Exposure (12 page)

Bill lowered himself to the floor and raised his hands.

“I’ve been waiting for you – or someone like you,” he said hoarsely. “I always knew this day would come: I just didn’t know when.”

He bowed his head, his body trembling.

“Here’s the thing, Bill,” said Charlie softly, “you might make it till morning if you tell me what I want to know.”

“I’m not in it anymore, man,” said Bill in a rush. “I’ve been out for a year now. I don’t know nothing.”

“That’s alright, Bill,” said Charlie almost conversationally, “because I want to know about something that went down three years ago. I’ll refresh your memory: you picked up a package from Carmel, California and it was delivered to Nevada. You remember that job?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, buddy,” said Bill, his eyes rolling, as if he’d be able to make them see the danger behind him.

Charlie looked at Helene.

“Throw me a pillow.”

“What?”

Helene was still frozen on the bed. She struggled to understand what was being said.

“Throw me a pillow,” said Charlie quietly, “so I can shoot this bastard in the leg without upsetting all those nice boys and girls downstairs.”

Helene was pale, except for the livid spot on her cheek where Bill had hit her. Awkwardly, she reached across the bed and threw Charlie a pillow covered in a black, silk pillowcase. At least it wouldn’t show the blood: it was so hard to get blood out of silk, she thought inconsequently.

“Can you dance with one leg?” said Charlie, taunting now. “Shall we find out what happens if I shoot off your kneecap?”

Helene could see the sheen of oily sweat break out on Bill’s face. Suddenly she was glad: those slaps had hurt. In some separate compartment of her brain the violence of her thoughts shocked her.

“Okay, okay,” said Bill, licking his dry lips. “Maybe I do remember something but I don’t know anything. You dig?”

Charlie processed his answer for a second. “Let’s go through it again,” he said. “Who contacted you about the job?”

“It was through the employment listings page in the newspaper: The Los Angeles Times,” Bill stuttered quickly.

“Don’t yank my chain, Bill,” said Charlie, an edge to his voice.

“I’m not!” jabbered Bill. “That’s… that’s how I’d get recruited for a job: I’d look in the classified section and there’d be a coded message. I’d turn up at the location, get the brief, do the job and watch the money go into my bank account. That’s all! I swear. I never knew who booked me, it was safer that way: safer for them, safer for me. I didn’t
want
to know.”

It was clear that Charlie believed him because he went on to a new question.

“Did you see the target that night?”

Bill’s shoulders relaxed a fraction.

“No. I never saw his face. I was look-out; the number two guy did the snatch.”

“Where did you take him from? Describe the place.”

Bill shook his head worriedly.

“Some clapboard place on the coast.” Then a thought occurred to him, a memory. “It didn’t look much from the outside but it had a whole bunch of security. The number three guy was some sort of computer geek cos he got us inside pdq. Whoever ordered the job must have expected that.”

“Pen and paper,” said Charlie to Helene. “Bill is going to draw us a map.”

Helene pulled a small notebook and pen out of her shoulder bag. With a shaking hand, Bill drew a rough sketch of the shack’s location and handed it to Helene. His eyes darted back and forwards restlessly.

“And you never knew who he was?” said Charlie to Bill.

“No, I swear,” Bill choked.

“And you never saw the other men again?”

“No. No, never. There was a fourth guy who flew the chopper but I never spoke to him. That’s all I know.”

Helene saw Charlie give a small smile. But his next words didn’t match his expression.

“You’re disappointing me, Bill. You haven’t given me anything useful and you haven’t given me a reason not to shoot you.”

Bill started babbling. He hadn’t heard any hesitation or mercy in the cold voice behind him. A shudder ran through Helene as she watched the scene play out.

“I... I think one of the guys, the number two guy, was some sort of religious nut,” Bill babbled. “I thought he was a Buddhist, maybe, cuz… cuz he kept chanting the whole time but it turned out it was some other Asian thing – ‘sin’ or ‘shin’ or some whacko thing. I don’t know! He kept chanting these words over and over again. I remember it because it was driving me crazy, and me and the number three guy gave him kind of a hard time over it. Really, I don’t know anything else, I swear it!”

“I believe you, Bill,” said Charlie. “But I think I’ll shoot you anyway.”

