Razing Beijing: A Thriller (22 page)

“If our policy supporters don’t see an upside, which they
won’t unless they perceive we’ll deliver, it might very well happen. Nobody in
that town has any stomach for footing an undeniable loser.”

Stuart clenched his fist. “We are
not
going to have
any order cancellations.”

Cole’s bushy-gray eyebrows arched upward. “Good news, then?
You know, your two weeks are up today.”

“I need another three weeks.”

Cole appeared to remain calm. He rose from his chair and
walked to the window. He turned a moment later and faced Stuart with a pained
expression. “Lay-off notices go out Wednesday. You personally are being sued
into oblivion. Why should I not believe that after three more weeks, you won’t
be back for another three?”

Stuart had not heard anything about the lawsuits since the
meeting between his own attorney and Thanatech’s legal counsel. “We did have a
breakthrough the other day.”

“Hackett stopped by and told me about it.”

Stuart had reason to be skeptical of anything Hackett might
say. “Did he.”

“He was very complimentary, in fact.”

“Well, I’m afraid that we’ve suffered a setback. We need a
little more time to sort it all out.”

“Susan,” Cole raised his voice to summon his secretary. A
moment later the office door gently closed. Cole folded his arms and looked at
his vice-president of development programs with what Stuart interpreted as both
disdain and sympathy. “The board and I feel the time has come to reassign the Mojave
Task Force leadership.”

Stuart had reason to be surprised—he was devastated. Another
part of him welcomed the idea. “Is that so?”

“There’s a justifiable sense that progress has generally
stagnated. The consensus seems to be that people are spinning their wheels with
this theory of yours, that some electrical malfunction triggered the failure. What
we need is not perfection but hard decision making. Fix the most likely problems,
or whatever”—Cole waved his hand in the air—“and get the damn production line
and engine orders flowing again. Life, as they say, must go on.”

Stuart frowned—they had actually done a lot of those things
already. He fought to suppress a bitter sense of disappointment. Never before
had he been, well,
swept aside
. “I’m convinced we’re still dancing
around the source of the failure. Look, I’ll certainly support your decision as
well as the efforts of whomever you appoint.” At least he might have a hand in
selecting his replacement. He would then turn in his notice.

Cole narrowed his gaze. He sat down behind his desk. “I
don’t think your support is going to be necessary.”

“Wait a minute. We’ve both got a stake in resolving—”

“Why not take some time off?”

“I don’t want any time off.”

“This is no longer about what we
want,
Stu.”

Stuart searched the haggard face for an explanation. Tiny
beads of perspiration dotted Cole’s forehead. “What the hell is this?”

“Do I really have to spell it out for you?”

The two men fixed each other’s stare—Stuart realized what
he had become. He was to Jim Cole an embodiment of the crash’s ensuing
frustrations; the board’s sniping over delay, bad press, and punishing losses;
the lawsuits; earnings projections spiraling downward. He imagined that Cole saw
him as a living reminder of the death of his daughter, and the demise of what
had always been portrayed as an idyllic marriage. On the other hand, Cole had
to know that the program would not have gotten even this far had he not recruited
him for the job. Although they had not since spoken of it, Cole surely recalled
his personal veto of Stuart’s decision to cancel the flight.

“Why carve me out altogether?” asked Stuart.

“You’ve managed to become a liability.”

Stuart nodded; it was all he needed to hear. He stood from
the chair. “Let me try to rephrase that: the political capital of my departure
is worth more to the board than is my staying on to solve the problem.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it. There’s also the widely
held view that you simply don’t fit into the culture here.”

“I thought that was why you hired me.”

Cole held out his hands. “The world can’t wait any longer. Airlines
are threatening bankruptcy as we speak. I’ve bought you all the time we can
afford. I’m sorry, Stu. Consider yourself on indefinite leave, effective
immediately.”

Stuart jabbed his finger at his boss. “Not on leave, Jim.” He
turned and headed for the door. His hand grasped the doorknob.

