Malcontent/Part 4

Part 4
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They had no cash, no identification, and no phones. But they had guns.

Guns got them what they needed.

Mal and her new allies ditched the stolen cab and traded it for a hotwired truck outside Nakhon Sawan. They crossed into Myanmar at night and drove clear to Yangon. From there, they took a ferry to Chennai.

Once they reached India, Mal found she could finally breathe. She had been clenching her teeth for four days straight. In South East Asia, every set of eyes seemed to linger. It was all suspicion, all the time.

Not in India. Here, amongst the bustling crowds outside the ferry terminal, bathed in the clinging scent of diesel, she finally felt invisible again.

Lunchmeat excused himself and upon returning, proudly announced that he had taken his first shit since the Battleground.

"How was it?" Julie said, straight-faced.

"Freeing."

Mal’s contact met them outside the ferry terminal that night. He pulled up in a small Honda sedan. A thin man, dark mahogany skin and a platnium blonde goatee. His real name was Yash but he had found notoriety hacking bank records and forging passports under the alias GremlinXL.

More importantly, Yash owed Mal. Big. She could have rolled on him after what happened in Delhi. She didn’t.

"I heard you were dead," he said. "They’re saying you hung yourself in your cell."

"Who?" she said.

"People. Everyone’s talking."

So Martin had followed through with his promise. She doubted her network would believe that she’d kill herself. No, more likely they all assume she was murdered in her cell to keep her from talking.

She slid into the car. Duncan, Julie, and Lunchmeat piled in behind her.

"Wait, who are they?" Yash said.

"It’s complicated. Just drive."

He took them to a basement apartment on the outskirts of the city. The building was sandwiched between a mechanic’s garage and a shuttered Japanese restaurant. It was small and god was it hot. But there was food and a cold shower. Mal washed off what felt like an inch-thick layer of sweat, dirt, and dried blood.

"So, these were in your neck?" Yash asked, an hour later. They were gathered in his "office", a back room in the apartment littered with the detritus of his job: numerous CPUs and hacked gadgetry, boxes of computer equipment stacked to the ceiling. If there was a system here, it was imposible for Mal to decipher.

Yash poked at one of the bloody chips with a plastic fork. Mal had again argued against bringing the chips – better to toss them into the sea and be done with it. Duncan and Lunchmeat couldn’t be persuaded. They were convinced this was the only evidence they had of alien invasion.

Yash held the chip up to the light. The filaments had broken off at some point during their escape. Without those bloody tendrils, the tech seemed considerably less ominous.

"Right here. Under the ear," Julie said, lifting her hair to show the fresh scar.

"Did it hurt coming out?" Yash said.

"What do you think?" Mal muttered.

"What do I think?" Yash said, clenching his teeth. "I think you’re calling in quite the fucking favor, Madison."

Duncan raised an eyebrow at that. "You said your name was Mal."

"Look," Yash continued, "I make most of my money selling fake passports to mobsters. You call me out of the blue and tell me you’re in trouble, you need help, sure. Fine. You say don’t ask who these three are, I don’t ask. But this… whatever this is…"

He poked the chip again.

"This is science fiction. SIM cards in your necks? How do I know these people aren’t gonna kick in my door with machine guns? Or shit, why kick in the door? If they can put a chip in your neck, who says they can’t drop a space laser on my apartment?"

"I don’t know where you found this guy, Mal." Duncan locked his eyes on Yash. "But this guy knows what’s up." He slid his chair closer to Yash. "Brother, you are on the level. You probably know this already but yeah, the government’s been testing atmospheric weapon-systems since Desert Storm. I heard reports of cars being cut in half by lights from the-"

"Enough!" Mal slammed a fist down on the talbe. "If they were tracking us, we never would have made it into Myanmar. Or been able to sit around a ferry terminal for ten hours waiting for you to show up."

"We need someone who knows the dark web," she continued. "Someone who can get us answers and help cover our tracks. We need to know what this is and who stuck it in our skulls."

She held up the chip,. Yash recoiled like the thing was going to bite him. Mal could tell he was afraid. She took a breath and went in for the hard sell…

"Look, I know you’re not one to turn down some extra money. I have over three million Euros, clean, in a stash house in Paris. Another four in an account I can access once I’m ready for the world to know."

"Know what?" Yash said. Mal took a breath. She had him.

"That I’m not dead."

Mal had a plan. While Duncan and Lunchmeat had spent the trip out of Thailand bonding over conspiracy theories – everything from chem trails to lizards wearing human skin to JFK alien assassins – Mal had been plotting how to find them.

Yash got her online and they went digging. She had started with the island. That part was easy. Judging from where they had arrived on the mainland, she deduced the island was a small pile of green called Sanhok. It had held a tourist resort for a decade before being nearly wiped off the map by a freak tsunami in 2009. After that, it became a hub for organized crime – drug-running specifically, production and distribution of a street drug called Yabba.

