He goes toward the door of the shop, turns his back to it, and pulls a revolver out of the holster at the center of his spine. “Hey!” he shouts, although everyone in the shop is staring at him. “This is a national security incident.” He repeats the words “national security” in Thai. “We have a threat, but nobody’s going to get hurt if you do what I say.” He holds up his cell phone with his free hand. “I want to see your cell phones, right now, and I mean everyone. If you don’t show me a cell phone and I find one on you, you won’t go home tonight. Get them out and hold them up.”
Every person in the store-five customers and three employees-holds up a phone. “Put them on that table full of T-shirts, near the front door. Do not go out of the shop. You, you, you. Go to the table and drop your phone on it, then come back. Keep your hands in sight. Good. Now turn around and go through that door in the back. He waves the revolver at the door. “You’ll stay there for five minutes. In five minutes come out. Everyone understand?”
A few people reply automatically, but most of them head for the door, moving fast, as though they’re anticipating a bullet in the back. When the door has closed behind the last of them, Murphy shouts, “Five minutes!” Then, to the two women, he says, “I’m going to get behind these clothes, and when I say ‘Walk,’ we’re going to walk at normal speed. Outside the door we’ll turn left, all moving together, until we get to the stairs. Then we’re going through that door, all together. Both of you got it?”
The women nod, and the store manager clears her throat, licks her lips, and says, “Yes.”
“No hurrying, nothing out of the ordinary. You’re just a couple of women carrying a lot of clothes, okay? There’s a truck waiting down there, and you’re just taking them down the stairs, right?”
“Fine,” says the manager.
“Keep me in the middle, same distance from both of you. Go at the count of three. Carefully, so nothing happens to the clothes. Ready. One. Two. Three.”
They’re both taller than he is, but he hunches down anyway. He knows he’s invisible from below. It’s a watcher a level up that worries him.
And that’s precisely where Janos is, drinking his third cup of coffee, shifting from foot to foot and wishing with some intensity that he could take a bathroom break. He’s been staring for almost twenty minutes at the front of the store that Murphy went into, and it feels like an hour. The woman has gone into the store, too, and she hasn’t come out yet, so he’s stuck here. He has no idea where Shen is, although Rafferty hadn’t seemed worried about Shen. But it’s sloppy. He needs half a dozen people, with radios, to do this right.
He’s pulling out his phone to give Vladimir a piece of his mind when the women come out, carrying what looks like a whole rack of clothes. He goes up on tiptoe to see whether he can look over it, but he can’t; he’d have to be practically on top of them to do that.
So they’re moving clothes-they’ll take them to the escalator. Except that they turn left, heading for the stairway, the stairway Murphy came up. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe the people who run the mall don’t want that kind of shop business done in sight of the customers. Or maybe Murphy’s got himself an escort.
Rafferty’s not due to arrive for ninety minutes. Why would Murphy be leaving? And would he be leaving without the woman?
If it’s not Murphy, and Janos goes out of position to check, he could miss it if Murphy actually does move. This might be a diversion to draw whoever’s watching, leaving the area clear for Murphy to walk out two minutes from now, big as life. Janos leans forward, elbows on the railing. He’s forgotten about pissing. The shop attendant in front pulls the door to the stairs open, toward her, and gives it a shove; it’s the kind that swings closed automatically, and they’ll have to hurry to get through before it shuts on them. And they’re not going to make it. The woman in front is through, and the door is closing on the center of the rack, and then it’s pushed back again, and it opens and starts to close, and the woman at the back pushes it open again.
Two people, three shoves on the door. The woman in front could have kicked back at it, or …
Vladimir and the boy are at the front exit, waiting for word. Why would Murphy leave the woman?
Janos makes a decision and takes the down escalator in a kind of swan dive.
THE THIRD BEDROOM is small and dim and smells like a sickroom. Rafferty flicks on the wall switch, but nothing happens. The only light comes through the door in the hallway. He stands there, letting his eyes adjust, listening for the sound of movement behind him, and gradually he sees a milky line of light beneath a door in the room’s far right corner.
To open that door, he’ll have to go through the bedroom, and he realizes that he doesn’t want to. Rose, he thinks, would take one look and back away, saying, “Bad place.”
The rumpled bed, the sheets creased sharply, as though the person who sleeps there perspires heavily, a lemon yellow, edgy smell that Rafferty associates with fever, the absolutely bare walls-not a picture, not a poster, not a mirror-all fill him with a deep uneasiness. His eyes go to the ceiling. The area above the bed has been attacked with paint: spirals and loops and jagged, shapeless lines, random as roughly torn paper, in dark reds and chromium yellows and a lot of black. Years ago Rafferty had seen video of a spider spinning a web under the influence of lysergic acid, and that web had the same uncontrollable, fractured energy. Imagination as broken glass. He looks away, feeling vertiginous, and then up again. This is what the person on the bed, lying on her back, would have seen: a ceiling full of cracks and fault lines, a solidity on the verge of flying apart, but to what end? Would something come down-was that the meaning of the slashes of red and yellow? — or would the person on the bed be drawn up? And up to what?
Holding his breath, he enters the room and walks swiftly to the door with light beneath it, which he pulls open. It’s a bathroom, very long and narrow, with a window at each end, looking out on both the back and the front yards. Other than the peculiar shape, it’s purely functionaclass="underline" small and plain, with a single fluorescent tube running almost the full length of the ceiling. The bathtub, located below the back window, is piled full of white, an irregular, cloudlike surface of white cloth. He reaches over and tugs a fold close to him, and what he’s holding is a filthy white nightgown. He looks again. There must be thirty of them in the tub.
The nightgown smells of damp and sweat and dirt. It’s the same smell he’d caught downstairs, standing in the archway to the kitchen with the open door behind him.
From nowhere Miaow’s face suddenly swims up at him with its usual mix of hope and apprehension, and he finds himself on the verge of tears. He wants to be anywhere in the world but here.
He tosses the nightgown back into the tub and looks around to find a reason for the room’s shape. And there it is, a door in the wall opposite the small bedroom, closed and locked. Feeling the pressure of time, he goes quickly through the bedroom and into Murphy’s room. It takes him about four minutes to find the ring of keys; he begins by pulling out the drawers in the dresser and feeling their undersides. The bottom drawer comes out completely, and there it is, on the bare concrete floor beneath.
The first key on the ring opens the door.
The room is as long as the bathroom and twice as wide. It’s unfinished; there’s no drywall, and the floor is bare plywood. A small cache of firearms, including holstered sidearms, automatic weapons, and what seem to be wooden spears, fills one corner. Old uniforms hang on hooks set into the two-by-four uprights in the wall, and a low table, the size of a single bed, is piled with papers and photo albums. He opens one and sees a much younger Murphy and two other Americans in camouflage fatigues grinning at the camera. They flank a stick, much like the ones he sees in this room, on which is impaled the wide-eyed head of a young Asian male.