by Annie Bellet
She shoved the thought away. In a few months, she would not need the prince and his jet. He could become a luxury to her in the same way she knew she was a fascination to him. They made a good couple, him tall enough that even in heels she didn’t feel awkward, his hair still dark, his body lean despite seeing the other side of forty years ago. She liked his money, she liked that she was smarter than he was, mentally stronger, more worldly.
Nipa had always been precociously responsible. In the orphanage in Orissa she had taken care of the younger girls. When her intelligence and her physical beauty had caught the eye of Dr. Burke and his wife, she had pushed herself to perfect her English, to achieve the highest marks in her A-levels and O-levels and gone on to one of the top medical schools in the world, joining the Medicins San Frontieres at the remarkably young age of twenty-six. She loved the feeling of holding a life in her hands, of knowing that she had to be smarter, more determined, more accomplished than anyone around her in order to keep her world moving forward, to keep herself safe.
“There is my Indian beauty!” Faisal bin Abdul Al Saud strode into her hotel room as though he lived there and she was the visitor, which wasn’t wholly inaccurate. He was paying for the room, after all.
Nipa stepped into his arms and accepted a damp kiss on her lips. “The last piece is in place,” she said, stepping back.
“No, no, I do not want the details. Only tell me where and when, not who or how.” He smiled to take any sting out of his words. The prince had made clear that he loved the idea of her plan, would help her distribute the rice, but he wanted no part of the more illegal aspects. He loved the idea of being the handsome victor riding in with the spoils, saving the masses. As long as there was no dirt to be seen.
Not so different from most people, Nipa thought. Her years in the Medicins San Frontieres had exposed her to many people like Faisal. People who wanted to do something important and good in a vague way, but balked if faced with the bleeding, stinking, painful reality of the world.
“I have written out the details for you,” she said.
“Then it is settled. Enough business. Tonight is about pleasure. How would you like to dine beneath the sea?”
Nipa looked into Faisal’s brandy-colored eyes and wondered what lurked there, what kind of man he was that he, like so many, could turn off the world and its cares so easily.
“I would love to,” she purred, pasting her smile on. He would still help her, that was the important part. Everything she had worked for these last two years was coming together, springing into reality like an exotic flower. If she must, she would wait a little longer to watch it bloom.
* * *
Yanji, Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, Jilin Province-
Nipa entered the boardroom of her hotel outside the Yanji Chaoyangchuan Airport, still debating her outfit choice. She had never been to the planning of a heist before. She’d chosen a dark pantsuit and braided her hair into a long coil down her back. She wanted to look competent and efficient.
The Mongol was already there, along with four men and a woman. No one rose as she entered, each swiveling slightly in their chairs to look at her. The table was scuffed but clean, and a carafe of burnt-smelling coffee sat untouched on a sideboard. The place stank of cigarettes and mildew, though the ashtrays were empty and no one was smoking. The Mongol, sitting at the head of the table, motioned for her to sit with a somewhat impatient air.
“This is Dr. Burke. Our employer,” he said. “To my left is Fencer. He will be assisting with reconnaissance. I have yet to find place he cannot break into, or out of.”
She nodded politely to the whip-thin Caucasian man. He had light brown hair, cut military short, a quiet smile, and the tense posture of someone unused to sitting still.
The Mongol continued, “these are the Finnish twins, Nils, Jan, and Hanna.” He indicated the three blondes. Even sitting they were imposing, identical cornflower eyes, identical shaggy blonde hair, identical faces chiseled from blunt stony stock.
“Twins?” Nipa asked, “but there are three of you.”
The “twins” scowled and Hanna said in accented English, “Not ask.”
“They will be doing the heavy lifting. They assure me that forty-five thousand kilos will not be a problem to move.” The Mongol was definitely hiding a smile, his expressive mouth twitching. “And this,” he said, motioning to the last man, “is Jang Jung-su. He is our local and will be doing the driving.”
