Rebekah, Elvis, and Dominic are sitting hunched over something at the breakfast table as Brock approaches. For a moment his line of sight is blocked by the flowers that had been pushed to one side but he can soon see the sheet of paper that they’re focused on. As he gets even closer he sees a handwritten list of names. The conversation is already underway.
“… I don’t think so,” replies Rebekah with a mild grimace as she stares down at a name above Elvis’ finger. “He has motive, yes, but I can’t imagine how he could’ve gotten out of that mess so fast. And he’d have to find money and hire the shooters. And find us. I just don’t think so. Not him.”
She looks up and meets Brock’s surprisingly serene gaze with one of eager welcome.
“Dude,” she addresses him hopefully, “what do you think? Come, sit down. You were there. We need your input.”
“Think about what?” inquires Brock as he glides onto an empty chair, pushing the floral obstruction in front of him aside.
“Lukas,” she responds, her face frozen in anticipation of his imminent recollection.
“You know,” she says at last, “the first boat we took. The trip across the Atlantic. Cabo Verde.”
“Oh, right!” bursts out Brock as the memory comes crashing back into his brain. “The thing in the harbour,” he recalls while very slowly crumpling one hand into the other. Then he makes a low, groaning sound as his hands compact tightly together.
“Right,” she confirms. “That thing. That guy. You think it could be him coming after us?”
“Lukas?” replies Brock as he considers the possibility that the lanky Lithuanian is having them followed, shot at, and now smuggled out of Thailand in relative luxury and comfort. Lukas would’ve had to have somehow gotten out of custody in Cabo Verde, tracked him and Rebekah to Thailand, and there have made all of the ad hoc arrangements to come after them in the span of a couple of days.
“That’s a tall order for a guy like him,” notes Brock after some deliberation. “He seems like the type that could hire hitmen, the type that might have those kinds of connections. You know, seedy. But everything else, that seems unlikely. And this boat that we’re on right now, that doesn’t make any sense at all. I don’t think it’s him.”
As Rebekah places an “X” next to Lukas’ name, Elvis’ eyes move to the next name on the list.
“Victor and question mark?” he asks as he reads it aloud.
“Yeah, Victor and … what was her name again?” asks Rebekah as she looks up at Brock, her irreverent expression anticipating an answer.
“Allesandra,” he replies in a reserved tone. “Sandy.”
With a tender but curiously curled smile she nods and exclaims, “Of course! Sandy. Rhymes with Handy. How could I forget?”
She crosses out the question mark, writes Allesandra’s name above it, and draws an arrow downward to indicate the word’s proper placement in the list.
“Victor and Allesandra,” reads Rebekah, gazing up at Brock with the same mischievous smile. “What about them?”
He winces slightly as he evades her gaze. “Maybe, I dunno,” he says with soft but firm avoidance.
Noticing Brock’s unease, Elvis discretely shoots a questioning look at Rebekah. In response she gazes downward and shrugs deferentially toward Brock.
“What happened on that ship?” asks Elvis, his brows knitted with concern as his eyes flick between Brock and Rebekah.
Pulling his face into a mask of grim determination Brock responds, “It’s … it’s not important. Let’s just forget that part, okay? Yeah, I guess they have a reason to come after us. I mean, we ditched them off the coast and they were probably nabbed by the cops. Handy here” — he jabs his thumb toward Rebekah — “has a thing for impelling ships dangerously close to the shore.”
“That may be true. Or maybe I’m just not that creative,” she retorts with a subtly taunting demeanour. “But I don’t remember hearing any original ideas from you.”
“Yeah, well,” he says, momentarily lost for words.
Regaining his composure Brock continues, “Okay, look, I don’t think it’s them. They could probably spring for a boat like the Blackbird but there’s no way they’d be able to arrange it all so quickly. Or at all. I’d bet they’re still sitting in prison right now.”
“Hold on a sec,” intercedes Dominic. “You guys just reminded me of something. I’ll be right back.”
With that he stands abruptly and trudges toward the rear of the ship.
