“What do you mean they’re gone?” Jack asked.

Lian flashed the light around the open garage, checking it out as she spoke. “They just drove away.”

“No way.” Jack fell into a folding metal chair, exhausted, cradling his forearm with his good hand. “They’re not leaving, they’re moving.”

Paul didn’t like the sound of Jack’s fading voice. In Lian’s flashlight, Jack’s skin looked ashen.

“What do we have here?” Lian approached a squatting shape under a heavy cloth in the middle of the neatly ordered garage. She yanked it off. “Wow.”

It was a vintage motorcycle with a sidecar, painted olive drab. Lian read the logo on the teardrop gas tank. “Royal Enfield.”

“That’s an Indian bike,” Jack said. “Guy must be a collector.”

Lian flashed her light over it again. “It has keys, too.”

“Moving where, Jack?” Paul asked.

“What?”

“Where are they moving to?” Paul repeated.

“They’ll try and find a way down here, and finish the job.”

Paul turned around and faced the door. “We passed a traffic tunnel that runs underneath the expressway. If they can find that road, they can get down here.”

“There’s a turnaround three kilometers north on the expressway,” Lian said. “The road out front of this building connects to it.”

“That gives us four minutes, tops,” Paul said.

Lian unscrewed the cap. “Plenty of petrol.”

“If they get down here, we’re all dead,” Paul said.

“At least we have guns,” Jack said.

“But we don’t know how many more of them there are, and they might be getting reinforcements,” Paul said.

Jack nodded toward the Royal Enfield. “Can you drive one of those?”

“I can,” Lian said. She slung a leg over the motorcycle, turned on the gas, switched the key, and kicked it over. The small engine fired up instantly. She smiled. “There’s room for all three of us.”

Jack stood and limped over to the chain that opened the rolling back door of the building. He kicked away the latch that locked the door in place and started pulling on the chain as Lian rolled the bike toward the rear exit. He spoke to Paul over his shoulder.

“You and Lian hit the road out front and head due west. It’s got to connect somewhere—”

“It does,” Lian said. “About eight kilometers up the road it curves around north, and in another twenty it reconnects with the expressway.” She looked at her watch. “We can’t make it all the way to Kuala Lumpur in time, but maybe we can get within working cell-phone distance and make a call.”

“That’s the plan then. I’ll stay here and hold them—” Jack collapsed in mid-sentence. Paul caught him.

“Help me get him in the sidecar,” Paul said.