CHAPTER 25

Choi stood in the communications suite of Kang’s private Airbus A340. Stacks of electronic equipment, radios, and satellite transceivers lined the walls. The cramped space reminded Choi of the cockpit, without the benefit of windows, though at this particular moment they didn’t need them. It was night and they were crossing the Pacific at thirty-seven thousand feet. There really wasn’t much to see.

The radio officer handed Choi a printout, having decrypted it from the original satellite transmission. Choi looked it over. Pleased, he moved back into the aisle, walking forward to Kang’s private section of the aircraft.

Normally Choi would have waited for morning to inform Kang, but Choi knew that Kang was awake and undergoing a treatment session from one of his many doctors.

Choi knocked on the cabin door and a nurse opened it. Inside he saw Kang wired up to a newer, more powerful electrical stimulator. Instead of electrodes that simply attached to the surface of the skin, he was now having wires surgically implanted into his body. The doctors were attaching them to specific nerves that they believed could be regenerated and possibly even used to control prosthetics.

It was a dangerous step forward in his course of treatment, but Kang was desperate to get out of his prison. So far he’d tried every treatment medical science was offering: stem cells, neurological transplants, untested drugs, and holistic remedies.

But he’d continued to deteriorate.

Of all the treatments, only the electrical stimulation had slowed the progress of the disease, and Kang had become more and more dependent on it. But keeping his muscles from atrophying was not the endgame he sought. At his urging the doctors had gone forward with a new theory: that the right electrical stimulation would force the nerves to repair themselves.

Choi watched. Each time the electrical stimulators fired, one of Kang’s extremities would twitch, first his arm and then a leg. His fingers straightened and stiffened, shaking uncontrollably, and then the current was cut and they curled up into a lifeless ball once again.

Kang had been sick for so long that these movements startled Choi. He hadn’t seen Kang straighten his left hand in years, hadn’t seen Kang’s legs move in over a decade. He found something disturbing about watching it now. When combined with the strange facial distortions that accompanied the shocks, it gave Choi an almost overwhelming desire to leave.

The latest series of jolts ended and Kang’s body returned to stillness. He looked at the doctor who was watching the data displayed on a softly glowing LCD monitor.

“You wait too long to speak,” Kang said. “Is the news that bad?”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “Your neurological response is still weakening.”

“Then increase the stimulus,” Kang said.

“It will cause a great deal of pain,” the doctor said. “It will feel as if your skin is burning, as if a flame is cutting into you and you cannot pull away from it.”

“Yes,” Kang said. “And in my position you would welcome such sensations.”

The doctor nodded politely. “I’ll need a minute to adjust the settings.”

As the doctor scurried to a new position, Choi stepped forward. Apparently Kang noticed the look on his face.

“You disapprove,” he said.

“It is not my place to approve or disapprove,” Choi replied.

“That is correct,” Kang noted. “What do you have for me?”

“New information on the Americans. The one we thought had been killed in the mountains, the professor. It seems he might be alive.”

“So one of your failures is erased,” Kang noted.

Despite the anger he felt at Kang’s derision, Choi maintained his composure. Dying men had a habit of lashing out and Kang continued to do so.

“Let us hope,” Choi said. “What we know for certain is that either he, or someone using his password, accessed the mainframe at his old university. Information was downloaded, including satellite photos of the Yucatan.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Not precisely, but the terminal he used was in a small town, a large distance from where he and the woman were originally operating. And if she were to try and find him …” Choi let his voice trail off.

“Of course she will,” Kang said. “Where are your people?”

“In Tulum and Puerto Morelos. And in Mexico City, at the Museum of Anthropology, where they did some of their research.”

“This is good,” Kang said. “Keep them out of sight. You moved too early last time.”

Choi nodded and the doctor poked his head up from the equipment he was calibrating. “We’re ready,” he said.

Kang motioned for Choi to leave.

Choi bowed slightly and then stepped out through the cabin door, closing it behind him.

As he walked back to the communications suite, he heard a low buzz emanating from the room he’d just left. He also heard Kang grunting and wincing in unison with the electronic pulses. By the time Choi reached the communications room, Kang’s voice could be heard down the aisle, screaming in agony and pleasure.

CHAPTER 26

Hawker sat in the front passenger seat of a dilapidated, rust-covered jeep as Danielle drove. Yuri sat in the back. The three of them had been motoring along in the Mexican sunshine for hours, a welcome change to the cold drizzle of Hong Kong and the South China Sea.

As they traveled up the coastal road toward Puerto Azul, Hawker watched the sunlight shimmering off the water. In the most bizarre way, it almost felt as if they were on vacation. He and Danielle traveling like some couple, their adopted child, Yuri, seat-belted in the back, wearing a touristy sombrero and oversized plastic sunglasses.

He was quiet, even when spoken to in Russian. Yuri did not often engage. But for the most part he’d been a model child, concerned with little things right in front of him far more than the bigger picture of his surroundings.

Even now he seemed more interested in the clicking sound made by the arms of the plastic sunglasses than actually wearing them. He repeatedly took them off, opening and closing the arms seven or eight times in proximity to his right ear, before Hawker would put them back on his face.

After the tenth round of watching this, Hawker turned to Danielle. “What do you think is wrong with him?”

Danielle glanced in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know,” she said. “He seems to be in his own world. In some ways it reminds me of autism but I’m not sure. He didn’t exactly have a great start to life.”

The look on Danielle’s face was sadness, disappointment. They’d rescued Yuri from one prison but the future likely held another. Hawker understood it.

The rules were often blind to the facts and though he and Danielle could keep Yuri with them for the time being, and certainly would never return him to Kang, the diplomatic situation with Russia would be more difficult. Yuri was a Russian citizen, a ward of the state. And when the time came and the Russians demanded him back, legally there would be no way to stop them.

“Maybe we can keep him,” Hawker said, joking.

“He’s not a stray puppy,” she replied. “But we can’t send him back there.”

Hawker watched as Danielle returned to scanning the roadside and the signs. The drive had been a long one. Nine hours cross-country with only a canvas targa top to block the sun. Sweat, sand, and grime coated their bodies and the urge to stop, shower, and sleep had been hard to resist. But time was short and so they’d driven almost nonstop.

And yet Danielle looked great to him, as stunning as he remembered, in some ways even better. In Brazil, pressured by superiors to get an impossible job done under a daunting timeline, she’d been very official and intense. But here, driving the old jeep, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a crumpled cowboy hat, with her skin tanning in the sun, she seemed more natural, more at peace.