“You see my problem here,” says the stern man sitting across from Section B. His bright orange turban hugs his head as it moves around to punctuate his words. The dark brown eyes set into his wide face stare at them intimidatingly, his tied and tucked beard lending a further gravitas to his countenance. The striped epaulets and Port Authority insignias on the shoulders of his dark blue uniform brim with officialdom.
He’s behind a large and expensive-looking desk, rocking casually in an opulent executive chair, causing his name tag to reflect the stark light of the bare fluorescents overhead. Every so often the name “N. Singh Khatri” becomes visible on the small plastic rectangle before once again disappearing into bleached obscurity.
The Section stare at him silently. For the most part they’ve changed back into the same clothes they’d worn when they met at the Dockside Lounge except that the garments have been laundered, pressed, and imbued with a gently floral scent by the crew of the Merle.
Rebekah is donning her sunglasses and a scowl. Dmitri and Dominic are both wearing inscrutable expressions while Elvis sits beside them looking visibly worried. Seemingly unaffected, Mirabelle leans back in her rickety folding metal chair while Brock leans forward, listening attentively from his own sparse seat.
Some moments pass without comment.
“A number of deep sea fishing boats,” continues the weighty official, “just happen to cross paths at the nautical limit with a ship that appeared to have been traveling very erratically since leaving the coast of Thailand. By itself that’s very odd.
“But,” he continues, “even more odd is that our security cameras don’t show any passengers boarding these fishing boats, yet we see all of you disembarking. None of you seem to be properly dressed for fishing, there doesn’t seem to be any proof that any of you actually fished, and your guides seem to know shockingly little about you. To make matters worse, none of you seem to have any means by which to identify yourselves. Can you account for any of these things?”
More moments of silence pass.
“If that’s to be your answer,” he says, “then I’m afraid you leave me no choice but to hand you over to the authorities. This is a very serious matter.”
“Look,” responds Elvis nervously, “I think you should know–“
Immediately Rebekah silences him with an outstretched hand as she leans toward N. Singh Khatri. “How many explanations will it take for us to walk out of here?” she asks, a mild dismissiveness running through her question.
“My dear,” he responds with a smirk as he leans back to reveal a swollen belly, his uniform stretched across it, “you haven’t even offered a single explanation.”
“So,” she responds, her head cocked to one side, “how many, exactly, are we talking?”
The rotund official shifts his weight forward and stands up. He waits there a moment, head held back, blankly staring down his nose at Rebekah. Then, slowly, he rights himself and brusquely motions for her to follow him.
“Fine,” she responds, rising to her feet to follow the large man. She makes a slight detour to his desk, caressing the surface with her fingers, at times slowing down to linger.
The only one not following Rebekah’s movements is Elvis who is momentarily startled from his inner morass as the door to the adjoining room slams shut behind her. He quickly retreats back to a downcast pose, a nervous energy animating his limbs.
The small room falls into a dejected silence prompting Brock’s mind to wander for some scrap of information that may help their current situation.
He’s immediately taken to his most recent memory on the Merle where OpOne told them that everyone at the port had either been paid off or diverted by those who had been paid off. The Section would simply have to transfer to various chartered vessels as local fishing enthusiasts for the final leg of the trip. Everything was set, nothing to worry about. So it was with some chagrin that the Section were detained by the Port Authority the moment they stepped off their boats.
Brock reaches farther back in his memory.
They’d spent a considerable amount of time looking for surveillance devices on the yacht. Individually they would walk through areas while casually filming the environment on their mobile phones, disguising such actions by pretending to read something on the screen or using the devices to write down observations. When that seemed too obvious they would resort to simply using their eyes and relying on memory.
All of this information would then be relayed to Dmitri for further analysis and, if warranted, a covert personal examination by him. Using a small handheld device with a couple of short antennas he scanned for wireless signals. Using direct observation he and the team traced out potential closed-circuit lines.
