The Refugee Sentinel (2 page)

The voice in the receiver shook like a live wire, but came across with perfect, brittle clarity. “Colton Parker? I want you to die. It is important to me that you die.”

The man, who the voice had called Colton, squinted hard at the alarm clock. His eyes, semi-blind without contacts, somehow recognized the red outline of three-thirteen-am swimming in the darkness. He winced at the pain in his spine, as stiff as rusted metal, sat up on the bed and rested his head against the wall then shoved a hand inside his mouth, fishing out a chewed-up night-guard with a garland of drool clinging to the ground-down plastic.

“Who’s this?” he mumbled with a swollen voice. The weightless space between sleep and waking up filled him with grimy disorientation that would linger until the piercing warmth of a morning shower. His brain was attempting to catch up to his reflex of picking the ringing cell-phone and holding it to his ear. Yes, he was sitting up in bed and the weight in his stomach was the Big Mac he had eaten around midnight. He rubbed his four-day-old stubble and cleared his throat. A steadier attempt, “Who’s this?”

“This is Sarah.”

“Sarah? Jesus…” The words came out moist and clammy, like the December night.

“You must Sacrifice yourself. For me and Yana. Most of all, for Yana.” The voice broke, pushed away by a wet gulp, “Promise me, Colton.”

He stumbled as he got out of bed. His mind was clearer now. Funny how cold words could replace a hot shower.

“Sarah, hi. I haven’t heard from you in…too long… seven years?”

“Did you not hear me? Will you Sacrifice yourself for Yana?”

Another spasm shook his back. “Yana. How is she? Where are you, guys?”

“You almost killed her before.” The voice gasped for air then grew into a scream dug from deep within the lungs. “You selfish man…” There was pain in her scream, interminable and unbounded pain.

“What is wrong, Sarah? What’s wrong with Yana?”

Silence. When she spoke again, an invisible remote had wiped out the screaming. “They earmarked her last night. Who earmarks an eight-year old? Who does that, Colton?” More silence followed by the flat sound of the phone connection she had just killed.

The woman shoved the body back into the front seat and left six one-hundred-dollar bills on top of the wrapped gift. The setting sun was peeking inside the taxi with voyeuristic curiosity.

She stepped out of the car and entered the hotel, her heels cracking against the Olympic’s tiled floor and coming to a stop in front of the reception desk.

A pimple-ridden teenager in a purple uniform grinned at her. “Good afternoon and welcome to the Olympic Hotel, Ma’am.”

“I have a reservation for six weeks,” she said. “The President’s Suite.”

“Certainly, Ma’am. And what name is the reservation under?”

“My name is Li-Mei. Li-Mei Gao,” she said and signed the checkin paperwork. She was annoyed by the rate of twenty thousand dollars per night but had no alternative if a room with running water was to be in the books. It was what it was and she chose to think about Vigna’s glorious capture.

She hadn’t assassinated him all by herself, Taxi’s spirit had guided her even before she arrived to this wretched city. Her telemetry slate had lit up in unison with the plastic voice of the Alaska Airlines stewardess welcoming all Cincinnati passengers to Seattle and warning them to watch out for bags that may have shifted during the flight.

On the tablet, Vigna’s holographic image had turned orange, an indication he was less than a mile away. The plane had shaken to a final standstill, she had gotten up and elbowed her way along the center aisle, ignoring the looks of frustration from the passengers she stomped past. She kept glancing at the slate’s soothing orange as she squirmed by people and bags. She had turned her phone off at takeoff like the rest of the cattle in the main cabin, but was done following useless flight rules. Not when she sat in the deep plane guts, otherwise known as Seat 21E, with an orange-colored target blinking in her tablet’s crosshairs.

She had researched Vigna like any other target. The man was average: a taxi driver, but also impressive – a grandfather of the youngest High-Potential in the world. Killing Vigna would be of average difficulty but she welcomed an average target. She had used the last nine months to assassinate fifty military officers across the former countries of Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. They were non-commissioned targets she killed off protocol because of a promise she had given to Taxi.

Going back to her Vigna target, the sole complication was that Seattle was going to close its airport in a day or two and remove the one reliable spot for her to locate a taxi-driver. After he had appeared as a marker on her tablet, his difficulty had gone down to one out of ten. And she had turned out to be right: Mr. Vigna had died on schedule and as expected.

