Lethal Circuit (Michael Chase 1) Read online

  After Michael fought his way forward through the packed aisle, the driver left him in a cloud of diesel and dust in what was a fair approximation of farmland. The ludicrous spires of development now far behind him, Michael continued up the highway a few paces before hitting a crossroads where a blacktop road wound up a grassy hill. This was not what Michael had expected of China. Kansas maybe, but not the busiest manufacturing center on the planet. And yet, here it was, a golden field with a lonely road winding through it like something right out of middle America. If not for the salty ocean air, Michael could have sworn he was in the heartland. He imagined that the sea breeze had to be blowing in from the Pearl River Estuary, which was represented by a wide bay on his wrist top LCD. Feeling that there might be another set of eyes watching, Michael scanned the periphery to see if he was being followed. Except for the trickle of traffic on the highway, however, the rolling hills appeared largely deserted. Hiking a few paces up the road, he found a hidden spot behind a knoll and took a quick moment to do some housekeeping.

  Michael pulled his backpack off his shoulders and opened the drawstring to its main compartment. The pack itself was relatively low volume, small enough for him to always carry with him, yet big enough for the essentials. And though Michael had little experience with the Backpacker Circuit, he had spent enough time traipsing through the Cascades to know what those essentials were. He carried a change of clothes: a fleece jersey and a pair of cargo pants, underwear and socks; nothing fancy but warm enough for a cool night. Next up was a space blanket, the kind with a reflective coating on one side designed to preserve body heat in emergency situations. Michael had spent the night under just such a blanket, caught on the north face of Mount Rainer in a blizzard, and as far as he was concerned he would never go anywhere without one again. In fact, as he fished through his pack, he took the moment to slip the space blanket into the pocket of his cargo shorts. In the unlikely event that he got separated from his pack, it would be there.

  With that thought, Michael instinctively felt for the Swiss Army knife he carried in his pocket. After getting off the plane, the first thing he had done was pull it from his backpack. In general, Michael felt better about items he could keep on his person and to that end, his GPS capable watch, and a high resolution smartphone were a perfect complement to the trip. His cash and identification were further contained in a special pocket he had sewn to an inner panel of his shorts. As long as he kept his pants on, Michael reasoned, he’d remain in good stead.

  Still, the reason he had the pack was that though you could try, you couldn’t possibly carry everything you needed to travel for months on end in a single pair of cargo shorts. For that reason, the backpack also contained amongst other essentials: a Lonely Planet guidebook of the region, a Gore-Tex rain shell, a self-filtering canteen that made the dirtiest of water safe to drink, and a Petzyl headlamp, all of which he pushed aside in his effort to find what he was looking for. After dropping the pack thirty feet to the concrete below the previous evening, he hoped they were still intact. Luckily he had packed them within the folds of his down sleeping bag and with a final hook of the wrist he was able to extract what he was after — a compact pair of binoculars.

  Michael had debated bringing the binoculars, but decided in the end that they were so lightweight, they wouldn’t hurt. At least not physically. But after all these years they still packed an emotional punch. Michael had been seventeen, staring through a pair of binoculars just like these ones, when it had happened. One minute he was a happy hiker and the next he was a hostage. It was without a doubt the single most horrific experience of his life.

  Truthfully, the whole thing had started out great. His dad had invited him on one of his business trips. He was scoping out a new production facility for his company in Peru and Michael had jumped at the chance to go with him. Once they were done with business in Lima, they headed up to the Sacred Valley of the Incas near Machu Pichu. And that’s when their little excursion went seriously off the rails. It was unclear whether the kidnappers had targeted them in Lima or not, but they knew what they were doing. They waited until Michael and his father were apart and they sprung. Michael had climbed a few hundred feet above to scope out the area with the binoculars while his father set up camp near the stream below. Michael was consumed by the lush mountain scenery, simply drinking it all in, when he felt a sharp tap on his shoulder. He was startled, but not scared. He figured it was just his dad. Even though Peru was home to hundreds of kidnappings a year, he had given little thought to the phenomena. Besides, Michael was seventeen. He was invincible.

