Take No Names, page 22
“I’m awake.”
“Plan doesn’t work if you’re in a coma.”
“Had some morphine around noon,” I say. “There’s, uh. Fatigue factor.”
She hugs her knees to her chest.
“I should’ve listened to you. Turned myself in,” I say. “Prison would’ve been better than getting shot and causing a war.”
Her lips press together in a line. “What would Dad say? ‘Fù shuǐ nán shōu.’”
—Spilt water is hard to gather.
“You hated Dad.”
“Sure, it’s that simple, dumbass. I hate you, too.”
“I could go to prison now. Stop off at the hospital,” I say.
She nods brightly. “Hand off the baton, I’ll take it from here.”
We both know I won’t. “I’m Intruder A, not you.” I try to tap her nose with my finger, but miss. “And Mark would bail.”
“Dude needs you. But he’ll never admit it.”
The pickup slows to a crawl, inching through a procession of a dozen handcarts stacked with crates of avocados.
“He doesn’t need me.” I tip my head back onto the side of the truck. “He just needs someone.”
I hear Jules shrug. “Like everyone else,” she says, and slaps me a couple more times. “No sleeping.”
“I only need. Tofu. Pozole,” I say.
By the time the pickup delivers us to the restaurant, my cheeks are raw from being slapped. I’m just conscious enough to be impressed by Jules’s strength as she hauls me through the kitchen.
“Those kickboxing classes. Must be. The bomb.” I raise my eyebrows as high as they go, but my eyelids stay shut.
Chairs scrape across the floor. Harried voices. More hands, laying me on a table.
“—fair amount of blood,” Art is saying.
“—more of that broth,” Mark is saying.
“—a stimulant,” Sun is saying.
I manage to peel an eyelid open, see Sun giving Art a pointed look. Art purses his lips and rocks his head back and forth. Then he steps away and calls out, “¡Oye, Pá!” I hear a brief argument in Spanish, the kind of talk you’d like to never have with your father. And then he’s back, holding a tiny spoon of white powder in my face.
“Snort it, kid,” he says.
I muster enough breath to make a skeptical noise.
Sun says, “You must raise your heart rate.”
He covers one of my nostrils with his thumb and tips my head forward, and all of a sudden, my eyes are wide open again, and I’m sitting up on the table.
“Gak!” I observe.
“Easy,” Art says.
Jules’s eyebrows knit together. “I think we’re in new territory.”
Mark shakes his head. “There was that one time? At that dive in Beacon Hill?”
I’m blinking rapidly, scraping my upper lip over my front teeth. “That was baking soda.”
“Potato, potato.” He eyes the little vial in Art’s hand. “You know, my shoulder’s kind of bothering me, too.”
Art screws the tiny spoon back into the vial, tosses it back to Rafa, and says, “You might need the ER.”
I shake my head, the drugs lighting up my mind with vim. “I’m fine.”
“Pressure is crucial,” says Sun. He’s holding a roll of surgical tape from the first aid kit.
I picture my twin entry wounds beneath the wet bandages. Crimson blood oozing through the crystallized hemostatic powder.
“Okay,” I say, and then do some yelping as Jules holds up my elbow and Sun runs the tape under my arm and over my shoulder several times.
“Wow! All right! The gate to the neighbor’s house will be unlocked tonight, and the owners will be out until one a.m. NGAP will have a driver waiting for us at the Hipódromo. We do the thing.”
Mark’s eyes go big. “Those maniacs said yes?”
I nod. “They’re not too keen on the idea of APEX turning Mexico City into Baghdad.”
“So what’s the signal?”
“You’ll hear us.”
“Man. Man.” He rubs his eyes. “Shit just got real.”
“Shèbèi dōu zhǔnbèi hǎo le ma?”—You’ve got everything ready? Jules asks Sun.
He turns his head to indicate Mark’s backpack and mine, repacked with the weapons we’ve accumulated on our journey, as well as some additional gadgets from Mark’s duffel.
