Season One, Episode Twenty-Three: Dead Lines

‘That’s what deadlines are. Dead lines. You cross the line and you’re dead.’
The expensive suit jacket was hanging over the rickety chair, the black tie folded neatly on the seat. Even in the flickering neon light, you could still tell these were expensive clothes, not the kind one wears to an ordinary daily office grind.
The professor had his hands tied behind his back on the other chair. He was wearing his white lab coat, but the cloth looked soiled, raspy, as if it had been scraped along a rough and dirty pavement.
Sweat covered his face as he looked up at the man leaning over him. Camry looked even more devilish up close, with his white shirt unbuttoned half way down.
‘You’re lucky I have an important meeting scheduled, so I can’t use this tie to explain to you what a deadline is. But the people I am meeting are very serious about deadlines, and so should you.’
‘It’s a chemical process,’ the professor said in a voice laden with suppressed agony. ‘If it’s three months, it’s three months. There’s nothing I can do about it. There’s nothing the brightest chemist or engineer in the world could do about it.’
Camry spat in his face.
‘I’m paying you to work. Not to find excuses for not working.’
‘Working with water is a complicated process. I need to get the balance right.’
‘You need to get the balance right,’ Camry said slowly. ‘The balance you need to get right is the one between obeying my orders and receiving a mighty bit of punishment. Do you understand that?’
Before the professor had a chance to reply, Camry smashed a fist in his face, causing his head to pop back like a basketball in some game.
‘Two months,’ Camry said. ‘Do you know what that is?’
He pointed at a table in one corner, away from the neon light. The professor strained his bloodied head to look in the direction.
‘A jug filled with your three-month water,’ Camry answered his own question. ‘Wouldn’t it be ironic if I asked you to drink it, or if I poured it over you?’
The professor shuddered and looked down.
‘Please. Let me work to develop it.’
‘Two months.’
‘Two months.’

‘It was a three because I was not in shape.’
Camry was relaxing in the rear seat of the Mercedes 700 with a glass of French Cognac. They were driving through a high-class residential neighborhood, mansions, trees, lawns with signs telling you you could get shot if you tread on the grass.
‘Our professor is going to work harder but he’ll need an extra set of eyes watching him just in case his feet get itchy.’
‘I’ll take care of him,’ the driver said.
‘That’s where we’re going.’ Camry pointed at a Spanish-style mansion, yellowish walls, red roof tiles, a round tower at one end. The wrought-iron gate turned open without them even saying or doing anything. Camry put his glass down on the fold-out table surface.
‘I’ll put a word in for our friendly professor. Such a nice and hard-working man.’

‘Camry’s the most dangerous man this side of the ocean,’ Riot said. He was leaning against the expensive Italian car as Markus Bentley and Charlo’ were standing in front of him. ‘I can only assume it was him who had the video recording on the laptop delivered to your place. He focused your attention on the guard, and you went running after the Russian.’
‘Wasn’t the Russian the man who killed my sister?’
Riot looked away over the ocean.
‘Let’s just say we shouldn’t feel sorry about this Russian passing on to another life. If there’s any justice, he will suffer miserably. The problem is, you took the bag I gave you and you drew the wrong conclusions.’
Bentley looked at the objects displayed on the roof of the car.
‘You saw the Three Elders, so you rushed off to Taiwan,’ Riot continued.
‘How do you know about Taiwan?’
‘Remember, I was your sister’s friend and colleague.’
‘I still don’t believe too much of that.’
‘You saw the red doll, and you traveled to Macau. Wrong again.’
‘So what are you saying, what should I have focused on?’ Markus asked.
Riot grabbed the bottle of water from the roof and held it upside down.
‘This magic baby.’

NEXT: Camry meets some Very Important People in Episode Twenty-Four before June 18.

