Off the Edge (The Associates) Read online

  The host looked at them funny as they walked through the half-full dining room.

  They pushed out the doors into the furnace blast of air that was midday Bangkok. Cars and bikes careened by madly.

  “Send a boy for takeout next time. You shouldn’t leave the hotel. You’re safe at the hotel.” Rajini looked over at her. “Has your brother emailed you yet?”

  “No. And I’m worried.”

  “He probably has a girlfriend.”

  “Something’s wrong. He sounds…wrong. What if Rolly’s guys got to him?”

  “Has he used your code?”

  Begonia. He was supposed to use the word begonia in an email at the first sign of Rolly danger. Begonia. Be gone. “No.”

  “Well, then?” Rajini waved at a tuk-tuk, one of the colorful motorized rickshaws that buzzed up and down the streets.

  “But what if he’s sick? Or if Mama’s sick? All he emails about lately is TV and current events. It’s like he wants to email me, but not really email me.”

  Rajini stabbed a finger at her. “This is why you thought you saw Harken. You’re spooked about your brother. You watch. You’ll have an email from him tomorrow, I bet.” She looked down at Laney’s stockings, which, okay, looked a little odd with her black sheath dress. “What do you have on?”

  “It’s a new fashion.”

  “Are you wearing them for your show?”

  “Hell, yeah,” Laney said. “I think they’re fun.” Nobody ever paid attention to her, anyway. She was background music. Music to have conversations by. Laney used to despair about being ignored because her songs were the only deep-down truth in her whole fake life.

  Stupid.

  When on the run from a murderous and rageful ex-husband, you wanted to be ignored. That was the whole point.

  “I need to get a non-expired passport,” she said. “I know your brothers are working on it, but this was a sign—be ready for anything. I think I’ve gotten too secure at the hotel. You don’t know what it was like sitting in that closet. I kept thinking, What if I have to rabbit right now? Hardly any money. An expired fake passport.”

  “You worry too much,” Rajini said.

  “Still,” Laney said. “I want to start carrying big money and a valid passport at all times. I’m thinking about going down to Khaosan Road—”

  Rajini began to protest. “Laney—”

  “I don’t want to keep bugging your brothers,” Laney went on. “I know they’re just busy, but I need a non-expired passport. This was my wake-up call.” Everyone knew you could find opium-addicted tourists to sell their passports on the seedy edges of the strip. “I need to handle this.”

  “And end up mugged or arrested?” Rajini scowled. “No. Let my brothers swing you one. I’ll tell them to hurry. They have the cleanest passports. Don’t go to Khaosan Road.”

  Laney nodded, unconvinced. “I need cash, too. We’ll pass the bank—do you want to—”

  “Sorry.” Rajini looked at her phone. “I have to get back. How about after the weekend?”

  “Okay,” she said, dismayed.

  “After the weekend. Promise.”

  “Okay.” What could she do? Her account was under Rajini’s name. She was at Rajini’s mercy.

  Rajini smiled and chatted brightly as the little tuk-tuk wove in and out of traffic.

  Laney half listened, unable to shake the feeling of danger pressing in.

  Chapter Two

  Macmillan straightened his tie as he strolled past the row of tall, slender torches that illuminated the edges of the outdoor courtyard of the Bangkok Imperiale Hotel Des Roses. The tables were occupied by mostly Asian tourists, but clustered near the front were some of the most notorious arms dealers on the planet.

  And he had arrived to screw each and every one of them. With his ears.

  Macmillan adjusted his glasses, resisting the impulse to study the faces. He wouldn’t be recognized, but it wouldn’t do to be remembered. He wore a linen suit—top quality, just a bit rumpled, and his dark blond hair had grown just over his ears, swept back like a proper academic’s. His glasses had whisper-light frames, very man of letters, for his Peter Maxwell, PhD, linguistics expert persona. It was easy for Macmillan to play Dr. Peter Maxwell. It’s who he had been once upon a time.

  In a sunnier lifetime.

  Nobody seemed to notice that Dr. Peter Maxwell accepted teaching and speaking assignments in zones of unrest, or that the world’s most notorious terrorists and predators were taken into custody in the very cities he visited, often just days after he left.

