Cloud Atlas (58 page)

60

Fay Li, in visor sunglasses and a sunhat, checks her watch against the bank’s clock. The air-conditioning is losing its battle against the midmorning heat. She dabs perspiration from her face and forearms with a handkerchief, fans herself, and assesses recent developments.
Joe Napier, you look dumb but you’re deep-down smart, smart enough to know when to bow out
. Luisa Rey should be here any time now, if Bill Smoke was on the money.
Bill Smoke, you look smart but you’re deep-down dumb, and your men aren’t as loyal as you think. Because
you
don’t do it for the money, you forgot how easily lesser mortals can be bought
.

Two well-dressed Chinese men walk in. A look from one tells her Luisa Rey is coming. The three converge at a desk guarding a side corridor:
SAFETY DEPOSIT BOXES
. This facility has had very little traffic all morning. Fay Li considered getting a plant in place, but a minimum-wage rent-a-guard’s natural laxness is safer than giving Triad men a sniff of the prize.

“Hi”—Fay Li fires off her most intolerable Chinese accent at the guard—”brothers and I want get from strongbox.” She dangles a deposit-box key. “Looky, we got key.”

The bored youth has a bad skin problem. “ID?”

“ID here, you looky, ID you looky.”

The Chinese ideograms repel white scrutiny with their ancient tribal magic. The guard nods down the corridor and returns to his
Aliens!
magazine. “Door’s not locked.”
I’d fire your ass on the spot, kid
, thinks Fay Li.

The corridor ends at a reinforced door, left ajar. Beyond is the deposit-box room, shaped like a three-pronged fork. One associate joins her up the left prong, and she orders the other down the right.
About six hundred boxes in here. One of them hides a five-million-dollar, ten-thousand-bucks-per-page report
.

Footsteps approach down the corridor.
Clipping, female heels
.

The vault door swings open. “Anyone here?” calls Luisa Rey.

Silence.

As the door clangs shut, the two men rush the woman. Luisa is gripped with a hand over her mouth. “Thank you.” Fay Li prizes the key from the reporter’s fingers. Its engraved number is 36/64. She wastes no words. “Bad news. This room is soundproof, unmonitored, and my friends and I are armed. The Sixsmith Report isn’t destined for your hands. Good news. I’m acting for clients who want the HYDRA strangled at birth and Seaboard discredited. Sixsmith’s findings will hit the news networks within two or three days. Whether they want to pursue the corporate executions is their business. Don’t look at me like that, Luisa. Truth doesn’t care who discovers it, so why should you? Even better news. Nothing bad will happen to you. My associate will escort you to a holding location in B.Y. By evening, you’ll be a free woman. You won’t cause us any trouble”—Fay Li produces a photo of Javier from Luisa’s bulletin board and waves it an inch from her face—”because we’d reciprocate in kind.”

Submission replaces defiance in Luisa’s eyes.

“I knew you had a fine head on your shoulders.” Fay Li addresses the man holding Luisa in Cantonese. “Take her to the lockup. Nothing dirty before you shoot her. She may be a reporter, but that doesn’t make her a total whore. Dispose of the body in the usual way.”

They leave. The second associate remains by the door, holding it ajar.

Fay Li locates strongbox 36/64 at neck height, at the tip of the middle prong.

The key turns, and the door swings open.

Fay Li pulls out a vanilla binder.
The HYDRA-Zero Reactor—An Operational Assessment Model—Project Head Dr. Rufus Sixsmith—Unauthorized Possession Is a Federal Crime Under the Military & Industrial Espionage Act 1971
. Fay Li permits herself a jubilant smile.
The land of opportunity
. Then she sees two wires trailing from inside the binder to the back of the strongbox. She peers in. A red diode blinks on a neat four-by-two bundle of taped cylinders, wires, components.

Bill Smoke, you goddamn
—

61

The blast picks Luisa Rey up and throws her forward, irresistibly, like a Pacific breaker. The corridor rotates through ninety degrees—several times—and pounds into Luisa’s ribs and head. Petals of pain unfold across her vision. Masonry groans. Chunks of plaster, tile, and glass shower, drizzle, stop.

An ominous peace.
What am I living through?
Calls for help spring up in the dust and smoke, screams from the street, alarm bells drill the burnt air. Luisa’s mind reactivates.
A bomb
. The rent-a-guard croaks and moans. Blood from his ear trickles into a delta flooding his shirt collar. Luisa tries to pull herself away, but her right leg has been blown off.