She looked up at the receptionist. “I want to order hot spring water for a bath.”

“I’m afraid, we don’t offer spring water for bathing purposes, Ma’am.”

“Then what I’ve heard, about the Olympic being Seattle’s best hotel, is a lie.”

“We pride ourselves on our reputation, but the nature of this request is,” he stammered, “out of scope at the moment.”

“Out of scope? Both sea-borders are dealing with the same floods.”

“Ma’am, more than half of Seattle is flooded as I’m cert—”

“Spare me the drama. If you can’t do this,” she paused for effect, “I won’t set foot in your one-star bungalow again.”

“Let me check with my manager, please.” He disappeared behind a wall divider and returned after a moment with her card key. She guessed the manager must have calculated her probability to survive Defiance Day and derived her customer lifetime value. “Good news. We can indeed accommodate your request, Ms. Gao. However, this resource comes with an unfortunate extra charge.”

“Money is not a consideration.”

“If I may, hot spring water delivery of this volume would cost five hundred thousand dollars.”

“I’ll give you another fifty thousand if you deliver in the next fifteen minutes.” She headed for her room, done tolerating him.

Half an hour later, Li-Mei had undressed and slipped her hairless body in the tub. She shuddered with pleasure as the hot water covered her surprised skin. Her head dipped under the surface and the ceiling danced blurry in front of her water-filtered eyes. She exhaled, watching the bubbles race to the top, then sat up in the tub, stretching a dripping arm across the marble floor to pick up her tablet. She propped the tablet on her naked breasts. The screen greeted her with two horizontal sections – “Completed Targets” colored in green and “Outstanding Targets” colored in orange. A large, bold number “7” emerged in the middle of the “Completed Targets” section.

The orange section consisted of a table with three columns and four rows:

Li-Mei read the names in the rightmost column, the only names she cared about, for what seemed to her the one-millionth time – Colton Parker, Gordon Vigna, Victor Saretto and Natt Gurloskey. She touched Vigna’s name and smiled as the photos and profile data she’d seen countless times, inundated the screen. Once more, her fingertips flicked through Vigna’s life, one page at a time, each detail and pointless fact, until she reached the bottom of the last screen. She selected an icon reading, “Confirm Target Deletion.” First, the screen responded with, “Communicating with Mission Dizang,” followed by, “Target Deletion Confirmed. Congratulations, Agent Taxi.”

Other than the sweat trickling down her temples, Li-Mei’s face remained as stiff as a wood carving. She returned to the tablet’s home-screen - the rows in the orange table had decreased from four to three. For an imperceptible second, the corners of her mouth tilted into a smile then flattened again.

The top of the screen showed a large green “8.”

Colton’s face looked like a melted candle. He grimaced, his pupils dilated and he dropped the toothbrush in the sink. He collapsed to his knees, slamming his forehead on the padded toilet seat. He closed his eyes.

The call had him disoriented. The person on the phone wasn’t Sarah, couldn’t have been. At least not the Sarah he had kept alive in his memories, who had made him marshmallows in bed on weekend mornings and sung him to sleep with lullabies on weekend nights. This phone woman was distant, a gone-bad version of Sarah.

He picked up his cell and dialed the office. Three-thirty in the morning was as good a time for a message, with his stupor still thick and the office still empty. He wasn’t much of a faker but going to work today, after this call, was not going to happen.

“Hey Mike, this is Colton. Look… I won’t be coming in today. Just crawled out of the bathroom vomiting a storm. I’ll call you later today when I feel better.”

He stopped in the kitchen with Sarah’s words still ringing inside his skull. Had he forgotten about her? How could he? He missed her. He missed the lashy feel of her wet hair after a shower during those endless Seattle Sundays filled with rain and sex. He wasn’t sure if this was how heartache felt or guilt, but he hadn’t been whole since.

In the beginning, the sheer shock of their divorce had carried him through. As in, I’ll show the bitch. How dare she run away with my baby? Her late work nights must have meant polishing the pole of some PhD who was supposed to take us to the Moon. He must have taken her somewhere all right, with her back against a lab fridge and her legs in the air. At the same time while Colton was changing Yana’s diapers... The bitch. It was her fault. Had she come home that night, their lives would have turned out different... and normal.

