by Theo Cage
Rice had his face down on the hard, stinking hemp matt that was his bed, his body supported by his right shoulder and an aching hip. He had once spent ten years in the raw wilderness waiting for his enemies to find him. It was a difficult, lonely existence but he never once gave into negativity or despair. For the first few years, revenge fueled his resolve. Then, over time, the anger melted away and he began to appreciate the simple joys of his life: an unencumbered sunrise, fresh air, the quiet. He didn’t miss people except his wife, who he dreamed about almost every night. In a way it was like she was never gone, had somehow avoided being accidentally killed by a contract mercenary hired to terminate Rice.
It took Rice years to accept his wife’s death, to push away the guilt. Is that how Scarface felt? Had his family moved from the farm to the city, looking to improve his daughter’s life? And then his wife died in an American owned tire factory. A stupid industrial accident that changed everything for him.
Rice wobbled his head, feeling the dampness against his temple. Scarface and he were so much alike. His jailor could have stayed in his rural shack for the rest of his life, but he decided to take a risk and solve a puzzle: how to get his daughter an education and improve her life? The answer was move to the big city. The man was a problem solver. It didn’t matter how much education you had or money or support. Marching forward was always harder than standing still. He was like Rice—they were marchers. One foot in front of the other. Scarface was born in a Communist country; Rice was born in America. But they still marched every day.
Rice heard the oxidized hinges on his cell’s iron door cry out. He wanted to turn to greet his jailor, but he lacked the energy or the motivation to crane his neck. His head felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. He closed his eyes and imagined being somewhere else.
Then he heard footsteps. Scarface could have slid the dinner bowl through the pass-through, but he was the type who liked to check on his prisoners, see if they were still breathing, still enjoying their hellish experience. He usually jabbed his bamboo bat into Rice’s side, looking for a reaction. Rice waited for it.
The guard stood quietly by his side, saying nothing.
“Honorable guard, I am Landuo Rice, what was your daughter’s name?” whispered Rice, surprised how weak his voice sounded in the closed space of his cell. He waited for an answer.
Scarface didn’t move for the longest time. Rice could hear another door creak open down the hallway. Maybe two jailors split the workload. You take one side; I take the other. Common sense.
Scarface wasn’t going to answer a question asked by a prisoner with another guard within earshot. It was against prison rules. Rice waited for the hard end of the bamboo, the hated stick. He bet on a head strike, behind the ear. Or maybe his purple swollen wrist. That would send Rice rolling in agony. But Scarface didn’t strike him this time.
“Kim” was all the Chinese jailer said.
Kim. The guard’s daughter’s name was Kim. Rice felt a shudder slither through him, a hot stab of emotion he could never have predicted.
“How old was she?” Rice asked, calmly, hopeful to not signal his surprise, keep the flow of words going.
“Sixteen.” The answer came so fast, it was like the jailer knew it was coming or couldn’t stop replying or had lost control of his voice.
“Honorable guard, where did she work?”
The guard spit on the floor. “A cell phone factory. Now you must stop asking questions.”
“My wife was killed, too,” answered Rice, not caring what Scarface did next. He felt something had to be said: that the record had to be set straight. It was that simple.
“She was sitting right beside me. We were having lunch. It was blustery on the balcony. The sniper should have waited. But he didn’t. The bullet tore through her instead of me.”
Rice wondered if Scarface would comment or leave or yell or swing the bamboo pole. But he did nothing. Rice knew what had happened; Scarface was imprisoned now too, in his own memories. They were his walls and cages. He was like Rice—seeing his wife again, unable to let go.
“The last thing I said to her,” grunted Rice, “was about being selfish. I think I complained about the bed in our hotel room being too hard or something equally stupid,” said Rice, his eyes closed.
“Stop talking—or I will strike you again,” muttered Scarface.
“Imagine! I complained about a bed to her. And look what I sleep on now.”
