The quantum solution, p.23
The Quantum Solution, page 23
They began to walk again, the lights of the marina reflected in their faces and then along the length of their bodies.
“With this woman you must exercise patience,” she said in a lowered voice. “She does not know patience, she does not understand patience. This is your arrow.”
An Binh’s houseboat was moored at the southernmost end of the marina. It was painted a sea blue with faded yellow trim, making it as shabby-looking as all the others in the line. But as Ben was about to see, that timeworn appearance was strictly camouflage. They stepped aboard and went immediately down into the main cabin. Here, everything was neat, trim, and exquisitely rendered, from the silk-covered elm furniture to the paper lanterns that gave off jewel-toned light, to the niches in which were set what looked to him to be a collection of small Chinese imperial yangcai vases that, if real, dated back to the eighteenth century. If they were, indeed, real, Ben thought, there’d be many a museum willing to pay a fortune to acquire them. One thing was for certain, they weren’t from Pier 1.
However, all the miraculously rendered Eastern atmosphere served only to further set off the prime exhibit: the woman tied to a chair in the middle of the room.
Her eyes opened wide when she saw him, and she broke out into a smile of such relief that Ben almost felt sorry for her. Almost.
“Benjamin, thank God. You’ve come to save me from this madwoman.” As she spoke, her knees parted slowly and subtly, exposing the flesh of her inner thighs. And Ben, despite himself, felt a tightening, a certain heat roiling his lower belly. She knew her effect on him. There are ten thousand ways to smile, and, it seemed clear, Zahra knew them all. This one was unmistakable: it semaphored the silent phrase Take me. I’m yours. “And job number one would be calling off your attack dragon.”
“A liar and a racist, to boot.” Ben brought over a chair, positioned it facing the prisoner, seated himself. Behind him he could hear An Binh busying herself in the galley making—ah, yes—jasmine tea, by the scent wafting through the room.
In her extreme distress, Zahra let slip a frown. “Ben,” she whispered, “what is this? What the hell is going on?”
He leaned his torso forward, matched her tone and low volume. “An Binh is making tea. A long, involved process if you do it right. And she will. She’s a master.”
Zahra shook her head. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“Well, that’s the issue, isn’t it?” he said. “Neither do I.”
Her expression hardened, cracks showing in her makeup. “Listen, I’m a high-ranking federal employee, reporting to General Philip Johnstone Reade himself. I’m privy to things you can’t even dream of.” She jerked her torso back and forth without gaining any leeway from the rope with which An Binh had expertly bound her. “And certainly not your little Asian bitch.”
Give An Binh credit, Ben thought, she did not even miss a beat in her brewing routine. How many times, he wondered, had that same slur been hurled at her. Was she so inured it no longer had an effect on her? Never mind, he was aggrieved enough for the both of them. He felt his muscles tense, his fingers curl into fists, but then he heard An Binh’s voice in his mind, “She does not know patience, she does not understand patience. This is your arrow.”
As if to affirm An Binh’s read on her, Zahra twisted back and forth harder, for a longer time. Another person—a farang—would have told her curtly to stop, that her movements would only tighten the bonds because of the manner in which An Binh had affixed them.
“Get me out of here—now!” Her voice rising to the ceiling like soot from an explosion. “That’s an order, Benjamin—a direct order from General Reade.” When he made no comment, her cheeks and throat flamed pink. Her eyes grew wide and she bit back the words on her trembling lips, Why aren’t you answering me? “Don’t you fools understand that George Wilson has died, that I have to view the autopsy, direct the coroner to take the proper MRIs of George’s brain?”
“Speaking of which,” Ben broke his silence, “FBI forensics has been granted permission to exhume the body of Bill Fineman, the administration’s late director of human resources and the fourth member of the golf party, three of whom are dead.”
“Fineman died of a coronary,” Zahra spat. “The results are official, a matter of record.”
“Official but untrue. A new autopsy has been ordered with MRIs of Fineman’s brain.” He cocked his head. “What d’you suppose the new finding will be, hm?”
