“You’re working for Hiro, right? You don’t want to do that. I’ve spent some time with him. He was always open with me. I know what happens to his people.”
“I am working for Hiro,” he says. “I have to have a job, and this is what I do. He saw me fight and he recognized me. It’s not that different from what I was doing before, except I never worked for anyone this important.”
“Hiro’s soldiers never last long.”
“I’ll be the exception.”
“Even if you survive, it’ll mar you. He’ll think it’s funny. You’re a sweet boy, underneath it all. I don’t want to see that happen to you.”
He blinks, forces his eyes open. He can’t believe she’s alive, and that for the first time in his life he has a place and she’s calling him in the middle of the night to try to get him to abandon it, but even worse is that she doesn’t get him. “You don’t understand,” he says, in a voice that’s pure edge, a voice he tries never to use, what he thinks of as his true voice. “Hiro is weak. He drinks. He blunts his despair with television. He needs things. He isn’t pure. I don’t fear him. If he was smart he’d fear me.” As the flare of anger fades he sees that what he said has some truth, but that he’s also doing something stupid to impress her; it saddens him that, despite this knowledge, he won’t be able to stop.
A pause. He notices that his shin is bleeding—he must have barked it on the dresser when he scrambled out of bed. Numbness is part of the training—the nerves there have been dead for years. She says, “Are you sure you’re prepared to take him on?”
“Completely,” he says, though in fact he’s terrified, and the best he can say is he’ll keep trying.
“Then you’re brave, but me? I am afraid to die, and if you don’t help me I’m going to. So what do you say? I’ve got no one else in the world.”
“What do you need?”
“No,” she says. “I shouldn’t have asked. I can’t ruin your gig.”
“What do you need,” he says sharply. Hiro will try to kill him, of course, but that’s probably how it was going anyway, and he half-suspects he’s not meant to come back from the hit on that woman. Maybe his lifetime of training has been leading to this. He thinks of Achilles, Cuchulain, Tyson, Galahad, the joy they’d bring to this crisis, and he’s suddenly keen to get going and let his new life burn up like a dead leaf in a furnace.
“I need you to steal the phone back from Hiro, and right now.”
“His room will be locked.”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“And then?”
“Then get the hell out of Hong Kong, as fast as you can, because he’ll be coming. Best if you walk out—the city isn’t that big, and once you’re in the jungle there’s no good way to track you. There are villages up the coast where you can buy a boat.”
“And then?”
“Then it gets complicated. I’ll tell you on the way.”
He turns on the bedside lamp. The room is opulent, part of a princely life he’s now abandoning. “Take everything you need,” says Akemi. “You aren’t coming back.”
*
He strides down the hotel corridor with the bullpup swaddled in a bathrobe in the crook of his arm. The thick carpet stifles his footsteps—no sound but the metronomic thump of the duffel on his side. (He wadded the suit into the duffel, which can’t be good for it, but at least he’s got it with him.) He’d expected to hear some kind of human noise from behind the doors—whatever sex, snoring, chatter, TV—but there’s no sound at all.
The door to Hiro’s room is the same as all the others. The corridor is empty in both directions; he stands there, listening, awaiting a sign. He slips his hand into the rolled-up bathrobe, finds the grip by touch, and clicks off the safety, absurdly afraid the noise will rouse the hotel.
His hand hovers over the door handle. Akemi had said that she’d make sure it was open, but how, exactly, was she going to do that? He’s known hackers, even a few girl ones, and all as unlike Akemi as could be.
He turns the handle with painstaking care and is suddenly certain, absolutely certain that Hiro is waiting for him inside, lolling in an armchair and dandling a gun; he’ll have forced Akemi to call him, and in fact she’ll be in a room just a few doors away, sloppy drunk, pillows pressed over her ears so she doesn’t have to listen to him die. Game to the end, he’ll fire the bullpup at Hiro’s chest but Hiro will cock an eyebrow as he savors Kern’s dawning realization that he’s shooting blanks.
The door eases open onto darkness, silence.
He shuts the door behind him and stands there in the suite’s living room, heart hammering, wishing he were back in the ring in Kuan Lon. As his eyes adjust he sees faint spectral television light shining under the bedroom door.
The room is a mess. Bottles glint here and there, and there are crumpled clothes on the floor, among them a girl’s lacy underwear. On the coffee table is a bullet standing on end next to a pile of crumbling white powder.
He almost steps on a sticky room service plate, freezes in mid-motion, carefully places his foot on the carpet. He sees the winking green lights of a laptop on the desk, and there, connected to it by a data cable, is the phone. Keeping one hand for the bullpup, he detaches the cable, then puts the phone in his pocket, as easy as that.
A noise behind him and he whirls with the gun at his shoulder, the bathrobe starting to slide, then slumping to the floor. In the doorway to the bedroom is a naked girl, very pretty, staring at him wide-eyed, frozen in the act of reaching down to get her underwear. Her eyes track him as he moves to get a better look behind her, but he just sees a darkness, the glow of TV. She makes a rueful face and shrugs her shoulders infinitesimally to convey that she’s just doing a gig, and has no vested interests here, that as far as she’s concerned he’s quite welcome to kidnap or kill her client, and could she please go home.
He mimes closing the door, which she does with exaggerated care, and then she steps into the living room with her palms raised. Only a little light filters out from under the bedroom door but it’s enough for him to be distracted by her beauty—Hiro must have spared no expense—and she looks like a marble statue, standing there without expression.