by Steven James
So what did everything orbit around?
The video.
Yes. That was the key to everything. The one minute and fifty-two second long video of Cassandra in the tank.
And in one crystallizing moment, the final shape of the case became clear. No, Lien-hua wasn’t Shade after all. I’d been wrong, I’d been wrong. Thank God I’d been wrong.
No, she wasn’t Shade.
An old friend of mine was.
No reply from the other room.
Lien-hua called again, “Pat? Is that you?”
No reply. She steadied her gun, crouched. Listened for movement.
“Pat?”
No reply, except for the click of a closing door.
To get to the suite’s main room she needed to walk through one more bedroom. She glided in, made sure the room was clear.
Quickly checked the closet.
Empty.
Bathroom. Shower.
Nothing.
Under the bed.
Clear.
Now to the main room of the suite.
She eased around the corner and saw Creighton Melice standing placidly beside the desk.
“Down,” she shouted. “On your knees!”
He was holding her vase of dying flowers. Both of his hands wrapped in bloody, shredded gauze, the untended wounds smearing blood against the glass. “Nice flowers.” He set down the vase beside her notepad.
“I said get-”
But before Lien-hua could finish her sentence, the dart entered the back of her neck.
Someone else. There’s someone else in the room. Shade.
Lien-hua’s hand involuntarily flew up to her neck, and she tugged out the dart as she whirled around to see if she could identify the other assailant, but the ripple of the curtains told her the person had disappeared onto the veranda. By the time Lien-hua had turned back to Creighton Melice, he was on her with a vengeance, chopping his hand at the gun, sending it spinning to the ground. Then, he came at her with a stylized uppercut and back fist.
He’d studied martial arts.
But she knew the form: Choy Li Fut.
And knowing it, she could counter it. She leaned into this punch and used the force of his momentum against him, driving him backward, then twisted his wrist behind his back. He yanked free, but not until after she’d hammered his side with two brutal alternating straight punches that would’ve brought most men to their knees.
He didn’t even flinch, just pivoted backward and brought an elbow into her face. She tumbled against her vase and sent it smashing into the wall.
He feels no pain. You have to knock him out.
Moss began to grow across her field of vision.
The dart. She’d been drugged.
The whole world tipped sideways, sounds and colors came to life, time began to stretch thin and then wrap around her, and she couldn’t be sure what was real anymore.
Then Melice grabbed her arm, slammed her into the wall, and yanked her backward by the hair to smash her head into the mirror hanging beside the closet, but she sensed him standing behind her just to her left side. It would be a tough kick, but she’d done it before. She kicked up, doing the splits vertically, and slammed her foot into his face. She heard the crunch of impact but no cries of pain, though his grip did loosen and she was able to twist free.
He faltered backward, and she faced him, kicked him once in the side of his left knee, and as he crumpled, she connected another kick to his head, and then she felt her legs giving way, her strength seeping.
“Don’t fight it, Lien-hua,” he said as he shook off the kick and readied himself to come at her again. “It’s better if you just let yourself go. Only a few more seconds and you’ll be like me. You won’t feel anything.”
She took two quick steps, kicked, caught his chin, sent him flying.
Her thoughts stumbled over each other, looking for a place to stand, but found no footing. Lien-hua rushed him, gave him a front kick to his abdomen, and a roundhouse kick to the ribs, and he was down. Still conscious, though.
And now he was getting up.
If you can get to your gun, if you can just get to your gun.
But a smothering weakness washed over her. The world around her turned in a wide, hazy circle for one lingering moment that was somehow both slower and faster than real time. Then, despite her best efforts to stay standing, she began to drift to the ground.
Melice rose to his feet, retrieving her gun and sliding it beneath his belt. “You can feel it, can’t you? It’s taking over everything. I’ll bet you’re wondering what we’re going to do with you when you finally pass out.”
