She couldn’t give him a thank-you hug. She wanted to give him a lot more, but it just wasn’t in the cards. There was a reason she’d never had a relationship before, why she kept trying to ruin this one. There was no chance for normalcy, intimacy.
Damn it, he’d gotten her doing “woe is me” on a street in China. She was Angel Rage, for God’s sake! Terror of corporate America! She was stealing billions when Mike was…whatever he was doing. Before the whole human thing. Her life wasn’t supposed to be this complicated after a pardon.
She put away her ridiculous life and looked around.
Like everything else in China, the bank dwarfed anything back home. Fluted columns stretched five stories high, supporting a façade that was practically made of old money. People in expensive outfits walked mostly down the stairs from the entrance because the bank was near closing time.
The interior was every bit as impressive, full of marble and golden light. It reminded her of Mary Poppins. If Mr. Banks walked around a corner being harangued by Mr. Dawes—with Chinese characteristics, naturally—she would not be surprised. Kim tried to translate supercalifragilisticexpialidocious into Sichuanese as a clerk led them to the account executive’s area, but gave up after a few tries. She couldn’t quite figure out what tone to use.
It was a measure of how important this agreement was that the president of the company had shown up. “Ah, the girl with the beautiful voice and the fragile skin. I’ve heard a lot about you.” President Gao’s Mandarin was hoarse, and he had enough of an accent that he’d probably learned it in school. A quick Wikipedia cross-check told her he was from Shanxi, a province well east of Beijing, which meant he’d grown up speaking Jin.
President Gao shouted at a few of the vastly younger associates, who then went scurrying around with sheaves of paper. Two binders held copies of the contract, one in Simplified Chinese and the other in English.
Her talent was speaking languages, not reading them, so Kim couldn’t understand the Chinese version without a translation program, which would be useless with a document this complex. On a hunch, she grabbed the English stack and turned to a random page.
“Please,” she said in her Bejing-TV accented Mandarin, startling the interpreter President Gao brought along, “could you read section seven, sub-section b, paragraph one, to me?”
The interpreter read the paragraph out in Mandarin, and sure enough, what in the English text said completely exclusive rights remain with the designer continued on in Chinese as majority royalties must remain in China.
Kim switched to Jin. “Mr. President Gao.”
His eyes flashed as his lackeys fidgeted nervously.
“I am very sorry, but your writers have made a few errors.”
A slight smile broke across his face as an eyebrow arched. He must’ve been a lady-killer back in the day. “They have?”
“Yes. They are not very skilled at understanding your meanings. If you will pardon me, I must explain to my superior.”
Mike had no idea what they were talking about, and Kim had to assume at least some of Gao’s toadies spoke English. This had to be done carefully. “Mr. Sellars?”
She was probably the only one who noticed him pause. “Yes, secretary?”
Good, he was in on it. What it was didn’t matter. Making stuff up as she went along was kind of her thing. “Mr. President Gao’s translators haven’t done an adequate job with the contract. We may have to work together to ensure everything is correct.”
“Very well, secretary.” He waved his hand at her dismissively. “Just don’t screw it up this time.”
This time? Really? Just the barest shadow of a wink made her heart flutter. Kim missed their private channel in realmspace more than ever.
“Mr. President Gao?” she asked in Jin.
“Where did you grow up in Shanxi? You sound like my old neighbors.” He chuckled.
Kim made sure to not quite look him in the eye. She was just an interpreter. “Yes, I get that a lot. It’s complicated. Sir, the contract provided to you isn’t translated correctly. If you don’t mind, I would very much like to help correct it?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
It turned out the contract was very badly translated.
“All profits outside New Shanghai go to your corporation?” she asked in standard Mandarin. “Really?”
One of the lackeys tried switching to Sichuanese. “This bitch thinks she’s so smart. She’ll keep us here all night!”
