The Risk Agent (30 page)

She’d picked up the duffel on the other side amid a dozen people grabbing and fighting for their handbags.

A different duffel had come out the other side.

The switch had been made inside the X-ray machine—the original duffel trapped, a second duffel released and allowed to pass through the machine.

Knox turned and fought the tide of bodies, heading straight for the guard, who wore his surprise openly on his face. Knox grabbed him, kneed him and slammed him into a concrete pillar. He stole the man’s walkie-talkie and released him, leaving him to slump to the platform.

He lowered his head like a running back and parted the sea. Once that money was delivered, Danny was a dead man.

3:48 P.M.

Melschoi’s phone intercom beeped.

“The woman boarded a train, Line Two,” Rabbit said. “I am in the next car back.”

“Excellent. And the eBpon?”

“Unable to board. I left him on the platform.”

“Line Two,” Melschoi confirmed.

“Yes.”

“Watch for him,” Melschoi warned in an ominous tone.

“I left him behind, I’m telling you!”

“Watch for him, Rabbit. I’m telling you: chances are, you did not.”

22

4:00 P.M.

XINTIANDI SHOPPING AREA

SHANGHAI

Xintiandi, a high-end commercial development set in a renovated Shanghainese lane neighborhood of the 1920s, occupied eight city blocks, its buildings and now wide concourses home to luxury retail stores and four-star restaurants. An important tourist destination, it was also a home for the Platinum Card set. On the start of the National Day holiday it looked like a mosh pit at a rock concert.

Into this chaos arrived Grace, claustrophobia already wearing on her. The shoves; the cigarettes; the body odor; the perfume all served as catalysts for her anxiety.

She bullied her way forward, the heavy duffel slowing her down as it collided with others in the crowd. A light rain began falling. She pushed for the Cold Stone Creamery around the corner, fighting the dense crowds.

She arrived at the ice cream parlor, gripping her phone tightly in her hand, waiting for the next call.

And waited.

And waited.

The phone’s screen remained blank. She mentally urged it to ring.

Silence.

The rain fell harder.

Had she been too late?

She glanced around, immediately spotting two uniformed police moving methodically through the throng.

Had the kidnappers spotted the police? Canceled the drop?

The isolation from Knox was killing her. She wondered when she had allowed herself to become dependent upon John Knox.

She dropped the heavy duffel to the concrete, clinging to its strap tightly.

No call.

No contact.

She looked down at the duffel. The two zipper tabs met dead center in the bag; this was not right! She had pulled them both to one side, having had experience of heavy bags coming open when the zippers were centered like this.

She distinctly recalled pulling the zippers to one side.

She knelt, the rain beginning to pour down. She hardly felt it.

There, in the middle of the crowds flowing around her, in the middle of an all-out downpour, soaked to her bones, Grace nervously grabbed hold of the zippers and separated them. Hesitated only briefly before tugging the two sides apart.

She saw a bag filled with stacks of newspaper bundled together with twine. Unable to breathe, she looked up into the rain as if expecting answers. When? Where? How? She had put the money into this duffel herself—her reaction went far beyond bewilderment to outright denial. This was impossible!

Impossible or not, it was. She dug through the newspapers just to make sure.

The two cops were closing in on her. The Mongolian was back there somewhere. She had but a matter of seconds. The orange shirt gave her away.

She abandoned the bag.

She had no money, only a travel card with twenty yuan left on it—about three dollars. She hurried away from the police, approaching a T-shirt kiosk.

She stole a shirt, not by lifting the hanger off the peg, but by bending over and pulling the shirt down, off the hanger. Ten yards later, down on one knee, she delighted a pair of high school-aged boys by peeling off the orange top and donning the stolen T-shirt.

She returned to the Metro entrance, passing within a few yards of the police, who seemed to be looking for her.

Behind her, lying wet atop the plaza’s concrete pavers, they would soon come across the orange tank top, trod upon, dirty and already torn.

23

4:00 P.M.

HUANGPU DISTRICT

Knox prodded the taxi driver to stay with the blue Volvo sedan sandwiched in traffic up ahead.

