She didn’t know if Poitevin had escaped, and this was what troubled her most. The armed boy band shoved her back into the elevator, all three of them squeezed in tight with her, wordless, and pressed the button to return to the ground floor. Their stink filled that cramped space—one of them had an abiding affection for patchouli, while the other two preferred the musk of anxious sweat—and when the doors opened on the ground floor it was a relief to escape the smell, even though each step brought her closer to her destination.
Years ago, when she’d been more impulsive—when she’d been a Tourist—Leticia would have done something. Either in that tiny elevator, where the walls might have worked to her advantage, or along that short walk to the glass front doors, where another armed boy watched—presumably the one Poitevin had spotted. But she’d lost that impulsiveness somewhere along the way, in Nigeria or maybe before. So she let them take her across the park to the white van she hadn’t noticed before, and when she looked across the grounds, trying to pierce the darkness with vision that had never, despite rumors, been superhuman, she saw no evidence that Poitevin was out there.
Of course he wasn’t. If he hadn’t been captured, then he’d gotten his ass the hell out of Shanghai. It’s what she would have done, probably.
Maybe.
In the windowless van the stink returned, and they rocked with the bumpy road, taking hard turns that she could only imagine on the knotted map of Shanghai in her head. Certainly they had left Pudong, but had they gone east, or west? Or maybe south, toward Hangzhou Bay? Were they just traveling in circles?
Did it matter? It didn’t.
When they finally did stop, the boys sprang to life, hauling her out. They emerged into a basement parking lot, and her fragrant captors hustled her to another elevator—bigger this time, fluorescent bright, with numbers that went up to 72—and it rose so quickly that she felt it in her stomach.
The corridor on the sixty-third floor was white and gray, and they passed office doors with Chinese characters until they reached a door marked with Latin characters: NORTHWELL INTERNATIONAL, LTD. Patchouli opened the door. Together, they entered a dark space full of low cubicles, all empty. Through floor-to-ceiling windows Shanghai glittered, and for a moment she was mesmerized by the beauty, almost forgetting her escorts.
“Sit,” Patchouli barked.
He was pointing at an Aeron office chair near the windows.
“No, thanks,” Leticia said. “I’d rather stand.”
Patchouli looked exasperated by her. He took a step closer. “You sit. You no sit, you go,” he said, pointing at the high window.
It was a long way down, so she walked over to the Aeron, sat down, and crossed her legs at the knee. It was as casual a pose as she could find, but it was quickly ruined when Patchouli and the others hurried over with white zip-ties. They bound her hands behind the back of the chair, then crouched and tied her ankles to two of the rollers. Then they spun her around, and Leticia was not happy to see Patchouli holding a syringe in his dirty hand. He roughly pulled the sleeve of her left arm up to her elbow and gave her the injection.
Then he stepped back, eyeing her, and went to join the others, who had settled into chairs around cubicles. One cleaned his fingernails with a knife. It wasn’t nice to look at, so Leticia turned to the side to look at the lights of Shanghai as, one by one, they slowly twinkled out.
When she was slapped awake, it was light outside. All those pretty lights had been replaced by the ugly tangle of a modern metropolis, and even more disappointing than that sight was the man who had hit her. A white man of the sort of indeterminate age only wealth allows. From the shape of his shoulders and his buzz-cut scalp above old-acne cheeks, she could tell he had once been a soldier.
“Leticia Jones,” the man said, straightening. His accent was American, and his smile wasn’t bad. “Nice to meet you. I’m Ted.”
“Ted, huh?”
“You feel all right? It was just a mild sedative, until I could get over here. Not sick?”
She shook her head but said nothing.
“Good,” he said, taking a step back and glancing out the windows. “Okay, then. Tell me, please, why Milo Weaver is interested in Liu Wei.”
“What?”
“You and your partner are working for Milo Weaver,” he said, swinging his fingers around as if finding a rhythm in his own words. “You broke into Liu Wei’s apartment building with the intent of getting to him. But why? Why does Milo Weaver care about this man? Why does the Library care?”
Leticia tried to hide her surprise. Milo’s precious Library was supposed to be a closely guarded secret, so why did this asshole know about it? And despite the stupid canine code name, she didn’t work for the Library, but Ted assumed she did. It couldn’t simply be because she and Milo had met in Wakkanai, could it? Or was it because they knew who Poitevin was and had seen him with her? Given the poor quality of his spycraft, so easy to spot back in Tokyo, that could be it. Really—what kind of half-assed operation had she allied herself with?
