Angry horns blast as Luisa fumbles with the unfamiliar transmission. After Thirteenth Street the city loses its moneyed Pacific character. Carob trees, watered by the city, give way to buckled streetlights. Joggers do not pant down these side streets. The neighborhood could be from any manufacturing zone in any industrial belt. Bums doze on benches, weeds crack the sidewalk, skins get darker block by block, flyers cover barricaded doors, graffiti spreads across every surface below the height of a teenager holding a spray can. The garbage collectors are on strike, again, and mounds of rubbish putrefy in the sun. Pawnshops, nameless laundromats, and grocers scratch a lean living from threadbare pockets. After more blocks and streetlights, the shops give way to anonymous manufacturing firms and housing projects. Luisa has never even driven through this district and feels unsettled by the unknowability of cities.
60
Fay Li, in visor sunglasses and a sunhat, checks her watch against the bank’s clock. The air-conditioning is losing its battle against the midmorning heat. She dabs perspiration from her face and forearms with a handkerchief, fans herself, and assesses recent developments.
Two well-dressed Chinese men walk in. A look from one tells her Luisa Rey is coming. The three converge at a desk guarding a side corridor: SAFETY DEPOSIT BOXES. This facility has had very little traffic all morning. Fay Li considered getting a plant in place, but a minimum-wage rent-a-guard’s natural laxness is safer than giving Triad men a sniff of the prize.
“Hi”—Fay Li fires off her most intolerable Chinese accent at the guard—“brothers and I want get from strongbox.” She dangles a deposit-box key. “Looky, we got key.”
The bored youth has a bad skin problem. “ID?”
“ID here, you looky, ID you looky.”
The Chinese ideograms repel white scrutiny with their ancient tribal magic. The guard nods down the corridor and returns to his
The corridor ends at a reinforced door, left ajar. Beyond is the deposit-box room, shaped like a three- pronged fork. One associate joins her up the left prong, and she orders the other down the right.
Footsteps approach down the corridor.
The vault door swings open. “Anyone here?” calls Luisa Rey.
Silence.
As the door clangs shut, the two men rush the woman. Luisa is gripped with a hand over her mouth. “Thank you.” Fay Li prizes the key from the reporter’s fingers. Its engraved number is 36/64. She wastes no words. “Bad news. This room is soundproof, unmonitored, and my friends and I are armed. The Sixsmith Report isn’t destined for your hands. Good news. I’m acting for clients who want the HYDRA strangled at birth and Seaboard discredited. Sixsmith’s findings will hit the news networks within two or three days. Whether they want to pursue the corporate executions is their business. Don’t look at me like that, Luisa. Truth doesn’t care who discovers it, so why should you? Even better news. Nothing bad will happen to you. My associate will escort you to a holding location in B.Y. By evening, you’ll be a free woman. You won’t cause us any trouble”—Fay Li produces a photo of Javier from Luisa’s bulletin board and waves it an inch from her face—“because we’d reciprocate in kind.”
Submission replaces defiance in Luisa’s eyes.
“I knew you had a fine head on your shoulders.” Fay Li addresses the man holding Luisa in Cantonese. “Take her to the lockup. Nothing dirty before you shoot her. She may be a reporter, but that doesn’t make her a total whore. Dispose of the body in the usual way.”
They leave. The second associate remains by the door, holding it ajar.
Fay Li locates strongbox 36/64 at neck height, at the tip of the middle prong.
The key turns, and the door swings open.
Fay Li pulls out a vanilla binder.
61
The blast picks Luisa Rey up and throws her forward, irresistibly, like a Pacific breaker. The corridor rotates through ninety degrees—several times—and pounds into Luisa’s ribs and head. Petals of pain unfold across her vision. Masonry groans. Chunks of plaster, tile, and glass shower, drizzle, stop.
An ominous peace.
The shock dies; her leg is just jammed under her unconscious Chinese escort. She pulls free and crawls, stiff and hurting, across the lobby, now transformed into a movie set. Luisa finds the vault door, blown off its hinges.
A friendly hand takes Luisa’s wrist. “I got you, ma’am, I got you, let me help you outside, there may be another explosion.”
Luisa allows herself to be led into congested sunlight, where a wall of faces looks on, hungry for horror. The fireman guides her across a road blocked with gridlocked cars, and she is reminded of April’s war footage from Saigon. Smoke still spills in senseless quantities. “Get away! Over here! Get back! Over there!” Luisa the journalist
