Bulletproof Mascara: A Novel (36 page)

He cocked his head to one side, frowning. Clearly he thought she was crazy. She wished she could explain the whole thing to him. She thought about asking him to wait, but all of that was silly. Even without the language barrier and the fact that she wasn’t
supposed to reveal Carrie Mae to anyone, it was her fight. She couldn’t expect anyone else to take an interest.

“Thanks,” she said again, and walked away.

As she walked, she extracted various bits of gear from her bag and put them on. Hood and mask, gloves and booties, knife strapped to her belt. She knew she looked like a ninja frogman, but she felt like a cream puff.

The plunge into the Chao Phraya River wasn’t as bad as she was expecting. The water was warm, but the occasional bump into the unidentified floating object caused her to bite her tongue in an attempt to suppress girlie squeals of disgust. She tried to tell herself that Michelle Yeoh wouldn’t freak out over icky things in water, but it didn’t help much. Her webbed Kevlar gloves made scaling the pilings easier, but she felt a barnacle cut through the leg of her pants all the same. The blood mingled with the water, running off her in ticklish trickles.

From the pilings it was a scramble over the edge of the dock and a game of hide-and-seek as she worked her way closer to the building without being spotted by the guards and then up a stack of cargo containers to peer through the high windows.

She pressed herself against the wall of the warehouse and tried to breathe quietly. Below her a security guard walked with the dull, thudding pace of someone who expected a boring night. Nikki felt a thrill of exhilaration as she realized that he was totally unaware of her. She waited until he had passed, and then wiggled her way closer to the window.

The inside was dimly lit, but she could clearly see that the warehouse had been divided into two stories. The lower was full of large containers and boxes, and the upper had been extended loft style only partway across the length of the warehouse. Nikki
noticed with a sense of dread the ominous sign of a row of cargo containers being lined up on the floor. The doors were open, and workers appeared to be bolting metal frame bunk beds into each container. The stairs upward had been blocked off with a gate locked with a keypad. Anyone wanting to go upstairs would have to know the correct code. Her interest piqued, she climbed higher, working to get a better view of the second floor. Finally she had climbed high enough to stare through a grimy window into the upper story.

Row upon row of narrow cots filled the space, and on each cot rested a woman. Some not even women—girls barely old enough to claim puberty sat on those cots as well. Nikki felt her stomach drop. She looked back down to the main floor and counted up the beds and containers. Her head swiveled back to the loft. There were far more women than beds for those containers. They were planning on packing them in like sardines—probably only the strongest would survive. With the sudden clarity of a cartoon light bulb going off over her head, she realized what Sarkassian and Victor wanted with the patient records at Lawan’s clinic.

These women were the healthiest stock. They had been vetted by a doctor, after all. Sarkassian had taken the patient records and then taken the women. And now he was going to sell them like human cattle. They would become slaves and prostitutes.

In horror, Nikki saw that Lindawati was in the nearest corner of the warehouse. The little girl sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, rocking back and forth. A chain led from her ankle to a pipe next to the cot. Nikki sat back down below the window and put her head between her knees, her mind racing. She felt like throwing up. She tried to examine her options and think clearly. She hadn’t brought nearly enough weaponry to get all the girls out by herself. She needed the police. Possibly the
National Guard. She didn’t care who. She just wanted it to stop. She needed Val.

Climbing down the boxes, she slithered into the shadows, heading for the front of the building. She’d seen a small prefab shed in there. Men had been wandering in and coming out with clipboards and paperwork. And Sarkassian’s car was there. Surely, that’s where she would find Val. She would know what to do. She would save them.

She found Val leaning against the office shed and exhaling a lungful of smoke in curling waves.

“Val!” Nikki hissed.

Val’s eyes swiveled, but her head remained in position. “What are you doing here?” she whispered back.

“I figured it out,” Nikki said. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Val yawned, stretched, and walked away from the hut and toward the corner of the warehouse. Nikki followed her path, but kept to the shadows. When she turned the corner, Nikki stepped out into view.

“We have to get out of here,” she reiterated. “We’ve got to get backup and come back here with the police or something.”

“Get it through your head,” said Val. “For us, there is no police.”

“Well, we need some sort of help. We have to get them out of here.”

