by Barry Eisler
Well, she hadn’t counted on us. But with a little luck, we’d be no more than a bump in the road for her, immediately felt and quickly forgotten.
I watched her pass Harold Way. There was Larison, jogging down Harold, emerging right behind her.
“Go,” I said to Treven.
He put the van in reverse, cut the wheel right, and backed up all the way to the sidewalk on the other side of the street—essentially the middle part of a K-turn. Not too fast, not too sudden, just someone turning in reverse out of the motel parking lot to head south on La Baig. He stopped just as Larison reached Kei. Maybe she heard him coming; maybe some vestigial portion of her brain sensed the danger he radiated. Maybe both. Whatever it was, she started to turn. Too late.
Larison smacked her smartly on the side of the neck with the palm of his hand. Sometimes known as the “brachial stun,” the blow is intended to disrupt the brachial plexus network of nerve fibers, or, depending on the location of impact, the carotid sinus. Either way, the result can be temporary loss of coordination, unconsciousness, or even, if the blow is sufficiently severe and well placed, death.
The van stopped. Kei staggered and Larison clasped an arm around her. I moved from the peephole, threw open the rear doors, and caught Kei as Larison pushed her into me. We hauled her into the van and had the doors closed behind us two seconds after. Treven accelerated smoothly south and made a right on Sunset, so calm and courteous he even remembered to use the turning signal.
Kei hadn’t lost full consciousness, she was just dazed. We pulled the mailbag off her, secured her wrists behind her back with flex ties, and sat her up against the passenger-side wall. I knelt in front of her and quickly patted her down. Nothing. Whatever she was carrying, it must have been in the mailbag. Larison started going through it. He would disable her phone and confirm there were no tracking devices. Not likely there were, but it was possible Horton had implemented backup measures, hoping to protect her just in case.
I looked into her eyes. I could see she was coming back to herself. We didn’t need to do anything to resuscitate her.
After a moment, she blinked hard. She looked around the van, and then at me. “What the fuck?” she said. “Who are you? What is this?”
“It’s a kidnapping,” I said, using a word she would clearly understand and that would provide some immediate context amid her current confusion. “This isn’t a joke. It’s about your father. Colonel Horton. You understand?”
“My father…what did he do? What the fuck?”
“It doesn’t matter what he did. All you need to know is that he owes us something and we’re using you to get it. Do you understand?”
She looked from my face to Larison’s and back, and I could see how scared she suddenly was. She didn’t answer. I realized there was no need to let her see the bodies of the men her father had sent. She was frightened enough as it was.
“We’re going to take your picture now,” I said. “To show to your father.”
Larison handed me a copy of that day’s Los Angeles Times, which we’d scooped up from a driveway on the way to the motel that morning. I propped it on her lap. Larison moved in close and snapped a few shots with her phone. We’d send Horton the proof from his daughter’s own phone. That would increase his sense of how thoroughly we controlled her, and keep our phones clean.
I took the newspaper off her and tossed it aside. “We’re going to try to make this go smoothly. But there are two ways you could get hurt. One is, if your father doesn’t do what we want. Two is, if you don’t do what we want.”
She was breathing hard now and I knew she was fighting panic. Fighting it well. I respected her for it. And with the respect came a sudden and surprising dose of self-loathing.
I suppressed the feeling. I’d deal with the emotional fallout later. Like I always had before.
I looked in her eyes. “You’re worried that we’re letting you see our faces, is that it?”
She nodded. She was smart—smart enough to know that if a kidnapper lets you see his face, it means he’s not worried about you being a witness later. Meaning, probably, he’s not planning on letting you be alive later.
“It doesn’t matter if you see us,” I told her. “Your father is going to know exactly who we are. And he’ll explain to you when this is done why you can’t go to the police. So we’re not worried about you seeing our faces. Does that make sense?”
She nodded again.
“All right,” I said. “I get the feeling you’re smart. So you probably know about secondary crime scenes, and how you should never let someone take you to one, because once you’re at the secondary crime scene, the criminal can do anything he wants to you. And that’s true. But the thing is, you’re already at the secondary crime scene. We’re alone in this van, we have total control of the environment, and total control of you. If we wanted to hurt you, we’d be hurting you right now. But we’re not. And we want to keep it that way. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes,” she said, and I was glad she felt in control enough to trust herself to speak.
“In a little while,” I said, “we’re going to transfer you. First to another car, then to a hotel room. We’re going to keep your wrists tied and before the transfer we’re going to blindfold you, but we don’t want to make you any more uncomfortable than that. We don’t want to gag you, for example. I don’t know if you’ve ever been gagged, but I can tell you, it’s a horrible way to spend a few days. Much worse than you’d guess. Mimi, are we going to have to gag you?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Are you going to try to run away? Or fight us? Or in any way not do what we tell you to do?”
“No.”
“Look, for me, this is mostly just business.” I tipped my head toward Larison. “But for my associate here, it’s extremely personal. You don’t want to give him a reason, okay? Trust me, he’s looking for one.”
She looked past me at Larison, and I could tell from her expression that she believed. Believed utterly.
