's words. For some reason this particular cruelty stabbed her deep inside. She remembered her father's image of the black boot coming down on tiny wildflowers. Rok Mon had stomped these innocent women the same way he stomped on children. Ysa was only slightly pleased to know that she appeared stricken with horror.
Mother Marie nodded gravely. "Sister Gertrude, I wish I could have warned you earlier. There may be time to take you from here if you would prefer to escape."
Ysa swallowed and took a deep breath. "I came here to do a job. If there must be some sacrifice, to save the lives of your orphans, I will...take my chances."
"Very good. You are very brave. You have the love of Jesus in your heart, that is clear. As for the vaccinations...where are they? You landed without baggage."
With all the love of Jesus she could muster, Ysa told a smooth and credible lie. "They are in a trunk that was dropped by parachute. I don't know where it landed. Not too far away, I should think. Perhaps your sisters could find it."
"Not a problem. We will have the villagers search for it in the morning. No doubt it's in one of their rice paddies. I will inform the village chief of the situation."
With that, Mother Marie ended the meeting by standing up. "You must be tired," she said. "Let me show you to your chamber."
Ysa did not protest. Some sleep would be just fine. Along the way down more lamp-lit corridors, Mother Marie pointed out the dining hall, the meeting room, the other Sisters' quarters, and the chapel, where the Mother Superior suggested Ysa might like to offer prayer before going to bed. Her chamber was just down the corridor. Ysa said that yes, she would like that very much.
And that's just what she did. Alone with a candle in a pew near the front, she got on her knees and prayed.
* * *
She did not sleep well. For one thing, the narrow wooden bed had only a thin mattress filled with rice husk. For another, she was rethinking her acceptance of her impending death. She was also wondering where Kit was. He was to have bailed out just after her but to land somewhere else and later make contact. She left a candle burning in her window, but since the window had neither screen nor glass, just open shutters, the candle drew insects. In their frantic delight, the bugs darted all over the room, and soon found their way under Ysa's thin blanket. She blew out the candle. Even though Kit could then not possibly know in which chamber she lay, she kept expecting him to knock at the door or appear at the window. Long before dawn, a rooster in a chicken yard just below her window started cranking up his cock-a-doodle-doo. She did not notice the sun coming up, but she awakened with the groggy sensation of not having slept at all.
She arose when upon hearing a strange, animal-like shuffle in the corridor. She opened the door to see half a dozen Sisters herding an orderly troop of children past her room. The children, the orphans, looked laughably small, like skinny cherubs in short pants. The ones who had not passed, maybe half of the fifty or so, opened their moonish faces to her, their pinched round black eyes as wide as could be, their delicate little mouths dropped open. They said nothing, but the Sisters smiled and said, in English, "Good morning!" to Ysa as they passed. Ysa responded likewise, quite in love with the whole bunch. From habit, she searched them for a little girl with green eyes. For a passing moment, she thought maybe she'd just keep up her religious charade, be a nun for the rest of her life, virgin mother to a few dozen kids. She'd kill Rok Mon and a few thousand other people, kiss Kit and Frank good-bye, give her ferrets to Susan and her house to the Pope and just hang out in a medieval Burmese monastery until some fresh evil, diabolical force threatened the world...or maybe just forever.
She fell in line behind the children. Her nose told her where they were going - the dining hall. Mother Marie met her there, introduced her to the orphans and got them to shout out a big Bon Jour! She was given a seat at one end of a wooden bench at a long, bare wooden table where twelve children and a Sister from Peru sat. The Peruvian, of Incan extraction, looked almost as oriental as the Symbians. The children did the serving, dashing into the kitchen and wobbling out with trays of mango juice, tapioca pancakes, rice pudding, hard-boiled eggs. One little girl sneaked over to feel Ysa's yellow hair. Her little hand seemed the size of a spider as her tiny fingers wiggled into Ysa's hair. The Peruvian Sister shooed her away, but Ysa reached out to touch the little girl's hand as she retreated.
Ysa had already taken a big bite out of her rolled-up, butter-soaked tapioca pancake when Mother Marie stood to lead everyone in grace. Almost choking on the dry pancake as she held it motionless in her mouth, she bowed her head and pretended to pray. As all the little hand came to the top of the table, the big, stone-walled room filled with mumbled whispers. The prayer seemed to be mixing Latin with Burmese, and it went on and on until suddenly, shockingly, with a single gasp in common, it stopped. In the sudden flood of silence, Ysa heard, or really felt the heavy concussion of a distant helicopter. It was no whirlybird. It's cylinders fired with explosions so heavy she felt them in her chest. Everyone recognized it. For just a moment, their eyes came up from their concentration on their clasped hands, and their little mouths gasped in a common inhalation of tension. Mother Marie's prayerful voice rose louder as she pulled everyone back to prayer, a prayer audibly more intense and desperate and hurried than before. After the amen, Mother Marie's trained her eyes on Ysa and with a tilt of her head signaled for her to follow. As she left the room, Marie held her head at an angle that hinted at pride, but her face revealed a fear just barely under control.
"That is Rok Mon's helicopter," she said as they walked quickly down the corridor. "He is certainly sooner than I expected. I do not know how he could have gotten word of your arrival so soon. Perhaps he is coming for some other reason, or perhaps just passing by."
But the ponderous thub-thub-thub-thub-thub-thub of the helicopter just got louder and louder. Beneath it, the sounds of breakfast clean-up sounded frantic. Then Sisters and orphans were rushing down the corridor. Some of the children were crying, and so were some of the nuns. They crossed themselves as they passed Ysa.
"We have been through this before," Sister Marie said, her strong French accent not inhibiting her precise English. "Everyone will dissolve into the village. They do not really have anything to worry about. I have never seen him want anyone twice. But they remember. So Rok will be lucky if he sees a single Sister. If he asks people, of course, they will report where the Sisters are hiding - they must, and I would not ask them to suffer to protect us - but he usually comes, does what he wants to do, and then leaves."
"And what do you think he wants to do?"
Mother Marie stopped walking. They were between the chapel and Ysa's bed chamber. "I suspect he wants you."
Even though she'd expected this, Ysa didn't have to pretend to be shocked. The reality of it, the imminence of it, caved in on her with the weight of a collapsing building. He was coming in a helicopter the size of a battleship to have his way with her.
"I would suggest hiding," Mother Marie said calmly, "except that he and his men would tear the place apart until they found you. We'd all be in danger. I'd have to tell him where you were."
