Off the Edge (The Associates) (30 page)

“And I distracted you—”

“I was at a dead end anyway. Now I know I have to hack a new path. I—” In a flash he flipped over, finger to his lips.

She searched his face—
what
?

His whisper was soft and hot on her ear: “The creak. Get dressed and get into the bathroom. Slip out the window. Down in the warrens, follow a pattern—one right, two lefts, one right, two lefts. I’ll catch up.”

One right, two lefts?

With shaking hands she pulled her dress over her head and shoulders.

He was out of the bed, moving fluidly across the room, pale skin bathed in the blue light from the sign outside. In a flash he was crouched near the door, holding the gun, muscular thighs straining, skin glistening with sweat. But that white band his friend had wrapped around his chest flashed even in the shadows. It made him an easy target.

A beep broke the silence. The phone! Giving them away. Who would leave their room without their mobile?

He handed her the knit cap and jabbed a finger at the bathroom.

She had to trust him; he seemed to get out of everything.

She grabbed her pack, slipped into the bathroom, and eased the door shut. The window raised up easily, soundlessly, but she so didn’t want to leave him.

Peter’s voice: “Hold up, Laney.”

She got down and peeked out to see Peter zipping up his pants. He opened the door. A big, battle-worn looking man in black cargo pants and a black shirt walked in, arms raised, gun in one hand. He wore black gloves and he held his lips smashed together and aimed upwards, like he was assessing the situation and just didn’t like it.

“Clears the mind,” Maxwell—no, Peter—said to the man, somewhat nonsensically.

The man nodded and lowered his arms. “Right.”

“Come on out, Laney.” Peter shut the door.

Laney came out and Peter introduced her to the man—Fedor, pronounced
Fay-door
. Fedor set his gun on the desk and took Peter’s chair. Everything about Fedor was big; even invisible things, like the way he took over the room. The way he saw everything through those pale blue eyes.

“What do we have?” Peter asked.

“The auction’s off.”

“Completely?”

“For now. Our friend, ol’ Jazzman Rolly Drucker, he’s decided to hold a bit of a scavenger hunt instead. The prize for finding you and his ex-wife is a tasty one—the finder’s bids are automatically worth double.” Fedor looked over at her then. “Congratulations. You’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars to this guy.”

Laney felt faint. “He’s a maniac,” she said. “He’ll never stop.”

“Be glad he wants you alive,” Fedor said.

Peter sat on the desk. “So everybody who came for the auction—”

“Is out scouring the city for you both,” Fedor finished. “Two hours more in this place, that’s all you’ve got. Tops. You’ve managed to elude the players who were already in town, but right about now I’d imagine the Bangkok airport’s a
who’s who
of bounty hunters. And then there’s Dax. Dax wants you, too. Never underestimate Dax.”

“I won’t let him have her.”

“It’s not just her,” Fedor said. “Jazzman Drucker wants
you
alive, too. God knows why. A hundred G’s for bringing you in alive. I would’ve priced you more at $59.99.”

Peter smiled.

“That’s not why I came, though.” Fedor pulled a laptop from his sack. “You’re not going to like this. What you’re trying, it won’t work. The hack won’t work. I’ve been studying up.”

“No,” Peter said.

“Control can’t be shifted in the usual way once the laser head is engaged. It’s a failsafe. And Jazzman? There’s no way he hasn’t engaged that sucker.”

Peter’s whisper was sharp and hard. “Locked down.”

Laney tried to catch his eye, but he seemed so remote. Thinking about that train, maybe. Or the hand. That hand had crawled clear into his core.

Fedor crossed his beefy legs. “He knows the Association’s in town, and this is exactly the kind of shit we’d try. Sorry, it’s how the thing is set up.”

“There has to be another way,” Peter bit out.

Fedor’s expression was unreadable. “I’m going out on a limb here and guess you have a password and voice samples. Am I right?”

“Yes, but not near enough to beat a challenge word. I’m missing key sounds.” Peter checked his phone and slid off the desk. “Brussels was trying to get the prison phone recordings, but it’s a no-go. What do you have?”

Key taps and clicks filled the stuffy little room. A diagram went up on Fedor’s laptop screen.