He stood back and took aim.

Helene gasped.

“No!” she whispered. “Don’t kill him.”

“We don’t want any loose ends,” said Charlie, frowning but without taking his eyes off the back of Bill’s head.

“Please, don’t,” she said again, a wave of revulsion running through her.

By this time Bill was begging and crying, snot and tears streaming down his face.

Charlie finally looked at Helene, then back at Bill. He raised the gun and brought the butt down hard on Bill’s head, felling him instantly.

“Thank you,” said Helene, her voice shaky.

But Charlie wasn’t finished. He stepped forward and casually kicked Bill between the legs hard enough to rupture a testicle.

“I don’t like men who hit women,” he said.

Their eyes locked.

“Then thank you twice,” she replied, huskily.

He held out his hand and she took it gratefully. Together they walked down the stairs, his long arms wrapped around her waist, supporting her weight, and slowly made their way through the crowds of dancers, drinkers and smokers. From the corner of her eye Helene spotted Jenny, still alone, still looking lost and very young.

Helene and Charlie made their way back to the boarding house by taxi. The driver kept looking at Helene in the rear view mirror as if he wanted to say something, but in the end he just shrugged his shoulders and dropped them off at the harbour without comment.

They slipped into their room without attracting the landlady’s attention. Then Charlie got some ice from a fridge in the kitchen, made it into a pack and held it gently against Helene’s cheek.

“It’ll help with the swelling,” he said.

“Thanks.”

She took the icepack from his hand and went to stand by the window, feeling the ocean breeze cooling the air.

“Where do we go from here, Charlie?” she said. She turned to search for his eyes in the darkness. “I don’t really see how we can use what he told us.”

She felt helpless, the weight of hopelessness pressing down on her.

Charlie looked thoughtful.

“Maybe not… but I’ve been thinking about what Bill said; about the fact that the guy was chanting during the job.”

His voice seemed to come from a long way away.

“It seems to me that when a merc starts getting religion, it’s time for him to get out of the game. You can’t have that sort of conflict going on in your head because then you’ll start to doubt yourself and if you do that, the game’s up and you’re dead, or wishing you were.”

The words came out in a rush, then he paused and sighed softly.

“If the guy was doing a Buddhist chant,” he said at length, “we’d head for Nepal, I suppose.”

Helene followed his train of thought. She was trying very hard not to think about Bill and the scene in the bedroom – it made her palms sweat and her heart begin to gallop. She pulled her mind back to Charlie’s summing up. It made sense. Sort of.

“I need to get online to check something,” he said suddenly. “Can I use your laptop?”

Helene was taken aback by the eagerness in his voice.

“Of course,” she said. “But is it safe? Won’t they be able to use it to find us?”

He shook his head. “I added a programme to it that will make it untraceable. Didn’t I mention that?”

There was the hint of a smile in his voice.

“No. You didn’t mention it… I’d have remembered,” she said, amused and slightly annoyed. “What are you going to look up?”

“I’m not sure, but there’s something about the chant that Bill mentioned: he said he didn’t think it was Buddhist, right? I need to check something…”

Helene scrabbled behind the toilet to locate the loose tile. Wrinkling her nose slightly she felt behind the U-bend and pulled out the laptop and handed it to him.

He leaned back on the bed, the laptop balanced on his crossed legs.

Helene returned to the window, gazing out, while he checked a number of websites. She thought of Jenny back at the party: you don’t have to be 18 to feel lost and alone.

“Bingo!” he said, excitement evident in his tone. “Here it is: I knew there was something at the back of my mind. It wasn’t a Buddhist chant; I think it was Shinto – the Japanese religion. Listen to this:

‘Shinto teaches that certain deeds create a kind of ritual impurity that one should want cleansed for one’s own peace of mind and good fortune. Those killed without being shown gratitude for their sacrifice will hold a grudge and become a powerful and evil that seeks revenge.’

Helene listened intently, her eyes on Charlie.

He continued thoughtfully.

“Maybe the Number Two felt he needed rather a lot of purification.”

He paused.

“So… what does that tell us?” said Helene. “It could mean he went to a Shinto temple…”

Charlie shook his head.