Then, in 2012, Sanhok went dark.

She’d never seen anything like it. All criminal activity just stopped. Who controlled the territory after that? No one seemed to know. What happened to the Yabba producers? Again, silence.

And no one could tell her why. One of her trusted contacts, a man who supplied cartels in the Philippines, figured it had become a CIA black site – one of those places they bring you when they want to string you up by your wrists and waterboard you a hundred and seventy-seven times. Another contact said it was a training facility for a private military group.

Not-a-Lawyer-Martin hadn’t let anything slip to Duncan, Julie, or Lunchmeat, but whether by accident or not, he’d revealed something to Mal during their one meeting.

The people I work for have had their eye on you for some time. Since your Karakin deal, actually.

Had they done this on Karakin too?

Research on that island dug up the same kind of rumors: a mysterious government torture site, a hidden diamond mine. There was talk of a massacre and some kind of textile kingpin named Querishi.

Who controlled Karakin now?

No one knew.

She spent every waking hour working her sources as carefully as she could. At first, Duncan and Lunchmeat would sit with her – as much as she didn’t care for Duncan’s theories or Lunchmeat’s body odor, it was nice to feel like they shared this job – but after the third day of no results, her comrades gave up and spent their days eating street food, smoking cigarettes, and watching Netflix.

Mal started to feel hopeless.

Then, on day six, the breakthrough.

It didn’t come from Mal or her dark web network of smugglers and gun runners. It came from Yash. He came rushing into the flat one evening.

"I have something. I don’t know what to make of it. But it’s something."

His eyes were wide and he couldn’t seem to stand still.

"When I called it a SIM Card – it turns out I wasn’t entirely off," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"The chip. They’re wildly advanced. Not like anything on the commercial market. Doctor Soman said he’d heard about chips like this being used in experimental military procedures but he didn’t know anything about it being-"

"Slow down, Yash. Doctor who?"

"Sorry," he continued. "My professor, Doctor Soman. He runs the engineering lab at MIT – the Madras Institute of Technology. I let him take a look at the chip and-"

"I told you not to tell anyone-

"Look, I wasn’t gonna be able to figure it out on my own. Doctor Soman is good. And he’s one of us – he helps me dupe credits cards. Anyway, the chip seems like it’s designed to collect biometric data. Heart rate, blood pressure, that kind of stuff. But more than that. I don’t know what they were harvesting from you, but the amount of data this thing can transmit is huge."

Mal wasn’t following. Why was Yash excited? Why was this some kind of a breakthrough?

"We already knew they were tracking devices-" she started.

"Not like this. These things are pulling all kinds of data and sending it all the way across the world."

Mal’s eyes narrowed. "Where?"

"Milwaukee."

The answer was so unexpected that when she heard it, it didn’t sound like an actual word.

"What?"

"Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the States. That’s where the chip is sending the packets."

She shook her head. This didn’t make sense. Milwaukee evoked images of shuttered rust belt factories, cheap american beer and college football. Not high tech… whatever this was.

"This has to be a mistake," she said. "Maybe this is one of those… I don’t know. Like when the signal gets bounced to a hundred different server towers as a ruse."

"That’s what I thought. Except we checked. On all the chips. Double checked. Triple checked. These data packets are huge. And there’s no redirect. You wanna find out who put these in your neck I’d start there."

Duncan claimed to have a friend, another former marine who went by Eddie Denim, who could help them if they made it to the United States. Mal figured she could get them most of the way there with her connections. And if her connections failed her, she reasoned the guns would not.

It wouldn’t be easy or quick. But it was the only real lead they had.

Until 2am when her phone rang.

The sound ripped her from a dream. She had been back on Sanhok, covered in blood and unable to breathe. She shook off her drowsiness. From the other room she could hear kids shouting in Hindi – Julie had made it to season three of the Hindi-dubbed Stranger Things.

She fumbled in the dark for the burner phone and put it to her ear, only then realizing that no one had this number.

"Get a pen. I need you to write something down."

The voice on the line was distorted. Some kind of voice box. Harsh and hostile.

"Who is this?" she said.

"Ask another question and I hang up. Get a pen."

She almost asked again on instinct but caught herself. She stumbled off the couch she had slept on and into the kitchen. Lunchmeat was sitting at the table eating chicken biryani from a plastic Tupperware container.

She found a pen on the counter. "Okay," she said and the distorted voice immediately began reciting a string of numbers.

She scrawled them down on the inside of her arm.

"Repeat it back to me," said the voice.

She read them back, realizing what the numbers were as she did. Coordinates. "Where is this?" she spat out.

There was a long silence. Then:

"They used to call it Paramo. If you’re looking for answers, that’s where you’ll find them."

Then the line went dead.