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 stick 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