“I am pleased to meet you,” Nipa said in Korean, giving him a small nod.
The small Korean man raised his eyebrows and nodded back. “Val said you spent time in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” His Korean held some of the accent of the region, less soft than the language spoken in Seoul but smoother and more modern than the guttural North Korean dialect she had grown used to in her two years of service there with MSF.
“I practiced medicine there, until MSF pulled out.” Nipa busied herself with taking a seat, not meeting Jang’s eyes. Her time in the DPRK was not something she wanted to think about. It held her dreams hostage; she refused to let the nightmares unsettle her waking life as well. “Who is Val?” she added, switching back to English.
“I am,” The Mongol said.
“Nice to meet you, Val,” Nipa said without missing a beat. She felt petty, but the man seemed to read her well, deliberately setting her off balance as though it was his private pleasure to do so.
“Tomorrow, Jang and Fencer will go scout these warehouses,” Val said, picking up a conversation that Nipa guessed had been in progress before she interrupted. Another small annoyance. She prayed this man was worth every penny she was paying him.
“Why steal it?” Jan, or perhaps, Nils, asked. “This is China. Why not bribe for the rice?”
Nipa gritted her teeth and cut in, trying not to sound condescending. “I made inquiries about that. The firm handling the security for the testing center is foreign, and well paid. They were unreceptive.”
“This rice was made in a lab, yeah?” Fencer said. “Why not just steal the formula? Be easier to carry.” He winked at her.
“This is not a movie,” Nipa said, her smile brittle and a sour taste forming in her mouth. “There are at least fifty companies with patents on pieces of the genetic code that went into creating Crimson Rice. The only thing those companies agree on is that this rice would ruin their bottom lines. It’s too aggressive to control and it reproduces perfectly, so they can’t stop farmers from re-seeding with it. Those companies want to pretend it does not exist.
There is no magical vial or written formula that can work as quickly as distributing and planting the seed rice around the world. We would need years to reproduce and grow it, not to mention thousands of hours in a fully equipped laboratory. Every year this rice is locked away, another five-hundred thousand children will die. There is no time. This is how it must be. I need that rice, from that warehouse. Quickly.”
Nipa sucked in a breath and released her white-knuckled grip on the arms of her chair. Her heart raced and her hands were clammy with sweat. She hadn’t meant to sound so intense, but this close to her goal, she couldn’t seem to keep the reigns on her passion. The eyes of the dead stared at her from inside her mind, tiny bodies topped with over-sized heads, dark gazes pleading, accusing. It was getting worse as she neared the mission’s end.
No one spoke for a moment. Then Val wrapped the table with his knuckles. “We have been hired to take your rice from warehouse to airport. We will do this. We are all professionals here. You would not want us in operating room telling you your job, no?”
Nipa heard the gentle warning in his tone and leaned back in her chair. She stayed quiet through the following discussion, answering questions about the facility only when asked. The Mongol had a point, which she grudgingly acknowledged. She had hired them to do what they were good at. Her favorite professor in medical school had always warned them about the line between confidence and arrogance. Arrogance, he’d
cautioned, was what got people killed.
They broke for the night and she went back to her room, giving in to her weaker side as she broke open the mini-bar and drank herself to sleep. Even with the bitter spirits in her belly, Nipa’s dreams were still full of children’s brittle bodies, stomachs artificially swollen from grass soup and ground sawdust.
* * *
Jang and Fencer were not present in the boardroom the next day, having left before dawn to go see how tough the warehouse would be to crack. Nipa pushed her spoon around her teacup and argued with Val as they waited for the scouting party to return. The twins were playing a game of gin rummy at the opposite end of the table and clearly feigning deafness.
“I am going with you,” she said in the same tone she used to get five-year olds to swallow terrible medicine.
“You are not professional. This is not your place. You will wait at airport, as discussed.” Val showed no sign of yielding.
“You do not understand,” she said, for at least the fourth time. “I must see this through.”