The shock dies; her leg is just jammed under her unconscious Chinese escort. She pulls free and crawls, stiff and hurting, across the lobby, now transformed into a movie set. Luisa finds the vault door, blown off its hinges.
Must have missed me by inches
. Broken glass, upended chairs, chunks of wall, cut and shocked people. Oily black smoke belches from the ducts, and a sprinkler system kicks in—Luisa is drenched and choked, slips on the wet floor and stumbles, dazed, bent double, into others.

A friendly hand takes Luisa’s wrist. “I got you, ma’am, I got you, let me help you outside, there may be another explosion.”

Luisa allows herself to be led into congested sunlight, where a wall of faces looks on, hungry for horror. The fireman guides her across a road blocked with gridlocked cars, and she is reminded of April’s war footage from Saigon. Smoke still spills in senseless quantities. “Get away! Over here! Get back! Over there!” Luisa the journalist is trying to tell Luisa the victim something. She has grit in her mouth. Something urgent. She asks her rescuer, “How did you get on the scene so soon?”

“It’s okay,” he insists, “you have a concussion.”

A fireman? “I can make my own way now—”

“No, you’ll be safe this way—”

The door of a dusty black Chevy swings open.

“Let go of me!”

His grip is iron. “In the car now,” he mutters, “or I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”

The bomb was supposed to get me, and now
—

Luisa’s abductor grunts and falls forward.

62

Joe Napier grabs Luisa Rey’s arm and swings her away from the Chevy.
Christ, that was close!
A baseball bat is in his other hand. “If you want to live to see the day out, you’d better come with me.”

Okay
, thinks Luisa. “Okay,” she says.

Napier pulls her back into the jockeying crowd to block Bill Smoke’s line of fire, hands the baseball bat to a bewildered boy, and marches toward Eighty-first Avenue, away from the Chevy.
Walk discreetly; or run for it and break your cover?

“My car’s next to the bank,” says Luisa.

“We’ll be sitting ducks in this traffic,” says Napier. “Bill Smoke’s got two more ape-men, they’ll just fire through the window. Can you walk?”

“I can run, Napier.”

They advance a third of the way down the block, but then Napier makes out Bill Smoke’s face ahead, his hand hovering around his jacket pocket. Napier checks behind him. A second goon is the second pincer. Across the road is a third. There won’t be any cops on the scene for minutes yet, and they have mere seconds. Two killings in broad daylight: risky, but the stakes are high enough for them to chance it, and there’s so much chaos here, they’ll get away with it. Napier is desperate: they are level with a windowless warehouse. “Up these steps,” he tells Luisa, praying the door opens.

It does.

A sparse reception area, shady and lit by a single tube, a tomb of flies. Napier bolts the door behind them. From behind a desk, a young girl in her Sunday best and an aged poodle in a cardboard box bed watch, unperturbed. Three exits at the far end. The noise of machinery is monolithic.

A black-eyed Mexican woman swoops from nowhere and flutters in his face: “No ‘llegals here! No ‘llegals here! Bossaway! Bossaway! Come back ‘notherday!”

Luisa Rey addresses her in very battered Spanish. The Mexican woman glares, then jerks a savage thumb at the exits. A blow crunches the outer door. Napier and Luisa run across the echoing chamber. “Left or right?” demands Napier.

“Don’t know!” gasps Luisa.

Napier looks back for guidance from the Mexican, but the street door shudders under one blow, splinters under the next, and flies open with the third. Napier pulls Luisa through the left exit.

63

Bisco and Roper, Bill Smoke’s sidemen, body-charge the door. In the courtroom of his head, Bill Smoke finds William Wiley and Lloyd Hooks guilty of gross negligence.
I told you! Joe Napier couldn’t be trusted to pack up his conscience and pick up his fishing rods
.

The door is in pieces.

A spidery Mexican woman inside is having hysterics. A placid child and a bedecked poodle sit on an office desk. “FBI!” Bisco yells, flourishing his driver’s license. “Which way did they go?”

The Mexican woman screeches: “We care our workers! Very good! Very much pay! No need union!”

Bisco takes out his gun and blasts the poodle against the wall. “Which way did they fucking go?”

Jesus Muhammad Christ, this is why I work alone
.

The Mexican woman bites her fist, shudders, and launches a rising wail.

