by Sam Sisavath
I guess not.
“He had a backpack,” Stacy continued. “The way he was wearing it, with his hands always on the straps…”
“What about it?”
“It was important. That backpack—or whatever was inside it—was very important to him, and he held onto it as if his life depended on it.”
“What did you find out?”
“There was a third guy.”
“Are you sure?”
“I just confirmed it with the teacher.”
“Who else knows about this?”
“Three people right now, including you.”
“Ron?”
“He went home after the school, mumbling something about suing the station for worker’s comp. I took a cab over here.” Zoe glanced around the floor just in case one of Stacy’s neighbors was eavesdropping, but she was still the only person in the hallway. “So what do you want me to with it?”
“What do you think?” Joe asked. “Run with it. We go live on the air at ten exactly. Get what you can before then.”
“When’s the joint press conference?”
“In two hours.”
“Should I go?”
Joe didn’t answer right away.
“Joe?” Zoe said.
“No,” Joe finally said. Then, noticeably lowering his voice (He’s not alone), “This is breaking news, and we’re going to break it tonight. After the press conference. If they lie about the third guy, we’ll really have something.”
“Gotcha,” Zoe said, when she heard footsteps.
She stepped closer to the railing and peered down just in time to see broad shoulders in a black blazer and white dress shirt walking by on the floor below. She waited until the man’s footsteps faded before returning to the phone.
“You did real good, kid,” Joe was saying.
Zoe rolled her eyes but smiled anyway. “Gee thanks, Dad, glad I could make you proud.”
Joe chuckled. Then, back with his serious voice, “Ten on the dot. Get what you can before then.”
“Let me know how the press conference goes,” Zoe said, and put the phone away.
Stacy was still snoring on the couch, the (second) empty cup of Cuba Libre on the table next to her when Zoe went back inside. She pocketed Craig’s business card before picking up her purse and leaving the teacher’s apartment.
What were the chances Stacy would sleep through the rest of the day and not wake up until tomorrow morning with a hangover? If Zoe was lucky. Worst case, she would have a few hours’ head start on the competition. Either way, Channel 9 was going to break some news tonight, and she’d be the one to do it.
Suck on that, Adrian Hall. Heir apparent, my ass.
The cab was waiting for her at the curb when she stepped outside. Zoe checked her watch before slipping into the back of the sedan.
The driver glanced up at his rearview mirror. “Where we headed?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Zoe said and stared out the window at the sidewalk.
The driver turned around in his seat and gave her an amused grin. She was surprised by how young he was. Mid-twenties, and not entirely bad looking. “I sort of need a destination, miss. Can’t just sit here all day. Actually, nix that; we can, but I’ll have to turn on the meter.”
“Do you live around here?”
“Yup. Grew up just a few blocks away. Why?”
“If you were a seventeen-year-old kid and you couldn’t go home, but you needed a place to chill for a while where no one would hassle you, where would you go?”
“Easy. The mall.”
“You answered that pretty fast.”
He shrugged. “It was an easy question.”
“Two more questions, hotshot,” Zoe said. “What’s the nearest mall, and how far is it from Harold Campbell High School?”
The answer to her first question was Pine Creek Mall, with the second one being less than five miles. That was just close enough to walk to but far enough that someone looking to get lost would find the proximity to the high school acceptable.
Maybe.
The truth was she was working on a mountain of conjectures and secondhand information. How had Stacy described the kid?
Black. Sixteen or seventeen. Bald head. Tall. Skinny. Wearing Converse sneakers.
The shoes were the most descriptive thing about the third terrorist. That, and the fact he was carrying a bulky backpack that probably contained something heavy by the way it sagged against his body, at least according to Stacy. Whatever was in that backpack was clearly very important to him, so much so that he held onto it with both hands whether he knew he was doing it consciously or not.
Great. I’m looking for a tall black kid in Converse. Wearing a backpack.
That narrowed it down to a few thousand kids in the city. Or tens of thousands. But how many of those lived in this part of town? Or were at the mall right now?
You’re assuming he really is at the mall. And you know what happens when you assume…
She glanced at her watch for the third time in the last ten minutes. 6:18 p.m. According to Joe, the joint press conference wouldn’t be happening for another hour or so. Then less than three hours after that was the nightly news where she would drop her “third terrorist” bomb (Oh, nice choice of words!) on the city. That was assuming the FBI and HPD weren’t already going to reveal the information at the presser.
If they knew about the missing man.
If they weren’t trying to hide him.
The first made sense—ignorance was usually the number one excuse why most bureaucracies failed. The latter, though, would open a whole new can of worms. After all, why would the authorities lie about the existence of a third terrorist, one that could still be running around out there? Was the kid even a terrorist? If he wasn’t, then what was he? Or maybe she hadn’t been far off when she (lied) told Stacy the feds might already know but were in the midst of an operation to capture him.
