by Kenneth Zink
“By somewhere nice you mean somewhere with alcohol,” Robin said, as if alcohol was something she only drank at parties, parties she didn’t go to because she couldn’t seem to break out of her own selfimposed solitude.
“Sure do,” Mac said.
“We don’t have time.”
“A drink would loosen things up, that’s all I’m saying.”
“We understand you saw the men who did this,” Robin said.
“Men and women, probably. Don’t count your kind out.”
“You said they spoke Mandarin,” Tim said.
“I already told them everything I know. FBI, CIA.”
“I know,” Robin said. “I’ve read the report.”
“Me too,” Tim said.
“Then you have everything you goddamn need,” Mac said. “It doesn’t take whatever black magic you people got going on to know what I know.”
“Not a big fan of science, huh?” Tim said.
“If you want to find her then you’ll let us in.” Robin said.
“But sure, be vain, let her die,” Tim said.
“Tough guy,” Mac said. “Good for you. Say, what do you want for your twelfth birthday, kiddo?”
“To find a little girl and embarrass the man who lost her.”
Mac looked like he was gathering the last of his life to hit Tim.
“No one cares about your dick measuring contest,” Robin said, looking at the man and the kid. “FBI and CIA both say the FLF took the girl, but here you are, claiming the kidnappers were speaking Mandarin.”
“I heard it with my own ears,” Mac said. “You weren’t there, Wray. Neither of you were. Neither was the FBI or the CIA. But I fucking was. I fucking was. And I’m telling you, a squad of mercs, all speaking Mandarin, took that little girl.”
“Profiling isn’t just offensive Mac, it’s dumb.”
“Whoever it was took her from the Secret Service. From the United fucking States of America. If that’s not Lu and his CCP goons, then I don’t know what is.”
“Big move for them to make,” Robin said.
“Yeah well, desperation makes fools of us all.”
“Where’s that from?”
“My ass. Pulled it out just now.” Mac smiled, but Robin saw everything he was trying to hide beneath it. Pain, regret, shame, all revolving around the simple fact that he’d failed his sole purpose to protect the girl.
“Actually it goes, time makes fools of us all,” Tim said.
Mac scoffed. “Sure it is. Who said it?”
“Don’t remember but it’s true.”
“We need more than just the fact that the kidnappers were speaking Mandarin,” Robin told Mac.
“Look, I had them save the rounds they dug out when they hauled me in here, in case people like you showed up. Do your thing with the bullets. Find who loaded them in the magazines. Go from there.”
“Quite a plan for a man who doesn’t believe in what we do,” Tim said.
“I’m an asshole but I’m not stupid.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“The bullets are a start,” Robin said, “but you were there, Mac.”
“So were the bullets,” Mac said.
“Bullets don’t have eyes and ears,” Tim said. “You do.”
“You may have caught something more just the sound of Mandarin,” Robin said, “something you don’t consciously remember.”
“You’re questioning my memory?” Mac asked.
“No more than I question the memory of any human being. It’s my job.”
“I never liked you people.”
“Get in line,” Tim said.
“We need to find her,” Robin said.
“You think I don’t want to find her?” Mac said, pausing, sighing like a steam engine. “I just don’t want you going through my stuff. Up here.” He smacked his head. “Too much bad shit.”
“Your time in the service?” Robin asked.
“Yup,” Mac said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m over it.”
He wasn’t over it, she could tell. Could sense the splat of trauma wafting off him.
“Look, you keep refusing and we come back with an F-warrant,” Robin said.
“The girl might be dead by then,” Tim said, “but we can do it that way, if that’s what you want.”
The man chuckled. It was clotted, bitter, like he was coughing up arrowheads.
“Promise me this,” Mac said, staring at Robin. “If you take a look inside, and you find Lyla, then you do the right thing.”
“Of course.”
Mac sat up in bed. “So. How do you want to do this?”
Robin slipped off a glove. “Your hand.”
He held out his hand, a thick wad of callouses, and she took it and the room around her, the sight and sound and feel of it all, disappeared.
Something was wrong. All she felt was murk. Lots of it. Colors and sounds and feelings that rolled through her mind like an underwater wave rushing to shore in the middle of the ocean with nothing but moonlight to shine through the depths. She sifted through the gloom for something, anything that tied back to the kidnapping the day before.
The clink of a bullet casing, curly hair running through a comb, the smell of burnt sugar, the giggle of a girl, the scream of a woman, the sight and sound of crayons scrawling across paper, the overwhelming urge to protect something, the oak and caramel of bourbon, the feeling of a tiny sack of flesh clinging to his shirt.
Beyond that, nothing. The fragments were muddled, out of order and out of focus, cloudy slivers of a bigger picture, a tempest that threw her back to being a girl without any control over Erodium energy, a lunatic and a freak and monster demon abomination.
Robin let go of Mac and opened her eyes, taking a step back, the hand she’d used to hold his shaking.
“You okay?” he asked.
“It’s nothing,” she said, slipping her glove back on.
“What we do isn’t easy,” Tim said.
Mac looked at Tim. “Never said it was.”
