Three Times The Trouble (Corin Hayes Book 3)

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Three Times The Trouble (Corin Hayes Book 3) Page 6

by G R Matthews


  “Honoured Chen requests presence,” Bojing’s voice was loud in my ear.

  Great.

  Chapter 12

  It was the same grey metal walled room with the same table and chairs. Bojing and the guard with the heavy fists shoved me into the room and forced me down onto the chair. The guard moved behind me and Bojing sat across the table alongside Chen.

  “Morning,” I said. After all, I’d been raised to be polite.

  “Where is it?” Bojing translated Chen’s words.

  “You know, I’ve never been totally clear what it is,” I said, wetting my lips with my tongue. A little moisture to moisten the scabs and skin would, I hoped, make it easier to talk. Today was all about talking and avoiding more of Chen’s crude interrogation technique.

  I waited a moment as Bojing translated my words. A look of confusion appeared on Chen’s face and there was something in the tone of his voice I couldn’t quite identify.

  “Honoured Chen interested in your lies is not. He wishes to know only the sword where it is,” Bojing said.

  The box was the right length and size to hold a sword. It should have been in there too. I knew that I hadn’t opened the box or the one inside. That wasn’t the job. Recover the antique and deliver it to Yunru. Avoiding my home city for a few days, or weeks, while the security forces resolved the mess of an investigation I’d left behind, and do this little job was all I had to do. Yet, somehow, with my typical luck, I’d ended up in trouble.

  “Would he accept the answer that I didn’t take it?”

  “No,” Bojing said without bothering to translate for Chen. “Tell us.”

  “Listen, Bojing, I didn’t take the sword. I didn’t even know that was what I was supposed to be looking for. You know that,” and I paused while he translated for Chen. “All I know is what I was told. To go onto the ship and retrieve a box. You sent me the picture, the description and location. I didn’t know anything else. Not even the fact that it was sword I was recovering.”

  Bojing scrunched up his face and narrowed his eyes as if he’d just eaten something sour, or rotten. To his right, Chen waited for the translation and when it came shook his head.

  “Open the box,” Bojing said. “Sword you see and take.”

  “No.” I kept my hands clasped together and on my lap. No threatening moves or sudden break for freedom. For a start, there was nowhere to go. All the doors were locked. And any break for freedom was likely to result in a broken nose or worse. “I didn’t.”

  Chen smashed his hand down hard upon the metal desk and the echoes took a long time to dissipate.

  “Honourable Chen does not believe you,” Bojing smiled.

  “I am telling you the truth.” It was all I had. At the moment I couldn’t come up with a convincing lie or even a good story. “Tell me what the sword looked like. Maybe I saw it amongst the wreckage in the room.”

  Chen listened intently to the translation and raised an eyebrow. There was a silence that stretched for an eternity. I wasn’t going to break it. All the time they were thinking, they weren’t hitting me and that was just fine.

  A Pad slid across the desk, Chen’s, and on the screen was a picture of a sword. Knights on horseback might be a thing of the ancient past but I recognise a sword when I see one. It is just a long knife. Get stabbed and it’d hurt. The advantage of a sword was the extra range. They both killed people but there was a good chance of being arrested if you walked around carrying a sword, even if you were a knight. Hiding a knife was easier.

  However, this was definitely a sword. A long, thin double-edged blade that came to a sharp point, just what you want in anything you intend to stab someone with. There was a white hilt and grip and a tassel made of deep red strings or thin strips of material. Shit.

  “You this sword have seen.” Even in his broken translation I knew it was a statement and not a question.

  Looking up from the Pad, both Chen and Bojing had focused their eyes upon my face. They’d read the realisation there. He was right, I had seen this sword before. Hanging over a bed in a small, and who am I to judge, single dwelling near another city. That was thousands of kilometres away and there was little point dropping the owner of that place into the same dung heap I found myself. Also, there was no chance they would actually believe me. To them, the wreck was sacred and so was, by extension, the sword. To them, nothing had been on or off of their sacred ship until I came along. Therefore, the sword was still on the ship. Or I had hidden it on my Fish-Suit and even they knew that couldn’t be the case.