"I would like to wait in my chamber. Let him do what he must do. And then we'll get on with what I must do."
Mother Marie placed a hand on Ysa's shoulder and said, "God bless you, Sister Gertrude. You are very courageous.""
Faint tears came to Ysa's eyes. "No, I'm not," she said. She wanted to fall forward into Mother Marie's arms. She wanted to be a baby, but Mother Marie pulled her in for a quick kiss on each cheek and a few thumps on the back. "Don't let him inside your mind or your soul," she whispered, her voice cracking. "God save him, he's jut an animal. This is no more personal than a bee sting, and the pain shouldn't be any more than that."
The helicopter was much closer now, probably within sight. Ysa kissed Mother Marie's cheek, then turned and hurried to her chamber.
She felt better there, protected by the high stone walls, comforted by the bed where she'd slept. This was her territory. She felt an advantage here. As she wiped the wetness from her eyes, she also wiped away her fear. Something automatic took control of her. She felt nothing but the power of cold logic. From her nurse's bag she took the super-cold canister that held Rok Mon's death. She rolled the syringe between her hands until its deadly contents liquefied. She removed the plastic sleeve that protected the needle and tossed it out the window, where it rattled down across the sheet metal roof of the chicken coop. With two quick twists of her wrists she tore off two lengths of bandage tape. One she used to secure the needle along the edge of the bed against the wall. She marked its location, about halfway down the bed, with a smudge on the wall. With the other piece of tape she secured an open scalpel beneath her mattress at a level where her shoulders would be.
She taped the holster of the Walther to the head of the bed, against the wall, positioned so she could draw the weapon quickly. She let a round into the chamber, flicked the safety up, cocked the hammer back. She lay down and practiced reaching and drawing, slowly at first, establishing a groove, then did it faster, without touching the trigger until the right instant. She did the same for the actions of grabbing the syringe and jabbing it into the man's backside, holding it there with both hands while one thumb pressed the plunger. She did the same with the scalpel, though she did not yet know exactly what she'd do with it once she'd drawn it.
The sound of the chopper had built up from a distant thub-thub-thub to a cracking, unceasing string of explosions. She could see it from her window. It was Huey, a monstrous relic from the war in Viet Nam, complete with rocket tubes. Completely black, it looked like a deadly dragonfly as it settled down onto the same soccer field where Ysa had landed. Men in camouflage uniforms spilled from the side door as soon as the chopper touched down. Each carried a weapon, and they deployed themselves as if onto a battlefield. Two stood at attention beside the door.
It had to be Rok Mon who hopped out. Wide and brawny, he was physically bigger than any of the men who had preceded him. In camouflage fatigues and black combat boots, he stood with the confidence and power of a man who could not be moved, appeased, or dissuaded. On the ground, solid as stone, he looked about as if he might detect some danger or target that his men had missed. Then he reached upwards into the door and pulled a child out of the helicopter. His huge fist practically dragged the girl across the soccer field to the wall that ran around the monastery.
It was Soong Tan. Ysa knew it with cold certainty. Rok had not only taken her prisoner but was also keeping her with him. Maybe she was just a pet he wanted on hand. Maybe he was afraid to leave her out of his sight, even among his own people. And maybe he had a purpose for her here.
Ysa went to her bed and assumed a lotus position, her back against the wall. She inhaled a slow, measured dose of calmness and exhaled as much tension as one breath could carry. She did it again, letting her mind fold back into itself, collapsing into a private darkness. Within half a dozen breaths, she was floating on a river of flowers, gently descending through a garden she could smell but not see. Choirs of birds sang hymns she could feel but not hear. A zephyr whispered of spring in the Alps, and she could see herself, so young, in meadow grass, her mother and father on a blanket with food and wine and wildflowers. Larks dipped and dashed as little Ysa raced through waist-high grass, giggling, laughing, blissful with the pure joy of unadulterated life. A cloud shadow chased her, lapping at her heels, threatening to be darkness the way puppies pretend to be wolves. She out-raced it. It dissolved into sunlight as she fell into the grass and rolled onto her back to see the sky, so blue, so blue, so blue. Little wildflowers leaned in to kiss her face like good friends. She drifted far enough that when the door boomed open, it took her a full second to return and to open her eyes. There stood Rok Mon, hulking, sweating, smiling, holding in his meaty fist the arm of a little Burmese girl with long, shiny black hair, tiny green eyes and the wide, puffy cheekbones of a Dutchman. The thin line of her lips was not oriental. The angle of her nose was clearly European. The defiant way her little jaw thrust forward and to the side reminded Ysa or her father. She sensed her own jaw, at that moment, at precisely the same defiant angle. Instantly chilled as if hit with an avalanche, she knew she was looking at her sister.
Rok Mon knew it, too. He looked directly into Ysa's face - just her face - and examined it. As he registered each detail, his smile grew until it exploded with a guttural laugh that was evil in its glee. He spun Soong Tan around and lifted her by the arms, raising her face to Ysa's eye level. "Look familiar?" he growled in peasant Burmese. "Haw! I knew!"
Ysa said nothing. Still thinking with hard, calculated logic, she kept silent. She would give him no information until it served her advantage. Nor would she reveal emotion which he might turn against her. She would not let her eyes betray her astonishment. The resemblance had shocked her but not as much as Soong Tan's actual presence. Rok Mon had known of the resemblance beforehand, and he had brought the girl here to prove it.
Rok tossed Soong Tan aside like an armful of dirty laundry. She stumbled into a corner and sank to the floor. She neither cried nor showed any reaction. She just sat up and pulled her long T-shirt - it was all she was wearing, besides simple sandals - over her skinny upraised knees. She wrapped her arms around her shins and let her head rest on her legs as if she intended to take a nap during whatever might follow.
Rok's eyes glinted like black steel as they perused Ysa from top to bottom, bottom to top. "So you have become a nun," he said in a voice that in other circumstances might have passed for friendly. "What an unexpected development, no? The roads of our lives take many surprising turns, don't they?"
They certainly did. But how could Rok be aware that a few weeks ago she'd been a pediatric nurse, then tried robbing a bank, then gotten roped into becoming a nun? He couldn't have known all that. If he did, he wouldn't be there at the threshold of a trap. What was he thinking?
"You are beautiful as a nun," he continued, his hands in his pant pockets, his eyes still roaming her body. HIs voice sharpened. "But you were more beautiful as a whore."
An electric jolt shot up her spine, and she knew he saw her reaction. More beautiful as a whore? What in the world was he thinking? Who did he think she was?
