David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

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.