by James Church
“I’ll be back at noon. If you can’t see by then, we’ll have to reconsider.”
“Any chance of something to eat?”
“I’ll check, but people are busy packing right now. You’ve caused a lot of problems.”
They were in a rush, packing, she’d said. I knew the machine was already crated, so they must be packing something else, like files. And I was excess baggage, except they thought I had what they needed—the money. Vincente had given me a phony bank account number to use for the advance payment, 37 percent. When they asked for that and I handed it over, that would buy me some time.
A few minutes later the door opened.
“We didn’t know you would be so difficult, or we would have selected someone else.” It was a man’s voice. He spoke in Korean, but it was clear from the accent that he was Japanese. He was a dark shape, nothing more.
“You have an advantage, whoever you are.” I twisted my head from side to side, as if trying to get a fix on his location. “Come back when I can see.”
“No time for that, as the prickly woman explained. I need to know if you have the final transportation arrangements, Route Victor, according to the agreed plan.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. I was supposed to find out the transportation route from them. They thought I had it?
“Of course I do,” I said confidently. “But nothing happens until I can see.”
“We can’t wait for that.” The man should have been calm if he hoped to be in charge. Instead he was shrilly impatient. “My bonus is at stake, and probably your life.” He took a breath, as if he realized he had made a mistake. His tone softened. “If we work together, maybe we can get out of this, each with what he wants.”
Even though I couldn’t see, it was clearly a transparent lie. “And you are who?”
“You can call me Kame. I handle transport.”
Bull’s-eye! I was with the man who handled transport, only he didn’t know what he was supposed to know. I weighed where this left me. Kame couldn’t be his real name. The word means turtle in Japanese. Who would give that name to a transportation specialist except maybe a gang with a sense of humor? On the other hand, maybe it was his real name; maybe he had drifted toward that profession in subconscious reaction. He had probably heard every bad joke about the name already. I let it go; no sense rubbing it in at this moment. Besides, he sounded nervous, and with nervous people, sometimes it’s best to say nothing. It often makes them more nervous.
I was right. This one couldn’t stand even five seconds of silence. “You may not have heard of me,” he said in a low voice. Before I could reply, he pressed on. “I’m not supposed to have revealed myself to you, but things being what they are, we have to bend the rules. Anyway, you can’t see me, so it’s as if I don’t exist.”
I instantly liked this logic. It meant as long as I couldn’t see, he assumed I didn’t exist either, not enough to hurt him. It was similar to what I had heard from Tomás in the hotel. Personally, I always felt that cosmic questions about existence were a distraction. If I wasn’t here, then why did my head hurt? If I was here, how did I get into this mess? For now, the sense of my existence racing parallel with my nonexistence seemed perilously hooked to the fate of a phony dumpling machine.
“Listen,” I said, “you want your bonus, but you can’t get it if you don’t come in and knock me around. Am I right? They need to think you beat it out of me.”
“A good point,” he said. “Not unreasonable. I need to know the transport arrangements. You must have been entrusted with them. They’ll be suspicious if you just hand them over without a fight.” He waited a moment, and then repeated what he’d said, as if to convince himself. “You must have been entrusted with them.”
“I must have been.”
“Who are you?” He hissed the question as he grabbed my hand. “You have all your fingers. Where are your tattoos?”
“Who am I? Funny, I have the same question—who are you?” I pulled my hand away. They still thought they were dealing with the Japanese mafia. “I also have clean fingernails. Care to see my feet? You think I’m going to give you any information when all I know is that you claim you’re in charge of transportation. I can’t see you. You said it yourself, maybe you don’t really exist. You want a bonus? Then you better start talking, fast.”
“I got here yesterday,” he said. “How come I don’t know you? How come no one told me to expect you? I thought I was supposed to work through that Russian fellow, Yuri.” The turtle sounded off balance, which is what I needed. If I was going to get out of this room, I was going to have to be the one in control of our encounter.
