by Rob Wood
39
SINGLE ROOM OCCUPANCY
Purdy awoke slowly and, through partially lidded eyes, took in his surroundings. He was bound, wrists and ankles, with plastic zip ties. His hands were tied in front of him. He was slumped against the side of an overstuffed armchair. Cochrane was similarly bound and had been tossed across a sofa.
The room was old, with cracked plaster walls and ceilings. There were steam heat registers at the windows, their ribs caked in many layers of paint. The windows, Purdy noticed, were barred on the outside. That was typical in New York, except that from what he could see of adjacent buildings, they must be up on the third or fourth floor. Bars at that height were usually regarded as a redundant security feature.
Squirming around for a better look, Purdy noted that their decorator had been a slave to old hotel room convention. There were two end tables skirted with table cloths at each end of the sofa. For each table, there was a companion reading lamp. A fake cardboard oil painting of a wooded scene hung in a plastic frame. The surface had been stamped to simulate brush strokes. Faded Chinese characters, celebrating the New Year, hung by the doorway. The door, the casement and floor moldings were all dark, stained wood. Street sounds filtered in from outside. Lots of sound. That meant a crowded street, and, if Purdy was right, some of the chatter was Cantonese. This meant Chinatown.
Sitting across from him, in a companion armchair, was a heavyset Chinese. He had a shaved head, fat hands, and a Beretta. A Beretta, Purdy recalled, was said to be the most popular handgun in the world.
Cochrane stirred, moaning softly.
Ironic, thought Purdy, that the two of them had run unchecked from China to Vladivostok, only to be snuffed here in America. Right now, chances for a normal life expectancy looked like slim and none. The door swung open and a second Chinese came in with food on a tray. Tea. Two steamed rolls, a fried egg for each of them, and pickled vegetables. Not too good as last meals go.
The new Chinese placed the food on the end tables. All the while, the first man had his handgun raised in a two-handed grip pointed directly at Purdy, then Cochrane. The second Chinese gently shook Cochrane.
“Time to rise and shine,” said Purdy, calling across to her.
The second Chinese left the room, exiting out the main door to the corridor. Before the door closed, Purdy saw other doors off the corridor. So this, he judged, must be an old hotel-cum-tenement. One of those known as “SRO” for “single-room-occupancy.”
Their main guard now dropped the pistol into his lap and merely watched them eat.
Eating meant two hands on the cup of tea, fingers on the fried egg, roll and pickled vegetables.
“Are you okay?” Purdy asked, at the same time signing, “Our guard may speak English.”
“I’ve felt better,” Cochrane replied, signing, “How to get out?”
“Sorry to hear that,” Purdy said his voice quavering with concern, at the same time he signed, “Play sick.”
Cochrane ate more and more slowly, choking on the food. She began moaning, then holding her stomach. She hung over the edge of the couch and coughed out a mouthful of partially chewed pickled vegetables onto the floor, then followed it headfirst. With bits of food stuck to her face and hair, she writhed on the ground, kicking up the volume of her moans.
Beretta in hand, the guard got up and peered down into her face, asking in Chinese if she were sick.
Once the guard had turned his back, Purdy pulled his knees toward his chest and slammed them down, using that momentum and the strength in his abs to propel himself up and out of the chair.
The guard caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and turned just in time to receive a head butt to the ear and temple that sent him teetering backward. Cochrane kicked the legs out from under him, and the big Chinese hit the floor like a ton of bricks. Cochrane rolled over his right hand and arm, where the Beretta had been. Purdy, already bouncing on the balls of his feet to keep his balance, jumped high into the air and came down with a knee on the man’s windpipe.
It was over in a moment. Purdy and Cochrane froze, listening for footsteps in the outside corridor. There had been no shouts, no gunshots—and now, thankfully, no response from beyond their door.
“What now?” Cochrane whispered.
Purdy rose slowly from the body on the floor. “Let’s get ambulatory,” he said.