Season One, Episode Twenty-One: The Second Tile

Markus and Charlo’ were stepping across a campus. Palm trees, camphor trees, parks, stately buildings not old enough to be historic, but imposing nonetheless.
‘Have you ever thought that maybe he just wanted to talk to you?’
‘The Riot character?’
‘He didn’t look that threatening to me.’
‘You’ve got a character coming at you who knows where you are even if you’ve never told him, you better get moving.’
‘You know the meaning of the word paranoia?’
‘I never studied French.’
Charlo’ giggled.
Markus took her by the arm and led her into the garden. A large square garden enclosed on all sides by a covered walkway. He pulled her under the roof.
‘Anything looks familiar?’
She looks around, up at the ceiling, down at the walls beneath the pillars. At regular intervals, tiles showing buildings are mixed with regular colored ones.
‘How did you know?’
‘Family secrets.’
‘Those three elders again, right? Did your father tell you to find all this after your sister’s death?’
Markus frowned.
‘This is my own destiny. Let’s find the tile.’
He walked rapidly along the pillars and tiles, looking at them one by one.
‘Which one are you looking for? Let’s split up and each take half the area,’ Charlo’ suggested.
Markus shook his head.
‘I know where to look.’
He pointed at the first corner.
‘Round that way, it’s close.’
A tile showing the Montmartre basilica in Paris. The next one showed medieval European buildings in white and brown.
‘Where is that?’
‘It doesn’t matter, all I care about is what’s behind it.’
He pulled a knife out of a pocket in his cargo pants and hit at the cement surrounding the tile. Charlo’ looked around, expecting scandalized teachers to shout abuse at them. They were the only people around. In the distance, she saw a young man play guitar under a tree in the park.
Markus ripped the tile out and laid it out on the floor, face up. He reached his hand inside the cavity and pulled out a red cloth, similar to the one they found in Macau.
‘Surprise, surprise, what’s the mystery object this time?’
Charlo’ crouched by Bentley’s side, but he waved her away.
‘Keep a look out. We don’t want to be jumped on.’
She stood back up and looked around. The young man with the guitar had gone. She watched Markus untie the cloth, and carefully deposit an object in his left hand.
‘Another key? Boy, this is getting predictable. So now, we have a second key, and no doubt, we now have to look for a third key hidden behind another tile somewhere.’
Markus didn’t smile.
‘Let’s leave,’ he said.
‘What’s the hurry?’
‘We have what we want, let’s go to the next stage.’
‘Ever considered I might be getting tired of following you around the world and not getting any answers? Someone killed your sister, you killed them, but now you’re still hopping around. What is your aim?’
‘I’ll tell you when we find the car.’
‘What car?’
Markus waves the key in front of her face.
‘This is a car key. You’re driving us to find that car.’
‘You’re not as charming as you used to be.’
‘Believe me, if Riot is on to us, we’re better off completing this as fast as we can.’

Three blocks away, along a tree-lined avenue, a BMW X7X moved into a shaded parking slot.
Riot cut off the engine and took a PDA-like device from the breast pocket of his jacket. He touched the screen with his right index three times.
‘So that’s where you are, my dear friend. Playtime is almost over now.’
Riot immediately started the engine up again and drove off.

NEXT: Markus Bentley runs riot in Episode Twenty-Two before May 15.

Season One, Episode Twenty: Riot Runs

Markus walked out of the airport toward the taxi rank. He saw Charlo’ hanging around but he gave her a stern look. She took the first cab up. He boarded the next one and told the driver to follow her.
After she left her cab in a neighborhood he wasn’t familiar with, he told his driver to continue for one block, got out and walked back. From a distance, he saw her enter a renovated building. He brushed past the old lady with all the paper bags stepping out into the street.
There were four floors and he hadn’t seen one familiar name on the bell list of residents. He was about to ring the bell on the third floor with the name C. Gabal on it when he heard a whisper above him. Charlo’ was leaning over the balustrade while waving at him.
‘I live up here,’ she whispered. ‘I thought I had told you the fourth floor.’
‘That was way back, before we went traveling,’ he said.
Inside her apartment, they crashed. He held her and kissed her, ferociously.
‘They let you go,’ she said. A statement of fact.
He didn’t reply but accompanied her to the bed. They fell on the top while extricating themselves from their clothes.

