“Yes. That’s exactly what it’s like.”
“But then we’ll have protected your sister. Or at least found out what happened to her. But we won’t have done anything to protect the other girls my brother has victimized. The victims yet to come.”
For the second time that afternoon, Livia felt she’d been hit by a judo throw she hadn’t seen coming.
“So,” MacKinnon continued. “What are we going to do to protect them?”
Livia said nothing.
“I’ll help you,” MacKinnon said. “You can tell my brother we’re working together. Tell him we’ll both testify, go to the media, whatever. And if he thinks you’re exaggerating, or bluffing, or making the whole thing up, and he calls me, I swear to you I will back up everything you say.”
Livia said nothing.
“But in exchange for that, you can’t leave him to hurt anyone else the way he and Fred hurt us. You can’t.”
Despite herself, Livia was impressed. She had created so many boxes for suspects in the interrogation room. It was disconcerting to experience one from the suspect’s perspective.
Not that it mattered. She had already known she wasn’t going to just walk away after bracing Lone. If she’d been forced to choose between finding out about Nason and letting Lone live, there was no question she would have chosen the former. But she didn’t expect to have to make that choice. She would squeeze everything possible out of him. And as soon as she was convinced he had nothing more to offer, she would leave him, the way she had left his sick brother. The way she had left Weed Tyler.
But she hadn’t exactly planned on discussing any of this with MacKinnon, either. She realized again her moves were off. She wasn’t as in control as she usually was, she wasn’t as aware of what was happening at the periphery of the game. The Lone girls’ tragedy… it was just too close to hers and Nason’s.
All that said, she wasn’t worried the woman would be any kind of risk. MacKinnon was too motivated to keep her secrets. Protect her family. Continue to live the life she had painstakingly created for herself. Beyond which, of course, she wanted her brother dead. It was about the last thing she would object to, or go to the police about.
“It isn’t fair,” MacKinnon said. “They victimize us in secret, and then the only way we’re allowed to fight back is to be raped again in public? By scandalmongers, by the tabloid press, by gawkers rubbernecking at every disgusting detail of what they did to us against our will?”
Livia sighed. The woman had great instincts. But she hadn’t yet learned not to sell past the close.
MacKinnon held out her hand. “Do we have an understanding?”
Livia hesitated. Then reached out.
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.
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 façades 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.