Dark Target (7 page)

“Will you walk with me?” she said.

“Sure,” he said.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said. “I could get in big trouble if anybody knew I was talking to you.”

“Not from me, you can’t,” DeLuca said. “I can protect you if you need protection. I have close friends in very high places.”

“Not high enough,” she said. “Cheryl didn’t want to be transferred. They made her leave. Do you really think she’d prefer
processing new recruits in Albuquerque to working here? And don’t let Major Huston tell you how much he loved Cheryl—he thought
she’d only gotten to where she was because the Army needed to have a Native American on the program. He called her a pagan
once, to her face.”

“I appreciate you telling me this,” DeLuca said.

“I think they wanted to shut her up,” Reznick said. “I think she’d found out about something they didn’t want her to know.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“I don’t know,” Reznick said. “And I don’t know about the boyfriend stuff. I couldn’t tell you this inside, but she told me
she was gay. At least she let on that way to other people because there were so many men trying to ask her out that she had
to do something to make them leave her alone. Though in the military, you can’t come right out and say you’re gay—don’t ask
and don’t tell. Don’t ask for your rights and don’t tell anybody when they’ve been abridged.”

“Why did she tell you, then?” DeLuca asked. “It’s all right, I promise you. Any conversation you have with me is completely
protected.”

“So you think,” she said. Her paranoia was palpable. “She told me because I’m gay. And now that I’ve told you, I could be
court-martialed. I’ll just have to trust you.”

“What men?” DeLuca asked. “Who was interested in her?”

“Who wasn’t?” Reznick said. “The Mountain is a pretty catty place, though the official term for it is ‘close-knit community.’
You hear rumors all the time.”

“Rumors?” DeLuca said. “About what? Or who?”

“That she was having an affair, with a married officer,” Reznick said. “But you hear things like that about everybody. I heard
that about me. And frankly, when I did, I let it spread because it meant people were more likely to believe my partner was
just my roommate.”

“So you think Cheryl talking about a boyfriend was just a cover story?” DeLuca said.

“I don’t know,” Reznick said. “Either that or pretending she was gay was a cover story. I can usually tell, and if you ask
me, I don’t think she was. Gay.”

“Why do you think she took the files?” he asked. “Assuming she took them.”

“I don’t know,” Reznick said, “but knowing Cheryl, I’m sure she had to have had a very good reason. She loved this country
… Colonel…”

“Agent DeLuca,” he told her.

“She loved it more than anybody I’ve ever known. And she considered herself one of the original owners. But she loved what
the military had done for her, too. It had given her everything. She would never betray it. I know that. That’s all I can
say. I have to go now.”

He considered her words as he started his car. He wondered if he wanted to drive to Albuquerque tonight or wait for the storm
to pass—he’d wait to see what the conditions were like, once he got down the mountain.

In the Shijingshan district of Beijing, Wu Xiake leaned out the window of the men’s toilet and took one last drag on his cigarette
before flicking the butt into the river below. Some day, he half-expected to flick a cigarette butt into the Yongding and
watch the entire river catch fire, such was the level of pollutants and chemicals in the water. He’d gone to an illegal Website
one night and read a story about how the massive levels of pollution resulting from the recent Chinese economic revolution
were destroying the earth’s environment at a dramatic rate, and how Chinese pesticides entering the river traveled from there
to Bo Hai Bay and the Gulf of China and then the Yellow Sea and the Pacific Ocean and ended up in the Arctic Circle and ultimately
in the fatty tissues of polar bears, where they acted like artificial estrogens that were making the polar bears gay. Wu Xiake
had other things to worry about, besides gay polar bears.