‘What do you think?’ Riot asked as he was observing the blue plastic cup filled with water. He took it and went into the bathroom, putting it next to a tile from Holland that had been worked into the wall.
‘About what?’ the woman asked from the dinner room, where she was eating a raspberry waffle.
‘Our precious guy. I think it’s time I paid him another visit.’ Riot looked at the water from different angles.
‘You won’t betray me, will you?’
‘We’re not there yet. First I want to know what he got out of Asia and what he’s planning on doing about it. I also want to know how far Mondeo has come in understanding all of this.’
He walked up to her and tore a piece off her waffle.

Markus and Charlo’ were resting. In bed. Naked. They didn’t know how long they had been here. The flight from Asia took 12 hours. The interrogation by the black cop. Markus was the first to budge. He took a quick shower, then she joined him.
‘What did you tell them?’
‘Nothing.’
‘They fell for that?’
‘My sister is dead and they blame me because I’m the only link they can find.’
‘They haven’t found out about the Russian you killed at the Brother Hotel, then?’
They went back to bed for another round of horizontal passion.
Two hours later, Markus walked over to the window for a look at the street.
‘Bloody screaming murder.’
‘What?’ She immediately sat up in bed.
‘The guy I told you about, Riot? He’s crossing the street and coming here right now. Get your clothes on, we’re moving out.’
Charlo’ pulled her jeans on.
‘You think he knows this place.’
‘He must have had me followed from the airport.’
‘What does he want?’ she asked as she pulled a yellow T-shirt over her head.
‘I don’t want to be here to find out.’
Markus picked up a sports bag, threw all the stuff in he deemed necessary, and grabbed her hand.
‘You have the car keys?’
She ran back into the bathroom and plucked the keys off the washbasin.
‘What a funny place to keep keys,’ he said.
On the way out, he noticed the name next to her doorbell. Ch. Whiggs.
‘Not there, let’s go out the back.’ He went for the rusty structure outside the hall’s back window. The fire escape. Just as they clambered out the window, he heard doors slam downstairs. Riot was probably on his way up. Markus led the way, but kept Charlo’ close behind him. On the second floor, he heard movement, so he stepped back and pressed her against the wall next to the window. Inside, Riot was on his way up. He looked at the rear window but didn’t stop.
Markus counted to five and continued the run down.
‘Where is your car?’ he whispered at her when they had reached street level.
She didn’t utter a word but pointed at the other side of the street, away from the building. They crossed the street, and that’s when Riot saw them.
‘I just missed the bleeding hearts,’ he told the woman on his cell from the fourth-floor window.
‘Follow them and see where they hang out,’ she said. ‘Don’t show yourself until Markus shows us what he has.’

NEXT: Markus Bentley uses the key from Macau in Episode Twenty-One before May 2.

Season One, Episode Sixteen: Moaji

Markus walked over to the other room to pick up the phone, while Trick poured Charlo' another cup of green tea.
‘Do you know moaji?’ the Taiwanese man asked her.
‘Never heard of her,’ Charlo' smiled.
‘Do you like sweets?’
‘He does,’ Charlo' said with a wave in the direction of the other room. ‘He always has marzipan on him.’
Trick smiled.
‘He learned that here. He was bored with life, so he went about making things himself. Painting, at first. When the galleries weren't interested, he turned to food.’
‘Interesting. So what kind of food were you mentioning there?’
‘Moaji. The aboriginals here in Taiwan make them. Rice stamped into a sweet ball, with peanut or sesame inside and outside. I'll get some for you to taste.’
Charlo' wondered whether he was going somewhere to listen in to Bentley's conversation. But Trick was back in seconds. Carrying a tray with four peanut-colored balls. He offered her a pair of chopsticks.
‘How did you meet Markus?’ she asked.
They reclined, munching on the moaji.
‘Our fathers knew each other. His was stationed here for a long time, and obviously, my father was Taiwanese.’
‘You say his father was stationed here, you mean like a military man?’
‘Something like that. I was young, I don't know too much about that. Markus and I went to the same school and grew up together until he left for the States.’
‘With his dad.’
‘His dad stayed here,’ Trick said.
Charlo' detected a finality.

