Razing Beijing: A Thriller (72 page)

The block-and-tackle was up to the job. Five men
together were able to coax the canvas-covered slab of steel suspended within a
web of nylon straps past the edge of the big Ford’s bed. The load carried by
the block-and-tackle was eased, and the truck settled on its undercarriage. With
much shoving and grunting, the specimen was slid all the way on.

FBI AGENTS HILDEBRANDT AND
BROPHY
covered the last half-mile to the entrance of the bridge on foot.
As best either man knew, the wailing of sirens and the countless helicopters
hovering over the river had, if anything, intensified in the last eleven-odd
hours. Agent Brophy had been in touch with the New York office by cellular
phone. His unit chief urged that the men avail themselves to assist in emergency
efforts or, better yet, report to the Washington investigative team already
onsite.

Hildebrandt lamented with Brophy that a team dispatched all
the way from D.C. had beaten them to the bridge.

They walked past the upper deck Jersey-side tollbooths and
approached one of several harried NYPD officers. The cops were trying to keep
personnel from wandering aimlessly through wreckage, deploying them where
emergency services were the most needed.

“The last FBI guys we saw are a good half mile through
that,
”
the officer pointed at the chaos over his shoulder. “Watch your step, fellas. Don’t
walk directly underneath anything.” The policeman left the two FBI agents in
order to deal with another incoming ambulance.

Hildebrandt had never in his life seen or imagined so much
destruction. He and Brophy worked their way toward the support tower, the base
flooded by bright lights and the throbbing hum of gasoline engines. They
stopped along the way to help an ambulance crew hoist a woman strapped to a
gurney up over the side of collapsed pavement, where hours ago cars and trucks
and busses hurtled along the southbound lanes just as they had for decades.

He and Brophy stepped aside as a big, 2-ton pickup truck
bounced slowly in, out, and around sunken sections of pavement on its way back
to terra firma. Hildebrandt approached a figure wearing orange NJTA coveralls
directing the efforts of others.

“FBI?” asked the man, the name Brooks stenciled over his
pocket. Brooks looked blandly at the two men for a moment and said: “We got
plenty. You just missed the big-shot, though, carting the evidence back to his
ivory tower.”

“Oh, in the truck?” Hildebrandt asked.

“The truck, yeah. Help from cocksuckers like him we can
do without.”

AIDED BY THE ABSENCE
of southbound traffic, Lance Lee steered the lemon-yellow pick-up onto New
Jersey Turnpike exit 15E. Carl Smith, a.k.a. Paul Devinn, rode wordlessly in
the passenger seat and looked mostly at the office complexes and warehouses
they passed. In the pick-up truck’s bed was an important element for explaining
the loss of over four hundred innocent lives. By leaving the highway three
exits north of the airport, Lee was violating the strict ‘chain of custody’
rules that bound investigating agents to an auditable record of court admissible
evidence.

Everything had so far proceeded according to plan. Complaints
from forensic scientists that he hadn’t allowed them to examine or photograph
the specimen had been handled by asserting the importance of gophering it off
to Quantico. Their attention was easily diverted to the plastic bag containing
the cotton swab that Lee had thrust into their hands.

Lee drove by memory toward his destination several miles
east, past abandoned warehouses, landfills, and refuse dumps long since closed
following the region’s declaration as a migratory waterfowl refuge. Driving
further into deserted marshland, they left the buildings behind. Finally,
three-point-six miles from the exit, he turned left onto an unmarked dirt road.
A half-mile further, the truck totally obscured by darkness and towering salt
grass, Lee and Devinn found the waiting men.

Each vehicle flashed its headlights four times—Lee pulled up
beside the Chrysler sedan. Two Asian men seated inside returned anxious stares
before exiting their car. Lee readily recognized the driver, who identified
himself as ‘Orville,’ by the missing outer knuckles from the fourth and fifth
digits of his right hand. His partner lugged a suitcase as both men climbed
onto the bed of the truck and ogled the cargo.

“A hundred yards,” Orville instructed Lee with a wave.

