"They would have put up more of a fight," Rafferty says.
"If they could," Arthit says.
The two of them stand there, listening to what they've just said. Rafferty says, "Arthit. I'm so sorry."
Arthit doesn't even glance at him. "We haven't got time for that. Let's go." They take another look at the living room, Rafferty pausing to put the director's chair upright, and then the master bedroom. Noi and Arthit's bed is rumpled on one side: Noi's afternoon nap, Rafferty guesses. The covers have been folded back neatly. The sheets have the sharp, topographical creases that come with sweat, although the room is cool. To Rafferty the sheets are a map of pain. He sees it in the sheets, he has seen it in the halting rhythm of Noi's walk, he has seen it in Arthit's face. He has never seen it in Noi's.
But stilclass="underline" The room is neat. Against his better judgment, his hopes continue to rise.
He follows Arthit into the bathroom, spotless except for one long black hair in the tub, one of the dozens Rose sheds every day without any apparent effect. Her toothbrush stands in a glass next to Miaow's bright pink one. Just for the hell of it, Rafferty runs his thumb over the bristles. "Damp," he says. Arthit nods.
And then Arthit pushes open the door to the guest room, pushes it farther than Rafferty had, and they both see it: a small, tightly folded square of paper. Rafferty starts to bend down, but Arthit grunts and shoulders him out of the way, pulls a handkerchief from his pocket. Using the handkerchief, he picks up the square of paper, and the two of them go into the living room, where Arthit carefully opens it. Rafferty could have told from six feet away that Miaow wrote it. The compulsively neat hand, the ruler-straight lines: She brings to writing the same obsessive control she puts into the part in her hair and the corners of the sheets when she makes a bed. For years she could control nothing in her life. Now she controls the things she can. "What the hell?" Arthit says. Rafferty looks at it more closely. It says: 4.61.32.62.41.82.62.74.61.63.53.32.52.53
"They're pairs," Arthit says. "Figure the periods are just separators." He slides the note, still protected by the handkerchief, a few inches in Rafferty's direction. "Not the first number," Rafferty says. "It's alone." The two of them sit close together, studying it, looking for patterns, trying-Rafferty realizes-not to think about anything else. Avoiding the beast in the room: the memory of Arnold Prettyman wired to a chair with half his face burned away. "This is Miaow, right?" Arthit demands. "No question." Arthit holds the paper up to the light. A bright yellow illustration of a cheerful duck bleeds through from the other side. "Why periods?" "They're fast," Rafferty says. "Anything else, like asterisks, would take too long." "The numbers," Arthit says. He screws up his face. "Nothing higher than the eighties, nothing lower than the thirties." "The second digits in the pairs," Rafferty says. "One, two, three, four." "Nothing above four." The two of them sit, shoulders touching, heads bent over the note. "She took the time," Arthit says. "She hid somewhere and took the time to do this." He looks up at Rafferty. "She was sleeping in the guest room. Maybe they came in through the kitchen. Noi and Rose are there, about to share a cup of coffee. Miaow is awake, down the hall. She hears something, sees something. She hides-" He blinks. "The front door," he says, his face suddenly soft. "If they came in through the kitchen, she could have gotten out through the front door. Maybe even gotten away. Instead she hid and wrote this."
"My girl," Rafferty says. The words, heavy and rough-edged, scrape the inside of his throat. "Brave as a fucking lion."
Arthit makes a sound that might be a sob. He makes it once. Then he wipes his face with a fist like a ham and says, "Next steps."
Poke takes another look at Miaow's note. "Arnold introduced me to a guy," he says. He pushes the picture of Prettyman from his mind. "He does codes."
"Get him." Arthit stands and crosses the room. Looks out the window at the front yard as though he half expects to see them there, laughing and waving at him. Pleased with their joke.
Rafferty pulls the phone from his pocket, and it rings. He snaps it open and pushes the "answer" key so hard the phone flips out of his hand, and he has to scrabble beneath the table to recover it. He picks it up and puts it to his ear.
"Mr. Rafferty," a man's voice says. "My name is Colonel Chu."
30
You Guys Are So Old
You," Rafferty says. "He wants you."
Frank's eyes are lowered slightly. He sits, once again, on the edge of the bed, seemingly unaware of Arthit's glare. Given its intensity, Rafferty wouldn't be surprised to see two smoking holes appear in the center of his father's chest.
"Only me?" Frank says without even glancing up. He looks like a man listening to music from a distant room. "Not Leung? Not Ming Li?"
"Only you. Mr. One and Only."
"He doesn't know about Ming Li," Frank says. He turns his head slightly, but his eyes remain fixed on a point in the middle of the floor. "He knows she exists, but he doesn't know who she is, who I've trained her to be. He probably thinks she's with her mother. I'm surprised about Leung, though."
"I've been thinking about that myself," Rafferty says. Leung, sitting on a rickety wooden chair, gives him a startled glance and looks away.
"You can't give Frank to him," Ming Li says. "And why not, exactly?" This is Arthit. "He'll kill them all," Ming Li says as though it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Your wife and daughter." She looks over at Arthit. "His wife. Anything else would be too much work." "I don't know," Frank says. "If you give me to him, I mean. He might not." "He'll kill you," Ming Li says. "Of course he will. But he might not kill the others." Rafferty stares at his father. Ming Li follows his lead. A silence stretches around them. "He's not stupid," Frank continues. He still has not looked at anyone in the room. "He just needs a reason to let them live." "What kind of reason?" Arthit asks. "Something to his benefit." "Like what?" Ming Li says. "If he gets you, if he gets the box, he's got everything he wants." "No," Frank says. "Not quite. He hasn't gotten out alive." He leans back against the wall. "Give me a minute." Arthit pushes himself away from the wall, the shoulders of his uniform dark with the rain that has begun to fall again. He and Rafferty had gotten wet changing vehicles four times on their way to Khao San Road. While Frank thinks, Ming Li asks, "You're supposed to call him?" "Yeah. Let it ring a couple of times and hang up. Then, within thirty minutes, he'll call me back." "He's on a cell, and we've got the number," Arthit says. "Wherever he is, he doesn't want to get triangulated. So he'll get as far as he can from his base and then call back." Ming Li says, with an edge in her voice, "So, older brother, why didn't you just tell him where we are? If you don't care about Frank, what kept you from handing us to him?" Rafferty and Arthit share a glance. "Because I agree with you. We deliver Frank and he kills them all." "And that's the only reason?" Ming Li asks. Rafferty shakes his head, deflecting the question. "So I told him I'd talked with Frank once but had no idea where he was and no reason in the world to want to find out. He thought that was funny."
"It doesn't make any sense to me at all," Frank says. "What's in your frame of reference that's not in mine?"