Moore remained awfully quiet.
“Can you arrange something discreet?” she asked.
“I told you before, you risk the Agency getting their hands on him,” Moore said. “My guess is that they’d take custody of Yuri if they got the chance and I don’t know if that would be any better than turning him over to Saravich.”
Danielle felt a wave of anger surge through her. “We can’t endanger him like this,” she said urgently. “He’s just a child, a special-needs child at that.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but things are going out of control up here,” Moore replied.
“They’re not exactly going well down here, either,” she said.
“Yuri will be safer with you,” Moore said.
Moore really had only two expressions: smug satisfaction and thinly veiled disgust. Nervousness was not his way, but she could hear a type of tension and concern in his voice that was out of place.
“What’s going on?”
“The Russians and the Chinese are going out of their minds over this event. They’re accusing us of building and testing some new weapon that we can’t control. It’s giving Stecker a lot of ammunition and the president, who I thought was smarter than that, is playing right into it.”
“Bottom line,” she asked.
“Suddenly showing up with a Russian child who’d been kidnapped by the Chinese, before being stolen by American agents and dragged off to Mexico, might not be the smartest thing to do right now.”
“Then find me a safe house,” she demanded.
“In Mexico?” he said. “Do you really think we have one?”
Danielle cursed under her breath and looked at Yuri again. She’d begun to feel as if she were risking Yuri’s life for someone else’s gain. Being forced to make that type of compromise was the main reason she’d quit the NRI in the first place.
“Are you telling me the safest place for him is here with us?”
“No,” Moore said. “I’m telling you that if things get any worse there might not be anywhere safe for anyone.”
Moore’s voice was cold and unyielding. It left her wishing she’d never answered the phone. She felt a soft breeze drift in from the balcony. The storm was growing closer.
“You’ve got ninety-two hours,” Moore said. “Make them count.”
She had no choice but to trust his take on the situation. “Find out what you can about Yuri,” she asked. “I’ll let you know before we make our next move.”
Moore signed off and Danielle put the phone down. She turned out toward the balcony. The wind had grown stronger and cooler and drops of precipitation had begun to spatter against the wall. As the lightning flashed in staggered waves, she could see the rain blowing sideways across the beach.
Hawker had moved from his chair and was now leaning against the wall in the sheltered part of the veranda, just outside the doorway. He was just standing there quietly, watching the storm.
She wondered if he was thinking of the last storm they’d been in together, a moment in time two years ago that was so fresh in her mind it could have been yesterday. She wanted to walk over to him, put her hand on his shoulder, and wait for him to turn to her, but she knew things could not be that simple.
She thought about Marcus and felt a new wave of guilt. She imagined him back there waiting, forced to trust what Moore told him about her well-being, probably worried sick over her fate. Now she wished that she’d spoken with him when offered the chance.
She took a deep breath. She didn’t like this. Didn’t like confusion.
Her mind flashed to Moore’s statement. There might not be anywhere safe for anyone. She needed to focus. To stop thinking about Hawker, to stop thinking about Marcus. To stop thinking about anything but the job in front of her.
She watched Hawker a moment longer. And then she turned from temptation, walked to her bedroom, and closed the door.
CHAPTER 38
The massive warehouse on the outskirts of Campeche belonged to a subsidiary of Kang Industrial. But the normal business that was conducted there had been moved, giving way to Kang’s pursuit of the stones.
From his chair Kang surveyed the effort. Through the windows near the back of the structure, he saw the Skycrane helicopter his men had used to hoist the statue from Isla Cubierta. It sat dormant on a helipad, waiting with two others of its kind for a new mission to fulfill. Inside the building, stacks of equipment lined the walls: there were armored vehicles squatting on massive tires, containers holding inflatable rafts, a small two-manned submarine, and a flight of drone reconnaissance aircraft similar to the U.S. Army’s Predators.
As Kang looked around, his heart swelled with pride and fresh confidence. His collection of high-tech equipment had been growing for years, part of a newfound reality he had embraced.
His deteriorating health had given him an unusual vantage point from which to study his empire. As he’d been forced to delegate and rely on others, he’d seen the growth of his empire stall and the number of failures and missed opportunities rise to a level he could not abide. It had taught him a lesson that he considered a revelation: Human limitation and fallibility were the greatest of enemies.
Just as his own body betrayed and failed him, the people around him betrayed and failed him. Physically Kang was forced to rely more and more on the machines. They strengthened him, healed him, and gave him mobility and independence.
To save his empire he had forced a similar paradigm into place. Ultramodern surveillance systems blanketed every square inch of his domain; predictive artificial intelligence software allowed him to move quickly in business and other fields without a large cast of human analysts to slow him down. Computer programs tracked the productivity and reliability of every employee he had. They decided who to hire and who to fire. There were no meetings, emotions, or friendships involved. Just facts, data, and algorithms. With the human element removed, his businesses had begun to thrive again.
And now he intended to bring similar changes to his quest for the stones. Despite the efforts of Choi and his men, Kang knew it would be machinery that allowed him to find and recover what he was looking for. Human power was only necessary to operate or initiate the equipment, and if the humans failed or lagged they were easily replaceable.
In Kang’s eyes, Choi and his men were nothing more than spare parts, one just as good as another, but the machines … the machines were the key.
One of the doctors called to Kang. They were ready to begin the latest and most advanced incarnation of his treatment. At this Kang turned his chair and crossed the floor. Choi followed dutifully at his side.
They arrived at a metallic worktable. Spread out in sections were various types of familiar equipment: the electrical stimulators, the monitors, the power packs.
“Are you ready, sir?” the doctor asked.
“Is the testing complete?” Kang asked.
The doctor nodded. “All diagnostics have been run and the feedback from the earlier sessions downloaded.”
This was the moment of truth.
“Then you may proceed,” Kang said, extending his right arm awkwardly.
The doctor assisted him, straightening and stretching Kang’s arm and sliding a gauntlet of sorts onto it. Next he connected a brace to Kang’s elbow and a shoulder harness of sorts. Once Kang was strapped in, the doctors began connecting wires to various points of the harness.
“I will leave you,” Choi said.
“You will stay,” Kang ordered.
Choi sat down uneasily.
As the doctors worked, a yellow forklift carrying several large crates traveled methodically toward them. The forklift deposited its load and then scurried away as men rushed into position and opened the crates. Inside rested the mechanical equivalent of pack mules: four-legged machines, powered by an internal engine and controlled by an advanced computer brain that kept them agile and balanced on almost any terrain while carrying hundreds of pounds of equipment.