The place is hot again. As little as he wants to touch them, he has come to look for manufacturers' marks on the whips and restraints in the bottom drawer of the cabinet; they might tell him where they were bought. He is dreading the moment he has to pick them up. The instant he enters the office, he stops as suddenly as he would if he had walked into a glass door.
Uncle Claus's CD-ROMs are back.
Not all of them, he sees, as he nears the desk. There are three empty slots in the storage tower. The others have been returned, presumably by whoever removed them in the first place, which-according to the woman next door-had been Doughnut. Considering all the trouble she took to gain access to Claus Ulrich's life in the first place and the care with which she erased her presence when she left, it must have been important to her to return to take these things away, and equally important to bring them back.
He sits down at the desk and turns on the computer. While he waits for it to go through its internal checklist, he opens the first of the CD cases, which says WINDOWS 98.
The disk inside is home-burned from a blank available everywhere in Bangkok, ten disks for two to ten bucks, depending on the gullibility of the buyer. Written neatly near the center, in black permanent marker, is the notation "AT Series 400–499."
AT Series. AT Enterprises, the letterhead in the drawer. He opens the next case, watching the irritating hourglass on the computer screen and asking himself for the thousandth time why they couldn't have programmed the damn thing to actually fill with sand so you'd have some idea how far along you are. How difficult could it be? The second disk is in a box that says COREL WORDPERFECT, but it too is home-burned. The notation says "AT Series 600–699."
He opens all the cases, arranging the disks by number. When he's finished, he has a pile of jewel boxes on the floor and thirteen disks spread out across the desk, beginning with AT Series 0001–0099 and ending with 1500–1599. Missing are 500–599, 700–799, and 800–899.
The computer is ready at last. He slaps the 0001–0099 disk in the drive and looks at the directory.
The files are, as promised, numbered AT 0001 through AT 0099. They are.jpg files, which means pictures. His heart sinks at the information. He does not really think he wants to look at these.
And until he sees the first one, he has no idea how right he is.
Chouk has asked himself a hundred times whether he should make the payment he promised the guard. He knows the risks, knows it is one of the few times he will be exposed. For the first time since he intercepted the maid to take delivery of the money, he will have to arrange a meeting. Madame Wing will be far more vigilant, now that he has returned her money, shredded into scrap, and made his second demand.
How he wishes he could have been there when she opened the suitcases. Perhaps the guard knows how she reacted. That alone would almost be worth the risk of paying him.
Why had Tam looked at the photos? He has talked with Tam incessantly in his head since that night, trying to explain why he pulled the trigger: the risk that Tam would turn on him, that he would go to Madame Wing. No one can be allowed to prevent Chouk from completing his work. He has made promises to too many people who are now long gone.
But still, Tam had loved his wife, and she probably loved him in return. Chouk has ruined two lives.
It is fitting, he thinks, that Tam had known him by a different name. Chouk no longer knows who he is; he is as hollow as a ghost. All that remains is the course he has set. Motion is everything.
He is no longer Chouk Ran. He is just whoever it is who is doing this.
And she will pay for that, and for all those she destroyed.
But still, the bits of him that remain are troubled. He killed Tam, and if he does not pay the guard, he will have abandoned both of the people who helped him. He could not have done what he has already done without their aid. Even though they did it for money, not because they believed in his mission.
He looks around the rented room he has slept in for two nights. Unlike the flophouses, here there are no rows of bunks; it has a door and walls to keep people out. He needed the privacy to handle the money. The large shredder he bought at the office store gleams in the corner. He should probably change rooms, but he can't face the work of moving the shredder. He had no idea how heavy it would be.
With a strong feeling he is doing the wrong thing, he goes down to the street to find a pay phone.
A cheap hotel room. It could be any of a thousand hotels, anywhere in Southeast Asia. Cold light comes through a small window. It is probably raining.
The bed is narrow, with a garish red coverlet. The floor is dirty linoleum. There is no rug or other furniture except an attached bed table and a large, old-style phone with a dial.
A number hotel, maybe.
In 1982.
Uncle Claus's camera had an automatic date-stamp function, and he occasionally forgot to turn it off. The picture on the screen is dated 9-16-82.
The little girl hog-tied on the bed was somewhere between eight and ten on September 16, 1982. The ropes bite into her wrists and ankles, and her defenseless stomach is bare and streaked with red.
She is crying.
The series began with photos of her wearing the clothes of poor Southeast Asian children everywhere: T-shirt, shorts, sandals. She had been smiling in the first few shots. She stopped smiling when her clothes began to come off. She started crying when the hot red wax dripped from the candle onto her bare chest.
After he has looked at fifteen or twenty pictures, Rafferty gets up and goes to the bathroom and vomits into the toilet. On his way back to the computer, he stops at the filing cabinet and, for the first time, forces himself to pull out the restraints, the leather straps and gags and handcuffs and the collar with the spikes set into its edges that are designed to cut into the neck and chest.
They are tiny.
He returns to the screen and searches further through the pictures, feeling the fury rise in him, mixed with a swelling terror. He has difficulty forcing himself to keep his eyes on the screen, and he jumps to his feet and steps back, believing for a moment he will pass out, when he gets to the picture of the child with the electric iron on her chest. Her right arm is thrown over her eyes, her mouth wide in pain. Her ankles had been cuffed together so she couldn't kick in self-defense.
He was in some of the pictures, too, a naked fat man with his face crudely blacked out with Magic Marker. He held a camera remote in one hand, with a button at one end of it. He depressed the button to snap a picture whenever he was satisfied with the level of monstrosity being inflicted on the bright red bed.
There are almost sixteen hundred of them.
Rafferty feels the sickness and the fear rise up in him again, but he forces them away and then lets the fear back in, lets it drive him forward despite his revulsion as he keeps looking, opening one disk after another, paging through the photos as quickly as the computer will allow, looking at nothing but the faces and paying special attention to the later ones, the 1300, 1400, and 1500 series, some of which are date-stamped within the past three to four years. The most recent image with a date stamp, AT1548, was taken in 2003.
He is looking for Miaow.
This is something she would never talk to him about. She would never talk about it to anyone. If it is here, if she is here, he has to know it before they meet with Hank Morrison in-what? Three or four hours? He has been here, in this hell, for hours.