Eventually they determined that a small chamber toward the stern was bug-free, as far as they could tell, so that’s where they would hold most of their exchanges. As a secondary option, their old location on the aft deck of the ship would be used. At these meetings they would plot false stories and misdirections which would be casually revealed in front of known snooping devices around the ship.
Among the foremost of these false revelations were references to Section C along with reverential allusions to Section A, and hints at the existence of Sections D through Z. It was hoped that these stories would either distract or dissuade whoever was coming after the one and only Section B.
This phantom threat, considers Brock, may be the main reason that they’re now being detained.
His mind rewinds even more to the point when Rebekah came back to their table after her interaction with OpOne. Her effort to gain the cooperation of the Merle’s captain seemed to have failed, yet when she returned she surreptitiously flashed them a curious thumbs-up.
She would later go on to explain that, “He was able to look away. He put on his sunglasses. He knew what I can do and he was ready for it.”
“So you can’t manipulate him,” objected Elvis. “I don’t get how that helps us.”
“That helps us,” she explained calmly, “because it eliminates certain people from our list of suspects, because my targets always forget me. I get them to make up something or imagine some other person to explain what’s happened to them, to make me vanish from their story.”
“Maybe someone remembered,” retorted Elvis.
“I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head decisively. “I know you haven’t gotten to see much of my work but my targets focus very hard on avoiding any memory of me. Sometimes they get all pissed off if someone even suggests what really happened. They don’t just not remember, they push back hard against remembering.
“Then it must’ve been someone who covertly watched you,” concluded Elvis.
“Could be,” she added reflectively, “but I’m usually discreet about when and where and how I work. I don’t advertise my m.o. to the public.”
“Dockside,” interjected Dmitri almost immediately, holding up a finger and an eyebrow.
“I’m usually discreet,” she reiterated, “but if anyone was watching then I don’t have a clue who it was.”
“We were all a little off our faces that night,” recalled Dominic, bringing the topic to an end.
This is also where Brock decides to stop. As usual, nothing concrete is coming out of it. He gazes over at the sturdy wooden door and wonders how Rebekah’s negotiation with N. Singh Khatri is going.
Behind the door Rebekah is doing her best to appear irritated at the corpulent man’s demands. It had become obvious that he had already been paid but wanted more. His motivation was simple.
“If I’m going to be taking this sort of risk,” he explains with a calm arrogance, “I’m not going to do it at a discount.”
“Oh, so you’ve done this sort of thing before?” she asks, detaching a bill-sized blank paper sheet from the small notepad she’d snatched from his desk. A few moments earlier she had suggested to him, in her own special way, that she was actually holding a large stack of bills. She reassured him that he was in control and that every choice was his own. She told him to just be himself. Then she continued to go along with the scenario as it played itself out.
“Look,” he says with a softened forcefulness, “I don’t have time to sit here and count individual pieces of paper.”
Rebekah pauses breathlessly.
“Just give me everything,” he continues, leaning back on the expansive leather couch. Surrounding him, the opulent wood furniture, ostentatious statuary, and gaudy paintings seem to add to his girth as it settles into the creaky cushions.
Taking a moment to recover, Rebekah places a rubber band around the middle of the notepad, fans the loose end of the stack with her thumb, and with an agitated sigh says, “This is fifty thousand dollars. It’s everything we have. Are you seriously going to take everything we have?”
“That is my one and only offer,” he says with a satisfied smile. “Take it or leave it. And don’t think too long because the federal police are already on their way.”
She slaps the blank notepad onto the marble top of the sumptuous coffee table between them, repositions herself on the uncomfortable stool beneath her, and directs what she hopes is a pissed-off pout at the blackmailing official across from her.
He smiles, picks up the notepad, and flips through the free end while examining it with slightly glazed, unfocused eyes. After a few moments he rocks himself to a standing position, stuffs the hallucinated money into the inner pocket of his jacket, straightens out his uniform, and glares at her.
