Kingmaker Read online

  “Why not? Ain’t like he’s using them.”

  “All right, everyone. Listen up. We got four buildings to cover. Scarberry, Hash, I want you to take the western structure. Carbone and O’Leary, you take the one behind it. Me and Collins will start with this guy, then do the main building. Whoever finishes last gets the fourth building while everyone else gets to drink what’s in that cooler we brought. Got it?”

  There was a chorus of acknowledgments, followed by the crunch of boots dispersing. Alexei heard the top of a Zippo flick open, a plasma torch ignite, and then a metallic snap. The stiff weave of his suit lifted the armor above his torso, leaving a shallow cavity into which his chest slowly rose and fell as he took measured, invisible breaths.

  “You scan this guy yet?”

  Alexei could hear a handheld electric potential sensor being triggered. “He’s cooked. Man, that’s a nice fucking helmet he’s got on.”

  Alexei heard a boot next to his head, then felt his visor get shoved up.

  “Holy shit, this ain’t no Hajji!”

  “It most certainly is not.”

  “Fucking mercenaries.”

  “What do you mean fucking mercenaries? What do you think you are?”

  “I’m a military contractor. There’s a difference.”

  “And what difference is that?”

  “The difference is he’s dead and I ain’t, which means I get to make the rules.”

  “You can make all the rules you want, just do it while you’re helping me move this guy.”

  “Hold on. He ain’t even bleeding. Let me get his helmet first.”

  Alexei felt fingers working at the strap under his chin.

  “Leave the helmet where it is, Collins.”

  “Come on, man. That’s a nice fucking helmet. Ain’t like he needs it anymore.”

  “I said leave it. Take the bike if you want it, but we’re here to collect these bodies, not rob them.”

  “How can you rob someone who’s dead? That’s just plain ignorant.”

  “By taking shit that doesn’t belong to you, that’s how. Now I’m done fucking around, Collins. I said no.”

  A moment passed and then Alexei’s visor got slapped back down.

  “Fine. Fuck it. Helmets are for pussies, anyways.”

  “Relax. It’s not like you got much to protect. Come on. Let’s get this done.”

  Alexei felt himself being lifted from the ankles and armpits, carried a short distance, and then lowered.

  “Gently now.”

  “Man, how come you’re always sticking up for these ragheads?”

  “He isn’t a raghead. You saw him. He’s about as white as O’Leary’s ass.”

  “Whatever. Anyone who comes out here and takes up arms against the United States is a raghead in my book, and you’re the only one I know who gives a fuck about what happens to every one of these camel-humping sons-a-bitches. That what they teach you in officer school? You too brainwashed to break the rules every now and then?”

  “It’s not because I’m an officer, and it’s not because I’m afraid to break the rules.”

  “Then what is it? What’s wrong with grabbing a helmet, or a gold tooth, or a little jewelry every now and then? Ain’t like they’re going to miss any of it.”

  “It’s called respect, Collins. Not that you’d know anything about that.”

  “Respect? Wait a second. You do know that we’re sending these bodies out for DECOP, right? You do know what Deceased Enemy Combatant Processing is, don’t you? I’m pretty sure that’s about the farthest thing from respect there is.”

  “Maybe, but that’s not my call. What is my call is how they get treated before they get sent out. It may not be much, but it’s something.”

  “Yeah, it’s something, all right.”

  “Let me ask you something, Collins. You think you’re always going to be on the winning side of this fight?”

  “I damn sure intend to be.”

  “You might intend to be, but what we want and what we get are two very different things, aren’t they? When your number’s up, you want someone pulling your teeth out of your skull with some rusty old pair of pliers, or cutting off your ear and wearing it on a necklace as a souvenir, or dragging your bare-ass body through the streets while everyone spits and pisses on your corpse?”

  “They’ll do all that shit anyway. It don’t matter what we do.”

