I picked the lock, then I carried the body there and put it in the bathtub. I cranked the air-conditioning to its highest setting. The body would start to stink in the next day, which was Saturday, but the remodelers didn’t work weekends so as not to disturb the current tenants, so I might have two days before the body was found, if I was extremely lucky. Fine. I would be gone by then.
I put the pieces of the cell phone into a plastic bag I could throw away after I left the apartment. I didn’t want the Company finding it after I was gone; I didn’t want them on my trail.
I went back to bed, and I thought that having killed, I would never sleep again. But I slept the deep and restful slumber that comes after making a hard decision.
15
MY SPARK OF INSPIRATION CAME from a complaint Ollie had made about some missing imported whisky. Because there are thousands of containers holding crates of fine whiskies shipped from Ireland and Scotland, and nearly nine billion metric tons of all sorts of cargo shipped on the seas every year. These goods are mostly carried in two hundred million containers—twenty-foot- or forty-foot-long steel coffins you can fill with whisky or shoes or computers or frozen meat or whatever. Even me.
Many cargo ships carry six thousand containers or more. Almost none of these containers are inspected for contraband. A busy port may see thirty thousand containers a day enter and then be loaded onto rail and trucks. As the ships arrive to deliver their cargo—whether in New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Houston—they are met by a fleet of trucks. Stop the containers to conduct detailed inspections, which involves offloading a container onto a truck, hauling it to a scanner, having bureaucrats complete paperwork and watch the inspection, unpack and then repack if any anomalies are found, and then reload and return to a truck, and you get a logistical and financial nightmare. Any inspected container creates a delay, strains a link in the surprisingly delicate economic chain. Trucks bring cargo or empty containers to the port and they take away cargo from the port. Stop for inspections, and the trucks and the trains moving the raw goods and finished products stop. The stores don’t have necessities on their shelves. The shoppers complain, the stores lose profits, the shareholders scream bloody murder, the politicians listen.
This is the big, gaping hole in our armor.
The security people brag that six percent of containers get inspected. That math means ninety-four percent don’t. But that number lies. Six percent at a major port would be nearly two thousand containers a day. It simply doesn’t happen.
I could get to Europe if I could get inside a container. The odds of being caught in an inspection were very low. Hide in the steel box for seven to ten days, get spit out in London or more likely Rotterdam, the biggest European port. Then hitch a boat into London. Start looking for Lucy and my son.
All I had to do was smuggle myself.
16
Amsterdam
EDWARD LOVED FEAR. The smell of it in the skin, the taste of it in the saliva, the feel of it in the drumming heartbeat. Fear was the most powerful force in the world. Edward knew fear was the engine for religion, the spark for war, even the kindling for love—because all people are afraid to be alone.
Fear had been the key to breaking the young woman’s soul.
Edward sipped his coffee at the kitchen table and considered the past three weeks. His experiment had proved to the malcontents and low-level criminals he’d formed into a loose gang that a careful application of abuse, drugs, and isolation, coupled with a consistent dose of rape and frequent threats of execution, could produce desired effects. He could tell each morning that the group’s nervousness about the kidnapping had lessened: the ransoms were paid, and the young woman had begun to drift into their circle. It wasn’t so different from his student days as an actor: you created a character and stepped into the skin. Now he’d done that for the young woman. He had remade her into a new character.
Edward made it clear to the others that no one else was to touch her; no one else was to speak to her without his permission. She was his clay. He knew, though, that they listened at the closed door as he told her of her evils, and