Purdy removed the decorative skirt from one of the end tables and folded it into a pad. This he placed against one of the windows. A sharp elbow in the center of the pad safely splintered the window. Purdy cut his plastic wrist cuffs on a window shard, standing at the broken window and sawing. In a minute, he had both hands working again.
Holding another piece of glass folded in the table skirt, he freed his ankles, then cut Cochrane’s cuffs, so they both were free.
Cochrane removed the second table skirt and wrapped a shard of glass in it as a makeshift knife. Purdy, similarly armed, followed her to the door. Cochrane flattened her back against the left side wall. Purdy, against the right wall, placed a hand on the doorknob and turned.
Nothing happened. The door was locked. Purdy’s heart sank to the floor. He looked at Cochrane. They were trapped.
40
YOU WON’T LET HIM HURT ME, WILL YOU?
Lily came to gradually, wakefulness introduced in a series of sensations experienced slowly and clearly. Now, for example, she was feeling the cool, slippery sensation of satin against her legs. Then came a breeze that passed from her toes up to her belly, breast, and neck. Next she was aware of a dull ache at her shoulders because her arms seemed to be pinned over her head. Lastly she heard voices. With an effort she could pull the sounds from distant murmurs to logical sound bites, near and clear.
“I’ve secured loans on the strength of the Sunrise placement. I’ve bought the contracts. I’ll sell them as soon as the price moves. We’ll all be rich. But you’ll need to be there. Part of the contingency team.”
Lily’s eyes fluttered open. She stared down at her feet. Her naked toes looked back at her. Where were her pumps? Where were…? Her blouse was gone. Her breasts were bare. The bra had been severed and the cups lay on either side of her. Her panties likewise had been cut down the middle. Her skirt remained only as ragged strips binding her ankles, and, she supposed, her hands, which were pressed together and pulled toward the headboard.
She remembered the dissident Yu Jie’s description of being stripped naked and examined by government officials. Yu Jie and so many others. “It takes away your personhood,” he had said. “Oh, yes.” she thought.
“So, you’re awake.” Cao Kai moved toward her. He held a knife in his hand. Behind him, a Chinese in a Sunrise jumpsuit stared and swallowed hard.
“How much did you hear?” Cao Kai asked her.
“Nothing.”
“Doesn’t matter if you did. You can satisfy your curiosity. I’ve got to say goodbye to some of my new friends and backers. When I come back, I’ll get my own kind of satisfaction.”
“I know you’re not into biofuels, Cao. What’s this about—oil?”
“Of course, oil. I told you that before. I even offered you a stake. Sunrise BioFuels has taken a big futures position.”
“You can’t control oil markets.” Was anyone ever at such a loss in a conversation, Lily wondered bitterly, forced to argue while stripped naked on a bed!
“I can. And I will.” Cao was unfazed.
“What are you going to do—blow up the White House? What’s going to make markets jump when you say so?”
“So crude, your thinking. Like a grade B movie. I’m not going to destroy anything; I’m simply going to . . . what is their expression?. . . additize?”
Lily stared at him, not comprehending.
“Tenderize, flavorize, additize—oh, this wonderful American language!” laughed Cao. “It has no discipline, no real rules.”
“To additize?” Lily struggled to make sense of this.
“It’s easy. Easy
as pie! Pie!” He laughed again, and shook his head. Suddenly he stopped. “Let me ask you a question. “Have you ever heard of LOOP? The LOOP.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘No.’ LOOP is the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port. Think of it as a steel island sitting in the Gulf of Mexico. It is the only deep-water port facility in the United States. That means it is the only place where the ultra large crude carriers—the world’s biggest tankers—can unload their million-barrel cargoes of oil.”
“You’re going to blow it up?”
Cao threw his hands up in the air. “I told you, “No!” No act of war. Nothing so heavy-handed. Nothing that can be seen or anticipated. Or defended against.”
He paused and smiled. “In fact, nothing much out of the ordinary is going to happen. Business as usual. LOOP is connected via undersea pipeline to a pumping station in Venice, Louisiana, that moves the imported oil to refinery and storage destinations. Both classes of target are of interest. But the latter is more important. LOOP connects to Bayou Choctaw and the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve.”