In time, alcohol and the wet fear of being alone had declawed his accusations. He did miss her, the curve on her nose and the strands of hair she shed through the house. He missed how she snorted when she laughed and cocked her head sideways when she was in a good mood. When they had started going out in college, he dialed a radio station on Valentine’s Day for two hours to request a song for her: “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” In a way, she was always going to be the grace of his life. A morning of waking next to her was worth a million Defiance Days. Then smelling her hair and nuzzling in her morning breath, while she tried shielding it from him but in the end, capitulating to his full-on kisses. Then making love to her in the shower. She had given him countless mornings like that.

He had shared her with the algae for the first, and only, two years of their marriage. He had hoped Yana’s arrival would bring them closer, but it hadn’t. Sarah wasn’t distant or tired or having an affair. She was crazy busy… all the time. And each time he complained about her absence, she would give him the same save-the-world bullcrap he’d grown to despise. “Don’t you want your child to live in a world with snow caps and potable water? A world with wildlife other than ravens and sparrows. Don’t you, Colton?” He had no antidote to her pitch. Not after the North Cap went, fueling a frenzied debate to replace countries with a central government structure the Australians had proposed calling The United Lands of Earth.

He had no antidote because he knew she was right but, most of all, because he loved her. He was a junior, a Finance major, about to flunk out of Northeastern University when they met. She was a year ahead and cruising, the future Valedictorian of the College of Applied Biochemistry. She was spoken for with a post-graduation job offer from Amgen and a marriage proposal from Roger Maletta, the senior goalie who had strapped the Huskies on his back to two consecutive NCAA East Hockey titles.

One of the two offers had to cancel the other and, as luck would have it, Sarah chose Amgen in Seattle over staying put and being married to Maletta in Boston. It must have been a close call, because the combination of Maletta’s orphan beginnings and chiseled abdomen had delivered three years of dating Sarah, despite him cheating on the side. She either put up with it or he satisfied her savior complex, which Colton got to appreciate later. Regardless, Maletta had drawn the short straw; Seattle - the long one, and she dove into her algae work, in the shadow of the Space Needle, with abandon she hadn’t applied to anything else in life. Colton loved how happy she was as the Savior in Chief of an Earth that was dying a little bit more by the day.

During his senior year, he commuted between Seattle and Boston to see her on weekends, as if his academic work needed more obstacles. His life became a sleep-deprived series of shuffling in and out of classrooms and airports. He was broke and in the bottom ten percent in all his classes. But he spent time with Sarah, giving her the only gift he could – his time and thoughts. Seattle grew on him, all because of her, despite its ridiculous rain slugs, which Sarah called “my algae mustangs,” a fixture in her lab work. In a few months, she let him stay at her one-room apartment, instead of at the Thunderbird on Aurora, the only place his budget could afford.

On Saturday nights, lying next to her, he’d been afraid to fall asleep, afraid to jinx the moment, as she slept in his arms snoring softly like a kitten. When he did fall asleep and awoke, he was happy to wake up next to her. When he proposed a year later, on one knee, looking up at her, during the seventh-inning stretch in a game where the Red Sox were crushing the Mariners and the cheesy “Marry Me, Sarah. Yours, Colton!” flashed on the main scoreboard, he thought he’d have a heart attack.

She blinked at him, her mouth frozen in the middle of chewing a hot dog. In his head, he heard a reverberating “No,” but his eyes saw her stand up and nod in tears, her lips mouthing a “Yes,” then smiling and adding, “I love you, Colton” with coleslaw drizzling down her cheek. If the world ended tomorrow, a thirty-percent likelihood event per the ULE Ministry of Science, he wouldn’t care. Bliss was bliss, no matter if it lasted for a day or a decade. Later that night, the United Lands of Earth Senate passed the “Defiance Day” bill. Still, he didn’t care. An atheist for life, on the night she had agreed to marry him, he was a born-again Christian and Mormon and Jew, all in one.

Now he was reduced to looking for her hairs around the house. He missed her with a bi-directional force that threatened to blow him up and, at the same time, crush him like a can of Coke. Sleep refused to come. Would the warmth of another woman’s body do, if he imagined it was Sarah’s?

The Déjà Vu Gentlemen’s Club was bustling on a Friday night.