He’d returned to the Metro security station in time to catch the four P.M. shift change, had watched as one of the uniformed security men had left carrying a heavy black duffel with the oversized, smudged Nike logo on its side.

The guard cut through People’s Square indifferent to the steady rain and the gloom it produced. Knox skillfully avoided being seen, reveling that the shoe was on the other foot. The guard continued two blocks on foot until meeting the blue Volvo.

The first decent break of the past week came as a woman and her daughter disembarked from a taxi heading the same direction on Dagu Road as the Volvo. In the rain. In Friday rush hour.

Knox took it as an omen.

Now his taxi driver ran a light as its timer expired. The man used the right lane to pass two vans, nearly paving two cyclists in the process.

“Hen hao!” Very good! Knox called out from alongside the driver. They’d caught back up—less than a block separating them from the Volvo.

The driver smiled widely, his few remaining teeth cigarette-stained and crooked.

24

4:04 P.M.

XINTIANDI

A defeated Grace descended into the Metro station. Her legs burned; her throat was dry; the soaking wet green T-shirt stuck to her like unwanted skin. Acutely aware of the probing electronic eyes and the possibility of a Mongolian still following, she hung her head and attempted to blend in with the hundreds—thousands!—of Chinese swarming the underground station.

The operation was blown. Her face was known to police. She’d lost Knox. She’d lost the cobbled-together ransom money. One of the Mongolians was following her.

Lu Hao would be killed. Danner, along with him. She’d come to believe the switch had been made in the X-ray machine back in People’s Square. It was the only place she’d been removed from the bag. It was a devious, clever deceit.

She knew there was only one person to blame for it coming off so flawlessly.

25

4:20 P.M.

North of the confluence of Suzhou Creek and the Huangpu River, Knox’s taxi sped through the area northeast of the Garden Bridge that in the past 160 years had been home to American traders, Russian refugees, Japanese merchants (and then military occupiers) and the European Jews whom the Chinese required to live in squalor during the war. An uninspiring and neglected part of the city for decades, it had recently undergone gentrification, and was now home to hotels, coffee shops and office buildings.

He tapped the driver’s forearm. “Slowly, cousin,” he said, speaking Shanghainese. “Straight on.”

“Excuse me. The car—”

“Straight,” Knox repeated. “Turn around and pull to the curb.”

“But—”

“Kuai, kuai, kuai!” Fast.

The Volvo had slowed and taken two successive rights. Evasive action to check for tails. Knox was betting it would take two more, returning to
its former route. The pause to look for tails was a good sign: they were getting close.

He’d had the taxi turn around so he could see through the Volvo’s windshield in order to confirm its passenger had not left the vehicle. The sleight-of-hand trick with the duffel weighed heavily upon him.

Knox checked his watch, forgetting it had stopped hours ago. The moment that money was delivered, Danner and Lu Hao would be killed. Close wasn’t going to cut it. The stopped watch suddenly seemed prescient.

The driver, his face animated, waited for him to say something. Knox could hardly think.

Too long! The Volvo hadn’t been trying to lose surveillance; the two consecutive rights had been the result of a missed turn or one-way streets. It was nearing its destination.

He texted Randy.

need location

A moment later a text returned:

soon

Knox directed the driver in the direction they’d last seen the Volvo. Recalling Grace’s mention of broken glass in the background of the video, he realized they were in the wrong neighborhood.

“Abandoned building or old lilong near here?” he asked the driver. “Broken windows?”

The driver’s face contorted. “Power station by river, many years,” he said. “Made new most recently.”

“New does not work,” Knox said. He pointed for the taxi to take another right, the Volvo nowhere to be seen.

His phone buzzed:

south of Kunming Rd, east of Dalian

Knox defined the area for the driver.

“We are close!” the driver said, accelerating and crossing Dalian Road two blocks later. “Is large area.”

“Yes,” Knox said, peering through the smeared windshield.

The driver offered a thumbs-up, then pointed out his side window.

It wasn’t the Volvo he’d spotted, but a brick fortress set back from the curb.

With hundreds of broken windows.

