The Red Room

30

Traffic is Grace’s enemy. Stopped with dozens of other pedestrians, she awaits a light change at a three-way intersection of wide avenues. The island in the center of the interchange is the destination, but the longer the light drags out, the more it feels to her as if she’ll never make it.

Adrenaline has given way to fatigue; her blood feels poisoned. The people are well dressed; Gap and Abercrombie anchor the intersection on opposite sides of the square. She clutches her phone, her lifeline. The emergency operator’s English was atrocious. Grace’s Turkish failed her. Grace told her she could see a bull, a sculpture of a bull. The woman operator told her to go there and wait. Help is on its way. At least that was what Grace thinks she said.

The man rudely pushing his way toward her clearly has other plans.

Grace tries to summon her strength, but while the physical power feels within her reach, her emotions are taxed. She is empty, unable to find a spark to light her will. She knows the terms to describe the psychological disconnect of hostages, has read the case studies; she saw these things firsthand on the Shanghai op. Her abduction was less than an hour long. How could it have affected her so?

And yet, she wants to sit down on the curb and tuck into a ball and hope no one sees her. She’s broken free and escaped; she’s beaten the odds. But this man aims to crush any hope she has of victory. She doesn’t think she can survive a second abduction. A part of her is tempted to run into the speeding traffic and take her chances, stocking feet and all.

The changing of the traffic light robs her of this option. It results in a footrace; the fresh legs of her pursuer against her own elephantine limbs. The police expect her at the rendezvous. It’s impossibly far.

And then a hallucination. Of all the faces she might have invented as her savior — her longtime lover, Lu Jian; her cadet training officer; her father — it is John Knox she envisions coming toward her through the undulating mass of pedestrians. It must be a hallucination because he doesn’t see her; he looks beyond her, his face caught in a stony expression. She angles in his direction, trying to catch his eye, struggling with vertigo amid the riot of people spinning around her.

“The taxi’s waiting across the intersection,” Knox says.

It sounds like Knox, but the man walks past without so much as a glance in her direction. Grace spins, trying to get a look back, but is turned again by a collision with a stranger. Finds herself facing the giant bull, realizes she’s only yards from the curb. The statue is a massive bronze beast in the exact center of the island. Curious tourists surround it.

Feeding her fantasy, she glances across to the far side of the intersection: a waiting taxi. Coincidence? The mind of the hostage is susceptible to all kinds of impressions; she supposes she must have spotted the taxi before inventing a Knox who instructed her to go there.

The crush of pedestrians disperses at the curb. Taxi or not, she’ll never make it. She knows better than to look back, to let her adversary know she’s on to him. It would only hasten his attack. But she forsakes her training and glances over her shoulder.

Gone.

She only looks for a split-second, but it should have been enough. Now she looks left and right, expecting him to come at her from another angle.

Car horns sound well back. The knot of pedestrians ahead begins to move; the traffic light is in her favor. She steps off the curb, the asphalt warm on the soles of her feet.