The Wonders (30 page)

Who were these kidnappers anyway? What kind of person would choose to make a living by stealing other people?

“What do you think the kidnappers are doing now?” he asked Minh. “Are they watching TV? Are they talking to Kathryn? Are they eating lunch?”

“Don't, Leon!” Minh's voice was hoarse from crying. “Don't talk about them like they're human.”

S
USAN AND HOWARD
had given Leon life. Medical pioneers are people who take risks in order to make possible what has been impossible. The risks they take mean that the survival rate of their patients is low. They operate on people others have given up for dead. They operate on people who would have died without them, and often the patients still die.

When Susan approached Leon, he was the walking dead. He was eleventh on the list of people Susan had called. Her phone call was courteous, brusque. She told him she was working for a medical-technology company that offered an extremely high-risk procedure for patients who had no further options for treatment. She said he would have to sign a waiver that his family would not sue if he died during the procedure or as a result of the procedure. She said the treatment would be lengthy, lonely and painful, but that it would cost him nothing in terms of money.

Only when they met did she tell him that she was the surgeon, that her husband was the engineer, that the whole venture was illegal, that Leon would probably die and that his family
would never know what had happened to him, because he would have told them that he was leaving for palliative treatment overseas and could not be contacted.

But he was going to die if nothing happened. What did he have to lose? He couldn't understand why the other ten people had refused.

“Because they want to die close to their families and friends, Leon. They were happy to take the risk of the procedure, but when I told them they would have no contact with the outside world during treatment, during which they could well die, they backed off.” Susan tilted her head as she spoke, as if she was surprised Leon hadn't already understood this.

At last his solitary nature, his fearfulness with people, his propensity to spend time alone with his books, had come into its own. He was the only one who was happy to walk away from his life. It was the first real risk he had ever taken.

That conversation had come back to him when Hap called him alone to the screening room.

More footage had been uploaded. A bruise shaded Kathryn's cheekbone purple and yellow. Her lower lip was split. The wound gaped open, no longer bleeding but still raw and swollen.

“I need to discuss something, Leon. I'm extremely concerned.”

Leon wiped his forehead. Surely someone else should be here.

“I need to talk to someone because I think this kidnap isn't what it seems. Or else it is what it seems but they've taken on more than they can handle. They're insisting we bring forward the time of the trade and they only put up that footage because we said no deal without proof she was still alive. Professional kidnappers never damage the goods. Kathryn shouldn't be injured. I need to ask the Wonders' permission to take radical
action, and Rhona's gone into some kind of overdrive. The insurance company has asked me to stop her from calling them. She's not thinking straight. The thing is, Leon, this kind of action can have consequences. Sometimes, despite our best men and our best plans, the hostage doesn't survive the rescue attempt.”

“I can't make that decision, Hap. It's not up to me. Ask Christos.” As if Hap could. Christos was already furious with Hap, wanting to blame someone and finding only him. Leon couldn't stop the words coming. “No, sorry, of course you can't ask Christos. But, Hap, I'm not the right person to ask. What about . . .” Leon had been about to suggest Hap speak to Minh. After all, Minh was the one who wrapped her steady trust around people, who settled things down in tense times. But if Hap went to Minh because she was the only one with enough moral fiber to make a decision, what did that say about Leon?

“Okay, forget it. I'll deal with it.” Hap opened the door for Leon to leave.

Clockwork Man. Rhona had been right all along. Leon's expertise involved reading, searching the Internet, learning everything secondhand. Finding things out about people not to help them, not to improve their lives. Simply so he could pretend to know them, to pretend he was closer to them. All the jokes the Wonders had made about the people who came to see them being voyeurs, and here, at their heart, was the man without a heart, the ultimate voyeur, who watched the world through screens, exactly as Minh had said. During the time when he was going to die, he took a risk because he had nothing to lose, not even life. Now that he was alive, wealthy, famous and loved, he had turned into a weak brace-wearing man who ran from bad news.

The indigestion that had plagued Leon since the operations burned up his throat in a fiery tide and flooded his mouth. He
raced to the apartment, and when Minh got back from her walk, she found him hunched over the toilet bowl, waiting to vomit.

After he had lain down, Minh came into the bedroom and sat beside him on the bed. Her weight tipped him in her direction. He closed his eyes.

“Can I do anything?” She ran her hand along his thigh, encased in its tube of stiff denim cotton. “Do you want an analgesic or some tea? Hap told me that we have a meeting in thirty minutes. He wants to tell us something about Kathryn.”

Leon rolled over so his back was toward her. “I don't need drugs. I'll be ready for the meeting.” He needed to think. How to become stronger, a braver man, a true man.

At least he had learned something. He was no automaton. No machine could experience shame the way he was experiencing it. No matter how smart or trained or wired or bioengineered, machines could never replicate the uniquely human emotion of shame.

At the meeting, the common room was dimly lit, but Leon could still see how reddened the eyes of Rhona and Yuri were, how rigid the face of Christos. Kyle jigged at the side of the room, unable to stand still while talking to someone on the phone. Minh stood behind Leon, her arms wrapped around his waist, her head resting on his right shoulder blade. The staff gathered at the door leading to the kitchen to listen as Hap reported the latest.

