63

Peter Brook, one of most important stage directors of the twentieth century, describes four categories for theatrical performances: the deadly, the holy, the rough, and the immediate. Which type of performance is the most relevant for this moment in the zeitgeist?

I quickly scroll through my emails and pull up the last few from Malia. I download the Clear report and scan the addresses for Harris Ojai. There are so many fake companies it’s difficult to untangle the connections, but the credit report and the cable bills make the place on Rondelay Court the most likely choice for his personal address. The GPS shows it as a cul-de-sac off Skyfarm, somewhere near the top of the hill.

I race up Ralston and back onto Chateau, the Jeep’s tires squealing as I make the sharp left turn onto Rondelay. I slow down to approach the address quietly. It’s palatial. I pull it up on Zillow, looking for photos: 18,000 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, guest house, pool, sauna, Jacuzzi, helipad off the south lawn, wine cellar, solar generator room, 10-car garage, movie theater, gym. The house is built on the side of the hill, one floor at street level, with three floors below, hugging the side of the canyon. It looks like there are only two viable entrances, unless I hike up the canyon from below. That would probably be the safest ingress, but I don’t have time. With 18,000 square feet, it would take three SWAT teams to clear the place with any measure of security. I park on the street, slip my gun into the small of my back, and take two additional mags from my messenger bag. I also grab the old carbon fiber baton they gave me at Quantico.

The driveway is steep and curved, soaring oak trees on both sides. It’s so quiet I can hear the wind whistling through the canyon. The orange Bentley is in the driveway. The garage doors are open to reveal six more luxury cars lined up in a row. Amazon and FedEx boxes litter the front porch. I can hear K-pop music echoing from inside, the bass beat vibrating the windows.

I approach the front door and try the handle. It’s unlocked. I slip inside. The house is decorated with fussy white furniture, glass tables, lurid gold accents. The smell of cigar smoke permeates the walls. I move through the foyer, the kitchen, the enormous dining room, and an office suite—all empty.

In the living room, I’m startled by the sight of myself in the huge gilded mirrors. Down a hallway, two bedrooms are side by side, the beds piled high with gold-fringed pillows, price tags still attached. The floors are cluttered with open boxes filled with calendars, mugs, and knickknacks, all bearing Harris Ojai’s face and logo. In every room, a thousand small images of Harris Ojai stare back at me.

The beat of the K-pop song stops. I stop cold, listening for movement. Seconds later a new song starts, the vibration from below pounding through my sneakers. I find the stairs and silently make my way down, hand on my gun. On the next level is a second family room, a massive television on the wall tuned to Bloomberg, the ticker scrolling across the screen. Behind a white leather sectional, fitted with recliners and cup holders, is a fully stocked wet bar. Still no one. The music is coming from the floor beneath this one.

I move methodically through hallways and bedrooms. Inside a mahogany-paneled office, dozens of real estate contracts are stacked on a desk. The computer is on, four monitors, the keyboard between them still warm. Outlook is up, all the passwords unlocked. I move around to get a better look. I scan the names in the inbox—Laura Crowell, Chinese investment companies, something in Cyrillic, and the police chief Jepson. I copy and paste the inbox to a folder that I copy to my alias Dropbox account. Over ten thousand emails. I scan the computer’s file directory structure and move the entire tree titled “Greenfield” over to my box as well.

Past the office, I find a game room outfitted with a foosball table, billiards, six flat-screen TVs, a row of pinball machines, a layer of dust across everything. Six clocks hung high on the wall show the time in Beijing, Manila, New York, Singapore, Jakarta, and Geneva. At the far end of the room, another staircase.

I descend. At the bottom, I peer around the partition and see a workout room with wooden floors, a ballet bar, lots of mirrors. A massive screen covers the opposite wall. An aerobics instructor on a live feed is leading a workout session. In the middle of the room: Harris Ojai, clad in a green tracksuit, dripping sweat. He’s facing the screen, grooving to the workout, step two, three, four, arms pumping. The instructor is yelling at Harris, hurling abuses. “You call this a workout? You’re pathetic! Knees up! Core tight! Faster!” She has a headset on, her words booming through the speakers. I don’t know how much of the room she can see, but the mirrors leave me feeling exposed.

I slip my gun into the holster, pull down the hem of my sweater to conceal it, and try to affect the air of an assistant sheepishly interrupting her boss’s workout session. Ojai, focused on the screen, doesn’t notice me entering the room. I’m six feet behind him when the music stops.

The woman hits a button on her headset, and her angry persona instantly disappears. “Harris, you have company. Let’s pick it up tomorrow. Remember to watch your carbs.”

As Harris turns around, the screen goes blank.