  Macmillan scanned around. A cloud had moved over the moon, casting the back tables in darkness, but then he saw it—the light of a cell phone illuminating a scruffy cheek. He made his way to the far edge of the courtyard and stopped in front of a table occupied by a lone man with sooty hair and glasses. “Nice night for a drink under the stars.”

  His old friend Arturio—Rio for short—gave him a level glance. “Clears the mind.” This format of greeting served as an all-clear signal among the Associates. Not that they needed it; the Associates were tighter than a family; they’d know if something was off from a mere look. But the greeting was protocol. Part of their culture.

  Macmillan sat.

  “I left a message,” Rio said. “The Russians have a hitter on you.”

  Macmillan crossed his legs, stiff from the sedentary existence of the adjunct professor, teaching and grading. “Good luck with that.”

  “It could be Anders.”

  Macmillan shrugged it off. Nobody knew what he looked like—as Peter Maxwell the linguistics expert or as Macmillan the spy. A grainy video had circulated for some years, but it was useless, even to a legendary hitter like Anders.

  “People will have guessed you’re here,” Rio said. “Somebody’s out there waiting for you to screw up, old friend.”

  Macmillan scanned the crowd up front. “Let them fill my belly full of bullets.”

  Rio gave him a dark look, but he damn well knew: Macmillan would do anything to stop the auction of the TZ-5. He would give up everything. His humanity. Even his life.

  In a lot of ways, Macmillan had died long ago. He was just an operative these days. A tool. A charming, deadly overachiever. Nothing touched him. That was part of his power.

  “Your belly full of bullets would be the opposite of my plan,” Rio said.

  Macmillan watched the stage. They were setting up for some singer.

  Noise. Great.

  The TZ-5 was a disturbingly advanced weapon—a powerful remote control drone with a wingspan of just seven feet and deadly laser weapons, and it could be powered from miles away by lasers. It was configurable enough to take out an entire airport or a single man running down a crowded street. In short, it made US drones look like plastic playground toys. The Association had been hunting the TZ for two and a half years. The man who possessed it would finally be turning up here at the hotel, ready to sell. The highest bidder would get the blueprints and the prototype, exclusively. It would shift the balance of power, no matter who got it. Lots of innocent people would die.

  A waiter came over to light the candle on their table and their hands came up in unison. “No thanks.” Neither wanted their faces illuminated.

  Rio smiled at the waiter. “We’d love another round of tea. And more of those little cakes.”

  The waiter nodded and left.

  Rio shifted his dark eyes to Macmillan. Rio wore a lavender silk shirt under his dinner jacket. Quietly stylish. Quietly lethal. He was the Association’s resident assassin.

  “Is there a show?” Macmillan asked.

  Rio pulled out his mobile and scanned through emails. “Woman singer. An American.”

  “Not too loud, I hope.”

  “You won’t even notice. Barely-there ballads,” Rio said. “Sexy, what you can see of her. Unmemorable. Walking wallpaper.” Rio chose his words with imagination and precision. Macmillan liked that in a friend. Rio put away his phone. “What are you c
arrying?”

  “My regular.” Meaning a Smith & Wesson Platinum 500.

  Rio raised his eyebrows. Meaning, and? What else are you carrying?

  “Party favor.” Macmillan angled his gaze down, indicating the .22 at his ankle.

  Rio waited. Eyebrows raised.

  “I was just teaching class for God’s sake,” Macmillan said.

  The assassin’s hands disappeared under the table. A few moments later, Macmillan felt a tap on his knee. “Take it,” Rio said. “It’ll beat a metal detector, too.”

  Macmillan felt the soft leather, the buckle, the ridges of the grip. Rio’s favorite Sig. “Rio.”

  “Put it on. Humor me,” Rio said.

  Rio often showed affection through firearms. He lent them and even gave them as gifts, the way a mother might dole out mittens and cookies. Macmillan kind of loved that about Rio. He loved everything about Rio. Of all the Associates, Rio was most like a brother to him; they’d saved each other’s asses more times than he could count. Macmillan strapped the holster around his free ankle and sat back, eyeing his old friend. “Happy?”