“We've brought the handover time forward to midnight. That's the earliest we can reach the handover location. It's remote. The kidnappers say they're worried about tip-offs. I don't like it, but it's not unheard of. There are other worrying factors, but there's probably no time for anything else now except to do the trade as soon as we can. I wanted to keep you updated.”

Rhona sagged into a chair. “Does this mean we'll have her
back sooner? Isn't that a good thing?” Her eager voice was far from her usual authoritative tone.

“It's an earlier handover. We can't be sure exactly what it means.” Hap gave Rhona's shoulder a brisk massage before he bent down and whispered in her ear.

He strode off, leaving Leon wondering whether he had shared his concerns about Kathryn with anyone else. It was improbable he would have gone to Christos, who was already incandescent with fear and fury, flailing around trying to find a reason to blame Hap. In the last couple of hours, Rhona had folded in on herself. She had stopped hurrying about, stopped calling people on the phone, stopped everything. Minh wept and wept, a mound of damp tissues rising beside her. Yuri sat silent and shrunken in the corner.

Kyle paced from room to room, plugged into various communication devices, dealing with interview cancellations and trying to build a story that Kathryn was indisposed with the flu. No one was supposed to know Kathryn had been kidnapped. If it got out, who knew what would happen. What would the crazies do? What would her fans do? What would the religious groups who had been calling for her death do? It was impossible to imagine the madness that would manifest after that kind of announcement.

As the hours to the deadline juddered along, Leon walked the house and the grounds, encountering each person maintaining their own vigil. Kyle insisted on having TV and online media streaming all the time.

“Can't you turn that off?” he asked Kyle.

“And then? Do what instead?”

Leon found the relentless drone of newscasters insufferable. He hunted out an old pair of earphones and a music player loaded with Minh's music, and kept walking with Beethoven scouring his brain, scratching away the fear, the self-recriminations. Minh
had gone to her studio, where Leon knew she'd be methodically cleaning every brush, every palette, every water glass. Leon found Yuri sitting on a stool by the bear enclosure, singing into the darkness. He pulled off the earphones. He had never heard Yuri sing before. It was a melancholy air, the words in a language he couldn't understand.

Back toward the house, Leon stopped to watch the great sleeping bodies of the elephants. Perhaps the faint music of Yuri's song had entered their wide ears because they shifted position, eyes still closed, and twined their trunks together.

He put the earphones on again. The screen of the player said that this symphony was by Mahler. In the kitchen he found Christos sitting beside tiny Vidonia, who had decided to stay through the night. Leon took his place on a stool beside them. He accepted a small cookie Vidonia offered. The dry floury lemon crumbs melted slowly on his tongue. The music in his ears was so dense he felt separated from the world around him, immersed in a sea of sound. Christos picked up his phone, and although Leon could hear nothing but the music he imagined Christos was ordering more candles lit in his village in Greece, more prayers offered.

He left Christos and Vidonia and walked back to Minh's studio. She had finished cleaning her equipment. She stood before a large bare canvas. Leon pulled off the earphones.

“Are you going to paint her?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said. Her hair, the hair he loved to touch, usually thick and glossy, hung in strings around her face.

She didn't know about what Hap had said either. Leon knew he should tell her, but he couldn't. He put the earphones back on and drowned himself in the music.

At one in the morning, Hap brought the news they had dreaded.

T
HE K AND R
negotiator arrived at Overington, disheveled and sweating from the journey, his gray hair oily and a brush of stubble rasping against his hand each time he rubbed his face. It was not his fault, everyone knew that, yet he was the one who had seen Kathryn dead, and that made him ugly and despicable.

Hap sat, legs apart, face in hands, while the negotiator explained what had happened. Leon could barely breathe. No one wept or spoke. They had all cried themselves out. The air in the room was curdled from the rank breath of people so wretched they could not eat, could not sleep.

The negotiator told them that when he arrived at the exchange location, loaded up with the ransom, a truck was waiting for him. Inside the cab of the truck were three figures. It was midnight. Normally the negotiator would not do a trade in the dark—he needed to see that the kidnap victim was unharmed—but the spokesman for the kidnappers had sounded jittery and was pressing for the trade to happen early. Hap and the
negotiator had decided that if the kidnappers were that anxious, it would be better to get Kathryn away as fast as they could. The damage to Kathryn's face was worrying too. So the handover had been brought forward to midnight from the original time. It was essential that the kidnappers not be panicked or believe that the police might be involved.

“Damage to her face?” Rhona said, looking to Hap.

“There was no point showing you the footage. You would have worried even more,” Hap said, without glancing at Leon.

“Why didn't you go in and rescue her then?” Christos sat up. “You knew it had gone wrong? So many times I begged you to—”

“We tried. They'd already left when we got there. Moved to another location. We found one of them shot through the head, an execution. Go on,” Hap told the negotiator.