“Lina! What are you—”

“I let myself in.”

Through a forced, nervous grin, “You want to talk about selling your house, I presume?”

“Harris, where is my son?”

Sweat pours down his face and darkens the armpits of his tracksuit. He shakes his head. “What are you talking about?”

I move toward him. “Where. Is. My. Son.”

He backs away, his orange neon sneakers squeaking against the floor. “Lina, whatever you’re thinking, I assure you—”

My right hand slides into my pocket, feeling for the foam handle of the tactical baton. “Where is my son, Harris?”

“Please, Lina, you are mistaken.”

I remove the baton from my pocket. With a single flick the carbon fiber expands, locking into place. Harris’s eyes go wide, fixated on the weapon.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Where is my son?” I repeat, inching closer to him, holding the baton aloft, ready to swing.

“Why would I take your son?” he says frantically. “Your son is a superstar. He scored 1,927. No one in the state ever scored 1,927 before! Your son is a gift, a miraculous gift! He makes me money! He makes money for the whole group!”

I step back, processing the information, lowering the baton to my side. “The group?”

“Yes, the group.” His eyes go wide. “You didn’t think it was just me, did you?”

“What group?”

“There are overseas investors and, of course, a few helpful, involved local citizens.”

“Investors in what, exactly?”

“Lina, I run the one of the most successful residential real estate funds in the country.” He is unable to hide the pride in his voice. “I buy and sell houses, yes, but so much more than that. It’s simple math. The test results increase property values by unbelievable margins every year. Didn’t you ever wonder why our home prices perform better than anywhere else? Don’t you wonder why they go so high, so fast? Don’t you wonder why, when interests rise, tech companies fold, and the market hits a downturn, none of it affects this town? What we do isn’t only for the investors. Our work is a gift to the homeowners. Even you, Lina!”

I stare at him in silence.

“This year’s scores will increase property values by fifteen to twenty percent, easy. Affluent parents don’t just want to live in a neighborhood with good schools anymore, they want the best schools. The Wonder Test is the benchmark. We didn’t make the rules, we just seized the opportunity. Our town has 3,302 houses. The average house value is 4.9 million. Take fifteen percent, conservatively, multiply by 3,302 houses. Lina, you understand.”

Harris seems giddy, frantic. “Intelligence is genetic,” he sputters. “I know you have no problem with math.”

He’s talking about 1.78 billion dollars. I move closer, feeling the energy of the baton in my hand, lightweight but rock-solid.

“Are you not understanding me? 1.78 billion dollars. Just this year. And that’s conservative. And it doesn’t even count our related rental project. The fund is flush, 7 billion dollars in equity, and our returns are impressive by any measure. Every year after the scores come in, we sell some of the houses we own and rent out others. We reinvest the profits and pay extraordinary dividends. We are not monsters. We are businesspeople. Billion, Lina, with a b.”

“Businesspeople don’t kidnap children.”

Harris is red, dripping sweat. “No, no, you must understand. We prepare every student as well as we can: the best tutors, the best software, even the best nutrition. And, for those who still cannot be relied upon to ace the test, we provide amazing opportunities: luxury vacations, private campus tours of Ivy League schools, all perfectly timed to miss a few days of school.”

“What about the Lamey twins, Gray Stafford, Caroline?”

“I can explain.” Harris’s voice cracks and he takes another step backward. “That was an anomaly. A mistake. Until the twins, it worked like magic. The Stafford boy, that came as a shock to me too. It wasn’t supposed to go that way. These were blips on the radar. Were they regrettable? Yes. Terrible? Yes. But they were isolated incidents. I thought we had ironed out the kinks. The Rekowskis enjoyed Dubai, the Kingsley boy was on the set of a Scorsese movie for a week. As hard as we tried, we could not find that French girl’s parents, and she refused to sit the test out. So stubborn. I feel awful about the whole thing.”

I’m trying to wrap my head around the scale of it. “The woman who talked to Caroline last Sunday, trying to persuade her not to take the test. You sent her. Who was she?”

“An assistant. When someone refuses, we must make adjustments. The investors demand perfection. They demand higher and higher dividends. And it is my job to deliver. No children were supposed to get hurt, though. My instructions were clear.” He smiles, feigning sweetness. “And I hear the French girl is safe now, back with you. No harm, no foul.”

“No harm?” I say, taking two steps forward.

He backs up, sputtering, “It wasn’t ideal, but . . .”

“Who are your investors?”

“They are wealthy, well-connected men, primarily members of the Communist Party in China. In a volatile market, a nearly risk-free investment like this is priceless. And it provides a perfect way for these overseas investors to move money offshore.”