HUANGPU DISTRICT

Rabbit had lost the woman in Xintiandi, leaving Melschoi wanting to break something, starting with Rabbit’s head.

He called his source inside Feng Qi’s group.

“What can you tell me?”

The line went dead. The man couldn’t talk.

Minutes later the man called back.

“We are monitoring police radio. The foreigner has been spotted in People’s Square Metro station.”

“Tell me something I don’t know!”

“Our people are headed there.”

“You’re too late! He’s gone.”

The eBpon would suffer for this—if he ever found him again.

HONGKOU DISTRICT

Knox faced a pair of crumbling four-story brick blocks. The roof and windows were riddled with holes. Given the location provided by Randy, and the description, by Grace, it was a strong candidate.

Danner’s time clock was quickly expiring. Knox had to test the waters.

The compound was set back from the street across a patch of bare
dirt and weeds and surrounded by high brick walls that met at an elaborate archway where a wrought-iron gate hung open. Inside the archway were aluminum lawn chairs occupied by a handful of overweight women, smoking and cackling in Shanghainese.

Electric wires had been strung through several of the second- and third-floor windows in the building on the left. The structure on the right appeared fully abandoned.

A nail-house by all appearances—a residence condemned to demolition where a few determined squatters had “nailed” themselves down, refusing to be relocated.

He had no great desire to confront a group of Shanghainese matrons; they were considerably more frightening to him than the Mongolians, but they would know everything going on in those buildings.

He crossed the street and approached them. Soaking wet now.

The woman closest to the street wore an armband symbolizing her affiliation with the government as a neighborhood observer. Only in China, he thought, could a squatter hold a community position.

On the dry concrete protected by the archway, he saw fresh wet tracks leading into the compound. The security guard, he thought. Or a courier who had met the Volvo and taken possession of the duffel.

He was tempted to follow the tracks and ignore these women. But he knew they could be paid sentries. No time to shorten Danner’s time clock.

“Heavy rain!” he said in English.

The youngest of the five women—mildly attractive—nodded faintly, though the one in charge shot her a penetrating look, apparently not wanting a language bridge between this waiguoren and their group.

“Rain,” Knox said, in intentionally poor Mandarin.

The head matron cocked her head. He tried again, improving only slightly.

She nodded, and then rattled off in Shanghainese that waiguoren spoke with rocks in their mouths. The other women chuckled—all but the youngest. Knox had an ally in her.

“You live here?” Knox asked, sticking with intentionally poor Mandarin. “These building?”

The lead woman stared at him through suspicious eyes. In Shanghainese she let him know it was none of his damn business, her language so foul that one of her friends looked to the brick walkway demurely.

In Shanghainese the younger woman said, “Be polite, you old witch. He is guest in our country. He and his kind bring commerce and prosperity.”

“They bring the avian flu and KFC. To hell with them all,” the older said, carrying on the national rhetoric that had pinned the avian flu’s origin on the United States.

“Indeed, we live here,” the younger woman said to Knox, in slow, halting Mandarin spoken so that he might understand.

“Any young men, men my age or younger, recently join you?” he asked her.

In rapid-fire Shanghainese the lead woman said, “Shut your mouth, pretty flower, or I will report you and your tribe as running a brothel and have you imprisoned for generations. Do not test me.”

Her admonishment sobered the others, while telling Knox all he needed to know. He caught the eye of the young woman, who was blushing.

“What floor?” he asked in English, knowing the matrons could not understand him. “Show me with your fingers. I will not betray you.”

“What does he say? What does he say?” snapped the old bitch. “You will not speak! You will not answer him!”

But Knox had already turned away from them having seen the young woman’s left hand, resting on her knee, touch thumb to pinky—the Chinese hand signal for “three.”

He took two steps, stopped and turned, now back in the rain. Addressing the lead woman, speaking perfect Shanghainese, he said, “You are a bitter old cow with the brains of a potato. I had five hundred yuan I was prepared to offer you to help me with the magazine article I am writing. Now it remains in my pocket, and you remain in the chair, poorer for your rudeness.”