His hands came from his pocket and reached toward her as if she might fall into his arms.
She didn't.
"Come," he said, wiggling his fingers. "I would like to see you as I have seen you before." His eyes twinkled with a perverted, reptilian love. Though she had no idea in what way he might have seen her before, she was sure she did not want him to see her that way again - she had to entice him to the bed. She had to get his pants down. Clearly that would not be too difficult. The problem would be to survive the incident. Death was not an option now. She had Soong Tan. She could not leave this girl with this man, but it would all the more difficult for the two of them to escape. Soong Tan would have no idea what was going on.
Still wiggling his fingers as if to tickle her, Rok took a step toward her. "A little kiss for Mon? Come, my darling Gertrude."
Gertrude. The name was a clue. He had not known her as Ysa. He had been informed of her presence here as Sister Gertrude. Had someone told him Sister Gertrude was a prostitute? It still made no sense.
His hands took her at the waist. Rather abruptly, he pulled her against himself and mashed her with a kiss. His mouth, gooey with saliva, held hers the way an animal clenches its prey. She leaned away but could not back off from it. His heavy, meaty head just groped forward, pursuing what it wanted. Nauseated by the smell and taste of sweat, cigar smoke and stale whiskey, she tried to twist away. His teeth held her lips, biting hard enough to almost bring blood. When he finally released her, his eyes glistened with satisfaction and desire.
Soong Tan, head turned so one cheek rested on her knees, seemed to ignore what was happening just a few feet in front of her. Ysa guessed that the girl had seen such things before. Her lack of emotion hinted of traumas she had suffered or seen. Could anything restore her innocence? Ysa did not want her to see what was going to happen in the next few moments. However things turned out, it would not be pretty.
Rok put a hand behind Ysa's head and forced her to look down. She could see a little bulge in his pants, not much but the beginning of something. "Look," he said in a voice that was both mean and affectionate. "See? Big surprise for you down there. Why don't you go down there and look at it. Like the way you did for your boyfriend."
Her boyfriend? Rok either had fantasies that were light years from reality or he had her mistaken for someone else. "Be a good whore," he cooed. "Go on down there and open me up and see what I have for you. Go on."
She hesitated. She had not imagined that things would get this repulsive this fast. Straight rape, wham-bam, would be better than this. She hesitated until Rok's hand came to either side of her neck and his fingers gripped her beneath the front and back of her collarbone. "Down," he growled.
The pain forced her to her knees. His belt buckle, a heavy Budweiser logo with the fierce-eyed eagle and Anhauser-Busch banner, was level with her eyes. "Open it," he said.
Ysa inhaled cold, calm logic again. She would do this. Two days from now, when he was dead, she would forget all about it. Every time it came to mind, she would imagine his corpse underground, the food of worms, grubs and maggots.
Then she knew how she would do this, would make it flow into her plan. She opened the belt. She opened the fly. She pulled his pants halfway down his thighs. He was about half erect, excited but not enthusiastic. His genitals were dark and wrinkled but almost hairless. She could not bring herself any closer to it.
"Hold it in both hands," Rok said from above, his fingers tinkering with her hair, "the way you do."
And then she knew. She knew where he had seen this, where she had heard those words before. She had heard them from Hans Lizst-Schmidtmeister, her Austrian lover in Paris, the rancid rat who had taped her in a thousand throes of orgasm. She had also heard herself and him, and seen this same scene, down on her knees, in Han's video.
Somehow Rok Mon had seen it.
* * *
Ysa struggled to reveal no recognition while a maelstrom of emotions raged through her brain. Hans had taken the beauty of love and thrown it in the gutter. Rok Mon now wanted to join her in the gutter. Inspired by her acts of throbbing love, he wanted to achieve the same through rape. Maybe he wanted to practice for Soong Tan. Maybe he wanted to show Soong Tan how it was done. Maybe this was a lesson for her.
Ysa knew it was a lesson for herself, too. She had been betrayed once again. First Hans had betrayed her. Now someone with a copy of the tape had betrayed her even worse. Someone had given it to Rok Mon. It could not be mere coincidence that she was in the middle of Burma and Rok just happened to have seen the tape and just happened to have shown up within a few hours of her arrival.
Someone had set this up. She hated to think who it had to have been.
Ysa felt herself thinking the way a man thinks, the way her father had taught her when he told her not to get mad but to get even. Logically. Methodically. Strategically.
She would start with Rok. She would get rid of him. Then she would move on.
She knew how to entice him beyond his own control. She knew how to touch him, stroke him, raise his desire until he would do anything to satisfy it. She touched him with the detached coldness she had used to keep from vomiting the first time she had had to unfold the intestines of a rat in a college course on basic surgery. She touched and stroked and tickled this most vile part of this most vile man. And he reacted.
When she had aroused him sufficiently, she leaned back and looked up at him. He smiled at her in a rather pleasant, pacified, appreciative way. "You like it, do you not?" he said softly.
"You are a very big man," she said, lying with the smoothness of a professional. His pride and joy could have passed for an genetically defective peanut.
She unbuttoned her blouse and let it slide from her shoulders. She let him pull down her bra straps, then fumble with the hooks in back. Apparently he did not have much practice with women who wore bras. Once he got it, she stood, took his hands, and led him to the bed. Faking a look of overwhelming desire, she pulled her dress up to her waist, revealing her black satin panties.
"Oh, you are a very bad nun," he said, eyes gleaming. His hand grabbed her panties at the waist and pulled them all the way down and off. He gasped with pleasure when he saw what he had come to see, and he folded forward to make love to it.
But she did not want that. She did not want him to have that pleasure, and she did not want to have to pretend to enjoy it. She wanted him on top of her, his face near hers, his bare buttocks at her waist. She noticed how remarkably easy it was to reach down, place her fingers on the side of his head and draw him up to her. He could not resist. As weak as a little boy, he slid up the length of her body, and she clamped onto him with her legs.
As his heavy Burmese lips started to kiss at her, she twisted her head to one side. Soong Tan still crouched in the corner, head down and turned away. Ysa was glad. She did not want the girl to see this.
