Absolutely unbelievable. Molly was furious. “Whoever’s idea it was to use a child this way—they ought to be strung up.”
The people who lived in the neighboring houses had all been evacuated. Many of them stood back behind the line of soldiers, watching the drama play out.
Or not play out, as the case had been for the past several hours. But now one of the soldiers who spoke English had manned a megaphone, calling out for Jones to surrender.
And another of the soldiers had snatched one of the children—a baby of maybe eight months—out of the arms of her mother. He was using the child as a shield as he crossed the square, toward them.
The baby was screaming and reaching for her mother, who was also wailing, held back by several older women.
It would have been funny the way most of the civilians all instantly scattered. One moment they were there, the next they were gone. With the exception of the desperate young mother and her two companions, they all just vanished into the lengthening shadows of the afternoon.
But there was nothing even remotely humorous about a baby used as a human shield.
One of the soldiers approached the crying mother. He raised his weapon. And the woman fell to her knees—if not quite silenced, then silent enough.
“Hold your fire,” the megaphone man said, both in English and in a dialect Molly could roughly understand. It was different from the language spoken on Parwati Island, where she’d spent several years. But it was close enough for her to recognize similarities.
“What’s going on?” Max said as he came into the room. He was buttoning his shirt, and aside from one slightly sheepish glance at Molly and a quick attempt to straighten his hair, his attention was now fully on the situation unfolding.
“They’re bringing us some kind of radio,” Jones said, handing him the binoculars.
The window was one-way—mirrored on the outside. They could see out, but no one could see in. Still, Jones had told Molly that didn’t mean there wasn’t a sharpshooter somewhere across the square with a scope that was high-tech enough to see through it. Max apparently was thinking the same thing. He stood back and off to the side as he looked out through the bars.
“A radio?” Max said, his voice heavy with disbelief.
“Yeah,” Jones said. “Don’t get your hopes up. I think it’s going to be a single-channel walkie-talkie. Our interpreter probably didn’t know the word for it.”
“Mmm,” Max acknowledged him, binoculars trained on the military personnel clustered on the far side of the square. “They think they’re out of our range. They must not know we’ve got some serious weaponry in here. I wonder . . .”
“Maybe they know we’d never use it,” Molly suggested. “I mean, they must know we wouldn’t shoot at the soldier, for fear of hitting the little girl.”
“The baby’s for us,” Max told her, still looking through those binoculars. “We’re supposed to believe that they won’t fire at us when we open the door, if the baby is out there on the doorstep.”
The soldier with the baby was getting closer, and Molly could see that he was indeed carrying something besides the child.
“I’m going downstairs,” Max said.
“I am, too. I should be the one to open the door,” Jones said.
“What if it’s a bomb?”
Molly turned to see Gina standing just out in the hall—looking extremely worried, as if she’d already taken the return train, express, from Heaven. “This radio thing that they’re so keen to give us,” she clarified. “What if it’s not really a radio?”
Max was shaking his head. “From what I can see, I doubt they have the technology to—”
“But what if they do?”
He looked at her, and Molly held her breath. But his answer wasn’t patronizing or condescending, like,
Since everyone knows we just had sex, I’ll pretend to respect you by answering as if your silly question is valid.
Instead, he was honest. “That would be bad,” he told her. “But we need to communicate with them, Gina. I don’t see how we have a choice.”
She nodded. “At least make sure it’s really a radio,” she said, “before you bring it inside.”
“That won’t be so easy to do,” Jones told her.
Gina shot him a look. “Sure it will.” She gestured to the window. “Shout down to the baby-stealer, and tell him send a message to the guys in charge, with that same radio that he’s delivering. Have him tell them to repeat our message back to us over their megaphone. It should be something unusual, something that they wouldn’t just say—like, you know, the lyrics of a song. Then we’ll know it’s really a radio.” She frowned. “Unless he’s wearing a second one . . .”
Max had the binoculars back up. “I don’t see any wires on him. And I doubt they’d have miniatures—earpieces—when they obviously don’t even have the money for body armor.”
“Although,” Gina said, clearly intent upon playing devil’s advocate, “what if he doesn’t speak English?”
