They shook.
MacKinnon held on to her hand. “And this is just a request. It’s not a quid pro quo. Not a demand. No more than a favor, really. But . . .”
She leaned closer and gripped Livia’s hand harder.
“You make him suffer,” she whispered. “For us. For Ophelia. For Nason. You make him fucking suffer.”
Livia nodded and withdrew her hand. It wasn’t something she could promise, she knew.
But she wasn’t going to rule it out, either.
58—NOW
Less than thirty-six hours later, Livia was in Bangkok.
She’d flown back to Seattle from San Francisco, emailed the people at the Krav Maga academy to tell them she wouldn’t be able to teach for the next few days, and called Donna to tell her the same—a few days for a personal matter. She’d never before asked for personal time, and was less concerned that the request would cause an administrative problem than that it might attract suspicion. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything other than Nason.
She didn’t bring a gun. She didn’t have time to figure out what regulations would govern US law enforcement trying to bring firearms into Thailand, and even if it had been possible, she didn’t want the attention. Nor did she bring the Vaari, which was big and intimidating, and therefore might raise eyebrows if someone searched her bag at customs. She decided instead on a Boker Plus Subcompact—about four inches extended, two folded. Small enough to clip to a bra. Sharp enough to cut to the bone. And the kind of thing a careful female tourist might be expected to carry on holiday. She considered what she might be up against, and decided to bring a pen-sized pepper spray, too. Not police issue, but one of the quality civilian versions. And one last item—a six-inch, injection-molded nylon Kubotan impact weapon, about the size of a large marker pen. Unlikely any of it would be found in a checked bag. If it were, she’d deal with it. On balance, the risk felt worth taking. She made reservations online, packed a bag, grabbed her passport, and caught a post-midnight flight through Taipei, landing at Suvarnabhumi Airport a little before noon local time.
Passing through the airport was strange. Seeing so many Thais, hearing the language, smelling the food. Even as a child, she’d never felt Thai—she had always been hill tribe, Lahu. And now she was American. Even the rudimentary Thai she’d learned as a child was mostly gone. So why was being here making her feel so . . . what, mournful? Nostalgic? She wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, she hadn’t been prepared for it.
She caught a cab to her hotel—the Anantara Riverside Resort. She’d found it online, and it seemed like the kind of place a “tourist” like her might choose. Moderately priced; lots of pools and bars and restaurants; close to the Grand Palace and other attractions. And big enough to offer a comfortable degree of anonymity. She’d taken a course with Narcotics, where one of the instructors, a CIA veteran, explained that you had to live your cover. Not just because the cover might get probed, and so needed to have as much depth and breadth as reasonably possible, but because the more you lived your cover, the more you would feel it, and the more you felt it, the more you would look it. “If you want to fool, you have to feel,” was how he put it. And while there was only so much she could do on such short notice to prepare and inhabit a cover, having the right hotel reservation when she arrived was a no-brainer.
The cab ride took over an hour. It wasn’t far, but the roads were colossally jammed—honking cars, gear-grinding trucks, buzzing tuk-tuks, motor scooters with engines that sounded like chainsaws and with two, three, sometimes even four people perched on them. Even on a full-sized motorcycle in America, you never saw more than a single passenger, and witnessing how much these people could do with so little made Livia feel a pang of remembrance for her childhood in the forest.