I let another moment go by, then said, “But I’m sure you’re going to be fine. Now, do you have any questions?”
She nodded. “Where are you taking me?”
“I can’t tell you that, other than to say it’s someplace where we can manage you, and where no one’s going to be able to find you until we let you go. Anything else?”
“What did my father do?”
“You’re going to have to ask him that. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Why do you keep asking me if I want to ask you anything, when you know you’re not going to answer?”
I smiled sadly, admiring how quickly she’d mastered herself, and liking the moxie she’d accessed even in the midst of shock and distress.
“You ask good questions,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t answer them all. I can tell you this, though. We’re going to change cars a couple times. You and I are going to ride in the trunk in one of them. And it’s going to be at least a few hours before we’re someplace comfortable, someplace with a bathroom. If you need to go before then, we’re going to need to put you in an adult diaper. Can you make it?”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m trying to make this as easy on you as I can, Mimi. But yeah, you better believe that I’m serious.”
Kei declined the diaper, and I was relieved. Maybe it wasn’t worth much under the circumstances, but I really didn’t want to subject her to the indignity. This was going to be hard enough as it was.
We spent the next two hours driving under virtually every overpass on the 101, the 110, and the 10, and going in and out of various underground parking garages, too. I took the passenger seat; Larison stayed in back with Kei. When I was satisfied, I called Dox. “You ready?”
“Ready, partner.”
“All right. We’re on our way.”
We made a left off Venice Boulevard onto South Redondo. As we came to the stop sign on Bangor Street, I saw the Fusion, waiting to make a right
—Dox. He pulled out ahead of us, and we followed him south toward the 10. As soon as we were under the overpass, Dox cut right and swerved to a stop on the sidewalk. The trunk popped open. Treven hit the hazard lights, cut right onto the sidewalk and then back onto the street, skidding to a stop so that the passenger side of the van was right alongside the open trunk of the Fusion. I jumped into the back and slid open the side door. Larison was already standing there with Kei, still wrist-tied and now blindfolded. The two of us lifted her easily into the trunk and I squirmed in beside her. Larison slammed the trunk shut and Dox peeled out back onto the road, accelerating to the end of the tunnel, then rapidly decelerating and emerging at a normal speed. Treven would be right behind him in the van, same timing, same formation as when we entered.
What we were doing was creating a kind of shell game using the overpasses and the garages. We still didn’t know how Horton had tracked us to the Capital Hilton, and our working assumption was that he had used spy satellites. We had to assume he had access to the resources of the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. If so, and if he had a fixed point for a target—such as, say, Dulles Airport, or outside his daughter’s house—it was possible he could track that target from the fixed point to wherever the target went, virtually indefinitely. If our working assumption was right, we’d been lucky in Washington, maybe in the hotel parking garage, maybe elsewhere between D.C. and Los Angeles. But we didn’t want to rely on luck again. Every time we drove the van under an overpass, or in and out of a garage, we created the possibility that we’d switched Kei into one of the dozens of vehicles that emerged from under the overpass at around the same time we did, or from the garage afterward. Multiply this dynamic by dozens of overpasses and garages times dozens of cars, many of which would themselves continue under other overpasses and into other garages, and we could create a dataset too big for Horton to act on, at least in the time we would permit him.
The plan now was for Treven and Larison to continue the shell game for the next couple hours, then to ditch the van, bleach it out, and get back to the hotel using buses and the Metro system. By the time they were done, Horton would be facing thousands of possibilities, each of which would have to be manually tracked, assuming it could be tracked at all. As for Dox and me, we did one more switch, into the U-Haul truck, which we had left in a giant underground garage in a mall in Westwood. Dox stayed at the wheel and I stayed in the cargo area with Kei.
At a little past noon, I felt a series of short turns that told me were back at the motel. “How are you holding up?” I asked Kei.
“I need a bathroom. Badly. Please don’t put me in a diaper.”
I checked my watch. “Can you hold on for three more minutes?”
She glared at me. “Barely.”
The truck stopped. “Face the front of the truck,” I told her. She complied. A moment later, the cargo doors opened and Dox climbed in. He was carrying an extra-large cargo carrier, 59 by 24 by 24 inches. Just roomy enough for someone of Kei’s dimensions. He pulled the doors shut behind him.
“All right, Mimi,” I said. “One more transfer.”
Dox, looking distinctly reluctant, set down the cargo bag and held it open. Kei grimaced, then stepped into it and curled up on her side. “I’m not going to gag you,” I told her. “Remember our deal.”
I was betting I’d be able to spot when she was planning an insurrection, and that I’d be able to preempt it. In the meantime, she would bide her time, believing she was lulling me. That was fine. The net effect was that she would be unconsciously inhibited by what she thought was hope. Meaning she would be comfortable. And, more importantly, more cooperative.
We zipped her in and opened the door. Dox picked up the bag as though it was filled with nothing but Styrofoam peanuts, slung it over a shoulder, and carried her into the motel. I shut the truck doors and followed him in.
