BOOK THREE
HUMUS
SIXTEEN
I hear voices coming from the hotel room as I exit the stairwell. I pick out Mere's voice easily enough, and after listening for a moment, I recognize the other voice. I fumble with the door handle, pretending that I'm having trouble with the electronic key, and by the time I figure it out, all sound from inside the room has stopped. I enter the room, casually looking around as I shut the door behind me. She is sitting in one of the chairs and the bathroom door is nearly closed.
“Don't slip in the dark,” I call out to Ralph as I walk by the bathroom.
Mere's wearing comfortable jeans and a gray turtleneck sweater, made from the same grade of wool as the sweater she bought me. She's already started stretching the arms over her hands. Her hair is pulled back into a loose pony tail, and her eyes are bright—she's been crying, but not recently, and there are other emotions that have taken precedence.
“I have very good hearing,” I remind her as Ralph catches his foot on the edge of the bathtub and nearly pulls the shower curtain off its rings.
“I know,” she sighs. “He… I don't know what he was thinking.”
Ralph comes out of the bathroom, and when he nervously steps past me, I can smell bourbon on his breath.
“I only made travel arrangements for two,” I say.
“Where are we going?” Mere asks.
I glance at Ralph. “Why don't we start with why he's here.”
“You told me to call him.”
“Call, yes. Invite him over for a drink, no.”
“We're not drinking,” Ralph says. “Not… not now,” he amends when I look at him again.
“What sort of travel arrangements?” Mere wants to know.
“Mere,” I say patiently. “There's a Need to Know conversation we need to have. Is Ralph an asset or a liability?”
“Jesus Christ.” Ralph backs away from me, and when the bed hits him on the back of the legs, he sits down heavily. “You did do it.”
“Do what?” Mere demands.
“He set the fire. Oh, shit. The guys at the hospital. What did you do there?”
Ralph's had too much time to speculate and he's letting his ideas get the better of him. This meeting is going sideways, and it needs to get back on track. I move, slapping Ralph down on the bed and putting my hand over his mouth. He squirms for a second and I apply pressure. He quiets down, his eyes bulging with fear. Mere is half-out of her chair and I stop her with a word. “Don't.”
She glares at me, not entirely cowed but smart enough to not make any sudden movement that I might interpret as threatening.
“Do you remember the boat?” I say. “Do you remember what I said when I held you?” She nods and I don't have to say anything more. “All of that still applies. More so, perhaps, because I am under a bit of stress right now. Do you understand?”
She nods again.
“Everything is either an asset or a liability,” I explain, partially for Ralph's sake. “You want to be an asset.”
“I know,” she says quietly.
“Eden Park was not my doing, nor was it my responsibility. Why?” She doesn't answer at first and I repeat the last word. Firmly.
“Because you had retrieved your asset,” she snaps, “and no one there was a liability.”
“Correct.”
Ralph starts to squirm under my hand, and judging from the amount of white I'm seeing of his eyes, his panic is getting the better of him.
“That's… You're a cold-hearted bastard,” she interjects.
I bare my teeth at her. “I'm a soldier of Arcadia,” I remind her.
She stares at me for a long time, still furious with me, but when I do nothing but wait for her to say something, she finally sets aside her outrage and thinks about what I just said. And why I am waiting. “He's an asset,” she says, nodding toward Ralph.
I take my hand away; gasping and coughing, Ralph scuttles back on the bed until he runs into the headboard; even then, he tries to press himself as far away from me as possible. “F*ck, f*ck, f*ck,” he says when he can breathe more readily. “What the f*ck is going on?”
Mere sits down again and her shoulders slump as she leans back against the seat. “You heard him,” she says. “He's a soldier. He follows orders.” The last word comes out dripping with venom.
“Whose?”
Mere lets loose with a brittle laugh, and Ralph flinches at the sound.
“I don't understand,” he whines. “I really don't. This… this is weird, and I don't know what is going on between you two, but it isn't going to be …”
“Safe?” She shakes her head. “No, it probably isn't going to be. For any of us. So, the question becomes: What do you want, Ralph?”
“What… what do you mean?”
“You want in on this story or not?”
“What story?”
She smiles at him, a predatory curl of her lips. “How much do you know right now? Maybe you can slip some speculation past your boss, but you don't have much and Secutores is going to disappear. Unless you start making wild accusations and then, well, they've set two fires already, right? I don't think they'll have any problem starting a third.”
“What about him?” His eyes dart toward me. “What did he say he was? A soldier of what?”
“He's mine,” she says flatly. “But you can have the Liberty and Eden Park.”
He licks his lips carefully, his eyes darting back and forth between us. “And…?” His fear is gone, replaced by an expression not unlike the one I had seen on Mere's face not a few minutes ago. Animal cunning. Looking for an angle.
“Anything more will make you a target,” she says. When that doesn't make him blink, she continues. “I'll need someone I can trust for research—quiet research, without attracting attention.”
“I'm a staff journalist with the largest independent Australian newspaper,” he argues. He sits up straighter as his spine starts to come back. “I'm not an intern.”