An Binh appeared holding a black lacquer tray. On it was a Chinese tea service for two. Setting the tray down, she poured a cup of jasmine tea for Ben before helping herself.
Zahra’s upper lip twisted. “Oh, sure, I see how it is, Ben. She’s not only your bitch, she’s your whore.”
Forcing his muscles to relax, Ben took up his tea, sipped it slowly and steadily while staring at Zahra over the rim.
Then she had a fit, throwing herself back and forth until the chair rocked on its left-side legs, then the right-side. Ben made no sound, no attempt to keep the chair from crashing onto its side. Meanwhile, Zahra threw her head back, howling like an animal. “Get me the fuck out of here! Someone will hear me, someone will come or call the cops. You’ll see. And then I’ll have you thrown in prison, sent to Guantánamo, where you’ll rot in hell for the rest of your lives.”
“No one will hear you.” An Binh’s voice was soft as a summer breeze. “No one is coming. No one will miss you.” She smiled sweetly, with only the center of her lips, as only she could. “This is your Guantánamo, Zahra. This is your hell. You’re never getting out of here. Never. Never. Never.”
At last, Ben thought, she had allowed herself to respond to Zahra’s hateful bigotry, but in her own time, her own way. Ben thought it terrifying, as did Zahra judging by the expression of dread on her face. Ben continued to sip his tea, inhaling the aromatic scent, delicate as a butterfly’s wing. Patience, he thought as he slowed his breathing.
Hyperventilating, Zahra began to cry, tears overflowing her eyes, running down her cheeks. She grew very still, bit her lip. Her eyes implored Ben’s. “Please,” she whispered. “Please. I’ll do whatever you want.”
Another tool in her bag of tricks, he thought. Hyperventilating was a well-documented actor’s trick. Usually, hyperventilation was caused by extreme anxiety or panic. But deliberate hyperventilating was another animal altogether, though the results were often the same. It constricted the throat, set up an unvirtuous circle of improper breathing, resulting in, among other symptomology, crying. Ben had seen this trick used before, a number of times; he knew how to differentiate it from its panicky form.
“Ben, please,” she whispered, “I’m begging you. I can’t take this—this confinement. I’m claustrophobic. I feel like I’m about to jump out of my skin.”
Now the grotesque chameleon had turned herself into a helpless damsel in distress, warm, soft, in need of protection and ever so grateful for it.
More tears. “Untie me, at least,” she implored. “Untie me. That’s all I ask.”
He stared at her stonily. The slippery slope of granting one blubbering-induced concession after another.
Her hair, damp with sweat, was plastered to her forehead. The stink of fear was coming off her in suffocating waves. “Where’s your humanity, Ben? Have you no empathy? You must be crazy and numb. Dear God, have pity.”
At his continued silence, she broke down for real, sagging as much as she was able, chin on chest. The real sobs coming from deep down in her belly. He was witness to all the false layers she had built up crumbling one after another. She had come to the bottom of her toolbox and found it empty. She now knew that all her false threats, her deceitful entreaties had fallen on deaf ears. The tricks that had always worked for her, always getting her what she wanted, had lost their effectiveness. Her power was gone.
Bent over as far as she could, she retched, vomited, kept retching even when there was nothing left to bring up save black bile.
Ben stood up. “Time to cut your bonds.”
Her eyes rolled in her head; she drooled pink saliva.
“And then, like a dog that hasn’t learned to obey, push your face into the mess you’ve made on your host’s floor.”
“Oh, God, no!” she shrieked. Looking up at him with bloodshot eyes. “You can’t mean that! Ben, you can’t!”
He stepped behind her.
“No, no, no!” she cried. “Oh, please, no!”
Silent as an owl, An Binh pushed Ben’s chair out of the way, crouched in front of Zahra. Her nostrils didn’t even dilate; she had smelled much worse in the backwaters of Vietnam and China.
So softly, Zahra was obliged to strain at her bonds to hear, “Tell him what he wants to know.”