  Or so he thought. The first smack of the pistol dissuaded him of his invincibility pretty quickly and once the other two kidnappers trained their machine guns on him it was all downhill from there. Michael tried his best to act brave, to look brave, to be brave, but he was scared and it must have shown. His attackers asked him at gunpoint where his father was and when Michael refused to answer, they pistol whipped him again. And that’s when he got really frightened. Because, Michael thought, if his father wasn’t here, where was he? Did he even know what was happening?

  The lead gunman, his coarse black hair tucked behind his ears, ripped the binoculars savagely from Michael’s grasp. The memory of it rocketed Michael back to the here and now. The abduction had happened nine years ago, but the thought of it still shook him. True, he was functioning again, and his nights of awakening in a cold sweat had become rarer, but they still occurred, reminding him of just how quickly anybody’s life could be turned on end.

  Focusing his mind on the task at hand, Michael slipped the binoculars into his now rather weighty pocket and tightened the drawstring on his pack. The top of the knoll lay twenty yards above and like any good boy scout he wanted to take a look around before introducing himself. Michael scampered up the steep slope and laid down in the tall grass at the top of the knoll taking in what looked like a multi-story building across the meadow. If anything, the previous evening’s events had reinforced that an abundance of caution was in order. This was no game he was playing. People had already died. And that meant he had to be careful, more careful than he’d ever been in his life.

  Michael brought the binoculars to his eyes, gently spinning the focus wheel. About fifteen hundred yards ahead, approximately where he estimated the GPS coordinates to be, rose a six-story building, the road looping into a circular drive around the front of it. Flowers bloomed and ornamental trees blossomed in the surrounding gardens. The structure itself was constructed of decaying concrete with large warehouse style windows, but the setting was so pretty, the building’s generic form seemed almost incongruous. A second, more industrial building with a tin roof obviously served as some kind of garage facility, vehicles parked in front. Still, for all the evidence of human habitation, there wasn’t a soul in sight. An elaborate metal sign mounted high on the west side of the main building identified the enterprise as Chohow Industries.

  That these were the approximate coordinates indicated by his father’s message was certain. What was less clear was what he was going to do next. Obviously he needed to get closer, but he wanted to do so in such a way that his approach didn’t raise any alarm bells. Still, Michael reasoned, the most direct route might also be the least suspicious. He was, after all, a backpacker and what did backpackers do but lope around seeing the sights? Granted an industrial building in the middle of nowhere wasn’t likely to make any Condé Nast top ten lists, but who was he to judge? Maybe the structures were shining examples of post-communist Chinese architecture.

  Michael picked himself up off the ground and hiked up the winding road. Within a few minutes he had reached the circular drive. His GPS told him that the coordinates his father had left him were somewhere within the larger of the two buildings. Slipping off his backpack and depositing it at the base of what looked like a banyan tree, Michael casually walked the final few feet into the open doors of the deserted reception area.

  The first thing he noted was that h
e’d have to come up with another excuse for being there. The building wasn’t a shining example of anything. The bare concrete floor and walls looked old, but Michael guessed that they were probably new and simply decaying before their time due to a combination of improperly mixed concrete and Shenzhen’s high humidity. There was an unoccupied metal desk in the dark corner of the open lobby and a ten-foot-wide switchback staircase leading up through the floors. With no one to stop him, Michael kept right on walking, mounting the first flight of stairs.

  He was struck by the quiet. The building appeared utterly vacant, and on each level he was met by a locked, green metal door, paint peeling off its face. Though the coordinates his father had left him accurately indicated a longitude and latitude, there was no indication of a precise elevation, so Michael knew that even if he stood exactly upon the spot indicated, he’d still be guessing. Now that he was in the building he was pretty much on his own. Except, he thought, if his dad had gone through the trouble of leaving him the coordinates, he wouldn’t leave the floor of the building to chance. No, he would have provided that information. And with that Michael remembered the coordinates’ final digit. The five. Initially Michael had thought it to be a fraction, but that was unlikely. GPS coordinates were routinely expressed to four decimal places. No, the final digit wasn’t a fraction, it was a floor. Redoubling his step, Michael now knew his destination lay two floors above.