“Brilliant, Bisco, like the FBI kills poodles.” Roper leans over the child, who hasn’t responded in any way to the death of the dog. “Which exit did the man and the woman take?”

She gazes back as if he is nothing but a pleasant sunset.

“You speak English?”

A hysteric, a mute, a dead dog
—Bill Smoke walks to the three exits—
and a pair of fuckups royale
. “We’re losing time! Roper, right door. Bisco, left. I’m the middle.”

64

Rows, aisles, and ten-box-high walls of cardboard conceal the true dimensions of the storeroom. Napier wedges the door shut with a cart. “Tell me you’ve gotten over your gun allergy since yesterday,” he hisses.

Luisa shakes her head. “You?”

“Only a popgun. Six shots. C’mon.”

Even as they run, she hears the door being forced. Napier blocks the line of vision with a tower of boxes. Then again, a few yards down. A third tower topples ahead of them, however, and dozens of Big Birds—Luisa recognizes the dimwit yellow emu from the children’s program Hal used to watch between jobs—spill free. Napier gestures:
Run with your head down
.

Five seconds later a bullet rips through cardboard three inches shy of Luisa’s head, and Big Bird stuffing poofs into her face. She trips and collides with Napier; a rod of noise sears the air above them. Napier draws his gun and fires twice around Luisa. The noise makes her curl into a ball. “Run!” barks Napier, grabbing her upright. Luisa obeys—Napier starts knocking down walls of boxes to impede their pursuer.

Ten yards later Luisa gets to a corner. A plywood door is marked
EMERGENCY EXIT
.

Locked. Breathless, Joe Napier reaches her. He fails to force the door.

“Give it up, Napier!” they hear. “It’s not you we’re after!”

Napier fires point-blank at the lock.

The door still won’t open. He empties three more bullets into the lock: each bang makes Luisa flinch. The fourth bang is an empty click. Napier kicks the door with the sole of his boot.

An underworld sweatshop clattering with five hundred sewing machines. Flakes of textile are suspended in the viscous heat, haloing the naked bulbs hanging over each machinist. Luisa and Napier skirt the outer walkway in a rapid semicrouch. Limp Donald Ducks and crucified Scooby-Doos have their innards stitched, one by one, row by row, pallet by pallet. Each woman keeps her eyes fixed on the needle plates, so Luisa and Napier cause little commotion.

But how do we get out of here?

Napier runs, literally, into the Mexican woman from the makeshift reception. She beckons them down a semiblocked unlit side passage. Napier turns to Luisa, yelling over the metallic din, his face saying,
Do we trust her?

Luisa’s face replies,
Any better ideas?
They follow the woman between reams of fabric and wire, split boxes of teddy-bear eyes and assorted sewing-machine body shells and innards. The passage corners right and stops at an iron door. Day filters in through a grimy grille. The Mexican fumbles with her key ring.
It’s 1875 down here
, thinks Luisa,
not 1975
. One key won’t fit. The next fits but won’t turn. Even thirty seconds on the factory floor has affected her hearing.

A war cry from six yards away: “Hands in the air!” Luisa spins around. “I said,
Hands in the fuckin’ air!”
Luisa’s hands obey. The gunman keeps his pistol trained on Napier. “Turn around, Napier!
Slow!
Drop your gun!”

The señora shrills: “No shoot I! No shoot I, Señor! They force I show door! They say they kill—”

“Shuddup, you crazy fuckin’ wetback! Scram! Outa my way!”

The woman creeps around him, pressing herself against the wall, shrieking,
“¡No dispares! ¡No dispares! ¡No quiero morir!”

Napier shouts, through the funneled factory noise, “Easy now, Bisco, how much you being paid?”

Bisco hollers back, “Don’t bother, Napier. Last words.”

“I can’t hear you! What did you say?”

“What—are—your—last—words?”

“Last words? Who are you? Dirty Harry?”

Bisco’s mouth twitches. “I got a book of last words, and those were yours. You?” He looks at Luisa, keeping the gun trained on Napier.

A pistol shot punches a hole in the din, and Luisa’s eyes clench shut. A hard thing touches her toe. She forces her eyes open. It is a handgun, skidded to a stop. Bisco’s face is contorted into inexplicable agony. The señora’s monkey wrench flashes and crumples the gunman’s lower jaw. Ten or more blows of extreme ferocity follow, each one making Luisa flinch, punctuated by the words,
“Yo! Amaba! A! Ese! Jodido! Perro!”