Rice was surprised to hear the door to his cell close. He turned slowly, careful to not put weight on his wrist. Scarface was gone; the rusted iron food bowl sat a few feet away, untouched.
Rice stared at the dish. He wasn’t hungry. When you are kidnapped or imprisoned, one of the tenants of spy craft is to build a bond with your captors. Most terrorists today, and Rice knew this from personal experience, were trained to ignore all attempts at friendship. Psychological games were played at every level. But Rice didn’t care. He was curious now what had played out in his jailers’ life. And he felt compelled to tell the story of his wife’s death. After all, she hadn’t been killed by an enemy of the state.
The man who did the deed was an American, a patriot, a soldier. A CIA operative, like him, just following orders.
He kicked with his good leg, knocking the bowl of meagre food over. He was angry again. He didn’t know why, but that seemed to be the appropriate state to be in right now.
溺死
D R O W N I N G
RICE HQ
THE SECOND GRACE TOOK IN Hunter’s pale complexion and blue-tinged lips, the oxygen tube feeding into his nose, she willed herself into a stony composure, the kind she had learned on missions with the Marines. No one needs to see even a trace of emotion on your face in these kinds of situations. She wasn’t going to give Hunter anything else to deal with right now. He’d been through enough.
She’d seen men thrown through the air from a munitions blast, their legs and arms no longer acting like limbs, their heads twisted at odd angles. They didn’t seem human anymore. Hunter looked like that when the data hit him. It tunneled through him like a missile travelling at the speed of sound. His brain was instantly overloaded. Every muscle in his body, tendons he hadn’t had control over for years, contracted like a million volts of electricity had shot down his spine. His back arched up until she swore; she could hear the vertebra snapping. It was hard to watch; more difficult to understand.
Hunter had told her he needed to open the bandwidth in order to find Rice. He felt their leader and friend was in imminent danger, existential danger.
Then this morning, when she left the room for a few minutes, because that was what Hunter did, he turned up the volume. Maybe only from one percent to five percent. He would never tell her. Maybe it was more than that. She had no way of knowing.
“It’s all there. I just need to focus,” said Hunter.
“What’s there?” Grace asked.
“Numbers. Cars travelling. People walking. The entire planet is monitored. By thousands of satellites and drones and security cameras and sensors. Rice is in there somewhere. Or a shadow of him. Maybe just a perturbation.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Perturbation! Things we can only see because they are suggested to us by some other action. Like an invisible planet that causes a nearby star to wobble ever so slightly—”
“You sound insane. A wobbling star somewhere will tell us where Rice is?”
“Not a star. But another person. Maybe someone moves over in a crowd of people on a street in Paris or Lisbon or Jerusalem. It’s not a specific piece of information like a location. It’s the swirl of pedestrians, a wave moving through a crowd, only a faint shadow for a clue. Swimming through that is like using the world’s most illogical search engine. Everything is there. And I mean everything. That’s the problem: what is the right question?”
“How about Where is Burroughs Rice?”
“It doesn’t work that way. The Internet doesn’t know that an
swer. Maybe it knows a million things that could give us the answer, but it has no intelligence. The Internet is extremely dumb.”
“Hunter, I love you, but I’ll never understand what you’re thinking. You’re like a contraption from another dimension.”
“Anyone else calling me a contraption would have evoked my undying animosity. But from you, it’s almost endearing.”
“It’s been more than two weeks.” She was talking about Rice.
“I know, that’s a long time,” offered Hunter.
“Not for Rice. He was gone once for almost ten years.”
“Not to you, though.”
Grace looked up, her eyes flashing again. That look was like an assassin’s flare. Hunter was momentarily speechless, cortical synapses in a hopeless tangle. He recovered with some effort.
“Is there anything you don't know?” she asked.