“You will. From airport. This is not place for ego, Dr. Burke.”
That stung and she bit back a choice French curse. Her phone chimed, breaking the ensuing silence.
Nipa’s stomach twisted into a rope. That sound was specific to one person, her inside man at the Ingo-Kim Food Research Center, or, specifically, her inside woman. If she was risking a call, it was not likely to be good news.
“I have to take this,” she said, rising stiffly and fleeing the conference room.
It wasn’t a call, but an email. Her friend, the woman who had gotten her the job at the Research Center helping out with the human consumption trials, had forwarded an internal memo. Nipa scanned it, the ropes in her stomach tying themselves into knots.
Fencer and Jang came down the hallway as she finished. She stared at them, barely registering their unhappy faces as she blinked hard, fighting the frustrated tears burning behind her eyelids. With a deep breath, she followed them back into the room.
The air held the tense silence of a conversation cut off mid-sentence and the twins broke apart from where they had been talking, she assumed, with Val.
“Bad news,” she said.
“Worse news,” Fencer added.
“You don’t know what mine is yet,” Nipa snapped. Everything was falling apart, her shining plan crumbling like a proverbial house of cards.
“Dr. Burke, speak.” Val held up a hand, silencing Fencer.
“I just heard from my source inside. The rice seed is scheduled to be destroyed on Saturday.” Two days. That was all they had.
“Doesn’t matter,” Fencer said. “It would be suicide to take it out of that complex anyway.”
“The layout of place did not look so bad,” Val said. “Where is problem?”
“North Koreans. That’s the problem. Some bigshot drug dealer moving meth out of North Korea and into China has paid off those fancy German security blokes and is using some of the warehousing space for his product. He’s got his own guards there, too, armed to the teeth. We’d have to wait until he ships his stuff out, at the least, or risk getting a mad gang using us for target practice.”
“We have to get that rice,” Nipa said, hating the whine in her voice. She would not beg. Yet she knew, deep in her heart, that she would beg, would fall to her knees and plead. The price she had negotiated with The Mongol left her bank account in the three figures, or she would have been offering them that, as well. She was almost forty, and had turned down lucrative hospital appointments, burned all the social capitol she could manage with anyone she could beg, arm-twist, or guilt into helping her with her plan. If she failed, if this failed, she would have nothing.
And another half a million children would die around the world from malnutrition and related diseases. Countless more falling into poverty as they were unable to keep up with the rising costs of buying seed from the large companies slowly strangling out crops with genetic patents. Half a million more eyes turned on her in her sleep at night.
“Please,” she said again, looking at Val.
She was surprised to find sympathy and something else, something deeper, more raw, in his gaze.
“Where are they taking the rice?” he asked. The others were so silent that Nipa wondered if they were holding their breaths.
Hope stung her chest with physical pain as she hastily wiped her eyes and checked her phone again. “To a garbage burning facility outside Yanji.”
“Could you figure the most likely route, Jang?” The gears were almost audibly turning in The Mongol’s head now.
“Simple. Only one road out from the Research Center, only one road into the garbage facility.” Jang shrugged, looking intrigued.
Hanna asked something in a language that Nipa did not recognize and assumed was Finnish. Val answered her in the same language and suddenly all three broke out in smiles.
“This makes our job easier. We can ignore the warehouse and take the trucks. I do not usually hijack, but variety is the spice of life, no?”
“How will we do it?” Fencer asked the question that Nipa was too excited, too stunned to form into words.
“I am thinking a Disco.” Val smiled, the first full, genuine smile that Nipa had seen from him. It made him handsome and yet, as he turned slowly and looked at her, it terrified her, too. “And you, Dr. Burke, you will be the ball.”
* * *
In her mind, Nipa had pictured being part of the actual heist. Her brain had melded scenes from James Bond movies with her own fantasies, picturing something high tech, with her in a dark, flattering designer suit and a wicked pair of sunshades.
