My mind went into overdrive.
Okay, so a guy was coming at me with a knife. He had a wounded arm, probably from Irina while she was being murdered. That meant he wanted to kill me too.
Irina was strong, trained, and armed, but she still lost a knife fight to this guy. What chance did I have? I can’t fight for shit. And running wasn’t an option either. I was in heels and a tight skirt.
I had one chance, and it relied on me guessing where he was going to stab. I was a helpless, exposed girl with no weapon. Why waste time? Just slit my throat.
I jerked my purse to my neck just in time to block his attack. His lightning-fast strike slashed the purse open and the contents spilled out. That would have been my throat. He assumed I’d be halfway through dying after that assault, so he left himself a little open.
I grabbed his bad arm with one hand and punched it with the other. He cried out in pain. He lashed at me with the knife, but I twisted out of the way. I hung on and kicked off the doorframe to torque his injured arm as much as I could. Maybe if his pain was bad enough, he’d be distracted and I could run away.
He screamed in rage and used the arm to hoist me into the air. Okay, that wasn’t part of my plan. He lifted me bodily over his head and swung me down toward the hotel room’s floor. This was my chance. It would hurt, but it was a chance.
I let go of his arm right before hitting the floor. It didn’t lessen the blow. I smashed into the ground on my side. My ribs exploded with pain. I wanted to curl up and moan but I didn’t have the time. I was free—if only for a second.
He stumbled. He’d just had 55 kilograms of Jazz on his arm and it suddenly fell off. I pushed through the pain in my side and got to my knees. With every ounce of strength I had, I slammed my shoulder into his back. “Lefty” was off balance and wasn’t expecting an attack. He tumbled into the hallway.
I fell backward into the hotel room and kicked the door shut. It locked automatically. Less than a second later, I heard the first resounding thump as Lefty tried to force his way back in.
I scrambled to the nightstand next to the bed and dialed the phone.
“Front Desk,” came the immediate reply.
I tried to sound panicked. It wasn’t hard. “Hey! I’m in Room 124 and there’s some guy pounding on the door! I think he’s drunk or something. I’m scared!”
“We’ll send security right up.”
“Thanks.”
Lefty flung himself against the door a second time.
I hung up and limped to the door. I peeked through the peephole. Lefty reared back and took another running leap at the door. Another rattling thump, but the door was unaffected.
“Metal door, metal deadbolt!” I yelled. “Fuck you!”
He’d backed up to take another run when the elevator doors at the end of the hall opened. The beefy security guy stepped forward. “Something I can help you with, sir?”
A few other room doors opened up. Confused guests peeked at the action. Lefty hadn’t exactly been quiet. He took stock of the situation and of the very large security guard. This wasn’t something he could stab his way out of. He looked at the door longingly, then scampered off.
The guard straightened his tie, walked up, and knocked on my door.
I opened it a crack. “Uh, hi?”
“Are you all right, ma’am?” he asked.
“Yeah. It was just weird is all. Aren’t you going after him?”
“He had a knife. Best to let him go.”
“I see.”
“I’ll stick around in the hall for a while to make sure he doesn’t come back. Rest easy.”
“Okay, thank you.” I closed the door.
I took a moment to recenter.
Lefty was in Jin Chu’s room because… why? He had no way of knowing I’d come. He wasn’t there for me. He must have been there for Jin Chu.
A Latino assassin. And wouldn’t you know it, Sanchez Aluminum was owned by Brazilians. Shit, I know companies get pissed when you trash their stuff, but murder? Murder?!
I looked through the peephole again. The guard stood nearby. I was safer than I’d been all day. All right. Time to search the room.
Man. Must be nice to be rich. The room had a king-size bed, a tidy workstation in one corner, and a bathroom with a graywater reuse shower. I heaved a sigh. My dreams of a nice place had died with Trond.
I tossed the room. No point in subtlety. I found the usual stuff you’d expect for a business traveler: clothes, toiletries, et cetera. What I didn’t find was a Gizmo. And judging by the condition of the room (at least the condition it was in before I trashed it), there hadn’t been a struggle. That was all good news for Jin Chu. It meant he probably wasn’t dead. Most likely scenario: Lefty came to kill him but he wasn’t home. So Lefty waited. Then I showed up and ruined everything.
You’re welcome, Jin Chu.
I was about to leave when I noticed the safe in the closet. It’s one of those things you don’t even pay attention to. The wall-mounted safe had an electronic lock with instructions on how to set it. Pretty simple, really. It starts disarmed. You put your shit in it, then set the code. It’ll keep that code until you check out.
I tried the handle and it didn’t open. Interesting. When one of those wall safes isn’t in use it’s ajar.
Time to become a safecracker. Those things aren’t exactly made to protect the crown jewels.
The contents of my now-destroyed purse lay strewn across the floor. I found the makeup compact and slapped it against my palm several times. I opened it to a mess of crumbled powder. I held it up to the safe and blew across the surface.
Brown, dusty makeup clouded the air around the safe. I stepped back and waited for it to clear up. Dust takes a long time to settle in Artemis. Atmosphere plus low gravity equals particles taking forever to fall.
Eventually the area cleared up. I took a good look at the keypad. A layer of makeup covered everything, but three of the buttons had more dust on them than the others. The 0, the 1, and the 7. Those were the ones with finger grease on them. With a hotel like the Canton, you could bet they cleaned everything in the room between guests. So those numbers had to be the digits Jin Chu chose for his combination.
According to the instructions on the safe, you set a four-digit code.
Hmm. A four-digit code with three unique numbers. I closed my eyes and did some math. There’d be… fifty-four possible combinations. According to the instructions, the safe would lock down if it got three incorrect combinations in a row. Then the hotel staff would have to open it with their master code.
I replayed my brief interaction with him in my head. He was on Trond’s couch… he drank Turkish coffee while I had black tea. We talked about—
Aha! He was a Star Trek fan.
I typed 1-7-0-1 and the safe clicked open. NCC-1701 was the registration number of the starship Enterprise. How did I know that? I must have heard it somewhere. I don’t forget stuff.
I opened the safe door and found the mysterious white case—the one Jin Chu had tried to hide from me. The outside still read ZAFO SAMPLE—AUTHORIZED USE ONLY. All right, now we were getting somewhere!
I popped open the case to discover… a cable?
It was just a coiled cable, maybe two meters long. Had someone taken the secret device and left the power cable behind? Why do that? Why not take the whole case?
I looked at the cable more closely. Actually, it wasn’t a power cord. It was a fiber-optic cable. Okay, so it was for data. But what data?
“Okay. Now what?” I asked myself.
The door beeped and slid open. Svoboda stepped into his studio apartment and dropped his Gizmo on the shelf near the door.