“Slow down, Red. What’s going on? What happened with the lawyer?”

“Forget the lawyer. You were right about him.”

“I told you so,” Val said automatically. “Now, how was I right? What’s he up to?”

“Probably the same thing we are,” answered Nikki. Val was still walking, aiming toward the edge of the pier. “He’s govern
ment,” Nikki continued, “probably CIA. He’s probably investigating Sarkassian.”

“Investigating Sarkassian for what?” Val’s eyes looked like black slits in her face.

“I figured it out,” Nikki said excitedly. “They’ve been bribing Amein to give them patient records from Lawan’s clinic. They go through the records and select the healthiest girls and then they sell them and ship them overseas in cargo containers. The girls have to be healthy to survive the journey and they have to be poor enough to go to Lawan’s clinic, otherwise someone would miss them. Lawan found out. She must have been about to go public, because they kidnapped her daughter to keep her from talking. Her daughter is upstairs in the warehouse along with the rest of the girls. We have to get them out of there!” Nikki finished her summation breathlessly. Val had stopped walking and was staring at her. The stare went on long enough that Nikki started to fidget.

Val finally pulled her gaze away and looked out at the river. “The Chao Phraya looks beautiful this time of night,” she said.

Nikki turned to see what was beautiful, but saw nothing but the lights from the other side. “Sure,” she said flippantly, her mood rebounding now that she had Val to back her up. “You can’t see the water.” She fiddled with the straps of her bag, cinching it down tighter on her back. Val’s mood was throwing her off.

Val sighed. It was a sad sigh, as if Nikki had said something incredibly disappointing.

“You’re funny, kid. You really are. I even kind of like you.”

“Don’t sound so thrilled about it,” Nikki said, still staring at the lights on the other side. She wondered what stories were behind those lights.

“I’m not,” said Val. “It would be a whole lot easier to kill you if I didn’t like you.”

Nikki turned around laughing, then stopped, staring at Val in disbelief. She recognized the gun—the silencer was new—but the sight didn’t make any sense.

“Sorry, Red,” Val said. Nikki looked left and right, for the guards. Val wouldn’t point a gun at her. But they were alone, and Val’s hand seemed perfectly steady. Nikki tried to decipher the look on Val’s face, but couldn’t.

“Why?” she managed to stutter out. “We’re partners.”

“Come on,” said Val, looking angry. “Don’t pretend you’re not spying on me for Mrs. Merrivel. You don’t really expect me to believe that we got paired together by accident or that you just happened to have met Jirair in Canada.” She laughed—a barking, unpleasant sound. “I was nearly free and clear. I’d sold the house. Most of my money had been transferred to the Swiss bank account. No one suspected anything. All I had to do was disappear, and Jirair and I could have been sailing to Bali with no one the wiser. And then you came along, all wide eyes and innocence. I might almost have believed it, except for the Canada story—but that’s what made you perfect, wasn’t it? You already knew what was going on. She just needed you to put the nail in my coffin. Mrs. Merrivel must have thought you were manna from heaven.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Nikki, enunciating every word as clearly as she could, as if her life depended on the transparency of language. She backed away from Val, one step at a time. She knew it was foolish. Val wasn’t going to shoot her. Not really. But she backed up another step anyway. She knew the river was close behind her. “I am not spying on you. Mrs. Merrivel just assigned me to you.”

Val shook her head. “Well, then she just signed your death warrant. At least you know who to blame.”

There was an odd popping sound and Nikki felt a burning pain in her side. The gun popped again and Nikki felt the second impact in her torso. She took one more step and realized she was out of ground, out of time, and out of luck.

THAILAND XIII

Down the Rabbit Hole

It was Orion’s Belt that told Nikki she was alive. She had opened her eyes, or at least thought she had. But everything was darkness. Everything was the same temperature as she was. She couldn’t tell where her body left off and something else, anything else, began. There didn’t seem to be any sound, and when she opened her eyes she couldn’t remember the feeling of movement, and so she wondered if she was alive. And then, through the clouds and pollution, she’d seen the dim outline of Orion, forever shooting at an unknown foe.

