Near Imizu
Japan
Jon Smith took as deep a breath as he could, gritting his teeth as he pushed himself into a sitting position. He closed his eyes for a moment to let the pain subside, then opened them again in order to examine the shackle anchoring his ankle to the bed.
He’d have actually laughed if he didn’t know how excruciating it would be. Of all the desperate situations he’d extricated himself from over his career, this was almost insulting. The strap was fashioned from a simple strip of leather, and the flimsy padlock securing it looked like it came off a piece of tourist luggage.
He eased himself back into the pillows to assess his situation one more time. According to the machine he was attached to, his vitals had stabilized. Generally good news. The chest tube was gone and the hole between his ribs had been closed with a few neat sutures. Even better. On the downside, though, the pain in his back was as bad as ever and now he had confirmation as to why.
The doctor caring for him didn’t speak much English—probably by design—but with some universal medical jargon and a couple of X-ray films, Smith had been able to put together a mental list of what had happened to him: five broken ribs, two of which were smashed beyond recognition, a precariously reinflated lung, massive initial blood loss, a near-fatal case of hypothermia, a scapula held together with a couple of screws, and a sutured hole where the crossbow bolt had been extracted. Actually, extracted sounded better than the pantomime the doctor had used to describe the procedure. Two hands on the shaft and a foot in the small of his back. In the man’s defense, though, combat medicine sometimes rewarded those willing to just dive right in.
So he was technically on the mend, but not so much that the chintzy ankle restraint didn’t look both a mile away and a little like Fort Knox. He scanned the medical cart next to him, but there was nothing sharp enough to cut with or small enough to turn into a pick. And even if there had been, what then? The only escape he could realistically envision involved him shuffling along, dragging an IV cart behind him. Any obstacle more formidable than an unarmed Girl Scout or, God forbid, a set of stairs would be completely insurmountable.
He reached out and carefully retrieved the cup next to his bed, sucking thoughtfully on the straw. No matter how many angles he examined the problem from, he always came to the same conclusion: he was completely, irretrievably screwed. Whoever the man was who had locked him to this bed and called in the medical team hadn’t done it out of the goodness of his heart. He wanted answers and he’d do whatever was necessary to get them.
There was a creak outside that Smith had determined was a loose floorboard ten feet or so down the hallway. He counted to three and right on cue the sound of a key turning in the door disturbed the monotonous beeping of the machine monitoring his heart. Another one-count and it began to swing open.
The unusually tall Asian woman who entered had an athletic grace that in another place and time he would have stopped to admire. A simple brown dress clung loosely to her curves, and a broad-brimmed hat completely shadowed her face. She set a small satchel on the medical cart but didn’t immediately come any closer.
Smith tried to tell himself she was a nurse, but she had a predatory way of moving that suggested something very different. This wasn’t a woman who cared for the sick and helpless. This was a woman who extracted information from the sick and helpless.
He looked away, staring up at the perfect white of the ceiling. He’d never been interrogated by a woman before and that worried him. Since he’d regained consciousness, he’d been preparing himself for a clumsy Japanese guy with a lot of tattoos and a rubber hose. In the shape he was in, he figured he wouldn’t have to hold out long. Death would quickly intervene on his behalf.
This woman was almost certainly a very different animal. She’d be aware of his injuries, inflicting pain carefully and only when necessary. She’d confuse him, drug him, try to make him psychologically dependent on her. And she’d keep him alive for as long as it took.
Smith started going over the story he’d concocted, trying to imprint it into his mind with enough force to make it real. He was a drug addict. An American military doctor from the base in Okinawa who had written one too many bogus prescriptions for himself and had the army’s investigators breathing down his neck. He’d been trying to find another supplier when the man he’d been there to meet was killed. Smith was just in the wrong place at the wrong time—an innocent bystander in a war between his new dealer and the Japanese mafia.
The woman moved soundlessly to the foot of his bed and looked down at him. Her face was still shadowed by the hat, so he looked for hints in her body language about what was to come. Even in his situation, it was hard to ignore the perfection of her outline beneath the utilitarian dress. With a little luck she’d start by trying to use her beauty to play his emotions.
When she lifted her hand and he saw the matte-black blade, though, it was clear that Lady Luck had once again turned her back on him.