The Red Room

by Ridley Pearson

  She did, in fact, but she’s loath to admit it.

  “Tepebasi to Taksim,” he quotes. “Gets us close to the river. The meet will take place on the Asian side in an area where Westerners like me can be more easily spotted.”

  If Knox is the target of a kill order, this is risky territory.

  Under Besim’s watchful eye, Victoria has returned the Harmodius to the Alzer Hotel’s bellman storage. When the remainder of the payment is deposited into escrow, Grace will be with Knox to vet the sourcing—requiring at least five minutes while in his company.

  Given the okay, Victoria will meet one of the Iranian guards and pass along the claim tag. The moment the Harmodius is in the guard’s possession, she and Knox are nothing but witnesses. Dulwich has made no allowance for an exit strategy, a fact his conversation with Grace did nothing to change. Knox’s safety relies on no one being followed to the meet and on no connection existing between Mashe and whoever killed Ali.

  “Makes things interesting, doesn’t it?”

  He’s been reading her mind. Again.

  “Don’t worry so much,” he says.

  “You can barely walk, certainly not run.”

  “Never discount the miracles of modern medicine. Believe me, I feel very good right now.”

  “You are doped.”

  “Umm.” He closes his eyes again.

  Grace wants to doubt him, to question him, but entreats herself to listen and learn. Dulwich has a dozen men and three women at his disposal, all contractors for Rutherford Risk. He subcontracts Knox for the intangibles. If she’s smart, she can learn from Knox’s arrogance. His relentless efforts to set himself apart from the status quo run contrary to her Chinese heritage and training. If she’s to become like him, it will require a personality change, a psychic shift that’s well out of reach. She sags back into the uncomfortable, slippery plastic bench, discouraged.

  44

  Knox is not asleep. Despite the meds, his mind is overactive. It’s easier to focus without looking at the weathered faces of the old Turkish women riding the bus, the wide-eyed toddlers in strollers, the men reading newspapers as if they plan never to disembark.

  He hears the bus wipers engage and realizes it’s raining again. A few seconds later, the report on the roof confirms: it’s pouring. His legs twinge; the pain presents a real problem, though he’s unwilling to admit it. He thinks back to Grace pushing him around in a wheelchair in Shanghai as cover, marvels at how things change. He works through the possible variations of what could go wrong at the meet and how to react. He stores each reaction, a bullet list of responses depending on the situation. Into his assumptions, he must fit his disability.

  The pieces do not mesh well. If Dulwich or the client pulls something, if Knox was supposed to escape by his wit and physical prowess, the plan has failed before it even started. He’s going to hobble in and hobble out. They will all have to wait for the Harmodius to be in Mashe Okle’s custody. If they are to be used as unwitting couriers, the complications will escalate due to his infirmity.

  “We have to bring it with us,” Knox says, eyes closed.

  “Impossible. The funds will never be transferred.”

  “Sarge wanted us and the prize in the room for five minutes. If it plays out the way I planned, using Victoria, Mashe may not see the piece until he’s back in Iran. We’ll have done all of this for nothing.”

  “There is nothing inside it. It was X-rayed. You said so yourself. It is a piece of metal sculpture, that is all.”

  “We don’t want to wait around for its retrieval. That kind of down time is too dangerous. Sarge kept stressing an in-and-out. Why? What if he didn’t mean the op as a whole, but just the five- minute meet?”

  “He would have told me this when I met with him.”

  Knox knows Dulwich to be a pragmatic man. He’ll defend the op first, the operatives second. Grace filled the man’s head with evidence of a possible dead drop. From that moment on, Dulwich was thinking only of preserving his side of the op. “I’d like to think he’d hate to lose us, don’t get me wrong. But his flag waving with you was meant to drive home a point: the op’s success is bigger than any one of us. Any two of us. What you have to know about Sarge is this: the man’s a patriot. First and foremost. His ultimate loyalty is not to you or me or even Brian Primer. He’s an agnostic whose higher power is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No one’s going to change that. If he perceives that the gain will require loss . . .”