He looked at her with a smug smile, pleased both with his plan and the fact that he had her fooled.
“We will dock a tanker—a Venezuelan tanker, actually—at LOOP. We will discharge a cargo of highly radioactive oil.”
“Radioactive?” It dawned on Lily. “Let me guess. That tanker has been specially outfitted by Shanghai Marine Fitting and Valve—at an attractive price to the client.”
Cao lifted his eyebrows, astonished. “Very good, Lijuan. You are fitting the pieces together. In fact, that’s how the radioactive material will be moved from shielded containers to the stream of oil at the point of discharge.
“You may not know that every oil cargo is inspected by an agent for the purchaser in order to ensure that the type of crude and amount of crude oil specified is, in fact, changing hands. The inspector of this cargo will succumb to radiation poisoning in a matter of hours. It is a time certain event—as your acquaintance with the unfortunate Korean will confirm. The Venezuelans will deny culpability. But that won’t matter—they are Venezuelans. Radiation sickness in the cargo inspector will result in a back-check of where he has been. The mooring buoy where the Venezuelan tanker docked will be “red hot,” so to speak. Above-normal radiation levels will be tracked all the way back through the onshore pumping station to the major interstate pipeline systems and, of course, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
“Lawyers who have, in the past, brought suit against Exxon-Mobil for mismanaging normally occurring radiation levels in an oilfield—and BP for radioactive contamination due to their huge Gulf oil spill—will assist the family of the cargo inspector in their pursuit of justice. Headline writers will be very happy. With any luck, LOOP will be decommissioned for a period of time. Certainly the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the supplies of numerous American refiners will be made suspect. The practical effect will be to remove millions of barrels of usable crude oil from the supply chain. And that, my dear, will drive up price.”
“You’ve got the process all figured out,” said Lily.
“The PLA looks at such things. Certainly, I do. I see it as instructive. It is the reason we manage information so tightly in China. Information that is uncontrolled can lead to speculation and serious consequences.”
“This will make you a wealthy man.”
“I still have to share with friends in North Korea, but yes, I shall be comfortable for the rest of my life.”
“What about me?”
“It’s too late for you to share in this experience. But not too late for me to experience you. Haha! When you were in China, I had to be careful. You had power—a public icon, an influential woman. But here. . . here you are just a woman in a bedroom. And I’ll be back.”
He opened the door to leave. The man in the Sunrise jumpsuit saluted. Cao inclined his head toward Lily. “Watch her closely,” he said.
Lily shivered. She turned toward the guard. Her eyes held his. Her lower lip trembled.
“You won’t let him hurt me, will you?” she whispered.
41
PICK AND GO
Cochrane felt her eyes welling up with tears. “What a damnable reaction!” she thought. She had never before felt so desperate and so frustrated. The locked door was a silent rebuke. It was a thick and solid threat to their freedom . . .and possibly their lives.
“We could take the guard by surprise when he brings the next meal,” Purdy whispered. His voice trailed off without conviction. It was not the best idea.
“Of course, that presumes there is a next meal.”
“Yeah, and it’s pretty hard to get the drop on someone heading toward you into the room . . . especially when they’re covered with someone’s standard issue Beretta.”
Cochrane’s eyes flicked over the sparse furnishings in the hotel room.
She again wrapped the shard of glass with the cloth table skirt, testing the grip.
“Bring me that lamp.” She nodded in the direction of a hideous dime-store imitation of a Ming vase, from which protruded a light bulb and shade. “No shade. Just the lamp,” she said.
“No shade. Just the lamp,” Purdy repeated the words under his breath as if they had a sacred meaning. It reassured him to follow her directions—given that he was completely out of ideas himself.
He brought it to her, holding the lamp in both hands.
“Hold it just like that,” said Cochrane. She stepped on the lamp’s two-pronged plug, pulled the cord tight and cut off the plug,
“I used to strip a lot of wires doing electronics kits with my sister,” she said. “Sure hope those extracurriculars pay off now.”