“Yeah, well, things changed,” I growled. “They do that sometimes. And we adjust, don’t we? How come you don’t know me? I’ll tell you why—because they’ve tightened up on security. Too many things have been going wrong. Too many threads leading to too many other threads. Yuri’s dead, hadn’t you heard? Broken thread. The deal is through me.” Considering I could barely see shadows, it was not a bad foray.
“The plans for Route Victor, where are they?” The turtle had suddenly regained its balance and was getting annoyed. “No games on this, whoever you are. The others have convinced themselves that you are Japanese. Of course you aren’t. Any idiot could sense that. Doesn’t matter anymore, because we are nearly out of time. Everything has to start rolling in less than an hour.”
I could barely see, and I didn’t know where I was in the factory. I also hadn’t learned what I had been sent in to find out—how the dumpling machine was being shipped. But I had established one thing beyond doubt. They were all sufficiently crazy that anything was possible, all of which gave me added incentive to get out and away from them as soon as possible.
“I need back my sight,” I said, craning my neck. “As soon as I can see, I can sign the necessary papers, you’d get your bonus, and we’d all part friends.” It didn’t sound very convincing once I’d said it, maybe a little too subservient. It was immediately clear that it wasn’t convincing to the turtle at all.
“We don’t need you to sign anything,” the man said, his voice shaking in anger. His Korean was in shambles. “That’s a stupid formality. I’m surprised you don’t know that. They’ll burn the paper as soon as they have the money. They’re not keeping any paper, nothing.”
If money was so important, then I might as well retreat behind those walls. It was my last chance. “I can’t release funds without a receipt.”
A solid whack on the back of my head threw me to my knees. “Maybe you are Japanese after all,” he screamed. A second whack on the head was more vicious than the first. “There are two receipts. Want another?”
I was stunned for a moment by the blows. When I finally raised my head, I could see again, better in one eye than the other, but this was no time to insist on perfection. I couldn’t let on that my sight was coming back. As long as they thought I couldn’t see, I was relatively safe. If they really needed the transportation details from me, it wouldn’t do them any good to kill me. That made sense to me; I had to hope it made sense to them, too. Vincente had emphasized that they wanted one thing—money. If they were greedier than they were crazy, that gave me a margin of safety I might be able to use.
“Don’t do that again,” I said. “You’ll dislodge my memory. Do you think I was stupid enough to put anything on paper? You think I like paper any more than your friends do? The transportation schedule is up here.” I tapped my head.
The woman who’d given me the injection burst into the room. “We have to move,” she shouted at Kame. Her voice was a notch above a high-speed saw cutting through metal. “Find out what we need from this donkey’s ass and then get rid of him.”
“How?” Kame sounded as if the idea had never occurred to him.
“Are you kidding me? Out back, same as always.” She seemed to be in a terrible state of confusion. She ran to the window, stood on her tiptoes to look out, then turned and ran out the doo
r.
“I need the transportation route,” Kame screamed at me in English. “Route Victor! V Victory. Now! And when I say now, I mean now.” Then he repeated it in Korean, then in Japanese, and finally, for some reason, in German.
“If you kill me, you won’t get it. The dead don’t talk, or haven’t you heard?” I cocked my head as if I still couldn’t see and was straining to hear what was going on. “I’ll make you a deal. Get me my sight, I give you the information.”
“I don’t know how to fix your damned Korean eyes.”
“It’s easy. The lady explained it to me.” I stood up.
“Don’t move, you bastard.” He was off to my right, backing away slightly.
“Look, I’m not doing anything, just getting onto my hands and knees, see? Here, come over and put your hand on the back of my head.”
“What if I slit your throat instead?”
“A lot of blood, and you’d probably slip on the floor running out, at which point you’ll realize that you don’t have the transport information and you’ve blown the chance for a bonus. Go ahead if you’re going to, we haven’t got all day.”