Rok was beginning to hump in search of entry when her left hand found the syringe taped to the outside of the bed. He did not notice as her hand reached down behind her legs, and he probably assumed the best as one finger traced a line across his cheek to a certain spot. Ysa held on tight with her legs. This was when she was going to die. She knew it. But if she could pin him against herself for just two seconds, he would die, too. It might take him a couple of days, but death was death no matter when it came. To him it probably sounded like a shriek of orgasm, but it was the word death that he heard as the needle stabbed deep into his left gluteal muscle. He arched against the pain, but her thighs held him as her thumb carefully depressed the plunger on the syringe, feeding in the viral medium at the precise rate his muscles could accept it. He bucked and heaved to get away, but by the time he freed an arm from under her, she was done. He was a dead man.
But still kicking. His first punch missed, glancing off her face without effect, and that gave her the half-second she needed to release him and roll him off herself and off the bed. As he hit the floor, he rolled over the needle. It dug into him, causing him to lean back and roar like a lion. He groped around his hindparts, exposing the part Ysa wanted. She took his pathetic manhood in one hand as her other grabbed the hidden scalpel. In a single movement with the swift precision of a practiced nurse, she sliced around his foreskin, neatly removing it. Half-erection, she knew, was not the best condition for a circumcision. It clearly hurt. As soon as he had yanked out the needle, he brought both hands around to shelter the stinging pain at the end of his rapidly shriveling member.
With a certain satisfaction, she saw that she'd done a sloppy job. He was bleeding profusely and in obvious pain and fear. He peered through the blood to see how much damage had been done and then to see the piece of flesh that she hurled into his face.
Ysa shouted, "Soong Tan! Come!" The girl looked up, scared and confused. Ysa grabbed her with one hand and her blouse with the other. "You have to jump," she said to Soong Tan, who seemed hypnotized by the sight of all the blood on the floor and between Rok's legs. Ysa lifted her to the windowsill, held her by one wrist and all but threw her from the window. Soong Tan clung to her, dangling by one arm, her toes about a yard from the roof of the chicken coop below. Seeing Rok struggling to his feet, Ysa released her and watched her tumble to the corrugated sheet metal roof. Ysa turned to face Rok. No man had ever been in a better position for getting kicked in the jaw. She let him have it, sending him reeling backward. Then she pulled on her blouse, hopped to the windowsill, swung her legs out and, just before jumping, turned around to do one thing she thought she would never in her life do in the presence of a man.
She spit, and the frothy blob hit him in the face.
She and Soong Tan were hopping off the chicken coop when they heard Mon shrieking for help. They had just seconds to get out of sight. Soong Tan followed as Ysa pulled her by the wrist through the chicken yard gate and onto the soccer field. Looking back, she saw a Burmese face at the window from which they had just jumped, and then she saw the barrel of an M-16.
They had nowhere to hide. Across the field, just beyond a fence of bamboo, the field dropped into a ravine which rose into a steep hill of bushes on the other side. At that moment she realized she had left the Walther back in the room. It would have made all the difference. She could have covered Soong Tan's escape, and maybe her own. They could not both get across the field, but maybe one of them could make it if they both ran at once. She just hoped the bullet would find the bigger of the two targets. She did not care. She was satisfied not to be dying in Rok Mon's hands. She pointed the way to Soong Tan and yelled, "Run! Now!"
The girl moved fast, scampering like wild prey with a jackal at her heels. Ysa ran behind, dodging left, then right, then more to the left, moving unpredictably, hoping to draw gunfire away from her little sister. The first burst tore up a line of turf just to her right, sending her careening farther to her left, farther from the direct line to the gate in the fence. She sensed the second burst and tumbled to the right, escaping death again, this time by inches as the invisible bees smashed into the grass with a stuttering thwop-thwop-thwop-thwop-thwop-thwop.
The third burst, the last one she heard, sounded as distant as an echo or a dream, removed from the situation, an imaginary gunfire, a strong suggestion spat out in five quick syllables. At the same instant, she heard the bees as they zipped through the air, five in quick succession, but going the other way, back toward the window. As she rolled up from her last dodge and aimed again at the gate, she snapped her head around to look back. She glimpsed a quick burst of blood red as the man in the window fell backward into the room. His weapon clattered down onto the chicken coop.
The gunfire had come from the hill across the ravine. She did not look for its source. She just dived through the gate and stumbled into the brush of the ravine. Never had she felt herself in a safer place. She loved the dark protection as much as she loved the hearth of her own home. The instant silence and smell of dew-laden plants embraced her with safety.
Soong Tan cowered there, down near the bottom, where a trickle of water seeped from the hill and gurgled toward the village below. Terror gripped the girl's face. Though Ysa knew she should keep running, she first had to comfort her little sister. Bringing her into the shelter of her arms, she held Soong Tan to her chest. "It's going to be OK," she said. "We're free. He's gone. That wicked, wicked man is dead, and you are coming home."
Soong Tan just held on. Ysa was actually pleased to see her cry. She was afraid that all feeling had been beaten out of the girl, that at the age of ten she was an old woman, battered and abused beyond the range of human emotion. But she wept just like a little girl. It almost seemed she was finally taking care of the weeping she had been putting off. Unspeakable pains choked her, and her tears washed over her face like rainfall. She could not utter a word. Ysa did not want her to. She just wanted the poor girl to cry out the remainder of her pain and to open herself to love, the kind of love only a sister could give, not the kind that Rok Mon had in mind.
They hunkered in the brush of the ravine, clinging to each other for comfort and hope, until a voice invaded their damp, dark haven. "Ysa! Ysa!" It was Kit. He sounded both angry and desperate, perhaps close to panic. "Are you down there?" he called.
"Oh, Kit!" she cried. "Kit!" Her face flooded with tears. Kit was there. He would save them.
"Get up here," he shouted. "Hurry."
Ysa pushed Soong Tan ahead of her as they scrambled up the other side of the ravine. They emerged from the undergrowth to see Kit just a few yards away. For a second, she thought he still wore his priest's suit, but no priest ever wore a black T-shirt, black jeans, black boots and black smears across his face. He was down on one knee, aiming an M-16 toward the helicopter and the monastery behind it. When she said his name, he did not look up until he had squeezed off a single shot. She knew by his half-cocked smile that he had hit his target.
"How'd it go?" he asked with startling calmness as he took aim again.
"We made it."
"Yeah, I know that part. But what happened?" Crack, he let off another shot, apparently missing.
"I got him," Ysa said. "He's a dead man. And hurting, too. I'm sure he'll head straight home to lick his wound - so to speak."
"Is that him?" Kit indicated the monastery with a lift of his chin. A hunched and bloody figure, barely able to walk, supported by two men, staggered toward the Huey. Several others had pulled back from their positions, tightening their defense around the helicopter, firing randomly at the ravine and the hill.