Markus picked up the phone.
‘Lose the girl,’ said a gruff voice.
‘What? What are you saying, and how did you find me?’
‘Don't ask me questions I don't want to answer,’ Riot said. ‘You're busy in a completely wrong way. Get rid of the girl.’
‘I need her to watch my back. Did you have anything to do with those thugs who attacked me?’
‘So why do you say they attacked just you and not the girl as well? Lose her, you don't need her. And you shouldn't have gone all the way to Taiwan. There is nothing for you there.’
‘Remember who told me to do this for my sister? You did,’ Markus said.
‘I didn't tell you anything. I just gave you some of her belongings, because she wanted you to have them,’ Riot said.
Markus thought back to Riot's impromptu visit and to his sister's objects. Was he wrong about the Three Elders?
‘Do you mean the Three Elders were not the important object in there?’
‘I expected you to be smart enough to figure that out on your own, smart heart.’
‘Hold on. Did you just say smart heart?’ Markus said.
‘Remember, I worked with your sister, she told me what she called you, only I'm beginning to wonder why. As I said, lose the girl and get your act together,’ Riot said. ‘I'll find you for our next talk.’
He cut the connection, leaving Markus staring at a silent phone.

‘He's so predictable, it's beyond sick,’ Riot said to the woman standing behind him eating an apple.
‘Do you think he will get rid of her?’ she asked.
‘Charlo' is not the kind of woman you get rid of after a phone call, I know her too well for that.’

‘You need to return home,’ Markus said as he sat down next to Charlo' and took a pair of chopsticks Trick handed him.
‘Do you really know what you're doing? Running all the way here, dragging me along? You get me shot at by a bunch of roughnecks and now you send me away like I'm a piece of dirt?’
Markus put the chopsticks down.
‘I feel it will be safer for you if you're not with me.’
‘Who was that talking to you?’
‘His name is Riot. He's the man who gave me my sister's belongings after her death.’
‘How do you know he's not her killer?’
‘He's a colleague of hers. If he had killed her, would he have bothered to show me his face and give me her things? Is that your logic?’
Charlo' gave him a look that killed while Trick concentrated on his moaji.
‘I am doing for my sister now what I couldn't when she was alive.’
‘You killed her murderer. What more can you do?’
‘My sister gave me those things. They're a message from the grave, she wants me to do this.’
‘This creep, Riot you call him, how do you know he’s not fooling you?’
‘I know those objects were in my sister's possession, he didn't fool me, they were hers.’
She grabbed another moaji ball.
‘You're not getting rid of me this easily.’
Silence fell as the three digested the moaji.
‘We need to go to Macau,’ Markus said as Trick nodded in agreement.

NEXT: Markus Bentley and Charlo' head for Macau in Episode Seventeen before March 3.