Abandoning her teasing coyness Rebekah says,”We covered our tracks pretty good. Maybe our boat washed up and once they remembered what actually happened maybe the cops believed Victor and Sandy. That’s two big maybes.
“On top of that it still wouldn’t give them time to set all this up,” she concludes, pointing to their present situation with a swirl of an her index finger.
“Okay, so who’s next?” asks Brock, eager to continue down the list.
Putting another “X” on the paper next to Victor and Allesandra’s names, Rebekah reads the next line on the list.
“My parents,” she says flatly.
Then, with determination she states, “So we can just forget about that. There is no fucking way that my parents are trying to kill me, or us. And even if they had the money, which I’m certain they don’t, they wouldn’t be spending it on a ship like this. Definitely not my dad, that’s for sure. Also, why would they send Shindan after us?
“Maybe … maybe,” she continues with emphasis, “this is a setup. Maybe someone wants us to think that my parents are involved.”
“Why?” asks Elvis earnestly.
Beneath furrowed brows her black eyes move from side to side as the question rolls around in her mind. Eventually shrugs uncertainly and replies, “To scare me?”
“You’d think that they’d be more obvious, like sending you scary surveillance photos of your folks, or their home address, or something personal,” suggests Brock, “not have you find their initials on a Chinese form stuck in the back of a box in a locked train car, found by sheer luck by the way, heading for who knows where.”
“Good point,” she agrees resolutely as she places an “X” next to Cornelius and Arti.
Just then Dominic returns with an opened laptop computer. “I thought so!” he announces triumphantly.
“See here,” he says, jabbing his finger at the screen. Rebekah, Brock, and Elvis crane their necks to view the display. There, in a web browser, is an article from the Bangkok Post from a few days prior. Dominic is pointing to a headline that reads, “Two Americans arrested in breach of territorial waters”.
“I thought I remembered reading that around the time you guys arrived,” he states, nodding at Rebekah and Brock. “They don’t name the couple, the boat, or where exactly they were picked up but apparently they ignored warning signals and just parked their ship on a sandbar near some public beach. When the cops boarded them the woman was freaking out claiming they’d been hijacked. The police thought that the guy might be on something.”
Rebekah and Brock both scan the article intently and then sit back to consider what they’d read.
“What are the chances of something like that happening once, let alone twice at around the same time?” asks Brock almost rhetorically.
“Uh-huh,” agrees Rebekah. “Unless they work like lightning and have some major connections outside of their circle of crypto bros, it wasn’t them.”
“Crypto bros?” inquires Elvis, still in earnest.
“Cryptocurrency speculators,” she explains. “Like Gordon Gekko with a keyboard.”
“Who?” asks Elvis, his face contorted with confusion.
She abruptly ends the topic with, “Never mind. Point is, we can safely rule out Victor and Sandy.”
At this point Dmitri arrives from below deck and the agents of Section B quickly get him up to speed as he settles into a free chair. Shortly afterward, Mirabelle emerges from somewhere at the front of the Merle and saunters casually over to the group where she eases into a chair and her traditional pose of detachment.
With everyone assembled, Mirabelle’s associates are brought up again by Rebekah. This time the rebuttal is more definitive.
“I do not believe it is zem,” responds Mirabelle. “Zey are much more personal. If zey want to kill me zey want me to see zeir face, to know it is zem. If someone else see zen good, good for business reputation. Zese people ‘ho come after us now, zey don’t even say ‘ello. Also, I do no steal anysing. I do not report zem to police. Ze most detail I share wis anybody is now, wis you.”
Rebekah accepts this with a nod and adds an “X” beside “Mira’s friends“.
“Who are all these people?” asks Brock, pointing to a previous series of names on the list that had already been eliminated.
“All the people we think might have a grudge against us,” explains Rebekah. “Before your time.”
“And this guy?” he asks again as he spots a name without an “X”, pointing at it with two fingers. “Should I know him?”
“Maybe,” responds Dominic. “We were after him that night we first met in that park.”
“Howard?” reads Brock with an exaggerated inflection at the question mark.