"I gave him a little something to think about on the way home." Ysa said. "Kit, I'd like you to meet Soong Tan."
He did not look up from the sight of his weapon. "Cute," he said. "Get going."
"Where?"
"Follow the ravine and go on up over the hill. Stick close to the vegetation. Don't let him see you after they take off. Watch for Frank."
"And what are you going to do?"
"You don't have to worry about me."
"But..."
"Go!" He barked it like an army sergeant, and Ysa obeyed like a raw recruit. Taking hold of Soong Tan's arm, she stumbled along the edge of the ravine. Behind her, Kit's rifle took periodic single shots. The helicopter started firing up its cylinders, slow and heavy, like a dinosaur awakening. Ysa looked back at it. Kit had hit a couple of men. Others came out of the helicopter to get them. Kit managed to hit another of them, tying down the chopper while she and Soong Tan made their escape to whatever lay over the hill.
She looked back only one more time, just before they crossed the crest of the hill. With a thunderous effort, Rok's Huey was lifting off. Kit had lowered his weapon and, inexplicably, almost surreally, he was strolling up the bare hillside. About halfway up, he turned and sat down with legs crossed Buddhist style, his weapon across his lap. With no hint of hurry, he unslung the radio from his back and raised the antenna. Ysa wanted to shout to him, to tell him to run, but he was too far away, and she was certain he knew what he was doing. The Huey was rising from the ground. Ysa kept going until she and Soong Tan had topped the hill.
On the other side, the terrain was level for several yards, then sloped into a valley with a stream at the bottom. Beyond that, on the other side, dark green rain forest blended into low clouds. Frank was over there somewhere. Ysa called out his name as loud as she could, but the open air just swallowed his name. but she kept calling out, and in her own voice she heard the first twinges of panic. She kept shouting his name, louder and louder, as if her voice could produce him through sheer insistence.
And then she saw the trap. She saw what she'd been expecting all along, the moment when she became an expendable pawn in a vicious game far larger than she. Another helicopter was coming in low and fast, almost straight at them, swaying as it hugged the valley floor. It was smaller than the Huey, a mere bug in comparison, but the two rocket tubes below made it look like a very deadly bug. Frank, if he was around at all, had escaped, and now Ysa stood there, in the open, with a little girl clinging to her legs, not crying but paralyzed with fear.
Had she been alone, Ysa would have faced her death right there, standing in defiance of evil. But she had Soong Tan. Death was no longer an option. She had to survive. The ravine offered the only possible shelter. Even though the chopper had obviously seen them, she pulled Soong Tan over the edge of the ravine. On a slope almost too steep to stand on, they clung to a bush and cowered below it. The chopper had two rockets. Maybe they'd miss. They'd shoot overhead and keep going. That was the only hope. If men got out, she and the girl would roll into the ravine and dash downstream as fast as they could. Maybe Frank would appear. Maybe Kit would figure out what was going on. Maybe something would happen, a miracle or something.
But the Huey behind them had risen high enough to begin moving forward. It didn't have to go far before maneuvering to a position aiming at the far side of the hill. If Kit was still sitting on the hill, he was a dead man.
As the Huey covered that side of the hill, the smaller chopper cornered Ysa on her side. It swayed in closer , maneuvering, settling lower, taking aim. It knew exactly where they were. Rather than stand defiantly, Ysa turned her back, held Soong Tan as protectively as she could, and prayed that the rockets would either miss by a mile or hit her square on so she and Soong Tan could evaporate without feeling a thing.
She didn't see it, but the chopper seemed to come all the way to the ground, and the throbbing of the blades slowed a bit. She did not look back until she heard her name called from above. She heard it twice. She turned and looked up, expecting a bullet in the forehead, but it was Frank. He had his hand out to her, and he said, "Come on, Ysa. Hurry."
The three of them ran low and fast through swirling dust to Frank's helicopter. His muscular arm heaved Ysa and Soong Tan up through the open doorway into the co-pilot's seat. The Huey could not have failed to see them, but it seemed more concerned with the other side of the hill. As the little chopper revved up and almost immediately lifted off, Frank hollered, "Kit's over there?" His head tilted his head toward the Huey. He said it as if he didn't care one way or the other; he just wanted the information. Ysa couldn't read his eyes through his opaque green aviator's glasses.
She just nodded. If she'd tried to speak, her voice would have cracked. Her whole face would have exploded in tears. As Frank's chopper pulled away, it rotated to face the Huey. The huge black ship looked as evil as Hell itself, and when the first burst of rockets shot from their launcher, the flicker of orange flame looked like an eruption of brimstone. At the same instant, the hillside exploded upward in dark tentacles of rock and earth. She was witnessing, she knew, the incineration and obliteration of a human being. She couldn't help but expect a faint song of angels, some tragic music, the glimmer of a soul bound upward toward Heaven. But those wee the romantic images of Hollywood movies, the hopeless image of a dream. The upheaval of fire and blackened earth was the reality. Where an angel might have hovered, a death-dark helicopter hulked like something satanic.
As the little chopper lurched back from the concussion, Ysa, beyond her own control, screamed from the gut. "Stop him!" she howled. "Stop him! Stop him!"
Frank kept the chopper backing off, still facing the Huey but moving away. He showed no emotion as he guided the craft back and upwards.
"Do something!" she screeched. The words sliced through the roar of the motor and blades above them. "Do something! Stop him!"
Frank just shook his head with agonizing slowness. "Can't do it," he said.
"You've got rockets! Shoot him down!"
He kept shaking his head. "Can't do it. We've got to let him get away. He's got to take his disease back home. If he'd look over here, maybe we could draw him away, but he's after Kit. There's nothing we can do."
Rockets belched from the second launcher. Another explosion, this one farther down the hill. With grim resignation, Frank looked away and tilted the chopper toward the horizon. Soong Tan, curled in Ysa's lap, seemed to notice nothing. In fact, she seemed asleep. What horrors, Ysa wondered, had this girl suffered before she learned to just turn herself off so she could hide in sleep?
Frank turned the chopper away from the explosion as the last of the debris fell away. The Huey disappeared as he banked around a hill and up another deep valley.
"He's dead?" Ysa asked quietly.
"He wanted it that way," Frank stated. "He made one big mistake. He got personal about it. He let Rok get inside him. You can't do that in war. You can't hate. It's just like any other job. You have to do it and then go home."