“No magic, Grace. Rice and a few beers was all it took to pry that story out of him. He was very fond of your annual New Year's Eve rendezvous up in the Washington mountains.” Rice had gone off the grid years before, an attempt to escape a dozen hired killers after a multi-million-dollar reward being offered by the people he used to work for. Grace would meet with him once a year in his rustic cabin and share a bottle of Scotch. They both felt once a year was a reasonable risk.
Grace would fill Rice in on everything he missed. Rice wouldn’t say what else they shared. And Hunter was too much of a gentleman to ask.
“You were pretty close,” added Hunter.
“He saved my life more than a few times.”
“And you, his.”
“That’s how it works,” said Grace, looking out through the window at the Sonoran mountains to the south of their mountain hideaway.
“We’ll find him,” he added.
“Let’s be realistic, Hunter. He’s been a wanted man for as long as I’ve known him. Luck doesn’t last forever.”
Hunter remained motionless, like a life-sized chess piece waiting to be moved. Grace watched him, knew he was processing. He hated to fail, hated to admit he couldn’t crack a problem or solve a puzzle. But they had nothing. Rice had disappeared into a black hole. Brace would have to tell Britt they were unsuccessful in locating him, as hard as that would be.
And there was more to be concerned about. The downed F35 in Florida. First, the President’s daughter dies in a self-driving car, then one of the country’s most sophisticated military assets drops from the sky for no reason. Was this the start of something? A global cyber war?
“I’m going back in,” said Hunter, no emotion in his voice, sounding very robot-like. “I need to. There’s too much at stake.”
处理者
D O C T O R
Quinjang Prison
RICE’S WRIST HAD SWOLLEN to the size and color of a purple grapefruit and throbbed constantly. Any movement at all shot a jolt of raw pain down his arm that made his eyes water. His ankle was no better; less swollen but blackened at the edges with blood pooling in the joint. He wriggled along the floor to the side wall and sat up, bracing his back against the cold cement.
When he first came to Quinjang his primary goal was escape. After a week his strategy switched to maintaining sanity. Escape seemed impossible, at least not in the near term. Solitary confinement limited his options. Eventually he might be admitted into the general population, if he lived that long. There might be opportunities there.
Opportunities. He liked the word. It buoyed him up. Other words gave him hope. Britt and her baby. Their home in the desert. His friends. A cold beer on the deck.
The iron door ground open and his jailor entered, brandishing his bamboo rod. The man had skills. Maybe he had trained in some ancient martial art Rice was unaware of. The stick swung through the air at blinding speed and caused bruising pain on impact. Crueler than a knife or a baseball bat in the Chinese man's skilled hands.
Rice felt himself shrink back against the wall, not curious about how a blow from the bamboo rod would feel on his gangrenous wrist.
Then another man entered his cell; a Caucasian, dressed in a green smock, a tie at his neck, a red neatly trimmed beard. A doctor or a medical assistant? He pulled a gurney behind him covered in a sheet. The sheet was blindingly white. The cleanest object Rice had seen in weeks. He couldn’t take his eyes off the glowing linen.
“Mr. Rice,” said the man, his voice crisp and American. Had he been rescued? Rice choked back congestion in his throat, his voice thickened by a surprising wave of emotion. “Your guard is going to help you onto the bed. He has promised that if you cooperate, there will be no need for the stick. Do you understand?”
Rice nodded his head. He said the word opportunity again to himself. Opportunity. He felt a shiver of energy charge through his body. Hope was a wonderful thing.
Scarface reached for Rice’s good arm and pulled him up. Rice was tempted to respond with force, his knee coming up hard into the jailer’s solar plexus, his good wrist down on the man’s thin neck. Then it would be just him and the Caucasian doctor. The man in green looked unthreatening, almost distant. Surely the smell of this place must punch him in the gut, make his stomach turn. The thought gave Rice pause. The doctor was too familiar with the surroundings, almost at home among the human excrement and crying voices.
“Who are you?” asked Rice.
“They call me ‘yi sheng’, the doctor, the treater.” He pronounced the word as Eee-shung.
“Ok, doc. What’s on the itinerary?”
