THE PAWN SELDOM KNOWS
Kade swam in and out of consciousness. He was in a car. Sam was with him. His head was in her lap, her hand on his brow. Lights raced by. There had been a fight… Explosions. He caught flashes of conversation. Tasers. Kidnapping. Abduction.
He could just barely feel Sam's mind through a haze of static. She was concerned. For him. And she was angry. Someone was going to pay.
Then he was being moved, carried out into the night, through a doorway. There was a woman's face. Thai. A stranger. And then a coffin lid closed down around him.
He tried to fight, found he had no strength. They'd buried him alive. He blinked hard and the world swam back into focus. Strange noises all around him. Then the lid came away and bright light filled his eyes.
He was in a compact surgery. An operating table with lights and two insectoid robotic surgeons occupied one wall. An emergency metabolic suspension tank was against a second wall. The coffin he was in was an imaging bed. They'd been scanning him.
The Thai woman was at a console, looking at diagnostic results. Kade tried to sit up, failed. Sam gave him an arm and he managed it on the second try.
The Thai woman looked over at him. "You have a concussion. Not very serious. No significant brain bleeding. You do have a linear fracture of the skull on your right side, but it's faint, and not impinging on the brain. You're going to have major bruising of the side of your face."
Kade grunted.
She loaded up a syringe and approached him.
"What now?" Kade asked.
"I'm going to inject you with growth factors. Trust me, you want this."
Kade followed her instructions without further demur, letting her treat his wounds. He was lucky to be alive. If Sam hadn't been with him, or if she'd been a little bit slower, or if that guy had smacked him just a little bit harder…
Then again, if it weren't for her, I wouldn't be in this mess at all.
The last step was a lumbar puncture. The Thai woman slid a needle into his back, between his vertebrae, sucked out a tiny sample.
Cerebrospinal fluid. They're looking for signs that Shu inserted something else into me. They won't find any.
After the Thai woman was done with him, Sam led Kade to a room where he could lie down, then disappeared.
Kade dozed. He woke at some sound, disoriented.
Where am I?
The party, the fight, Thailand, Su-Yong Shu, it all came flooding back into him. A chill went up his spine. His stomach knotted up. He reached for the Nexus OS. No good. He couldn't get the OS to launch, couldn't invoke the serenity package. The nodes in his brain were scrambled. What was he doing here? Why were people trying to kill him, trying to capture him? He was going to die in this place. They were going to catch him, torture him, and then, even though he'd tell them everything, they'd kill him.
He felt faint. His heart was pounding in his chest. His breath was short. He was trembling. He felt cold all over. His body was covered in sweat. He needed to get out of here.
The door to the room opened. Light flooded in. Kade flinched, threw up an arm to ward away whatever was coming.
"Kade!"
It was Sam. Samantha. She had something in her hand. She moved towards him, closing the door behind her. He flinched back farther, put both hands up to keep her away.
"Kade!" She was on the bed with him now, her hands on him. "It's OK. It's OK. Husshhh. It's OK. I'm here. You're safe. We're in a safe place. It's OK. Shhhhhh."
Her words didn't reach him. Her thoughts did. She was calm. She was comfort. She was strength and safety and resolve. He was someplace safe. They'd gotten away. No one would hurt him here. It was OK.
Bit by bit he relaxed. His heart slowed. It no longer threatened to burst from his chest. His breath steadied. The trembling subsided. Sam held him, and he clung to her. It was OK. It was going to be OK. They were safe now. It was OK.
He lay that way for a while, feeling the comfort of her mind, listening to the strong beat of her heart, the rhythm of her breathing, feeling her stroke his hair as she whispered again and again that it was OK. Her thoughts grew stronger in his mind. He lay that way, and sleep took him.
Sam stroked his head and whispered kind things and exuded support and peace and safety until Kade fell asleep again. This poor kid, scared and out of his depth. They were the same age, but Kade seemed so young in comparison. How was it that Kade, who'd grown up in a happy middle class family, in a happy suburban town, shielded from all threats until recently, was the anxious one, while she, Sam, with all the damage and torments of her childhood, was the strong one?
Maybe he was still recovering from the death of his parents six months ago.
Or maybe he was the normal one. Maybe she'd just had all the weakness beaten out of her.
She had work to do. She'd borrowed a slate from the safe house. She picked it up from the floor where she'd dropped it, shifted back into physical contact with Kade to reassure him, tapped and typed out her report. It took time. Three men, presumably Thai nationals, were dead. Bangkok Metropolitan Police would have found them by now. Her DNA could be at the scene. Oversight would have a field day with this. She finished up the report, shook her head, submitted it. Then she lay there, drifted into a half sleep with Kade beside her.
She woke – an indeterminate amount of time later – to a tap on the door. Someone turned the handle, stuck a head in. It was Lee, the squad leader. He spoke softly.
"You've got a call. ERD Deputy Director Becker. Want it on your slate or out here?"
Sam blinked the sleep out of her eyes. Her contacts said 3.05am. Kade was asleep, an arm around her.
"Out there," she said. "Be there in a sec."
Lee's head disappeared. Sam slowly extricated herself from Kade's embrace, slipped out and to the comms room.
It was a three-way call. Becker on one screen, Garrett Nichols on another.
"Sam," Becker said. "You OK?"
Sam nodded. "Yes, sir. Couple bruises, nothing major."
"I read your report. Good work out there. That was a hard fight."
"Just doing my job, sir."
"Any personal suspicions as to who the assailants were or what they were after?"
Sam nodded again. "They were after Lane, sir. I'm sure of it. They hit him first with non-lethal weapons, but didn't hesitate to use lethal force with me. As to who they were, hired muscle or organized crime, I'd guess. The self-destruct suggests the latter."
Becker nodded. "Nichols?"
"I agree with Agent Cataranes. This was an abduction attempt aimed at Lane."
Becker spoke again. "The major value that Lane has is the Nexus 5 design. That has to be what they wanted. As to who they are, let's enumerate the possibilities."
"OK," Nichols said. "First guess, Su-Yong Shu. She may want what Lane has. She's already shown interest in him. Inviting him to this conference may have been a ruse so she could nab him."