The soldier who delivered the radio spoke just enough English.
Gina’s strategy worked like a charm. The walkie-talkie was a single-channel short-range piece of shit—they couldn’t use it to call for help. Max got it off the doorstep without being shot at and relocked the door.
The baby was taken back across the square and handed over to her weeping mother.
Everything was wonderful—including Gina’s smile because Max had used lyrics from an old Elvis Presley song.
“Like a ribbon floats, Girlie, do you see,” the words had been broadcast over the megaphone in stilted, accented English. Like a life-and-death version of the telephone game, most of them had been seriously misheard or misunderstood. “Dolly, sowing, goats, some things are men do be . . .”
But it was clearly close enough.
Everything was wonderful—except for the one thing that mattered the most.
The negotiation.
The CO—the army commander in charge of this operation—was following strict orders, that much was clear to Max within fifteen seconds of conversation with the interpreter. The CO wasn’t a professional negotiator, and he told Max that he wasn’t authorized to cut any kind of deal.
It was more than a lack of imagination on his part. The man clearly had a single goal—to save his own ass. There were people who played strictly by the book because they believed in the rules. But the CO did it because he was frightened.
Max spent about thirty minutes explaining—gently, so as not to frighten him further—that he was American and that he wanted to speak to someone from the American Embassy, and that yes, he knew there was no embassy here on Meda Island. He wanted to speak to someone from the embassy over on East Timor, in Dili.
Only to discover that the embassy in Dili had been shut down. Evacu-ated. Due to the increased terrorist threat, all personnel had been moved to a location deemed more safe.
Then came the worst news of all.
The commanding officer had been informed by his superiors that Grady Morant was the leader of a notorious terrorist cell, wanted both by the Indonesian and U.S. Governments.
And, oh, yeah, he’d also managed to let it slip that his orders were to shoot them—all—the moment they stepped out of the door, even with their hands up.
So much for no one getting hurt.
Now, maybe there were barriers due to language, but Max simply could not convince the CO that there was a serious misunderstanding.
“I want to speak to Emilio Testa,” Max finally said.
“Who is Emilio Testa?” came the response.
Max looked over to find Gina watching him. She knew why he was asking. If Emilio was alive, then Jules probably wasn’t.
“He’s the man who lives in this house,” Max said into the walkie-talkie.
There was silence, during which Gina spoke. Quietly. “If Jules isn’t dead, if he’s bringing help, he’d have been here by now, wouldn’t he?”
Max couldn’t lie to her. “Yeah.”
The walkie-talkie squawked. “We know this man not, this Testa.”
“That might be a lie,” Max told Gina. “Or maybe not. Maybe Testa dealt with someone further up the chain of command.”
“Are you prepared to surrender?” the voice from the walkie-talkie asked. It was clearly a selection right from the negotiation section of their translation book.
But was he kidding? If surrender meant opening the door and getting shot . . .
“I want to speak to an American,” Max said. “Preferably someone from the Jakarta office of the CIA or the American Embassy. But I’ll take—I’ll talk to any officer of any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. Any at all. Any American,” he repeated.
“You are in no position to make demands,” came the reply, also right from the book.
“Sure we are,” Max said. “We’ve got enough food and water to last months.” Not true, but if the officer didn’t have access to Emilio Testa, then he didn’t know that. “You really want to sit out there for that long?”
“The Colonel arrives tomorrow. As does the tank.”
Max sat up. What the fuck?
“Did he just say
tank
?” Gina asked, wide-eyed.
“Please repeat,” Max said into the walkie-talkie.
But he got only dead air. Whoever was on the other end had turned off their walkie-talkie.
No wonder their man wasn’t a particularly skilled negotiator. He didn’t have to be.
The colonel—whoever
he
was—was on his way. That was either good news or bad. They wouldn’t know until he arrived.
As for the tank—no mystery there. That wasn’t just bad news, it was freaking bad.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-ONE
They might be bluffing,” Molly said.
“They might not.” Max said, meeting Jones’s eyes. “You have any experience with . . . ?”