A minute later the truck rolled to a stop. All four men got
out and wordlessly went about their task. Here again, the crane came in handy. Orville
re-attached the hook on the end of the cable to the nylon straps. Paul Devinn
operated the crane to elevate the cable specimen clear of the truck bed.

There on level ground, where Orville and his assistant had
previously left it, the ‘boot’ was already prepared. The boot consisted simply of
a large wooden shipping crate lined with thick heavy-duty canvas, beneath which
and covering the entire bottom of the crate was a quarter-inch thick, solid
steel plate. With Devinn at the controls of the crane, the three other men were
able to help maneuver the nylon sling containing the cumbersome object as it
was lowered onto the boot. It took the efforts of all four men and a pry bar to
remove the nylon web.

Orville directed his assistant to tighten a metal packing
strap around the circumference of the cable, firmly encasing all but the
‘fracture surface’ within protective canvas. This done, they removed the Tyvek
sheet taped in place by Lee and NJTA personnel, thereby exposing the critical
evidence.

Orville opened the suitcase and removed a thick,
dinner-platter diameter charge of Composition-4 plastique explosive—extremely
powerful, however grossly inadequate to accomplish the damage for which it
would later be blamed. Lance Lee directed Orville to position the charge on the
extreme edge of the cable’s ‘severed’ surface. A narrow detonator the size of a
child’s crayon was pushed into place.

Lee knelt to examine the work. It was unlikely the metal
strap would survive the blast but probably adequate to achieve the desired
effect, which was to limit contaminating the more recently cut surfaces with
explosive residue. Any unintended contamination he would explain away as shoddy
hygiene of the Jersey transit authority.

Lee stood. “Two minutes ought to be enough.”

Orville nodded. He knelt to complete the final step of
connecting the insulated wire leads between the detonator and battery-operated
timer, ten feet away. His assistant climbed onto the roof of the truck in order
to make one last check for intruders.

“What about the other suspension cables?” Devinn asked Lee.

“What about them?”

“Won’t they provide contradictory evidence?”

“Probably,” Lee admitted. “But that’ll take a week or ten
days to come to a head. By then it won’t matter.”

Devinn pondered the compelling answer without saying a
word.

Orville set the timer before joining the men in the truck. Lee
drove them all back to where the car was parked. He kept the engine running and
all of the men variously looked at their watches, covered their ears, and
waited.

The blast was powerful enough to buffet the truck. The
neatly formed mushroom cloud of smoke rising up in the darkness was dissipated
quickly by the breeze. This actually had been a concern, at one point
compelling them to contemplate the time and difficulty to muffle the entire
works with an iron-mesh blast blanket, of the type employed by the construction
trade. In the end, Lee decided that probable inquiries into the need for and
licensure of blasting equipment were not worth the risk. With one of the
largest domestic terrorist attacks in U.S. history unfolding fifteen miles away,
there was no one nearby to notice or care.

Wednesday, July 8

MUCH OF DENG ZHEN’S TIME
since arriving in Tokyo was spent catching up with his professional
acquaintances. Inevitable were the invitations to visit their countries and to
enjoy, perhaps, a secluded estate, everywhere from Norway to Malaysia. Deng
well understood these overtures to be what they were, not dishonest enticements
but simply largesse of the profession of government. Just today, his Indonesian
physician friend offered Deng and his family use of a seaside villa in Bali,
his polite refusal invariably triggering in him a familiar sort of
embarrassment.

Presently, Deng sat on the sofa inside his suite at the
Capitol Tokyu while contemplating an invitation of a totally different sort. The
single rap on his door had drawn his attention to the slip of paper on the
floor. At first he had thought Cheung or one of the others must have slid it
there, but opening the door he had found the hallway empty.

Whoever had written it was clearly aware of the throng of
security, requesting he leave in five minutes unless his telephone rang twice,
the signal to abort. Was this some sort of a trick—a test of his allegiance to
the Motherland? Perhaps an effort by his political adversaries to cast him in
disrepute?

The secondhand of his watch indicated that another minute
remained. The phone taunted him silently. This was ludicrous, he thought,
heaving a sigh. Before his eyes the ink letters of the note began to fade. In
another few seconds, they were entirely gone.