“We’re going to look at your wrist problem first. Clean it up. Check you out.”
“Why?”
“You’re valuable to us, Mr. Rice.”
“Us?”
“My people. I apologize, our friend here was perhaps too enthusiastic in his disregard for you.”
“You are American!”
“I was born in San Diego. But I’m not an American. I am a Chinese citizen.”
“And if I refuse your care?”
The doctor’s expression didn’t change. “You need medical attention, Mr. Rice. Strange of you to turn that down, get another perspective, a different venue. You might enjoy a change of pace.”
“You’re telling me you work for these assholes?”
“It would be more accurate to say they work for me. Sometimes great things for many can come out of the brief misery of a few.”
“Sounds like a sales pitch for Communism.”
The doctor patted the top of the bedding on the gurney. “Hop up here, Mr. Rice. I’ll try and make you feel better and we can have a little chat.”
Scarface helped Rice over to the wheeled hospital bed and handcuffed him to rails on the sides. The clean sheet looked inviting, but somehow Rice knew he was hopping from the frying pan into the proverbial fire.
鲸
W H A L E
The Three Sopranos
WEY PEEKED OVER HIS MONITOR AT ZERZY, who had gone silent for a change. Toshi had his head down, his fingers clacking away on his keyboard. The silence was unsettling. They were all shook.
It was one thing to crash a car; to pull an American fighter jet out of the sky seemed so surreal. This was the US military they had just thrown serious shade at, the biggest and most powerful force on the planet. The US of A had nukes, cruise missiles, killer satellites; some horrible death might be spiraling down towards them right now.
And it was so easy to knock that jet out of the sky. That seemed wrong too.
“I wish I had that F-35 on video,” said Toshi, finally, breaking the creepy silence. “That would get five million views easy.”
“Did you know your hack would kill pilot eject feature?” asked Zerzy, loud again, her dark glasses hiding a scowl. Both boys were surprised by her anger. After all, she had sent the President’s daughter and her lover off a bridge. The pilot of the F35 was a soldier though, like Zerzy’s old man, not a spoiled billionaire or a Facebook princess. To be honest, the two males hadn’t yet figured out what her moral margins looked like e
xactly.
“It couldn’t be helped,” said Toshi, chewing on a granola snack he kept constantly at his side. “Bad design, the jet having the safety system dependent on the main power. Should have been a backup.”
“Yeah, you sound broken hearted,” grunted Wey.
“Guys!” shouted Toshi, his skinny arms up in the air. “We did it. Cheer up. We dropped an F-35 right out of the sky.”
“Yeah, but you won’t see another launch now forever,” said Zerzy. “They’ll ground them. You could have tested your control dozens other ways. Like flipping power back on. You were showing off. My kid brother has more brains than you.”
That taunt cooled the room down a few degrees. Wey glanced over at Toshi and winked. Girls! Who can figure them out?
But no one as going to challenge her. On day one when the Chinese army techs were installing the new servers, one of the grunts made a pass at Zerzy. She grabbed him by the throat and tossed him against the wall like a soggy mung bean noodle. She wasn’t helpless by any stretch of the imagination.
Zerzy jumped up from her inflated ball-chair. “Shut down. Shut down,” she yelled, her belly bump jiggling. Way stared at her, the message not cutting through to his cerebellum. He had never seen a woman like her, never stood so close, was never overcome by so much cheap Russian perfume. Zerzy stomped on her power bar and reached for Wey’s. Before he could object, she pulled his plug as well and the four big power stacks went down. Wey couldn’t speak. Toshi simply slipped his hand behind the monster Toshiba rig and flicked the slider. The room went quiet, a dozen or more computer fans winding down.
“I didn’t hear an alarm. What the hell did you do?” asked Toshi.
“You didn’t see?” she said.
“See what!”
“It was like killer whale just swam under our boat. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“What have you been smoking or snorting or mainlining, girl. Ritalin?”