None of it made any sense. At least, not yet. She was operating on what she (generously) thought was probably 20 or so percent solid information. There was a whole lot of data out there that she still didn’t know, but she was sure that once revealed would form a better picture of what was happening and why.
And no one was going to just hand it to her. It was up to her to find it.
So what else is new?
Which was why she was sitting in the food court on the second floor of the Pine Creek Mall, drinking her third cup of orange soda and giving herself two minutes before she had to go to the bathroom for the second time, when she saw him.
At first she didn’t believe it.
Am I really this lucky?
No, it can’t be.
Can it?
But it was him. She was sure of it. Stacy’s description of the teenager fit him to a T, right down to the white Converse sneakers.
And there was something else about him that stood out: he was talking into a cell phone.
That in itself wasn’t strange enough to note—who wasn’t talking or playing with their cellphone at the tables or on foot around her?—except for the fact that the phone was one of those old candy bar-shaped mobiles she hadn’t seen since she went home last year. Her mom had one of those, a ten (fifteen?)-year-old relic from the past. A teenager wouldn’t be caught dead using a phone that old.
And yet there he was, standing at the edge of the area designated for diners. She saw him from the side but knew it was him. African-American, a plain T-shirt underneath a black jacket, faded jeans, and the backpack that hung off him like whatever was inside was too heavy for its container—or his lanky frame. Either that, or he had been lugging it around all day and didn’t notice it was starting to sag.
Converse stood out even in a building full of kids his age. Her cab driver had been right about Pine Creek Mall. The place was packed with high schoolers and twenty-somethings. Looking at them going about their life, she couldn’t have guessed there had been a terrorist attack on a school five miles f
rom here earlier today.
Welcome to the Internet Age, where half a day might as well be half a month. Or year.
Except not everyone had forgotten, if the presence of uniformed police officers was any indication. She noticed them everywhere as soon as she stepped inside. It was a show of force, the city’s way of letting its citizens know they were being protected, that the many law-enforcement agencies were keeping vigil for more acts of terrorism.
“Yes, you can all go back to shopping now, folks; we got it handled!” was the point.
It was bullshit, of course. As if ten or twenty more cops in a random shopping mall were going to stop someone determined to launch an attack.
Was that what Converse was doing? A secondary attack? Or maybe a final strike in retaliation for his two dead comrades, one of whom might have been his sister, as strange as that sounded given their very different ethnicities? Was that some kind of bomb in his backpack? And what exactly was she doing here surveying him when she should be grabbing one of the cops—
There, two uniforms walking past her, hands on their gun belts.
If the nearby presence of cops spooked Zoe’s target, he didn’t show it by the way he turned his back on them and continued talking into his phone. His very old, ancient relic of a phone.
What was he doing here? Was he really just looking for a place to lay low? Someplace to get lost in the crowd? Or was this a prelude to another attack? What was in that backpack of his? A bomb? Was she risking everyone’s life for the sake of a story?
What are you doing? Grab one of those cops now!
And tell them what?
That was the other thing: she had no proof. Nothing definitive, anyway. There was just a hunch and a (probably still)-drunk-on-her-couch teacher traumatized by the day’s events.
“We’ll get to them later, but there’s no rush,” Craig Mansfield had told her at the school parking lot. “Terrorists are dead, and those kids are traumatized enough without forcing them to relive it so soon.”
The two police officers, both sheriff’s deputies, had already vanished into a crowd of people coming out of the movie theater behind her. Zoe stood up and tried to relocate them when she saw it out of the corner of one eye: Converse, staring at her from across the group of tables.
She turned around and looked back at him, and yes, he was definitely staring at her.
Oh goddammit, Zoe thought when the kid turned and pushed his way through an elderly couple.
Oh no, you don’t!
She didn’t bother running across the food court, and instead pivoted and darted left. That allowed her to escape the maze of chairs and tables—and all the people occupying them—and run parallel to the circular guard that separated the eating area from the rest of the floor.
She scanned the faces, looking for dark skin—
There!
He was moving as fast as he could while still clinging to the phone in one hand, but it would have been a stretch to say he was running. It was the backpack, or whatever was inside it, slowing him down. It had to be heavy, and he was definitely clinging to it just the way Stacy had described.
What’s in that thing? Bars of gold?
She thought about flagging down one of the cops in the building—she glimpsed another one talking to a civilian across the floor to her right—but he was too far, and getting his attention would mean taking her eyes off Converse for too long.
And right now the kid was angling his way toward one of the escalators and glancing frantically around him. Was he trying to find her? Looking for the cops to make sure he wasn’t being chased? Then why was he scanning the floor—
They locked eyes again.
“Hey!” she shouted.
He ignored her (Of course he did, what did you expect?) and darted down the nearest escalator.
It took her ten seconds to finally reach his last spot, and she knew it was ten seconds too long before she even got there. Instead of racing down to the first floor after him, she ran to the railing and tried to find him using her higher position, but he was gone. She kept moving anyway, but there were no signs of him among the legion of teenagers down there. There were plenty of black kids and adults, but no one with a heavy backpack.
