“Nothing,” I said, taking the binoculars from my eyes.
We were on the roof of a building down the block from the address Abu Nadel had given me for the lunch meeting. It had only one entrance and one window, covered by a closed wooden shutter. Nobody had gone into or out of the building in the past half hour, and we had only fifteen minutes to go before the meeting.
“Agreed,” Boon said. “It’s quiet.”
“Too quiet?”
He smiled. “That’s what they say in the movies.”
Boon and I had been making small talk since we got on this roof. It wasn’t mission protocol, perhaps, but it distracted us from the baking sun. Like all men in our business, we never talked about combat or childhood or anything personal like that. Those topics were dangerous. We only had two safe topics: the future and the opposite sex. I’d been avoiding the second, but it was eating at me and, eventually, curiosity kills cats.
“So how’d it happen?” I asked, without taking my eyes from the door down the block. He knew what I meant, but I knew he’d make me spell it out. “How did you and Kylah get together?”
Boon took a long time to answer. “Remember that night you passed out at the T-Top?”
Not particularly, but I guess that was the nature of my affliction. I’d been on a steady skid in those early weeks in Erbil, beating myself up over everything I had and hadn’t done. I guess that’s what happens when a man like me stops running and takes the time to think. That night, falling apart like that in public, had snapped me out of my slide.
“Wildman had disappeared, so Kylah and I took you home. Put you to bed. We talked.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was eyeing the meeting point. “It was pretty inevitable after that.”
I didn’t say anything. I was starting to see how I must have looked to Kylah in those first few weeks. And to Boon.
“She was just killing time, Locke, until the right thing comes along.” He paused. “Just like the rest of us.”
I thought of what Kylah had said, about Boon being a damn dirty Buddhist in bed. I couldn’t help myself.
“What was she like?”
Boon smiled and shook his head, and for a while I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally, he said, “A long time ago, I knew a woman in Chiang Mai. I was just out of jump school. She was older, rich, maybe married. She called me chawna—peasant. She was always laughing, especially when I ran my tongue up and down the back of her neck, and afterward, she would lie back and tell me to do whatever I wanted, as long as I did it very slowly, and it pleased her. I still remember the smell of her khao soi Mae Sai. And the taste. Salty and spicy and slick.”
“And that’s what it was like with Kylah?”
“No,” Boon said. “It wasn’t exactly the opposite of that.”
I stared at Abu Nadel’s meeting place across the street, not sure what to say. Boon was a weird dude.
Finally, he broke the silence. “Do you remember that brothel in Sudan?”
I knew the one he meant. It had been a hard week, one of the hardest of my life. We’d gotten into a firefight with a separatist army and another outfit hired by an oil company. Some of the fighters were no more than boys, barefoot, carrying knives and rocks. We’d done what we had to do and Jimmy Miles, ever vigilant to our moods, thought we needed some R&R.
“I remember the woman you chose,” I said. She was dark, black, and huge. Not fat, but tall. She towered over Boon. It seemed like an odd choice at the time, and still did.
Boon nodded. His eye was to his riflescope. “A woman stepped out of the enemy position,” he said. “She was almost naked, just beads . . . necklaces . . . but she seemed important. She didn’t come toward us. She just stared at me. Into me. You understand.”
“You shot her,” I said. “Was she the first woman you ever killed?”
“No.”
I wasn’t surprised. Americans thought of Thailand as an exotic beach, but it had a violent side. Boon did two tours in the special forces as part of Narathiwat Task Force 32, fighting the Runda Kumpulan Kecil, known as the RKK, a ruthless Islamic terrorist group that murdered Buddhist monks collecting alms and villagers going about their work. They killed schoolteachers, politicians, and civil servants. They torched schools simply because they flew a Thai flag. Boon was no sheltered innocent. I knew the world.
“She was the one,” he said. “After all the others, she was the one who got to me. And that woman, at the brothel . . .” Reminded him of her. I knew that feeling. Of course I did. It was natural, but dangerous. It needed to be killed away.
“I cried the whole hour I was in the room.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was the most open Boon had ever been with me. I suspected it was the most open he’d ever been with anyone. Why me? Why now, on a scalding-hot rooftop in northern Iraq?
“Do you remember your choice?” he asked.
That surprised me. “I do,” I said tentatively.
“Me too. That’s why I stay with you,” he said.
I hadn’t slept with a woman that night. I had bought something far more profound and dangerous: a solo concert from an older woman, sung in the Dinka style. The music had been outlawed in 1989, when Islamists took over the country. I had paid far more for the song than Boon had paid for his hour, but maybe the music had been redemption for us both. Until that moment, I didn’t even realize he had heard it.
“Chiang Mai, huh?” I said, thinking back to his earlier story. “I spent time there.”
Boon put down his binos. I guess he wanted to see me clearly, or maybe I’d finally surprised him. “No shit. When?”
“Between high school and college. I took a year off, to do a solo walkabout around the world. I spent a summer as a novice at the Buddhist monastery there, teaching English and seeking enlightenment.”
“What happened?”
“My visa expired.”
“Farang”—white foreigner—Boon chuckled. My enlightenment had been lost to paperwork, what could be more farang than that?
“I tasted my share of khao soi Mae Sai while I was there, though. It’s quite spicy, if I remember correctly.”
Boon nodded. “It’s my favorite soup. But only if you get it in Chiang Mai. They don’t know how to make it right down south.”
I took a drink of water and wiped sweat with my head scarf. The roof was a sweatbox, no shade.
“I don’t think this is the place,” I said. “I think Abu Nadel gave us the first address he could think of. He isn’t coming back, or if he is, he’s taking us somewhere else.”
“Odds are better it’s a trap,” Boon said.
“Why do you say that?” I asked, watching the empty building.
Boon shrugged. “Because if I think that and I’m wrong, it won’t kill me. If I think the other way . . .”
Wildman’s head popped up above the edge of the meeting site. He looked around, then back toward us. I gave a thumbs-up: coast is clear. He worked quickly, taping loops of detonation cord and blocks of C-4 to key points of the building. We didn’t have as many supplies since leaving Apollo, but we had plenty of C-4 and det cord. Wildman made sure of that.
Boon was right: better safe than sorry. That was why I’d sent Wildman down with the explosives and remote detonators. If I was going to be walking into an ambush, and I very well might be, I wanted to make sure someone was ready to blast me out.
Or blast us all.