Qubit, page 11
He got up and stumbled into the bathroom, rinsed his mouth with mouthwash, then urinated sitting down because standing took too much effort. He rinsed his hands and returned to the bedroom to put on some sweatpants. He’d walked out into the living before realizing he’d forgotten his phone. He went back and picked it up, looking absently at the message indicator again.
It was good they’d left a message. He never answered calls from numbers he didn’t recognize. Opening the fridge and staring inside revealed he was out of Coke. He was out of everything. He’d hardly spent any time in his apartment for the past few months.
Once again, he’d had too much to drink and vaguely remembered Kafka dropping him off. He put his hand to his mouth—his lip was healing nicely. Apparently, he hadn’t gotten into another fight.
Grabbing his wallet and keys from a bookshelf by the door, he walked down the hall to the elevator and pressed the down button. He hated having to go out for coffee. It defeated the whole point, which was to wake up. By the time he’d get to the coffee shop, he’d be already half-awake. Of course, he was effectively unemployed again, so he didn’t have anything in particular to do.
A chime indicated the elevator had arrived, and the doors opened. Lock got in and pressed the button for the parking garage. He could maybe contract some small programming jobs. Web sites. Little mobile apps. As long as it was too small to bother with a background check, he had as good a chance as anybody. He’d manage somehow. The truth was, it was a huge relief to be done with Kirin Patel and the Wave Nine. It had been a big mistake from the start.
The elevator chimed again, and Lock ambled out into the parking garage, humming as he want, still trying to get that damned Hawaii Five-O theme right. He’d have to find it on YouTube or something, otherwise it was going to drive him nuts. He reached his truck, unlocked it, and got in. It took three tries, but the engine turned over, and Lock backed out, absently pulling his phone out of his pocket at the same time. The focus of his eyes alternated between the road and his phone as he drove the truck out of the garage and onto Orleans Street. He dialed up the message and then sat back and waited expectantly for the voice mail to play.
“You need to learn to do as you’re told,” said a deep, heavily accented voice.
Another much more familiar voice came on. “Dad?”
“Sophie?” Lock answered, forgetting for a moment that he was listening to a voice mail.
“Dad? It’s me, Sophie. What’s going—?”
There was a rustling sound and the deep voice returned. “Get back to work.”
Lock’s truck slowed and began to veer to the right, toward a curb flanking an abandoned field. He forced himself to focus on driving. He couldn’t remember where he was going. Just drive straight, he decided. He picked up the phone and dialed a number.
“Nine-one-one emergency services,” a voice answered. Lock hung up.
He found himself at Third Street and turned right because it was the easiest thing to do. He took a sudden hard right a block later onto Fort Street and hit the gas. “Kirin, you motherfucker,” he said aloud. He hit a red light at Cass and began to bounce in his seat, his jaw set. He pressed the accelerator to the floor as the light changed.
He looked up into the rearview mirror and noticed a black Mercedes SUV behind him. Kirin always traveled in one. He was suddenly certain the man was following him.
He hit another light at Woodward and pounded the dashboard. “C’mon, God dammit!” he yelled, looking back up into his rearview. He saw the SUV pull up right behind him. He got out of his truck, marched up the SUV, and started pounding on the driver’s-side window.
The window rolled slowly down, revealing a sneering, dark-skinned man wearing sunglasses. “Don’t be stupid. Just get back in your truck. Talk to Kirin.”
Lock glared at him. There was another dark, burly man on the passenger side behind another pair of sunglasses. Where had these guys come from? He turned to the driver. “Where is she? Where the fuck is my daughter?”
A car pulled up behind them, honked, and then swerved around. The driver of the SUV spoke slowly with a thick accent. “If you care about her, you’ll get the fuck back in your truck and go see Kirin.”
Lock peered into the backseat of the SUV, which was empty. “Where is Kirin?” Lock yelled.
“In his office, you fucking idiot,” said the driver as the window rolled back up.