“Yeah, well, you said a whole lot else.”
“Story checks out,” Robin said, turning to Tim. “Nothing new.”
A lie. She couldn’t frag like she used to. Couldn’t do the one thing she knew, above all else, made her worth something.
“Where are the bullets?” Robin asked.
“Counter,” Mac said. “Far wall.”
“All yours, kid.”
“Okie dokie,” Tim said, heading to the table along the far wall but pausing when he reached it. Robin wondered why. Maybe he was taking a breath before he did the first real work of his career.
She came up beside him and looked down at the metal dish. Three bullets. Bloody, purple, smudged. “You know what to do?”
“Yeah.” He shrugged away as if her hand had been on his shoulder.
“Then get it done.” She let her words roll out like a boulder off a cliff, hoping he’d hear the thud. He may have been her partner but he was also just a kid.
Just a kid. Was that how she’d been, all those years ago, at the start of her own career? Not a woman but a girl? She remembered feeling strong. Like she’d reached the apex of age and couldn’t possibly get any older.
While Tim fragged the bullets, she drifted to the window, staring out at the city beyond the hospital.
“How long have you known her?” Robin asked Mac. “The girl.”
“All her life. She was a newborn when we first met.” He laughed. “I said that like she was a full person, like someone I met at work or something. But she was just a baby.”
“You have any kids yourself?”
He turned his head away, a look of shame in his downcast eyes, and pressed a button that looked like a trigger for morphine. “When you see her, Lyla, give her a hug for me, will you? Tell her I’m sorry.” He turned back to the window, his eyes going to the same place she suspected hers went when she passed out drunk, pointed toward the sun but
unable to see it.
“Got it.” Tim clinked the bullets back into the metal dish and Robin turned just in time to see him yank his glove back on. She already envied what he had, the ability to frag, as if she no longer had it.
“Well?” she asked.
Tim looked at Mac on the bed. Gone. Drowning in numbness. “Big boy down?”
“Give him a break.”
Tim sighed. “Two of the bullets were so muddled I couldn’t frag anything from them.”
“Muddled?” Robin asked. Maybe he was having trouble too, the same trouble she’d slammed into like an impenetrable wall of dark fog.
“Muddled by pain. A lot of it. I know A-Cad said any bullets or blades that found their target would be tough to frag but fuck.” He sounded like he’d just finished crying even though his eyes were dry, one of those moments where she remembered he was just a kid.
“Fuck,” she whispered, thinking back to all the spent bullets and swung blades she’d fragged in her career, trying to forget there was a difference between murk and pain.
“Bullet number three came through though,” he said. “Pulled just enough fragments from it to piece something together.”
So there was something wrong with her. Something profound, subconscious. Rotten. She couldn’t frag, not like she used to. Maybe it was the cancer, or her knowledge of the cancer, fucking with her head. “Out with it,” she said.
“The rounds were loaded into the magazines of an MP5 by a man named Shinzin in Chinatown.”
“An arms dealer.”
“How do you figure?” Tim asked.
“If Chinese operatives did kidnap the girl, they couldn’t have smuggled weapons into the country,” Robin said. “They’d need to touch down here and then buy up weapons before they could take her.”
“I definitely knew that.”
“Sounds like we’ve got our next crumb.”
“You want to check my work?”
“No need. I trust you. Good work, kid.” Robin patted his shoulder on her way out of the room, trying to forget that she’d failed to frag Mac, that what made her special was slipping through her fingers, that she was losing who she was.
7
Before they tracked down the arms dealer they stopped the cab so Tim could grab some takeout and Robin could grab the tallest thing of coffee she could buy, lock herself in the bathroom, and spike the brew with vodka from her flask. When she was done she chugged what was left. She’d need more soon. And an excuse. She’d conjure it later, when the time came. For now she closed her eyes and waited for the liquor to take hold, for that familiar numbness to crawl to the surface of her skin.
Back in the cab she ran a search on her phone through the NIF database for the target.
Gender: Male.
Name: Shinzen.
Location: Washington, D.C.
It was a long shot. There was no guarantee the man that had sold weapons to the terrorists that took Lyla Walker lived in the capitol or even existed in the first place. Tim could’ve botched the first frag of his career.
But sure enough the search returned a single result.
Shinzen Liang. Seventy-two. Second-generation Chinese-American. Legal arms dealer with no criminal record. Lived in Chinatown. Drove a pickup truck painted like an American flag, the front colored blue with white stars while the sides and back were streaked with red and white stripes. She couldn’t wait to meet this guy.
Tim slipped into the cab with a rustling plastic bag loaded with fat burritos wrapped in foil. At least a few pounds of food. He noticed her staring at him.
“What?” he asked.
“That enough for you?” she asked.
“For now. Want one?”
“No thanks.”
Robin searched the NIF database for the truck. Ordinarily she’d just find the home address and stake it out until the target showed up, but she didn’t have hours to waste just waiting around for the target to plop in her lap. A little girl was missing.
