Page 116 of Code 6

“Special...,” he started to say, but his voice dropped.

“In a voice as loud as mine,” the interrogator shouted, “specialwhat?”

“Special handling!”

Rottke’s chest heaved with each breath. The interrogator stepped back, as if satisfied for the moment. Then he moved closer, tightening his glare.

“And what is ‘special handling’?”

Rottke summoned his last show of defiance and spat directly into his interrogator’s face. The Russian cocked his arm, ready to bludgeon his prisoner.

“Blackout?” said Gamble, reading the stage direction aloud. He put the pages aside, his heart pounding.

It was evident that his daughter could write, but that wasn’t Kate’s point in sharing these particular pages. Nor was it merely a history lesson—unless the lesson was that history repeats itself. Code 6 was a Nazi abomination of state-of-the-art technology. Good made evil. Gamble had given his speech a thousand times about the disconnectbetween technology on the one hand and forces of “good and evil” on the other. It was all packaged in his story about the famous fictional sled dog that was his company’s namesake.

“Buck is neither good nor evil. Buck is pure. In the right hands, Buck can do wonderful things. Buck, however, is not always in the right hands. We do not control the sled driver. Our creativity and inventiveness can never be stifled by the unfortunate reality that, in the wrong hands, Buck can be a force for evil.Never.”

He wondered if Kate’s play was her rejoinder. A strange memory popped into his mind, and he was suddenly at the kitchen table with a sixteen-year-old Kate, drilling her on SAT questions and those confounding analogies. He could almost hear her voice in his head, articulating the message behind her play in that singsong pattern: “Code Six is to IBM as Patrick’s ransom demand is to Buck Technologies.”

It was a chilling thought, made all the more disturbing by the fact that he didn’t have clearance to know exactly what code the kidnappers wanted. Patrick did, but he was unreachable. Jeremy Peel surely did, but he was unlikely to share any secrets, even if he could have done so without breaking the law. There was only one person he could think to ask.

He picked up his phone and dialed the women’s federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia.

“I’d like to schedule a visitation with Sandra Levy,” he told the operator. “As soon as possible.”

Chapter 53

Patrick and Olga rode in the back of a box truck. Liu hadn’t told them where they were headed, but Patrick assumed it was Cali, the city Javier had chosen for the exchange. Obviously, Liu was doing all he could to keep Kate under the impression that nothing had changed.

“He’s going to kill me,” said Olga.

The truck was loaded with twenty-pound bags of rice, which Liu had rearranged to make room for his hostages to sit inside the double cargo doors, toes touching and facing each other. The floor-to-ceiling crack between the locked doors provided just enough ventilation for them to breathe and enough daylight to see.

“Don’t say that,” said Patrick. “We’re going to get out of this alive.”

“You might. Not me.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“It’s not up to you.”

“We have to keep hope.”

“We have to be realistic. Tell me this. Why would Liu keep me alive?”

The white noise of truck tires on pavement filled the silence between them. Patrick wanted to be positive, but it was hard to find convincing words of encouragement with Liu in control.

“See,” she said. “You don’t have an answer. Javier was different. With him, there was hope.”

“Sorry, but I never saw Javier as a beacon of hope.”

“Javier had reasons to keep me alive. This venture into the business of kidnapping was a sideshow. His bread and butter was sex trafficking. I was his product. You don’t kill your product. This man has no reasonto keep me alive, except to torture me and get you to do whatever he wants you to do. When it’s over, he’ll kill me.”

Intellectually, it was hard to argue with her logic.

“Then we need to find a reason for him to keep you alive,” said Patrick.

“Yeah, well, I guess we know the only thing I’m good for.”