On Fire

by Thomas Anderson

The afternoon of the next day Kim is still in the loft space above the warehouse office. Her butt is sore from sitting on the metal struts from which the office’s ceiling is suspended. Moving this way or that no longer provides much of a solution to how to get comfortable enough to endure more endless hours of hiding from a group of thuggish Russians and a Chinese factotum. Kim is tired, hungry, sore and miserable. The sleepless night was a painful never-ending rehearsal in her mind of what she should do once discovered, an eventuality she now considers as inevitable as it is dreaded.

  At one point in the middle of the night Kim climbed down to raid the kitchen, only to find a few dried out cookies, some crackers and a container of sugar for coffee. But it was something. Blessedly, she was able to use the facilities. Then she realized that she had left the gun on the shelf in her hiding place, so she hurried to get back to it.

  Kim looks into the warehouse, past the rafters and lights. There is enough daylight coming in from the interspersed skylights to give her a dim view of the goings on below her. The Russians continue to search for her and have created systematic crossing patterns intended to trap her into one location or another. Occasionally, Dai Gu shouts, alternately in Russian and English, this instruction or that. None of it seems to do any good. As far as Kim is concerned, the searchers just continue to wander aimlessly about the place.

  She straightens when she hears talking. The voices seem to be approaching. Suddenly they stop. Kim’s heart races. She thinks they could be finally looking at the office, thinking about searching it to look for her. Have they stopped talking to put her off? This is the moment that kept going through her mind all through the very long night. Listening, straining for a telltale sign that one or more of them is coming up the blue steel stairs. There is a clink on the hand railing of the stairs. Is it a wedding band? She hears what she thinks is a too heavy footfall, then the jingle of keys displaced in someone’s pocket as a leg swings up a stair.

  Kim is attuned to anything she can hear, but now there is nothing. Nothing for a while. Nothing for too long.

  There is no door on the office, nothing to squeak or swish. They can come right in and she won’t know until it’s too late. She starts to move to the ceiling opening and is surprised at how easily she has come to move across the metal support railings that hang over the suspended ceiling tiles. She regrets not leaving one of the tiles sufficiently askew so that she might be able to see a person making their approach from below to the ceiling panel that opens to the loft.

  Kim moves into position. The panel only needs to be pushed. She wonders if they could have reached it already, if they could have really been that quiet. She doesn’t see how. But the panel moves. Kim raises her hand with the gun in it. Her heart abruptly starts banging into her chest. The panel keeps coming and she sees a mop of dark hair on a middle set man. Before he has a chance to look up she swings down, hard. The man she hits groans and, instantly falling, disappears. Kim rears back, not even a little sorry for what she has just done.

  The falling man must have been caught with the help of the others. She hears voices, a grunt, and the sounds of something, a person maybe, slapping against a table.

  “Miss Scott!” she hears Dai Gu say.

  Kim remains poised rigidly near the ceiling opening but says nothing.

  “Give it up Miss Scott! You will not be given another chance. Toss the gun or I will order these men to begin firing into the ceiling immediately. I hardly need tell you, this is something you are unlikely to survive,” Gu says, his voice stentorian.

  She can’t hold back any longer.

  “Screw you, asshole!” she yells and feels better right away.

  Kim tosses the gun. It clatters to the wood floor, directly at Dai Gu’s feet. He gives the others a look first, one of the “I told you so” variety, and then casually leans down to pick it up.

  “Now you, Miss Scott. Your turn to come down. If you will, please. You will not be harmed, I assure you.”

  She weighs the proposition only briefly. She doesn’t want to get hurt and be unable to defend herself after that. She held them off for a long time, hopefully long enough that Zak and the others at least have a chance of catching up to her and her captors.

  Almost as if to seal her decision, a panel over the kitchen suddenly bursts open and a man appears. He has a gun. It is trained on her.

  Kim backs up and lowers a foot, then a leg, then both legs. She grabs the railings and soon is suspended over the desk for a second, just swaying. Finally, she lets go and drops. She lands in a crouch.

  “Here,” Gu offers her his hand and helps her climb down from the desk.

  The men close around her, pinning her in next to Gu, who takes a packet of pills from his pocket.

  “I’m going to need you to take two of these,” he says, taking her hand and measuring out a couple.

  Kim stares at the pills he is expecting her to take.

  “You know,” Gu says, “it was Vic’s idea to get an infrared gun and he was gone all morning. But guess what?”

  Gu is gruff. He puts his arm around the kid, who must be Vic, and shakes him.

  “He found one!”

  “I’m so glad,” Kim replies. She stares at his hand and the pills.

  “Do it,” he says.

  She takes them, upending her hand into her mouth.

  “Swallow them.”

  She does.

  “Open your mouth!”

  She does that too, making a show of it, tilting her head this way and that.

  “Now these men are going to escort you to the plane. If you do anything that I don’t like I will personally break something,” Gu threatens.

  By time they have her out of the warehouse and back into the fog on the tarmac, Kim is beginning to stumble. The grip of the men on either side of her however is very tight. They practically carry her to the plane and up the air stairs, and by time the plane finishes checking with the tower and beginning its taxi to the runway, Kim is fast asleep on a sofa seat.

  The private jet reaches the end of the runway, turning about, lining up with the runway centerline. Its jet engines pitch into a higher roar as it prepares to take off. The pilot clears the plane with the tower. He releases the brakes and the plane starts to roll down the runway, gaining momentum. Two brilliant landing lights eat the fog, which twirls in spirals off the wing tips. White lights on the wings strobe brightly in the growing darkness of the late afternoon and as the plane ascends, a red strobe under the nose comes into view, joining the blinking of the white strobes. The white and red lights go on and off asymmetrically, each with a different timing, sometimes opposing each other. The airframe ascends quickly, receding until the white fuselage can no longer be made out, replaced by flashing lights climbing into a hazy sky.

  Chapter 72