The man bounces Knox off the seat back. “Fuck you!”
“Microwave,” the driver says. Apparently the same word in Persian as English. Knox is able to make out most of his explanation. “Listening device. Americans. Microwave. I have heard of this.”
“Then shut up!” the passenger barks. Only seconds later, he says softly, “From where? You watch for tail, yes?”
“You are a prick. Of course I watch. It is your job, also.”
“How large, this microwave?”
“No idea. Maybe nowhere nearby. Maybe satellite.”
Grace toes Knox gently, and he wonders if she’s amused that Okle sent Cheech and Chong to fetch them or if it’s something more. The Vicodin has relaxed him to a point at which everything’s amusing. They could cut off his hand and he’d thank them. But Grace isn’t enjoying herself. She’s an accountant in wicked shape, trained as a Chinese spook. She’s ambitious, pragmatic, professionally androgynous, socially challenged, mildly alcoholic and lonely. She’s not playing footsie to win a chuckle, but to literally nudge him. He must be missing something. If his watch wasn’t approaching the heat of a laundry iron, he might be able to think, but in another few seconds they’re all going to smell his burning wrist hair.
The van jostles him in the seat. He’s attempting to focus enough to rehearse the upcoming meeting. Anticipation is nine-tenths of survival. But Grace’s nudge interrupted his preparation, like throwing a trivia question into a conversation. He can’t keep his ideas separate.
It doesn’t help when the van goes into paint-shaker mode and his thigh wound hits a pain pitch that could shatter glass. Inside the black hood, it’s too warm; he sucks for air, claustrophobic. His injured shins pulse. The food isn’t sitting right, a mass lodged somewhere around his collarbone and swelling. He tries swallowing away the burning feeling, but his mouth may as well be stuffed with cotton balls.
Grace relives the events inside the van during her abduction: the driver’s watch warming to the point he dumped it; the van experiencing engine problems. Engines that run on computers; computer boards running on batteries.
Grace toeing Knox serves its purpose, the connection made. Similar, perhaps identical phenomenon — abduction, vans, overheating wristwatches. Knox isn’t thinking clearly and he knows it. Resents it. He would trade the pain for a moment of insight. It’s often called “connective tissue”: the threads that exist or can be strung between events or persons. It’s here for him to see, but he does not. He wishes he could get a look at Grace to know if she’s come up with the answer or only the question.
The van slows. His wrist is either beyond pain or the watch is cooling. He and Grace are pushed down as doors bang open and closed. Grace has been made to lie across Knox, while Knox’s bagged head is pushed against the van wall. Their captors want to limit any chance that the head sacks will be seen by a random street dweller.
Grace says in a forced whisper, “My phone. Five minutes.”
The van is moving again. Knox and Grace are pulled back to sitting positions. He assumes the Harmodius is onboard; Victoria delivered. She had better leave it at that, had better return to her hotel room and await a message. No time for heroes.
Grace’s phone. Five minutes. What the fuck?
Goddamned Vicodin.
46
The head sacks come off inside an apartment building. Grace and Knox are ushered upstairs as their captors struggle with the crate holding the Harmodius.
Grace is thinking that if Besim’s friend spots surveillance, she’ll never know about it. Her phone is off, its SIM pulled. She believes it was returned to her purse, but she isn’t about to check. Instead, she’s trying to help Knox from behind as he struggles to climb on painful legs. With the ascent of each stair, she considers another bullet point on her list of financial topics to cover with Mashe Okle.
Like Knox, she has a role to play; unlike Knox, she does not ad-lib. She recites her lines, considers her strategies and steadies him by holding him around the waist, impressed by the sense of physical power that comes with the contact — even a wounded John Knox would prove a formidable foe.
The sparsely furnished apartment is a safe house. Not lived in, judging by the lack of personal touches. Drawn drapes lend a sense of claustrophobia to the scant items of furniture: imitation leather couch; a glass-topped stainless-steel coffee table, badly scratched. Several of the floor tiles have been cracked and reglued.
Akram looks nervous. Mashe does not. He’s smaller than his brother, wiry but with a big head, his black hair trimmed over the ears but fashionably long on his neck. He wears heavy-rimmed glasses with thick lenses. Gray suit trousers, a collarless pressed white shirt. The matching suit coat hangs over a ladder-back dining chair at a table that may have never seen a meal. He carries an air of aloof overconfidence, no doubt perpetually aware that he is the smartest man in any room.
Knox sits down on an orange-cushioned chair that hisses under his weight. It’s positioned facing the coffee table at a right angle to the couch. The chair is too small for him; his knees stick up high. He’s chosen it because due to a jog in the wall there’s no way anyone can come up from behind him. It’s a defensive position. Across the room, Grace takes note of his choice.
Mashe Okle shakes their hands and introduces himself as “Akram’s brother.” He then approaches his two handlers and stands by, awaiting the unpacking of the Harmodius. It’s an ordeal. Grace is wondering if Knox is thinking what she is: they’re halfway to their five-minute deadline already. This is made more evident by Mashe’s twisting of his wristwatch.
She believes her phone is directly connected to the overheating wristwatches, though the mechanics make no sense. She has shut off her phone on multiple nights with no odd consequences. How would powering off a device or removing a SIM card create such an effect in the first place? More to the point, her phone has never been out of her possession. Who could have rigged it, and when?
But the empirical evidence contradicts all her arguments.
Three minutes…
If he’s defecting, why is he continuing to act out the role of art collector?
“Out,” Mashe Okle instructs his two security men, one of whom takes in Knox warily. Knox grins for the man, ever the wiseass.
The guards leave the apartment though their conversation carries through the door; they want Knox to know they aren’t going anywhere.
Mashe Okle studies the Harmodius with deep reverence. He dons a pair of white cotton gloves and touches the piece sensually. “Akram and I have discussed the results of the preliminary lab work. I must say: it sounds promising.”
“There is the matter of the financing,” Grace says, firmly embedded in her role.
“If I were part of a cultural police force, Ms. Chu,” he says, making it known he’s researched her at least to the point of knowing her name, “you two would have been arrested upon entering this apartment.”
“Such investigations take months, even years. We both know that.” She’s wondering if he considers her a midlevel bureaucrat with the United Nations or a freelance accountant in Hong Kong. The man gives off an intimidating presence, especially for a person so small and thin.
“Point taken,” he concedes.
“The recent deposits into your investment account require adequate explanation and sourcing, or I am afraid this transaction cannot go forward.”
Everyone knows that Mashe holds the cards in terms of the transaction going forward. They are in his safe house, with no idea what part of the city they are in. It’s his goons outside, and his brother standing to Knox’s left.
The sounding of a ship horn in that instant works against the Okle brothers. Its proximity and clarity reveal that the apartment is located no more than ten blocks from the Bosphorus. Rain clatters against the windows on the other side of the mauve drapes. The sound is metallic, suggesting a fire escape. Grace assumes Knox has catalogued this and more, though she doesn’t appreciate the faraway look in his eyes. That, coupled with his shit-eating grin, is reason for concern.