15 REPLAY






Sam sat in lotus on the floor of her own room down the hall of the Prince Market Hotel, reviewing the day.


Her surveillance devices detected no new bugs on Kade or in the room. No unusual behavior on the hotel net. Typical distribution of foot and elevator traffic within the hotel, on their floor, and just outside their doors. Typical time spent in their rooms by the maids, with no unusual behavior. No flagged individuals detected by faceprinting at the conference or the hotel.


Still, Sam was worried. There had been two bursts of surprise from Kade over the course of the day. What were they?


The first had happened around 5.20pm, just after he'd reached his room. She went back to the feed from the bugs in Kade's room, played the video. The room was still and silent. The bed was made, two mints on the pillow bracketing a comment card. Kade entered, tossed off his conference tote and shoes, ate one of the mints, filled out the comment card, ate the second mint, and then lay down for a nap.


She called up her support team, requested a sweep of Kade's room tomorrow morning after they'd left for the conference. Someone would do a more detailed scan for bugs, transmitters, or anything else unusual. They'd pick up the comment card and the mint wrappers for analysis while they were there.


The second incident seemed more straightforward. She'd made note of the time when she felt it. She scanned through camera data from the conference center, found that time. It had been just moments after Kade had walked away from Shu. He'd gotten in line at one of the bars and then Professor Somdet Phra Ananda, coming from another direction, had gotten in line behind him. Kade had turned, presumably at something Ananda said, and they'd had a brief conversation.


Had Ananda said something that had shocked Kade? She found another camera angle where she could see the senior monk's face, zoomed in so it filled a frame, projected it onto the wall. She zoomed in on Kade's face, projected that in a giant frame next to Ananda. Then she synced the audio from the bugs on Kade, played it, watched their faces.


Ananda stepped into line behind Kade, eyes fixed forward, lips pressed together in that perpetual serene half smile the senior monks wore, and then… The conversation was short, hardly more than a few words. Nothing in it seemed particularly shocking.


Sam looked at the times again. Interesting. It was hard to say the exact sequence of things, given that it had taken her a few seconds to react. Even so, it seemed as if the sense of surprise might have come before he turned around and had his brief conversation with Ananda.


Sam rewound the clock, added a third wall frame with a wider view of the area, played the scene again, one-quarter speed, with the two shots in sync, timestamp displayed at the bottom of each.


Ananda stepped into line behind Kade. His face was impassive. His mouth closed. He said nothing. Kade turned. Why? And as he turned, Ananda's eyes moved, changed from the faraway gaze of someone lost in thought or taking in all around him to the near-set focus on an object in one's immediate foreground. A second passed. The time stamp Sam had noted was on the screen now. Another second passed. Only then did Ananda's mouth open. Sam queued the audio from one of the bugs on Kade. Young man, what is your name?


And then another interesting thing happened. Kade reached the front of the line and ordered his beer. While he fumbled, Ananda simply walked away, not even asking for the water or juice the monks were drinking.


Sam zoomed out, stitched together two more cameras. Ananda walked briskly, head turning this way and that, apparently searching, until he spotted a particular monk, nearly six feet tall, thin, angular, with a large hooked nose. They spoke a few words. The tall hook-nosed monk bowed, turned towards the bar where Kade and Ananda had spoken, and walked briskly there.


Kade was nursing his beer a few feet away from the bar, now. The unidentified monk stepped towards the edges of the room, outside Kade's peripheral vision, his face turned towards Kade, and waited. By this point she would have been asking Kade if he was ready to go. She watched it happen. Kade kept his eyes down on the floor. He looked lost in thought. In reality he was lost in a chat conversation with her.


And then he looked up, set his beer down on a table, and walked towards the exit to meet her. She zoomed out again. The monk followed discreetly. He had a clear view when Kade and Sam met and then walked out together. The monk paused for a moment. A few seconds later he followed them out the door.


Sam switched to an external camera. She watched herself flag down a tuk-tuk. She and Kade climbed into it and off they went. The unidentified hook-nosed monk climbed into the next one, and it took off in the same direction.


Fuck. That was twenty minutes ago. He could be inside the hotel right now.


First, secure the tactical situation. Nakamura had drilled that into her.


She felt for Kade. He was asleep, calm. Video showed him passed out on his bed, clothes on. Hallway cams. Empty. Stairwells, lobby, elevators – no orange-robed monks, no bald men. A lot of people sitting and chatting in the bar.


She took control of Kade's door, instructed it to throw the safety bolt until she overrode it. Next she sealed the stairwell doors and locked the elevator out of this floor, set alarms on them directed to her slate.


Sam grabbed the monk's face and a clip of him walking from the video feeds and forwarded them to the CIA daemon in the hotel net; told it to watch all cameras for that individual, any bald man, any monk. She instructed it to spawn a new watcher and sent it digging from the present back through time to find any telltales in the hotel logs.


And then she rewound the hotel's lobby and external cams, watched herself and Kade arrive. There they were. Climbing out of a tuk-tuk, walking through the lobby, into the elevator. She waited. No additional tuk-tuk appeared. No monk walked through the lobby.