  Maybe there was a chance.

  “Yes,” I said. “On the ship, in the room. It wasn’t in the case though.”

  “Where?”

  “In a pile of debris, in the corner, under a filing cabinet,” I said and listened to Bojing translate.

  Chen spoke back and made a series of short, sharp arm movements that weren’t hard to interpret. Make him tell us or kill him. I’d tell them everything, as soon as I could think it up.

  “I can go and get it,” I offered. “I mean, you’ve got my suit, but I know where your sword is.”

  A rapid fire discussion took place between Chen and Bojing. Behind me the guard’s feet shifted and I readied myself for the first blow. It didn’t come. Chen cut off Bojing and waved the guard back.

  “Tomorrow, you go get it. Not have it when come back. Kill you,” Bojing translated with that sour look on his face. I don’t think he liked me. Hard to believe.

  “Absolutely. No trouble. Glad we can get this sorted. Hate to leave a customer disappointed.” A hot needle of pain stabbed my bottom lip. Too much talking and I’d opened the cut. My fingers came away bloody. “Anyone got a plaster?”

  Chapter 13

  So now I’d agreed to go back to the wreck and bring back a sword I knew wasn’t there. An impossible task, even for me. Especially for me. On a positive note, it would mean I was out in the ocean in my Fish-Suit, a device originally designed to be stealthy, to hide and not be found. Once dropped on the wreck I could go anywhere. I would be free.

  Free to die. There was nowhere to go. The maps on the Fish-Suit would be useful, but they’d show me that every other city was out of range of the Oxyquid and the suit’s power supply. Even rationing power and doing a lot of walking across the sea bed, I would still suffocate after a day and half, maybe two if I was careful.

  Bojing and Chen had left me in the interrogation room, alone with the guard. I’d expected to be beaten, just as a lesson in how to behave, but no fists had fallen. Minutes, or hours, my sense of time was vague, they returned. A submarine would be docking at the prison, sorry, apologies, warehouse airlock by morning. It would have my suit on board and I’d be told to go and retrieve the sword. Fantastic.

  I’d bought a day of time. A day to think of something, to do something.

  So far I had nothing. No ideas at all.

  The door was unlocked for the evening meal, the guard grunting at me, and I walked towards the table still trying to come up with something. Tonight the chef had outdone himself, a bowl of slightly green water with flaky strands of what might have been fish floating in it. Somehow, in defiance of all culinary laws, they had managed to rob it of any taste whatsoever. There are, I’ve been told, restaurants where the food is designed to have subtle taste, to not overpower the taste buds, but to excite them and crave more. I’d imagine that took a lot of skill. Me, I’d rather know and be able to taste what I am eating. If it sounds disgusting on the menu, I want it to taste that way, or confound my expectations by being delicious. The chef here clearly held to neither school of thought. He wouldn’t be getting a good review from me when I got out of here.

  I snatched one of the hot, sticky buns that accompanied the soup and plonked myself down opposite the girls and away from the other guests. No one spared us a glance.

  “Evening,” I said.

  “Good evening,” Chunhua said.

  “Ko-Rin,” said Lijuan. I gave her a smile, careful not to mak
e my lip split again.

  “I’ll be checking out tomorrow,” I whispered after the guard had completed his mandatory circuit of the table.

  Chunhua’s eyes widened. “They told you?”

  It took a moment to realise the young girl’s command of language was good enough to capture slang and idiom. “Not like that. I am going back to the wreck and recover the item they want.”

  “Ah, good,” she said, taking a sip of her soup. “It is there then?”

  “That’s what I told them,” I answered, thinking for a moment that perhaps they were being clever. Setting two innocent girls up to question me and discover the truths that a beating would not reveal. “You never told me, why are you here? You don’t seem to fit in with the other guests.”

