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long time,” Tommy said. The child-like singsong to his voice gave him away.
    How long had it been? Knox wondered. Tommy was prone to exaggeration.
    “I’m heading to China for a week or two.”
    “I thought you were in Cambodia?” Tommy didn’t miss much—the doctors got that part wrong, time and time again.
    “En route to Hong Kong. Then on to Shanghai.”
    “More pearls? I think our inventory is okay, Johnny.”
    “There’s always something good in Shanghai.” Like a paycheck that might begin to endow Tommy’s future medical costs. Their partnership gave them a reason to work together. It was something Tommy not only could handle but was good at. It kept Knox traveling. It was never going to make them rich. “It could be good for us.”
    “I thought you were coming home?” Pouty.
    Knox rarely went home. He made a million excuses to himself, all of them convincing, but the truth nibbled at the edges, stinging.
    “I am, buddy. Just need to get this out of the way first.”
    “Business first,” Tommy said, sounding like a mynah bird.
    “You got it.”
    “I’ll tell Eve.”
    Evelyn Ritter, their bookkeeper. Tommy had a crush the size of Texas.
    “Good idea.”
    “What’s wrong?” Tommy asked.
    That was the thing about Tommy: what he lacked in academicintelligence he compensated with intuition. Maybe he’d learned to read Knox’s expressions, though Knox was well practiced and tried not to send conflicting signals. Maybe he’d heard something in his voice. Or maybe it was far more subtle: Knox’s timing; his choice of short sentences. Maybe his kid brother just got him like no one else.
    “It’s a side job, Tommy. Moonlighting.” He wasn’t going to lie. Talking down to Tommy resulted in regression, a lesson long since learned. “Something for Dave Dulwich.”
    “Mr. Dulwich?” Excitement. “The soldier you rescued?”
    Dulwich had been a soldier once, but not when Knox had pulled him from that truck.
    Knox said, “You know Mr. Dulwich.”
    “Can I speak to him?”
    “I think you already did,” Knox said, not meaning to.
    Silence. He’d stung him with that. Tommy lived to please his older brother. Any sense he’d inflicted something on Knox would burrow down deep inside him and come out later as something far more vile.
    “I wouldn’t have gotten this offer,” Knox said, “if it hadn’t been for you.”
    “You think?”
    “I know. Are you kidding? You’re taking care of me. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around?”
    Tommy’s laughter coughed static across an otherwise surprisingly clear connection. Knox, at forty thousand feet in a private jet; Tommy on a smart phone in Detroit.
    He leaned to get a good look out the window at the chunks of land and water so far below. From somewhere within came the urge to refuse Dulwich’s offer. Or was it too late?
    Knox laughed along with his brother as a cloud pulled the blinds and the space inside the plane grew mildly claustrophobic.

SATURDAY
September 25

    6 days until the ransom

5
    2:00 P.M.
    PUDONG DISTRICT
    SHANGHAI
    Knox arrived at Shanghai International’s sprawling new terminal wearing a khaki-colored ScotteVest windbreaker with most of its fifteen concealed pockets occupied by his passport, cash, documents and electronic devices. He wore a pair of white earbuds, the wires from which disappeared into the jacket’s collar and connected to an unseen white iPhone provided by Dulwich. The iPhone was apparently one of Rutherford Risk’s newest toys. During calls, it switched cellular carriers every ten seconds, limiting any electronic eavesdropping to a few spoken words here and there.
    Customs let out into an L-shaped gauntlet of web-strap retainers beyond which stood hundreds of Chinese holding signs or waving frantically. Loud and chaotic, just how Knox liked it.
    He blended into the crowd heading for the Maglev train—a frictionless marvel, the envy of the engineering world. The thirty-kilometer train trip