“But Sita is your name, isn’t it?” Klien paused, licked his lips. How he was enjoying this, his moment of victory after years of disappointment. “I want to know the identities of the people who kidnapped you.”
She stared at him. Her one satisfaction, amid all her fear, was the knowledge that he was so wrong. She would play along with his little game.
She shook her head. “I don’t know who they were. They took me and locked me up. I managed to escape.”
Klien was shaking his head. “It doesn’t make sense, Sita. Why would they take you from the house and simply lock you up? They would either demand a ransom, which they didn’t, or kill you, which they didn’t. So… are you going to tell me the truth, Sita?”
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Shall I tell you what I think happened?” he asked. “I think they took you, locked you up as you said, and were going to demand a ransom, but something happened?”
She shook her head. “What?”
“I think that, while they held you, a certain rapport developed. It often happens between kidnappers and hostages. You grew close to them, and they perhaps to you. They took you away with them, perhaps you even worked for them at, what? Thieving? Prostitution? For whatever reasons, you never returned home. Either they kept you captive for years, or you actually enjoyed the life you were leading.” He shook his head. “But that is irrelevant. What matters is that you know the identity of the people who took you, and I want to know who they are.”
He was no longer smiling, and the sudden transformation, from condescending affability to controlled but obvious rage, filled her with fear. She stared at him, shaking her head, “I… I don’t know.”
He stood, and in one fluid menacing movement slipped a hand inside his jacket and produced a laser pistol. He held it almost casually at his hip, directed at her chest.
“Who were they? Where are they now? Tell me.”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”
He nodded with a show of reasonableness. “Very well, I’ll explain. They took something from your father’s safe, something that is very important to me. It is called a softscreen, and it contains information that I need. Now do you understand, Sita? I need to know who kidnapped you so that I can trace them and locate the softscreen. Now, are you going to tell me, or should I resort to more than mere verbal persuasion?”
The softscreen… She wondered what information the softscreen might contain that was so vital to him.
“Now, Sita, tell me: who were they?”
The very fact that he wanted information from her, she realised, might prove to be her salvation. He would hardly kill her if he thought she might be able to lead him to the screen. She decided, then, to tell him the truth. She would tell him what he wanted to know, play for time, and hope that the security team would arrive before she had finished her explanation of the screen’s whereabouts.
“Who were they?” he asked again, raising the laser.
She imagined herself as his latest victim, one side of her face burned beyond recognition, the other scored with a bloody crucifix.
No, she told herself. He needs me alive.
“I’ve killed many people, Sita,” Klien told her matter-of-factly. “I would suffer no compunction at killing you, too.”
She wanted to call his bluff, then, tell him that if he killed her he would never know who kidnapped her. But something in his manner made her realise that this would be a mistake. He had lost his urbane charm, or arrogance, and he was close to breaking point. There was a light in his eyes that was almost maniacal.
She shook her head. “You’ve got it all very wrong, Mr Klien. You see, there were no kidnappers.” String it out, she told herself. Play for time…
He barked a laugh. “No? Then who robbed your father’s safe? Who took the softscreen?”
“I took the softscreen, Mr Klien. I ran away from home, but first opened the safe and took some money and the screen.” She shrugged. “People must have thought that I was taken by whoever stole the softscreen, but that wasn’t how it happened.”
That gave him pause to consider. He watched her, his mind ticking over.
He nodded slowly and licked his lips. “Very well.” His voice was no longer the sophisticated drawl. The words caught in his throat. He was so close, after all, to what he had sought for such a long time. “Very well, Sita. Now tell me, what did you do with the softscreen?”
She smiled. “I kept it, of course. I lived on the streets for five years and kept it with me. It was a source of great entertainment for me and my friends. We—”
He interrupted. “Where is it now, Sita?”
She hesitated. She imagined the security team, hurrying towards the apartment. Play for time…
“Tell me why you need it, and I’ll tell you where it is.”
His reaction scared her. He moved forward, jabbing the gun at her. “Tell me!”
“Ah-cha, ah-cha…”
She glanced through the window. Shiva! In the street below she saw an unmarked truck draw up, half a dozen plainclothes men jump out. She thought she might pass out with fear and dread.
“Sita, if you don’t tell me…”
“Ah-cha. It’s… I sold it. I sold it to…” She bit her lip, feigning concentration. She heard footsteps on the stairs.
“Who? Who did you sell it to, Sita?” He stared at her, something insane in his eyes. He raised his pistol and directed it at her chest.
She heard a movement in the doorway. The door swung back, smacking the wall. The first shot turned the window behind Klien’s head to molten, dripping slag. Rana saw a security marksman crouching in the doorway.
Klien ducked and swung his weapon, fired instantly. The marksman screamed and fell as the laser hit him in the head.
Rana watched with a sense of disbelief as Klien turned towards her. She could intuit his intentions from the look in his eyes. She began to plead with him, but, almost sadly, he shook his head. In the second before his finger pressed the trigger, she imagined that she saw something like pity in his eyes.
She screamed, and Klien fired.
The laser hit Rana in the chest and she fell back against the wall. She slid to the floor, staring at Klien in disbelief. The pain seemed to fill every cell of her body with agonising fire.
He fired again, this time at another security officer in the doorway. He dived across the room, sending a barrage of shots through the wall. He ran to the doorway and scanned the hall, firing all the time. Rana heard another cry.
He paused and looked back at her. His gaze fell to the hole burned in her chest. For a brief second she thought that he was about to fire again and finish her off, but instead he moved through the door and disappeared, and something in his confident dismissal of her fate frightened her even more than the thought of the coup de grâce.
Rana began to cry. She reached up and fingered the wound in her chest. The skin between her breasts was burned and blackened, and though the pain pulsed through her body in sickening waves, worse than the pain was the thought that she was dying.
It was this knowledge, that after such a short life, at just twenty-three, she was going to die so needlessly, that made her cry like a child.
Rana’s vision blurred. Nascent in her thoughts, but cut short, was the satisfaction that at least Klien had failed to find the softscreen.
19
Bennett lay in the command couch and allowed the Cobra to fly itself through the upper atmosphere of Earth. He monitored the screens set into the console that surrounded him, vigilant without a co-pilot to back him up. The ship entered the upper cloud layer, the aluminium blue of the troposphere replaced suddenly by opalescent cloud whipping around the viewscreen. The Cobra hit turbulence and rocked solidly, Bennett swinging in his couch. Seconds later the ship dropped through a raft of cumulus and the desert of northern India seemed to extend forever far below.