  Knox sits up. It’s a deluge out there. Looking through the windshield is like trying to see through Saran Wrap. “The one thing we haven’t given serious consideration to is the idea that Sarge has gone rogue.”

  Grace is unblinking.

  Knox says, “Use of the Red Room. Mine was at lunch hour. Yours?”

  She doesn’t answer. Doesn’t have to.

  “Fewer people in the office during lunch. No one using that room.”

  “He made it clear that Mr. Primer was not to be involved. Was upset when we made direct contact with Xin.”

  “When I called, the op wasn’t listed. We took that to be a security measure. But maybe it isn’t listed anywhere. The Harmodius is tied to Israel. Sarge is in bed with the Israelis. We are now in bed with the Israelis.”

  “Speculative. And how does any of this help us?”

  Knox shuts his eyes again. Listens to the slap of the wipers. A man clears his throat. The air brakes wheeze. Knox checks his watch. Turns on his phone.

  In a painful heave, Knox sits bolt upright. “Mashe’s going to defect. It’s an elaborate plan to allow him to defect! It could never look like it. Never be connected. His own guards would kill him. Sarge never said people wouldn’t die; he said that the POI wouldn’t be killed. The POI is going to defect to the Israelis through us, a private company. If he does, Western intelligence of the Iranian nuclear program takes a giant leap forward. The program itself loses another scientist.”

  “But since it is arranged privately,” Grace says. She’s going along with him, though he can’t tell from her face how much she’s buying it. “The Iranians do not know to which country he has defected, making it the more difficult to track him down and—”

  “So who takes out the guards?”

  The bus rumbles. Knox can’t make sense of it. So close . . .

  “Akram,” Grace is gloating. “We will be searched, certainly. But the brother is no threat. He is familiar to them. The last person they will suspect of such a crime.”

  “That’s all well and good but there are pieces that don’t fit.” Knox can’t be sure if he spoke the words or only thought them. He experiences another rush of sensational warmth from the Vicodin. Doesn’t see the point of arguing. Of anything. “Akram,” he hears himself say.

  He’s not echoing her conviction but looking at his phone’s screen, where an alert shows. He passes the phone to Grace.

  “It is an address,” she informs him. “We have twenty minutes.”

  45

  A taxi drops them off in front of the Blue Mosque. Several hundred tourists mill about in a way that makes the crowd feel like several thousand. Above their heads, squadrons of pigeons arc through the rain as if it isn’t falling.

  Knox and Grace take shelter beneath a plane tree but can’t avoid getting wet. Grace checks her watch impatiently. Knox’s phone chimes a minute later: a license plate number. A dark blue minivan pulls to the curb, where a police officer waves it off. Grace waves at the driver from twenty yards away.

  “That the same van that took you?” Knox asks.

  “No.”

  The last thing Grace sees as she climbs inside is Besim’s accomplice straddling a pale blue motor scooter back by the gesticulating police officer. As she steps in, a hood is pulled over her head.

  “Where is sculpture?” a heavily accented male voice asks in struggling En
glish.

  Knox answers, “The woman makes her case with Mashe.” He speaks through the darkness of the hood. “When she is satisfied, you will release her and she will text me once safely away. Then, and only then, will you see it.”

  “No!” Grace objects.

  “Shut up!” Knox counters. It’s a hybrid plan that meets his requirement of keeping at least one of them safe.

  “Unacceptable. No sculpture. No meeting.”

  Knox supposes this would fill Dulwich to bursting—the enemy begging to be in the same room with the Harmodius.

  The man searches and empties the outside pockets of the Scottevest but, feeling more contents, unzips the windbreaker and starts emptying its nineteen compartments. The man starts a dialogue with the driver in Persian, clearly impressed by the garment.

  “Where you make jacket?” the man asks.

  Knox scoffs. “If you want the sculpture, before you shut off my phone and pull the SIM,” he’s assuming they are well into making sure no GPS signal allows them to be followed, “you need to text the number ending in six-seven-six and request a curb drop.”