Fedor said, “We’ve never seen this weapon up close, but I’ve been going over the work of Eiger, one of the three researchers. The guy was heavy into unmanned ground vehicles. He worked on a four-legged, talon-type robot for the Chinese—the kind they used at the Ground Zero cleanup, only it comes with weapons systems. They’re controlled remotely, but here’s the thing—Eiger always built in a maintenance override.”

She heard Peter suck in a breath. Did that mean he was happy? “How do you—”

“I know an old colleague of his,” Fedor said. “Eiger would’ve disabled the override before they sold the weapon, but they didn’t sell it, did they? It was stolen while they were completing work.”

“So the back door is probably still open,” Peter said.

“Wide open.” Fedor smiled, big and lethal. “And I bet Mister Jazzman Rolly Drucker doesn’t even know. It wouldn’t be in the documentation. If you can beat the challenge words you can transfer control to your voice and do a self-destruct.”

“I just need more samples,” Peter said.

“And you have to be standing next to it,” Fedor said. “You can’t do a maintenance override remotely.”

Peter leaned cool against the desk. “So it’ll be
that
kind of party.”

“Hold on! You can’t go back there,” Laney said.

Peter cast a glance at her. “Sounds to me like Rolly would be happy to see me.”

“Peter!”

“He has to be on site to access the weapon,” Fedor said.

“No.” She turned to Peter. “He wants you there so he can kill you in the most painful way possible. He’ll want to make you scream and cry and beg for your death. He’ll want to literally flay off your skin or pull out your guts or something.”

“No offense,” Peter said, “but your ex really is a boor.”

“That’s not funny.”

Fedor went on, undeterred. “Jazzman is holding court on the rooftop lounge. We have a bartender informing, but he’s scared shitless—he’ll rabbit anytime now. A lot of cold operators up there, a lot of hardware.” Fedor was back on the laptop. “You know what a 360-290 sighting array is?”

“Ooh,” Peter said. So he knew. And he liked it.

Fedor went on—it was all very technical, something about a laser on a boom arm. You could aim and shoot the weapon with a phone or laptop. Like a video game. They crowded together in front of the screen, finishing each other’s sentences, scribbling on the hotel pad. Fedor seemed to be teaching him how to control the weapon and make the thing shoot itself. At one point they both paused and stared into nothing. Stumped. Fedor reached under his pant leg and pulled out a small knife. Casually as could be, he tossed it across the room.

Thwuck.

It stuck into the wall and they resumed their conversation, like it was normal for a man to throw a
knife into the wall.

Together they manipulated diagrams on the screen, with Fedor jabbing the keyboard with his thick fingers. He talked about Eiger creations in a rough rumble, like a connoisseur. During another pause, Fedor threw another knife. Maybe throwing knives helped him think.

Peter borrowed one of Fedor’s un-thrown knives to peel a mango. Fedor grumbled about the ants. Everybody knew eating fruit in a room meant an instant trail of ants—up the wall, over to the table. Even saliva on the lip of water bottles sometimes attracted them. Peter kept on, casually talking weapons and words with his strongman, knife-throwing friend.

This was his world,
she realized.

Peter could probably throw a knife, too, except it wasn’t his style. Magnificent, dangerous Peter. These guys clearly worked for a government of some sort. The US government? Military? Fedor sounded American, though his name wasn’t. Peter had that slight Euro accent, like he was from everywhere and nowhere. Peter was talking about the difficulties of things called a
lveolars
and the desperate need for more recordings of Rolly, but his eyes were on her.

He cut off a chunk of mango and, trancelike, he rose and brought it to her. “There’s always a way,” he said, handing it down to her.

She plucked it from his fingers. “Thanks.”

“Always,” he said, letting the meaning change to something more important. A promise.
Always
. A communication on another level.

“Always,” she whispered. This was the Peter she’d fallen for—the Peter who dug behind language, the handsome scholar who knew about secret dragons.

Fedor shifted in the chair, one arm over the back, legs sprawled. He wore that assessing expression of his, eyes keen. Fedor was as surprised by romantic Peter as she was by covert operative Peter. It was there she got it: Peter hadn’t lost parts of himself in the train bombing. He’d gained parts of himself. He was all of these things. Lover. Fighter. Scholar. Hunter. Killer.