War without hate. Ysa staggered at the thought. Could war be fought that way? Should it? The idea horrified her. How could men be so mechanical, so coldly logical, that they could kill each other as if it were no more than an afternoon softball game? She'd rather believe they fought from hatred. She wanted to believe that Kit had hated Rok, had gladly sacrificed his life to ensure Rok's death. And he had sacrificed himself to let Ysa and Soong Tan get away.
The chopper, open at the sides, was awash with wind. The sky outside the doorway was just an arm's length away. The wind whipped at her hair and clothes. Frank, as hyped-up as a boy in a bumper-car, could barely stay in his seat. She glimpsed him snatching a sideways peek at her chest. She couldn't blame him. Her bra was back in the monastery, and her blouse wasn't buttoned straight. Her legs below it, scratched and smudged, were bare. She didn't mind if men looked at her. Their weakness was her advantage.
One question begged an answer. Somehow it related to Kit's sacrifice and Rok's death and the whole nature of what had happened. Though it seemed detached from the death they had just witnessed, the question could not wait.
"The video, Frank," she asked, her voice as controlled as that of a man at war. "How did Rok get it?"
Frank checked his instruments, scanned the horizon to the left and right, sucked in on his cheeks, bit his lip on one side, checked the horizon again. "It was the only way we could guarantee that Rok would show up. We had it delivered to him, along with a note about your religious conversion and your planned visit to the monastery."
She had every urge to rip his throat out with her fingernails. "Where did you get it," she screamed.
Frank hesitated, then said, "Your boyfriend still had a copy. The only one, or so he said. I think he told the truth."
Frank's sly grin hinted that he knew more. Ysa asked, "What makes you think he told the truth?"
"Let's just say he was scared. Very scared."
"What did you do to him?" She was surprised to feel herself concerned, albeit only a bit.
Frank wagged his head left and right. "Well...let's just say we made a little phone call while he was in Cancún. The Mexican Federales took it from there. He won't be making any videos for a while."
"And whose idea was it?" she asked, not bothered in the least that Hans must be rotting in a Mexican dungeon.
"To call the Federales?"
"To send Rok the tape!" She almost spat at his obtuseness.
"Well...maybe that's why Kit decided to stay behind." Frank looked at her through his dark glasses. "I think he felt guilty."
Ysa turned away. She didn't know what to feel. Kit had betrayed her, and then he saved her. Had he chosen to die because he could not face her? She would have forgiven him. If she had known of the choice between forgiveness and his sacrifice, she would have accepted her own humiliation.
She had never imagined how much a child in a lap could comfort her. Soong Tan, so small for a girl just shy of adolescence, curled against her. She had fled into the safety of sleep. She would awaken in a new world. Within a day she would be in America. Within two days she would be asleep in her own bed in Ysa's house, and a few days later she would be in school. Ysa wondered how much the poor girl had already suffered, whether she would ever recover. Would love be enough to bring her back to the world of human beings?
Thinking that, she realized that Frank had suffered something as traumatic, in his way, as Soong Tan's experience. He'd been through wars, and one experience had cracked him, driven him to the brink of insanity. But he'd returned. He had pulled his life together and proceeded onward, albeit wounded and with emotional baggage too full of sadness to be expressed. She wanted to hear it, though. Someday she would tell Soong Tan about the man who had rescued her. Perhaps then she might understand and deal with her own inner pain,.
"Frank," Ysa began, pushing her voice into the wind. "Central America...Nicaragua...tell me what happened."
Frank's head snapped around to face her. His eyes stabbed at her as gleaming and sharp as bayonets. In an instant she knew she should not have asked.
"What about it?" he barked.
"Kit...he told me. I just wanted to understand..."
Frank did not reply. He turned his attention to the horizon. His jaw clamped shut, his face went solid. It reminded Ysa of the façade of Fort Ticonderoga, a steep wall of boulders and dark, narrow slits. She did not know whether to touch him or let him work out his thoughts alone. Still holding Soong Tan with both arms, she watched his face until it relaxed a notch. He glanced at her out the side of his dark aviator glasses.
"That was quite a video," he said, not turning. A hard smile crept up the side of his face.
At first she didn't know what to think. Why was he returning to that subject? Did he just want to pretend that Nicaragua had never happened? She said nothing. She just looked at the side of his stony face, at the knotty point where his jaw met his skull. She could not read him, but she smelled trouble.
"I liked it," he said with a slow, ponderous nod. "I liked it very much."
A weightless queasiness seized her stomach, and then she realized the helicopter was losing altitude. She looked ahead. They were aimed at a bald mountain top that rose above the undulating green sea of forest. "You really got me to thinking," Frank continued as a crease of smile sliced across his lips. "I think I'd like to, well, as they say, take advantage of you? If you catch my drift?"
She caught it. She did not like the way they were closing in on the mountain top. Soong Tan stirred under the sudden pressure of Ysa's fingers as she said, "Let's talk about it in Rangoon, Frank."
Frank tilted his head to one side as if giving it some thought. "Naw," he said, now smiling. "Let's talk about it right over here."
With a deft sway he banked the chopper and descended at an angle until with surprising suddenness they were on the ground. With the flick of a few switches, Frank cut the engine. Soong Tan emerged from her sleep, looked around in a vague and lost sort of way. Ysa's heart beat very hard.
Frank unsnapped his own seat belt, then hers. "Some on," he said. "Let's go."
All she could think to do was say, with all the insistence she could muster, "No, Frank. Let's go back to Rangoon. We'll work out something there. Don't worry. I owe you one." It was her prerogative to lie. She'd pay him back, but not with what he might expect.
But he had no such ideas. "No, really," he said almost playfully. "Let's work it out right here. On top of Old Smokey."
Ysa made no move, no gesture, no sign of agreement or protest. A simple inhalation took all her energy. Frank got out without a word, walked around the front of the helicopter, and grabbed her arm from the door on her side. "Out," he said, his grip paralyzing her arm.
"Don't do it, Frank. It's better when I cooperate. Didn't your father ever explain that to you?"
"No, as a matter of fact he didn't. Now get out." He yanked on her so hard she almost toppled out the door. She clung to Soong Tan, who clung to her, sensing but not understanding the trouble they were in. Frank growled, "She stays," and pushed the girl as he pulled Ysa out the door.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, miraculously, all fear left her. She stood as tall as she had ever seen her father, as brave as Kit holding off a helicopter gunship. She was stronger than Frank. She knew that.