  There is discussion between this man and at least two others. Knox does the math—three at a minimum, including the driver. Knox is spun around and pushed to the floor as if he’s praying backward, into the pew. His bruised shins strike the floor of the van and he goes faint. The op has reached the point Dulwich intended—the five minutes are nearly upon them. He wonders if they’ll be his last.

  The hood is lifted as the van pulls to the curb. Knox sees gray cloth upholstery and, in the reflection off the seat belt’s chrome tongue, flashing pieces of a face and a Makarov PMM trained on the base of his neck.

  “You do this!” he’s instructed. “I am watching.”

  His phone has been set up to text Victoria’s number, as Knox indicated. The guy probably can’t write English. Knox types:

  curb drop. supply address. now.

  The phone pings, an address being texted back. His captor barks it out to the driver, pulls the hood over Knox and returns him to the seat bench. He stretches the seat belt across Knox and fastens it—a gesture that has nothing to do with safety.

  He can hear the guy working. “Where you make jacket?” he repeats.

  “You can get ’em online,” Knox answers. “Pants. Shirts. FBI uses them.”

  The man repeats the part about the FBI to the driver. Another exchange. His captor peels the Scottevest off Knox. The work is intimate, providing Knox several lost opportunities to knock the guy into another postal code.

  “What is going on?” Grace asks.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Shut the fuck! No talk.”

  Knox hears the windbreaker being passed up to the driver, who shakes it, studying it as he drives.

  “Scott-y-vest,” Knox says, drawing out the pronunciation.

  The man repeats it. It’s a language lesson. He gets the hang of it.

  “Google T-E-C. It’ll be there somewhere near the top.”

  “I keep.”

  “No,” Knox says.

  “John!” Grace interjects. “It’s a jacket!”

  “It’s my jacket.”

  “No talk!”

  Knox says, “You take my jacket, I take your gun.”

  The man clobbers Knox through the hood, but stuffs the jacket into his gut after the driver says something nasty.

  Grace clears her throat as if to say, Happy now?

  Knox coughs to let her know he’s thrilled. His hands roam the jacket. They’ve left him his phone, though it’s certainly shut off and currently without its SIM.

  “No talk!” the myna bird says.

  The guy opens and chews a stick of gum, failing to offer his guests any. Knox’s mouth is dry; he feels groggy. Wakes up when he slumps into Grace, who catches his head.

  “Off!” Their captor shouts. He’s in the front seat, judging by the sound. There has been no attempt to bind their wrists or ankles. Ostensibly, the blindfolds are about protecting the location of Mashe Okle. That, in turn, tells Grace and Knox that Mashe Okle’s situation has changed, the turning point likely the attempted assassination in the taxi cab that left Ali dead. Grace and Knox are too shorthanded to know if the elder Okle has visited the mother’s hospital room any time since. Doubtful. More likely lying low.

  If their theory is right and Mashe Okle is a defecting nuclear scientist, he may have realized that his mother’s illness was either faked or forced, as Knox and Grace have. May understand that all the visits in the world aren’t going to improve her health. Only crossing the imaginary line, the border between Iran and whatever country he has struck a deal with, can save her now.

  Unless they are wrong about his defection. This is the part of the spook world Knox detests, why it never attracted him: too many unknowns. Dulwich made him believe they were doing something good, something that has to be done; Knox can’t shake the feeling he has to play this out.

  Grace helps Knox to sit up straight; there’s an unmistakable tenderness in her touch. It communicates concern, caution, patience, apprehension. They are in the lion’s den. Together. Separately. Their single agenda: to watch a clock tick out five minutes in Mashe’s company. Both are assuming an announcement or an action on his part will occur before time expires. If not—if he’s not defecting—it’s anybody’s game.

  Knox wonders silently if the perceived dead drop was simply misunderstood by one or more foreign agencies. The expectation is the passing of information; in reality, it may be the willing exchange of a human being.

  What’s beyond doubt is that neither he nor Grace possesses enough reliable intelligence to have any idea what to expect, which makes planning their exit strategy impossible. That, in turn, explains Dulwich’s inability to address the subject at the falafel shop. Knox’s mind is too dulled to pull all the pieces together.