The car was last seen an hour ago in Chinatown, parking in a lot next to a wide open street market where some sort of crowd was starting to gather. Robin gave the address to the cab AI while Tim tore into a burrito and they pulled away from the curb, hurtling toward Shinzen Liang.
On the way there a late summer storm rushed in and out at sunset, pelting the cab, blotting the windows, turning the glass into a blurred mosaic of fiery color.
“What a load of bullshit,” Tim said through a mouthful of gunk, rice and beans tumbling out of the tortilla in his hand and pattering into the bag on his lap while he scrolled through an article on his phone detailing the mysterious shooting the day before, when the girl had been taken. Wedged between a heap of text was a muted video of pundits speculating about what happened.
“The world’s full of bullshit,” Robin said. “Get used to it.”
“These assholes are literally making shit up and qualifying it all with ‘maybes.’”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“If POTUS had just been honest, instead of burying the story—”
Robin laughed and Tim looked at her.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“Imagine telling the entire country that the granddaughter of the President of the United States was not only kidnapped, but that no one knows who kidnapped her or why.”
“At least it’d be true.”
“You’re funny.” Robin took a sip of coffee and savored the bite of vodka that sat below the bitter notes of hazelnut and cinnamon.
Tim sighed and shook his head, his eyes glued to his phone. “Man, I want to nail these fuckers.”
“The kidnappers?”
“Yeah. China.”
“Stop making assumptions.” She’d solved enough cases to know the first truth wasn’t always the only truth.
“So the mountain of evidence piling up behind us is all just a coincidence?”
“Until the case is solved, yes.”
“I can’t wait to be right,” he said, shoving the final clump of his current burrito into his mouth.
“It’d be a big risk for Lu to take, kidnapping someone close to the President.
“It’d be a big risk for anyone to take, but someone obviously took it.”
“If Lu did take the girl then it can’t be for leverage.” Robin tapped her fingers on the armrest and looked out the window, streaks of leftover rain striping the glass. “He knows the President won’t negotiate.”
“Eh,” Tim said, unwrapping another burrito, the cab starting to smell like a filthy microwave.
“She won’t. She can’t afford to. Not in an election year, not as a woman. The world will call her weak.”
“I doubt it.”
“Ah, to be young again,” Robin said.
“You don’t think she’ll do whatever it takes to save her own kid?”
Robin sipped her coffee and closed her eyes.
“Wouldn’t want to be in her shoes,” Tim muttered.
“Silence used to be a virtue.”
“Hey, what if he runs when he find him? The target.”
“Won’t matter,” she said, imagining a septuagenarian running from a woman half his age.
“Five bucks says he freezes like a dick in winter.”
“I don’t bet.”
“Well that’s no fun,” Tim said.
“This isn’t supposed to be fun.”
“Aren’t you a bundle of joy.”
“Arriving in one minute,” the AI said.
Robin took a look outside at Chinatown, a confused crossroads of gentrification. The neighborhood looked like a theme park trying to emulate the communities of yesteryear, drab buildings interspersed with the occasional Chinese spurt of color, wall of text, stack of architecture, all remnants of decaying authenticity. As she understood it, the new wealthy residents fought to keep that history alive, but somehow that same history seemed to have a way of dying even more, simply because those keeping it alive were not those that had birthed it in
the first place. The whole hub felt accidentally fake.
When they reached the lot next to the street market, parking across from the truck colored like a flag, Robin looked at the crowd, the people packed tight outside bodegas and fast food joints, blocking the whole street like plaque in an artery, a tiered overpass of Chinese architecture looming above the mass that was vibrating with chatter and chants, signs and slogans, some bearing the name Rex Hardy, and then she finally understood what was happening. This was a campaign rally, not a surrogate in sight, the thing led entirely by supporters, getting together to do nothing but stir each other up.
“Looks bad out there,” Tim said.
“Yeah,” Robin said.
They stared out the window a while. In the middle of the mass a supporter yelled through a megaphone, standing on a shipping crate, conducting the crowd with one of the same sound bites she’d seen outside the White House. It was muffled but she could read his lips a mile away. Knew what he was saying.
“STOP THE FRAGS!”
The crowd threw his words back at him with a force that dwarfed the megaphone.
“STOP THE FRAGS!”
She looked away, her leg shaking, the buzz fading, her adrenaline rising.
The girl was out there somewhere. Sure, the NIF had frags hunting down the lead on the FLF, but if China had kidnapped Lyla Walker, then Robin was on the right trail but burning time she couldn’t afford to lose. Not if she wanted to find the girl.
Robin looked at Tim. “We find Liang. Pull him out. Get what he knows.”
“Sure thing, boss lady.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Alright, boss.”
“And stick with me,” she said.
“Okay.”
“But not too close or they’ll tag us.”
“Right.”
“And those,” Robin said, looking at his hands, his gloves. “Put ‘em away.”
“You going to ask me if I finished my homework next?” the kid asked, jamming his hands in his pockets but with his gloves still visible.
“Deeper,” she said.
He pushed his hands so far inside his pockets that the gloves disappeared, nothing left to see but the sleeves of his coat. “Hey look, now I’m not a frag.”