Deng stared at the blank page, thinking. He rose
stiffly to his feet, tore the piece of paper into slivers, entered the bathroom
and flushed them down the toilet.

INSIDE THE HOTEL’S
opposite
wing, Stuart sat on the edge of his chair leaning forward, resting his elbows
on his knees with his hands clasped together, staring at a cigarette burn in
the short bristle, gold-on-maroon carpeting. On the other side of the room,
McBurney leaned back on the spindly legs of a chair, hands folded comfortably
on his stomach, gazing up at the ceiling.

Stuart could tell the moment he had entered the room that
McBurney was still piqued over the process break-down that Emily’s call
represented. It was as if he, Stuart, was somehow at fault for hiring
intelligent people capable of deducing his whereabouts. What bothered Stuart
was McBurney’s apparent indifference to the substance of her message. McBurney
also made him nervous by frequently checking his watch.

Stuart cleared his throat. “They don’t believe a word you
told them, do they?”

McBurney lowered his gaze and stared at him.

“This is all a political exercise, then.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Your faith in the NRO seems to depend on the moment. I’d
have thought Emily Chang’s message would warrant that they reconsider—”

“Suffice it to say that my colleagues at home are busy
following other leads,” McBurney blandly dismissed. “Let other people worry about
the bridge. Right now I’d concentrate on my script. You won’t have as much time
as you...” McBurney held up one hand and the other to his ear, the flesh-tone
coil of wire visible above the collar of his shirt. He glanced at his watch.

McBurney snapped his fingers and clamored to his feet. “You’re
on, Mr. Pedersen.”

THE AIR FELT CLAMMY
as they rode down the service elevator. Arriving on the floor beneath the lobby,
the doors slid noisily open. Waiting just outside with a cart full of laundry
was a stocky Japanese man who, maybe because Stuart knew otherwise, did not
look the part. The man nodded almost imperceptibly to McBurney, who then tapped
Stuart’s elbow to motion him out. Their Japanese accomplice brushed past them
and disappeared behind the elevator doors.

Stuart followed McBurney down the service corridor, past a
bank of polished brass elevators and a coatroom toward the sound of a pianist
meandering through a melody by Gershwin. As they entered the carpeted foyer
outside the Lipo Bar, McBurney exited the building by himself through revolving
glass doors.

Stuart watched to see that McBurney had disappeared into
the night. Just inside the entrance to the bar, he then quickly did a few
things above and beyond the usual Japanese etiquette for entering a drinkery. The
first of these might easily be attributed by locals to a Westerner’s lack of
nuance: he slipped off his shoes. Stooping as if to position them away from the
door, he also slipped off his belt, folded it and tucked it into one of his
shoes. In the other he placed his wristwatch. With that, Stuart entered the
lounge.

At 12:13
A.M.
the
tables were pretty much empty. Seated at a table near the baby grand piano was
an attractive olive-complexioned couple, who ignored Stuart walking past the
oval-shaped bar at the center of the dimly lit room. The Japanese bartender in
white dinner jacket kept his eyes downcast while toweling off the burnished
mahogany. The room’s one individual patron, a Chinese man whom Stuart instantly
recognized, eyed Stuart’s approach and stood uncertainly to greet him.

Deng Zhen accepted his hand and gripped it firmly. Behind
the mutual recognition and calm intelligence in the older man’s eyes was a
strong charisma. “Hello, Mr. Stuart.” Deng spoke in halting English. “This must
be very important.”

Stuart noted the lack of surprise. “I am afraid that it is,
Mr. Deng. But then, so was your e-mail.”

Deng made no effort to disagree. Both men sat down.

“I’m sure you would agree that we probably don’t have much
time,” Stuart said, a bit more confident now. He explained that their meeting
had been arranged by an intelligence branch of the U.S. government, and that to
the best of his knowledge, their conversation wasn’t being recorded, but they
should expect their meeting place was under surveillance for their own
protection. Deng seemed unmoved by Stuart’s first point; he visibly relaxed
upon hearing the second.