Joe’s going to kill me. Shit.
And she was breathing way too hard. She hadn’t realized it until she gave up looking for Converse and leaned against the nearest wall to catch her breath. God, she was out of shape. When did she get so out of shape? Had running around the school this afternoon taken that much of a toll on her?
I need to work out. God, do I need to work out more.
Zoe was bending slightly over at the waist and sucking in some much-needed air when she saw it—a candy bar-shaped phone about twenty yards from her, on the floor. It was identical to the one she had seen Converse using.
Wasn’t he looking around for something earlier?
She pushed off the railing and hurried to the phone. A few people saw the device before she got to it, but no one bothered to pick it up.
Right. Old relic of a phone. Of course no one cared enough to pick it up.
She grabbed it off the floor, and as soon as she did, heard a voice say through the phone’s tiny speakers, “Aaron? Are you still there? Aaron, answer me.”
Chapter 11
Xiao
The chair.
The fucking chair.
Of course, it wasn’t the same chair they had put her in years ago (How long had it been now? Two? Three years? The exact date was hard to remember, mostly because she didn’t like thinking about it for more than a few seconds at a time.), but it might as well be. It sure as hell sent the same flurry of terror through her.
She was afraid. More afraid than she had been in years. Maybe even more afraid than when she found herself in this situation the first time, because at least then she had the benefit of ignorance. She didn’t have that now. She knew exactly where she was and why there was a feeling of euphoria that seemed to hang over her, telling her to Relax, just relax, everything will be all right as long as you just relax.
Except she knew better.
Fuck you, chair. I’m not going to relax.
Fuck you!
She wasn’t the only one in the room. A man with beady eyes and a sharp nose, who looked more like an insect than an actual human, was there when she woke up. He stood in front of a computer monitor that extended out of the wall near the door, flicking at the touchscreen with his fingers. If he even knew she was conscious, he didn’t bother to acknowledge it.
She couldn’t move any part of her body or turn much of her head, but she didn’t need to in order to see she was surrounded by white walls, a white floor, and a white ceiling. She wasn’t just in the chair, but she was back in the room. The same one as last time—except not the same. Not that you could tell the difference, because every room looked identical. Porter had said as much to her later after she was rescued.
Porter, where are you? I could really use you right about now, you sonofabitch.
The metal chair (How is it metal? It can’t be metal. Can it? Metal shouldn’t feel this good.) held her in place even though there were no restraints to keep any part of her body from moving. That inconsistency should have freaked her out, except it didn’t, because it had been the same last time. She was being held down by some kind of force, an invisible monster she couldn’t see with her eyes.
But at least she wasn’t in pain despite taking that bullet at the school. She was shot, wasn’t she? Of course she was. She still remembered it like it was…yesterday? Earlier today? A week ago?
How long have I been here?
There was no pain, but she couldn’t trust that. The chair could make you believe things that weren’t true. She could be bleeding out right now, for all she knew, though that was doubtful since she couldn’t see blood anywhere around her, and against the stark whiteness of the room, even a tiny drop of red would stand out.
So there is a bright side after all.
“You’re awake,” the man finally said.
Xiao’s eyes snapped over to the man’s (insectlike) side profile. He had spoken but hadn’t turned to look at her. She got the feeling she was an afterthought to him, that she wasn’t quite interesting enough for his full attention.
Works for me, pal.
“I’m a light sleeper,” Xiao said. “Especially when I’m sitting and sleeping. Do you know how difficult that is? Can this thing recline?”
“I’m afraid not,” the man said.
“Then I want my security deposit back.”
The man chuckled.
“So that’s a no?” Xiao asked. Then, when he didn’t answer, “Where am I, exactly?”
Her voice sounded calm to her own ears—and normal. Which meant what, exactly? She didn’t know. For all she did know she could have been sitting in this place for the last week. Maybe even longer. The chair had a way of making you lose track of time. It could also keep your body functioning without food or water. How any of that was even possible was beyond her.
“They can do things that shouldn’t be possible,” Porter once told her, very early on in their partnership. “You’ll discover that the impossible is normal to them. My advice? Don’t spend too much time trying to figure it out. I was there—deep inside the Rhim—and I still don’t understand ninety percent of it.”
“Ninety percent?” she had said.
Porter had smiled sheepishly (a rarity for him), and said, “I’m feeling overly generous.”
How did the chair do what it did? She didn’t have a clue, and maybe she never would. Right now, she didn’t care, because it wasn’t important. Getting out of it—getting out of this room—were the only things that mattered.
So how are you going to do that?
Good question. That’s a really good question.
She sighed, and said, “So you’re just going to ignore me?”
“Yes,” the man said.
He was wearing some kind of white lab coat that helped him to blend into his monochromatic surrounding, not that he ever could fully. He was physically an odd duck—tall, thin, and the sharp contours of his face only helped him to further stand out.