Lock slammed the heel of his palm into the door of the SUV. Once back inside his truck, he floored it again, only to hit yet another light at Congress. He yelled at the light, but then caught himself. He needed to think clearly and conserve his energy.
The truck lurched forward again, speeding down Woodward. Lock took a hard left at East Jefferson, tires squealing. He ran the light at Randolph and then pulled up in front of the tall glass cylinders of the RenCen. He got out, ran up the steps into the lobby, and walked briskly to the elevators. He punched the elevator button repeatedly until the doors to one of the elevators opened. Two businessmen in gray suits tried to get into the elevator with him, but Lock pushed them back out.
“Sorry, in a hurry!” he yelled, frantically slammed the palm of his fist on the button to close the doors.
He reached Kirin’s floor and made his way down the corridor to his suite, storming through the front doors. The prim secretary said something to him, but he ignored her. He threw open the door to Kirin’s office so hard it bounced back and hit his shoulder. Kirin was sitting on the couch, legs crossed, sipping from a steaming mug.
“Where’s my daughter?” roared Lock, taking two steps into the room and stopping at the coffee table. He stifled the urge to upend it and break the glass top over Kirin’s head.
“She’s safe,” said Kirin, barely glancing up. “As long as you behave yourself.”
“God dammit, Kirin, I swear to God—”
“You’ll do what?” said Kirin, anticipating Lock’s threat before he could get it out. “Sit down. And listen. Before you get you and your daughter killed.”
Lock faltered. “Where’s my daughter?” he repeated.
Kirin laughed. “Do you really think I’m going to tell you? Lock, please. Sit down. You may not understand this, but I’m your friend. I may be the only one you’ve got right now.”
Kirin seemed entirely unthreatened by Lock, in spite of the fact that Lock could easily have leapt across the coffee table and tried to strangle him. If anything, he seemed amused. Lock felt disoriented. He refocused on Sophie. “If you were my friend, you’d tell me where my daughter is.”
Kirin frowned and gestured to his big easy chair. “Lock, sit down. Your daughter will be fine. As long as you keep your head. I didn’t want it to come to this. I tried to warn you. I could see where this was going. I tried to help you, but you’re too much of hothead. And now…well, now we have to deal with this.”
Lock found himself sitting down, even as the room seemed to be getting smaller. He perched on the edge of the chair as though he might change his mind at any moment, unwilling to concede the initiative completely.
“That’s better. Now listen. The people I work for…they are very dangerous people.” Lock noticed that Kirin had said the word dangerous the way most people would say friendly. “It’s important at this juncture that you understand that, Lock.”
Lock continued to glare from the edge of his seat. Why wasn’t he punching Kirin in the face over and over until he told him where Sophie was?
“They will kill you and your daughter without a second thought. Even if I tell you—”
“They? Who’s they?” Lock thought back to the two men in the SUV that had been following him.
“I can’t get into that. All you need to know is that they’re rather…ruthless.”
Lock shifted his stony gaze to the glass surface and saw himself staring back. The two men in the SUV. That’s why he wasn’t beating Kirin senseless. He looked up at the door, half expecting them to walk through it.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” Kirin was saying, very pleasantly, as though they were planning a company picnic. “Your going to go home and let this all sink in. Then tomorrow you’re going to come into the lab and you’re going to write some software for me, starting with harvesting those broker accounts. That’s all. That’s what comes next. If you do your job, as I have no doubt you will, as you always have, you’ll see Sophie again alive and well, and everything will be fine. It’s very simple. Don’t make it complicated. Understood?”
Lock found himself nodding his head.
Kirin took a sip from his mug and leaned back on the couch. Lock picked up the powerful scent of chai. He waved his hand dismissively. “Now go home, Lock. Go home and think this through. Calmly.”
Lock looked up, his eyes vacant, and stared at Kirin. He felt as though something had been drained out of him. Something that had left him alive only in a purely physiological sense. He stood up, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, and walked toward the door. He heard Kirin saying something as he left the office. Something about feeling better in the morning. He walked out through the lobby and past the two large men he’d seen in the SUV, who were just arriving. One of them said something that might have been a threat, but Lock ignored them.