Right. Time to swat that one on the nose with a newspaper. She switched to Sichuanese and said as sweetly as possible, “This bitch is really sorry she’s keeping you from a date with your mother’s dog.” From the laughter, half the contingent was local. The rest were probably from Beijing, or maybe Shanxi. The dog slunk away, lesson learned.
Mike asked, “What was that all about?”
Kim focused on him and switched to English. “Sparky over there is upset about our language problem.”
“You just called him something nasty, didn’t you?”
“No, he called me something nasty. But that’s because he sleeps with animals.”
This time she got a count of who chuckled. Three of Gao’s assistants spoke English.
She turned to Gao and switched back to Jin. “My superior agrees that your translators are sadly lacking. I’m afraid this will take longer than any of us planned.”
The laughter rolled out of Gao like stones tumbling down a hill. In English, he said to Mike, “She’s brilliant.” His accent wasn’t any stronger than when he spoke Mandarin. If anything it was faintly British.
“Sir,” Mike said as he took another drink of water, “you have no idea.”
He nodded. “When we’re done, drinks are on me.”
The translations took forever, and Jesus, they had stamps for everything. Kim tried to joke with a clerk about how she needed to find the right stamp to become the premier of China. He gawped at her like she had some genuine insight.
The doors of the bank opened, and five men walked in carrying assault rifles. She lost her realmspace connection. Judging by the startled looks around her, so did everyone else. Mike tensed, but this wasn’t the right time to start kicking everyone’s ass, not with those guns. She gave him a brief “no” shake of the head. “Call the cops,” she whispered to him.
“I still can’t connect.”
“No, call the cops from your side.”
Mike might not be able to connect to Chinese realmspace, but he was a part of normal realmspace. There was no way to cut him off from it.
Their party sat at the back of the bank. Teller windows and ATM kiosks lined the front walls. Some of the armed men ordered tellers to back away from their desks while others closed window blinds and disabled camera points.
“As long as you all stay calm,” the one in the center of the room called out, “nobody will get hurt. We’re just here for the money.”
The one who’d made it to the back of bank shouted, “You all, hands up slowly! Stand up and come out here!”
His face fell when he saw Kim and Mike. He shouted behind him, “We’ve got a problem, Li Jiàn. Foreigners.”
All five men looked around in a panic when sirens began to wail. “Zhuang Tu,” Li Jiàn shouted, “is the jammer working?”
Zhuang Tu herded the tellers out of their area and pulled a device the size of a deck of cards out of his pocket.
It was a Maj-17 signal jammer. She’d used one just like it on raids during her Rage + the Machine days. The thing was an antique.
“Yes,” he said as he checked a screen only he could see, “absolutely.”
“How did they find us so fast?” one of the other men asked.
Kim didn’t dare look at Mike. Score one for the good guys. The sirens built to an impressive volume; there had to be several units outside now.
“Put everyone in the center of the room,” Qiáng Shān commanded. “We need another plan.”
Kim played the wide-eyed barbarian
and stood still next to Mike.
The one who’d discovered them stamped his feet. “Where’s the interpreter?” Everyone shifted nervously. “Where is the interpreter!”
Cautiously President Gao lifted his hand. “I am the interpreter.”
Kim hid her reaction better than his babbling staff did. He motioned them silent with a single wave of his arm, and their talk stopped in mid-sentence. “I am the interpreter.”
He switched to English and addressed Kim and Mike. “Please, they want us to sit in the center of the room.” Switching back to Mandarin, he said, “The woman has a severe skin condition. She will bleed if you touch her. Please tell your friends.”
For a man who’d made an earnest attempt at robbing Mike blind, Gao was turning out to be a bit of a gentleman.
After they’d been herded into the main room with everyone else, she said as much to him. He laughed. “That was business. These hooligans will ruin your impression of my country. I take that very personally.” He smiled and nodded. “Since we’re speaking English now, I’m Samuel.”
“I’m Kim Trayne, and this is Mike Sellars.”