Season One, Episode Fifteen: The Second Elder

Markus and Charlo' had to press themselves against the parked motorcycles as a small blue van squirmed through the alley.
‘What is it with your father?’ Charlo' asked.
A loud bang went off above their heads, on the second floor of the place they were passing. Charlo' ducked, but Markus stayed composed.
‘What the hell was that?’
‘Someone changing a gas bottle,’ Markus said.
The black BMW closed in but did not pass them.
‘Your father?’ she asked again.
Markus looked behind them.
‘What is it?’
‘The new BMW 5. No, let's go, now.’
He grabbed hold of her right arm and pulled her along, running out of the alley. Behind them, the doors of the car opened and three men in black shirts and dyed hair stepped out and ran after them.
One of the men produced a Beretta.
At the end of the alley, Markus turned left, dragging Charlo' with him. They heard the men shout. When they rounded the corner, a shot went off and planted itself in the rear window of the SUV they were just running by.
‘We'll never keep this up,’ Charlo' hissed as they scrambled into the next side alley, past parked motorcycles and a stand selling smelly stuff.
‘We have to,’ Markus hissed back.
Another bullet whizzed past their heads to end up lost somewhere with a clang.
An elderly man on a motorcycle ran into them as they veered left and the cyclist went right. The three pursuers appeared again, and this time the bullet missed Markus Bentley's left arm by an inch.
The next crossroads was easy to take. A noisy bustling street market on the right. Stands selling exotic foods in the center of the road, shoes and T-shirts spread out on plastic sheets on the sides. Markus pulled Charlo' over and together they dived into the crowd, jostling some of the onlookers and sightseers, but that was alright, they didn't seem to mind.
‘Keep your head low,’ he told her.
They kept bumping into people, but there was a system to it. The Taiwanese saw these two crazed foreigners come at them, they just gave way. Once that happened too late, when Charlo’ crashed into a young woman eating a squid on a stick, but she mumbled an apology as Markus pulled her away.
Once he felt they had created some distance, Markus dove into a dark gap between two shoe stores and ran hunched toward a metal box at the end. He crouched behind the box and told Charlo' to do the same.
They watched as almost a minute later, one of the pursuers in black passed by without looking at them. The two others followed just seconds behind, each on a different side of the road, no gun in sight.
Markus waited another five seconds, tapped his companion's shoulder, and off they went, further into the darkness until they reached another non-descript alley, the same motorcycles parked everywhere. Markus made sure there was no dark BMW looming around before he chose the direction.
‘Who were they?’ Charlo' asked.
‘I don't know, but I sure didn't want to wait for them to introduce themselves.’
‘Do you think Lassiter sent them?’
‘It's not important what I think. All I know is, we cannot go back to the Brother Hotel.’
‘Where are we heading then?’
Markus signaled her to keep silent. They reached the main road and hailed a cab, a yellow one like all the others. The cabbie didn't understand English but Markus knew the address in Chinese, or that's what Charlo' assumed anyway.
‘Are we going to look up the second elder?’ she asked as the car passed the last subway station and went uphill out of the urban jungle and into the green.
‘We're going to visit an old friend of mine.’
‘Is he as trustworthy as the last one?’
‘Stop questioning me. You get a free trip to Taiwan and all you do is moan.’
‘I didn't ask for this trip, remember. If I stay away too long, my job will be gone.’
The car turned into a dark tree-lined alley, where the houses stood away from the road, hidden from view behind walls topped with shards of glass. Markus waited until the cab had vanished from their sight before moving away. They had alighted in front of the third doorway in the alley, but Markus now crossed the road and marched deeper away from the main road.
‘What if there's nobody home?’ Charlo' asked.
‘We'll either have to scale the wall or spend the night in the bushes.’
‘You must be kidding. Aren't you? Are you?’
Markus checked the number on the next door. A shiny metal door set in a long wall which had once been white but now only showed off the humidity of the environment in black streaks all over.
There was a bell, no name. Markus rang, counted to six, and rang again.
‘Nobody home,’ Charlo' said.
Just when even Markus began to believe that, a light went on above the doorway.
A buzz and a click, and a youngish Taiwanese man with a crew cut stood grinning at them.
‘Hi, Trick,’ Markus said.
They didn't shake hands, but the Taiwanese man signaled them inside. Markus introduced Charlo' as a friend, and Trick gave her the same grin and the same silent welcome.
The trio walked across a dark grass lawn to reach a house that looked like something out of a fifties movie.
Inside, Charlo' had expected to find Chinese furniture and antiques, but instead all she saw were shag carpets, leather couches and garish plastic chairs, black-and-white pictures of Paris and London on the walls.
Trick offered them hot bitter tea in small green enamel cups.
Markus was the first to speak.
‘I want to show you this,’ he said as he produced the three elders out of his bag.
‘So you still hold on to the past,’ Trick said. ‘The furniture in this house is fifties, sixties, and seventies, but I'm a 21st century man. You should try it sometime, it feels a lot better.’
That was the longest time Trick had been speaking since they entered the house, Charlo' thought.
‘What else can I do for you?’ Trick asked.
‘Our hotel reservation has been canceled,’ Markus said, without irony.
‘My house is your house.’
He filled up their tea cups. A phone rang in an adjacent room, with a loud metallic sound like a dial model from decades ago. Trick walked off.
When he returned, the smile had vanished.
‘Someone in the States named Riot wants to have a word with you about your sister,’ Trick said.