He took the elevator down to the building lobby, sharing it with two women in knee-length skirts. Their perfume gave him a headache. He wandered out the glass doors and down on the steps, where a traffic cop was placing a ticket on his windshield.
A cop. He could tell the police. Tell them everything. What happened to him didn’t matter any more. All that matter was getting Sophie back.
But if he talked to the police, they’d just kill Sophie.
A wave of nausea hit him. He stumbled around to the driver’s side and got in, ignoring the ticket and the blaring horn of cars zooming past. He closed the door and stared at the steering wheel. He leaned back in his seat and tried to breathe, but he couldn’t seem to get the air into his lungs. A knock on the window startled him. It was the cop again.
Lock rolled down the window reflexively. “Anything wrong?” asked the cop. Lock stared at him, feeling as though he’d been paralyzed. “Well…you can’t stay here,” the cop scolded. Lock noticed his skin was pockmarked. Probably had really bad acne as a teenager. He handed him the ticket he’d left on the windshield. “And don’t forget this. Now get a move on. You’re blocking traffic.”
Lock took the ticket and nodded absently. He watched the cop step back, then pulled his truck out, ignoring another blaring horn, and begin rolling with the flow of traffic. Cold air blasted the left side of his face, but Lock didn’t bother to roll up the window. He drove up East Jefferson and past the Chrysler Freeway. In the next lane over, cars zoomed past, and Lock considered simply swerving in front of one. But that wasn’t reliable—he might survive. He drove past the strip mall with Jet’s Pizza, its brightly lit sign reminding him of how he used to take Sophie there on the way home from the lake.
The lake. He could go to the lake. He took a hard right across a lane of traffic and sped down toward the River Walk. He pulled into a circular drive and stopped, with a vague idea of drowning himself. He ignored the walkways, cutting across the grass until he reached the edge of the water where a small seawall had been constructed from broken blocks of concrete. He fell onto his knees to the ground.
He heard Karen’s voice from the night after his conviction had been handed down. We’re not going to come see you, Lock. I want her to forget all about you. I want her to forget how you let her down.
He should have killed himself long ago. Or at least stayed out of Sophie’s life. Just like Karen had asked him to after he’d gotten out. But it was too late now.
The logic of it was cruel and unyielding. They will kill you and your daughter without a second thought, Kirin had said. If he killed himself now, Kirin or his thugs would simply kill Sophie. Kill her and dispose of the body. That would be their most expedient, least risky course of action. So he couldn’t kill himself. He couldn’t run from this.
This time…this time had to be different. Somehow.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and stared at it. Was it possible that he really did have a voice-mail message from the kidnappers with Sophie’s voice on it? Had Kirin really just told him his daughter’s life was in his hands?
The wind whispered in its blustery way and gave him the answer. He remembered sitting in a parking lot in a strip mall on a rainy afternoon, just outside his father’s dental practice. He’d met his father exactly twice before, and one of those times he had been a newborn. He remembered sitting in the parking lot for an hour. And then he’d driven away before his father had closed up for the day. He could remember swearing to Kafka afterwards, through tears that shamed him so deeply he’d never thought of that day since, swearing that he’d never be like his father.
And when Karen became pregnant with Sophie, Lock was the one who’d wanted to get married and have the baby. He’d been the one to convince Karen that they could manage it. He remembered smoking cigars with Kafka outside his and Karen’s rundown little apartment in East Detroit and getting dizzy because they had never smoked cigars before. He wasn’t going to be like his father. He was going to be there for Sophie.
Except that somehow, he hadn’t been. She was four when he’d gone away and eight when he returned and twelve before she had begun to trust him again. And now, he’d betrayed her—again.
He stared out at the lake, pleading with it, hoping for some long-forgotten magic that would let him correct this one horrible mistake. Just this one. That was all he asked.