“Tanks?” Jones shrugged, trying to hide his fear. It had gone through him in waves when Max first brought him the news, and now it settled, securely in his intestines. “Enough to know that there are two places I never want to be. Inside of one during a battle where the other guys have tank-busting artillery, and at the spot where the bastards who are inside of the tank are aiming its gun. I mean, yeah, this place is solid, but . . . A tank’ll do some damage.”
And wasn’t
that
an understatement.
At that point, they split up—Molly and Jones going upstairs, Gina and Max staying down. The kitchen was their base of operations as they went through every cabinet and closet in the house.
Searching for a radio transmitter. Or anything else that might help them get the hell out of here in one piece.
A pair of ruby slippers? A magic portal to another dimension? A kit for a build-it-yourself helicopter with a special force-field feature that would keep them from getting the shit shot out of them when they took off from the upstairs window?
So far no luck.
They had, however, found a George Foreman grill and an espresso maker. A karaoke machine had created quite the false alarm since it looked rather radiolike. At least it looked more like a radio than the George Foreman did.
They’d found a copy machine and five boxes of paper. A year’s supply of candles. An ancient box that claimed the device inside could make something called “Incredible Edibles,” only it was filled with mint-condition baseball cards—including a Tom Seaver and a Ted Williams.
After setting that box aside—wouldn’t it be nice to have Emilio help pay some of Molly’s upcoming medical bills?—Jones moved into Emilio’s bedroom, where he opened a cabinet to find a flat-screen TV.
The TV showed only snow when he turned it on, but there was a DVD player attached, plus three shelves of DVDs.
It seemed that Emilio had a thing for a porn star named Ruksana, who appeared on all the covers of her DVDs dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl, complete with her hair up in pigtails.
Molly, of course, caught him flipping through the various titles. “Let me guess,” she said. “You’re looking at these in order to get a better understanding of who Emilio is. So you can figure out where he might hide something like a radio. If he had a radio to hide.”
Jones laughed. “Exactly.” He couldn’t have done a better job bullshitting his way out of that one himself. “I’ve discovered that Emilio’s a lot like me. We both go for nice girls.”
Molly looked at the cover of the DVD he was holding, and laughed. The English title was in small letters at the bottom of the picture—
Very Mischief Maiden in Big Trouble.
Apparently something had been lost in translation.
“If I ever write my memoirs,” she said. “I will definitely use this title.” She flipped the box over. “Who knew I had so much in common with ‘the one Ruksana?’ ”
Jones looked at her. The mostly windowless house was dimly lit—they were using candles in an attempt to conserve the generator’s gasoline. But Molly could bring light into the darkest room.
She smiled at him as she put the DVD back on the shelf. “So if you had a radio, where would you hide it?”
“I wouldn’t have one,” Jones told her, playing with a lock of her hair. She was wearing it up due to the heat, but as usual, tendrils escaped around her face. “You don’t need a radio when you work alone. But if I had worked with someone that I needed to get in touch with, I’d’ve kept my radio in my car. Or in my boat or my plane.”
“Do you think—”
“There’s nothing in the Impala,” he told her. “I went over it. A coupla times, before all the shooting started.” He closed his eyes, trying to see the dashboard of that crappy subcompact that had been parked out on the street. The car that Emilio and Jules had driven off in. Jones had started to hotwire it when he’d thought Molly was inside of the white van that had left in such a hurry.
He tried to picture the glove compartment, to see if it had a lock on it that was more substantial than usual. But it was no good. He just didn’t remember.
“What?” Molly asked.
“If I were Emilio,” Jones told her, “I’d keep my radio in the car I always used when I was, um, not necessarily following the letter of the law. My less obviously identifiable car. Like the little Ford he took down the mountain.”
“Shit.” Molly rarely swore, but if there was ever a time for it, it was now. They’d sifted through just about every closet, drawer, or cabinet in the place.
No radio. At least none that acted as a transmitter.
But Gina came into the room, radiating excitement. “Hey, have you found any . . .” She saw them standing by the cabinet. “Great, this is exactly what I was looking for.”
“Porn?” Jones asked.
“Honey,” Molly said to Jones in her super-patient sitcom wife voice. “Gina doesn’t need porn to make
her
sex life more exciting.”