Lien-hua’s legs melted, and she collapsed onto the carpet. She blinked. Tried to focus. The paralyzing sedative was climbing over her quickly. She couldn’t move. Too weak. Powerless. Melice walked to her, stood beside her. Leaned close. “Do you feel like a victim yet? If not, you will. I have quite an evening planned for you.”
He stepped out of the edge of her vision, and Lien-hua tried to rise to her feet, but it was all she could do to roll her head to the side. She saw Melice bend over a chair in the corner of the room and pull something out of a garment bag.
“She’s almost ready, Shade,” Melice said.
Then, a shadow fell across Lien-hua as someone else approached and stood behind her.
The world was being swallowed by a hungry, sweeping numbness. But before the gray sleep could cover her, she saw Melice turn and step toward her.
A red, silk evening gown in his hands.
98
Tessa and Riker talked for a while at the bar, then danced some more, returned to the bar, then danced again. Time meant nothing in here. Only moments mattered. Shared moments.
And so, Tessa had no idea how long they’d been in the club when Riker led her up a wooden staircase located in the belly of the building. She found that she needed to use the railing to keep her balance. It’d only been a couple of drinks, but still, the world seemed to be slowly tilting to the side.
With every step, she could feel the music pulsing through the floor, but more distant now. The top of the stairs was another world.
They arrived at a hallway lined with doors, high above the throbbing club.
Now alone and no longer under the pounding spell of the music, Riker grinned. “It’s quieter up here, huh? This way we can talk.”
For a moment she was afraid he was going to direct her into one of the rooms, but he just sat at the top of the stairs and patted the floor beside him. She joined him.
“So, if you go to school in Denver,” he said, “what are you doing here in Diego, anyway?”
The music. The world. It was all slightly askew. A little off balance. “Um. Just visiting some friends at SDSU.”
“Oh. Well, you should have told me. They could have come too.”
Her heart was beating. Beating.
Pulsing music rising through the air. She was alone with a guy.
An older guy. A cute guy who liked her.
She let her gaze climb his chin, his cheek. Until her eyes found his. “Maybe I didn’t want anyone else around.”
Then she closed her eyes and kissed him deeply, and as she did, in the back of her mind, far beneath the thrill of the moment, a little girl felt the ice cracking underfoot.
I sprinted through the hotel lobby. Too many people waiting by the elevator. I flew up the stairs.
Fifth floor.
Then into the hall. Drew my gun. Room 524.
Key out, I slipped it into the lock. “Lien-hua?” Gun ready.
Door open.
A broken vase on the floor and a scattering of dead flowers on the damp carpet. A Sabre 11 military issue dart beside them.
“Lien-hua!”
I scoured the entire suite. Empty.
They had her and they had the device.
No!
I grabbed the room phone.
Earlier in the day when I was in the evidence room, I hadn’t thought to s
tick some kind of tracking device in the bag with my contraption. But now, I called Angela Knight to have her track the GPS for my cell phone, which I’d left in the laundry bag.
Let it never be said I don’t learn from my mistakes.
She told me it would only take a few minutes, and then put me on hold before I could tell her I didn’t have a few minutes.
As I waited I had a disturbing thought. I remembered the video Melice had made of Cassandra. What if he made one of Lien-hua?
I flipped open my computer to see if Shade or Melice had emailed me anything. I found nothing except a message from Calvin: Couldn’t reach you on your mobile, my boy, but you mentioned that radioactive isotopes had been found at the arsonist’s apartment. I’ve been wondering if perhaps the fires were never intended to cover up a crime at all, but maybe the smoke was. Call me.
— Calvin.
The smoke?
I thought about the device, the fires, their locations. Why there?
Why then?
What about this: Drake’s men would test the device, emitting trace amounts of cesium-137. And after they’d left, Hunter would arrive. That’s why he didn’t know about the tests… But since Drake’s men had used the device, when Hunter arrived at the arson sites he would be exposed temporarily to the cesium-137, and that’s why MAST found the traces of it at his apartment…
The smoke.