He cursed, then returned to his cubicle. In the next cubicle, his friend Cui Chen was working on his desktop computer, moving
frame by frame through the first half of the new movie that had streamed in that afternoon over the Internet from their friends
in America, an action thriller starring Bruce Willis and Uma Thurman. At least this time, whoever had sneaked the digital
camera into the theater to copy the film had held the camera steady. The last film that Wu had worked on, the bootlegger had
coughed loudly every few minutes. Cui’s job was to translate the first half of the new film into Mandarin for subtitles. Wu’s
job was the translate the second half, but the Boss wanted it done overnight, and Wu had had very little sleep the night before.
If there was another job available to him, he’d take it, but at sixty-six years of age, who would take him? He’d once been
one of the top English-to-Mandarin dubbers in the business, the voice of actors ranging from Paul Newman to Curly of The Three
Stooges, with the best “nyuk nyuk nyuk” that anybody had ever heard, but now with DVDs, speed was of the essence, and nobody
wanted dubbers anymore. It was much faster to go with subtitles. Everything was so hurried. His knowledge of English had gotten
him this job, but he felt it was only a matter of time before the Boss got rid of him.

“Did you solve the problem?”
Cui asked him in Mandarin without looking up from his computer screen.

“I can’t do it. It is too idiomatic. I was thinking about it, but it makes no sense to me,”
Wu admitted.

“Tell me again what the lines are,”
Cui offered.
“Maybe I can help.”

“
Bruce Willis says to Uma Thurman,
‘You wouldn’t be the one waiting for Mr. Right, would you, because Mister Right left.’
And she says,
‘You look like Mister Wrong to me. Your mama must have done a number on you.’
And he says,
“If that’s what you want, I don’t want to be right,’
and she says,
‘You know what they say about two wrongs.’
And then he says,
‘You have the right to remain silent, but I haven’t met a woman yet who I couldn’t make scream.’”

“Scream?”

“Yes. Scream.”

“This makes no sense at all, Wu,”
Cui said.

“Who is screaming, and what is she screaming about? Is she in pain?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do they say about two wrongs?”

“Two wrongs are better than three but worse than one?”

“Possibly.”

“Just do the best you can,”
Cui said.
“Much of this is not knowable. If the Boss questions you, I will tell him you are right and he is wrong.”

Wu appreciated Cui’s offer of support, but he knew that if it came to where the Boss was going to be hard on them, Cui would
capitulate instantly. He sat down at his computer screen and typed in the best translation he could come up with in the time
given him.

“You are not the person who I thought was once here pending the arrival of the white man. And anyway, he is gone,”
Bruce Willis said.

“And yet you very much resemble he who isn’t that person or any other,”
Uma Thurman replied,
“and he is not white. Surely your mother was forced to write a number upon you.”

“If it were up to me, I would rather go away now,”
Willis said.

“They say when you are wrong twice, that is bad, and this you know,”
the actress replied.

“Even if you choose to say nothing, the thing you do not say will be loud. You may yell now.”

“Did you finish?”
Cui asked. Wu sighed.

“I did my best. If I’m lucky, everyone will be too busy looking at Uma Thurman to read the subtitles,”
Wu Xiake said, adding, in English, “Why soitenly—nyuk nyuk nyuk…”

“I wish my wife had breasts like hers,”
Cui said.
“They were like that when my wife was nursing our daughter, but she wouldn’t let me touch them. Like Hong Kong. Very appealing,
but what difference does it make if you’re not allowed to go there?”

Wu Xiake had just moved on to the next scene when he heard a noise, a low rumbling that sounded like a locomotive was crashing
through the building. The noise grew louder and the building shook, until he was certain that an earthquake had struck. He
crawled under his desk, where Cui joined him as the power went out in the building and they were engulfed in darkness and
dust. He coughed. It was hard to breathe. “Cui?” he called out. He was fortunate in that he still had the headlamp his wife
had bought him for his birthday, to wear when he had to ride his bicycle home in the darkness, and the light was strong and
the batteries were fresh. He turned it on, but the room was full of dust and smoke. Cui was crying, so Wu did what he could
to comfort his friend. The noise lasted for perhaps twenty or thirty seconds, and then the building was still again. Cui was
shaking. Wu held his friend.

“We must get out,”
Wu said.
“There could be aftershocks. Are you hurt?”

“No, I think I’m okay.”

“Follow me, Cui.”

