by Thomas Waite
“Please don’t do this to me.”
“This is nothing.”
Emma reached back, undid the clip, and handed the bra over, noticing that the bars of the cage were heavily welded. No place to sit, no toilet, not even a bucket. And her cramps were getting brutal. She thought of curling up again, but the bottom of the cage was also crisscrossed with metal bars.
“Are you thirsty?”
“Yes, I’m really hungry, too.” Even with the cramps. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday.
The woman brought over the hose and let Emma drink her fill. She said nothing about food before walking up the stairs and closing the door.
But she did leave the light on. Emma was grateful until she looked up and saw why: a ceiling-mounted camera was pointed at her. When she moved, the camera moved.
She looked more closely at the ceiling and saw two more cameras trained on her.
What’s she going to do to me?
That was when her eyes fell to the walls and floor. With the greatest apprehension she studied the room. And then she saw it. There could be no mistaking its purpose.
It was an instrument of unutterable pain.
VINKO STARES AT HIS computer’s blank screen. There’s no electricity. That’s clear, and the desktop doesn’t have a battery capable of running much more than the device’s internal clock. He jumps right onto his laptop, but those batteries aren’t working. That makes no sense, unless he’s been hacked and the batteries drained while he slept.
He’s never bothered with a gas generator because his backup was always hydro from two streams that run across his acreage down to Hayden Lake. But the streams are nothing but a trickle, dried by an unusual yearlong drought.
Vinko points his binoculars up and down the lake, trying to spy lights or any other signs of power, but it’s autumn, the slow season. There’s nothing burning out there. Why would there be at this hour?
He grabs his phone. Why didn’t he think of that first? But it’s not working, either. Tiny pulses of panic thrum in the bottom of his gut.
The NSA. They know you’re Steel Fist. They could be moving in on you right this second.
He feels marooned on an offline island. He has no idea of what’s going on in the world—or even on his own damn website.
Biko stares at him from his spot on the floor in Vinko’s office, the border collie the only consistent presence this morning. It’s close to ten-thirty. They both hear the goats. The beasts need airing, food. Vinko swears and storms out of the house. He feels unhinged. The most critical time of his online life, and he’s been shut off like a light switch.
He opens the barn. Goats spill out into the sunlight. Vinko eyes the lake. Same as it always was. The very normalcy is unnerving.
• • •
Golden Voice peers at Vinko through her high-powered telescope, taking great pleasure in his evident frustration. She couldn’t very well let him go online this morning, now could she? Not after taking over his website and impersonating him with his subscribers. While he slept, she used her massive catalogue of his responses to their questions over the years to keep up appearances. He has no idea that Steel Fist has been hijacked. She’ll be using his name for many years. But for the man who claimed it first, it’s all over but the burial.
She must move quickly, though. Once he’s done with his goats she can’t give him any time to head into town to try to find out what’s going on in Hayden Lake. Which is nothing, which would tell him far more than she wants him to know. She can’t imagine that he doesn’t have plans for his escape and his “bail-out bag”—phony passports, cash reserves, compact weapons, maybe even supplies for wilderness survival. She has all of that and more.
Golden Voice steps back from her telescope, smiling at the prospect of what she’s about to do to him. Even more charming to her is what she’ll do to his followers.
She walks down to the basement with a bowl of cold oatmeal for Emma Elkins. The girl squats in the corner of her cage, hunched over like a chimp. Golden Voice checked on her twice during the night. The girl didn’t sleep well on those metal bars; she was tossing and turning every time her warder looked at the monitor.
She must be exhausted.
“Hungry, are we?”
Emma surprises Golden Voice by shaking her head.
“I’m bleeding,” she says, “from down there.”
“How’s your bellyache?”
“It’s more like cramps. But I don’t think it’s my period. It really hurts.”
Golden Voice hears pleas for help underlining the young woman’s voice. She sounds scared of her own body, when she should really be terrified of the one moving closer to her cage.
“You’ve probably miscarried. I thought that was happening when you started whining on the plane. I’m going to wash that mess down the drain.” Golden Voice walks over to the hose. “You must be very happy. You got rid of your baby just like you planned.”
“I’d decided to keep it.”
“That’s what you’re telling yourself now.”
“No, I did. I knew I’d get all the help I need because my mother is very—”
“Successful? Comfortable? She is. But not for long. She’s on her way to save you. Isn’t that sweet?” Golden Voice trills. “I’m sure you saw my chainsaw.” She drops the hose and walks over to a hunter’s orange Husqvarna case. It lies open, displaying a chainsaw long enough to cut through a thick tree. She jerks hard on the cord, bringing it to life.
“Better get up. Better get ready to move, Emma, because I can reach in with this. It’ll give me a lot more to wash down the drain.”
She lunges at Em, who throws herself from the corner of the cage, banging and scraping her elbows and knees on the iron bars. The blade comes within inches of taking off her foot.
“I’ll get you when I really want to,” Golden Voice shouts above the screaming saw. Exhaust pours from it, graying the air. “But I don’t want to cut you too much before your mother joins you. You’re such a performer, right? You love to sing, and every singer needs an audience. You’ll have millions of people watching you, including your mom. You’ll be naked and dead and I’ll make sure to cut you right up the middle.”
