Did Kim Lee know that this unknown someone wanted him dead? Would he know why? What was the real reason for the money? Would he know anything about it? Slowly a new idea began to emerge. Maybe she shouldn't kill Kim Lee right away. Maybe she should take him home and toy with him.
Corey Schneider had always been careful to follow her own meticulous plans. Being spontaneous was dangerous, given her vocation. But somehow she couldn't shake the feeling that she was being manipulated for reasons she didn't understand. And she wanted to understand.
The door lock to the Buick clicked open as she pulled gently upward on the internal latching mechanism. She paused and tried to fathom how she might kidnap this man without any preparation. She had a roll of heavy duct tape to hold the bomb under the seat. It would certainly bind him sufficiently. The truck would be very useful. She could hide the Mustang and Mr. Lee as well. Without further equivocation she determined she would do it. Quickly she put the bomb back in her pack and retreated to the forest.
The forest edge was so quiet that a ringing in her ears made the silence uncomfortable. Winter brought with it cold dank air, along with a moisture-laden forest that seldom enjoyed the sun's warmth even on its uppermost parts. A pocket of black shadow created by the light of the halogen bulbs of the parking lot seemed to deepen the bone-chilling cold. Occasionally she heard the rushing air from a passing car in the distance. The access road to the office complex was a quarter mile or more from the two-lane highway that served it. Most workers had gone home two hours ago. Only the management football fans remained.
She could feel her heart beat as a slight pulse in her stiffening neck. Her mind sorted through her rapidly forming plan. Considering that she might even build a cage in the basement for her resident corporate asshole, she contemplated whom she might hire to construct it and how she could explain it to him.
A beam from a spotlight mounted on a security vehicle swept across the trees on the far side of the lot. Cruising around the edge of the parking area, the patrol would be one more impediment to a kidnap. If the security people were around when Lee exited the building, she would be forced to abandon her plan.
For this new scheme to work, Lee had to disappear. When she was through with him, his body could be discovered in a manner that would maximize publicity for the cause.
She considered what she might do with the bomb. It would make a great gift for Dan Young or that the bitch Maria Fischer. Since Young and Fischer were becoming such buddies, maybe it would suffice for both of them.
As the patrol car swept past, she noticed a figure coming down the lit glassed-in stairs in an outside wall of the Amada office complex. It looked like Lee. He was alone; apparently he was leaving early. The patrol car was moving away now. Waiting was an ordeal. Every second brought a hope that no one else would come, that the patrol car would not double back. One person seeing nothing more than two shadows in the night could spark an inquiry that would lead them to her.
The chair was a 200-year-old solid wooden affair from Spain. A nobleman had been tortured to death in it. She had been kind enough to tell Kim Lee that. There was a creaky friction between ancient dowels and their sockets every time he moved vigorously. Held together with some sort of pre-modern glue and wooden pegs, it was massive and still stout. Slightly frayed fabric, probably the fourth or fifth recovering, played under Kim's fingers. Some other heavy thinker had also squeezed his fingers on the rich material. Kim did it just to remind himself that he was alive, to allow his mind to sense something in the blackness even if it was only tired fabric against his fingertips.
His chest and back were bathed in sweat; sometimes his hands gripped the chair so tight the last knuckle of each finger ached with the strain. He tried to think-about the chair, the room, the details of each. It worked for a few minutes at a time, but then the terror would return.
He didn't want the fear to grip him so fully that he quit feeling, quit thinking. It was amazing really that his mind could be suffocated, his emotions clamped in a vise, with just a simple description of what she intended to do to him. It was incredible luck the way she managed to discern his deepest fears. Of course he was afraid of dying. He wanted to live. He wanted to live so bad it hurt inside, so bad that the sum of his life had become this moment and his sole mission to survive. But beyond the fear of death, there was a much greater fear-the fear of her kind of death.
When his chest hurt and his sides ached, when he had run out of tears, he made himself think about his wife and young child. Perhaps at this moment he actually felt closer to his wife. Only twenty-five, she had frizzy black hair that touched the tip of his nose when she sat in his lap and giggled-just curled up like a ball, scrunching her toes under her bottom, her big white teeth grinning out from her skinny lips. That's what he called her sometimes to tease-"skinny lips." Then she would rub her nose against his and make little snarling yaps like a mad Chihuahua. And he'd run his hands up her shapely dark arms, and the love would be pouring over him and out of him, and that was the best thing in life.
Then there were his dreams of their baby girl growing up. Now she gurgled and smiled, barely able to walk, knowing her parents only as the source of all comfort and sustenance.
But one day she would know them as people: their favorite books, what they did on Sunday afternoon, which relatives were invited often, Dad's favorite sake, and Mom's favorite perfume. Kim wanted to be there so that she could know him. He wanted to watch her roll her eyes and smile at his jokes. But he had forgotten these things and had started thinking that being a rich and successful corporate lawyer was the best thing in life. Now here he was locked in a black closet, sitting in an antique, history-making chair, waiting for a madwoman to come and do something he tried desperately not to think about.
He had a sense that whoever had taken him was cold to the core, completely unreachable. Now he thought of the watchmen who had lost their ears, and recalled the terror in their eyes. Now he understood.
Then he heard someone climbing stairs-he'd figured out about the stairs, because of the stair-climbing footfall, marked by a feather-light stride on the wood, and the sound of a barely discernible slide on the ball of the foot. Whenever she brought him food or water, or led him to the toilet around the corner from his dark little room, he heard these things.
Just missing Kim's knees, the door creaked open to the inside and there stood his enemy.
"If you'll just let me out of here, I'll do anything."
"Tell me why the timber industry wanted to give five hundred thousand to the environmental movement."
"Most in the industry want the government to buy the Highlands Forest to stop all the protests."
"Who wanted me to steal the money, and why?"
He hesitated. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Kenji Yamada had grown dangerous. Perhaps his boss was as dangerous as his tormentor.
"You really aren't willing to take the steps necessary to escape the fate I've promised you."
In the dull light, before he noticed what she was doing, she took out heavy shears and snipped off the end of his little finger. The torture she had promised was so elaborate and what she had just done so simple, that it was a surprise. It was a moment before he began to scream. For a time he couldn't think; he could only yell. Then suddenly he was sopping wet and terribly cold. She had dumped a bucket of ice water over him.
"I'll tell you! I'll tell you everything. Just don't hurt me anymore. It's a new process. Incredible. But the bats, they're-" He gasped. A heavy weight pressed on his chest and pain shot up into his throat. He tried to take a breath. What could she be doing to him? What could he tell her? The room spun around and then there was nothing.