She had been wondering if these men had ever seen a movie. Because in the movies, prisoners were always being frisked to make sure that they didn’t have anything on them. But no such treatment had been meted out to Qian Yuxia. Perhaps it was because they were Islamists and had a taboo against touching women. Perhaps it was because she was female, therefore deemed harmless. Or maybe it was because she was wearing a snug-fitting pair of jeans and an equally snug sleeveless T-shirt, making it obvious that she was not carrying anything. Whatever the reason, they had never bothered to inspect her for contraband; they had merely taken her into a large cabin on the main deck and handcuffed her to the leg of a table. The cabin was a busy place, serving as the galley and the mess for the ship’s crew, and the table she had been chained to was the one where they took meals and drank tea. Someone was always in the place, and so she had not thought it advisable to pull the phone out of her boot and use it for anything. From time to time a buzz against her ankle would inform her that she, or rather Marlon, had just received another text message. If the place had been a little quieter, she’d have worried that someone might hear the buzz, but with the grumbling of the engines, the slap and whoosh of waves against the hull, the clanking and hissing of cookware, and bursts of static and conversation emerging from the radio’s speaker, she was safe from that. Zula had been put somewhere else, apparently in a separate cabin, and Yuxia had wondered: If their positions had been reversed, and Yuxia had been alone, what would she have done with the phone? The two basic choices being: communicate with Marlon, or call the police and tell them everything.