“Write whatever you want based on any research you do,” she says. “But I don't have to tell you why I want things or what my conclusions are.”
“Fair enough,” he agrees.
“You play games with me, and I cut you off,” she says. “You tell anyone anything that puts us in danger and—”
“Who would I tell?” he interjects. “I mean, willingly. Right? I know how this works. I'll keep my mouth shut.”
“What if Secutores comes looking for you?” I ask.
He takes the question well. “I don't know,” he says.
“Tell them everything,” I say. “If it comes to torture, don't be a martyr. They'll probably know more than you anyway.”
“Oh, that's reassuring. So they'll just be ripping out my fingernails and tasing my testicles because they're that sort of psycho perverts?”
“Well, they certainly won't be doing it because they think it'll make me come running to your rescue.”
“Yeah.” He glances down at his hands, which are balled up into fists in his lap. “I kind of figured that out already.”
“What's it going to be, Ralph?” Mere asks again.
He exhales heavily and his fists tighten again. “Nnnnn,” he starts, strangling a single letter. “F*ck it. I'm in.”
“Okay,” she says. “Then it's time for you to go.”
“What?” He stares at her, looking as if she had just ripped his heart out and stomped on it.
“Silas says we're leaving,” she says. “Do you really want to know where we're going?”
“Oh, right. Right.” He nods, caught between elation and disappointment. “Right. I don't even want to know.” He pushes away from the headboard and gets off the bed. “Okay, I'm gone. Yeah, I can be gone.” He gives me a wide birth, but stops before he reaches the bathroom. “I can work with Secutores setting the fire. I can stir the pot a bit on that. I might even be able to get some speculation going about Kyodo Kujira, but I need something else. Something from the big picture.”
Mere nods, and I step over to the dresser/armoire unit and pull out the bottom drawer. I grab the CO2 pistol and offer it, butt first, to Ralph.
“What is it?” he asks, reaching for it as if it might bite him.
“One of the Secutores agents was carrying it.”
“Which one?”
“Does it matter?”
He offers me a wry grin as he plucks the gun from my hand. “No,” he says.
“Be careful,” Mere says. “Whoever supplied that to Secutores isn't going to be very happy if they find out you have it.”
“Yeah,” Ralph nods. “I know. He hefts the gun and looks at both of us in turn. “Thanks,” he says. “Thanks for the chance, and, uh, thanks for not killing me.” The last is directed at me.
“No problem,” I say.
“Shit,” he says, more to himself than to us, and with that, he darts for the exit, his sense of self-preservation finally getting through to the motion control centers of his brain.
“So,” Mere says after the door has shut behind Ralph. “Where are we going?”
“Easter Island,” I tell her.
“And how are we getting there? I don't have any identification. I can't get on a plane.”
I reach into the back pocket of my pants and produce the fruit of my recent labors. Two passports. “You get to be Madame Moreau, from France.”
“I do?”
“I'm your other half, but I'm local—from one of the Marquesas Islands, not far from Tahiti. We met there four years ago. You were part of our archeological tour group. I was your local guide. We feel in love, and we're finally taking our honeymoon. Easter Island for a week and then on to South America. Maybe we'll see the Nazca Lines.”
“Seriously?”
“Well, I had to book a flight that would match our story.”
“No, the passports. You got them in what? Three hours?”
“I had to use what the guy had in stock.”
“In stock? You make it sound like you went to a local head shop or something.” She slides off the bed and pads over to investigate the folio I offer her. “Where did you get this picture?”
“Off the Internet. I think it's from some Christmas party you attended a few years ago. In Boston. At the mayor's estate. You wore a green—” I bite my tongue. A green dress. It had matched her eyes.
She looks at the picture for a moment, one hand idly straying to the scar on her throat. “I looked good that night, didn't I?” she says softly.
“Our flight leaves in two hours,” I say gruffly, changing the topic. But it's too late; she's already caught me.
She already knows I was watching her. That's how I knew to step in when Kirkov went crazy, but what she's never known is how long I'd been watching her.
The incident with Kirkov happened in March. Three months after the Christmas party where she wore the green dress.
“I get that it's a romantic destination for a pair of newlywed archeology nuts, but why are we going there?” she asks, letting the topic drift happen. “You and I.” She shakes her passport at me. “Not these two.”
“There's a spa on the island. The soil of Rapa Nui has particular qualities not found anywhere else.”
“A spa?” Her eyebrows pull together. “My god, I thought I dreamed you saying that. A spa. With native children who will massage my feet? Are you serious?” She gestures toward the door through which Ralph had just left. “You broke me out of an insane asylum, which was burned down hours after we left.” She hits me on the chest with her passport. “And we're not done talking about that, by the way.”
“I know,” I acknowledge.
“You've just scared the shit out of a local contact—and me too, by the way. And if you're halfway not kidding with what you said, then we've got a private security company after us who seem to think they're not beholden to local laws. Or international ones, for that matter. Not to mention whoever hired them. All this, and you want to take me to a f*cking spa?”
“An Arcadian spa.”
“Oh,” she blinks.
I tap her passport. “Freshen up, Madame Moreau. We're leaving in twenty minutes.”