Butterfly Stomp Waltz

Chapter 34

34

In a big wicker chair with a really thick cushion in the corner of the safe house’s dining room I dive into the data we extracted from Noah’s estate, and find myself forced to agree with Rob. Several messages mention Deke’s private cottage in “the compound.” One says that the locals had “assigned the ever-willing and very flexible Miss Xi to attend to Eckhart’s most personal requirements.”

Reading that, I throw myself out of the lopsided chair and march out to the safe house’s tiny courtyard. It takes an hour of karate kata, each strike thrown brutally, before the red rage recedes enough that I can return to work.

Deke’s leaked details on thirty-nine freelance specialists. Some, like Pillock and Daft, he’s given safe house locations and phone numbers and the names of their Parisian haunts. Others only have a name and a contact method.

Bradley’s not on the list. Or Jacka.

Weirdly, neither is Rob. Deke knows a lot about Rob, down to the computer codes to hook into Rob’s private virtual network. There’s nothing on the list, though.

I’m not on the list.

Because I have a whole separate file.

Deke hasn’t just spilled everything about me professionally.

He’s spilled everything.

Likes and dislikes. Favorite colors and outfits. Where I get knots in my back, and how I like them massaged out.

How to escalate that massage into more than a massage, and what I like him to do then.

With very… precise details.

My face burns with humiliation. My heart pounds. I want to set something on fire, but if I quit now I’ll never return.

My dad’s address.

And at the very bottom—my mom’s address.

Mom split when I was ten. If she’d stuck around, she would have lost the few teeth she had left—unless Dad broke her neck first.

I’d looked for Mom. I’d searched, so I could either hug her or slap her. Probably both.

How had Deke found her?

And how long had Deke been holding that secret?

How long had he been waiting to use my mom against me?

Kata aren’t enough this time. I grab Bradley for some flat-out sparring. At least, it’s flat-out for me. Bradley sidesteps almost every strike, and I’m pretty sure she permits me the blows I do land.

Bradley doesn’t ask why.

She’s too professional to not read everything.

Dammit.

It’s another hour and a half until I can bow out. Bradley thanks me for the warm-up. I take a shower and drag myself back to work.

Other messages hint that Noah is on his way to, or already in, this Myanmar compound. Deke’s enough reason for me to go to Myanmar. But if Noah’s there, if I can put Noah down like the maniac he is, that’s gravy.

The sensible flight from Lisbon to Myanmar is Emirates Air, with layovers in Dubai and Singapore. Rob and Bradley get the easy route, but I’m not visiting the United Arab Emirates any time soon—I have three different death warrants there, under three different names. Seems the combination of theocratic royalty and ridiculous wealth brings out my worst nature. And the UAE has some of the best facial recognition software in the world. A false mustache and a haircut won’t do.

I wind up with Air France from Lisbon to Paris, with only a one-hour layover to catch a bus to the hub and another bus to the other terminal. Charles de Galle airport has all the simplicity and elegance of five gallons of boiling spaghetti. Fortunately, the only luggage I have is this flimsy plastic satchel with my tablet and the rest of the clothes Bradley bought.

The stupidly long flight to Singapore, wedged in a middle seat between this sweaty chubby Chinese guy who desperately needs fresh deodorant and this Australian chick drinking enough to be noxious but not enough to pass out, gives me time to think. Time I rather wish I didn’t have.

I love—loved—Deke. He’d saved me when my life fell apart. He’d helped me claim a new life. We’d been through too much to not trust each other completely.

But somehow, Noah had turned Deke.

When? When could this have happened?

How long had he been lying to me?

How much money does it take to destroy love?

I guess the answer is, “Little enough that Noah could write the check.”

I felt desperate to believe that Deke was imprisoned. That he’d been captured, and that they were opening his brain with drugs or torture or wires to the brain. But nothing in the emails even implied that. And Noah’s people had no problems putting appalling things in email. They had lost twenty people testing a possible new antibiotic derived from a newly discovered Tanzanian fungus. Another message mentioned that the compound had acquired another dozen subjects for a “head transplant research program” and that the surgeons were hopeful to achieve at least one success… this time.

Head transplants. How much would Noah charge one of his plutocrat friends for a whole new body? Someone young and healthy? The answer was almost certainly “less than some human monsters would pay.”

Somehow, that doesn’t anger me as much as Deke’s betrayal.

I sit with the tablet on my lap, utterly unable to concentrate on the latest batch of comics. My headphones and Screaming Females on shuffle block out the airplane’s roar and the hundreds of conversations around me. My legs are so long that I’m pretty much sitting diagonally, pressed up against the giggling Aussie woman, knees meeting the aromatic Chinese guy’s. He keeps trying to get me too look at his face, but I avoid meeting his eye. Right now, my stare can knock someone dead.

Plus, I’m pretty sure that Air France pumps first class flatulence back to steerage. Because they can.

Eventually, I doze.

Singapore’s airport makes more sense than Paris’ Charles de Galle, but I have about six hours to go half a mile. Singapore’s a transit hub, with crowds constantly flowing through the airport, so rather than risk being recognized I plop down a credit card for five hours of private silence in a tiny hotel room. The bed is as comfortable as a rocky beach and the shower hardly wider than my shoulders, but the air doesn’t have even a trace of jet fuel or exhaust, so it’s heavenly. My Jetstar Asia flight for the last leg is overbooked, and my legs still haven’t forgiven me for the cramped flight from Paris, so I suck it up and buy the first class upgrade. One glare convinces the rich jackass next to me that he’d like to keep his hands to himself, and my knotted leg muscles gradually relax.

Thirty-three hours after leaving Lisbon, a smiling East Asian woman in a crisp uniform stamps my passport and welcomes me to Myanmar’s capital, Naypyidaw.