The fourth watcher

behind it somehow, throwing a shadow that travels down the vine like dirty water in a clear stream, and as the light thins and clouds, the stones feel heavier and sharper, and they grate against one another, a sand-gritty sound, less like stones than like. . what? A room, he sees a room, and it’s a terrible shade of green. It, too, smells of linoleum. Someone is with him, someone who doesn’t like the sound of a shoe scraping over dirty-

A shoe. On linoleum.

Then the vine brightens again, blooming with light, and he opens one eye, just a crack, narrow as a blind drawn against the massed brightness of the day, to see a world of white. Close to him, only a foot or two away, is a white shape, white without outlines but brighter than the white beyond it, and it is moving. Moving parallel to him, away from his feet and toward his head, and he hears the scraping sound again, and then a whisper.

There is a second figure, this one brown, a brown he knows very well. A brown that makes him think for a second or half a second that he is looking at himself; he is out of his own body and looking at it as it moves across this white room, following the figure in white. He closes the eye, but the urgency of the tom-tom sound warns him to open it again, and he forces the lid up. The light floods into him and strengthens him, and he can focus.

A hospital room. White but for a darker rectangle where black is in the slow act of giving itself over to blue, with a note of orange bleeding upward, warming it from below. A window. Dawn? What dawn? How long has-

A doctor, dressed in white. Masked in white. Behind him a Bangkok policeman. Dawn through the window, the sharp pain of the stones on his chest, the smells, the sound of shoes on linoleum, a brilliantly clear sudden memory of a dark room, a big man, some kind of enormous, rib-caving punch to the chest, a slow fall. A girl in white.

White. The white-clad doctor, at the head of the bed now, reaching up. A gentle tug at the wrist, no more intense than a fly landing on it. The doctor has a clear plastic bag in one hand, filled with a liquid as transparent as water. In the other hand is a hypodermic syringe.

The policeman comes closer, watching the doctor. He is close enough for the man on the bed to see his face, a new face, a face he doesn’t know, and to read the name tag on the uniform. The name tag says petchara.

Arthit’s eyes open wider as the doctor inserts the syringe into the top of the clear IV bag and pushes the plunger. Something-some tensing in his body-brings Petchara’s eyes down to the bed, and he starts to speak, but Arthit rides a bolt of ten thousand volts of neural electricity to rip the intravenous needle from his own wrist and shove it into Petchara’s thigh, while with his other hand he grabs the clear plastic bag and squeezes. Petchara leaps away, and Arthit lets the bag drop and sees the policeman stagger, dragging the bag with him, until his back hits the window where dawn is announcing itself, and finally it occurs to him to yank the needle. He stares at it in his hand, stares at the mostly empty bag, and then all his muscles let go, and he drops, loose-jointed and as awkward as a marionette, to the floor.

The doctor is already out the door when Arthit finds and pushes the big red button on the side of his bed. He can no longer hold his head up. His vision blurs and darkens at the edges, narrows, and the room disappears, leaving nothing but the rectangle of dawn, more orange now, framed by the window.

He sleeps.

46

Monsoon Christmas

Frank’s a bonanza,” Elson says. “Monsoon Christmas.” He is seated comfortably on an uncomfortable chair as angular and uncompromising as he is, his black suit soaking up a

surprising amount of the light streaming through the window behind him. The chair, just strips of black leather on a chromium frame, looks like he designed it. “Frank’s the kind of gift that makes you wonder what you’ve been doing right all your life, why you deserve this. I mean, we’re going to be able to dam up one major river of counterfeit into this awful country, without the North Koreans even knowing it, for a few months at least.”

He bounces a couple of times in the uncomfortable chair, just out of enthusiasm. He’s doing something with his mouth that might pass for a smile if the room was a little dimmer. “And it’s extra-good we’ve got Frank, because Chu’s not talking. And I mean not at all. On the other hand, we’ve got the other cop, the one who was dressed like a doctor, and he can’t stop talking. He talks even when there’s no one else in the room. Seems to think we’re going to send him to Syria for interrogation.” Elson rubs his hands together. “And there’s all that fake money.”

“For example,” Rafferty says, “about Frank. What kind of things has he given you?”

“Frank,” Elson says in the tone Miaow uses to say chocolate. “Well, Frank’s just something that happens maybe once in a decade. He’s given us fucking flow charts of the counterfeiting structure. A map of routes used to take money out of China, routes we can seal up. He’s given us a bank in Harbin, China, owned by his former. . um, company, that’s a central distribution point, a bank we can crack into electronically. It’ll let us put enough pressure on the North Koreans that the cash flow will dry up. No more cognac, no more new cars for the fat cats. It’s probably enough to bring them back to the negotiating table.”

“That’s good,” Rafferty says.

“And more. There’s an American end, a sleeper who’s been in place for almost twenty years, reporting directly to Chu. And he was nowhere on our radar.”

“Irwin Lee,” Rafferty says.

Elson’s eyebrows go up. “Your radar is better than ours.”

“Shucks,” Rafferty says.

“Isn’t it a wonderful name?” Elson says. He makes a frame with his hands and says the name into it. “Irwin Lee.”

“Lee is one of the two most common Chinese names,” Rafferty says, but Elson’s enthusiasm tickles some obscure area of Rafferty’s brain that specializes in obscure connections, and suddenly he’s sitting bolt upright. “That’s what this whole thing was about, isn’t it?”

“What?” Elson asks.

“Irwin Lee. My father’s going to be Irwin Lee, right?”

Elson looks disappointed, as though he’s been deprived of his big surprise. “Nobody knows about Irwin Lee except Chu,” he says. “It’s a perfect fit. Lee has a twenty-year legend, one of the best I’ve ever seen. A house in Richmond, Virginia, that I can guarantee no triad member ever heard of. We’re going to remove the current Irwin Lee and install your father. He’ll live in Richmond and consult with us.”

Rafferty leans forward. “What has Chu said about Frank?”

“About Frank? That’s the one thing he’ll talk about. Says he doesn’t understand it, can’t figure out why Frank betrayed him. They were friends, he says. Says he’d have made Frank his successor if Frank had been Chinese.” He starts to add something and thinks better of it.

“What?” Rafferty demands.

“The, um, story about Chu insulting Frank’s wife. I mentioned it as a way of suggesting why Frank’s loyalty might be a little weak, and Chu said it never happened.”

“Of course it didn’t,” Rafferty says. He can feel the blood rise in his face. “I can’t believe I fell for it. You’d think, by now, I’d know. It’s always about my father. Whatever it is, whatever is happening, it’s always about my father.”

“I’m not following you,” Elson says.

“He took the goddamn box in the first place because he wanted to be Irwin Lee. The rubies were a bonus. All the stories about Chu being the worst thing since Grendel’s mother were his way of justifying himself to me. His way of making sure I was on his side. He needed Chu either dead or put away forever, so he could be Irwin Lee. And I could help, so he sold me that line of crap.”

Arthit says something that comes out as a croak, and Rafferty says, “Arthit. Don’t try to talk.”

But Arthit lowers a heavily bandaged hand-the doctors had to do a little emergency repair where he yanked out the intravenous line-and pushes a button that raises the top third of the bed to a forty-five-degree angle. As he