Razing Beijing: A Thriller (24 page)

Upon driving home he walked across the street to make a
show of offering Joetta Hollinsworth, the middle-aged widow who liked to make
passes at him—and who also was central to the neighborhood gossip mill—the more
costly goods in his refrigerator which, he assured her, would only go to waste.
Devinn politely declined her offer to enjoy some of it tonight over candlelight
and suggested a rain check instead, blaming it on a mountain of packing to do.

At 10:17
P.M.
, he sat
down to commemorate his next-to-last dinner before officially departing life as
he knew it with his favorite take-out sushi. Whatever his misgivings about
pulling the plug, it was too late to turn back now.

Thursday, May 21

EMILY SAT ON THE MIDDLE
of
her bed clutching her knees to her chest, staring at the cordless telephone. The
clock on her nightstand read 1:48
A.M.
;
again she had woken to soft feminine laughter mingled with low tones of male
companionship. She bided her time while enduring the noise and struggling to
suppress her envy.

It had been three hours since managing to raise only the
generic voice-mail greeting on Stuart’s home telephone. It was irrational for
her not to have left a message. More irrational yet was her concern for who
besides Stuart might hear it.

The nagging question was whether Thompson’s death meant her
blackmailers had lost the means of stalking her behavior, thereby opening the
opportunity for her to thwart and ignore them. Of course, his murder might have
been inadvertent or completely unrelated to what Emily collectively thought of
as the sabotage conspiracy. She had literally ransacked her studio apartment in
an attempt to find the listening device undoubtedly there; upon finding none
she realized that she did not know what one actually looked like. Lodging a
complaint with the telephone company yielded an onsite inspection of her home
telephone and the lines leading out to the utility pole. At least her studio
wasn’t bugged, or so it now seemed. She had yet to identify a suitable next
step.

What frightened her most was difficult to say. She was
afraid for her parents, with no word yet from their smugglers. Thompson’s
murder meant she had reason to fear for the well being of others in her work
unit. Certainly, she feared for herself.

Emily groaned as the sound of her neighbor’s
amour
reached a rhythmic crescendo. She thought back to instances of certain signals
from Stuart and wondered if these had been more the result of her own wishful
thinking. Some she vividly recalled not thinking so at the time...she felt
herself giving in to the temptation to indulge her imagination.
Why do I
torture myself?
Her unrequited longing for Stuart felt like an adolescent
schoolgirl’s crush, a source of private embarrassment.

In any case, Stuart was one person who would not dismiss
her story out-of-hand.
So what am I waiting for? More people to die?

Emily snatched up the phone. For the fifth time that
evening, she pushed the redial button and held her breath.

“Yeah,” she heard Stuart grumble on the other end.

Emily closed her eyes.

“Hello?” Stuart’s voice implored.

“Stu, this Emily Chang. I’m sorry that I woke you up.”

“S’okay.” There was a pause as she pictured him struggling
to sit up and turn on the light. “What’s going on?”

To her horror she started to cry. “Something’s gone terribly
wrong.”

Stuart remained silent.

“I need to show you, they killed...they threatened me and
forced me to stop my work. And Sean Thompson! Now I think they killed Sean.”

“Slow down, Emily. Let’s start over, okay? Who exactly do
you mean by ‘they’? No, wait. First tell me what happened to Thompson. He
called me here at home the other night, apparently on his way to see me. He practically
begged me to wait up for him and then never showed up.”

“When was that?”

“Night before last. I figured he was mixed up over some
personal matter and decided to change his mind. You’re telling me he’s dead?”

Emily willed herself to breathe, slow down, and think. So—Stu
had been contacted by Sean...his very admission to it provided yet more
precious assurance that Stu wasn’t involved. She clutched a swath of bed sheet
and wiped the tears from her face. The calming effect of finally sharing her
burden began to take hold. “It sounds like they found Sean the morning after
you spoke with him. I don’t know the details but they appear certain that he’d
been murdered. The FBI even questioned me about it in Paul Devinn’s office. They
think it was robbery and that it looked drug-related.” She then described
Thompson’s uncharacteristic behavior in the weeks leading up to his murder.

“So that’s the personnel problem you were telling me about?”

Emily sighed. “And something else horrible has happened.” She
tried to explain the blackmail threat she received by relating it to her
suspicion that Thompson’s subsequent murder had somehow not been a matter of
coincidence.

Stuart listened patiently despite her voice breaking on
several occasions. When he finally did interject with a question, he sounded as
if he might not believe her. “Have you told any of this to the police?”

“I’m afraid to.”

“You lost me. Why do you think the blackmailers might’ve
killed Sean Thompson?”

Emily was frustrated. She had taken something only
partially clear in her own mind and managed to make it utterly incoherent for
Stuart. “I’m not comfortable going into more detail over the phone.”

“I see.”

Emily hesitated. “I think we should meet. Then I can show
you.”

To her surprise, Stuart agreed immediately. “I’m flying
back into town Saturday morning to settle a few things. Would you like to meet
then, maybe for lunch?”

Biting her lip, Emily considered Stuart’s invitation. “Why
don’t I pick you up at the airport?”

A TROUGH OF SOGGY
low-pressure
settling in over the Great Lakes delayed Stuart’s arrival by over an hour. Emily
watched with conflicted feelings as the flight from Richmond finally descended
out of the mist onto the runway.

While there was a risk that he would associate her with the
destruction of his career and professional reputation, there simply was no one
else to whom she could turn. The potential for more deaths, perhaps Stuart’s
and her own, worried her desperately as she watched the Boeing 737 taxi to the
gate.

“Where to?” Stuart asked minutes later.

“Have you had any breakfast?”