  Rio gave him a wry glance then nodded toward the stage. “Take a closer look at the far right table up in the front.”

  Macmillan stood as though to search his pockets, scanning the front. Six, seven tables of dealers. He noticed the North Koreans in the sea of faces, and even a table of Glorious Light operatives. And he’d never known the Peruvians to be acquainted with Dmitri Turgenov’s clan, but they were mixing it up now. With one of the New Tong out of Texas. Macmillan sat. “It’s like international arms dealers gone wild up there.”

  “All flown in over the last two days. Who knew they’d all show so early?”

  They were waiting for a man known only by one name: Jazzman.

  “They all want to pre-empt the auction,” Macmillan said.

  That was the worry, that the weapon would change hands before the auction, and the Associates would never see it again. Until people started dying.

  “The new thinking is that Jazzman is here already,” Rio said, “mingling, assessing his buyers, waiting to unmask himself.”

  “That’s what I’d do if I were him,” Macmillan said. “If he’s here, I’ll find him.”

  Rio nodded once. A simple, precise reply.

  Nobody escaped Macmillan. Back when he had been a rising star in the linguistics world, he could spend entire months studying the way different people pronounced a diphthong like the ow in low, and draw all kinds of conclusions about what that meant. He could see a universe in a single word choice. He used his expertise to understand people, and by extension, humanity itself.

  These days, he used his ability to ferret out scum. Fugitives who’d used plastic surgery to change their appearance. Killers.

  The TZ could turn out to be the most prolific killer of all. This was the case he’d been born for.

  Jazzman had stolen the TZ in a bloody attack on an independent lab in Panama over two years ago—freelance scientists working on their own designs to sell on the world market. Governments across the globe went on red alert when the news got out that the TZ had been stolen. Nobody talked about it publicly, but contingency plans were made from Washington D.C. to Tokyo.

  Then Jazzman and the TZ had simply fallen off the map. For two and a half years, the security community had held its collective breath. There was some hope out there that Jazzman had hidden the TZ and gotten himself killed.

  Until last month, when talk of this auction started up. Jazzman was back, and he was hot to sell. The sale was announced during a series of conference calls, during which Jazzman used sophisticated voice distortion software that disguised his gender and his accent during the calls—everything but his word choice.

  And that’s all they had to go on to find Jazzman. His choice of words.

  Worked for Macmillan.

  Macmillan had studied the recording extensively, charting the man’s errors and idiosyncrasies. He mined his word choices and frequency of use. He got to understand Jazzman’s speech habits well enough to be able to recognize him to a 99.5% certainty—if he could hear him speak. Not just a few words; it had to be a real conversation.

  That would be the trick. To get close enough to the dealers to hear conversations.

  Rio, on the other hand, was hunting the old fashioned way. With a very powerful rifle and a list drawn up by Dax, the leader of the Associates.

  “How many of them are staying at this place?”

  “About thirty so far,” Rio said. “Turns out the Shinsurins own this place.”

  “Ah, Shinsurin hospitality. Ideal for the romantic exchange of weaponry.” The Shinsurins were a powerful clan with strong connections to the Chinese business community and the New Tong out of Texas.

  Rio speculated aloud on ways to get close enough to the tables of dealers to record their conversations. The Arabs would be the problem—they weren’t mixing with the other arms dealers.

  Macmillan didn’t think Jazzman was an Arab. English could be Jazzman’s second language, but Arabic wouldn’t be his first. But he let Rio spin on. He was soaking in Rio’s tone, the gestalt of his speech and manner. Rio had lost his wife some years back and he’d turned darker and more nihilistic since. Anybody could see when a man held himself apart from the crowd; Rio was smart enough not to do that. But Macmillan could hear Rio’s remoteness in his language itself. More passive constructions. Fewer content words and third person pronouns. The tone, the delivery, even the unsaid. As if Rio was drifting away. Sometimes when Macmillan listened to him, he had the impulse to clamp a hand onto his friend’s arm, to be his anchor. Macmillan knew what it was like to lose somebody.

  The assassin gave him a steely glance. “I know that look. I know what you’re doing.”

  Macmillan tilted his head.