The daemon returned. In eighteen months of data from all cameras in the hotel, it had 8,572 instances of orange-robed monks and zero of this monk. Nor were there any hits in the past twenty minutes. He was not in the building.


Sam relaxed fractionally. He had followed them, it seemed, but had not come in. Or if he had, he was much more than a normal monk. She took a breath. Forty seconds had passed since she'd realized they'd been followed. They'd elicited attention of some sort but immediate danger was likely low.


She called her support team, debriefed Nichols quickly. He agreed with her assessment. They'd attracted attention but were likely safe. Even so, he sent two of the local contractors into the lobby as backup.


OK. At this point, attracting attention was the greater risk. She unlocked the stairwell doors and let the elevators reach her floor again. She left Kade's door locked and bolted and alarms to alert her anytime someone approached their floor. The support would be here soon. She doubted there was a risk. Something had drawn Ananda's attention to Kade, and he'd wanted to learn more. That did not spell an imminent assassination attempt.


When seeking to understand, go breadth first. That was Nakamura again.


Breadth first. From the top again. Kade's jolt of surprise in the late afternoon. She pulled up the feed from the bugs in his room and on his body around that time. Kade was not a good liar, not good at masking his emotions, except when he activated the emotion-suppression software he had. And Sam was fairly certain he'd activated that after the jolt of surprise, either to manage his own reaction to something, or to hide it from Sam.


The cameras in the lobby and elevators showed no jolt of surprise. It had happened sometime after he got out of the elevator. The video from the tiny bugs in his room was low quality. She couldn't see the minor tics that would give someone away to her in person.


Audio then. Sam closed her eyes, then played only the audio stream from the moment Kade entered the hotel. The lobby was loud, but even so she could hear his breathing and his footfalls. The transition to the elevator was obvious. His breathing stood out in the relative quiet of the small space. Then the elevator door opened; his breathing was louder now. Footfalls. Breathing. Trouser legs rubbed against each other. Pause as he reached his door. Beep of the door lock as he swiped it and it accepted him. Click of the door as it unlocked a fraction of a second later. A breath as he walked into the room. Audio from the room bugs joined the audio from the bugs on his body now. His conference tote bag landed on the floor in a light thud and a crumpling of cheap plastic. A breath as he kicked off the shoes. Foil unwrapping, the sound of chewing as he popped the first mint into his mouth. And then… a break in the rhythm. A breath missed. Chewing paused. A second passed. Another. Another. And then he swallowed, and breathed again.


That was it. Sam paused the playback and opened her eyes. On the slate, Kade was frozen, still standing, the comment card in his hand. She couldn't tell what was on it, but something there had caught his attention. Excellent.


And the interaction with Ananda? Sam pulled up the interlocking video again.


Assume it was two seconds between his jolt of surprise and when I noted the time, she thought. Mark the point two seconds earlier…


She replayed the videos at one tenth speed this time, zoomed in to each of their faces in two projections on the wall, out to the level of their two bodies together in a third. Ananda stepped behind Kade. His face was serene, impassive, lips curved into just the slightest smile at nothing at all. The marker happened. Kade's whole face twitched. The angle of his neck changed. He inhaled sharply. A quarter-second later his eyes and chin moved to the left, starting the turn that would bring him around. Ananda stayed impassive, serene.


No, wait, play that again, focus on Ananda. She went backwards, forwards again. He stepped behind Kade. The time marker arrived. Kade reacted. And a quarter-second later, there, on Ananda's face, there was the tiniest flutter. Ananda's nostrils flared by the barest margin. His eyes flicked from their thousandyard stare to focus on something in front of him. Kade had just barely begun his turn, only milliseconds before. There was no time for Ananda to have responded to the motion. He was responding to something else.


Sam thought furiously. Ananda had been a monk for forty years. He'd spent more hours in meditation than Sam had spent awake. He must have nearly complete control over his expression, over his underlying emotions. He'd trained himself to accept the world with equanimity. But not perfectly so. Something had cracked that long-practiced equanimity. For a split second, Professor Somdet Phra Ananda, eminent Buddhist monk and accomplished neuroscientist, personal friend to the King of Thailand, had been sufficiently surprised that something broke through that Buddhist calm and made itself known on his face in the tiniest of ways. Something to do with Kade.



Neither Sam nor her support team observed the third tuk-tuk, which had followed the unidentified monk, nor the large darkskinned man in black clothing within it.



Across town, in his tiny rented room, Wats zoomed in on an image of a tall, bald, hook-nosed Thai in monk's robes. Who was this man? Why had he followed Kade and Cataranes? Whoever he was, he'd spooked the ERD. Two military types had arrived at the Prince Market Hotel half an hour ago. They were Thai men with the bulk of augmented muscle, wearing blazers in this heat, blazers large and loose enough to conceal weapons in. They were still there, sipping sparkling water in the lobby. Just two businessmen out late for some Perrier in a hotel lounge on a Monday night. Yeah, right.


He stared at the monk's picture again.


Who are you?


This was a complication. An unknown. Wats didn't like unknowns.


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