“Oh, Mr. Pizza Delivery Man . . .” He pretended to be Gina, his voice all breathy and high-pitched. “Really? Right here in the kitchen? Even though my friends are upstairs? Okay! Wocka-chicka, wocka-chicka.”
“Shut up!” Gina laughed, but she was blushing. “Give me a break, I haven’t seen the man in a year and a half.”
“So the first thing you do is jump him? Without even . . .” Jones realized what he was saying. Molly was looking at him. Oops.
“We just don’t want you to get hurt,” Molly told Gina.
“I’m trapped in a bunker disguised as a house on a remote island in Indonesia,” Gina said, “surrounded by an army whose commander has been given an order to shoot to kill, even if we surrender. A tank is on its way, the intention being to blast us out of here.”
“Point taken,” Jones said. “So why are you looking for porn?” He took the DVD case from Gina.
Ruksana Visits Vatican City.
“Didn’t Ruksana win some award for this one?” he asked. “Like most tasteless and offensive piece of shit of the year?”
“Oh, dear,” Molly said as she saw it. “That’s just
wrong.
”
“Open the box,” Gina told him.
Aha. There wasn’t a DVD inside. There was a computer diskette.
“We think it’s some kind of backup file,” she told them. “It was hidden in the pantry. With an old computer—one that was being stored there. Like someone got a laptop but didn’t want to throw the old desktop away? I thought it was weird to hide a DVD back there, so . . . Of course it
is
porn, and I guess people who are into it hide it wherever, but I opened the box and . . .”
Molly had already taken one of the DVD cases from the shelf, opening it and . . . “Here’s another.”
Jones grabbed a stack and started searching, too.
“Max is setting the computer up in the kitchen,” Gina told them. “If he can get it to work, we can try to see what’s on these disks.”
The computer was practically an antique, the monitor tiny by modern standards. It chugged slowly to life as Gina brought Molly and Jones back into the kitchen.
“Find anything else?” Max asked from atop his pillow. It hurt to sit, but if he kind of half perched, using the cushion, it wasn’t too painful.
“The mother lode,” Gina reported. “Ten more disks.”
The contents of the pantry were spread out across the kitchen floor—everything from piles of old newspapers to a supply of dog food to a box of fliers—printed half in Indonesian, half in Portuguese—for what looked like a political campaign. They had to step over it all to get to the table.
“Does anyone else want tea?” Molly asked, crossing instead to the stove.
Gina put the disks down on the table near Max. “Yeah, I’d like some, too, but I’ll get it.” She touched the back of his neck as she headed toward Molly. It was the lightest caress, but it was both possessive and intimate, and Max suddenly became acutely aware that this very table was where they’d recently . . .
Okay. Anyone else in the room thinking about that? Max glanced at Jones, who caught his eye and tried not to smile and . . .
Yup, Jones was thinking about it, too.
“Sit,” Gina told Molly. “Put your feet up.”
“Thanks, sweetie.” Molly came over to sit at the table, right across from Max.
Max pretended to be fascinated by the computer monitor, which was still giving him an hourglass icon. In his peripheral vision, he could see Jones moving a chair so that Molly could elevate her feet.
“My ankles have been starting to swell,” Molly said. She was speaking directly to him. He couldn’t not look up at her. Oh, man, was he actually blushing? “It’s a recent development.”
Wait. Swollen ankles were . . . ? Didn’t she have breast cancer?
She smiled across the table at him. “Don’t look so worried, Bhagat. It’s normal. It’s probably from the heat. I’m just supposed to be careful because, well, I
am
in my forties . . .”
Now Max was completely mystified.
Molly’s smile widened. “What? You’re looking at me like . . .” But then her smile vanished and she turned toward Jones. “You didn’t tell him I was pregnant,” she said. “Did you?”
“You’re pregnant, too?” Max asked. He turned to look at Jones. “No, he didn’t tell me that.”
Jones rubbed his forehead as if he had a bad headache. “Mol, I thought it was private. Until we got the results of the biopsy . . .”
