Stealing the Dragon

Chapter Fifty-four

Lin opened her eyes.

Her pupils were dilated, her vision blurry. Her shoulder was cold, almost numb, but she could feel something warm and wet running across her elbow and assumed she was still bleeding. She blinked and tried to take deep breaths to clear her head, but her lungs felt like they had collapsed, an invisible elephant sitting on her chest.

Her arms were tied behind her back and she couldn’t feel her hands. Rocking forward, she shifted her weight, and on the third try managed to sit upright and get her legs under her. Almost immediately her left hand started to pulse, then throb, until she almost fainted from the pounding and the dull, ragged pain.

That’s when she remembered the knife.

She didn’t have to see her hand to know her finger was gone. She tried to control her breathing, the way she’d been taught, but she could only manage shallow breaths. Her head was still cloudy, and she struggled to keep her eyes open.

She was sitting in a small room, almost a closet, maybe four by four with a ceiling roughly eight feet high. Buckets and mops had been pushed into one corner, and shelves covered the wall to her left, stacked with toilet paper, paper towels, tampons, and cleaning supplies. The wall behind her was empty, painted white. To her right was a door with a deadbolt lock. Directly in front of her, set against the far wall, a video camera rested on a rolling table. The red light above the lens was illuminated.

Beneath the camera was a monitor, a new TV with picture-in-picture, a little square in the corner of the screen showing one scene and the big screen showing another. On the big screen was a room dominated by some kind of conveyor belt running down the center, with a large central structure jutting upward like a smokestack toward the ceiling. At the end of the conveyor was a beige mountain almost ten feet high. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a pile of fortune cookies.

It took Lin a moment to make sense of the image in the small screen until she moved, because she didn’t recognize herself. Haggard and bloody, she bore no resemblance to the girl who boarded that ship in Fuzhou such a short time ago.

Lin closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she saw the bomb.

She saw it on the monitor first, sitting on the floor next to her, in plain sight but off to the side. A gray square with texture like clay, wires wrapped around it leading to a digital clock. Lin squinted at the small screen and then twisted her head around. The clock was counting backward in minutes.

She said the number as it changed, as if saying it aloud would give her control over its inexorable decline.

“Fifty-three…”