I should have taken the hormone boost too, Lisa thought. I should be doing my part nursing him. But it was easier for Alice, easier with her career in finance already established enough that she could take so much time off, while Lisa still toiled daily towards tenure in her ivory tower.

“What did he want?” Alice asked.

“To talk,” Lisa said. “Maybe to blow a whistle.”

Alice squinted, and Lisa could feel her skepticism. “Whistle-blowing takes balls and a conscience. The Martin Holtzmann you’ve described didn’t sound like he had either.”

“No,” Lisa sighed. “He didn’t.”

Anne got home an hour later.

“You look better,” she said.

Holtzmann smiled. “I feel better. In fact, I think I’ll go to the office tomorrow.”

Anne Holtzmann lay in bed, pretending to sleep, listening to her husband’s breathing until she was sure he was out.

Something was very wrong here. Paranoia. Emotional outbursts. Night sweats and vomiting. It almost reminded her of…

Anne rose quietly and padded into the bathroom. One by one she opened the medicine cabinets, then the drawers, searching through them, looking for a bottle of pills.

Nothing. Martin had finished the painkillers months ago. So why was he acting like a man on drugs?

Anne Holtzmann crept quietly back into bed, troubled. Tomorrow. Tomorrow she’d do some digging into her husband’s activities.

Chapter 56: En Route

56

EN ROUTE

Monday October 29th

He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious. Sun Tzu had written that in The Art of War. Feng repeated it to himself again and again as Nakamura drove them out of the city, to a darkened piece of coast on the Mekong Delta, as Nakamura left Feng chained inside the jeep as he loaded supplies into the inflatable boat, as Nakamura clipped a metal leash to Feng’s restraints and pointed with his gun towards the beach.

So tired. Every part of him hurt. He’d downed thousands of calories and the hunger still gnawed inside, his body ravenous for resources to apply to its reconstruction. At his best, he thought he could take the CIA man. But chained, wounded, tired, and weaponless?

Ahead the inflatable boat waited on the sand, piled high with supplies as waves crashed down a few meters beyond it.

“The engine won’t start without me,” Nakamura said. “Drag it out into the water.”

Feng did as he was told, dragging it out with his bound hands as Nakamura followed, until he was thigh-deep in the surf. The CIA agent climbed in, the end of Feng’s leash still in his hand. “Come aboard,” he said. And then Feng was in the boat as well, in the front, looking back at Nakamura.

“We going all the way to Burma in this thing?” Feng asked.

His CIA captor just laughed.