Yes, of course.
The smoke would disperse the radiation so MAST wouldn’t be able to identify the tests during their radiation sweeps of the city.
Yes. I could finally see it. The fires weren’t meant to distract, the smoke was meant to disperse. It made sense. It fit, but in that moment I didn’t care.
All I cared about was Lien-hua.
And Angela was taking too long, way too long to help me.
Lien-hua shook her head. Everything was bleary, dim. The world lay shrouded in a misty dream. Her hotel room. She remembered that. Melice. The dart. And now, she was lying on her side, that much she could tell.
But she wasn’t on a bed. No. Something else. Something stiff and cold.
She took a quick inventory of her body, moving her limbs slightly. Nothing seemed broken. She wasn’t tied up. That was good. But where was she?
She shook her head again, tried to clear her thoughts. Opened one heavy eyelid. Bleary. Bleary.
Blinked twice.
No, not a bed. She wasn’t on a bed; it was concrete.
She slid one tired hand along her leg but didn’t feel the fabric of her jeans. Instead she felt the silky grace of the evening gown.
Both eyes open.
She saw what she was wearing. Elegant and red.
Lien-hua’s head still pounded. Dizzy. So dizzy.
She eased her hands forward, and as she began to sit up she felt a cold ring encircle her left ankle and then heard the sound of a lock snapping shut.
As I waited for word on my cell’s location, I noticed Lien-hua’s notepad on the desk, a bookmark toward the end. I flipped it open and saw that she’d drawn a flower being snipped from its stem.
Below it she’d written “June 17, 1999.”
The date meant nothing to me, and before I could wonder about it any longer, I heard Angela’s urgent voice on the other end of the phone. “We’ve got it, Pat. Your cell’s at the Sherrod Aquarium.”
I was all the way to the door by the time I heard the phone’s receiver hit the desk.
Lien-hua twisted around and saw Creighton Melice kneeling beside her bare feet. And in one terrible instant she realized where she was-the empty shark acclimation pool at the Sherrod Aquarium, her ankle now shackled securely to the drain. The dizziness was fading. Her head began to clear. She pushed herself to her feet.
Melice stood up and smiled. “Drowning will be a terrible way to go, don’t you think, Agent Jiang?” Though Lien-hua was still somewhat disoriented, her instincts took over, and with years of honed quickness, she leapt toward him, using the chain to add a few inches to her leg’s reach. In the air, she angled her right foot at his jaw, reached full extension, and connected, hard, sending him smacking into the glass wall of the pool as the angry chain snapped her back to the ground. Her ankle cried out in pain, but she was on her feet again in seconds. Arms locked, ready to fight. Melice stood and shook his head. His legs were wobbly. It hadn’t been one of her best kicks, but it wasn’t her worst either.
She lowered herself into a ready stance. “Come here, Creighton Melice, and I’ll make you wish you could fight like a girl.”
As Tessa kissed Riker, she felt a warm tingle rising within her, swallowing any uncertainty she might have had about the direction her choices were taking her tonight.
Below her, in another world, the music pounded, thumping like a distant heart.
Exciting. So exciting.
Over the course of the last few minutes, half a dozen couples had stepped past them either on their way to, or from, one of the rooms in the hall.
Finally, Riker pulled away from Tessa’s lips just far enough to speak to her. He held her close, so close. “It looks like we’re a little in the way here by the stairs.” His words held both a promise and an invitation. “No privacy. C’mon. Let’s grab a room.”
Exciting.
So exciting.
The sweetness of his kisses overcame her flicker of hesitation, and she stood, took his hand, and followed him to a room at the far end of the hall.