She said, “I don’t work for Milo Weaver. Coming here was my idea.”
“Your idea, huh?” She was struck by the way Ted said those words. That doubtful tone—it was a tone she knew well. All her life she’d heard it. “Where’d you get a big idea like looking into someone else’s business?”
Yes, that was the tone all right. This was what she’d meant when she’d used the word “racism” with Milo a week ago. This Caucasian, like others before him, had misjudged Leticia, and she’d made a career out of using that to her advantage. She said, “Borno, Nigeria.”
Ted straightened, looking surprised, so she went on.
“I followed a money trail from Boko Haram to Liu Wei.”
Ted chewed his lower lip, concerned. “How much of this does Milo Weaver know?”
“Why are you so worried about Milo, Ted? Big guy like you, you’ve got everything under control.”
The answer stunned him briefly; then he cracked a grin. “Yes, Leticia, we do. But when this much money is involved, you have to have it more than under control. You need to have it locked up.”
“And you don’t? You’ve got the power of Northwell International behind you. That’s no small thing. And I…” Leticia stiffened, a sudden realization dawning on her. “Oh, shit,” she said, and almost laughed.
“What is it?” Ted asked.
She shook her head and told him something she knew he would believe: “I’m stupid.”
“Don’t tell me that, now.”
But she was stupid, she now saw. It had taken her too long to make the obvious connection. Milo hadn’t made it either. She said, “A woman named Joan tried to get me to work with you. She said she was from DC, but she wasn’t. Not at all. Not the Bureau, not the Agency, not Homeland. No, she was Northwell all along.”
Ted scratched the side of his neck, but from the calm expression on his face she knew he didn’t care what she’d put together. Because he’d never planned to let her leave this office alive. That was bad news, but here she was, and, tied up, there was nothing she could do about it. So she filed that fact away for the moment and decided she might as well satisfy her curiosity.
“Tell me, Ted. Why is Liu Wei sending money to Boko Haram? How does kidnapping little girls help Tóuzī?”
Ted shrugged. “That’s beyond my pay grade.”
She smiled at him. “And here I was thinking you were the captain.”
She heard movement and looked over to see Patchouli straighten suddenly, put a finger to his ear, and leave the room in a hurry. Ted either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He stepped right up to her, and when he leaned close and gently reached out to her face she steeled herself. With a thumb, he wiped some sweat from her cheek. Very seriously, he said, “Leticia, it’s time to talk. It’s time for you to tell me everything.”
“I don’t know much, Ted. Remember, I’m stupid.”
He smiled, then walked slowly around the chair until he had disappeared behind her. “Milo Weaver and the Library aren’t worth dying for.”
Ted was right. But Ted and Northwell International weren’t worth dying for either. The dilemma now wasn’t how to survive this office. It was how to die with the least amount of embarrassment.
“So you think you know about Northwell?” his voice said.
“Sure. Rent-a-soldiers.”
He leaned close, his breath wet and warm on the back of her ear. “We’re much more than that, Ms. Jones. People hear us coming, they run.”
She stopped herself from laughing—that was how Tourists thought of themselves, back in the day. “You’re not magic.”
“Magic,” he hummed into her ear. “Maybe you’ve got some of that black girl magic I’ve been hearing about. Think I’d find some if I—” In a remarkably fast move, he grabbed the hair at the base of her skull, squeezed it tight, and with his other hand brought a knife to rest against her cheek. Her hair follicles ached, and the knife, which was cool at first, quickly warmed to the temperature of her hot skin. He whispered into her ear: “If I dig deep, will I find some magic?”
Despite her fatalism, and her conviction that she would never leave here, Ted’s ham-fisted threat was disheartening. She could make peace with death, even find some dignity in it, but damn—she really didn’t want this asshole to be the one who finally took her out.
Then she heard—heard because she couldn’t turn her head to look—the door open and a group of people enter. Among them, she smelled Patchouli. The grip on her head dropped away, and she turned to see Patchouli with two more Chinese men and a Chinese woman, who snapped in Mandarin at the American. Her accent wasn’t easy, but Leticia made out This isn’t your country.
“Who gives a shit about countries anymore?” Ted asked in English. “Who the fuck are you?”