Her memory checked out, and Lee turned her attention to where she might be now. Her BrainPal’s internal chronometer told her that she had been out for roughly six hours. Given that expanse of time, it was possible that she, the apparently late Jefferson and (she rather strongly suspected) Hughes were now on the other side of the planet from Zhoushan. She doubted that, however. It would have taken at least some time for Two and Six to have gotten her naked and strapped to a chair and otherwise prepped for what they were planning to do to her. Two also mentioned that he (she? Lee decided to go with “he” in her brain for now) had already had enough time to talk to Jefferson and Hughes and to kill Jefferson when he had not cooperated. For these reasons, Lee suspected she was still somewhere in Zhoushan.

She also suspected, since she was still in fact in the hands of Two and Six and not already rescued by her platoon, that wherever she was had shielding that kept her BrainPal from transmitting her whereabouts. She tested this by trying to make a connection to Hughes and then to several other people in the platoon: nothing. She tried pinging the Tubingen: also nothing. Either this room specifically had a signal blocker or she was somewhere that was designed with (or had among its capabilities) the ability to block signals. If it was the latter, that would bring down the number of possible buildings it could be in Zhoushan.

Lee thought again, more deeply, about her situation and realized she was sitting on a clue. She was in a restraint chair of some sort—moreover, a restraint chair designed for someone to sit in for an extended period of time, given that the seat of the chair had a sliding trapdoor to allow waste through. Lee did not fancy herself a connoisseur of restraint systems, but as she was now in her ninth decade of life, she had seen a thing or two. In her experience, restraint chairs showed up in three places: hospitals, prisons and particularly specialized brothels.

Of the three, Lee dismissed the idea of a brothel first. It was possible, but brothels were a place of business and not particularly secure. People lived in them and worked in them, and there were (if the brothel was at all successful) all sorts of new and different clientele coming in and going out at all times of the day. Brothels would ensure some privacy, but probably not so much that a shotgun blast wouldn’t be noticed, not to mention a corpse or two being dragged out of the premises.

In a hospital a corpse would not be a problem, but the shotgun blasts probably would be. An abandoned hospital might solve that issue, but hospitals also generally were not signal-proof—too much medical information was shuttled about electronically to make it a feasible idea.