Reamde

This one was harder. But really not that hard, when she thought of Yuxia and the bucket. “Perfect. And total. Obedience.”

“Well chosen.”

WHEN THEY HAD turned Yuxia upside down, her greatest fear had not been being stuck headfirst into a bucket of water—for she sensed, somehow, that this was nothing more than a demonstration—but that the phone would fall out of her boot.

She had been wondering if these men had ever seen a movie. Because in the movies, prisoners were always being frisked to make sure that they didn’t have anything on them. But no such treatment had been meted out to Qian Yuxia. Perhaps it was because they were Islamists and had a taboo against touching women. Perhaps it was because she was female, therefore deemed harmless. Or maybe it was because she was wearing a snug-fitting pair of jeans and an equally snug sleeveless T-shirt, making it obvious that she was not carrying anything. Whatever the reason, they had never bothered to inspect her for contraband; they had merely taken her into a large cabin on the main deck and handcuffed her to the leg of a table. The cabin was a busy place, serving as the galley and the mess for the ship’s crew, and the table she had been chained to was the one where they took meals and drank tea. Someone was always in the place, and so she had not thought it advisable to pull the phone out of her boot and use it for anything. From time to time a buzz against her ankle would inform her that she, or rather Marlon, had just received another text message. If the place had been a little quieter, she’d have worried that someone might hear the buzz, but with the grumbling of the engines, the slap and whoosh of waves against the hull, the clanking and hissing of cookware, and bursts of static and conversation emerging from the radio’s speaker, she was safe from that. Zula had been put somewhere else, apparently in a separate cabin, and Yuxia had wondered: If their positions had been reversed, and Yuxia had been alone, what would she have done with the phone? The two basic choices being: communicate with Marlon, or call the police and tell them everything.

When the men had come in to tie her up, one of them had knelt down in front of her, and she had stifled a gasp, thinking that he knew about the phone in her boot and that he was about to reach in there and snatch it out. She had crossed her ankles to hide it. But the man had paid no attention to the contents of her boots. Instead he had passed a rope behind her ankles and brought its ends around to the front and tied them in a knot above the phone, which meant that it was trapped in there. So securely that even being turned upside down had not shaken it loose.

After the terrible thing with the bucket, they dragged her back up to the galley. One of the crew members—the one who seemed responsible for most of the cooking—put a cup of tea in front of her. She was sick and quivering, coughing and raw chested, but basically undamaged, and so she picked up the cup, pressing it hard between both of her hands, which were shaking uncontrollably, and sipped. It was actually pretty good tea. Not as good as gaoshan cha but sharing some of the same medicinal properties, which were just what the doctor ordered for someone who had recently been upside down breathing seawater.

Until now, the main thing driving her actions had been concern for Zula. And she was still very concerned about Zula. But that emotion had now been forced out by something much more intense and immediate, which was a desire to see every man aboard this vessel dead. Not even a desire, so much as an absolute nonnegotiable requirement.

Her hands were not shaking with fear. This was rage.

After a few minutes, they moved her to a cabin: the same one, she guessed, where Zula had been held earlier. Which raised the question, What had they done with Zula?

They must be taking her into Xiamen for some reason. The whole purpose of the affair with the bucket had been to force Zula to run some errand for them.

She became so preoccupied by this that she failed to notice for a long time that the phone was buzzing against her ankle. Not just once, to announce a text, but over and over again in a steady rhythm.

She snatched it out in a panic, worried that it would go to voice mail before she could answer it. The number on the screen was hers; this was Marlon, calling her with her own phone.

“Wei?” she whispered.

In the background, she could hear a rhythmic squeaking noise.

“What is that sound?” she asked.

“Csongor rowing,” Marlon said.