They sat on the floor while the five men whispered to each other ferociously. From the snatches Kim could hear, none of this was going as planned. Zhuang Tu, the guy with the jammer, was a dumpy little thing with greasy, unwashed hair. Li Jiàn, the leader, was taller than the rest and rail thin. The other three resembled each other so much they might be brothers, or maybe cousins. They wore faded T-shirts, ragged jeans, and worn shoes. Their money must’ve gone to buy the guns.
The tone of their accents finally clicked. Kim asked Samuel, “They’re not from the city, are they?”
“No. Country boys from near the mountains, I suppose. I’ll bet they’re looking to steal bride prices.”
“Bride prices?” Mike asked.
Samuel nodded. “Even today a Chinese man must provide a bride price to his fiancee's family. Women are rare here in the mainland, especially the countryside. It’s very expensive.”
He frowned as one of the cousins shouted, “We can’t leave now!” The others hushed him quiet.
Samuel continued, “The countryside is increasingly unstable. It’s a very bad business. Three Gorges delayed the chaos, made room for an influx of peasants, but that’s all stopped. The pressure is rising again. I hear rumors now about how the government is having a hard time out there.” He leaned toward them. “It’s a very bad sign.”
Zhuang Tu, the one with the jammer, said, “No! That won’t work! They’ll shoot us in the car before we get to the airport! I saw it in a movie!”
“Well,” one of the cousins said, “what do you suggest then?”
All the old-fashioned phones in the room rang at once. Their bride-less captors startled, and then just stood there staring at the phones like they were magic. Kim put her head down. She couldn’t seem too interested in what was being said.
Li Jiàn lifted one of the handles out of the cradle with fingers that trembled so much she thought he might drop it.
“Hello?” It was the high point of the conversation. “Yes, they’re all fine…No injuries or deaths, we aren’t foreign devils…I don’t think so. We have hostages and guns.”
One of the young bank tellers began crying into the shoulder of her coworker.
“No, you will not order us to do anything. We control the situation! Just like this!” he slammed the phone down, which immediately rang again.
Kim could only see Li Jiàn’s feet as he paced in front of it, each ring making him twitch. After a dozen rings he picked it up.
“Do not call us again! We control the situation! We will call you! You call again, and we’ll shoot one of them!” He slammed the receiver back onto the phone’s base.
All the tellers, young and pretty local girls, started crying loudly.
Their captors walked around the girls, shushing them awkwardly like boys in a school yard who’d been caught yanking pony tails. It was almost sweet, except for the assault rifles they had slung over their backs.
“What happens now?” Mike asked.
Samuel grunted. “My country has a task force for these things, an antiterrorist squad. You heard about the Chengdu disaster, yes?”
They both nodded; it was the biggest news of the year.
“That squad found and destroyed the terrorist cell.”
One of the cousins unslung his rifle and set it aside, but he fumbled it. When it flew into the air everyone shouted and tried to find cover.
It clattered loudly onto the marble floor. Kim had no illusions that it might not be loaded. The safety was set at least; she could see it.
Samuel shook his head. “I only hope they’re good enough to deal with a gang this awful. Professionals, even professional terrorists, are predictable. These idiots are capable of anything.”
Their captors broke into two groups: Li Jiàn and Zhuang Tu would either argue about their next move or stare sullenly at the walls. The cousins sat in a corner of the room chain smoking and playing mah-jong. The hostages consisted of Samuel and his group of five, the six bank tellers, the bank president, then Kim and Mike, all spread out evenly across the cold marble floor. They sat under and around tables in the center of the room.
Three hours went by without any changes. Kim had been an international computer-hacking badass from about the time she was twelve until it had all fallen apart six weeks after her eighteenth birthday. That whole time, and the five years after that she spent hiding from the world, nobody had ever gotten close to her. This was the second time she’d been kidnapped in six months. It was starting to seem like a habit.
She leaned over and softly asked Mike, “What’s going on outside?”
“I’m not sure,” he whispered back. “The international news feeds only picked up the story about fifteen minutes ago. The government isn’t letting anyone get within a mile of this place. It’s all telephoto shots from buildings a long way off. They’re just waiting around.”