Fedor stood and closed the laptop. “I’m leaving this with you. I’m going to try something to get those prison calls. We have to complete your library.”

With that he left.

“You can’t go back to the hotel,” she said to Peter.

“He won’t kill me,” Peter said. “Not if he thinks I know where you are.”

“He’d make you want to die,” she said.

He went to the window and peered through the gap in the curtains.

“See anything?” she asked.

“Hunters.”

“Crap!” She went to where he stood and he showed her where to look. Her heart pounded in her chest. “What do we do?”

“Nothing. They don’t know we’re here. It’s the hunters I don’t see that worry me. We need to get on the move.” He turned to her. “I need more samples of Rolly’s voice. YouTube clips. Instructional recordings. I don’t need much—just a few sounds. The
oo
of book. The
zh
sound from garage. The
j
of
judge
. The
ch
of
cheese
.” He showed her the list he had made on the hotel pad.

Just a few tiny sounds standing between them and everything.

“I want to help you. I wish I could.”

“It’s okay.” He touched her hand, sliding his palm along hers. A line of ants was already heading in from the edge of the window, trailing up along the wall, across the ceiling, and down to the wastebasket where the mango peels were.

It was then they heard it—the telltale creak. Then again, softer.

He handed her a gun and the knit cap he’d worn earlier. “It’s not Fedor,” he whispered. “Two, three guys.”

She grabbed her bag as he pushed her into the bathroom. He lifted the bathroom window. The sea of metal roofs behind the hotel looked almost pink in the mixed light of the moon and a red neon cola sign high in the distance.

“One right, two lefts, remember?”

“Yeah.” She put on the dark cap and slung her bag over her shoulder. “Aren’t you coming?”

“I’ll catch up. Don’t argue. Don’t stop no matter what you hear. Go!” The intensity of his command sprang her into motion.

She scrambled out the window and lowered herself onto the rusty fire escape landing. Her pulse raced as the window shut above her, and she had this fear that she might never see him again. Like the window was cutting them off from each other forever.

A helicopter chopped above. Probably just news.

She climbed down three flights toward the dark little alley, which wasn’t quite wide enough for a car, and hopped onto a pile of cans and newspapers, making an awful racket. Down one side some chickens pecked at feed under an anemic light that swarmed with moths.

She turned right and ran. Buzzing bulbs illuminated her way, strung up via webs of wire. She came to a fork and looked left. Bikes cluttered the way, and a woman squatted in front of a cook stove; flames danced on the corrugated metal behind her.

Curry. Dinnertime. She slowed to a walk as she headed past, smiling, looking for the next left. Just then, a gunshot rang out. A chorus of dogs started up.

She slowed.

Another shot. From the direction of the hotel.
Peter
.

Don’t stop no matter what you hear.

Trusting him had worked out so far. She went on, past a blue wall with blue painted spikes on top, taking a left into an alley thick with encroaching jungle and lined with corrugated metal full of graffiti.

Footsteps sounded nearby; she darted behind a trash can and drew the big Sig Rio had given to her, holding the fat grip with shaking hands.

Just kids. She pulled the black cap down further over her head and slipped out, gun hidden in the folds of her blue skirt. She tried to not look alert, to not look out of her mind with fear as she walked.

Another right. The next left. The next.

But something was wrong—she felt it deep down. She backed into a dark doorway, thinking maybe she should wait. Even the dogs sounded more alarmed than usual. If anybody would sense things, it would be the dogs. Minutes went by, or at least that’s the way it felt. It wasn’t a good sign that Peter hadn’t caught up; it seemed to her that he would get to her right away…or not at all. She forced herself to count to 100, but she couldn’t concentrate. Her heart was drumming in her ears.

The dogs were growing frantic.

What if he needed her help? She could backtrack…just to check it out.

She retraced her footsteps, doing the pattern backwards, but things looked different. She slowed when she came to the blue painted wall.

It was on the wrong side. Was she going the wrong way? Was it a different wall?

When she heard shots ring out—close by—she didn’t even think, she just ran in that direction. People were coming out their doors; she sidestepped them, zigging and zagging her way to where she thought the hotel was. She nearly ran into a woman who was backing away from a corner. She flattened against a wall as a moped whizzed by. She kept on. Another blue wall.