  “Maybe, but that’s not the point. It isn’t about who they are—it’s about who we are. They might be our enemy, but that doesn’t mean we have to hate them. We all got our fights to fight in this world.”

  “That’s why we should be out here getting what we can, when we can. If you ask me, we’re passing up a damn good opportunity here.”

  “That’s the thing,” the man said. “I’m not asking.”

  Alexei felt the space around him condense and then he heard the click of several latches. When he opened his eyes again, it was black.

  The time glowing in the corner of his visor told Alexei that it was a little less than three hours before he was loaded onto a freight drone, and then another ten hours before he landed. Environmental scrubbers in his helmet kept carbon dioxide levels in the casket down to 394 parts per million by absorbing the poisonous molecules into the padding, and he sipped cool, compressed oxygen from the vent over his nose and mouth. The freighter was refrigerated, and when the sensors around Alexei’s torso detected that he was nearly hypothermic, current from the batteries in his boots was forced through the resistant steel fibers woven into his suit’s composite material until his core was back up to ninety-eight degrees. He spent a few hours drifting in and out of sleep and he dreamed that he had the opportunity to kill a man who he hated intensely for reasons he could not recall, but the trigger of his pistol was soft and the bullets just slid down the barrel with a metallic rasp and dropped to the floor at his feet where they bounced and rolled and accumulated into a maddening pile of impotence.

  He felt himself being unloaded and then the casket vibrated as it moved along a track. There were industrial sounds ahead of him: the banging of heavy objects being moved and stacked; the hiss and groan of pneumatics; the robotic whine of servos and actuators; the accumulative cacophony of products either being assembled or destroyed. When the noise entirely surrounded him, Alexei placed his palms against the top of the casket and pushed. The material warped, then reformed to its original shape as soon as he lowered his hands. He made a fist and punched feebly in the small space, but the carbon fiber shell deflected his blows. The casket jerked to a stop and then the top was gone and Alexei was suddenly looking up at the underside of a massive metallic insect. Jointed appendages clattered above him wielding high-speed diamond-tipped saw blades and drill bits, scalpels, retractors, needles, suction tubes, and fiber optic scopes. There wasn’t enough room to vault up and out, so he threw his weight against the side of the casket, but it was locked securely into its track. An array of steel grippers began to descend—mechanisms designed to pin him at multiple points and keep him immobile during the initial cutting—but they paused just above the casket. The noise immediately around him wound down as the machinery’s residual power faded. The casket was yanked further along the track and the surgical cluster was replaced by a chubby face with saggy eyes and a black beard shaped along an ample jawline. The man smiled.

  “Good morning, Tin Man!” he announced enthusiastically through a thick Russian accent. “I am Bogdan! Welcome to America!”

  Alexei sat up and pulled off his helmet. The queue he was in was stopped, but the lines parallel to him were still operating. The steel appendages made minute adjustments on multiple axes as they applied their implements in perfect coordination. Various organs and entrails were carefully detached or gathered and spooled from wet red abdominal, chest, and cranial cavities, then placed in molded dishes which were conveyed along separate paths. The robotic instrument cluster to his right was being sterilized in a simmering vat as a fresh corpse wa
s brought into position. There was a total of at least twenty working lines with caskets identical to his placed about two meters apart from one another, and although he couldn’t see what was beyond this room, he assumed the remains were bound for more discreet tissue, chemical, and genetic analysis. The air smelled of acidic and caustic vapor.

  He climbed down and stood unsteadily on the concrete floor as the circulation returned to his legs. The man before him was short and heavy and seemed to be trying to augment his stature with a thick black bouffant. He had a bag hanging from one shoulder and a smug grin on his plump lips.

  “A few more seconds and the Americans would have possessed the famous heart of the Lion.”

  “Where are we?”

  “South Carolina. Folly Beach. Home of the biggest insurgent processing plant in the country.”

  “How did you stop the line?” Alexei asked him.

  The fat man gestured behind him. “It was no problem. The kill switch is right on the wall.”

