Two Chinese men dragged a struggling peasant woman into the L-shaped room and flung her to the floor near where the man slumped in a chair, his hands tied behind, his face bloodied, his feet naked. The room was airless.
“Take a good look,” one told her in Cantonese. “When you’re questioned, remember — that’ll be you if you don’t answer.”
Dressed in loose pajama trousers and shirt, the peasant woman cowered on the floor and blinked in the way of someone who has not understood a word. The man shook his head, beginning to worry. He looked at his partner, and they left.
Randi heard the door lock behind them. Her black eyes flashed angrily, and her gaze swept over the room, analyzing it. The two wide windows, one front and one back, were covered by drapes. The morning light penetrated only in thin lines around them. She did not move, concerned she was being observed from somewhere. She studied Jon and the knots that tied him to the chair. Silently, she swore. Damn. They had him, too, and they had been tuning him.
She had stumbled into more than she or Langley had expected. Whatever Jon was working on this time, clearly Ralph Mcdermid was part of it.
Experience had taught her that when her almost brother-in-law showed up, something significant was likely involved.
Langley was rarely in the loop of whatever exactly Jon was doing. His employer must operate at the highest levels of the federal government, no matter how much he denied it. That meant the leaks Mcdermid had somehow orchestrated might be only the tip of some political or military iceberg. If she were right, her assignment took on a new dimension she would, for the moment, keep to herself.
Meanwhile, she had to hope her local team had realized by now she had been taken while staking out Ralph Mcdermid and his latest girl novelty, and that they were already mounting a rescue. On the other hand, she could not count on it.
She crumpled back against the floor as if overcome by fear. What she had to figure out was some way to escape so she could contact them. At the same time, she could not let them realize she and Jon knew each other or that she was a Langley spy, no matter what they did to Jon or to her.
As if hearing her thoughts, the door to the L-shaped room opened, and Ralph Mcdermid entered. The Altman CEO was followed by Feng Dun, but it was Mcdermid who stood over her.
He asked harshly in English, “Why are you following me? Spying on me?
You’d better talk, if you don’t want to rot in one of your government prisons.”
She forced her body to do nothing. She lay on the floor in her peasant disguise without moving a muscle, as if she understood no English and had no idea what he said or even that he was speaking to her.
Feng Dun kicked her in the ribs. She howled in protesting Mandarin and twisted to look up at the two men, an innocent peon cringing with fear.
“She’s not from this area,” Feng Dun told Mcdermid in English. “She’s speaking Mandarin from around Beijing or farther north.” He casually kicked her again and switched back to Mandarin to demand, “What are you doing so far from home, peasant? Why are you in Hong Kong?”
Randi howled once more, a small, aggrieved nobody being picked on by the powerful. “There is no work on the land of my father!” she screamed.
Then, weeping: “So I left for Guangzhou, but the money is better here.”
“What the hell is she saying?” Mcdermid said.
Feng repeated it. “It’s a common story. Millions leave the country to look for any kind of job in the cities.”
“Millions don’t end up following me. Why was she spying? For whom?”
Feng translated the question with a few twists of his own: “You were following Mr. Mcdermid most of the day. Did you think we didn’t see you?
Mr. Mcdermid is a very important man. Unless you want to be given to the police, who will put you in prison for the rest of your life, you’ll tell us who paid you and what he wanted you to find out.”
Ever since Feng and the two other men had surprised her, listening at the bedroom window in the garden of Ralph Mcdermid’s mansion, Randi had been thinking of what she could say that they would believe. A lot would depend on their level of paranoia. On how much Mcdermid had to hide, on how many enemies he had, and on how well he and Feng Dun knew those enemies.
She decided to try to evade a little longer. She would continue to act like a frightened, unsophisticated country woman, then give them the “mystery man” story. “I was only looking for money,” she whimpered. “The gate to the garden was open. I heard voices, and I went in to ask the rich foreigner for help.”
Feng Dun’s foot kicked so fast she did not see it move until it exploded in pain against her ribs.
She shrieked like a pig being dragged to slaughter. As she writhed on the floor, she managed to gasp, “My family must have money. I don’t earn enough in the factories to send to the village. I have to have more. And … and sometimes I have to steal. It was such a fine house … there’d be much money in such a house. There’d be beautiful things to take and sell … ”
“Stupid peasant!” Feng’s pale face flushed pink and contorted in rage.
“You followed him all day. You were spying on him. Probably for far longer!”
Randi gave her best cunning, groveling, pleading, terrified-nobody performance. She grabbed at Mcdermid’s ankles and blubbered up into his repulsed face.
Feng cursed in Mandarin, grabbed her by her pajama top, and dragged her away from Mcdermid. “Peasants! They pretend they’re being skinned alive if you bump into them. I’ll give her something real to howl about.” He spun around. In his soft voice, he spoke rapidly to the other two men.
“Get the electrodes and the blowtorch.”
His words were in Shanghainese, but Randi understood the dialect. Her mind reeled. She could stand torture as well as most, but resistance would almost certainly end up incapacitating her even if she were rescued or managed to escape. Still, there was one story they might believe completely: She would give them Jon.
He was already hurt. For all she knew, it could be serious. She steeled herself as she glanced at him. He sagged against his bindings, unconscious, not even moaning. She could do nothing for either of them if she, too, were badly injured. And she could do nothing for the Company and certainly nothing for America.
She would let them get their blowtorch, their electric devices, or whatever other horrors Feng Dun had in his torture arsenal. If they chose the electrodes, they would apply a nasty stun to her first, which she knew would leave no serious damage. She would not break and give them Jon until the second or third jolt. The longer she held out, the more they would believe what she told them. If they started with the blowtorch, she would have to gamble and give him up sooner. Blowtorches frightened her.
The two grinning men returned with their persecution tools. Reflex was a physical reaction beyond control of the mind. Only a split second after she had reacted did Randi realize Feng Dun had been watching.
He smiled again. “Light the blowtorch,” he told one of the men. To the other, he ordered, “Bring another chair. Take off her sandals.”
Ralph Mcdermid swallowed hard. “Is that really necessary?”
“Yes, Taipan,” Feng Dun’s voice had a harsh, irritated edge. “In matters of this importance, hands must get dirty. Even bloody.”
The second man grabbed a chair from a corner. Feng Dun picked her up by the shoulders. She sagged, but he lifted her as easily as if she were a straw doll. He dumped her onto the chair. The first man lit the blowtorch, while the second pulled off her sandals.
She shrieked again in Mandarin. “No! No! I’ll tell you. He hired me.”
She pointed at Jon, who still did not move against his ropes. “I was afraid to say it. You would hurt me as you’ve hurt him. But … that’s the man who did it. He paid me, told me to follow the gentleman there, and remember where he went, what he did, and who he talked to.
Everything the foreign gentleman did. I needed the money. My father and mother are old. They need medicine and food. Their house is old. It must be repaired. Please! Don’t hurt me!”
She chattered on as if terror had unleashed a flood of words. Mcdermid and the other men turned to study