She goes to him and gives him a hug: not a sister’s hug, or a lover’s hug, but a roommate’s hug. A really good roommate.
“Bǎozhòng”—Take care of yourself, she says, and he nods again. I see the spring coiling in his body, the readiness to act. And in that moment, I know he’ll play his part to perfection.
“Thank you,” I say. “For keeping me alive.”
He looks at me with his usual blank intensity. The corners of his mouth move upward about a millimeter.
I look away before emotion takes over, not quite ready to forgive my father’s killer while coming up on party drugs.
“Jules,” I say. “What do you say? Would you send Mark his share?”
“Oh, yeah. Fine.” She pulls out her phone.
Mark goes stiff like he just remembered leaving the oven on. “I never set up an account. I could do it now. Five minutes. Aw, fuck it.” He’s standing there with his backpack on, his hands gripping the shoulder straps. His stance unsteady. His face pale as bone.
“If you don’t make it there”—he frowns at his shoes—“no amount of money’s going to save my ass. But hey.” He starts toward the back door. “I call shotgun. Oh. Too soon?”
Art shakes his head. “You and Sun should take that motorcycle. That way, you’ll at least have a ride if Victor and Jules get, uh. Held up,” he says. “I’ll drop them at the Baoli.”
34
Art puts the truck in park and kills the engine on the far side of the huge, dark roundabout. The protesters have left the plaza now. The traffic on La Reforma is sparse. The Mexican police are gone from the other side of the fence, but the Longdai security guards in black jumpsuits remain.
I check Dad’s Casio. “Ten forty-four,” I say.
“Hey,” Jules says. “The summer solstice is at ten forty-six.”
And so we sit for a moment as the hidden sun reaches the northernmost point of its celestial journey for the twenty-fifth time in my life, finding me in a vegan chef’s truck, watching four naked men in cowboy hats pick up trash around a smashed bronze of Columbus.
“Heck of a day,” Art says.
“Thank you for everything,” I say. “You should ditch the truck. I’d feel awful if anything happened to you because of the help you gave us.”
Art gives me a sardonic look. “Kid, like your sister said, we’re all making our own calls here. You didn’t force me to take any risks I didn’t feel like taking,” he rumbles. “Trust me, I’ve done worse for less. If you think you’re living fast, you should’ve seen me at your age.”
He extracts his soft pack of Pall Malls from his breast pocket, taps one out, and stares at it for a moment before tucking it behind his ear. “Thanks to you little punks, ol’ Rafa gets his ninth life. And I’ll have enough left over to open the finest plant-based cantina that Salamanca’s ever seen. So. You’re welcome.”
I shake his right hand with my left, and Jules gives him a hug. Then we hop out, Jules slinging the rope over her shoulder. We walk across the roundabout toward the fence. When we reach the plaza, I glance back.
The truck is still there, but all I can see through the windshield is the glow of an ember.
“Bu yào kào jìn!” shouts one of the guards—Do not approach!
We slow our steps and raise our three functional arms in the air. As we get closer, I recognize a few of the guards from this morning’s scuffle. The skinny guy I bashed in the chest with the mop. The older, stocky one who shot me, the one Sun kicked in the head. He’s got a stripe of white tape across his nose. The buff one who asked me, —Mr. Lijia, is something wrong?
“Wǎnshàng hǎo,” I say. “Shì wǒ, Rùqīnzhě A.”
—Good evening. It’s me, Intruder A.
And as Jules and I step up to the fence, the light from the atrium’s windows falls onto our faces. The guards who didn’t meet me this morning are peering forward. The ones who did are flinching back. Nobody seems quite sure what to do.
We lie down on the ground.
“Wǒmen shì lái tóuxiáng de,” Jules sings to the paving stones—We’re here to surrender.
A hushed discussion takes place, and then I hear one of the concrete post stands scraping across the ground. Footsteps approach us. Hands frisk my ankles, waist, pockets, finding nothing.
And I’m thinking, See the bandages, have some mercy, and please don’t grab my right arm, when the guard doing the frisking grabs my left arm and yanks me to my feet.