  “How long do we have before someone notices?”

  “I am told each line has fifteen minutes to repair itself before a technician is sent in.”

  “Does anyone know you’re here?”

  The fat man’s laugh rebounded off the high ceiling. “Not even my wife, Tin Man. She thinks I’m spending a week at the beach with some whores. Maybe there will still be time, no?”

  “Did you bring water?”

  “I have everything you requested,” Bogdan said, and then his smile faltered. “As long as you have the money.”

  Alexei unzipped the top portion of his suit and removed a thick envelope. The fat man took it and thumbed through the notes.

  “A private jet would have been a lot cheaper,” he said. “And a lot more comfortable.”

  He took a brushed steel canister from the bag and handed it to Alexei. Alexei unhinged the top and tipped it back twice, pausing to breathe in between.

  “Give me the protein.”

  Bogdan handed Alexei a single white tube. Alexei ripped off the top and squeezed the paste into his mouth. When he’d swallowed it all, he finished the canister of water.

  “Show me the rest.”

  The fat man widened the top of the bag and began presenting its contents. “A twenty-five centimeter tungsten carbide tactical combat knife with serrated blade. A Gryazev-Shipunov 10mm pistol with four twenty-round magazines. Two packs of Sobranie black blend unfiltered cigarettes—very good, by the way—and, of course, a passport. Congratulations, Tin Man. You are an American now!”

  Alexei took the passport and opened it. “Alexei Drovosek? Not very subtle.”

  “You are the Woodcutter now, no?”

  Alexei motioned for the bag and Bogdan passed it to him. He began verifying the contents for himself.

  “With all due respect, Tin Man,” Bogdan said, “I think you are wasting your time and your talents here.”

  Alexei did not look up. “What makes you say that?”

  “Everything there is to own in America is already owned by someone. This is not the land of opportunity it once was. Do you know the Thirty-first Amendment?”

  “What about it?”

  “Every year it gets more and more support. Eventually it will be ratified and all the votes will go from the citizens to their employers. Once that happens, this place will be as bad as Russia. Maybe worse.”

  “You’re thinking small, comrade,” Alexei said. “You’ve been away from the motherland too long. You think I came all this way to open a grocery store?”

  Bogdan smiled. “Tell me. What did the great Tin Man come here to do?”

  Alexei looked up from the bag. “No matter how much a man has, there are two things he can never get enough of: pleasure and protection. Just like in Russia, the wealthy here need weapons, drugs, and girls. Or boys, depending on the individual. Whoever can provide them safely, discreetly, and reliably can get access to the most powerful men in the country.”

  The fat man’s smile broadened. “I like the way you think, Tin Man,” he said. “But you know what you are going to need?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “A partner. Someone who knows people. Someone with connections.” He pointed at the bag in Alexei’s hands. “Someone who can get you what you need.”

  Alexei slipped the passport back in the bag but he didn’t remove his hand.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I do need all those things, and more. But you know what I need right now?”

  “Tell me, my friend.”

  “I need a body to fill that casket.”

  Alexei took a step forward and the knife went into the fat man’s gut. He had planned to slide the blade up under the rib cage and into the man’s heart and wait for it to stop twitching as the muscle went into spasm, but he was suddenly concerned about the amount of blood it would leave on the floor. He withdrew the knife and Bogdan groaned as Alexei hoisted him up into the casket. The fat man’s fingers looked like raw bloody sausages as they pressed down over the wound. Alexei retrieved the bloody envelope from the man’s coat pocket and slipped it into the shoulder bag.