  He also knew he was no longer alone. Rounding the fourth floor landing, chatter emanated from the hallway above. Michael mounted another two steps and listened. Unlike the green steel doors on the other floors, the fifth floor door was propped open by a plastic chair, women’s voices audible from within. Michael considered rehearsing his cover story, but nixed the idea when he considered that it was unlikely anybody would speak a word of English anyway. He was in China after all, not Chattanooga. He needed to adjust his expectations accordingly. Mounting the final steps he stuck his head in the door expecting to find at most a couple of chatty secretaries. Instead he found a full-fledged assembly line.

  Row upon row of young female workers sat in blue smocks assembling some kind of small product, each adding their part in turn as whatever it was made its way down the line. Two older, matronly woman wearing green smocks strode up and down the line keeping tabs on the workers. If this was a Chinese factory, it certainly wasn’t the hell hole Michael had been led to believe they were. It looked more like a sewing circle than anything; a large group of women, working on what appeared to be a plastic toy as it was passed down the table. The whole process couldn’t have been less high tech, or strangely, Michael thought, watching the completed widgets get thrown into a bin at the end of the line, more efficient.

  Large grime streaked windows let the sunlight in, a dented freight elevator parked on the far wall of the open space. Glancing at his GPS, it was obvious to Michael that the coordinates were near the end of the assembly line. Michael could tell his presence didn’t go unnoticed; there were furtive looks in his direction, but he wasn’t actively acknowledged, not even by the supervisors in green smocks. The lack of attention suited his purposes just fine. He didn’t hesitate. He simply walked right in. The first few steps were fine. No one paid him much heed. Unfortunately, when he was about halfway down the assembly line a loud buzzing alarm sounded. Michael braced himself. But instead of security taking him down, the young female workers rose in perfect order, a few giggling at him as they filed out the door, leaving the factory floor. Glancing at the clock on the wall, Michael realized that he had just witnessed a shift change. They had literally left him alone in the room without a word. Before he could fully consider why his presence had generated so little interest, his GPS beeped plaintively. Aware that the unit was accurate to at best seven feet, Michael glanced around to find what he might be looking for. Eight feet away, he saw it.

  Walking the final few steps to the end of the line, Michael reached into a large open cardboard box and withdrew one of the hundreds of identical objects the morning shift had produced. The object was a Lucite sphere, perhaps four and a half inches in diameter. It sat on a black plastic base and if Michael’s initial perception was correct, it was a snow globe. A snow globe which in turn contained a globe of the earth suspended in whatever solution they put in these things. The interesting thing was that when Michael picked it up, green LEDs began to light up all over the tiny enclosed globe—like phosphorescence in a frothing sea. As far as Michael could tell the LEDs glowed on every continent but Antarctica. It looked like a lot of work had gone into the object’s creation. What it didn’t look like was anything worth losing a father over.

  The globe was unpackaged, but the next table over was stacked with elaborate boxing material that Michael briefly imagined ending up in a landfill. The globe gave Michael pause as he considered what it was his father was trying to say to him. Sending him a set of coordinates made sense. But coordinates to what? A toxic child’s toy? Michael tucked the globe into his pocket before casting his glance around the factory floor to ensure he wasn’t missing anything. He tried to find some kind of message or sign, something that would hint that he had found what he was looking for. Instead, he felt the kiss of cold steel to his throat.

