As they drove, she glanced back and forth through the left and right windows, taking in as much as she could. Had the city always been so dense, so teeming? She had never been here, and had only caught glimpses as they passed through during that nightmare trip in the white van. But no, there couldn’t have been this kind of noise back then, and construction, and energy. There was so much money now. She could see it at work in the high-rises sprouting everywhere like freakish mushrooms, the glitzy fa?ades of shopping malls, the smartly dressed women carrying fancy bags. But there was so much poverty, too—beggars, children who looked like they lived on the street, people practically in rags. What had William Gibson said? The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed. That’s what money felt like in Bangkok. It existed. But only for a few.
She was surprised at how many people asked if she was Thai—the customs officer at the airport, the cab driver, the hotel receptionist. She didn’t think she looked Thai. Not even Lahu. She didn’t feel it, not anymore. But there must have been some vestige. She wasn’t sure what that meant. Or how she felt about it.
The room was pleasant and functional. Not that it mattered. All she needed was a bed. She’d been too keyed up to sleep on the plane, and had spent most of the trip reading a couple guidebooks she’d bought at the airport, trying to learn as much as possible about the city, gaming out approaches, gambits, when/then scenarios. She needed to know the layout, the clothes, the customs. She needed to be able to move without disturbing what she moved through. In America, that had become easy. In this new place, it was going to be a challenge.
She bolted the door, showered, dried off, and lay down. Her mind was still racing, but she’d been awake for over forty-eight hours and her mind quickly lost to her body. Her sleep was black and empty at first, but then there was an awful dream where she had found Nason but there was something wrong with her—she was dead, but somehow Livia had brought her back to life, and Nason was saying, “Why, Labee? Why?”
She woke with a groan and sat up, looking groggily at the bedside clock. She’d been asleep for almost four hours. It was already evening.
She rubbed her eyes and tried to shake off the dream. She’d had many like it when she was a teenager, but the last one had been a long time ago.
She’d left the air-conditioning on too strong a setting, and the room was cold. She shivered. What was she doing here? How could she get away with this? A United States senator? What was she thinking?
She realized that something about being in Thailand, about facing the past, was making her feel like that long-ago little girl. She’d thought the girl was gone, that to the extent the girl lived on at all, it was only as a shadow, a distant memory.
But no, she’d been wrong. That little girl was still here.
And she was scared.
Come on, Livia. We can do this.
Because she wasn’t that little girl anymore. That little girl had grown into a champion wrestler and judoka. A self-defense teacher. A cop. A killer. A dragon. And it wasn’t the girl who was going to face Ezra Lone. It was what the girl had become.
No. That was the wrong way to put it.
Ezra Lone was going to face her.
59—NOW
She showered again to clear her head, then got into character. A lot of makeup. Oversized, horn-rimmed eyeglasses. A short black skirt. A cream-colored blouse with a black bra underneath. Flats, because while heels would have been a little more in keeping, there were some tactical concessions she just couldn’t make. And a brown Coach handbag with no labels. The Boker was clipped to her bra in front of her left armpit, easily accessible from under the blouse with a right-hand draw. Just in case.
She took the elevator to the lobby and headed out to the street. She was surprised at how oppressive she found the evening heat and humidity. She’d really gotten used to the glorious weather in San Jose, and then to the chill and the damp of Seattle. She wasn’t acclimated to the tropics anymore. And yet, at the same time, it felt so familiar, like fragments of a dream she’d forgotten upon waking.
She took the modified Gossamer out of her purse and used it to locate Lone’s cell phone. Having been trained on the device, she knew it would work anywhere in the world, but still she was irrationally afraid that being abroad would somehow screw up its functioning. There were other possibilities, of course, involving calling for Senator Lone at various high-end hotels, or having Becky Lone contact his office on a pretext . . . that sort of thing. But the Gossamer was the surest, lowest-profile, most accurate way of pinpointing his exact location, right down to the room.