With that thought, Michael instinctively felt for the Swiss Army knife he carried in his pocket. After getting off the plane, the first thing he had done was pull it from his backpack. In general, Michael felt better about items he could keep on his person and to that end, his GPS capable watch, and a high resolution smartphone were a perfect complement to the trip. His cash and identification were further contained in a special pocket he had sewn to an inner panel of his shorts. As long as he kept his pants on, Michael reasoned, he’d remain in good stead.
Still, the reason he had the pack was that though you could try, you couldn’t possibly carry everything you needed to travel for months on end in a single pair of cargo shorts. For that reason, the backpack also contained amongst other essentials: a Lonely Planet guidebook of the region, a Gore-Tex rain shell, a self-filtering canteen that made the dirtiest of water safe to drink, and a Petzl headlamp, all of which he pushed aside in his effort to find what he was looking for. After dropping the pack thirty feet to the concrete below the previous evening, he hoped they were still intact. Luckily he had packed them within the folds of his down sleeping bag and with a final hook of the wrist he was able to extract what he was after — a compact pair of binoculars.
Michael had debated bringing the binoculars, but decided in the end that they were so lightweight, they wouldn’t hurt. At least not physically. But after all these years they still packed an emotional punch. Michael had been seventeen, staring through a pair of binoculars just like these ones, when it had happened. One minute he was a happy hiker and the next he was a hostage. It was without a doubt the single most horrific experience of his life.
Truthfully, the whole thing had started out great. His dad had invited him on one of his business trips. He was scoping out a new production facility for his company in Peru and Michael had jumped at the chance to go with him. Once they were done with business in Lima, they headed up to the Sacred Valley of the Incas near Machu Pichu. And that’s when their little excursion went seriously off the rails. It was unclear whether the kidnappers had targeted them in Lima or not, but they knew what they were doing. They waited until Michael and his father were apart and they sprung. Michael had climbed a few hundred feet above to scope out the area with the binoculars while his father set up camp near the stream below. Michael was consumed by the lush mountain scenery, simply drinking it all in, when he felt a sharp tap on his shoulder. He was startled, but not scared. He figured it was just his dad. Even though Peru was home to hundreds of kidnappings a year, he had given little thought to the phenomena. Besides, Michael was seventeen. He was invincible.
Or so he thought. The first smack of the pistol dissuaded him of his invincibility pretty quickly and once the other two kidnappers trained their machine guns on him it was all downhill from there. Michael tried his best to act brave, to look brave, to be brave, but he was scared and it must have shown. His attackers asked him at gunpoint where his father was and when Michael refused to answer, they pistol whipped him again. And that’s when he got really frightened. Because, Michael thought, if his father wasn’t here, where was he? Did he even know what was happening?
The lead gunman, his coarse black hair tucked behind his ears, ripped the binoculars savagely from Michael’s grasp. The memory of it rocketed Michael back to the here and now. The abduction had happened nine years ago, but the thought of it still shook him. True, he was functioning again, and his nights of awakening in a cold sweat had become rarer, but they still occurred, reminding him of just how quickly anybody’s life could be turned on end.
Focusing his mind on the task at hand, Michael slipped the binoculars into his now rather weighty pocket and tightened the drawstring on his pack. The top of the knoll lay twenty yards above and like any good boy scout he wanted to take a look around before introducing himself. Michael scampered up the steep slope and laid down in the tall grass at the top of the knoll taking in what looked like a multi-story building across the meadow. If anything, the previous evening’s events had reinforced that an abundance of caution was in order. This was no game he was playing. People had already died. And that meant he had to be careful, more careful than he’d ever been in his life.
Michael brought the binoculars to his eyes, gently spinning the focus wheel. About fifteen hundred yards ahead, approximately where he estimated the GPS coordinates to be, rose a six-story building, the road looping into a circular drive around the front of it. Flowers bloomed and ornamental trees blossomed in the surrounding gardens. The structure itself was constructed of decaying concrete with large warehouse style windows, but the setting was so pretty, the building’s generic form seemed almost incongruous. A second, more industrial building with a tin roof obviously served as some kind of garage facility, vehicles parked in front. Still, for all the evidence of human habitation, there wasn’t a soul in sight. An elaborate metal sign mounted high on the west side of the main building identified the enterprise as Chohow Industries.
That these were the approximate coordinates indicated by his father’s message was certain. What was less clear was what he was going to do next. Obviously he needed to get closer, but he wanted to do so in such a way that his approach didn’t raise any alarm bells. Still, Michael reasoned, the most direct route might also be the least suspicious. He was, after all, a backpacker and what did backpackers do but lope around seeing the sights? Granted an industrial building in the middle of nowhere wasn’t likely to make any Condé Nast top ten lists, but who was he to judge? Maybe the structures were shining examples of post-communist Chinese architecture.
Michael picked himself up off the ground and hiked up the winding road. Within a few minutes he had reached the circular drive. His GPS told him that the coordinates his father had left him were somewhere within the larger of the two buildings. Slipping off his backpack and depositing it at the base of what looked like a banyan tree, Michael casually walked the final few feet into the open doors of the deserted reception area.
The first thing he noted was that he’d have to come up with another excuse for being there. The building wasn’t a shining example of anything. The bare concrete floor and walls looked old, but Michael guessed that they were probably new and simply decaying before their time due to a combination of improperly mixed concrete and Shenzhen’s high humidity. There was an unoccupied metal desk in the dark corner of the open lobby and a ten-foot-wide switchback staircase leading up through the floors. With no one to stop him, Michael kept right on walking, mounting the first flight of stairs.
He was struck by the quiet. The building appeared utterly vacant, and on each level he was met by a locked, green metal door, paint peeling off its face. Though the coordinates his father had left him accurately indicated a longitude and latitude, there was no indication of a precise elevation, so Michael knew that even if he stood exactly upon the spot indicated, he’d still be guessing. Now that he was in the building he was pretty much on his own. Except, he thought, if his dad had gone through the trouble of leaving him the coordinates, he wouldn’t leave the floor of the building to chance. No, he would have provided that information. And with that Michael remembered the coordinates’ final digit. The five. Initially Michael had thought it to be a fraction, but that was unlikely. GPS coordinates were routinely expressed to four decimal places. No, the final digit wasn’t a fraction, it was a floor. Redoubling his step, Michael now knew his destination lay two floors above.
He also knew he was no longer alone. Rounding the fourth floor landing, chatter emanated from the hallway above. Michael mounted another two steps and listened. Unlike the green steel doors on the other floors, the fifth floor door was propped open by a plastic chair, women’s voices audible from within. Michael considered rehearsing his cover story, but nixed the idea when he considered that it was unlikely anybody would speak a word of English anyway. He was in China after all, not Chattanooga. He needed to adjust his expectations accordingly. Mounting the final steps he stuck his head in the door expecting to find at most a couple of chatty secretaries. Instead he found a full-fledged assembly line.