The second perimeter Read online

  Emma nodded again. Even in the state she was in, she knew who Li Mei meant: her handsome lover, the one with the beautiful gymnast’s body— the one whose face she’d blown off.

  “We were new agents,” Li Mei said, “but we gave our agency some of the best intelligence it had ever received. Yes, you caught me, but I should have been treated like a hero when I returned home and Zhao, he should have received a warrior’s funeral. But that didn’t happen. They considered me weak for breaking down under your interrogation, and for getting caught, they called me a reckless fool. And because you made me talk, men in other places were captured, other operations were blown. I was disgraced and my lover was dead, all because of you. Then do you know what happened?”

  Emma shook her head.

  “Then they interrogated me, my own people, with more drugs. They had to make sure, they said, that I hadn’t been turned by you, that I wasn’t going to double for you. And I was raped. Raped! They didn’t plan for that to happen. It was a jailor who got out of control.”

  “I’m sor—”

  “But that wasn’t the end of it. Do you know who Zhao was?” She didn’t wait for Emma to answer. “He wasn’t just my lover, he was the son of one of the most powerful men in Beijing and he blamed me for his son’s death. He wanted me shot but instead I was sent to Lanzhou in Gansu Province for four years. Do you know Lanzhou, Emma, what a lovely place it is? We have a gaseous diffusion plant there for our nuclear weapons program, and I worked in the kitchens and in the rice paddies. I worked like a slave. After that they sent me to a listening post on the North Korean border and I lived in a hut without plumbing and hot water for three more years. It was like being in prison. But that wasn’t enough for Zhao’s father.

  “My parents, my poor parents, they lost their apartment in the city. Zhao’s father made that happen. And my younger brother, he was a student, just a sweet boy, but he was taken from school and put in the army. He died on a training exercise. All this happened because you killed Zhao.”

  “I’m sor—”

  But Li Mei wasn’t finished. “But I haven’t told you the best part. I had a baby eight months after you finished with me. His tiny brain had been destroyed by all the drugs. Your drugs, their drugs. They said he was stillborn, but who knows. They may have just destroyed him when they saw his condition. My baby!”

  Emma tried to say “I’m sorry,” but she couldn’t form the words fast enough.

  “Zhao’s father finally died and I was allowed back into intelligence again. My language skills were too good for them to lose me. I was too good. So for ten years I took every miserable assignment they gave me and most of my assignments involved sleeping with men to gain intelligence. I had such a bright future. I was an Olympic athlete; I speak four languages; during training, I was always at the top of my class. If it hadn’t been for you, I would have been directing Chinese intelligence operations by now. Instead I stayed a lowly field agent. I became a sex lure, a perpetual honey trap, forced to use my body to succeed. But they gave me no choice. And in spite of how successful I was, they still didn’t trust me completely. The fact that I had failed in Hawaii was always in the back of their minds. So to advance, I started having affairs with my superiors. I had to fuck my way back into their good graces, to be given an important assignment in the West.”

  “I’m sor—” Emma said.

  “Quit saying that!” Li Mei screamed. “But at last I was accepted. Twenty years after Hawaii, twenty years after you destroyed my life and my career and everyone I loved, I was given two operations to run in America: penetrate the shipyard and lure John Washburn to China. And I was succeeding. But then you showed up. You’re like a bad penny that just keeps coming back, and you were about to destroy everything I had worked for again. Again! But then I came up with a plan. I decided to take you. I would give you to my superiors.”

  Li Mei had been standing, talking down at Emma as she sat on the floor. Now she squatted so she was eye level with Emma. Lowering her voice, she said, “I have thirty hours of tape, tape that shows how valuable your knowledge is. You kept me from getting Washburn out of the country but I have his files. And I have the files Carmody copied. And now I have tapes of your interrogation and I have you. My superiors will be happy. This time I’ll be treated as a hero and not a failure.”

  Emma shook her head. “They won’t,” she said.

  “They will!” Li Mei said. “They’ll take me back and they’ll help me get you out of the country, back to China, to finish your interrogation. They’ll torture you for months until they’ve bled you dry. Then they’ll shoot you.”

  Emma shook her head again, but she was just too tired to speak, too tired to form the words to tell Li Mei how wrong she was.

  Li Mei stood and looked down at Emma for another moment, her eyes triumphant. “I’ve beaten you,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. Then she opened the door to the bedroom and called out, “Loc! Bao! Come here.”

  The two men came to the doorway, Bao puzzled, Loc irritated at being summoned so rudely.

  “I have to contact the embassy in Vancouver,” Li Mei said in Chinese. “It will take a couple of days to set up a meeting. While I’m gone, I don’t want her out of this room. Keep her handcuffed to the bed. Let her sleep. If she wakes up, give her something to make her sleep some more. She’s very dangerous. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Bao said.

  Loc didn’t say anything. He wasn’t looking at Li Mei, he was staring at Emma. Li Mei noticed that he had that odd light in his eyes again. She couldn’t tell what the man was thinking but whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  “Loc,” Li Mei said. She waited until he made eye contact with her and said, “If she’s not here when I return, I will kill you.”