99
Lien-hua’s thoughts were still foggy, but she stood her ground, waited to see if Melice would fight her. “Are you that scared of me, Creighton? Scared of a chained-up girl? Maybe now I won’t beat you as badly as I did at the hotel, but I doubt it. You’re not nearly as good as you think.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a tripod on the edge of the deck above her. For a moment she thought it might be the device, but then she saw that it was a video camcorder.
Oh, not good. Definitely not good.
“I don’t want to fight you,” Melice said. “I want to watch you. See how you do compared to the others. And tonight the whole world will be watching. Lots of people out there with my taste in entertainment. An FBI agent? At the world’s largest aquarium? We’ll get at least eighty thousand hits by tomorrow. Maybe a hundred.”
Lien-hua yanked her foot against the chain.
“That’s good. Keep that up. The more you tug the better the video will be.” He began to climb the ladder that led out of the pool, leaving bloody prints from his wounded hands on each rung.
“You broke my tank at the warehouse, but this should work just as good, don’t you think? Sorry to say, it won’t be a live feed, though.
I don’t want us to be interrupted by any cops.” When he reached the deck he gazed around the animal husbandry area. “Kind of ironic, huh? That we’re back here where everything started yesterday morning.”
Dread dripped into Lien-hua’s stomach. Be brave. You need to be brave. “Where’s Shade? Still too afraid to show his face?” she asked.
“Shade is taking care of a few loose ends.”
She worried that Melice might be referring to Pat, but she didn’t want to appear weak or scared so she didn’t let her concern reach her face. Melice glanced at his watch and then continued, “Be here in thirty minutes. I’m sorry you two won’t have the chance to meet.
The filming will be done by then.”
Then she had it. She realized Melice’s primary motive. “Pain.
Shade’s going to kill you with the device. Make you feel pain.”
“Oh yes.” He looked to the side, across the deck. “It’s already set up and waiting for me.” Then, he let his eyes roam back toward the acclimation pool and walk across Lien-hua’s body. “You look good in that dress, by the way. I’m sure your viewers will appreciate that you’ve kept yourself in shape.”
Lien-hua looked around, tried to think of some way to escape, but saw no viable options.
Not drowning. Please, no. Anything but drownin
g.
Melice positioned the camera. “Now, you may need to work with me a little here. I’m not sure how quick that pool is gonna fill. I’ll probably have to shoot this a couple times, let some water out, and then refill the pool again, before I can get all the footage I need. So, do your best to hold your breath and you might last two or three takes.”
And then, Creighton Melice stepped out of sight and turned on a valve somewhere, and the thirteen-foot-deep shark acclimation pool began to fill with water.
100
I came screaming to a stop at the aquarium’s little-used exit door near the two rusted dumpsters, leapt out of the car, and found the door locked. I might have been able to pick it but I didn’t want to waste the time. I shot out the lock, then slipped into the building.
Melice’s face appeared beside the video camera. “You’re starting to feel it, aren’t you, Lien-hua? What we talked about in the interrogation room? The door to hope beginning to close. You’ll yank at that grate until your ankle is chafed and raw, you’ll try to unhinge the clasp, maybe try to pick the lock somehow. But all the while the water will be rising and then, finally-reality check-you’re not gonna get away. You’re going to die right there, tonight, while I watch.”
Water to her knees. The pool was filling faster than she’d thought it would.
Melice continued, “Don’t be upset. Just remind yourself that over the next few months you’ll be providing entertainment to hundreds of thousands of eager viewers.” Then he added, “Who knows, you might even make it to a million downloads by summer.”
Tessa sized up the room. Wooden floor. Plaster walls. A queen-sized bed pushed into the corner, strewn with a tangle of filthy, rumpled sheets. There on the far wall, faded blue curtains in front of a narrow, airless window. The place smelled like the back room of a bar, and the only stirring of air came from a small oscillating fan beside the bathroom door.
No overhead light. Just a small lamp beside the bed. Riker walked over and snapped it off, so that now the only light in the room came from the murky yellow haze climbing through the window and resting expectantly on the bedsheets.