They walked a short distance to a surprisingly busy
delicatessen located in Cleveland Hopkin’s main terminal. Stuart held Emily’s
chair as she sat down. A waitress appeared and took their order, Emily a sesame
bagel and orange juice, Stuart a cup of black coffee.

Stuart sat forward in his chair. “So, how are you doing?”

“We all miss you at work. Things are floundering a bit.”

“I presume that means the investigation’s winding down?”

“The day after you left, Mr. Hackett instructed everyone to
stop what they were doing and document what they had done. The committee is
putting together a final report, and I guess they will recommend three or four
re-designs as a result of the effort. There’s word of another flight test. Now
we’re bracing for when the production line ramps up. With fewer people, of
course, it’ll be back to more overtime.”

Stuart nodded thoughtfully. He seemed comfortable allowing
her to broach the subject of Thompson’s murder when she was ready to.

“Stu, I want you to know that I think it’s cowardly the way
Thanatech is blaming you for dragging out the investigation. I’m not alone in
that opinion. Someday everyone will know it was a horrible misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding or not, the fact is I am responsible. I
did the best I knew how and the cards fell where they did.” He shrugged. “My
boss saw things differently. The politics surrounding this damn lawsuit didn’t
help matters. As it turned out, I’d already been planning to leave for some
time.”

Emily felt a stab of disappointment. “Really?”

The waitress showed up with their orders and then hurried
off to tend to an elderly couple.

“Seven months ago my wife, my ex-wife, died of non-Hodgkins
lymphoma.”

“I had heard. I am very sorry.”

“Nowadays I don’t...the reason I brought her up is because
I originally accepted Cole’s invitation to work at Thanatech in order to get
over her and our break-up. So, the time had come for me to be back in Virginia
to raise my daughter. Actually, even before Angela died, I’d been toying with
the idea of taking a position where I’d been working when the whole divorce
mess started.”

“How old is your daughter?”

Stuart’s face lit up. “Old enough to take real advantage of
me. Ashley is ten.”

“Ashley,” she repeated the name. Emily brushed a strand of
hair behind her ear. For the first time that morning, she smiled.

“Why don’t we talk about your family?”

Stuart’s innocent inquiry hit Emily like a splash of cold
water.

“That bad?” he asked, seeing her smile melt away.

She watched the people walking hurriedly past in the wide
corridor of the concourse. “Would you mind if we went somewhere else to discuss
it?”

After Stuart paid for their breakfast, neither said much as
they walked through the terminal to short-term parking and her old Toyota. Emily
asked Stuart to drive, and they exited the airport’s circular maze of access
roads and headed east on Interstate 480, skirting the city. Saturday morning
traffic was moderate and in twenty minutes Emily directed them to a wooded park
on the crest of a hill overlooking the haze-covered valley and the Cuyahoga
River, remarking that she liked the tranquility of the park and often came
there to jog or to sit in the shade with a book. They sat in the car silently
for several minutes and watched the sun struggle to burn through the fog.

Emily asked: “Remember when it seemed the engine control
might reveal what triggered the crash?”

“Remember? It was miraculous! That it later failed
shouldn’t be looked—”

“I caused it to fail.” Emily turned toward him, her tears
flowing freely down her cheeks. With great control her chest heaved once and
she choked back a sob.

“What do you mean,
caused
it to fail? And what’s
that got to do with your family?”

She searched his eyes. “I
intentionally
derailed the
investigation so that it wouldn’t succeed. Believe me, I didn’t have any
choice.”

Stuart looked at her distrustfully for what seemed an
endless moment. He clenched his jaw. “You’d better tell me exactly what
happened.”

“You have no idea how sorry I am.” Emily shielded her eyes
with her hand while her shoulders wracked with sobs. “When I heard you’d been
dismissed...I struggled to think of some way that would not involve you any
more than you already were.” She reached beneath the passenger seat and
produced a manila folder, splattering a tear on the middle of the cover.

Stuart skimmed over the single page of paper she handed him;
the constructed words and letters cut from newspaper and pasted in place
suggested an anonymous note of some sort. The author’s intent could not have
been more clear, and yet Stuart was certain only of his relief that he hadn’t
unloaded on her without first reading the note. “Should we be physically handling
this?”

Emily presented him with several large photographs. “The
people who sent these would have been careful not to leave fingerprints.”

One word escaped Stuart’s lips: “Sabotage.”

The photographs all showed different angles and variations
of the same theme. In each, the tormented eyes of the man being threatened struggled
to convey a sense of dignity. Stuart sensed that the victim somehow knew the
photographs were destined for the hands of his daughter. “But the letter isn’t
addressed to you,” he observed, flipping back to re-examine the note.

“Actually, it is. I changed my name to Emily Chang when I
became an American citizen. They are mocking me.”

He looked at her. “So you know who they are?”

In slow and painstaking detail, Emily relayed her discovery
of the blackmail threat in her studio, her cat butchered in the bathtub, and
that she had had no choice but to lie to him about what actually happened to
the ECU. “I had expected my first direct encounter with such horror years ago,
when my government threatened to exile me for refusing to pursue the career
chosen for me. For some reason they decided to spare my family. Only the
political leaders of my homeland could be responsible for such atrocity.”

Stuart found it hard to accept that modern governments went
around threatening people with guns and without the due process of law. Wasn’t
China a member of the World Trade Organization, the United Nations? “We must
have been on the verge of discovering something that made somebody nervous. You
think they tampered with the ECU and intentionally caused the plane to crash?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Do you have any idea why?”

She shook her head. “All I know is that soon after the
threat was delivered to me, Sean Thompson’s erratic behavior intensified. He
was increasingly late to work, feeling sick and leaving early, complaining that
he wasn’t given clear objectives, that sort of thing.” Emily described the lie
she had told her staff, her fabrication that the NTSB was preparing a campaign
of polygraph tests.

“All of this was after that trip you took?”