But the lake’s magic would not be summoned for him, and Lock knew why. From almost the very start, Kirin had let him know his daughter was in danger. Her security. Lock had known what he meant. That’s why Kirin was the first person he called when he’d thought Sophie was missing, the night she’d only been staying at Krista’s, with a dead cell phone battery.
How long had he been sitting there on the grass? His legs were numb. He unfolded them and was greeted by the sensation of stepping into a mound of tiny burrs. He hobbled over to a nearby overlook and leaned back against the railing, facing away from the lake, shivering.
His jumbled thoughts began arranging themselves into a series of questions that all had the same answer, asked again and again and again, like an unholy prayer. The police? Nope, they’d kill Sophie. Kill Kirin? Nope, they’d kill Sophie. Kill himself? Nope, they’d kill Sophie.
He walked slowly back to his truck, which mercifully hadn’t been towed. He opened the door and got inside. He fumbled for the keys in the pocket of his sweatpants and started the car. His thoughts faded away gradually, replaced with a still and suffocating certainty.
He was Sophie’s only chance to come back home alive.
Part 3
Hopeful
11
* * *
Twenty thousand feet above the Midwestern United States
Thursday, April 26th
1:00 p.m. EST (Eastern Standard Time)
Sophie felt the burlap sliding up against her skin and was momentarily blinded, blinking rapidly as her eyes adjusted to the light. She sucked in a deep lungful of recirculated air, free of the suffocating warmth and heavy scent of potatoes coming from the sack that had covered her head. Blotches of color filtered through rapidly blinking eyes. She had already guessed from the sounds of nearby airplanes taking off and landing that she had been taken aboard an airplane of some kind; with her hood removed, she could see that it was a small jet. The two dark-skinned men in suits and a cowed, olive-skinned flight attendant were aboard. They spoke in short, unintelligible bursts, and one of the men slapped the flight attendant on the rear. Both men laughed.
Sophie turned around and looked behind her, but she was at the back of the plane. There was no sign of Krista. She remembered the car had made a stop before arriving at the airport. She’d heard the door open. Had they simply let Krista go? Sophie shuddered, thinking about the alternatives.
The flight attendant brought her a Coke. “Thank you,” she stuttered as she took the plastic cup. The ice rattled slightly as Sophie tried to steady her hand. Any fleeting thought of appealing to the attendant for help vanished when she saw the woman’s face. Sophie could tell she’d been crying—her eyes were red and swollen, and her mascara was smeared faintly down one cheek. The attendant walked back to the front of the plane, and Sophie tried to sip her Coke, but she was hyperventilating, which made it impossible to drink.
One of the men got up from his seat and took two long strides toward her. Sophie flinched involuntarily and gagged on the reek of cologne. The man reached out with one hand, palm up, uttering incomprehensible syllables. She saw that there was a small blue pill in his hand. After a moment, she realized he was saying, “Go on, take this, take this now” in heavily accented English. She reached out with a trembling hand and took the pill, then put it in her mouth. She inhaled sharply so that she could take a sip of Coke and swallow the pill. She looked up and saw the man staring at her intently. Sophie looked away, fighting an urge to scream or cry, she wasn’t sure which. Apparently satisfied, he returned to his seat.
She wondered where they were going. Had that really been her dad on the phone? What had they done with Krista? She felt her lungs filling with air and her eyes were closing. She couldn’t keep her head up. The flight attendant was there, reaching down, then cradling her. She was lying on her side, there was a blanket, she was thirsty, men were speaking but not saying anything, she was at the beach, Krista was there, she was being pulled out by the current…
Lafayette Park, Detroit • Lock's Apartment
Thursday, April 26th
8:00 p.m. EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)
Lock sat at his kitchen table, staring mournfully at a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels and a box of pizza with two slices missing. He’d called Kafka, but Kafka was at work and hadn’t answered the phone. At least the whiskey had calmed him down enough so that he could breathe normally.