  The fat man rolled back and forth in the casket. He tried to sit up but his movements were arrested by the pain in his gut. Despite the weight, the casket slid easily on its rails and Alexei heard the man pleading in Russian as he was positioned under the belly of the bristling steel beast. On his way out, the Tin Man punched the green button on the wall and the disassembly line came back to life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hyun Ki was sedated and blindfolded the last time she was moved. Nobody will tell her where she is, but she has figured out a few things about the penthouse apartment she shares with fifteen other girls. Where one would expect to find windows behind walls of sheer curtains there are only mirrors, so it’s impossible to know exactly how high up she is, but it’s high enough to detect an occasional minute sway in the structure which usually corresponds to the faint whistle of wind finding its way in through fissures in the building’s facade. By pressing her ear and cheek against the tile in the shower, she has frequently sensed the rumbling of an elevator. She suspects she is on the top floor of the tower since she has never heard anyone above her or felt vibrations in her feet as she presses them against the ceiling from her top bunk. But even at the penthouse level, the sounds from the streets below still manage to reach them, and the emergency sirens register as distant and gradual crescendos rather than the high-pitched bleating more common in Europe. She has never heard Japanese campaign slogans or silvery product jingles broadcast through PA systems mounted on the roofs of slowly moving vans, nor the persistent drone of Chinese or Korean government propaganda. She has never felt an earthquake, or heard the whine of a tsunami warning system being tested. When the women who care for the girls answer their handsets, they simply say “yes?” or “hello?” instead of dígame or moshi moshi or da or allo, and she has never seen anyone kneel down and press a forehead to the floor in prayer. Those around her with dark skin are not so dark as to be of pure African bloodlines, but rather all have some trace of Caucasian in their ancestral pasts. The food is rich in protein and poor in flavor and spice, and the sense of not just money, but of profound and imperishable wealth, is undeniably pervasive.

  Ki’s best guess is that she lives in Manhattan.

  She has been here for ninety-two days, and she has never been mistreated. All sixteen girls are weighed and scanned daily, at which point their schedules and menus are determined by formulas in the house moms’ handsets. The amount and type of food they are to eat, the vitamins and supplements they are to take, and the amount of time they are to spend using various pieces of exercise equipment in the adjoining gym are posted on a sheet of plasma glass in the common room. Once a week, two women are brought in who divide the work of giving every girl both a manicure and a pedicure—processes which involve hours of meticulous clipping, filing, soaking, and moisturizing. A great deal of attention is paid to the girls’ feet and toes as volcanic rock
is used to remove dead skin cells and calluses, and aloe vera and eucalyptus are massaged deep into the tissue. Once a month, all the girls are given physicals by a female physician who tests their blood and urine, the results of which define just a few of the many variables that are used to orchestrate the girls’ lives. It has occurred to Ki many times that she and her housemates are perhaps among the healthiest, most pampered, and most carefully monitored human beings on the entire planet. For this, many of the girls are thankful.

  When they wake up, they find clean clothes—usually tight-fitting pajamas or short cotton nightgowns—folded neatly on their dressers. Each girl is expected to groom herself before breakfast and to pick up after herself throughout the day. The entire apartment is thoroughly sanitized weekly by a team of housekeepers—always female. Individually tailored portions of food are served on schedule, and in the time between chores, workouts, and meals, the girls are free to watch videos, play games, or read. The noise level is electronically monitored and there is surveillance equipment in every room: black camera domes on the ceilings, optical spheres turning in their sockets, silicon-covered lenses embedded in bathroom tiles. The house moms sometimes step carefully among the girls and take photographs, or move along the periphery of the room and quietly capture video of a girl sitting alone and cross-legged on a cushion with a doll or stuffed animal cradled tenderly in her lap.

  As far as Ki can tell, there are two ways to leave the apartment. The first is by breaking down. If a girl begins to cry and cannot be consoled, she is taken away by one of the house moms. If the house mom cannot manage her, two men are summoned to take over in as gentle a manner as possible. These are the only males the girls ever see on a regular basis, and they are in and out with extreme focus, haste, and precision—speaking to and making eye contact with the house moms only. The girls almost always return, calm and with no signs of physical abuse or injury and with absolutely nothing to say about their time away. Occasionally they do not.