He dragged her around behind the helicopter, threw her to her knees. Then he calmly began to undress. He peeled his sweaty camouflaged T-shirt over his head. Still standing, he untied his low boots and pulled them off. He unbuckled his web belt and wrapped it around its holster, which held a big .45 automatic. He dropped his pants and stood naked before her. His excitement rose as he looked down at her and even more when he pulled the .45 from its holster. "Please," he said, pulling back the slide to raise a round into the chamber. "Don't make this any more difficult than it has to be."
"It could be easier in Rangoon, Frank. I'd sleep with you if you asked. Or anyway, I would have."
"I'm afraid I'll be long gone from Rangoon by the time you get there. Come over here. Let me help you with those buttons." His eyes all but drooled with desire.
"What about Soong Tan?" she gasped.
"Don't worry about her. I'm sure I can find her a very nice home. She's been worth a million ever since Rok got hold of her, you know. She's a collector's item. Some Arabs are interested, some Japanese. You wouldn't believe the market out there."
"You went through all this just to get her? And me?"
"Not at first. But I got to thinking. I mean, why not? There's no law in this world. You grab what you can. I'm grabbing you, and then I'm selling Soong Tan to the business where she belongs, and I'm taking my million to Rio de Janeiro, where I am going to buy myself a Lamborghini and a nice house on a nice beach and find a nice, tan chick who's never heard of Nicaragua. By the time you hoof it into Rangoon, if you make it that far, it'll be a done deal, and I'll have disappeared into thin air. So get up, sweetie. Be nice to me and everything will be OK."
She remembered now. He had practically warned her that this would happen. Back in the Grand Hotel Lounge. We are above the law. At the time, he had feared the idea. He must have feared what he felt within himself. Maybe it was a self-fulfilling fear. He knew how bad people could be and then saw how bad he himself could be, and then he couldn't resist the temptation of abandoning law and decency. He had become the snake his father had wanted him to be, and she was to be his mouse.
The same Buddhists who had taught her to love and pity such a man had also taught her what to do about him. She had to get close to him. They had also taught her to breathe. She took a perfectly controlled breath, filling herself with confidence and calm. She exhaled as if exuding peace into the world. She would do what she had to do. She would lean into it without thinking. She rose, draped with defeat, and stood with her head hung with shame. Frank took two steps to her, reached out to jostle one breast, lightly pinch the nipple, then fidget with her top button. She looked down as his one free hand fumbled with the button. The hand looked so sad and alone. He could have had her loving breasts with all their will and desire, but in his fear of himself, he was trying to take what she would have given.
The button wouldn't open to the clumsy fingers of his left hand any more than her heart could open to his confused cruelty. She saw her chance. She could not let it pass. Too much was at stake. For Soong Tan, she would put aside any consideration of morality. She wouldn't even think about it. She turned it off the way Frank had turned off any regard for law or goodness. As if detached form her person, her fingers reached forward to stroke his scrotum. His testicles responded, rising up and tightening the skin around them like a cloak. As his lust throbbed into his groin, his hand worked more frantically at the button. His gun-hand came up to help. Four fingers held the weapon at her throat while his trigger finger poked at the button. Between one hard heart beat and the next, Her hands flew into a well practiced performance, slapping one hand onto the top of the fist that held the gun. Her other hand pushed the barrel hard to his left and all the way around until it pointed at his chest. Her other hand, positioned to grab his trigger finger, snapped off the shot. It was just a flicker of a movement, the whole thing, but it was punctuated with a thunderous explosion and a burst of blood from his naked chest. The gun leaped up like a wild animal bolting away, and he flew backward, dead, poor Frank, before he hit the ground.
Ysa and Soong Tan walked out. It was not hard. They just went downhill until they came to a stream. There they slept on a flat rock outcrop, curled in moonlight and damp air. They followed the stream down to a village on the Irrawaddy. A peasant family fed them rice, stir-fried squash curry with pork, guava paste with goat cheese. Ysa traded the .45 for passage on a river boat. Within three days, she and her little sister were in Rangoon. Within twenty-four hours, an old buddy in the embassy produced a passport for Soong Tan. It took twenty-eight hours to fly to Dulles International. It took Susan two hours to drive them home, during which time she filled Ysa in on an unbelievable number of complications that her life had accumulated in the prior two weeks. Ysa did not ask her to shut up so she could hear the news on the radio, which was reporting a coup in Burma and troop movements into the Black Triangle. She did not want to hear the details of that. She wanted to hear about Susan's rich boyfriend with the red Stingray who had regained his eyesight and quickly arranged a marriage proposal between Susan and his brother, Rutherford ("of all the stupid names for a guy from Texas"), who had shingles and an obsession for monster trucks and the Dallas Cowboys. When Susan asked about the little green-eyed girl, Ysa said she was her sister. Susan said, "Your sister?" and then launched into a lengthy drama involving her own sister's affair with a state highway department snow plow driver with a drug problem.
Once home, Ysa introduced Soong Tan to such concepts as the fluffer-nutter on raisin bread and the herbal bubble bath. As she kneaded shampoo into the little girl's long, black hair, she sensed her coming out of her trauma-induced isolation. Her little fingers played with the foam - just a bit, but it was her first venture outside her self-enclosed privacy. When Ysa kissed her cheek, Soong Tan smiled and closed her eyes. She may have had her virginity ripped from her in a hundred ways too horrible to imagine, but her innocence would be restored. She was still a child, a human being with a heart and the ability to love. She was a beautiful flower in a dark world just as the raped Sisters of St. Augustine's monastery were flowers, just as she, herself, was even after Hans had taken her love and changed it into an object of smut.
Ysa now understood her father's obsession. Soong Tan was his daughter. Whoever the mother was - there was no way they could ever find out - he could not possibly have meant to abandon her, especially not with the child he sought so desperately. Soong Tan's mother had probably died in much the way her father - their father - had died. Ysa was as much an orphan as Soong Tan.
That night, for perhaps the first time in years, Soong Tan slept tucked between clean sheets for a night of sweet slumber. She sank into sleep as soon as her doll-like face pressed into the pillow. Ysa lay beside her, stroking her silky Burmese hair and chubby little Dutch cheek. The air from her tiny, round nostrils smelled as sweet as mown hay. Ysa had never seen such a beautiful child. Thinking of all that Soong Tan must have been through, and all that she herself had just survived, Ysa's eyes misted over and soon foundered in a sea of tears. The world was so bad, she thought, so full of evil, but here lay a child of goodness and beauty. A good and beautiful life lay before the child. And the world, free of Rok Mon, was a little cleaner than it had been before.