She opened her mouth and immediately swallowed a lungful of water. She coughed, her body contorting itself around the cough, and immediately gasped in pain. A shock wave of agony radiated out from her torso, manifesting itself as fireworks before her eyes and spreading out in rippling waves to the rest of her body. Freezing under the pain, she started to sink under the water again—she could feel it crawl up her nose. Her limbs began to move then, in an uncoordinated dog paddle fueled by panic. She
tried to suppress her coughing, both to stop the pain that it caused and because of the realization that somewhere out there in the darkness, Val waited with a gun.

Taking a deep breath, she tried to figure out what to do. She needed a plan. Mrs. Boyer always said that the first step toward creating a plan was to assess the current situation: where was she, what was her condition, what were her assets? She didn’t know where she was; everything was dark. She couldn’t tell if she was bleeding or not; everything was warm and wet. Panic was rising in her. Panic and fear. She felt herself beginning to slip into the place where there was no thought, only instinct, and that made her all the more afraid.

“Assets!” she commanded her brain, and her voice was a frog’s harsh croak in the blackness. Her only asset was her buoyant waterproof gear bag.

Realizing that her gear bag was really the thing keeping her afloat, and not her frantic paddling, she began to breathe a little more regularly. Painfully, she wormed out of the straps and pulled the bag around to the front of her. Wrapping her arms around it, she began to breathe a little easier.

The second step in creating a plan was to identify the problems. Problem one—she didn’t know which direction to swim. Problem two—she honestly didn’t know if she was bleeding. She’d been shot. There were two spinning worm holes of pain in her chest, but she was breathing. Which meant that she might pass out from blood loss at any second or she might be fine. Problem three—even if she did manage to live, she didn’t know what she was going to do about Val.

The third thing wasn’t really a problem, because she was probably going to die, and then Val would be someone else’s issue, so she could just ignore that one. And she couldn’t control the sec
ond problem, so she might as well act like she was fine. Which left the first problem—which way to swim? She tried to look in a circle, but from her vantage point everything looked black. She could feel the panic starting to seep back in.

Inside the bag, her cell phone began to ring. Even muffled by the fabric, she could tell it was her mother’s ringtone, and long years of conditioning made the bumping rhythm of “Sympathy for the Devil” hard to ignore. It was her mother after all. She had to answer. And more than that, the idea of speaking to her mother made her eyes well up with tears. She wanted to talk to her—now, when she didn’t know what to do. Her mother might not be able to fix the situation, and would probably just nag her into some sort of rash, rebellious activity, but at least her voice would be familiar.

Nikki pondered this and stared into the darkness. She’d managed not to answer many of her mother’s phone calls while she’d been in Bangkok. She hadn’t meant to; she’d just been busy. But the one time she actually wouldn’t have minded hearing the familiar tone of her mother’s voice, she couldn’t answer the phone without deflating her only asset.

The river pushed against her in laughing little waves, and she glared at it angrily. It seemed to be mocking her pain. But it pushed against her all the same, pushing in one steady direction.

Gingerly, Nikki paddled the water and tried to picture the map of Bangkok in her head. The river bent and twisted, but mostly flowed north to south. She’d entered from the right bank, which made it the eastern side. So if the water was pushing against her left side . . . She bobbed around until it was. Then she was pointing east.

She kicked once and felt the responding fireworks of pain, which left her gasping and lightheaded.

“Can’t stay here,” she said out loud. She knew it was true, but
staying there felt so much easier. “Change is hard,” she quoted Mrs. Boyer to herself. “You must maintain momentum.” She had thought Mrs. Boyer meant big changes—losing weight, becoming tougher, taking charge. She hadn’t thought it meant little changes like moving her legs up and down.

Slowly kicking, feeling every muscle and where it connected to her stomach, she began to make progress. It was a long journey. Things bumped into her. She could feel fish occasionally nibbling at her fingers—she hoped they were fish, anyway. And after what seemed like an eternity, she thought she could make out a pier. Lower jetties ran out from the shore. Moored boats bobbed in profile. Nikki tried to identify Sarkassian’s warehouse, but couldn’t. None of the landmarks looked the same. Even the pier looked different. Nikki realized, as she approached a floating dock, that everything looked different, because it was different. She had come up on an entirely different pier from the one she’d started from.