NEXT: Markus Bentley talks to Riot in Episode Sixteen before February 23.

Season One, Episode Nine: Room 714

The Chinese man picked up his chopsticks and brought a white dumpling to his mouth without his eyes leaving Bentley's face.
‘Is that what he told you? That I would have a name for you?’ the man said in fluent English, without any trace of an Asian accent.
Markus nodded.
‘I have a lot more than that.’
‘What's your name?’
‘Didn't he tell you you're not supposed to ask that? You can call me Cadillac, for all I care. But I wouldn't drive any of the bleeding wrecks.’
He drank a cup of green tea.
Markus noticed the table had several plates on it. One with half a dozen of dumplings and soy sauce, one with a tuna sandwich and two with pieces of fruit. Pineapple, apple, watermelon. Fresh and symmetrical.
He walked over to the table.
‘Can I get some of your fruit?’ Markus asked.
‘Cadillac,’ as he called himself, shrugged his shoulders. ‘Do whatever you please.’
Markus used a toothpick to stab at a piece of pineapple. There were two cups of green tea.
‘Were you expecting me?’ Markus asked.
‘Cadillac’ looked out the window, at the beach.
‘Do you own a gun?’
‘You have one for me?’ asked Markus.
The Chinese man looked around before stepping to a corner chair below which a thick envelope was lying.
‘Everything you need to know is in here,’ he said while handing him the envelope.
It felt really heavy, but Markus didn't want to look inside in this man's presence.
‘Cadillac’ kept his eyes darting around, making him feel uncomfortable.

Riot left room 725 and walked toward the elevator, away from room 714. He went down to the underground car park and walked around looking for the vehicle. He drew a deep breath when he saw the dark BMW X7X.
‘I'm glad you made it out on time,’ he said to the woman behind the wheel.

‘Do you have the three elders?’ the Chinese man asked.
‘My sister gave them to me.’
‘You know the answer is in Taiwan,’ the man said.
‘But what is the question?’ Markus asked.
‘Cadillac’ paced near the window.
Markus recognized the noise, the vibration of the windows.
A helicopter flew past the hotel, doors sliding open. A man in a jumpsuit and goggles appeared, aiming a machinegun. At room 714.
Markus didn't remember who was the first to shout ‘Down,’ but the glass was already flying. He clutched the envelope and ran off into the hallway. The elevator was ten floors below. Markus rushed for the emergency exit, running down the stairway like there was a monster on his heels.
It took him a while to realize the sound was his cell ringing.
‘I'll meet you at the shopping mall downstairs,’ he told Charlo'.
‘Fine. There's a reception desk with some kind of silver Christmas tree on. I'll be waiting,’ she said.
He wiped the sweat off his face just before pushing open the door to the underground mall. He didn't want to look too flustered, just in case.
He found the silver tree but she was nowhere in sight. The tap on his shoulder made him jump. The envelope fell to the floor with a heavy thump.
‘What's wrong with you?’ Charlo’ asked.
‘I met a contact up there and he got himself killed.’
‘You killed him?’
‘No, of course not, but they might think I did, so we need to get out of here yesterday.’
He pulled her away by the arm.
‘Let's find your car, Charlo'. Are you up for a trip to Taiwan?’

NEXT: Markus Bentley goes for the kill in Episode Ten before December 25.