Three deft strokes with her makeshift knife skinned off the plastic coating and bared the copper wire beneath. It shone like gold where the knife had shaved the last inch down to a chisel point.
“Cody, I’m totally lost,” whispered Purdy. “You building a radio?”
“Hardly, partner. Say hello to our new lock pick. I think I can trip the tumblers. I’ve done it before.”
“Quantico?”
“Mother’s liquor cabinet.”
Purdy rolled his eyes.
“Picking the lock is my job. That and opening the door nice and easy. That leaves you to take out the guard. Can you do it?”
Purdy cut his eyes at her. “That’s a rhetorical question, right?”
Cochrane inserted the pick into the lock carefully. She was tense and edgy. Her heart was in her mouth as she turned the knob and pulled slowly back on the door.
Behind Cochrane, Purdy watched for movement through the door jam or a shadow flitting beneath the door itself. Nothing. Body bent low, he pivoted from behind the door into the entranceway. Looming in front of him, a man in a green BioFuels jumpsuit, back to him, filled the doorway.
“Two hundred fifty pounds and built like a grain silo,” Purdy thought. He didn’t hesitate, though. He spun and kicked the man’s legs out from under him, wrapped a hand under his chin and arced him over a hip, making sure to slam his head into the floor.
“Whap,” went the head. “Thud. Thud.” The two feet landed a nanosecond later. Then, silence.
Purdy searched the body. He took a cell phone and cash. In the breast pocket, he found an airline ticket to New Orleans.
“This is interesting,” he said.
“What about the gun?” asked Cochrane.
“Let’s leave it. If the police get here before Cao Kai cleans the place up, it’ll be more use to them in tracing his activities and building a case against him.”
They took the stairs down to the ground floor, walking softly, alert for any sound. The lobby was empty. “I’ll go out first,” said Purdy. “I’ll case the area for surveillance and try to draw out any hangers-on Cao has deployed as guards on the street. If it’s clean, I’ll come back around the block and signal you from across the street.”
The 20 minutes he was gone seemed like
an eternity to Cochrane. Even after she saw Purdy’s signal, she proceeded cautiously, slipping out and closing the door silently behind her. She moved down the sidewalk, away from the door, and crossed the street a few yards south of where Purdy had taken up a position.
When she joined him, she was breathing heavily. It was simple stress, not physical exertion. He hugged her a moment in the recessed doorway of an herbalist’s pharmacy, flanked by shabby posters noting the acupuncture points on the human body. The face on the body outline stared back at them, inane, devoid of compassion or rational thought.
It was dark and empty on the streets of Chinatown, although this was one of the most densely packed places in New York. A few neon signs, still lit, threw shadows along the sidewalk. Sometimes the lights buzzed and snapped with the strain of carrying current through ancient wiring. There was a chill in the air. A light fog sifted out of the storm sewers and lifted the smell of damp cement off the pavement.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Cochrane in a whisper. “I’m apprehensive. Shit, no, I mean I’m scared.”
“Yeah,” said Purdy. “We need space to breathe… and we need to contact the authorities.”
“Breathing would be nice,” said Cochrane.
They huddled up against the chill and pushed on down the sidewalk, throwing a backward glance every so often over a shoulder, checking for movement, listening for footsteps. It was a long walk.
“You know we don’t have enough money,” said Cochrane, turning things over in her mind. We don’t have any weapons. We don’t have a map. And assuming we contact the authorities, I don’t think we have any credibility.”
“Well, aren’t you brimming with optimism,” snipped Purdy. “I’ll tell you what we do have.” He paused. “We’ve got company.”
42
NOW OR NEVER
Alert for any sound, Purdy could pick up the rumbling echo of a subway train heading toward the Canal Street station. And something else: a gritty accent, like brushes on a snare drum. It came in a fitful, on again, off again beat. All part of the night symphony. Was it innocent or was it someone trying to disguise footsteps?