“How the hell do they know this is what you did before you came here?” he asked her, throwing the letter onto their kitchen island.
She shrugged and walked to him, grabbed him, and pulled him in tight. Her fingers were laced behind his neck and she buried her face into his chest.
“I don’t know,” she said with a groan. “The last thing I want to do is work as a government lawyer again. That’s half the reason I signed up for this damn thing in the first place.”
She sometimes got into moods like this. Not angry or sad, just kind of… “blah,” as she would put it. He knew she just needed him to hold her and she would eventually come out of it. He stroked the back of her head and began to rock with her side to side as if they were dancing.
“Well, at least you didn’t start your own business. I mean, there’s your private firm, but you’ve hardly done anything with it,” he said, trying to console her. Inside though, he was seething with rage.
The bastards had done it again. And it obviously wasn’t Charlie Henry’s idea this time. Asher must be doing everything on his own now. No, Patton thought, that was why Asher had the other two killed—so that he could have the power to push his own ideas.
“Yeah,” she said, pulling away from him. She had her girlish pouty face now and he couldn’t resist kissing it. He kissed her and the small, soft kiss he’d planned turned into a long and passionate one that let him know what he would be doing later that evening. She pulled away again, a little breathless.
“I just like working for you,” she said, a little whine in her voice. He thought she was cute when she was like this.
“I like it too baby. But these guys aren’t letting up. I tried to stop them, but they just outfoxed me.”
She pressed her cheek to his chest and said “Yeah, but the game isn’t over yet.”
He smiled. She knew him a lot better than what he gave her credit for sometimes.
Everything about Bao’s current situation was bad, but nothing was worse than the fact that no one had talked to him for two days. At least he thought it was two days. He didn’t have anything to serve as a time reference. He remembered going to his friend Lindsay’s house, then leaving. But after that, everything was a blank. The only thing he knew was that he was very sore. When he woke up in a dark, unfamiliar room, he knew that he was in trouble. He was on a painfully hard bed and the blanket he was lying on was coarse, almost like an Army blanket. At first he yelled for help, but he gave this up after a half hour. Instead, Bao felt around the room. The floor was concrete. The walls were either concrete or cinder block. The only light in the room emanated from cracks around the heavy door, which, he realized, had no knob on his side.
Most people in his situation would have climbed up the walls out of fear, but Bao was different—at least, he’d been trained to be different. As a child, Bao was terrified of the dark. Instead of giving into Bao’s desire to sleep in his parents’ bed, Bao’s father walked him back into his own room and taught him how to meditate and to pray for calm like a good Buddhist. Eventually, Bao stopped waking in the middle of the night to seek comfort from his mother. Now, as he sat in this dark room, those lessons flooded back into his mind.
“Breathe in slowly, now… let it out even more slowly,” his father told him so many times, so gently and patiently. “And don’t just let it out of your mouth and nose. Let the breath out of your whole body.”
“That isn’t possible,” Bao would say, giggling.
But now Bao didn’t feel like laughing. Thankfully, though, he wasn’t afraid either. Two times he had been led out of the… the what… a cell? No one talked to him either time. They placed a bag over his head before leading him out of the room. Bao figured that whoever had him now were the same people who’d taken the other spies. His thoughts returned to his father, but just then, he heard the door opening. Not knowing what else to do, Bao sat at attention on the edge of his bed. Two hooded figures walked in and the light in the hallway blasted Baos’ sensitive eyes.
“Stand up and turn around,” one of the figures said gruffly.
Bao followed his orders immediately. He felt a plastic zip tie being tied onto one wrist, and then another onto the other wrist. Effectively handcuffed, one of the figures places a cloth bag over Bao’s head and then marched him forward. They pushed him down the hallway, then to the right, then to the left. He heard a door being unlocked and opened. Through his hood he sensed that the room was well lit. One of the people pushed him down onto a hard chair. Although he could sense someone’s presence, including those who’d brought him into the room, no one said a word to him for what seemed to be five minutes. Suddenly, somebody removed the bag. He was blinded again. Once his eyes adjusted, he found himself in a stark white room, sitting at a stainless steel table.
“Mr. Hahn,” came a surprisingly high-pitched male voice. The thin-faced man was balding and wore thick-framed glasses. “Sorry for this little inconvenience, but it’s come to our attention that you’re a member of a group of people who were hired to spy on Blue Creek.”
“We—,” Bao started to say, but was smacked in the head by someone that had been standing behind him. Someone straightened him and stepped away, but he could tell that they were still very close to him in case he spoke out of turn again.
“No need for explanations,” the voice said again. “We’re not asking for an admission or anything. We already know who you are and what you’re doing at Blue Creek. We’re just here to tell you that you will no longer be sending any falsified reports—.”
“I—,” Bao tried to say again, but was slugged in the stomach.
“Mr. Hahn, like I said, there’s no need for you to speak right now. I’m simply telling you,” the man said, impatience creeping into his voice, “you will not be filing any more reports that are negative towards the government. We have access to the entire network and we will know if you try to inform anyone. If you go against what we’re telling you now you’ll disappear.”
The matter-of-fact tone gave Bao chills. He considered speaking again but thought better of it. Instead, he sat there and nodded. Internally, though, he was weighing his options. What could he do? How was he going to let Patton know about this? There was no doubt that he was going to try, come hell or high water.
Governor Asher was in the hills west of town, sitting on a large boulder, overlooking the city—his city. Charlie Henry and Anna Radinski were now gone. No longer would he have to deal with the brooding old man or the controlling, manipulative little vixen. It was his time to shine. His ideas would finally be heard and implemented. His new level of power and influence felt right, like a custom-made saddle. At times like this, however, power felt like an itch that he couldn’t scratch. David Asher had reached the pinnacle of power, but he often found himself asking the same question of “What now?”
He hadn’t even been able to share in his latest triumph—the elimination of his former comrades. He regretted that and thought that he probably always would. He hated leaving important things up to other people, but he was learning on the job. As Anna told him time and time again, the person in charge couldn’t get their hands dirty. His only consolation was that he’d chosen the modes of their deaths. They’d treated him like a child, not giving him any say in what they were doing. And then the two bunglers had almost pissed it all away. He’d gotten recalled, for crying out loud. It was bad enough to lose in a reelection campaign, but to be recalled was worse.
But here he was—the king of the mountain. It was like the game that he and his friends used to play on a big dirt mound in their schoolyard. The competitors would start at different points at the bottom and then try to claw their way to the top. It didn’t matter who got their first. The winner was whoever could get there and then stay there. Young David often won because he was willing to play a little dirty. Sometimes he would throw dirt in the other boys’ eyes. Sometimes he would pull hair and bite ankles. Asher chuckled to himself at the memories, but then the painful ones inevitably crept their way into his mind.