Molly was pissed. “You thought you’d be able to talk me into terminating this pregnancy—”
“I thought,” Jones said, over her, “that after you spoke to another doctor or twenty, you might decide that saving your own life is a priority, at which point you might want the
privacy
—”
“What I
want
is this baby,” Molly said.
Max met Gina’s eyes from across the room. She had to be thinking the same thing he was—that they owed Molly and Jones an apology for fighting in front of them before. This was excruciatingly painful to have to sit through.
“I know you do,” Jones told her grimly. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t. God, Molly—”
“Well. I’m glad you finally found the courage to let me know that.” Molly stood up. She was statuesque, always standing very straight, but now she drew herself up even taller. “Excuse me,” she said to Max as she headed for the door.
Jones, meanwhile, was obviously frustrated. And pissed. “What I was about to say was: God, Molly, not if having it is going to kill you. Shit, Mol, don’t—”
But she’d already left the room. He chased her, and moving too fast, had to leap over the bag of dog food. In doing so, he knocked over the box of political fliers. They went everywhere. “Ow, shit, fuck, sorry!”
“I’ll get it,” Gina said, coming to his rescue. “Just go.”
But Jones stopped. He bent down and picked up one of the fliers, staring at the picture of the smiling candidate. “Shit,” he said again. He flipped the flier over, clearly looking for the part that was in English. There wasn’t any. “Molly!” he shouted. “I need you in here!” He looked up at Gina. “Go get her.”
Gina didn’t seem convinced that that was the best thing to do right now, but Jones was adamant.
“Tell Molly I need her to help me read this,” he said. “She’s better than me with languages.” He turned to Max. “I think I know what this whole goatfuck is about. I think I know who’s after me.” He held up the flier. “See this guy? He paid Chai a serious chunk of change for me to kill his mistress.”
“His name is Heru Nusantara,” Jones told them. “I don’t know what he’s running for, but someone’s obviously investing some money into his campaign.”
“I don’t think it’s a campaign,” Molly said. She was back sitting at the table, flipping over the flier. “I think it’s just, I don’t know, propaganda . . . ? It doesn’t say what he’s running for. At least not that I can tell. I mean, there are some similarities here to the dialects I
can
read, but . . .”
“You’re doing way better than I could,” Gina told her. The tea had finally steeped, and she poured it into two mugs. She brought one over to Molly.
“This part here has something to do with East Timor,” Molly pointed to the top of the flier. She smiled wanly at Gina. “Thanks.”
Gina got her own mug and sat down at the table next to Max, who was clicking and scrolling his way through the diskettes they’d found.
It was more than obvious that Molly was overheated, she was tired, she was upset, she was scared—Gina could relate. It had been one hell of a month, and it was far from over.
As if he could read her mind, Max, who had been resting his chinin his hand, shifted so that his arm was on the back of her chair. It was too warm in the kitchen for full contact, but he touched her anyway—with just a few of his fingertips, lightly against her back, the slightest pressure.
It nearly made her start to cry.
He was there. Beside her.
He loved her—somehow, he was finally at peace with that.
There was nothing more that she wanted—except maybe to live another hundred years with Max beside her.
Problem was, they only had enough food and water to last a few weeks. At most. And that wasn’t taking into consideration this tank that was coming.
Still, Max was here. He wasn’t just a voice on a radio, he wasn’t just a figment of her imagination.
“There’s something here about an American company coming in.” Molly looked at Jones. “Doesn’t East Timor have . . . I know it’s not oil . . .”
“Natural gas,” he said. “But no one wants to touch it because of the violence—the constant fighting on the island.”
“It looks like this is saying this politician, Heru Nusantara, helped set up a deal with a company called Alliance Co.,” Molly said. “The implication is it’s going to bring jobs and money into the area—and make East Timor a proper part of Indonesia once and for all.”
“Yeah,” Jones scoffed. “Like that’s going to happen. Someone’s going to get rich, and it’s not going to be the starving people of East Timor. That I can guarantee.”
“There’s also something about how the American embassy has come to Dili,” Molly told them. “Obviously, they’re there to support Alliance Co. The implication is that the American presence will create stability in East Timor.”