She shuts off the saw and pulls it out of the cage, then points it toward a ceiling camera. “I’ll feed out to millions of viewers. They’ll see every cut. They’ll hear every scream. But they’ll never know that I’ll be overseeing your slaughter because I’ll be wearing the mask. We’ll have our own Halloween down here.”
Golden Voice strolls to a cabinet and pulls out four iron stakes with steel cuffs attached to the ends. She carries them with no apparent effort to the center of the cellar. The drain sits a few feet away. She sinks each stake into an opening in the floor, locking them in place with a neat twist of the bar.
“Stand up,” she tells Emma.
The young woman huddles as far from Golden Voice as possible. She shakes visibly. Golden Voice grabs the hose and hits her with a powerful stream, washing the blood from her legs. The water turns pink and foamy and floods across the floor, swirling down the drain.
• • •
Lana spots Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington. From the air, the nearby city looks much like many of its mid-size western counterparts: a lone river amid ribbons of roads and highways that lace together urban areas, contiguous suburban towns, and exurban sprawl. All of it overseen by dusty mountains that look as dry as petrified rocks.
She reaches over and pats Cairo on the head. The hero of Abbottabad is strapped into a canine harness. She wonders how many missions he’s been on and whether he’ll survive this one.
Lana had caught up on news as she flew west, learning that the CDC had restarted smallpox vaccination programs in conjunction with the Army. Everyone seeking inoculation is now carefully searched by Army personnel or National Guard units. That precaution has led to massive lines but, so far, no more suicide bombings. The most recently declared quarantine areas are in the
upper Midwest, eastern Mississippi, and, oddly enough, the U.S. Virgin Islands.
As they come in for a landing, Lana receives a short text message on her phone: “Directions on the ground will follow.”
Cold comfort, those words—a recognition that someone thinks Lana will soon be on the trail of her own undoing.
By her best estimate, she’s beating Tahir to Spokane by at least two hours. She wonders if he’s flying in alone. Mostly, she wonders why he’s flying in at all. Galina lost track of his device once he boarded a commercial flight out of Washington Dulles, which was par for the course. But getting a seat on such short notice—given the crises and their consequences for civilian air travel—was remarkable. Or was it?
Lana told Jeff to alert the Department of Defense about her flight and Tahir’s. They’ll know they’re both going to Spokane, but beyond that only question marks loom for her.
She has a locator on her phone, but can’t imagine anyone sophisticated enough to hack the Fusion and grab Emma will overlook such an obvious means of having government officials track Lana.
True enough. Lana’s first instruction upon landing is to drive a blue Ford Focus from the parking lot. Her second is to park at a convenience market three miles away. Her third has her take the keys from the ignition and walk over to an old Land Cruiser. The fourth instructs her to use a Toyota key on the ring to drive it to a nearby park. In effect, Lana whisks herself away from the air base and from surveillance cameras before changing cars.
Next, she’s told to reach under the driver’s seat of the Toyota 4x4 for a phone and throw her own device into a bear-proof garbage container.
Fresh instructions appear at once on the new phone, directing her to Interstate 90. “Turn left on the off ramp.” She’s heading east, racking her brain for the likeliest destinations. Coeur d’Alene?
Little more than a half hour later, the phone’s familiar computer voice tells her to take exit 13 for North Fourth Street.
Hayden Lake? Naziville?
She feels as if a great hook has been buried in her belly and now she’s getting reeled in.
Only twenty-four hours ago she was resolute about not trading herself for Robin Maray, even when he appeared on the verge of being murdered. You never trade yourself for a hostage. A cardinal rule of tradecraft.
But even then she knew that if Emma had been held at gunpoint, she would have opened the door to the panic room.
Now all of Idaho feels like it needs a panic room, and every mile north a step away from whatever safety Lana has ever known.
“Hayden Lake six miles.”
As soon as she sees the sign, Lana thinks it’s her destination. But when she tries to use the phone to signal Jeff or Galina, she finds it will perform only a single function: to lead her to the lair.
To the real horrors of the world.
• • •
I’ve seen Vinko in Hayden Lake a few times. It took some traveling but he’s not that far from the ridge where I live on the cusp of Washington’s Coastal Range. We’re almost on the same degree of latitude. The trips took me past great wheat farms in the eastern part of the state. Where they rolled across gentle slopes they looked like Van Gogh’s Wheat Field and Crow writ large. All that wheat could feed so many of the deserving. It will.
As my plans assumed shape, I bought a three-bedroom bungalow with a basement on seven acres near the lake, then made sure to run into him a half dozen times in the past year. Simple exchanges—nods, smiles, that sort of contact. Certainly nothing flirtatious, not until I forced myself to dress for the part this morning. Small town interactions, that was all, but enough to make sure he’d think of me as a local when the time came.
That time is now.