  “She’ll be here,” Loc said. His lips twitched briefly as if amused by Li Mei’s threat.

  “And don’t hurt her. I need her in good physical condition.”

  “Of course,” Loc said.

  Loc knew ways to hurt the woman that would never show.

  51

  The house was a run-down rambler on a two-acre lot. It was set well back from the road, and surrounded by wild blackberry bushes and evergreens. Behind the house was a small creek and beyond that a fenced-in pasture occupied by two cows. The nearest neighbor was at least half a mile away. Isolated, as Neil had predicted.

  DeMarco drove by the place a second time then parked a block away, in a spot where his car wasn’t visible from the house. But he didn’t immediately exit his car. He did not want to go up against three armed people by himself. He called Bill Smith again, and again got no answer. Goddamnit. How could a friggin’ DIA agent not respond to his cell phone?

  So now what? He couldn’t approach the house from the front because of a picture window, or from the rear, through the pasture, because there was no cover. He could approach from either side using the foliage for cover. He flipped a mental coin and decided to go in from the east side.

  He jogged in a crouched position in the direction of the house and as soon as he could see the house through the trees, he got down on his belly and started crawling. As he crawled, he used the barrel of his newly purchased twelve-gauge shotgun to part the bushes in front of him. The shotgun was loaded and the safety was off. He hoped like hell it didn’t accidentally discharge as he crawled through the brush.

  DeMarco had never fired a shotgun in his life and he had fired a handgun only once, which was pretty ironic when he thought about it. His father had been a Mafia enforcer and here was his son, a man whose only knowledge of firearms came from television. Or maybe it wasn’t ironic. Maybe his ignorance was the expected and desired result of good parenting. His father had not wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and he had never exposed his child to the tools of his trade— and had he ever tried to, DeMarco’s iron-willed mother would have undoubtedly intervened. Whatever the case, his educational gap when it came to guns had never really bothered him— until now.


  He had bought the shotgun at a pawnshop. He didn’t know Canadian gun laws but he figured it would be easier to buy a shotgun than a handgun— and he figured that he’d have a better chance of hitting his target with a shotgun. He had walked into the pawnshop, a wad of cash visible in his hand. He pointed at the shotgun with the biggest bore and said, “How much?” The pawnshop owner, an Indian with a beard and a turban-wrapped head, didn’t ask for ID nor did he require DeMarco to fill out any forms. DeMarco didn’t know if the absence of paperwork was lawful and standard, or just the owner’s way of making sure he didn’t lose a sale. The pawnshop guy didn’t sell shells for the shotgun though. He said he didn’t have any. A more likely explanation was that he figured that if he sold a customer both a gun and shells for the gun, it was possible the customer might shoot him. DeMarco purchased shells in a sporting goods store ten minutes later. He had to ask what type of shell would blow the biggest hole in a target, a question that earned him a strange look from the clerk.

  He was now within fifty yards of the house and he could see two small windows, probably bedroom windows. Both windows had the curtains closed. He took a breath, rose quickly, and ran toward the house, dropping back to the ground as soon as he was beneath one of the windows. He waited a couple of seconds then stood up and looked through the window. He had been hoping for a gap in the curtains but there was none.

  He decided to crawl around the house to see if he could find a point of entry or at least get a glimpse of the occupants without being seen. As he was crawling, his cell phone vibrated. He looked at the caller ID screen: it was Neil, probably calling with Morton’s phone number. It was too late for that now.

  When he reached the back of the house he saw a crudely built patio made of flat cement blocks and on the patio was a rust-encrusted Weber barbecue. A sliding glass door exited the house onto the patio.

  DeMarco hadn’t been sure how he was going to enter the house or if he would enter at all. He had been thinking that he might be able to draw one of the occupants outside in some way, get the drop on him, and then use that person as a hostage to get to Emma. His other option was to kick in a door and take them by surprise. He thought this a really dumb option as someone would assuredly get killed— and it would probably be him. He also wasn’t certain how easy it would be to kick in a door. What looked easy on TV could be problematic in real life. But now he had an entry point. All he had to do was bash in the sliding glass door with the butt of his trusty shotgun.

  The smart side of DeMarco’s brain said he should wait for the cavalry, call Morton and request some backup— professional backup from people trained to do stuff like this. But he wasn’t going to do the smart thing; he couldn’t. He needed to know if Emma was inside the house. So he inched forward, cautiously, until he came to the sliding glass door, then quickly poked his head around the edge of the door to see if he could see Emma’s captors— and that’s when a woman screamed.

  Oh, Christ. Hold on, Emma.

  Then he thought: God help me— and swung the butt of the shotgun at the glass.

  52

  Loc opened the bedroom door and then stood in the doorway, looking at the white woman handcuffed to the bed. She was groggy but she wasn’t sleeping yet; the drugs hadn’t completely worn off.

