Around the room, the others looked on, approvingly it seemed. The old man was laughing, giggling at the entertainment. He moved forward, taking back the bread and proceeding to eat.
“Take it all,” he said to the others. “Don’t save any for them.” He was giddy. “With no teeth, they will not be needing food today.”
The young boy jumped down and took the largest bowl of soup, bringing it back to the dying man and trying to feed him.
“You eat it, Yuri,” the man said. “You need it.”
His voice was Eastern European, maybe Russian. She wondered what he and the child had done to Kang to warrant such treatment. Certainly he did not look like much of a threat. With great effort, he got to a sitting position.
“They will try to kill you now,” he told her. “They will want revenge.”
She thought back to the words of one instructor. If you move, make sure you do enough to prevent any countermove. She felt quite certain she’d done that.
“With those injuries, they’ll be immobile for weeks, maybe months without proper care.”
“Be careful when you sleep,” the Caucasian said. “They will come for you.” He pointed to the boy he’d called Yuri. “He can watch for you at night. He never sleeps,” the man said.
Danielle looked at the boy, perched on the shelf like a little bird.
“Is he your son?” Danielle asked.
“No,” the man said. “I kidnapped him, to sell him to Kang.”
Danielle found this revelation hard to fathom. The man seemed to have great affection for the child. “Kidnapped him?”
“I took him from the people he knew, though they were not his family. I took him from the only place he has ever known, though it was not a home.”
“He’s Russian, like you,” she guessed.
The man nodded. “He was under the care of the Science Directorate. They did experiments on him.”
The hair went up on the back of her neck. “Experiments?”
The man began to answer but went into a minor coughing fit first. “I wish I could say we were trying to save him, but that is not the whole truth. Kang wanted him. He promised us his safety and his fair treatment. But we did it for money.”
“What happened? How did you end up down here?”
The man coughed harshly once again, fighting to control it. “Things went wrong on our voyage. The navigation system, the radios, everything failed us, and my vessel lost its way in the Arctic. My crew thought we had been cursed. And maybe they were right.”
“I don’t understand,” Danielle said.
“We were tracking south through the night, following the compass. But when dawn came we realized we had been going the wrong way. Akula, orca, they followed us as if they knew we would soon fall into the sea. They pushed us onto the ice, slamming into our boat over and over again. Three and four at a time. The crew made it to the escape raft, but they were attacked and killed. And as the boat went down, I escaped to the ice floe with Yuri.”
Danielle looked him over. He smelled of decay. He had a stump wrapped in rags where his foot should have been and his hands, nose, and other parts of his face were black with gangrene. The child didn’t appear to have suffered the same way.
“How come he’s not frostbitten?”
“I used my knife, I dug us a small cave, and I surrounded him as best I could,” Petrov answered. “We were there for three days. Days almost without sun. I was certain we would be dead on the fourth, but a helicopter came. Kang’s people found us.”
“Why did he put you down here?”
“We were so far off course, he believed we meant to betray him.”
Danielle looked at Yuri. “All this for a child?” she said. “Why? Who is he?”
“He’s no one. He has no family that I know of, but he is unusual,” the dying man said. “He was born with a degenerative neurological disorder. His parents could not care for him and he was given to the Science Directorate. They use him in experiments, and somehow they stopped the progression of his disease. But there was a strange result, a side effect. They say he senses things, sees them.”
The man spoke in a wavering voice and she wasn’t sure the information was any more firm than the voice. Certainly it sounded odd.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Like a psychic?”
The man shook his head. “No. Physical things. Magnetic anomalies, electromagnetic disturbances. They say he can see beyond the normal human spectrum.”
“Can he really do this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” the man said, coughing badly. “Kang thought he could.”
“Then why is he down here?” Danielle said, realizing he’d used the past tense. “Does he not think so now?”
The man shook his head. “Yuri would do nothing he asked,” he said. “No matter the beating or incentive. No matter the threat. He only talks to himself or sings. And he would not leave my side. So Kang sent us down here. His men told Yuri that he would see me die and then he would have only his new master to cling to.”
Danielle looked at the young boy, slurping up the soup broth. “Does he even understand what Kang is asking?”
“I think so,” Petrov said. “He just doesn’t respond.”
Suddenly the boy looked up. His eyes darted toward the elevator door. Nothing happened, no sound could be heard, but seconds later the car slid into place at the bottom of the shaft and the doors opened.
The guards stepped out with their Tasers in hand.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Petrov,” he said. “Alexander Petrov.”
He went into another coughing fit, his body racked with spasms for twenty long seconds, and this time when he pulled the rag from his face, it was covered in blood.
CHAPTER 13
When Hawker didn’t respond to the man who questioned him, one of the thugs raised a gun and aimed it at his eye.
“You really won’t get much out of me if I’m dead,” he told them.
The thug was unmoved but the man behind him laughed. “Bring him with us,” he said.
Hawker was blindfolded and dragged into a waiting van. From there it was a short trip to the waterfront and a forced walk onto a waiting vessel, a diesel-powered junk.
As they rumbled out into the harbor, Hawker tried to guess their direction or speed.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked after a minute or two.
“I’ll gladly answer that, once you tell me what you’re doing here,” the Russian voice said back to him.
Hawker gave no answer. He was still trying to figure out the dynamics of the situation. Why should he, an American, have to explain to a Russian what he was doing in Hong Kong?
The motor beneath the deck cut back to idle and then died away. Soon the boat’s momentum ceased and the vessel began to rock back and forth in the chop of the waves.
“Stand up,” the man said.
Hawker stood, holding the rail, as one of the man’s guards pulled the blindfold away. He began to turn.
“Eyes forward!”
A rifle jabbed him in the back.
Hawker did as he was ordered. They were a mile out into Victoria Harbour, looking back at the skyscrapers of Hong Kong.
“You are a man without a home, or so I hear. A man with debts to pay, who is wanted even by his own country.”
Hawker did not respond.
“You go by the name Hawker,” the Russian said. “An interesting metaphor this word. Where I come from, it means a seller in the marketplace, a shill, offering goods or services.”
The name had come to him as a code, one he’d kept for his own reasons. He didn’t try to explain.
“At any rate, you are here plying your trades, both gross and fine, only in this case, it is at the behest of your own nation’s security apparatus. Care to tell us why?”
Hawker held the rail. He guessed that the man already knew the answer, or some version of it. He remained quiet.