Threat Vector

As he leapt off the girl and spun from the bed, Todd saw other men and women in the suite. There had to have been half a dozen strangers who had somehow slipped in while Todd was lost in the throes of ecstasy.

He fell on the floor, naked, and he scrambled on his hands and knees, looking for his pants.

His clothes were gone.

* * *

Ten minutes later Todd Wicks was still naked, though the woman in the gray pantsuit had brought him a towel from the bathroom. He sat on the edge of the bed with the towel pinched around his waist; he had to hold it tight because it was not large enough to cover him properly. The overhead lights were on and the candles had been blown out, and it was as if all the strangers around him had forgotten him. He sat there seminude as men and women in black and gray suits and raincoats milled about in the suite.

He had not seen Bao since she’d been hustled out the door in a robe, seconds after the intrusion.

On the fifty-two-inch flat-screen TV in the sitting area, well within Todd’s view at the edge of the bed, a pair of men watched the playback of a recording they had obviously made from a surveillance camera. Todd glanced up at it when they turned it on, and he saw himself sitting on the sofa, making nervous small talk with Bao. They advanced the recording a few minutes and the angle changed; a second camera had apparently been secreted in the bedroom high in the corner by the bed.

Todd watched himself take his clothes off, stand there naked and hard, and then kneel down between Bao’s legs.

The men advanced the recording again. Todd grimaced as his very naked and white backside began gyrating at cartoonish speed.

“Jesus,” he muttered. He turned away. Watching this in a room full of men and women, a room full of strangers, was killing him. He wouldn’t have had the stomach to watch himself having sex even if he was alone. His heart felt like it had been tied in a knot and the muscles in his lower back had cinched tight at the midline of his spine.

Todd felt like he was about to puke.

One of the two men standing at the television turned to him. He was older than Todd, maybe forty-five, and he had sad hangdog eyes and narrow shoulders. He took off his raincoat as he walked closer, hung it over his forearm, and he pulled a chair from the desk up to the edge of the bed before sitting down directly in front of Wicks.

The sad eyes stayed locked on Todd as the man’s right hand came out and patted him on the shoulder gently. “I am sorry about all this, Mr. Wicks. This is very intrusive of us. I can’t imagine how you must feel.”

Todd looked down at the floor.

The man’s English was good; he spoke with British English inflections slightly clipped in the Asian style.

“I am Wu Fan Jun, detective with the Shanghai Municipal Police.”

Todd kept his eyes lowered to the floor, the embarrassment and humiliation unbearable. “For the love of God, can I please put my pants back on?”

“I’m sorry, we have to log them into evidence. We will have something brought down from your room: 1844, is it?”

Wicks nodded.

To his right in the sitting room, the fifty-two-inch plasma kept going. Todd glanced at it and saw himself from another angle.

It was no more flattering than the previous one had been.

What the hell? Did these guys edit this in real time?

Todd heard the sounds of his own grunting and groaning.

“Can they turn that off? Please?”

Wu clapped his hands as if he himself had forgotten, then called out in Mandarin across the suite. Quickly a man rushed to the television and fiddled with the remote for several seconds.

Finally, mercifully, the screen went blank and Todd’s own moans of lust left the otherwise silent room.

Wu said, “There we are. Okay. I don’t need to tell you, sir, that we have a delicate situation here.”

Todd just nodded, eyes on the floor.

“We have been investigating certain… untoward activities here in the hotel for some time. Prostitution is not legal in China, as it is unhealthy toward women.”

Todd said nothing.

“Do you have a family?”

Wicks started to say “No,” a reflexive response to keep his family out of this, but he stopped himself. I have fucking pictures of me and Sherry and the kids in my wallet, all over my fucking laptop. He knew he could not deny they existed.

He nodded. “A wife and two kids.”

“Boys? Girls?”

“One of each.”

“A lucky man. I myself have a wife and one son.”

Todd looked up at Wu now, into the hangdog eyes. “What’s going to happen, sir?”

“Mr. Wicks, I am sorry about the situation you find yourself in, but I did not put you here. You provide us with evidence that we need in our case against the hotel. Their promotion of prostitution is a cause of great concern here in the city. Just imagine if it was your young daughter who had turned to a life of—”

“I’m really, really sorry. I don’t ever do this sort of thing. I have no idea what came over me.”

“I see that you are not a bad man. If it were my decision to make, we would just record this as unfortunate, a tourist who got caught up in something unpleasant, and leave it at that. But… you must understand, I will have to arrest you and charge you with engaging a prostitute.” Wu smiled. “How can I charge the hotel and the woman if I have no one else, no one to provide the third corner of the triangle that is this sad, sad crime?”

Todd Wicks nodded distantly, still not believing this was happening to him. But then he had a thought, and he jolted with excitement as he looked up. “I could provide a statement. I could pay a fine. I could promise to—”

Wu shook his head, and the low bags under his eyes seemed to droop even farther. “Todd, Todd, Todd. That sounded like you were trying to offer some sort of bribe.”

“No. Of course not. I would never consider—”

“No, Todd. I would never consider it. Here in China there is some corruption, I can acknowledge that. But not as much as the rest of the world insinuates, and, if I may be so intemperate to say, much of the corruption comes from Western influences.” Wu waved a small hand around the room, indicating that Todd himself had brought corruption on his poor nation, but he did not say it out loud. Instead he just shook his head and said, “I don’t know if there is anything I can do to help you.”

Todd said, “I want to talk to the embassy.”

“There is a United States consulate here in Shanghai. The United States embassy is in Beijing.”

“Then I would like to speak with someone at the consulate.”

“Of course, that can be arranged. I will mention, however, as a family man myself, that notifying American consular officials of this situation will make it necessary for my office to provide our evidence to the consulate. It is important for us to show them that this is not some sort of unfair charge against you, you understand.”

Todd felt a glimmer of hope. Having the U.S. consulate know that he had cheated on his wife with a Chinese hooker would be even more humiliating, but maybe they could get him out of this.

“And please don’t think the consulate can sweep this matter under the rug. Their involvement in this will be chiefly to notify your loved ones back in the United States about your situation, and to help you find a local attorney.”

Fuck that, thought Todd, and his glimmer of hope faded in an instant.

“What if I just plead guilty?”

“Then you will be here for some time. You will go to jail. Of course, if you fight the charge against you”—Wu scratched the back of his head—“although I don’t know how you would make that claim, as we have video and audio recordings of the entire… the entire act, but if you do, there will be a trial, and that will receive some publicity, certainly back in the States.”

Todd Wicks felt like he was going to be sick.