  8

  THE SECOND THING Michael’s father taught him about was fear. Michael was six years old. There was a gulley behind their house. The gulley was deep and rocky and a kid had been mauled there by a mountain lion not a year before. It was a scary place. That was why the neighborhood kids dared each other to go down there. Everyday after school the bigger kids would dare the smaller ones to climb down the rock gulley, close their eyes, and count to twenty. Everybody did it. Then it was Michael’s turn. His mom had told him not to go down there. His dad had told him not to go down there. But the kids wanted him to go. So he climbed down the rocky trail.

  Michael closed his eyes and started to count. And he felt the fear. Because he heard something in the undergrowth. Something scary. And it was getting closer. Michael couldn’t take it anymore. He opened his eyes and he started to run. But whatever it was kept right at him, charging through the undergrowth. Michael ran as fast as he could, but it wasn’t fast enough. The thing caught his leg, bringing him down. Michael screamed, and when he looked back at what had captured him, he saw his father. His father didn’t look mad. But he looked worried. He asked Michael if he was afraid. Michael said yes. And his father said that was a good thing. It wasn’t a good thing that he had come down into the gulley alone, but it was good to be afraid. Because we all got afraid, the difference was what we did with it. Some people ignored fear and those people were foolish. Because you had to respect fear. Fear gave you an edge. Fear could keep you alive.

  THE MEN WORE no shoes. That explained why Michael hadn’t heard them coming, but not where they had come from. It also didn’t excuse the fact that despite his intentions to the contrary, he had been careless. Careless and stupid. He had become so absorbed in the snow globe that he forgot to keep one eye out for trouble. There were three of them. Short sturdy Chinese men in blue jumpsuits, but Michael really couldn’t determine much more than that because they held him from behind. He did note that they seemed to have little interest in harming him. At least not immediately. They seemed more interested in transport. Knife still at his throat, they hauled him to the freight elevator on the far factory wall. After a dozen grinding seconds the elevator descended several floors down to what Michael guessed was the ground level.

  The elevator doors opened and Michael immediately noted that it was much noisier in here than he had expected. For whatever reason, the equipment must have been idle when he had come in. A series of machines were at work injecting plastic into hot molds that resembled industrial strength waffle irons. Two male workers stood over each machine, one monitoring the flow of the plastic pellets that were poured inside while another trimmed the excess plastic as the product was stamped out. His captors brought him to a standstill in front of one of the machines and Michael recogni
zed the plastic pieces being created as the two halves of the model Earth which sat inside the snow globe he held in his pocket. Whatever they were making here, they certainly weren’t trying to hide it from him. Not yet anyway.

  “Good afternoon,” a heavily inflected voice said from behind him. “My name is Mr. Chen.”

  Michael had to admit that things were looking up. Not only were they talking to him, but the blade of the knife had left his throat. At this rate they’d be sipping monkey tea and chewing chicken feet in no time.

  The man who identified himself as Chen stepped into view. Chen, who looked to be about forty, wore a well-pressed suit, his carefully coiffed jet black hair glistening under the overhanging bulbs. Michael sensed nothing malevolent or otherwise frightening about the man. And the bonus was he spoke English. Michael had been caught in enough places he wasn’t supposed to be to know that talking would be the best way out of the situation. It always was. But then, Chen smiled, revealing a row of crooked teeth, black with decay, and for no rational reason, a little bit of the hope Michael had felt just a moment earlier began to drain out of him.

  “Who are you?” Chen asked.

  “I’m a backpacker,” Michael said.

  “Nice to meet you, Backpacker.”

  In the next instant Michael felt his head smashed down to the deck of the injection molding machine. What had been a knife to his Adam’s apple was replaced by a cold metal bar. Michael was beginning to reconsider his tactics. Perhaps a reasoned response wasn’t the way to deal with these guys. But he wasn’t an idiot. A break for it now would likely result in a snapped neck, so he breathed the best he could through his constricted throat, waiting for an advantage. His cheek to the metal press of the molding machine, he looked up to see the other half of the mold on its hydraulic piston. The only positive thing about the situation was that the machine wasn’t turned on. That advantage was quickly stripped from him with Chen’s depression of the industrial grade switch.