Zahra blinked. “Then … then will you let me go?”
An Binh stared at her, black eyes unblinking. “Tell him who you really work for.”
“Will you? Free me?” Zahra’s voice quavered despairingly; she already knew she was not going to get an answer. Her eyes filled with disgust, a visible admission of her understanding that there was no other path for her now but acquiescence. Was this how it was going to end, not with a bang but with a whimper out of her own mouth?
38
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
“You’re taking an enormous risk coming with me,” Evan said. Tribe, however, appeared unperturbed. Possibly, Evan thought, he was probing her own level of anxiety, which was growing with every moment he was with her. “If you were anything but my boss I’d forbid it.”
When he laughed—really laughed, in private only, she had discovered—it took over his entire body. “But Evan, you know full well I thrive on taking enormous risks.”
She liked him most when he laughed, primarily because he seemed almost unguarded, most human. He was an extremely closed-off person. Perhaps that was one of the reasons they got along so well. She had no idea what he really thought of her, how deep their friendship went. Possibly it was only skin-deep, but on the other hand he was spending an increasing amount of time with her, participating in her fieldwork. She hadn’t asked for this, but she could think of no way of refusing him. She had tried that once—and only once. His reaction made it crystal clear that in all matters in which he took an interest he would do as he wished. Once he made up his mind, no one, nothing could dissuade him.
She had time to consider these matters, though not for the first time, as they crossed the tarmac of his private landing pad, where a white-and-black custom Airbus ACH160 helicopter hunkered down, a gigantic damselfly reflecting the early-morning sun. The acrid scent of aviation fuel and oil swirled briefly around her until swept away by the wind off the water.
“Where are we going?” Evan asked.
“Playa del Perdido.”
Tribe climbed through the open door to the Airbus, and she followed. Inside the doorway, she stopped, stunned. The main cabin just behind the pilot’s two-seat cockpit looked like first-class in a transpacific flight or a lounge in a high-end hotel: six wide leather-covered seats connected by sections wide enough to store laptops, pads, pens and pencils, along with pairs of cup holders. The middle and last rows were occupied by four men whom she did not recognize but who could only be bodyguards, judging by the semiautomatic weapons lying diagonally across their laps. Each one had a small chunky case on the floor between his boots. Some seemed indifferent, others averted their gaze from her battered face.
“Damn,” she husked.
“It’s on the other side of the island,” Tribe continued, as if she hadn’t uttered a sound, as if the guards were invisible to him, and very possibly they were; she imagined he’d been living with such people most of his adult life. “We’ll be flying over the volcano. You’ll like that—it’s still seething from the eruption in 2021.”
He was already seated next to the pilot, observing every detail of the preflight check.
“Okay, I give up,” she said, standing behind him, “what’s in Playa del Perdido?”
“Our friend.”
Tribe made a subtle hand gesture toward the pilot only she could see. Her pulse began to race. She knew “our friend” meant Lyudmila. He didn’t want her name mentioned in hearing distance of the pilot.
The engine started up and the rotors began to cleave the air above their heads. Apparently satisfied, Tribe rose, went past her to one of the seats in the first row of the main cabin. Evan followed, sat beside him. The noise rose and vibrations began, but in this luxury aircraft both were dampened considerably. Nevertheless, he pointed to a pair of headsets with boom mics. As soon as they had them fitted correctly, she heard Tribe’s voice clear and strong in her ear. The headsets must be noise-canceling, she thought.
“We’re on a closed circuit,” he was saying. “No one can overhear us.”
They rose into the air, the Airbus turning ninety degrees, and headed out across the island.
“I met Lyudmila eleven or twelve years ago. At that time I was making frequent trips to Moscow. Like other venture capitalists I wanted to take advantage of Russia’s low prices and their not-quite-bright-enough oligarchs.”
“They were smart enough to amass incredible fortunes,” Evan interjected.
