“Just give it to me,” he said tersely.
“I don’t have it.”
“Where is it?”
“Lok has it.”
“Of course.” Dong pressed his palms against the desk and stood up, turning toward the back of the chamber. Shen followed two steps behind.
Lok stood maybe twenty feet down the tunnel, behind a metal grate with a door set into it. On his belt was a flashlight, and over one shoulder was a sword. Over his other shoulder was a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 submachine gun.
“Lok!” Dong’s voice echoed down the tunnel.
Lok turned, smiling. He was always smiling, as long as Dong could remember. At first Dong assumed it was gratitude for being plucked from the Hong Kong slums, but now he suspected Lok suffered from the same cranial confinement as his brother.
“The box?”
Lok nodded and extended his right hand, palm up. It was a small cardboard box, the kind where the top slides over the bottom, the size that might hold business cards. Dong took it from Lok, who was still beaming, and held tight to the lid with his left hand, pulling the bottom down slowly with his right. The lid came off with a small popping sound.
Dong stared inside the box for a full minute before putting the lid back. His hands were shaking.
“We’re leaving,” he said, looking from Lok to Shen.
The two brothers looked at him and then at each other. “When?” They asked in unison.
“Immediately,” replied Dong. “Bring only what’s necessary. I will bring the heart.”
“What about the woman?” asked Shen.
“What about the gwai loh?” asked Lok.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
The three men jumped as the voice echoed down the tunnel, Dong almost dropping the box. Lok clicked on a flashlight to reveal Sally and Cape moving toward them, Cape holding Xan’s legs, Sally with her arms around his torso.
Dong waved awkwardly. “We were just-”
“Turning around,” said Sally, disgust in her voice. “Open the door.” She looked pointedly at Dong as Lok complied. She and Cape pushed past them and stutter-stepped to the nearest couch, where they deposited the still-unconscious Xan.
Dong’s face registered shock at seeing Xan, but Sally didn’t give him a chance to say anything. “A suspicious person might think you were about to steal the heart.”
Dong’s good eye narrowed as he stepped forward and handed her the box. “You insult me too easily,” he said quietly. “In another life, you would have worked for me.”
“I left that life behind for a reason,” said Sally. “In your world, people can only be trusted one moment at a time.” She broke eye contact with Dong and opened the box. Her jaw set as Cape stepped beside her.
A finger lay at the bottom of the box, severed just below the third knuckle. It was a woman’s finger, judging by the tapering and the nail, and Cape was pretty sure it was the pinky from the left hand. He had no doubt where it had come from.
Beneath the finger was a note written in Chinese, blood spotting the paper. Sally pulled the paper out of the box and read it aloud in English. “Bring the heart or I will send you hers,” she said in a monotone, then turned to Cape. “What time is it?”
Cape held up his watch. “Almost three in the morning.”
“We don’t have much time.” Sally put the paper back in the box and closed the lid.
“Where?” asked Cape.
“Ross Alley,” replied Sally. “The bakery.”
Cape nodded. “It’s Monday morning, isn’t it?” he said. “They’re closed Mondays.”
Sally looked at Dong. “Naturally, he doesn’t want to meet at his office or his home.”
Dong’s face was grim. “Lin’s already dead, little dragon,” he said, his voice barely audible. “You of all people must know this.”
“That why you were leaving?” asked Cape.
Dong waved his hand impatiently. “He knows about the south tunnel,” he said. “We’re sitting ducks.”
Sally shook her head. “He won’t come here-he doesn’t know what’s down here. If he was coming to us, he’d be here by now.”
“I can’t take that chance.”
Sally looked at Dong and smiled briefly, then stepped intimately close and whispered, “Yes, you can.” When Sally stepped away, Cape caught a glimpse of her eyes and was very glad he wasn’t standing in Dong’s shoes.
Sally turned her back on Dong and walked over to the couch.
Cape took his cell phone from his pocket and checked the screen. It had rung twice on the way over, but dropping Xan to answer the phone, though tempting, didn’t seem like an idea.
2 missed calls. 1 voice message. No signal.
It would have to wait.
He moved toward the couch as Sally leaned over Xan. Taking a new length of rope, she bound Xan’s wrists, ran the rope around his ankles, then brought the rope over the back of the couch and across his throat. He’d choke with every swing of an arm or kick of his legs.
“This guy that dangerous?” asked Cape.
“He trained me.”
“You sure one rope’s enough?” asked Cape. “Maybe we should drop an anvil on his head, or a safe.”
Sally ignored him. Cupping Xan’s neck in her right hand, she tensed her fingers and squeezed where the neck met the skull, then set her left hand under his chin and twisted violently, stopping the motion after just a few inches.
Cape grimaced. “I had a chiropractor do that once.”
Sally nodded but kept her eyes on Xan. “It’s the same basic movement. If I keep going, it would break his neck.” She released Xan’s head and took a step back from the couch, then started counting just under her breath.
“Five…four…three…”
Chapter Fifty-four
Lin opened her eyes.
Her pupils were dilated, her vision blurry. Her shoulder was cold, almost numb, but she could feel something warm and wet running across her elbow and assumed she was still bleeding. She blinked and tried to take deep breaths to clear her head, but her lungs felt like they had collapsed, an invisible elephant sitting on her chest.
Her arms were tied behind her back and she couldn’t feel her hands. Rocking forward, she shifted her weight, and on the third try managed to sit upright and get her legs under her. Almost immediately her left hand started to pulse, then throb, until she almost fainted from the pounding and the dull, ragged pain.
That’s when she remembered the knife.
She didn’t have to see her hand to know her finger was gone. She tried to control her breathing, the way she’d been taught, but she could only manage shallow breaths. Her head was still cloudy, and she struggled to keep her eyes open.
She was sitting in a small room, almost a closet, maybe four by four with a ceiling roughly eight feet high. Buckets and mops had been pushed into one corner, and shelves covered the wall to her left, stacked with toilet paper, paper towels, tampons, and cleaning supplies. The wall behind her was empty, painted white. To her right was a door with a deadbolt lock. Directly in front of her, set against the far wall, a video camera rested on a rolling table. The red light above the lens was illuminated.
Beneath the camera was a monitor, a new TV with picture-in-picture, a little square in the corner of the screen showing one scene and the big screen showing another. On the big screen was a room dominated by some kind of conveyor belt running down the center, with a large central structure jutting upward like a smokestack toward the ceiling. At the end of the conveyor was a beige mountain almost ten feet high. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a pile of fortune cookies.
It took Lin a moment to make sense of the image in the small screen until she moved, because she didn’t recognize herself. Haggard and bloody, she bore no resemblance to the girl who boarded that ship in Fuzhou such a short time ago.
Lin closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she saw the bomb.
She saw it on the monitor first, sitting on the floor next to her, in plain sight but off to the side. A gray square with texture like clay, wires wrapped around it leading to a digital clock. Lin squinted at the small screen and then twisted her head around. The clock was counting backward in minutes.