Rebekah returns his gaze expectantly.
“Go,” he says at last. “Take all your shit and leave as quickly as possible. If I see any of you here again you will not get the same offer. Am I making myself clear?”
She nods vigorously and heads for the door.
On the other side she’s met with the inquisitive stares of Section B. Without affect, she approaches until they’re within earshot before she curtly and quietly notifies them that, “It’s handled,” and continues toward the exit. They stand and silently follow her, exchanging glances of curiosity as they walk past two nonreactive sentries posted just outside the double doors.
Finally, having gone through another set of steel doors and down two flights of stairs, the group exit the building where they find their belongings in a pile next to a minivan emblazoned with the Port Authority logo. They instantly recognize the vehicle as the same one that had transported them here earlier. The uniformed driver who had been behind the wheel is nowhere to be found.
“Let’s grab our stuff and get out of here before he tries to spend some of that fifty grand I gave him,” instructs Rebekah with newly-found levity.
“Where’d you get fifty thousand dollars?” asks Elvis earnestly, visibly surprised.
Rebekah shakes her head and turns her attention back to the tiny hill of bags and containers.
“I don’t get it,” protests Elvis. “Seriously, were we carrying that cash on us the entire time?”
Mirabelle chuckles and says to Rebekah, “You know? I sink I like you little more every day.”
“What?” asks Elvis again, entirely flummoxed.
“Oh, Elvis,” says Mirabelle as she addresses him with surprisingly matronly pity. “Ruh-bek-ah did not give ze fat man money, she give ‘him fifty souzand reason.”
“Actually, it was probably closer to a hundred,” clarifies Rebekah, her head turned just enough to expose a smirk.
“Ah, oui,” responds Mirabelle, slyly reflecting the other woman’s smile. “Or maybe less. We use some for ze names, yes?”
“Yeah, good point!” shouts Rebekah, now fully engaged in getting various shoulder straps to sit snugly on her small frame.
Elvis stands rigid and speechless, perplexity freezing his ability to move or talk. All he can do is shake his head in confusion.
“You see,” explains Mirabelle to Elvis, “so actually we did not pay ‘im so much.”
He shakes his head more vigorously.
“You ‘ave not see,” she continues, “when Ruh-bek-ah take ze bloc-notes. Zis is ze money she give ‘im.”
“I don’t know what a bloc-notes is!” retorts Elvis with growing agitation.
“But ‘ow does Ruh-bek-ah know?” she responds with a gentle playfulness. She angles her head toward the other woman and asks, “Do you know zis word?”
“Never heard it before,” responds Rebekah, adjusting some buckles and still facing away from Mirabelle.
“But you know zis sing, yes?” asks the French woman again.
“Of course,” responds The Handler, turning around with a faint smile. “And now I know another name for it.”
Mirabelle turns to Elvis with an upraised eyebrow and says, “You see? She know, and I know, and I know she know, and she know I know. But you don’t know. Elvis” — she shakes her head disapprovingly — “you must do better.”
With this she strolls over to the diminishing pile of luggage and begins to pick out items to carry. At the same time, Rebekah walks past with a number of bags slung over her shoulders.
“It was a notepad,” she remarks as she lumbers past him.
“How was I supposed to know that?” he shoots back, now openly irritated.
Rebekah stops, slowly spins around, and cocks her head to one side. “How did Mirabelle know?” she inquires.
“She saw it,” he replies indignantly. “I didn’t.”
“Exactly,” she states, nodding bluntly in agreement. “She saw it because she was observing and you didn’t because you were too busy splashing around in a puddle of your own anxiety. I like you, Elvis, but you should try to get a handle on that. Doubt and fear can disable you, and believe me you don’t want that in a crisis. You know I’m speaking from experience here.”
With a finalizing nod she turns back around and walks toward the assembling agents of Section B.
Elvis is left standing alone and feeling a little dejected. Somewhere inside, however, he senses a growing spark of determination.