He moved behind me and put one hand on my head. I could feel it was missing a fingertip.
“Both hands. Hurry up, will you?”
He complied, and as soon as he did, I grabbed both of his arms, lowered my neck, and threw him with all my strength across the room. His body somersaulted and hit the wall hard. I heard something crack, and then he slid to the floor. I waited for someone to come through the door to find out what had happened, but no one appeared. When I crawled over to Kame, he wasn’t moving. His neck looked broken, and he didn’t seem to be breathing. A quick check proved he wasn’t armed. The threat to cut my throat had been a stupid bluff. His wallet had a few euros and twenty thousand yen folded under a flap, but no identification other than a business card covered with phone numbers. I put the wallet in my pocket, checked one more time to see if he was as dead a turtle as he looked, and carefully stepped into the hall.
I figured I had two options at that point—find a way out of the factory right away, or postpone that until I located the dumpling machine and figured out a way to disable it, even if it was already in three parts and crated. If they still lacked Route Victor, the machine must still be here. And if it wasn’t, there seemed little chance at this point I’d make any progress on discovering the transportation plans.
The first option, getting out of the factory, was more inviting, but after all I’d been through, I was determined to come out with something to show for my trouble. I needed to find the machine. According to the plans Vincente had shared with me, his preferred choice had been that I “reprogram” the machine. He wouldn’t say what that meant, only that it would be a simple task, so simple even a baby could do it. At that, Rosalina had softly tapped the horn, so I figured Vincente had scored a point. Vincente had smiled to himself and then leaned toward me. All I had to do, he said, was insert what he called a “gizmo” into a slot. That’s how it was explained to me as he handed me the very tiny plastic bag with the even tinier object in it. The slot was supposed to be on the left side of the machine, and if it wasn’t there, it was on the right side. Find the slot, slip in the gizmo, and the job was done. Only no one had considered the possibility that the machine would already be crated. Vincente had admitted that much. It would make using the gizmo more difficult, but if I could find the machine, maybe still not impossible.
The fallback in case option one didn’t work was also so simple even a baby could do it (again, Rosalina tapped the horn). That was to discover the transportation route so the shipment could be intercepted. Simple, except it turned out that no one at the factory knew the routing. They all thought I had it. And why was the turtle talking about a bonus? If he got the routing from me, whom was he going to tell, and what were they going to do with the information? Sell it to an interested party, someone connected with Yuri? And who might that be?
4
The last time I had seen the dumpling machine it was in a tunnel about five hundred meters from a heavy oak door that opened to the outside from the kitchen. Even if I found the kitchen and got out that door, I didn’t have the key I’d taken from Yuri, the one that he’d used to get into the tunnel. The key must still be on the bedside table in the fancy hotel near the beach in Portugal. There had been no chance to return to my hotel room to retrieve anything after that not-very-informative session with Tomás. It didn’t matter; the key probably wouldn’t work anyway, since when the factory guards repaired the lock they would have replaced the cylinder.
The hallway outside the room where I’d been for the past day or so was dark, with soft blue lights hanging from the ceiling every ten meters or so. The passage was only about a hundred meters long. At the end was an elevator, which opened silently when I approached. There were no buttons to push. The doors closed as soon as I stepped in, and the elevator went down. When the doors opened again, I was in another corridor, this one with no windows but the same blue lights. It had the feel of an underground passage, the more so because of the series of pictures on the walls of lean young men and women doing exercises in a sunlit meadow. All were wearing clothing, but not much. They were the sort of pictures that were supposed to convince the observer that he wasn’t really underground, and distract him long enough to find the way out before claustrophobia set in. Years ago I’d been in a long tunnel in an East German secret police training camp that had a similar air about it. I didn’t like it then, and I didn’t like it now.