  And lurking at the back of his consciousness is a voice reminding him about the pacemaker battery.

  Knox’s wrist warms beneath his watch. He ascribes the sensation to the meds until he hears cursing from the front seat and, seconds later, hears something strike the rubber floor mat. A fist knots the fabric of the hood and his shirt.

  “What the fuck is this?” the man asks.

  “What the fuck is what?” Knox asks, gritting his teeth against the burning of his watch against his skin.

  The man bounces Knox off the seat back. “Fuck you!”

  “Microwave,” the driver says. Apparently the same word in Persian as English. Knox is able to make out most of his explanation. “Listening device. Americans. Microwave. I have heard of this.”

  “Then shut up!” the passenger barks. Only seconds later, he says softly, “From where? You watch for tail, yes?”

  “You are a prick. Of course I watch. It is your job, also.”

  “How large, this microwave?”

  “No idea. Maybe nowhere nearby. Maybe satellite.”

  Grace toes Knox gently, and he wonders if she’s amused that Okle sent Cheech and Chong to fetch them or if it’s something more. The Vicodin has relaxed him to a point at which everything’s amusing. They could cut off his hand and he’d thank them. But Grace isn’t enjoying herself. She’s an accountant in wicked shape, trained as a Chinese spook. She’s ambitious, pragmatic, professionally androgynous, socially challenged, mildly alcoholic and lonely. She’s not playing footsie to win a chuckle, but to literally nudge him. He must be missing something. If his watch wasn’t approaching the heat of a laundry iron, he might be able to think, but in another few seconds they’re all going to smell his burning wrist hair.

  The van jostles him in the seat. He’s attempting to focus enough to rehearse the upcoming meeting. Anticipation is nine-tenths of survival. But Grace’s nudge interrupted his preparation, like throwing a trivia question into a c
onversation. He can’t keep his ideas separate.

  It doesn’t help when the van goes into paint-shaker mode and his thigh wound hits a pain pitch that could shatter glass. Inside the black hood, it’s too warm; he sucks for air, claustrophobic. His injured shins pulse. The food isn’t sitting right, a mass lodged somewhere around his collarbone and swelling. He tries swallowing away the burning feeling, but his mouth may as well be stuffed with cotton balls.

  Grace relives the events inside the van during her abduction: the driver’s watch warming to the point he dumped it; the van experiencing engine problems. Engines that run on computers; computer boards running on batteries.

  Grace toeing Knox serves its purpose, the connection made. Similar, perhaps identical phenomenon—abduction, vans, overheating wristwatches. Knox isn’t thinking clearly and he knows it. Resents it. He would trade the pain for a moment of insight. It’s often called “connective tissue”: the threads that exist or can be strung between events or persons. It’s here for him to see, but he does not. He wishes he could get a look at Grace to know if she’s come up with the answer or only the question.

  The van slows. His wrist is either beyond pain or the watch is cooling. He and Grace are pushed down as doors bang open and closed. Grace has been made to lie across Knox, while Knox’s bagged head is pushed against the van wall. Their captors want to limit any chance that the head sacks will be seen by a random street dweller.

  Grace says in a forced whisper, “My phone. Five minutes.”

  The van is moving again. Knox and Grace are pulled back to sitting positions. He assumes the Harmodius is onboard; Victoria delivered. She had better leave it at that, had better return to her hotel room and await a message. No time for heroes.

  Grace’s phone. Five minutes. What the fuck?

  Goddamned Vicodin.

  46

  The head sacks come off inside an apartment building. Grace and Knox are ushered upstairs as their captors struggle with the crate holding the Harmodius.

  Grace is thinking that if Besim’s friend spots surveillance, she’ll never know about it. Her phone is off, its SIM pulled. She believes it was returned to her purse, but she isn’t about to check. Instead, she’s trying to help Knox from behind as he struggles to climb on painful legs. With the ascent of each stair, she considers another bullet point on her list of financial topics to cover with Mashe Okle.