“We think so?” answers Rebekah with squinty-eyed apprehension. “Librarian. Kind of forgettable.”
Dominic nods in agreement.
Dmitri signals his inability to add any more details with a shrug.
“I remember him now,” recalls Brock. “Peed himself.”
“The very same,” confirms Dominic.
“I only saw him for a few seconds,” notes Brock. “Not really much else I can say.”
“He complained about his shit librarian salary,” remembers Dmitri. “He was probably telling the truth. I don’t think he could fund something like this trip.”
“And can you imagine someone like that guy hiring overseas hitmen?” posits Rebekah.
Doubting the possibility of such a scenario, Dominic, Dmitri, and Brock acquiesce.
With an “X” next to “Howard?”, Section B continue down the list.
Shindan and the staff of the Merle are thrown into the debate as the originators of the plot against Section B, but too many crucial questions remain unanswered.
The Section automatically fall into a hushed discussion about arbitrary topics when one of the Merle’s staff appear through a door, offering them a light lunch of chilled meats, cheeses, breads, spreads, and alternatives. The group eat mostly in silence, then sit and digest.
As the afternoon slips into a glassy sunset, the names on the list are reviewed again, a couple of new possibilities are included, and additional details are revealed. After some time Brock comes to realize that a large proportion of the names on the list were affected directly by Rebekah. Often it was at the behest of, or in aid of, others; but not always.
Nevertheless, with only a handful of exceptions the infractions don’t match the severity of the reprisal. Within those few exceptions, it’s almost certain that the individuals in question were still in police custody when the reprisal was already in motion. The timing doesn’t work out and for most of the names on the list it wouldn’t have been a plausible possibility because of a lack of funds, a dearth of experience, or some other grossly limiting factor.
Another hush falls over the conversation as evening refreshments glide out on iridescent trays, the otherwise imperceptible Merle staff beneath them only momentarily visible as they block the blinding sunlight with their bodies.
A few chilled drinks later the inconclusive conversation turns to Brock and his first experience with the pod. As details are shared and compared between agents, Dmitri grabs the idling laptop computer and slips off below deck with the vague intention to “check on something”. Nearly fifteen minutes go by before he returns.
“OCR software’s finished downloading,” he explains as he takes his seat again. “Now we can find out what that document says, the Shindan one with Rebekah’s parents’ names on it.”
Without a pause Rebekah eagerly rushes off to dig out the document while Dmitri installs his software. The predominantly Chinese text on the retrieved form is photographed using a mobile phone and the images transferred to the laptop. There the OCR software converts them into editable symbols that Dmitri translates using an online service. The satellite uplink is slow and the processes of analysis and discussion even slower.
Eventually, however, the entire document is translated. Even though some of the results are ambiguous there’s little doubt that A C Heinrich were Shindan’s clients, paying the organization a surprisingly meagre amount of money in order to obtain the papers in Rebekah’s messenger bag. A promised “included photo of daughter” is missing, the remaining instructions are sparse, and they don’t mention what Shindan was supposed to do with the stash once they had it in their possession.
In the face of these new facts Rebekah reluctantly reveals that some of the documents in the bag contain the one-time pads that she uses to encipher her communications with her parents. “They’re encoded into the text,” she explains in a hushed tone. “You have to know what to look for. But my parents have their own copies so why would they hire someone to steal mine?”
Brock suggests to her, “Maybe somebody else did, to lead you to them. Like you said, maybe someone’s got it in for your folks. You could just be collateral damage. Between low-rent thieves, people with more guns than sense, and a little planted evidence” — he motions toward the translated paper — “you could be enticed to contact your parents to find out just what the heck is going on.”
“So you’re saying that we’re … I’m … playing right into their hands,” states Rebekah, prompting him to confirm the correctness of her statement with a tilt of her head.
Brock nods.
“So we’re back to square one,” she rebuffs. “My parents don’t have any enemies and no one I know would go to all this trouble just to find out where they are. If someone wanted to come after me … well, here I am!”
For the second time in one day Dmitri acknowledges the statement with an agnostic, “Hmm.”