The corridor lights were on a motion sensor, but there was a delay, so I was always stepping into darkness. Maybe 250 meters down the corridor there was a Y intersection. I make it a practice to go right when I’m not sure. Sometimes that doesn’t work, but this time it did. Two hundred meters farther on, there was another elevator. Again the door opened as I approached. This time there were two identical buttons side by side on a metal panel, with no indication what they were for. In the upper left-hand corner of the elevator car, I spotted a tiny camera disguised as a ceiling light. I grinned at it and punched one of the buttons. The doors closed, but nothing happened. After a minute, the lights went off and so did the ventilation. A tiny red light blinked from the camera, so I figured it was still working, maybe monitoring what I was going to do next. There wasn’t much I could do, so I leaned against the back wall and closed my eyes. That seemed to be the right move, because the car started to move again, inching its way up. At one point things jerked to a stop and I could hear the whir of a motor as if the cable was old and catching its breath. The car moved again, jerked one last time, and then the door opened into a brilliantly white room, white marble entrance, white carpet, white walls, a white leather sofa, and stark white chairs. The effect after the darkness of the elevator was blinding, as it was meant to be. I was in no mood for a merry chase, no mood for an interrogation, and too old for a seduction. I blinked once, looked at the dimmest corner to give my eyes a moment to adjust, and stepped into whatever waited.
5
Across the room was a white teak desk, and behind the desk was someone in a chair facing away from me, looking into a garden of oak trees and a riot of red flowers. My footsteps on the carpet were silent. I coughed softly, and the room swallowed the sound. White room, no sound, very appealing view of a garden—I braced myself. This was the sort of place you walked into and were never heard from again. If there had been another chair near the desk, I would have sat down without being invited, but there was nothing, so I stood and waited. The person in front of me didn’t turn around. It was a woman with long brown hair. Her blouse was blue, almost sheer, and she had on a scarf that, at least from the back, looked expensive. I waited. The view of the garden was nice, but I didn’t think it rated complete concentration. Finally, I walked around the desk.
It was Rosalina. She was perfectly dead. Her lips were pale, her eyes open, her body slack but more like someone resting for the moment instead of forever. There we
re no wounds I could see, but I had a feeling the death certificate, if it got to that, wouldn’t say “natural causes.” Apparently, she hadn’t been to a nuclear engineering conference. Instead, she had briefly been in the room where I was being held. I was pretty sure the perfume was hers.
I spent a moment looking out at the garden, wondering if she had noticed something before she was killed. When I turned around, two men were standing inside the doorway across the room. One of them was tall, thin, with hands like hammers, heavy hammers, not the small lightweight ones for tapping in brads. His shirt wasn’t tucked in, not that I cared, but it looked like he had dressed in a hurry. The other man was immaculately groomed. He was what you might call little, and he was holding a small pistol pointed directly at me. Even across a wide room, you can tell something like that.
“We knew you were a problem,” the small man said. “But she said she could handle it.” He waved the pistol at Rosalina. “She was wrong. Dead wrong.”
The other man laughed. It was the sound of a heavy sledge breaking a boulder. He took a step toward me, but his friend muttered something and he stopped.
Normally, someone—even someone so short—who has a pistol conveys a certain air of confidence, which is usually a good thing because confident people don’t pull the trigger by mistake. This man looked confused, nervous, like a sparrow that thought everything that moved was a cat. His eyes darted to the garden, back to the body, and then back to me. There seemed to be a lot of nervous people in this factory.
“I think you have this wrong,” I said calmly. No sense in shouting at a nervous, twitchy person with a gun. “I walked into the room, and she was already like this. I assume the place is wired.” I looked into the corners of the ceilings for a camera. There were two. “You can check the tapes yourself. And, no, I’m not trouble. I am just trying to finalize a business deal.” I shook my head, slowly. Sudden movement is only useful sometimes, and this was not one of them. “Never had anything quite like this deal. Almost too much trouble.” I nodded slightly in Rosalina’s direction. “I don’t even know who she was.”