“Have it your way,” he heard Cole say as he opened the door.
“You’re fired.”

“Oh no you don’t.” Stuart turned to face the CEO. “You
can’t fire me, I just quit.” Stuart slammed the door hard enough behind him to
hear Cole’s golf trophies rattle on their shelves.

DEVINN EMERGED
from
the restaurant and tipped the valet, satisfied that he had just enjoyed one of
the most expensive lunches of anyone in town that day. He merged his emerald
green Maserati into traffic flowing along Knickerbocker Road, and a mile
further entered the southbound lane of Columbia Road.

All that remained before his departure was the tidying of
loose ends. Sean Thompson’s apartment was located in a working-class
neighborhood where Middleburg bordered the older section of Hinckley Heights. Most
of the people who lived in the complex held jobs and were out during the day. Devinn
pulled the car to a stop in front of building ‘D,’ as he had every day of the
past week. He entered the building and descended the short flight of steps to
the basement. Walking past the furnace and a pair of coin-operated laundry
machines he noted that the clothes dryer was running. A tenant somewhere in the
building did not concern him; he would be back outside in less than a minute.

Attached to the wall beside the electrical service meters
and breaker panels was a gray metal telephone junction box for each of eight
units in the building. Devinn removed a key from his pocket and opened the
padlock on a ninth such box, acquired at the local building supply. Devinn
removed the storage data card from the compact recording device inside, and
then substituted the blank from the breast pocket of his sport coat. He
replaced the padlock and snapped it shut, slipped the recorded SD memory card
along with the key into his coat pocket and walked back outside to the car,
plenty of time to spare for attending his next meeting at Thanatech.

While driving slowly east through residential side streets
it seemed to Devinn that things previously in shambles were falling into place.
His decision to thwart the investigation and destroy the potentially
incriminating evidence had succeeded, along with an unintended bonus: not only
had Stuart’s investigation been discredited, but the wealthy executive was also
being drummed out of the company. While this recent subterfuge had been risky,
he could finally claim that the Mojave matter had been put to rest. To hear his
handler tell it, Devinn’s antsy benefactors were severely disappointed that he
had not retrieved everything from the cache inside the dead Iranian’s Rivergate
apartment. At least he would recoup some of the credibility that the botched Mojave
sabotage had cost him.

Devinn removed the SD memory card from his coat pocket and
inserted it in the slot of the Sony mp3 player in the console beside him.

Thompson’s first two calls were incoming solicitations from
a credit card and Internet service provider. The next came from Thompson’s
older brother who, as Devinn knew, lived in Cincinnati and with whom Sean
shared the occasional burden of travel to visit, plans that usually included
the older sibling’s girlfriend. A seven-digit pulse tone signaled Thompson’s
outgoing call and one by now familiar to Devinn; the bachelor regularly ordered
out a nine-inch deep-crust pizza with extra cheese, mushrooms, and sausage. The
next call went to his brother, the gist of which was to reschedule his planned
visit to Cincinnati this weekend, citing demands of his job.

Devinn pressed the fast-forward button through another
series of incoming solicitations. He exited Royalton Road onto the northbound
ramp for Interstate 71 and merged into the right-hand lane.

Devinn next heard another outgoing pulse tone followed by
four rings and the greeting of a young child’s voice; Thompson hung up
immediately. A wrong number? Thompson dialed, again a child answered, again
Thompson hung up the telephone. The next outgoing call apparently went to a
neighbor because Thompson requested, and the woman agreed, to pick up his mail for
a few days beginning tomorrow, Thursday.

Devinn frowned. He suffered through several more incoming
solicitations. The final call was outgoing, and again Thompson had dialed the
wrong number and simply hung up. He ejected the card and slid it back into his
pocket.