Wu put his headlamp on his head and made his way through the darkness, crawling over fallen file cabinets and shelves. In
the hall, they found Ji Jiabao, the cleaning lady, trapped under her cart, so they lifted it off her and helped her to her
feet. She seemed to be okay. As far as they knew, they were the only ones in their part of the building. A night watchman
was supposed to make the rounds, but he was usually in the warehouse, watching movies.

When they got to the end of the corridor, Wu Xiake opened the double doors and stopped, because that was where the building
stopped. He saw only flame and smoke and the stars in the open sky above, and below, a pile of rubble where the warehouse
had once been, a part of the old converted factory once the size of several soccer fields now simply gone, and with it, millions
of yuan worth of copied DVDs waiting for shipment. The earthquake had destroyed Shijingshan Entertainment, and yet, when Wu
looked across the river, he saw that the old two-hundred-foot-tall brick chimney from the coal-burning power plant was still
belching smoke—how could the earthquake demolish the warehouse but not knock down the chimney?

By the time Wu reached his bicycle, the building was surrounded by fire trucks and policemen and people manning manual pumps
to bring water from the river to pour onto the smoldering rubble. He probably should have stayed to help, Wu thought, but
he was just tired and wanted to go home. Yet looking back at the building, he couldn’t help noting how odd it was—it was as
if somebody had taken a large knife and sliced the building neatly in half in a straight line. Perhaps that was where the
fault line of the earthquake lay, and yet, none of the other buildings in the neighborhood had been touched or damaged in
any way. The night watchman was the only casualty.

“You don’t think the Boss is going to blame us for this, do you, Wu?”
Cui asked.

“I don’t know,”
Wu said, worried.
“He might.”

“You have to tell him that I was working at my desk when it happened,”
Cui said.
“You have to tell him we are innocent.”

“Don’t worry,”
Wu said
, “I’ll tell him,”
though he didn’t plan on going back to work any time soon.

IT WAS 370 MILES FROM COLORADO SPRINGS TO Albuquerque, but DeLuca didn’t like to fly, and the point was moot because a snowstorm
dumping twelve to eighteen inches in Colorado along the eastern slope of the Rockies had closed the airport anyway, so he
drove, sometimes in near white-out conditions, following Interstate 25 south through towns like Pueblo and Walsenburg and
Trinidad, the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe freight trains on the tracks parallel to the freeway reminding him of the Polar
Express from the classic children’s book. The way he saw it, if he could drive thousands of miles across the back country
of Iraq, getting shot at by Hadjis wielding Kalishnikovs and RPGs, and come through safely on the other side, then a little
snow wasn’t going to deter him. He checked in with the other members of Team Red as he drove, calling Sgts. Colleen MacKenzie,
Dan Sykes, and Julio Vasquez on his mobile but getting through to none of them, so he left messages, telling them to enjoy
their vacations and to check their voice mail—it was possible, he said, that he was going to need them. He called Walter Ford
and Sami Jambazian as well, both former partners of his on the Boston P.D. and both working for him in their retirements,
and left similar messages, noting again how, now that everyone had cell phones and voice mail, you never actually talked to
people anymore. He called his wife from the road and learned his son Scott would be coming home from Iraq on extended leave,
which was good news. DeLuca told Bonnie he’d check in with her when he found a motel. She said it was late (he’d forgotten
he was in the Mountain time zone) and to call in the morning.

He told her he missed her.

She said she missed him, too.

He was having dinner in a truck stop in Las Vegas, New Mexico, when his telephone rang. He’d just watched an obese four-hundred-pound
trucker polish off four pancakes, each the equivalent of a loaf of bread, in a room full of giant truckers eating giant pancakes,
and he idly wondered how much extra diesel fuel was consumed, hauling their fat asses up and over the Rockies—it was a thought
he kept to himself.

“Mr. David?” the voice said, the accent thick but not impenetrable.

“Theresa, how are you?” he asked.

“You said I would call you if I thought anything,” she said.

“What’s happened? Are you okay?”

“I am fine,” she said. “I wanted to tell you a man called, for Cheryl. I don’t know what.”