The reality was a lot more like her Medecins San Frontieres days. A cold morning with wisps of mist not yet burned away by the sun. Her, standing on a pitted foreign roadway next to a broken-down car whose make and model she did not recognize.
Of course, she had worn scrubs and jeans in those days. And sensible shoes. Not a silk dress and a pair of heels that had once-upon-a-time cost her more money than was currently in all her bank accounts combined. She felt less like a Disco Ball and more like an exhausted woman in over her head. Even the knowledge that her team, as she tried to think of them after the last two days of rehearsals, arguments, and drinking, were just over the hill, was less than comforting.
Her phone buzzed, the signal. Val had explained that a Disco meant a distraction, a production where everyone would be looking at the ball and not around them before it was too late. Her job was to be a helpless tourist with a smoking car.
Nipa pulled out the zipo one of the Twin’s had loaned her and sighed. One damsel in distress, coming up. Her hands barely shook as she lit the wads of damp paper tucked under the bonnet of her car. The paper caught and smoked. She tossed the lighter into the car as headlights crested the hill and turned, letting her nerves show, hoping the drivers would believe she was terrified.
She certainly believed it.
There were two trucks, not one. She hoped that the razor intelligence of The Mongol would have a plan for that. Both trucks halted, unable to pass her apparently stalled and now smoking vehicle. A large man in a dark green uniform got out, the smile on his face reassuring.
“Please,” she called in English. “Do you have a phone? I don’t even know where I am!”
“Move away from the car,” the man called out in accented but understandable English, walking toward her. “That engine might go up.”
The car holding the twins sped over the hill and stopped with its bumper nearly touching the rear truck’s. Nipa hid her relief as Jang and Fencer swarmed up from the sides of the road, holding pistols on the driver and the man in front of her as the twins, she assumed, did the same for the men in the other truck.
“No one gets hurt,” Fencer said. He repeated it in German, along with what were probably instructions.
The four men with the trucks were quickly rounded up and their hands tied in front of them. Three of them looked annoyed, sitt
ing on the side of the road and muttering to each other. The fourth just glared, hostility rising off him like the mist burning away in the morning sunlight.
Jang and Fencer kept an eye on them as the Twins got the paper fires stamped out and pulled the little car around on the road. The Mongol came around the trucks and Nipa went over to him, smiling.
“Check the contents,” Val said to her, but clearly her joy was infecting him a little. Perhaps he wasn’t so immune to her looks as he pretended.
They pulled open the rear door of the first truck. Her rice. The bags were piled and stamped, just as she remembered from her one and only tour of the Research Facility. Val pulled out a folding knife and made a small cut. Seed rice, the pods faintly pink, spilled out.
“That is it. Yes.” Nipa wanted to dance. She wanted to sing, to kiss this thin, dangerous little man.
He pulled a roll of duct tape out of his coat and taped the tear in the bag. “We should check other truck, then go. That road block we put up will not deter traffic forever.”
Movement caught her eye as she stepped out from behind the first truck. A shout, then a scream, then a gunshot. Fencer tackled one of the restrained guards to the ground as Jang crumpled.
Nipa was moving before her mind caught up with her. She dropped to her knees at Jang’s side, turning the small Korean man over, her hands tearing at his clothing, searching for the wound.
Blood welled over her fingers as she searched up from his belly to his chest, pulling away his shirt. Jang gurgled, aspirating blood and fluid from where the small caliber bullet had pierced his lung. He would drown in his own blood if she didn’t do something.
“I need a knife,” she yelled. “And a pen. Tape. Someone!”
Val appeared at her side, holding out his knife. Someone, one of the twins, held out a cheap plastic pen. Nipa grabbed the knife, widening the bullet hole. Visions of infection danced like demons in her mind, but she shoved them away. “Hold his head and chest up, hold his arms, find a towel.” She barked orders, not even realizing she had slipped into French.