“They have shrines: I think the temples are Buddhist, although it’s not too clear. They seem to share a lot.”

He frowned in confusion.

“So he went to a shrine,” Helene continued, “and got purified. That doesn’t help us much unless we go to every shrine and find out if any westerners have prayed there lately. How many Shinto shrines are there in Japan?”

Charlie scanned the website.

“Eighty thousand. Or more.”

They were both silent, both thinking the same thing: We’re fucked.

Helene pulled off her wig and pushed damp hair out of her eyes.

“Okay, let’s think. We’ve got to narrow this down. Let’s assume that if this person, this mercenary,” she glanced at Charlie, “if he feels he’s got to ‘purify’ himself, is praying at a shrine going to be enough? What is an Anglo-Saxon mercenary, who’s grown a Japanese conscience, going to do? What if he feels so bad that he decides to do it properly: renounce his lifestyle, renounce the world? I mean, it seems to me that if you start praying in the middle of a… er… job, then, like you say, he’s got big issues. He’s going to try to pay his penance, not just by praying, but by becoming the holiest priest ever, right? So my question is: how does a westerner become a Shinto priest? It can’t be that easy…”

She took over Charlie’s seat in front of the computer and flipped through a couple of search engines.

“Look,” she said, “there’s a place here that helps people train to be Shinto priests. God, I love the internet!”

She read the words carefully:

“‘You would already need to have a long established relationship with the Jinja in question – that’s the place where priests worship – before being allowed to take their training programme. So while the programme itself may be short, it may take a few years of being associated with the Jinja to be allowed into the training programme. The programme through the Kompira Jinja in Shikoku is comprised of a minimum of two five-day long sessions held a year apart. The interim year is intended to be used by the student to go back to their home Jinja and practice what was taught. The programme is held annually in May.’

“Damn, we’ve just missed it.”

Charlie shrugged. “It’s still a place to start. If he is training to be a priest, he’s not going to exactly blend in so we should be able to find out pretty quickly. Where did you say this Jinja is?”

“Shikoku: it’s an island in the south west of Japan, Kagawa Prefecture. It says here that about a thousand years ago it was a holy place.”

She sighed.

“So, another one of our long shots.”

“Hmm,” he said, “it’s pretty thin.”

“Bordering on anorexic,” she agreed, “but what else do we have?”

“There is one other lead,” said Charlie. “We could look for this shack in Carmel. I should be able to find the place where we landed and we can use Bill’s map after that – try to work out who the mark was. Knowing that could help a lot.”

Helene looked hopeful, but Charlie’s face was puckered with distaste.

“Trouble is, we’d be in the NSA’s backyard and that could make things a lot harder. But either way, it’s information that’s three years old.”

Helene’s diaphragm felt like it was being squeezed, the breath leaving her lungs in a sharp rush. She definitely didn’t like the sound of pitching up on the NSA’s or CIA’s doorstep: that was like tempting fate… or tempting fate even more than they already had. It felt like a lose-lose situation.

Charlie was watching her eyes carefully. Then he reached into his baggies and pulled out a quarter.

“Heads we go to Carmel, tails we go to Japan.”

He threw the coin up in the air and caught it. He looked down then grinned at Helene.

“Looks like we’re going to Japan.”

“Darn,” she said, “I didn’t pack my kimono.”

Chapter 9

Helene lay awake as the soft dawn light grew stronger. Her eyes burned with tiredness but her mind whirled, leaping from thought to memory to idea to confusion once again. Her mind constantly returned to Bill no matter how hard she tried to push the memory away. She could picture the malice in his eyes when he’d hit her; the perverted enjoyment he’d felt in watching her pain and the fear that had blossomed in her eyes. And then she saw him writhing on the floor with Charlie standing over him, his expression that of one who was barely in control of his desire for blood. A shudder ran through her. She turned her head to look at him.

He lay close by her side breathing softly and evenly, his chest rising and falling rhythmically, his lips slightly parted.

Carefully she propped herself on one elbow and looked down at him. His skin glowed golden in the early light, his face younger and more innocent than she’d ever seen it. She studied the planes of his cheeks, the curve of his mouth, the gentle puckering of his forehead as his dreams raced behind his fluttering eyelids.