The Red Room

22

Grace has to see his face when she tells him. Though she’s unsure when competition became an integral part of her relationship with Knox, she nonetheless cannot resist a chance to put a hash mark in her column.

She video-Skypes his phone. When he doesn’t answer, she sends a text. Five impatient minutes later, Knox answers her video call. He looks tired.

“We could not have been more wrong,” she says, enjoying the look of confusion overtaking his face. It’s a handsome face, though she hopes he doesn’t know she sees it this way. “Actually,” she confesses, “you were close. In some ways, close.”

“You’re enjoying this way too much,” Knox says.

“The brother’s blue plastic ring is a Landauer dosimeter ring. Science, yes. However, a specific medical—”

“Hazmat. Dosimeters measure exposure to toxins—”

“And radiation,” Grace says, interrupting. “Landauer manufactures radiation dosimeters. In this case, a finger ring that carries your identity, as your lady friend said.” She enjoys needling Knox about his promiscuity; though she’s plucked the occasional businessman off a bar stool, she’s not proud of it. Currently her sex life is dismal to nonexistent. She is far more conservative than Knox, but that doesn’t take much. It also means she doesn’t see him as competition to her current life plan, which includes great financial gain and — eventually — her own security company. Rutherford Risk has paid too little attention to cyber crime and financial malpractice, two areas on which she would like her investigative company to focus. She cannot compete, nor would she, with Knox in the field. She considers it a symbiosis, mutualism more than parasitism, but if necessary she can see herself learning from him and draining him of his knowledge at his own expense, like a tick.

“A radiologist?”

“Perhaps.”

“Ahmadinejad is being treated for cancer?”

“Who said anything about Ahmadinejad?”

“Since when do bodyguards and agents follow a doctor around if—”

She brings a file up on the screen that hides him for a moment, though the video connection remains active in a window beneath.

“Mashe Melemet is a PhD, not an MD. He may design medical radiation equipment, but he does not practice on it.” Grace blames Knox for this cat-and-mouse gameplay. Prior to her working with John Knox, Grace was all facts and figures. She bowed at the altar of numbers. Knox has trained her by example to tease with information. She has come to enjoy the game. Immensely.

“What have you done?”

“I placed a call requesting his university transcripts, which were e-mailed to me.”

“This is why you are calling. You’re calling to crow.”

“Mashe Melemet took his doctorate at the Physics Institute’s LHEP — the Laboratory for High Energy Physics at Universität Bern. His early research and published material, highly regarded.” She gives him the best smug look she can conjure. “He studied abroad eleven years. Returned to Iran. He teaches for eight months and then goes off the grid.”

“Mashe Okle surfaces,” Knox says, speculating while emphasizing the change in family name. Nuclear physics. This is the Middle East.

“I love puzzles.” It’s true. Grace’s attraction to accounting, forensic accounting in particular, is the precision of the numbers always needing to agree. She loves a world where everything balances. Harmony. It’s the polar opposite of the family discord that drove her to seek independence.

“Jesus,” Knox says.

Grace gloats. She wants so badly to see his face. Is about to minimize the file in order to see the video window when the door to her apartment breaks open behind her.

Two men come at her, closing the distance before she fully swivels in her chair. Sitting is a position of vulnerability. She knows it. They know it. As she flexes to stand, one of them stiff-arms her back into the chair. Grace swings her foot, aiming for the outside of the other’s knee, but it’s a powerless blow and he barely reacts. Grace could try to fight, but reason gets the better of her.

The men reach for her, clearly expecting resistance. But Grace uses their tactics against them, allowing them to turn her back to the keyboard. One pins her arms as the other struggles to get a cloth bag over her head. This gesture triggers the floodgates of terror: confinement, torture, rape. She screams, bucking and writhing and straining to be free. A hand clamps over the bag, muffling her, hits her hard enough that her lips swell and she tastes blood. This, in turn, causes another instinctive struggle to be free.

Rutherford Risk deals with kidnapping on nearly a daily basis. Negotiation. Dead drops. The tracking and freeing of hostages accounts for over half of Rutherford Risk’s revenue. In this matter, Grace is far too well informed.

She is overpowered — itself a dreadful feeling. Her left hand stretches blindly for the keyboard. It’s a three key combination. Her first try misses. She fights to pull her right arm from the man’s containing grasp. He’s now bear-hugging from the side. She snaps her head decisively, knowing that the crown of the forehead can deliver a head butt with surprising strength and sustainability.

But that’s unavailable. Taking the blow just above her ear sends sparks shooting across her vision. Her opponent didn’t see it coming, though. He loosens his hold. It’s not much, more a reflex relaxation as the nervous system is stunned, but it’s enough for a final blind try at the keyboard.

Grace slides the index finger of her left hand across the keys, feeling for the raised bump on the F. Her middle and ring fingers form an isosceles triangle and she pushes down, with no way of determining if she has succeeded.

She hears the lid of the machine smack closed. Her hands are secured with a plastic tie. She’s gagged with duct tape; then the hood is lowered a second time. Stuff flies noisily off the desk. She imagines them taking both the laptop and iPhone power cords. In her mind’s eye: a face similar to one of the men guarding Mashe Okle. The same man?

Hears something dragging across the floor as she’s moved toward the door. Each man has her under an armpit. She makes herself dead weight, letting her bound ankles drag.

They bump her down the fire exit stairs, indifferent to her pain. She’s shoved into a car; a minivan based on the sound of its sliding door.

“Her phone?”

“Yes.”

“Turn it off. Pull the SIM.”

Some noise indicating effort. “Yes.”

“Battery from the laptop.”

“Done.”

The discussion between them is in Persian and surprisingly level-voiced. She retires any thought of overpowering them — it’s impossible with her wrists and ankles secured. The poison of fear has overcome her. She attempts to see through it and focus on the story. Story is everything. Story is the key to her survival.