The Detachment - Barry Eisler [94]
“Are you going to try to run away? Or fight us? Or in any way not do what we tell you to do?”
“No.”
“Look, for me, this is mostly just business.” I tipped my head toward Larison. “But for my associate here, it’s extremely personal. You don’t want to give him a reason, okay? Trust me, he’s looking for one.”
She looked past me at Larison, and I could tell from her expression that she believed. Believed utterly.
I let another moment go by, then said, “But I’m sure you’re going to be fine. Now, do you have any questions?”
She nodded. “Where are you taking me?”
“I can’t tell you that, other than to say it’s someplace where we can manage you, and where no one’s going to be able to find you until we let you go. Anything else?”
“What did my father do?”
“You’re going to have to ask him that. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Why do you keep asking me if I want to ask you anything, when you know you’re not going to answer?”
I smiled sadly, admiring how quickly she’d mastered herself, and liking the moxie she’d accessed even in the midst of shock and distress.
“You ask good questions,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t answer them all. I can tell you this, though. We’re going to change cars a couple times. You and I are going to ride in the trunk in one of them. And it’s going to be at least a few hours before we’re someplace comfortable, someplace with a bathroom. If you need to go before then, we’re going to need to put you in an adult diaper. Can you make it?”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m trying to make this as easy on you as I can, Mimi. But yeah, you better believe that I’m serious.”
Kei declined the diaper, and I was relieved. Maybe it wasn’t worth much under the circumstances, but I really didn’t want to subject her to the indignity. This was going to be hard enough as it was.
We spent the next two hours driving under virtually every overpass on the 101, the 110, and the 10, and going in and out of various underground parking garages, too. I took the passenger seat; Larison stayed in back with Kei. When I was satisfied, I called Dox. “You ready?”
“Ready, partner.”
“All right. We’re on our way.”
We made a left off Venice Boulevard onto South Redondo. As we came to the stop sign on Bangor Street, I saw the Fusion, waiting to make a right—Dox. He pulled out ahead of us, and we followed him south toward the 10. As soon as we were under the overpass, Dox cut right and swerved to a stop on the sidewalk. The trunk popped open. Treven hit the hazard lights, cut right onto the sidewalk and then back onto the street, skidding to a stop so that the passenger side of the van was right alongside the open trunk of the Fusion. I jumped into the back and slid open the side door. Larison was already standing there with Kei, still wrist-tied and now blindfolded. The two of us lifted her easily into the trunk and I squirmed in beside her. Larison slammed the trunk shut and Dox peeled out back onto the road, accelerating to the end of the tunnel, then rapidly decelerating and emerging at a normal speed. Treven would be right behind him in the van, same timing, same formation as when we entered.
What we were doing was creating a kind of shell game using the overpasses and the garages. We still didn’t know how Horton had tracked us to the Capital Hilton, and our working assumption was that he had used spy satellites. We had to assume he had access to the resources of the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. If so, and if he had a fixed point for a target—such as, say, Dulles Airport, or outside his daughter’s house—it was possible he could track that target from the fixed point to wherever the target went, virtually indefinitely. If our working assumption was right, we’d been lucky in Washington, maybe in the hotel parking garage, maybe elsewhere between D.C. and Los Angeles. But we didn’t want to rely on luck again. Every time we drove the van under an overpass, or in and out of a garage, we created the possibility that we’d switched Kei into one of the dozens of vehicles that emerged