Later that day, during a review of the impending
reduction-in-force, Devinn’s mind kept wandering back to the question of where
Sean Thompson was planning to go. And why conceal his plans from his brother? Perhaps
Sean was bugging out on a road trip in his Porsche—the foolish and ostentatious
frivolity infuriated him. But if making such a trip, would Thompson simply not
drive to Cincinnati as he originally planned? The young man had money in his
pocket for the first time in his life, the investigation was over, there was
reason to rejoice, but his voice sounded neither exuberant nor relieved in any
of the recorded telephone calls. If anything, Thompson sounded tense, much the
way he had during their rendezvous at Stouffer’s. Tense—but with no longer a
reason to be, which by now Thompson was certainly aware. To reveal to his
accomplice the scheme he had hatched to threaten Emily Chang would be to compromise
his tradecraft, and would make no sense, as he had chosen to threaten Chang
into action only out of his growing distrust of Thompson.

By the end of the afternoon, Devinn decided that he was
probably blowing things out of proportion, placing too much emphasis on a
series of inconsequential telephone calls.

Before heading home for the day, he dropped by briefly to shoot
the breeze with members of his staff and his in-absentia acting manager. He
made certain to wax eloquent and bore them all with the intricacies of fly tying.
Bathing in bonhomie, he bid them goodnight.

Devinn was oblivious to speed limits as he raced home to
his townhouse. It wasn’t Thompson’s preparations for a trip that troubled him. Playing
the card again in the car, he was finally able to put his finger on it.

Devinn knelt in front of a speaker of his living room sound
system and listened for a third time to the card. This time the quality was
excellent, and he could also vary the speed. He confirmed what he had heard in
the car, that the pulse tones preceding the outgoing calls were eleven digits
in length. Thompson had heard in two of his calls a child’s voice and
immediately hung up. It was the young voices that had thrown Devinn, each
sufficiently distinct to indicate different children. It hadn’t occurred to
Devinn until later that the pulses preceding the voices might be the same.

It might not have been the presumption of a wrong number
that prompted Thompson to hang up. It might simply have been the wrong voice.

There was an easier way to identify individual digits than
attempting to decipher each individual pulse. Devinn positioned the recording
before one of the two calls. He went to the kitchen, retrieved the handset of
his cordless from its cradle and returned to the living room. Double-checking
that his caller-ID block was activated, he acquired a dial tone, held the
handset toward the speaker, and played the tone pulse from Thompson’s wiretap
into the mouthpiece.

Devinn held the telephone to his ear. After the third ring
it picked up—he held his breath. The adult voice of the other party greeted his
call. Like Thompson, Devinn quickly broke the connection.

Friday, May 15

SEAN THOMPSON HOPED
he
could postpone his next refueling stop until reaching Fredericksburg, Virginia;
mulling over the math in his head, the time gained driving faster traded
unfavorably against the poorer mileage and a consequential refueling stop.
This
Porsche sure knows how to burn it
.

Wondering if perhaps there might be cellular coverage in
the remote West Virginia countryside, Thompson averted his eyes from the road
to punch in Stuart’s home number only to learn that his cell phone’s battery
was low. He swore loudly and tossed it onto the passenger floor. Stopping the
car for any reason was something he desperately wanted to avoid.

He had no idea if Stuart would even agree to meet with him,
especially given his estimated arrival time. Word of the executive’s dismissal had
instantly made Stuart one person Thompson perceived as both approachable and
technically capable of understanding that he had not meant to kill anyone. Yet,
Stuart had left over a rift involving the failed investigation, a factor which
could just as easily hinder his sympathy. Either way, Thompson figured he
needed a technical witness.
If only to keep me out of the electric chair.
That realization caused him again to pound the steering wheel—Devinn’s smooth
assurances had wrung hollow the moment he’d heard them. Then came word of the
man’s leave of absence, abandoning him to the NTSB scrutiny that his own boss
had announced.
Just how stupid does Devinn think I am?

He took a long sip from a bottle of Pepsi.
Blood money,
that’s what it is.
The money had totally lost its appeal. All he’d really
wanted was a chance to finally measure up against his successful brother, who
in the final analysis was no smarter or harder working than he was.
But
Scott worked to save people, not to scatter their body parts all over the
ground.