Contracts, Matt Rogers [phonics reading books TXT] 📗

and eating, eagerly anticipating the beginning of their various treks. There was nervous excitement in the air. Slater could understand why. Live an ordinary life with an ordinary office job and the prospect of hiking through Nepal seems exotic, extravagant, otherworldly, mysterious. Live a life like his own, or like King’s, and hiking through Nepal seems banal.

He wondered which group had the issue.

He thought he knew the answer.

These people were enjoying themselves.

He was restless and miserable, questioning every aspect of the operation.

He nodded goodnight to King, got up, and went to bed.

10

The next morning, Utsav ushered them into an off-road jeep built to handle the treacherous roads between Kathmandu and Phaplu.

Weak light had crept into the sky, but it was still practically dark. They’d set their alarms for four-thirty in anticipation of heading off at five. Downstairs, they’d wolfed eggs and bacon and sausage and spinach into their mouths to fuel them up for the day, and downed a couple of coffees each to get the juices flowing.

King knew the reasoning behind Violetta keeping information at bay, but he didn’t like it one bit. He stewed silently over breakfast, until Slater finally piped up when they clambered into the jeep.

‘Now you’re the quiet one.’

King looked across. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What else would I mean?’

‘What do you want me to be talking about?’

Slater pointed an accusatory finger in King’s face. ‘You’re acting how I was last night. Did I pass my bad mood onto you?’

King didn’t respond as Utsav got in the passenger seat and nodded to the driver, a thirty-something Nepali man with wrinkly skin weathered by years of exposure to the outdoors. The guy backed out through the steel gates, and they plunged back into the relentless traffic.

King said, ‘Headphones on, Utsav.’

It was an already-established request, passed on by whichever bureaucrat in the government had liaised with the guide and his trekking company. Utsav fished a pair of noise-cancelling headphones out of the footwell and slipped them over his ears. Even from the rear seats, King could hear the music blaring.

He tapped Utsav on the shoulder, and pointed surreptitiously to the driver.

Utsav shook an open hand back and forth across his own throat.

No English.

King nodded, then turned to Slater and said, ‘Remember all those problems we had in New York with the way information was passed along? I guess I’m not satisfied with that just yet.’

Slater said, ‘Then we both have the same issues. I hate this. I hate that there’s probably a dozen things she’s not telling us that aren’t yet important, but might give us a better idea about why we’ve been sent all the way out here.’

‘I just don’t want to sound like a broken record when I complain about it.’

‘They think we’re too dumb to take in information piece by piece. That’s what it comes down to. They want to hit us with all the intel at once.’

‘I’ll give her a call,’ King said.

He dialled, and she answered almost immediately.

‘Yes?’

‘We’re en route to Phaplu.’

‘Good. It’s going to be a long ride.’

‘I think we can handle that.’

There was an uneasy pause.

The driver gunned it around a convoy of mopeds and shot into an enormous intersection, where motorists and drivers roared around the wide dirt track in an eternal chaotic spiral. Then they were on a new road, flooring it through the outskirts of Kathmandu, where the old multi-storey buildings were spaced a little further apart, and the endless grocery stores sporting signs for Tuborg beer and Pepsi weren’t jammed up end to end.

Violetta said, ‘Got something on your mind?’

‘We want details. Now. Same deal as New York.’

She seemed to relent. ‘What do you need to know?’

‘Everything you’ve got.’

‘That’d take too long.’

‘Did you miss the part where we’re in the car for the next ten hours?’

She said, ‘I was about to tell you that we’re still working on an intelligence briefing, but that’s not what you want to hear, is it?’

‘Give me something, Violetta. This is our lives here. We need to know.’

She told him what little information they had to work with.

11

Slater sat in quiet patience as King listened.

For a few beats, he tried to make out what the tinny voice emanating from the phone’s speaker was saying. But amidst the blare of horns and passing shouts of pedestrians and the Nepali music whining out of the jeep’s stereo system, it was impossible to hear anything Violetta was feeding King.

So he turned his attention to the outside world.

What initially had seemed like chaos started to make sense the longer he focused on it. Sure, it was bedlam compared to the First World, but Slater had spent enough time on operations in undesirable locations to understand that most people back home, even those close to the poverty line, had luxuries that those here could only dream about.

But the people here were happy all the same. They laughed and joked and smiled as they trudged down dust-choked sidewalks and hefted hessian sacks full of groceries over their heads and ran across roads at breakneck speed to avoid getting wiped out by a dozen different vehicles. They were at ease in the madness, because it was all they had ever known.

Slater compared that to his own life, and half-smiled.

It was the same thing, all across the world.

You get used to your environment.

That’s what allowed him and King to train like they did every day back home. They needed unbelievable conditioning to do what they did day in and day out, and that took a work ethic that most on the planet would find sick. Certainly, a faction of psychologists would probably diagnose them both with some sort of obsessive disorder.

But that’s who they had to be, and that’s what they had to do.

To them, it was normal.

To them, it would be sick not to put their talents to use.

When King finally got off the phone, Slater said, ‘Update?’

King shrugged. ‘Not as much as I’d hoped to hear. But it’s all she had.’

‘Then that’s why they need us.