patrol car would not double back. One person seeing nothing more than two shadows in the night could spark an inquiry that would lead them to her.
The chair was a 200-year-old solid wooden affair from Spain. A nobleman had been tortured to death in it. She had been kind enough to tell Kim Lee that. There was a creaky friction between ancient dowels and their sockets every time he moved vigorously. Held together with some sort of pre-modern glue and wooden pegs, it was massive and still stout. Slightly frayed fabric, probably the fourth or fifth recovering, played under Kim's fingers. Some other heavy thinker had also squeezed his fingers on the rich material. Kim did it just to remind himself that he was alive, to allow his mind to sense something in the blackness even if it was only tired fabric against his fingertips.
His chest and back were bathed in sweat; sometimes his hands gripped the chair so tight the last knuckle of each finger ached with the strain. He tried to think-about the chair, the room, the details of each. It worked for a few minutes at a time, but then the terror would return.
He didn't want the fear to grip him so fully that he quit feeling, quit thinking. It was amazing really that his mind could be suffocated, his emotions clamped in a vise, with just a simple description of what she intended to do to him. It was incredible luck the way she managed to discern his deepest fears. Of course he was afraid of dying. He wanted to live. He wanted to live so bad it hurt inside, so bad that the sum of his life had become this moment and his sole mission to survive. But beyond the fear of death, there was a much greater fear-the fear of her kind of death.
When his chest hurt and his sides ached, when he had run out of tears, he made himself think about his wife and young child. Perhaps at this moment he actually felt closer to his wife. Only twenty-five, she had frizzy black hair that touched the tip of his nose when she sat in his lap and giggled-just curled up like a ball, scrunching her toes under her bottom, her big white teeth grinning out from her skinny lips. That's what he called her sometimes to tease-'skinny lips.' Then she would rub her nose against his and make little snarling yaps like a mad Chihuahua. And he'd run his hands up her shapely dark arms, and the love would be pouring over him and out of him, and that was the best thing in life.
Then there were his dreams of their baby girl growing up. Now she gurgled and smiled, barely able to walk, knowing her parents only as the source of all comfort and sustenance.
But one day she would know them as people: their favorite books, what they did on Sunday afternoon, which relatives were invited often, Dad's favorite sake, and Mom's favorite perfume. Kim wanted to be there so that she could know him. He wanted to watch her roll her eyes and smile at his jokes. But he had forgotten these things and had started thinking that being a rich and successful corporate lawyer was the best thing in life. Now here he was locked in a black closet, sitting in an antique, history-making chair, waiting for a madwoman to come and do something he tried desperately not to think about.
He had a sense that whoever had taken him was cold to the core, completely unreachable. Now he thought of the watchmen who had lost their ears, and recalled the terror in their eyes. Now he understood.
Then he heard someone climbing stairs-he'd figured out about the stairs, because of the stair-climbing footfall, marked by a feather-light stride on the wood, and the sound of a barely discernible slide on the ball of the foot. Whenever she brought him food or water, or led him to the toilet around the corner from his dark little room, he heard these things.
Just missing Kim's knees, the door creaked open to the inside and there stood his enemy.
'If you'll just let me out of here, I'll do anything.'
'Tell me why the timber industry wanted to give five hundred thousand to the environmental movement.'
'Most in the industry want the government to buy the Highlands Forest to stop all the protests.'
'Who wanted me to steal the money, and why?'
He hesitated. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Kenji Yamada had grown dangerous. Perhaps his boss was as dangerous as his tormentor.
'You really aren't willing to take the steps necessary to escape the fate I've promised you.'
In the dull light, before he noticed what she was doing, she took out heavy shears and snipped off the end of his little finger. The torture she had promised was so elaborate and what she had just done so simple, that it was a surprise. It was a moment before he began to scream. For a time he couldn't think; he could only yell. Then suddenly he was sopping wet and terribly cold. She had dumped a bucket of ice water over him.
'I'll tell you! I'll tell you everything. Just don't hurt me anymore. It's a new process. Incredible. But the bats, they're-' He gasped. A heavy weight pressed on his chest and pain shot up into his throat. He tried to take a breath. What could she be doing to him? What could he tell her? The room spun around and then there was nothing.
Lying on his belly on the massage table, Kenji began to relax. The young woman's hands were working on his buttocks and along with a slight erection came a general feeling of well-being. Because it was sexual it was the only part of the massage that compellingly did the job of distraction so that relaxation was possible.
When she got to his lower thighs, his mind departed to the cares of Amada, and his muscles took on a resilience that made deep relaxation impossible.
He picked up the phone, heard his masseuse sigh her discontent, but knew that she would say nothing about his placing a call. She normally tried not to irritate him when he was in these moods. What no one knew was that these moods of late had Dan Young's name written on them.
'How is it going?'
'I was going to call you in an hour,' Groiter said. 'I'm afraid it's not going so well. Turns out they did have another set of photos. Young sent them to Fischer in Sacramento and she's had them developed. Apparently she's given them to Patty McCafferty who has forwarded them to some university.'
The erection was long gone. 'Can't you get control of this? They're crawling up our ass.'
'We are carefully going through and figuring out what papers were taken. There is a very good chance they didn't get the right stuff.'
'I'm supposed to wait around and see if they can eat my heart out? What else are they doing?'
'Young is talking to relatives of the photographer. They say it's impossible that he would have raped the woman and run off.'
'Shit. Is there anything we can do?'
'Not really. But this is the same stuff the police were told.'
'Is there any way Young could have seen the money drop?'
'No. He saw the copter coming back to the compound after we got the money. He may have made a connection.'
'How?'
There was a brief pause in Groiter's quick responses.
'We found a transmitter in the briefcase-'
'Did you say transmitter?'
'We destroyed it on the way back to the compound.'
'You didn't tell me this. You didn't tell me.'
'Didn't think it was important. He thinks he got a signal before we destroyed it. That's all. It's a hunch.'
'A hunch? He's investigating because of it.'
'So far, he has nothing. I think it's dangerous to jump to conclusions.'
'I want you on this. I want you all over this.'
'What did she do to Kim Lee? He's dead, right?'
'She was supposed to bomb the car. But it's in the parking lot and he's vanished into thin air.'
'What do you mean supposed to?'
'You know. We've got surveillance. We were pretty sure that's how she was going to do it. But I didn't come right out and discuss the method. It doesn't work that way. She's gotta believe she's working for Mother Earth. We're just sort of fatherly advisers in the cause.'
'I don't care about the shrink stuff. I just want to know.'
'I'll get the details, but it may take a little time.'
'Well, get them. And get control. Push back.'