I look into his face—the older guard with the stripe of tape across his nose—and silently thank him. Then another guard wrenches my right wrist forward to cuff it to my left, and I squeal like a piglet.
“Ānjìng”—Quiet!
Nose Tape pushes me through the gate. He mutters something to his smartwatch and tips his head to the side, listening to a voice in his ear. Then he issues a few instructions to the remaining guards before leading us into the building. On the other side of the revolving doors, the vast atrium is a spooky variation of itself from earlier today, when it was filled with the merry bustle of money being made. Now the presiding mood in the Baoli is hushed like, Someone did a boo-boo.
And my skin tingles as I remember that I did that boo-boo, and only I can undo it. I feel like skipping. Is it the blood loss, or maybe the drugs? When I turn my head to look at Jules, I see that she, too, has a lively expression on her face, despite the lack of entry wounds on her body and cocaine in her sinuses.
She was right: it feels better to face the music. I’m finally turning myself in. Yes, in another country. For another crime. But for the first time in sixteen months, I’m owning it. Me, Victor Li. Intruder A.
Nose Tape pulls a remote from his pocket and points it at the turnstile, which slides open. He walks through without breaking stride. The escalator on the other side is stationary now, and he descends the steps at a jog. The underground corridor is once again lit bright as a tanning bed. There’s labeled masking tape all over the ground, the vestiges of ballistic analysis.
And then we arrive at the door to the security center, and Nose Tape swipes his badge again. The gravity of the situation returns to me. I remember what’s at stake: my life, for one. Jules’s, too, and many others. Quizás.
The door unlatches with a digital plink.
The interior appears as Sun described it: lots of cool white light, keyboards, monitors, and wheely chairs. Hum of electronics, odors of warm circuit and screen cleaner. And a barred cell right there in the far corner of the room. Space is limited underground, I guess. Still, putting your prisoners within sight of your security operations seems like a bad idea.
Unless you can make sure that they never see the light of day again.
The trio of security center denizens stand up as Nose Tape leads us across the room to the cell. He swings the barred door open, stands aside, and turns to fix us with a baleful look.
“Ladies first,” I mutter, and Jules affects a curtsy as she steps in and sits down on the short steel bench. I sit down next to her. The door slams shut. A latch slides into place.
“Shēnshàng yǒu dōngxī ma?”—Anything on their persons?
The last security guard to emerge from the security center—the one who Sun said was in charge—is talking to Nose Tape now. There’s a purple bruise on her chin where Sun hit her with the jug of cleaning fluid, and her right hand is wrapped in white gauze from wrist to palm.
—She had this. Nose Tape holds out the rope.
—I have these, too, Jules says, pulling two rings off her fingers and holding them out to the guard in her cuffed hands.
One emerald, one sapphire.
The woman in the black jumpsuit peers at the rings in Jules’s hands, takes them from her, holds them up to the light. Then she turns around and orders everybody out of the security center. She turns to Nose Tape.
—You, too, she says.
He shoots her a wounded look before shuffling to the exit.
She produces another remote from a jumpsuit pocket and aims it, one at a time, at the three security cameras in the room. One by one, the little red lights on the cameras go dark.
She rolls a chair over from a computer console and sits down in front of our cell. Folds her arms across her chest. Studies us for a long minute.
Then she unfolds her arms, sits forward with her elbows on her knees, and holds the rings in her palm between us.
—Where did you get these? she asks.
—Your suitcase, I say.
35
It takes me about ten minutes to get through the first part of the story, from Hull Secure Facilities to Los Tres Piratas. Jules chimes in now and then, helping out when my vocabulary fails me. The first time she does this—when she supplies the word for fugitive, “táowǎngzhě”—I give her an incredulous look like, When did you learn that? Apparently, living with Sun Jianshui has improved her Chinese just as much as his English.
“Jiù yìshí dào tāmen shì bǐjiào zhùmíng de, Měiguó jūnshì, uh, zěnmeshuō,” I’m saying—We realized that they were a relatively notorious American, uh, how would you say it—
“Hétóngshāng,” Jules interjects.