We set her down in the room, unzipped the bag, and helped her to her feet. I opened the folding knife I was carrying and let her see it. Dox was holding the Wilson—not because he wanted to, but because I’d told him to. I wanted to give her every possible psychological excuse not to resist, including the obvious facts of our numbers, our size—or Dox’s size, anyway—and our weapons.
“I’m going to untie your wrists,” I said. “Take your time in the bathroom. We won’t watch you, but the door stays open. If you do anything we don’t like, we’ll have to diaper you, hogtie you, gag you, and put a hood on you, and leave you like that for what could be days. It’s up to you.”
I stepped behind her and quickly patted her down. Larison already had, and even if he hadn’t, it wasn’t likely she was carrying, but this was Horton’s daughter, after all, and it would be foolish to assume any woman couldn’t be equipped with pepper spray or an FS Hideaway knife. Better to double check. But Kei had no weapons, nor even anything that could be used for one. I took hold of her wrists and cut the flex ties.
She hurried into the bathroom. It was tiny and windowless, and with the door open there was nowhere she could go for concealment. And I’d already checked it for anything that could remotely be used as an improvised weapon. About the only thing she might have done was to wrap her fist in a towel, smash the mirror, and pick up a long shard using the towel as a kind of handle. I judged such a move at this point extremely unlikely. If I was wrong, though, I would have plenty of time to get an upraised desk chair between us, while Dox approached her from behind.
I turned away while Dox dragged a dresser in front of the door. A small thing, but enough to dissuade her from thinking she could get away with a mad dash for the exit. I heard her urinating for a long time. When the sound stopped, I glanced over just to be cautious, but everything was fine—she had already stood and had quickly pulled up her jeans.
She came out of the bathroom and said, “I’m hungry.”
I nodded. “We’ll give you some food in a minute. First, I want you to lie facedown on the floor.”
“Why?”
“Because it’ll slow you down and keep you from being tempted to do something that might get you hurt. The alternative is, we tie you up again. I need a bathroom break myself, and I don’t want fewer than two people watching you when you’re free to move about.”
She hesitated, then did as I told her. I used the bathroom, then Dox followed suit. When he was done, I told Kei she could sit on one of the beds. She did so.
Dox sat across from her and said, “I apologize for inconveniencing you, Ms. Kei. We’re in a tight spot, and it was your dad who put us here. We need to give him a little incentive to do the right thing. Which I believe he will. Despite the late unpleasantness, he’s always struck me as the kind of man who responds to incentives.”
“That’s what you call this?” she said. “Inconveniencing me?”
“Well,” Dox said, “in the end, I don’t know that it matters so much what we call it. But I do apologize regardless. Now, you said you’re hungry. We’ve got some pretty good chow from a fancy supermarket, if you like. You look like a salad girl to me, am I right?”
“If by salad you mean cheeseburger, then yeah.”
“A cheeseburger’s a tall order at the moment,” Dox said. “But maybe later. In the meantime, we’ve got a few sandwiches in a cooler, left over from yesterday. Not as fresh as you might like, but I expect they’ll taste fine if you’re hungry enough. What would you like? Roast beef, I’m guessing now? With a tasty smoothie to wash it down?”
“Whatever. Yes.”
I sat in the desk chair, watching Dox feeding her and doing what he could to make her comfortable under the circumstances. Women were his weakness, I knew, the lady’s man bluster mostly a cover for the bottom line fact that he really just adored them. And his southern code of chivalry was no bullshit, either. He wasn’t happy about what we were doing, and I realized I’d have to watch him with Kei for the opposite reason I’d have to watch Larison. Where Larison was likely to let his evident hatred of
Horton cause him to harm Kei, Dox might get too attached and grow to feel too guilty, and therefore become too susceptible to manipulation.
“Why don’t you tell me what my dad did to you?” Kei asked him at one point. “What difference would it make if you did?”
Dox took a sip of the smoothie he was drinking. I was aware that he’d broken bread with her, and felt uneasy about it.
“Wouldn’t make any difference to us,” he said. “But I don’t want to mix you up in this anymore than we already have. I mean, you’re close with your daddy, right?”
I saw her weigh the pros and cons of possible responses before settling on the truth. “Yes,” she said. “We’re close. Which is why I want to know what he could have done to wrong you. I really can’t imagine it.”
Dox smiled. “I can tell he’s lucky to have you for a daughter. And all I can tell you is, part of the burden of being a man, and the nature of the defect that defines us, is that we sometimes have to do things we can’t tell our loved ones about.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because sometimes things need to be done in the world, and telling you would make you complicit. By keeping you innocent, we save you from having to join us in hell. It might not sound like much, but it is a comfort when you’re faced with hard choices.”
“But that’s ridiculous. You make women sound like children. You think we can’t decide for ourselves? That’s completely demeaning.”
“Demeaning? Hell, I wish someone would do it for me.”
“No, you don’t. You like keeping it all to yourself because doing so makes you feel powerful.”
Dox looked perplexed. “I don’t think so.”
“I do. You say my dad did something to you, something so horrible that now in your mind it justifies kidnapping and threatening his daughter? You’re willing to do all that, but not even to tell me what this is all about?”