I knew Harris was greedy, but the full extent of his greed is staggering. I inch closer. “Where is my son?”

Harris is now standing with his back to the mirrored wall. “I do not know where your son is. I swear on my life.”

With a single sweeping motion, I swing my arm, the baton whistling through the air, picking up speed. I barely feel any resistance when the tip of the baton catches Harris’s nose.

I step back, surprised to see that he is still standing. For a second, I think I must’ve missed entirely, but then I notice that Harris’s nose is no longer properly aligned. It is bent grotesquely to the left. He stares at me in shock. The perfect symmetry of his face, tens of thousands of dollars and years of plastic surgery, is suddenly undone, his facial features wildly off-kilter. A flood of bright-red blood lets loose, pouring out onto his hands, down his tracksuit, and onto the wood flooring. It is only after he sees the red that he falls to the ground, whimpering.

“Where is my son?”

“I don’t know!” he cries. “You have to believe me!” He pulls his bloodstained hands away from his face and reaches out to me. “I’m just a businessman,” he whimpers.

I flick the baton. The bone above his wrist breaks quickly and evenly, with little resistance. I look down and notice a wide diagonal stripe of blood across my white shirt. Harris rolls onto his side, cradling his broken wrist.

He screams, a gurgling sound rising up from his throat. He holds his broken wrist high above his writhing body. “Okay, okay, okay,” he whimpers. “I hired one guy.”

“What guy?”

“Kenny. He hired someone else, I never knew his identity, to take the twins and the Stafford boy, and Caroline too. But not your son, I swear, your son is gold.”

My mind is racing. Harris is telling the truth. He would give up the information if he had it. He is a coward, hiding behind his cars and his mansions, crumpling at the slightest pressure. But if he doesn’t know where Rory is, who does?

I hold the baton aloft again. “I want names.”

Harris leans back in terror, his head hitting the mirrored wall. He catches a glimpse of his bloodied, misshapen face in the mirror. “What have you done, Lina? What have you done?”

“Who. Is. In. The. Group. Who can tell me where to find my son?”

Harris wipes off his Rolex, squinting through blood and tears to see the time. “My video conference room is at the end of the hallway. The video chat was supposed to start three minutes ago. They’ll be wondering where I am. But they will not be able to help you. Go. See for yourself.”

I take a jump rope from a peg on the wall and tie his arms behind his back as he whimpers. Using an exercise cord, I secure his ankles. I don’t want to waste my handcuffs on him; I might need them later. I back out of the room, keeping my eyes on Harris. He’s writhing on the floor, a pool of blood smeared across the hardwood.

I hear voices. I move toward the sound, unholstering my gun. Behind me, I can still see Harris staring in the mirror at the ruined canvas of his face, sobbing.

The door to the conference room is open a crack. I glance in. A six-foot-wide screen is filled with squares. Each box shows a different room and phone number, people staring into webcams. They are all waiting for Ojai. They are mostly conference rooms, PRC country codes, Singapore too, Malaysia, but also a few local numbers. I see Chief Jepson. I see Dave Randall’s mother, the head of the school board. I see Laura Crowell. I search for Kobayashi’s face, but he isn’t here.

On a desk in the middle of the room is a computer monitor with a webcam. I step into the room, hold up my phone, and take a photo of the wall of people. Then I approach the monitor, allow my hand to pass in front of the webcam, using the F keys to take a screenshot.

“Harris, you’re late,” Laura Crowell says.

I move toward the chair in front of the computer. The inset box on the monitor shows me what they can see: my shoulder, the corner of my white shirt, striped with blood, my chin.

“That’s not Harris,” Jepson says. Instantly, his screen goes dark. And then another. I sit down in front of the monitor, showing my face. I see confusion in people’s eyes. I see fear.

“Where is my son?”

More squares go dark. Slowly at first, one at a time. As the participants realize what’s happening, the speed at which they disappear increases. Twenty boxes fill the monitor, then fifteen, then five. It happens in a matter of seconds.

“Where is my son?” I shout as the screens go black.

Finally, only one box remains. An empty chair. The background is familiar. I’m trying to place it, trying to remember, when I see the photograph hanging on the wall—a single swimmer slicing through an expanse of blue, snow in the background, the word “Helsinki” scrawled in red across the bottom of the photograph.

I hear her voice. A familiar face appears. Her eyebrows go up, that universal microexpression of resignation. Brenda, who welcomed me into her home, whose son invited Rory over after school. Brenda, who pretended to be my friend.

“Brenda, where is Rory?”

“Lina, it wasn’t us. We didn’t take Rory. You have to believe me.” Then all is quiet. “I’m sorry,” she finally says. Her screen goes black.