He looked at my mom. “Really, Julie? We’re really going to get into this now?”
“I should have known,” Mom said tonelessly, staring at the floor, rubbing her temples, a gesture that I associated with a very specific moment in their marriage, two years ago. “I should. Have. Known.”
“Oh, like you’ve been a saint yourself lately,” Dad said, loud enough that Annie stirred on my mom’s lap.
“Keep your voice down. What’s wrong with you?”
Dad didn’t say anything, and that only seemed to make Mom madder.
“Don’t you dare try to make this about me,” she said. “This has nothing to do with that.”
My dad reached up and ran his hands through what was left of his hair. “Julie, we’re locked in a room with no idea who’s doing this or when they’re coming back. I don’t particularly give a shit what old boyfriend you’re flirting with on Facebook.”
“Wait.” I looked at Erich. “Is this live?”
“No,” Erich said. “It is a Quicktime file. An attachment. It came through the iPad just a few minutes ago.”
“Can you get any idea of where it came from?”
“There is more.” Erich clicked on the PLAY triangle again.
I immediately wished that he hadn’t.
“Your son’s girlfriend,” Mom was saying. “Tell me, Phil, just out of curiosity, is there a depth to which you wouldn’t sink?”
Dad took in a breath and let it out. Maybe it was the angle, but he didn’t look like himself at all anymore. “I already told you, nothing happened.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that?”
“Right now, honestly, I don’t care what you believe.”
It was the wrong thing to say on every possible level, and I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle him for it. Meanwhile, Mom’s whole body sort of folded in on itself and she just started crying. It was a terrible sound, hoarse and scratchy, like she was coming down with a cold. In her sleep, Annie shifted a little on her lap, drew her knees up, and tucked in her arms but didn’t wake up. I just hoped she was really asleep.
“Look,” Dad said, “that’s not what I meant.” When he reached over to try to put his arm on my mother’s shoulder, she jerked away.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Julie-”
“Don’t.”
“Okay,” he said, sounding tired. “But I want you to listen to me. I don’t know why this is happening. I don’t know what we’re doing here. Obviously Paula isn’t who she said she was.”
“Obviously.” The bitterness dripping through my mom’s voice at that moment could’ve melted the insulation off the speaker wires.
“That’s not what I meant.”
Mom found some invisible point off-camera and stared at it. “What was she saying about getting out of here tomorrow?”
“I have no idea.”
“You acted like it meant something to you.”
Dad shook his head. “I was trying to get her to tell us something. Anything. Maybe about Perry.”
Mom straightened, looked back at him. “You think they have him somewhere?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would she tell you, if you asked?”
“Probably not.”
“You should try.”
“All right.”
“He doesn’t even have a passport anymore,” my mom said, and she sounded like she was going to start crying again. “He doesn’t have anything.”
“I’ll see what I can find out when she comes back. But you have to believe me, Julie, as God is my witness, there was never anything between me and that woman.”
Mom didn’t say anything for a long time. When she finally did, her voice was cold and distant.
“I agree,” she said.
“You do?”
“About the fact that it doesn’t matter right now,” she clarified. “Right now I just hope Perry’s all right.”
Dad looked at her, but she didn’t say anything else.
The clip ended there.
30. “Timebomb” — Beck
I stood perfectly still behind Erich, staring at the screen. The funny thing about equilibrium is that you don’t realize how much you rely on it until something comes along and yanks it out from under you. Somewhere in front of me, he was leaning forward, typing on the keyboard, little clicks adding up to something, or nothing, at the moment, I really didn’t care. I barely felt Gobi’s hand on my shoulder.
“I am sorry, Perry. Your father-”
“Yeah.” I turned, or at least my legs decided to, taking the rest of me along for the ride. Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about it meant thinking about it, and it didn’t take too much thought to realize how easily Paula could have used my dad the way she’d used me, as a way of gathering information about Gobi, and earning his trust, until eventually he’d leave himself and his family vulnerable. I tried to imagine my dad resisting Paula’s advances-I wanted to visualize him pushing her away, saying how wrong it was, she was dating his son. How he could never do something like that. There was wrong, and there was wrong, and there was this.
But I knew him too well.
And Gobi did too.
I tried to make my voice as calm as possible. “How much more time until you can pinpoint where this was sent from?”
“Not much longer,” Erich said, clicking in a new set of commands and watching the screen flash back at him. “They’re somewhere in western Europe. I’ll have the location soon. We may have to wait a few more minutes.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Now I really do want to hit something.”
The plank in Gobi’s hands was three inches thick and just wide enough for me to picture my dad’s face on it. I watched it turn into Armitage’s, then Paula’s, then back to my dad’s, then a screwball combination of the three. I curled my fingers into a fist. With every second I waited, I could feel the desire to lash out and punch it building up inside me, all the way from my shoulder down my arm until it had formed a buzzing electrical current.
Erich stood next to me, his voice patient and unhurried. “With tae kwon do,” he said, “the key is to focus on a point beyond your target, so that you are actually punching through it. In order to break that board, your hand will have to be traveling about thirty feet per second when it makes contact. Think of your fist as a bullet fired from a gun. Visualize it passing through the board. Are you ready?”
I nodded, checked my stance, and made a fist, cocking one knuckle out slightly like he’d shown me. I could feel the blood pounding in my temples. Putting all the force of my body into the punch, I swung at the block of wood. There was a sharp thwack as my knuckles smashed into it, and a bright bolt of pain ricocheted back up my arm to my shoulder, where it erupted into a throb of pure agony. I doubled over, clutching my hand and trying not to pass out or pee myself.
“You are not focused.” Erich’s voice floated in from far outside the pain. “Anger is not focus.”
“Yeah,” I managed. “Thanks.”
“Check your pulse.”
I put the fingertips of my good hand to the side of my neck. It was throbbing almost too fast to count. I took deep breaths, willing myself to slow it down, until it was in the sixties.
“Try again.”
“No thanks.” I shook my head. “That plank is unbreakable.”
Erich looked at Gobi again, then set his feet parallel with his shoulders. An expression of absolute focus, almost serenity, came over his face. I saw him draw back and swing his fist directly at the plank.
The whole wall exploded in front of us.
31. “Blow Up the Outside World” — Soundgarden
“RPG,” Erich shouted, his voice barely audible over the aftershock.
I scrambled backwards, and all the geek inside me could think was, They’re attacking us with role-playing games?
Gobi shoved me out of the way as a wide sheet of orange flame erupted through the gym. Bits of plaster and shreds of steel and glass fragments drifted through on a bitter cold wind, and through the hole in the wall, I saw it was dark out. Night had fallen. There were no windows here, and until that moment, I’d had no idea what time of day it was.