  Chunhua’s eyes darted to the other end of the table. Every man and woman there had the look of a killer, or if not a murderer then someone who wouldn’t be having any sleepless nights if they happened to inflict some serious injuries. Tattoos, shaven heads, and stubble, even on one of the women. With her carefully brushed hair, her manners, command of my language and the way she looked after the smaller girl, Chunhua was not one of them.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she answered.

  “It does to me. Why are you and your sister here?”

  “Lijuan,” and the little girl looked up from her soup. Chunhua took the little girl’s hand and held it tight. “Lijuan is not my sister. I am her, how do you say it, her carer?”

  “A nanny?”

  “I am not old,” she replied, a puzzled look on her face.

  “It’s a job. A nanny is someone who is employed to look after a family’s children.”

  “Yes, that is my job.” She spoke to Lijuan, pointing to the soup and making eating motions with her hands. The little girl screwed up her face in disgust. I knew how she felt.

  “Who employed you?” It might be that Lijuan was the real prisoner and Chunhua just a different type of guard, but who imprisons a five year old child?

  “Lijuan’s father,” she answered, picking up the other girl’s spoon and trying to feed her.

  “Does he work for Yunru?” I asked in my calmest, most innocent sounding voice, but the look I got back would have killed a shark at fifty paces.

  “That bitch, no.”

  “Sorry, just asking. So Lijuan’s family live in the city. They must be missing her. What about yours?” I slurped at my tasteless soup, stopping to pick a string of white fish, or just string, I couldn’t be sure, out of my teeth.

  “No,” she answered.

  “You don’t want to tell me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do want to tell me?” I stirred the soup, looking for anything lurking at the bottom.

  She sighed. “The Sio Sam Ong kidnapped Lijuan and me. Her father is an important man in another city, he is high up in the corporation there.”

  “They are blackmailing him?”

  “Blackmailing?” She wore the confused look well.

  “They are threatening to hurt Lijuan,” and the little girl smiled up at me at the sound of her name, “if her father doesn’t do what they want him to.”

  “I think so, yes,” Chunhua answered. “They took us from the street in our city. I was bringing Lijuan back from one of her dance classes.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Nearly a month, I think,” she said, dipping her spoon into her own meal and taking a sip.

  She was brave and composed. I am not sure I’d have managed to be that calm reliving the experience. She hadn’t given too many details and I could understand that. It would be hard to face, to think back and remember it all. A month of imprisonment. Just over a day on my own and I was going stir-crazy. The other thought tickling the back of my mind like a hammer on a recalcitrant nail was that Chunhua must know she and the little girl could be killed at any time. If Lijuan’s father didn’t do what they wanted, did it badly, or was himself killed there would be no need of the girls. Even if he did, there was no guarantee they would be returned home safe and sound.

  I took a breath to speak and a clank echoed through the prison walls. I felt the vibration through the souls of my feet. Everyone looked up. The long-term guests all turned in the same direction, towards the airlock and I followed their gaze. Above the airlock, the lights were cycling. A submarine had docked. New guests or my lift to the wreck tomorrow. Neither option filled me with joy.

  My only certainty, I needed to get away from here and get the girls away too. Three problems not just one, but had an idea.

  While everyone watched the airlock door, I slid the half-eaten bun off the table and into my pocket. The spoon followed it and no one noticed a thing.

  It was a start.

  Chapter 14

  A Submarine. My way out?

  When I’d been in the service my training had focused around covert entry to heavily guarded structures. Then blowing them all to hell. Here, I needed to escape a heavily guarded structure. Funnily enough, and looking back, there hadn’t been much training in that aspect of a mission. The word ‘expendable’ floated upwards in my mind. I forced it down.

  It made sense that the skills used to get in would be similar to those used to get back out. The key here was to make it out alive, taking two young girls with me, and all without the benefit of a Fish-suit or any real tactical planning.