  Loc had been trapped in the house for a week, the whole time taking orders from an arrogant woman. And the white woman, he could tell that she was arrogant, too. She would not be so arrogant when he was done with her.

  He walked over to the bed and looked down at her. That she was handcuffed excited him. That she was so helpless excited him. He reached into a pocket and took out a knife. He pushed the button on the handle of the knife and a four-inch blade leaped out. He’d cut off her clothes; that would be easiest. He reached down and grasped her blouse and placed the knife blade below the top button. Then his nose wrinkled. The woman smelled horrible. He knew that she hadn’t bathed in a week, but it was worse than that. It must have been all the drugs that they’d given her that made her smell so bad.

  Loc put the switchblade away and unlocked the handcuff on Emma’s wrist. “You get up,” he said in English. “You take shower. You smell bad.”

  “What are you doing?” Bao said in Chinese. “Li Mei said not to uncuff her.”

  “I’m going to have some fun, cousin. You can have some, too, when I’m finished.”

  “What?” Bao said.

  His cousin was always confused, Loc thought. If he wasn’t so big, he’d be completely worthless. Ignoring Bao, he said to Emma, “Get up! Take shower now!”

  Emma didn’t respond. She was beyond exhaustion but the residual drugs in her body kept her mind spinning, her thoughts coming in meaningless, fragmented bursts. It was as if there was a little man with a small cattle prod inside her head, and every few seconds he’d give her brain a jolt. But she could tell that the effects of the drugs were beginning to dissipate. The jolts were becoming less frequent. Sleep seemed like it might finally be possible. But now the skinny Asian, the one with the pockmarked face, the one who hurt her when he gave her the injections, he was saying something to her, something about getting up. No. She wouldn’t move. She had to sleep.

  Loc reached down and grasped Emma’s left arm and yanked her to her feet. “You take shower!” he screamed, and then he pushed Emma in the back, propelling her toward the bedroom door.

  A shower, Emma thought. A shower would be so good.

  “You move faster,” Loc said, and he pushed her from behind again, out the bedroom door and down a short hallway toward the bathroom.

  The push helped. Walking helped. The fog was rising from her mind.

  As Emma walked toward the bathroom, the big man said something in Chinese.

  Bao had said, “You’re going to get us in trouble. Li Mei said not to take her out of the room.”

  “Li Mei is an arrogant bitch,” Loc said. “I’ll do what I want.” Loc laughed and said, “You can watch if you want, cousin, so you’ll know what to do when it’s your turn.”

  “I’m not going to touch her,” Bao said.

  Loc ignored Bao and shoved Emma again. “You move faster,” he said in English.

  They reached the bathroom. Loc was behind Emma, his hand on her back. Bao was standing in the hallway, frowning, uncertain what to do.

  “Take off clothes,” Loc said to Emma.

  “What?” Emma said.

  Loc cuffed the back of her head, not hard, but hard enough to get her attention.

  “You take off clothes!” Loc screamed. “You take shower.”

  Emma nodded. She started to unbutton her blouse, the one she had been wearing since her capture. Then she realized the bathroom door was open. She turned slowly to close the door, but Loc’s hand slammed into it.

  “No!” he said. “Leave door open.”

  “Okay,” Emma said, completely docile, but her mind was beginning to function. Finally. She continued to unbutton her blouse.

  “You hurry,” Loc said.

  “All right,” Emma said, but she didn’t move any faster. As she undressed she looked around the small bathroom, then she looked back at Loc. He smiled at her, his lust transparent. She looked away from his face and down at the pistol in the shoulder holster he was wearing. She assumed the big man was armed also, but she hadn’t seen a weapon on him. She looked about the bathroom again. Nothing. Nothing to use for a weapon. Nothing to use to her advantage.

  She finished taking off her blouse and looked at Loc again, more defiantly this time.

  “I want privacy,” she said. Her words came slowly but they were less slurred than they’d been a minute earlier. And she was thinking clearly now— or as clearly as one can think when deprived of sleep for days.

  “You shut mouth. You take shower,” Loc said.

  Emma thought that if she didn’t move, if she didn’t obey, the man would slap her again. When he did, he’d be close enough for her to reach the gun in the shoulder holster. But she didn’t trust her re
flexes. She knew that before she could get her hands on Loc’s gun, the big man would be there to help him.

  She finished undressing and heard Loc say something in Chinese.

  “She has a good body for her age,” Loc had said to Bao. “Very firm. A little skinny but firm. Good ass.”

  Bao just shook his head. The naked white woman disgusted him; his cousin disgusted him. “I’m going to make some tea,” he muttered. He wasn’t going to be part of this.

  Loc laughed. “Good. Tea will give you strength. It will put some iron in your cock.”

  Emma stepped into the shower, closed the glass door, and turned the faucet handles.

  Loc started to tell her to leave the shower door open, but then he realized he liked the way her body looked behind the glass. It was like watching a movie. In some way he found it more erotic than watching her with the door open.