Chapter 22
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Suratan
Garrett Locke hustled outside and stepped onto the top terrace just after dawn. His coffee waited on the small table with a copy of the local newspaper folded next to it.
He was fifty-six years old. Tall. Lean in a way that suggested discipline rather than deprivation.
Silver hair at the temples while the rest was still dark.
High cheekbones. A jaw that photographers envied.
He might have served on nonprofit boards and spoken at commencement ceremonies.
Women noticed him and men deferred to him. As he meant them to do.
He crossed the teak boards to the railing, collected the binoculars resting there, and peered across to the far bank.
His river sentry was dressed as a fisherman, throwing his cast net in slow arcs.
The weighted mesh net spread in the air and dropped flat on the water until he hauled it back.
The rhythmic actions were intended to distract observers.
His real focus was sharply on potential threats arriving from the river at the downstream bend.
Locke noticed the net lay on the water a beat too long before the sentry hauled it in. He had seen something suspicious.
Locke swept the binoculars across the far bank and then followed the bend downstream. A moment later he saw it.
A cargo long-tail boat came around the bend from the south. Thirty feet of narrow wooden hull rode low under a load of fuel drums lashed down with blue tarp. Nothing about the boat seemed odd from Locke’s vantage point.
The long-tail’s oversized car engine howled at the stern. When the boatman opened the throttle, his long-tail could speed fast. But this one was coming in slow, angling straight at Locke’s compound.
No boat had permission to approach Locke’s quay this morning. The sentry knew it. Which was probably what startled him into action.
The sentry dropped his net into his boat, pulled the starter cord, and the outboard roared to life. He opened the throttle and crossed two hundred feet of open water faster than anyone should have expected.
He cut across the long-tail’s path at thirty feet.
Angry shouting rose from the long-tail, the boatman’s voice loudest. He cranked the engine handle at the stern. His boat slewed sideways and lurched with the correction.
One of the crew pitched over the side, arms wheeling, and hit the water with a flat slap Locke heard all the way up on the terrace.
“Somchai!”
The shout carried clearly across the water.
Two men leaned over the gunwale and hauled the crewman aboard before the boat moved past him.
The sentry’s boat remained in place, blocking entrance to the compound’s quay.
The long-tail steadied on its new course and continued downstream. The boatman kept shouting across the water at the fisherman until the bend took him out of sight. The man they’d fished out lay flat on the deck, coughing up river water.
The sentry idled back to his spot on the far bank, killed the engine, picked up his net, and resumed casting, as if nothing had happened.
Locke replaced the binoculars and moved to his chair for his coffee and newspaper while the day was still habitable. Chu would be arriving soon.
By noon the heat would become brutal wet, heavy air pressing against his skin. At this hour the heat and humidity were tolerable. A faint breeze brought the aroma of the river all the way up. His nose wrinkled involuntarily with the familiar elements.
His private compound descended the limestone cliff in four terraces cut into the rock face.
Wide verandas ran the length of every level of his home, supported by teak columns against the white plaster walls.
Steep rooflines pitched to shed monsoon rain beneath deep eaves to keep sweltering sun off the walls.
Dutch traders had built along this river two centuries ago. Locke bought the remote property from a general who’d acquired it from a timber baron who’d built it when teak was king, and the river was the only road.
His home was a natural fortress. There was no danger of invasion at ground level. Every approach on that side was fenced, lit, surveilled, and well defended. The limestone cliff and the jungle eliminated any approach on foot.
The river was the only way in, and, as the morning’s episode proved once again, Locke controlled the river.
The top level was Locke’s sanctuary and stronghold. His private residence included a study and a guest suite he never used.
The second level was Chu’s domain. The server room and operations center occupied the interior, but the terrace outside was open to the river and shaded by the deep eaves. Chu worked with the same view Locke enjoyed.
Below that, the third level was the heart of the compound.
The main house, dining room, kitchen, and a security station where two men watched cameras around the clock.
The veranda on this level was the widest, built for entertaining, with a long teak table where the timber baron had once hosted river traders and the general had hosted politicians.
Locke never used it. He didn’t entertain.
At the bottom of the cliff, the first level held the river dock, a stone quay worn smooth by decades of monsoon floods, a boathouse, and two boats that rocked gently in the current. Flowering vines hung from the rock face above and trailed into the water at the edges of the quay.
Below the compound, the river was two hundred feet wide and the color of milky tea. The water moved slowly here, curving around a bend half a mile downstream where the limestone cliffs gave way to flat farmland.
Upriver, the water narrowed and the current picked up where it ran through a gorge that was impassable by anything larger than a kayak. Locke’s compound sat at the only deep-water point on this stretch.
The stone quay at the bottom of the cliff could handle a thirty-foot boat. The gorge upstream and the military checkpoint downstream ensured that no one reached the compound by water without Locke’s knowledge and consent.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind him. Locke didn’t turn. Only one person was allowed on the top terrace without an invitation.
John Chu reached the veranda carrying a tablet under his arm. Chu was forty-eight now, compact and muscular, quick-moving even when he wasn’t in a hurry. His broad chest and short, thick arms could pin a man to a wall and hold him there for as long as necessary.
“Good morning, Chu.”
There was nothing about Chu’s appearance or behavior that raised concern.
His manner, his voice, and the way he listened suggested he had all the time in the world.
People talked to him the way they’d talk to a bartender or a seatmate on a long flight.
Some of those people were dead now. Some had suffered worse fates.
Chu ran operations from the level below.
The servers, monitors, and encrypted communications that kept Locke’s clients alive and hidden in plain sight.
Chu had been with Locke from the beginning, back when the idea of erasing a human being from every database on earth was something they were figuring out together in a rented room with borrowed equipment.