  The guard escorting me back to me cube didn’t speak my language and I certainly didn’t speak his. It made conversing impossible. He knew a few words, but food, toilet and shit weren’t going to get us far. It did, however, give me a chance.

  “Listen,” I started as we approached my cube, “there is no need for us to fall out. You could just let me go.”

  His quizzical expression was a joy to behold. There was no sense of humour, no disgust and, therefore, no indication he understood a word I’d just said. It was safer to check.

  I watched him place his key card against the reader and the door clicked open. A simple electronic lock that any half-good burglar could open. As long as they were outside the cube and had access to the electronics. I’d already checked the inside of the cube and there was no way to fiddle with a wire or two.

  He stabbed his fingers at me and then into the cube. His meaning clear.

  I took a few steps forward, into the doorway and turned to face him. He couldn’t close the door, I was in the way. He could push, punch, kick or shoot me and I wanted to avoid those if possible.

  “I’m sorry if we got off on the wrong foot. It seems that Chen,” I stressed the name to gain his attention, “seems to be building a trust with me. We’re off tomorrow to get the thing he wants. Bojing,” stressing the name again and there was a flicker in eyes, “may not like me too much, but I am sure he’ll come round to my way of thinking. Now, Yunru,” and there was a flinch, a tightening of the skin around his eyes, “will be very happy that I’ve brought it back. So no hard feelings, eh?”

  He waited for more and I waited for him to shoot me. Neither came to pass. After an overlong second he stepped forward and gestured again. Get out the way or you will get hit by the door seemed to be the general gist of it all.

  I stepped back and the door slammed closed. There was a click and quiet, subtle, low whir from the electronics. The door was locked and I was in my cube with no way out.

  With nothing to do but wait I cleared away the crumbs from the sticky bun I’d just shoved in the lock’s recess. The cheap, old electronic locks could sometimes detect when they hadn’t been fully deployed, but more often than not they couldn’t. The lock thought, if such a word could be used, it was locked but wasn’t. A quick check of the door, a rattle of the handle would convince most folks that everything was secure.

  Now, or rather later when night had fallen and they dimmed the lights, I could use the spoon I’d pocketed to ease the lock back. Once the door was open, I could do something else. I wasn’t entirely sure what that was at the moment, but I would be free.

  Waiting. Never m
y strong point. I could sit quietly in a bar and drink myself in to stupor, but at least I’d a goal fixed firmly in mind. Lift the drink, take a gulp, and put the glass back down. Repeat until unable to lift glass. Stagger home. Collapse. Pass out. Easy. I could do that kind of waiting, that kind of wasting time, without a struggle.

  Actually waiting to do something was utterly different. There is a sense that nothing you can do will speed the time along. A realisation that anything you do will just make the wait longer. An edge of expectation. A tart tang of fear and scent of boredom. It was all rolled into one and there was nothing you could do to shift it. Certainly not in a prison cell. All I could do was pace, back and forth, round and round. And that got boring really quickly. So I was reduced to laying on my mattress staring up through the wire grill of a ceiling. I couldn’t stop my foot twitching though.

  Time and tide waits for no man. I’d read that somewhere. Probably during what could laughingly be called my education.

  After my two hundredth wish for a drink, my seventy-fifth move to stand up only to realise it was an exercise in futility, and my fifteenth impulse to shout about how turning the fucking lights down might help folks sleep, the lights went down. One milestone completed. Now the real wait.

  Those last hours of waiting when you know that time is passing, every minute is bringing you sixty seconds closer to the moment you have to act. Whether it is going out on stage at a school play, speaking to a crowd of people, meeting a girl for the first date, filling the Fish-Suit full of Oxyquid or boarding a combat sub. They are all sources of excitement, stress and if you’re lucky a great deal of pleasure. Unlucky, and it could be the last thing you ever worried about.

  Now the lights were off, the waiting was a little easier. The real danger was in falling asleep. I’ve known soldiers and sailors who could go to sleep on their way to a mission where the expected chance of survival would barely creep its way past ‘no chance at all’.

 

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