“But they weren’t smart,” Tribe said. “Clever, yes. Lucky, even more so. But smart, no. That I found out firsthand. I was on the verge of making extremely advantageous deals with two of them when I was invited to a private party—oligarchs and high-ranking government officials only. Of course there were FSB officers present. They were always present, circling like vultures.
“Anyway, that night I met Lyudmila. From the start I was wary of her. First, she was an FSB major. Second, she sought me out, which worried me greatly. Reluctantly, I agreed to have coffee with her the next day. After that was settled, she disappeared and I didn’t see her the rest of the night.
“The next day I met her at a café, the location of which surprised me. It was outside the ring road, meaning off the beaten path. She had told me in detail the route I should use to get there, using only public transportation. ‘I’ll take care of the rest’ was the last thing she said to me before she vanished into the crowd.”
“By which she meant surveillance.”
“Yes. I don’t have to tell you that I was surveilled almost all the time I was in Moscow. But she was a major in the FSB. If she wanted me alone, I had faith there would be no other agents around when we met.”
“So you met her for coffee.”
“Vodka-laced coffee was more like it.”
Evan smiled as she nodded. “Yes. It was Lyudmila who taught me to love good vodka.” She shifted in her seat. “So what did she want?”
“You must know what she wanted, Evan. She wanted an alliance.”
Evan felt a little shock go through her. “Even then she was planning to defect.”
“She told me how she had been treated ever since she joined the FSB, how the men around her resented her intelligence, her ability to get any job done, her fearlessness in the field and ruthlessness in HQ. The higher in rank she rose the more resentment she felt, the more harassment she received—anonymously, of course. But she knew who the perpetrators were—that, or she found out. Her punishment was swift and final.”
“Her superiors didn’t stop her—they didn’t object?”
“They found her far too entertaining, she told me. Even then she was bitter about their callousness, their contempt for human life.”
“So you agreed. You formed an alliance with her.”
“I’ve never regretted it.”
“And you had an affair,” Evan said. “That would be Lyudmila’s way of sealing an alliance with someone like you.”
“Someone like me?”
“Smart, rich, handsome. Charismatic.”
“Is that what you think of me?” He laughed. “My mother used to tell anyone who would listen that I was incapable of a long-term relationship. ‘He’s easy to like,’ she said, ‘impossible to be with.’”
“So nothing happened.”
“Well, she tried,” Tribe admitted. “But my mother was right—that was never going to work for me. We did kiss once and that was electric enough for me to be sure I was doing the right thing by keeping our alliance all business. Your brain shuts down during sex and that can be dangerous for someone like me.”
Another reason, Evan thought, why he’s leery of anyone getting too close to him. But then here I am, closer to him than anyone else. Was there meaning in that? She didn’t know.
“Lyudmila’s a complicated person—more than most,” he went on. “But I expect you already know that.”
“She’s a good friend,” Evan replied. “Though there were times she put me in danger I think it was—at least partially—to force me to become better under fire.” She shrugged. “In any case, we’ve saved each other’s lives.”
“In the trenches of war,” Tribe said, as if he were quoting a military leader, “the closest bonds are formed. Brothers in extremis.”
“Sisters, too.” It was a tacit admonishment and he knew it.
He nodded. “So your friendship with Lyudmila is extraordinary, isn’t it; she’s someone with whom you share the exhilaration of surviving what might have been your deaths.”
“Exhilaration. I never think of it that way.”
He looked at her. “Exhilaration counters fear. In the field aren’t you ever frightened?”
“That’s why I drink vodka.” That came out from somewhere deep inside her. Had it even been a conscious thought? she wondered. “You learn never to talk about your fear.”
“Wouldn’t that be helpful—to get it out.”
A thin smile on Evan’s face, an element of ruefulness behind it. “You mean psychologically. Well, that may be true in civilian life, talking out your fears. But I inhabit the shadow world outside of society where fear is contagious, especially in the field. You learn to stopper that fear, stuff it into the bottom of the vodka bottle.”
“Are you an alcoholic?” he asked, slightly alarmed. “That wasn’t in your file.”