Locke had the vision. Chu had the discipline to make it work. They’d solved problems nobody else could help with, because nobody else believed they could build their system at scale.
That was fourteen years ago. The rented room was gone.
The borrowed equipment had been replaced by a server farm on the third terrace that could breach law enforcement databases on four continents.
But the thing that held the two men together hadn’t changed.
They had built something no one else had ever built, and each of them knew he couldn’t have done it without the other.
Chu took the chair across from Locke and placed the tablet face down on the table between them. He didn’t open it yet.
“The cargo boat this morning was the third this month that’s tried to come too close to our quay,” Chu said. “All three were legit. The boatmen are well qualified. They’ve worked this stretch of the river many times.”
“You think we’re being probed?” Locke asked, eyebrows raised. “Who would have the balls for that?”
“You’ll be the first to know when I find out.” Chu shrugged. “Next up, the Oshiro matter is closed.”
Locke picked up his coffee. “When did that happen?”
“Three hours ago. Quarter past three, local time in Japan.”
Oshiro was the name the Australian had been living under for six years. Before that he’d been someone else. He’d paid Locke millions to give him a new life. He’d agreed to the usual terms, which he’d decided to ignore and Chu could prove it.
Two weeks ago, Chu’s monitoring system had flagged Oshiro’s forbidden communication to an old girlfriend from his previous life in Singapore. The fool sent a cautious message through an allegedly anonymous platform.
Nothing was anonymous from Chu’s operations center.
The messages between them escalated until they arranged to rekindle their old passion in person. Oshiro traveled to the ski resort on Honshu, four hundred miles from the town in Hokkaido where he lived as if the distance made the transgression safe.
Locke gave the order without a second’s hesitation the moment Chu demonstrated the intercept. The world was Oshiro’s oyster, but he’d chosen to reach back into his old life. That single contact was a thread that could be pulled until everything unraveled.
“Show me.” Locke sought simply to confirm.
Chu played the Japanese news broadcast showing helicopter footage of a steep, snow-covered, mountain with pine trees dark against the white slopes. The camera circled a gondola line running from the base station up the face of the mountain to a peaked ridge.
The cable hung slack between two towers, swaying in the wind like a clothesline with the laundry ripped off.
Below the gap, three gondola cars had slammed a rock outcrop.
Crumpled metal and bright paint were shattered like a child’s toy against granite.
Rescue workers in orange vests picked their way through the debris.
The Japanese anchor’s voice ran at low volume under the footage. A text crawl at the bottom of the screen listed twenty-one dead and nine injured.
Investigators will attribute the brake failure to poor maintenance, which was not true. Chu’s team was directly responsible. The resort’s maintenance record provided the cover story. Nobody would look past it.
Locke watched without expression or comment. The footage was information. The dead were numbers. The numbers confirmed the desired result.
Oblivious now to the unfolding drama on the screen as rescue workers recovered the bodies and lifted them from the wreckage, Locke asked, “Oshiro?”
Chu nodded. “He and the woman purchased lift passes together at eight forty-five. Both are on the casualty list. His confirmed under the Oshiro identity. Hers confirmed by her Singapore passport. She told a colleague she was taking a ski holiday. Alone. No mention of Oshiro or anyone else.”
“What about the colleague?”
“Already handled. Drug overdose,” Chu replied.
“Solid work,” Locke handed the tablet back.
Locke noticed the fisherman on the far bank had cast his net again. The breeze had died and the river was flat and brown and still. A long-tail boat passed upstream, engine hammering, wake spreading in a slow V behind it.
“Something else?” he asked.
Chu opened another file on the tablet. “We had a new inquiry through Zurich last night.”
“Anything promising?”
“Possibly. He’s American and his profile suggests significant exposure. He needs to move quickly.”
Locke cocked his head. “How public is he?”
“He’s very public. His face is in every database we’d need to touch. We’d need to search, destroy, and rebuild press archives, congressional records, state department files, and more. He’s got decades of exposure across all of them.”
“You know a job like that takes ten times the work of a regular client. And if anything surfaces afterward, the scrutiny will be a hundred times worse.”
“At least,” Chu agreed, paused, and added the worst attribute, “and he’s a politician. Do you want his name?”
Locke scowled. “We agreed. No more politicians.”
“I know. But when I ran his background, something came up. Years ago, he worked for Trip Gold.”
Locke went quiet. Gold had been one of their first clients. He followed every rule and never gave them a moment’s trouble. Locke and Chu both liked the old guy. More importantly, they’d trusted him and he’d never given them any reason not to.
Gold had also sent them successful clients here and there. It was in large part because of Gold that they’d become as successful as they were.
“Does this politician know what happened to Gold?” Locke asked.
Chu shrugged. “He knows Gold disappeared. That’s public record.
But he can’t know how or why. He could remember Gold once talking about how people vanish outside of witness protection.
Gold was asking about that a lot before he found us.
Now he’s in trouble himself, and that old conversation could be the only thread he has to pull. ”
“So he has no idea what we do or who we are,” Locke said with a frown. “You’re certain.”
“Can’t be certain. I haven’t talked to the guy yet.
But he found his way to Zurich on his own.
Zurich passed him along because the profile looked viable.
” Chu took a breath. “Zurich doesn’t know about the Gold connection.
Zurich came into our system much later. I found this guy’s connection to Gold when I dug into the background. ”
Locke looked at the river without seeing it. Twenty-one people were dead on a mountain in Japan because the last politician they’d taken on couldn’t follow the rules.
Not that Locke cared about innocent lives. But he did care about opening a Pandora’s box of trouble when he didn’t need to.
“The only reason we’re vetting him is because of Trip Gold,” Locke warned.
“Absolutely.”