It was also a little emptier, now, without Kit McCracken. He had seemed as cold and mechanical as a war machine, but he had defended humanity and saved one human being. He had held the boot from one tiny flower. Maybe he had known that he should die the warrior's death rather than try to live in the warmth and security of love.
Back in Burma, she had dearly wanted to give him that love, but he'd done what some men have to do. Ysa knew now what she had to do. She had to raise Soong Tan into the kind of good, responsible person who would find her little way to save her little piece of the world, whatever little piece came her way and needed saving. She would be a combination of Ambassador Karl van der Meer and Mr. Kit McCracken.
As she lay in the dozing aura of little Soong Tan, Ysa slowly slipped into and out of sleep as if drifting back and forth between cold water and warm. She dreamed of Kit in Burma, but not of the black helicopter and its rockets. She dreamed of what had not happened, of their leaping together into the night and falling, falling, tight in each others' arms until a miraculous moment when their single parachute snapped open and gently lowered them, swaying, to an earth as soft as featherbed. She dreamed of lying with him, of his weight and strength, his firm certainty and control. Remembering the taste and texture of his lips, she was unconsciously grateful for the few passionate moments they had shared, the little wildflowers that had sprouted in the single shadow they had cast. She was dreaming of those lips when a pressure on her face and a breathlessness dragged her back to the waking world. It was a hand, not lips, across her mouth, and her nose could not inhale air sufficient for her fear. The dream of Kit's face dissolved into the dim face of Kit himself, hovering above her in the dark. "Shhhh," he whispered, one finger to his lips. "Let her sleep."
Once he saw recognition in her eyes, he removed his hand and replaced it with his lips. Real lips, hot and hungry. They ate at her mouth, then rose to kiss the tears that had tumbled from her eyes. "Oh, Kit," she squeaked as softly as she could. "Are you really here? Are you alive?"
"Didn't I tell you not to worry about me?"
"But they blew you up! All those rockets!"
"Missed me by a mile. A little trick I learned from the Viet Cong. You let the choppers get all lined up for the shot, and then you run like hell for the nearest hole. They miss every time."
She could not control herself. Her arms and legs climbed at him. Her mouth gobbled his face. Her lips chewed his ear. Her tongue could not have enough of him. And Kit, freed of whatever coldness she had felt before, cried gently as he returned her passion, lick for lick, nuzzle for nuzzle, kiss for sweet, sweet kiss.
But then she remembered the video and stopped short. Noticing her sudden shift in attitude, he pulled back, curiosity across his face.
"The tape," she said, almost angry but still unsure. "You gave it to Rok...."
"Rok's dead."
"But the tape..."
"I have the tape. The only copy in the world, I believe. That's what took me so long." His eyes twinkled in the dark. "I had to go get it."
"In Rok's stronghold?" she gasped.
"Quite safe by the time I arrived. Not a living soul around. The virus worked as we expected, and it didn't go far. Basically, we knocked out the inner circle and gave everybody else something to think about. I found the plutonium, too. It wasn't a bomb, but it was enough to make one."
"And the coup worked out?"
"So far, so good. Colonel Pham Trang's in. The president's in jail. The army's been cleansed of its top rats. All's right with the world."
Then she told him about Frank. Kit said the army had found the helicopter and the body. He pretty much figured out what had happened.
Ysa buried he face in her hands. "There was nothing else I could do," she said, not quite crying. "I offered him my body. But he wanted to take Soong Tan. I couldn't let him...the poor guy...the poor guy. I could have saved him if he'd let me."
"He had an awful lot of problems. We only knew some of them. He wasn't bad. I will say that about him. There was a goodness in him, but somewhere along the road, it got hurt. I don't know if there was a cure. I don't know what you could have done. He needed you twenty years ago. By the time he was tempted by sex, money and power, it was too late. Maybe the same was true of Rok Mon. Those were the pillars of his business."
"Kit, will the world ever be clean?"
Kit snuggled in close to her and worked an arm under her head. His other arm stretched across her and Soong Tan, too. The girl stirred but did not awaken. "I think we'll be mighty lucky if the bad guys don't win," he said. "Which reminds me..."
He had to feel around several pockets before he found what looked like a three-by-five card. "I think the good guys might win this time. Look what we found in the Rangoon General Hospital."
He handed her the card. She held it in the moonlight near the window across the bed. It was an official, raised-seal birth certificate for a Soong Tan van der Meer, born on the fourth day of July to one Ysa van der Meer and one Clarence McCracken.
Her heart flooded with something a lot like lava. With humble embarrassment, Kit whispered, "That is, if it's all right with you...."
God yes it was all right. Once again she was kissing him through tears. She wanted to take him to her bed in the other room, to paw at his chest, lick at his nipples, dig into his shoulders. Her fingers and lips and tongue had to know every bulge and crevice of his body. She wanted to arouse him until with all his power he came into her and exploded. She wanted to see him out of control, gasping, whimpering, reduced to babyish helplessness as she made his flesh hers. But not yet. It was too good lying there with him, talking gently in Soong Tan's aura.
"But what are you going to do?" she asked, still looking at the birth certificate. "What about your little spy company over on Enterprise Row?"
"We're going to lay low for a while. I was thinking about starting up some other kind of business."
"Like what?"
He put on his little-boy face and wagged his head from side to side. "Well," he drawled. "I've always wanted to have an ice cream stand. You know? Just stock a couple hundred flavors and serve ice cream cones out a little window. Personally, I can't think of anything the world needs more."
She loved this man. She had no doubt now. She loved him and would love him for ever, as she already loved and would always love Soong Tan. It dawned on her that in a matter of weeks she had gone from lonely orphan to having a full family nestled around her as if they'd always been there.
"Everything's OK now," she said, surprising herself with the simplicity of it. "Everything's good."
Kit said, "Yes," and she felt his stomach quiver involuntarily. "Everything is good."
They said nothing else. They just lay in the moonlight, listening to the early spring peepers. Soong Tan murmured something unintelligible. Kit's hard body gradually relinquished control of his muscles. His breathing slowed to an almost imperceptible movement of his chest. For as long as she could, Ysa held on to wakefulness, basking in the love she felt on both sides. The double-edged love for a child and man probed her heart with a feeling not unlike fear. Her heart knew enough to back away from that feeling, but she took control of it. She leaned into it, as her father had taught her. She just let it swallow her whole.
- the end -
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