CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER
NASH HAD FINISHED A GRUELING workout in the basement of the building.
It was an elaborate space with everything the most fitness-minded person could desire.
On several occasions he had ventured down here with Thura while various members of Steers’s protection detail had also been working out.
These men, who looked chiseled from stone, had enviable flexibility, nimbleness, quickness, and power that truly belied their average statures.
And each time they had glanced arrogantly and dismissively at the pair as they went through their workouts and close-quarter routines. However, Nash silently watched, and absorbed everything he was seeing.
Once, when he and Thura had gone back to their floor after working out, Thura had said, “Damn, those guys are unbeatable, man.”
Nash had thought that as well until he had started to note their tendencies and weak points.
He approached it like game film for football players.
Even one small observation could provide an advantage that might be worth its weight in gold later.
Nash had done the very same thing in business and found it to be a highly successful tactic.
Now Nash toweled off and sat on a bench after cooling down.
Right from the start he and Thura had applied for and received gun permits to go along with their work visas.
They had also been taken to a nearby gun range twice a week since they had been here.
Thura was a good if undisciplined shot, and Nash had given him some pointers that the man had thought were excellent.
Considerable time had gone by, and he had heard nothing from Rhett Temple, not that he expected to.
The man really didn’t have the means to contact him except through Steers.
And Nash wasn’t under any delusion that his former boss was doing anything to fulfill his promise to bring Nash home. That wasn’t what Nash wanted anyway.
As he got up to leave he noted, for the first time, a door at the far end of the room.
He walked over to it. The door was locked, but there was a glass panel in the top section of the door that allowed him to see inside.
What he saw startled Nash. It was pretty much the same boxing dummy that he had used at Shock’s facility back in the states.
It even had tape markers on the various strike points.
He wondered who used this room. He knew it wasn’t Steers’s men.
They had their own boxing dummy, which Nash used as well.
Puzzled, Nash left the workout room. He would normally turn left and head to the elevators to go up to his apartment.
Now, after having stumbled on the room inside the workout space, his curiosity got the better of him.
And since no one was around, he turned to the right and walked down the corridor to the end.
There were three doors down here; two of them were unlocked and empty.
But one was secured. When he heard voices behind this door, Nash slid behind one of the other open doors, but kept it ajar just a sliver so he could see out.
Two men exited from the secure doorway. Nash recognized them as part of Steers’s protection team.
They turned away from him, and he noted that the door of the room they had just exited was a self-closing one.
If he timed it just right . . .
As the men walked off, Nash was able to slip through the gap before the door closed. He waited until he could no longer hear their footsteps and then, using his phone’s flashlight feature, he looked around the darkened space.
There were shelving and tables with cardboard boxes stored on them.
Each box had writing on it, but it was in Mandarin.
He looked inside a few, thinking he might find drugs or even body parts.
But some contained clothing, others books; still others held some framed pictures that were very old, and he recognized no one in them.
One box did contain things of interest. The items looked like ceremonial garments of some kind, very colorful, made of silk with unusual markings down the sleeves and across the chests. There were also hats and jewelry and handbags that looked old but well-preserved.
He kept searching until he found one box in a far corner. When his phone light flashed over the box’s front and he saw the lettering in the English alphabet, his blood felt like it had frozen in his veins: MN.
With trembling fingers, Nash slowly opened the box and shone his light inside.
His heart skipped when he saw the velour warmup suit his daughter was wearing when she had appeared online to accuse him of sexually abusing her. Then he found her shoes. The tears trickled from Nash’s eyes as he conjured the image of his deceased daughter. Smiling, happy, full-of-life Maggie Nash.
Now her entire remaining physical existence had been banished to a box in the basement of a building in Hong Kong, a place she had never even visited.
Nash wanted to pull everything out of the box and take it with him, but that would have been a death sentence for him. He picked up the velour jacket and pressed it against his face, trying with all his might to detect her scent. And he thought he had; he felt her right next to him.
At least I want it to be so, even if it never will be for real.
And down at the bottom of the small box, his light glinted off something.
He reached down and picked it up. It was the ring that he and Judith had given their daughter when she’d graduated from high school.
She’d loved it and almost never took it off.
She’d been a September baby, so it was a sapphire.
He thought back to the bones they had found in that field.
Some had been the bones of her hand. Perhaps the hand that had worn this ring.
He held the ring for the longest time, trying not to think about what had happened to his daughter, but, in truth, that was all Nash could think about.
Although it was risky, he took photos of everything, put the items back in the box, and closed it up. He left the room after making sure no one was about, and rode the elevator to his floor. And all the way, Walter Nash thought only about killing Victoria Steers.