  “Back off,” Rio said. “I won’t be one of your puzzles.”

  “Fair enough,” Macmillan said.

  The waiter set down two teas and a plate of honey cakes. Rio thanked him, smoothing a stray bit of dark, wavy hair back out of his eyes. “Will the libidinous student body survive the week without their eminent guest lecturer?”

  “They’ll have to parse their tender sentences without my strong, sure hand, I’m afraid,” Macmillan said.

  A smile in Rio’s eyes. He always seemed so amused by the groupies Macmillan got when he was forced to play tousled, self-effacing Doctor Peter Maxwell. Macmillan wasn’t one to sleep with students, though. There were classes to teach, papers to grade, books to write, and severed hands to not think about.

  Macmillan had a lot of sex, but it was always for the job—just him, gathering intelligence, a shining blond Viking with ill intent.

  Macmillan caught sight of various players: The Russian clan leader. The Valdez brothers. Then he spotted Thorne, the notorious Hangman lieutenant. “Thorne’s here,” he mumbled.

  “Party’s really starting now,” Rio mumbled. Things got dangerous when Thorne came around.

  Up on the stage, a boy in a white, short-sleeved shirt set up a microphone stand. Then he set out a stool and pushed two large vases of roses onto either side of it, so that they would frame the singer.

  A minute later, a lone woman with a mass of loose, dark curls walked out onto the stage. She had on a pillbox hat with a net that came down to conceal the top half of her face. Her dress was a classic little black number, worn with knee-high panty hose, pulled up like tall socks, of all things. She lifted a hand in a wave, smiling at the audience, then she adjusted her microphone with deft movements, pale skin glowing in the torchlight.

  His eyes fell to those knee-highs with their crass stripe of too-tight elastic squeezing the flesh just below her knee, the hose itself just a titch darker than her skin.

  Macmillan knew, from his extensive experience undressing the opposite sex, that knee-highs like those had been designed for wearing under 1970s pants suits. You rarely saw them anymore what with today’s fashions, but such out-of-date garment
s were still available in Bangkok. This woman was wearing them wrong, like socks. The effect was dirty and delicious.

  Macmillan couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  He wished she would pull off her hat so he could see her face. And good God, he wanted to hear her speak. Her tone. Her words.

  Macmillan could feel Rio’s eyes on him. He needed to stop staring at the singer. He tore his gaze away and focused on Thorne, who stood up and moved to where the Finns sat. He fought to find something intelligent to say. “Tenacious, painful, annoyingly indestructible. Have to admire a man who lives up to his name.”

  “Thorne?” Rio asked.

  Macmillan nodded. It wasn’t like him to get distracted. He’d been feeling a little feverish in the last day or two, maybe that was it. Or maybe it was the hat, hiding her identity.

  “I would love to hear Thorne speak,” he continued. “Thorne could be Jazzman. Or the Finns. Or Valdez. That whole table is suspect. What I wouldn’t give to be that potted palm.”

  The potted palm stood at the intersection of four tables of arms dealers. They wouldn’t be saying anything sensitive out there, but Macmillan didn’t care. A rambling conversation about the weather would work for his purposes.

  “If we could get a listening device in that potted palm—”

  “Wouldn’t work,” Rio said. “The dealers cluster in different areas every night. And these minimalist tables. Candles and drinks.” Nowhere to hide a microphone, he meant. Putting it underneath would be ineffective in this din.

  “We should have tech look all the same.”

  Up on the stage, a boy brought the singer a guitar. She hooked the strap around her neck and tuned a string or two, then strummed a chord. “How’s it goin’ out there?”

  Macmillan straightened. Rio had thought her unmemorable? Walking wallpaper?

  Nobody answered, but she kept on. “I’m pretty goddamn happy to be here tonight, singing for y’all,” she said.

  The accent. Florida, or maybe lower Alabama, Macmillan thought.

  Again she smiled. “Now my mama always said, Laney, you want to have a friend, you gotta be a friend. And my mama was one of the best friends I ever had, I’ll tell you that right off. A little bit crazy maybe…” She tuned a string, strummed. “But a girl’ll forgive her mama a whole lot of things if she’s just doin’ her best.”