I’m driving another windowless van to his property. Not as new as the Chevy in Baltimore but that might stand out too much here. This is one of those four-wheel-drive vans Toyota made years ago. You still see them in mountain towns. I wanted a vehicle that would look normal, unprepossessing when I drove up. That’s one of the great benefits of being an attractive woman. Men always underestimate you. Even online, if you make a particularly keen observation, the assumption usually is that you’re a man, unless you state clearly that you aren’t. That has, without exception, worked to my advantage. And when they do see you, they are biologically driven to think, if only for fleeting moments, that if all goes well they might just bed you. This is particularly true of better-looking guys, and Vinko, say what I will about him, is not bad looking.
I drive right up to his “NO Trespassing” sign at the gate and shoot off the lock. There’s a proper technique for everything you do with a gun, and I long ago learned to do this without killing myself with a ricochet. As for the report, this is rural America where gunshots are now as common as pine beetles.
Then I drive another half mile and swing around his house. And there he is with his border collie and those goats.
I wave. I can see he’s not happy. I don’t need much from him at the moment. I just need to keep him off guard long enough that he doesn’t pull a gun on me before I pull one on him. But I will say, despite all my encounters with men in these situations, only one has actually done that to me. He’s dead. And this morning I’m in a skirt that barely falls to mid-thigh. It’s swishy, flirty. My legs are tan, my neckline low enough to hint at my modest cleavage.
“Hi,” I say with neighborly enthusiasm. “I’m sorry to bother you but I live right over there,” pointing across the lake—I could be pointing at the moon for all the specificity I offer—“and my power’s out and so is my phone. I was wondering if I could use yours.”
There. See. I’ve accomplished my first and most critical goal: establishing common ground with him by normalizing his power outage. His face relaxes. Even though my plight doesn’t actually explain the loss of all his electronic devices, much less his batteries and whatever other reserves he might have, he has company for his misery. Attractive company. I sit on my heels to call his dog over. The border collie ignores me, but not his master, not with this much thigh on display. More as I stand. His eyes follow my every movement. Voila! His fears appear to have vanished, anaesthetized by the merest glimpse. But here lies the irony: We do have common ground. It’s what lies between a target and the person aiming a lethal weapon at him.
That’s precisely what I do the instant he wanders within ten feet. I level a small pistol at him. He knows he’s in trouble now and he’s probably beginning to suspect that it goes well beyond not having power.
“I can shoot out both your knees in the time it takes you to blink, so stop where you are.”
I put out the flat of my free hand. He stares at it. Doesn’t respond with words, but he’s no longer moving. Victory number one. “Thank you, Steel Fist.”
The name of his secret alter ego brings the first hint of open panic to his face. His lips part tensely, giving his countenance a square shape I hadn’t noticed in our brief encounters. Whatever hope he had that this might be nothing but a simple robbery has given way to his worst nightmare—of being found out by someone who’s subtly insinuated herself into his life. He probably thinks I’m some kind of crazy liberal out to even the score with a racist. He should be so lucky.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He’s got game, I’ll give him that. But I tell him not to waste his breath. “I’m your guardian angel. Can’t you tell?” I jab the gun at him. I’m smiling. He’s not. His jaw is too busy dropping for that. That is not a figure of speech: his mouth falls open until I’m staring at his bottom row of molars.
I pull a plastic handcuff out of my skirt pocket. “I’m going to watch you cinch your ankles together. If you don’t do a first-rate job, I will kill you right now, but I really don’t want to do that. I actually have big plans for you.”
I do, but he doesn’t have to be alive for them to work. I spare him that detail. “Put them on tight.”
His dog sniffs me, then never takes his eyes off me. �
��Tell him to go away.”
He gives it a hand signal. It backs up. Clearly, the dog senses something wrong, but he’s a herding dog. What’s he going to do? Nip at my heels? Round me up?
Vinko finally takes off his boots and puts the cuffs on, cinching himself.
“Now put your hands behind your back.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not doing—”
I shove the muzzle into the soft flesh under his chin. “I will shoot your face off and leave you sucking dust through your snot holes if you even try to say no one more time.” Then I whisper, as though I’m sharing a secret: “I’ve done it before.”
The great Steel Fist puts his hands behind his back.
I’m nimble enough to hold my gun against his spine and slip the male end of the cuff into the female. We women really can multi-task. I yank hard.
“Tell your dog to herd the goats into the barn.”
“Biko, barn.”
His voice remains impressively strong.
“Lie down.”
He obeys.
I search him thoroughly. Nothing but a little pocketknife on his key fob, but used dexterously, he could have freed himself.
The dog, to my amazement, closes the barn door after herding the goats inside. “Tell him to stay over there. He’s got creepy eyes.”
Vinko orders his dog to sit.
“Get up, Stinko.”
It’s not easy with his ankles shackled, but he’s an aging athlete and manages to bend and twist and stand without falling back down. Covered in dust, he looks like a cinnamon cruller.
“I’m going to pull the van up and you’re going to crawl in through the side door.”
But as soon as I start to drive toward him he tries to hop away. This is so ridiculous. I climb out, walk over, and grab him. “Who do you think you are? The Easter Bunny? Get in the van.”
He sits and rolls into the open back area. I climb in beside him and close the door. I wrap duct tape around his mouth, as I did to Emma. I leave his eyes alone, wanting him to see everything, though without windows that includes nothing of our route.