The Red Room by Ridley Pearson Page B

What’s not to love? Opens her eyes again when Xin speaks.
    “You napping on me?”
    “Ready?”
    “Will call all fifteen, thirty seconds apart.”
    “Correct.”
    “Here we go.” Her head clears; she is instantly sober despite her efforts otherwise. This is not the first time this has happened; where the alcohol haze goes, she has no idea, but it’s undetectable. She has the cell phone to her ear. She watches Xin. He’s gotten a young woman in her early twenties to make the calls. The woman’s face glistens with a sheen of nervousness. Grace wants to caution her to do it right, but knows it would only add to the woman’s anxiety. She has to trust Xin. She chuckles to herself—his name, a common one, means “trust.”
    “Something amusing?” Xin asks.
    “You had to be there,” she says. She drains the remaining vodka. Trust is not found in her personal lexicon. She knows its absence is the source of much of her inner struggle.
    The calls go out. The young woman does an excellent voice, sounding about thirteen and troubled. Three calls. Five. Grace keeps eyeing the vodka bottle, knowing she’s over her efficacious limit but wanting more.
    “He’s on phone,” Besim says in her left ear.
    “Joy!” Grace says to Xin, whose typically quiet face registers a thrill. “That’s the one we want.”
    “Got it.”
    “Off phone.”
    She mutes the video. “Thank you, Besim. That’s all for the night. But please, don’t leave for at least another thirty minutes. I will tell you when.”
    “As you wish.”
    She will turn off the apartment light before allowing Besim to drive off. She wants as little connection to the wrong number as possible.
    Back with Xin, she says, “I need all calls, text messages and web access to and from that number over the past ten days to two weeks.”
    “It will take a few hours. Likely a lot of data. I will post here. You can access it once I post. I will let you know.”
    “Give me the GPS data as well.”
    “Copy.” Xin ends the video call.
    Grace is left with nothing on her computer screen but her wallpaper photo of a dog and cat curled together at the foot of a wingback chair. They’re not hers. She has no pets. No wingback chairs.
    She isn’t who she pretends to be. She isn’t who she is.
    As bad as that makes her feel, she feels damn good.

14
    N
ee-hao.”
Knox speaks over the phone’s earbud wire to retain his peripheral vision. His feet are tired, his belly empty; he’s back down the hill in Jabal, the nearest thing Amman has to a historic district. With each conquering army, one civilization has replaced the next, going back millennia. While the Jabal neighborhood is arguably also the most modern, these contemporary edifices are built cheek-to-jowl alongside ancient ruins. It’s a human stew of body odor, food scents and fossil fuel. Livelihoods are made on the streets, other lives are lost on the streets, and still others repair the streets.
    Now they are teeming in the evening hour.
    “Nee-hao,”
Grace answers.
    “Can you change a FedEx delivery address for me?” He speaks Shanghainese, a specific dialect of Mandarin. Of all the words, only “FedEx” is in English. It stands out like a black sheep.
    “Are you sender or recipient?”
    “Recipient.”
    “Must be sender.” Grace’s tone is deliberate, professional.
    “Electronically? Can you hack it?”
    “I could check with Data Services, see if we have that capability. I would guess it would come down to timing.”
    “Immediately.”
    “No. I would think not.”
    He hesitates. Victoria turned him in to the police, who will have located the shipment using her address as the point of origin. He’s counting on FedEx being so fast that the Harmodius is already in the air, or perhaps landed in Istanbul. The trick is to move it while the Jordanians debate how much to share with the Turks, and if they come to terms, the Turks set up surveillance to trap the recipient—Knox. Given the bureaucratic