The Informationist: A Thriller by Taylor Stevens

mirrored his shift in seating position. “So,” she said, and she smiled back and waited half a beat, “what’s your theory on the scars? Apparently you don’t believe that I’m suicidal or prone to cutting.”
    “Would it matter if I did?” he asked.
    “Actually, yes, thank you for asking, it matters a lot. It determines what types of reciprocal behavior I can expect from you when we find ourselves under stress.”
    “Then no,” he said, “I don’t believe it—it contradicts everything I know about you. If you were planning to end your life you’d do it in a chuteless BASE jump off Angel Falls.”
    Munroe drew a slow, deep breath and then held up her right hand and spread her fingers. “Fewer than these,” she said. “That’s how many people grasp what you’ve just said.” And then, after another moment of silence, “The funny thing is, everything I told them was true.” She shook her head. “What a fucking mind job. You reach out for help and get labeled delusional.” She pulled back a collection of beaded bracelets from the base of her left wrist and turned it over for him to see. “The scar’s real, as are all the others, but they weren’t self-inflicted.” She turned her right wrist over, blemish-free, and placed it next to the left. “When I do a job, I do it properly.”
    “There’s a lot I don’t know about you, Michael,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what you told your doctors, and it’s pretty evident from the file that I haven’t been able to fill in the blanks of your teenage years. I do know that when you arrived in the United States, you didn’t adjust very well and were later expelled from high school.”
    Munroe nodded and motioned for him to continue.
    “In that same year, you were barred from several eskrima training facilities and kicked out of nearly every martial arts class you attended. Getting expelled from school I could understand, but the knife fighting and martial arts made me curious—especially the places you were going—tough guys aren’t easily threatened, and if you go too far, they’ll just as soon beat the crap out of you. It took me a while, but I managed to track down your first balisong instructor—he remembered you well and not at all fondly. He said you’d come close to killing him a couple of times, says you easily could have, and he still doesn’t understand what stopped you. The stories from the others weren’t much different.” Bradford paused for a sip of coffee. “That ability and the spark of crazy that terrifies the hard-assed, it came from somewhere, Michael, and I have no doubt that’s where the scars came from as well.”
    “You’re a very perceptive man,” she said. “Maybe I’ll keep you around for a while—perhaps you can appreciate the mastery born from the will to survive.”
    T HE FLIGHT OUT of Frankfurt connected in Paris and touched down in Douala at seven-thirty in the evening. Munroe stepped from the cool, dryinterior of the plane to the open-air concrete halls of the terminal, and warm moisture washed over her as if she’d opened the door to a steam room.
    In a shifting line that converged and separated, the passengers moved through the halls toward passport control. Dampness settled on Munroe’s skin, weighing down her hair and fogging up the glasses of a tourist who walked beside her. And then, as if the heat had entwined itself around their bodies and in doing so encumbered their limbs, the speed of the pack slowed to a softer pace. By the time the first of the travelers arrived at health control, wet patches had spread under the arms and on the backs of their shirts, and some showed visible signs of exertion.
    Munroe asked Bradford for his passport, and he gave it to her. At health control she handed over her yellow card and both of their passports with the pink-red border of a ten-euro bill peeking from between the pages. To the woman on the other side of the small kiosk, she said, “We seem to have