“Hétóngshāng?”
“Contractor.”
I shrug my shoulders and repeat, “Hétóngshāng.”
Song Fei holds up a finger like, Just a minute. She pulls a phone from her pocket, stands up, and paces to the other side of the room.
“How do you think it’s going?” I ask Jules.
“Good, I think. It’s her, that’s one. And she’s listening.”
“That’s two.”
She comes back a minute later and says, “Jìxù shuō”—Keep talking.
Another ten minutes, and we’re caught up to the present moment and the plan we made. Her eyebrows shoot up when we tell her the terms we agreed to with NGAP, including the concessions they want from Longdai in exchange for their help tonight.
—I know it’s a lot to ask. We just want to set things right. We had no idea what Pearce intended, I’m saying. —If I’d known the kind of damage we were causing—
She puts her hand up to silence me again. Fills her cheeks with air and lets it out slowly.
Then she says, —How did you recognize me?
—We knew from Pearce that you were Longdai security, and then we realized that you lied to him about having defected, I say. —It made sense that you would come back to Mexico after being deported from the United States. And that you would be here, running the security center. When I shot at the barrel of your gun this morning, I injured your right hand. On the forestock. Which means your left hand was on the trigger. I knew from the handwriting in the notebook that you were left-handed.
She holds her bandaged right hand in front of her face and smiles incredulously.
—Circumstantial evidence. What if you were wrong?
—It would’ve been a lot harder to explain to someone else, I admit.
—Anyway, Jules says, —this was our best idea.
Song drums the fingers of her left hand on her knee. —Well, she’s saying, when the door slams open and Lai Yixun barrels in.
Song hops to her feet, meets him between us and the door. He cranes his neck to look at us, his hands clenched into fists. She puts a hand on his shoulder and redirects him to the other side of the room. Speaks to him in low tones as he makes impatient facial expressions, hands on his hips.
“Hoo boy,” Jules says.
“Rough day at the office,” I say.
“Let me talk,” she says. “Keep your head down. Because it’s your face that he’s been hating all day.”
They come walking over now. Lai stops in front of the cell and drills me with a contemptuous glare.
Jules stands up.
—I am Li Lianying. His sister. She strikes a conciliatory tone. —We’re very sorry about your train.
Lai looks from Jules to Song and back.
—Is this really happening? he says.
—We want to expose the people who are behind this, Jules says.
—So you confess! Publicly! He spits the words in my direction. —Tell the world that APEX hired you to do what you did.
Jules shakes her head. —You know that won’t work. We can’t prove anything without your help.
He scoffs. —You want my help.
—We can help each other. If we can prove that APEX instigated the conflict, then you’ll be vindicated, and the United States will be humiliated. The president will stand down. He doesn’t want war. Pearce is forcing his hand.
Lai stares incredulously at her for a moment, then runs both palms downward over his face. —Tell me clearly, so I understand, how you could prove that Whitney Pearce is behind this.
—Well—Jules counts on her fingers—one, first-person accounts from the intruders about what happened.
—Confessions.
—Confessions, sure. Two, the audio recording that Song Fei made of Pearce asking her to infiltrate the Baoli and buying painite from her.
He turns to Song Fei and says, —I thought you lost that recording.
She looks at Jules.
—It’s in the hair clip, right? Jules asks.
Song nods curtly. —I was afraid to back it up. I was under constant surveillance. If I were caught in the United States, I would be treated as a spy.
—Even though you were just trying to warn them about APEX, Jules says to her.
Song Fei casts her eyes downward. —The Americans I met were not receptive.
—Because when Americans look at you, they don’t see a person, Lai sneers. —Only a foreign threat.
—Well, Jules says, —not every American thinks that way.
“I spent two years at your top university.” Lai switches into his deliberate English. “Every week, somebody asked me, ‘Yixun, what’s the Chinese perspective on this issue?’ If they even bothered to learn my name. One professor called me John for a whole semester. Another called me Chucky.”