Zhuang Tu spun in the executive chair he was sitting in. “You! Old man! Tell them to stop talking!”
His Mandarin was really bad, with an accent heavy enough Kim had to rerun his sentences in her head to make sure she understood them.
Samuel slowly stood but remained silent.
“Old man,” Zhuang Tu said as he stood to walk up to him, “I said tell them to stop talking.”
Staring straight ahead, Samuel said in clear Mandarin, “You will not speak to me in this fashion.” The rest of their captors stopped what they were doing and stared. The hostages didn’t have any idea what was going on, and their fear made the kidnappers fidget.
The old man was clever, so she didn’t dare interrupt his performance. Because that’s what it had to be. He was up to something.
Hopefully it wouldn’t involve bullets.
Zhuang Tu got in Samuel’s face. The older man was taller than the short, greasy hacker. Kim had to fight off a smile. The old salt and the little toad. It reminded her so much of her Rage days. This was Mark, her other father, in a suit on the other side of the world.
“I will speak to you in any fashion I want!”
“You dishonor yourself, your family, and your ancestors behaving in this uncivilized manner,” Samuel shouted out, a drill sergeant haranguing a lowly recruit. “Even hooligans such as yourselves know better than to behave this way. You will respect me, or I will not—”
Zhuang Tu punched Samuel in the gut. When Samuel fell against him Zhuang Tu threw him to the floor. Guns waved around at the noise the hostages made, and it wasn’t a fun bit of theater anymore.
Kim opened her palm and placed it in front of Mike when he tensed. He just might be able to take them all out by himself, but she couldn’t be sure of it. It would only take one reckless sweep with an assault rifle to kill them all.
Zhuang Tu stood over Samuel. “You will translate for us, and you will obey us, and I don’t give two dog shits what you think about it, old man.”
&
nbsp; Samuel rolled on the floor, groaning.
Zhuang Tu turned to Mike and Kim and said, very loudly and slowly in Mandarin, “Barbarians do not speak.” He mimed zipping his mouth shut and pointed at them. “You. Do. Not. Speak.”
Doing her best imitation of an ignorant tourist, Kim trembled and nodded. In English, she said to Mike, “I think he wants us to be quiet.” She nodded and returned his gesture.
Zhuang Tu nodded once fiercely and broke into his country-fied Sichuanese. “Fucking barbarian tourists! You smell like pigs!”
“Sit down, Zhuang Tu,” Li Jiàn said. “We still need to figure a way out of this.”
Zhuang Tu hawked and spit at their feet, then turned and stomped away.
Mike bent down to help Samuel up.
“Take me over to the wall,” Samuel wheezed out.
“Will you be all right?” Kim asked.
Samuel nodded, reassured his staff he was fine, then shooed them away. Once things had calmed down a bit, he beckoned faintly to Kim. “Sit between me and the two hooligans.”
She scooted until he nodded once. Keeping his face neutral, he pulled his hand out of his jacket. “You seemed extremely interested in this when they walked in.”
It was Zhuang Tu’s Maj-17 jammer.
Kim nodded and said loudly enough for the others to hear, “I have it in my purse; I’ll get it for you.”
One of the cousins noticed them. “What’s going on there? What are you doing?”
To Samuel, she said in English, “Tell him I have ibuprofen in my purse. It will help your pain, but you’ll have to reach inside to get it. I can’t touch you.”
He translated for the cousin, adding, “Perhaps when this is over I’ll take her to one of our clinics. Chengdu is known for its hybrid TCM-Western approach.”
Kim shrugged inside. They’d tried Traditional Chinese Medicine when she was a kid and it hadn’t worked, but who knew what they’d come up with since then?
His hand went into her purse, rummaged briefly, and pulled out the small travel box of painkillers. The cousin who challenged them moved to stand next to her. Kim yanked back her bag and scooted away. He was far too close.
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