The Second Perimeter (20 page)

40

E
mma’s legs were rubber. Her brain was mush. They’d injected her with drugs when they took her from her car, and in the last twelve hours she’d been injected two more times. She was in a small room, approximately eight by ten, and the only furniture in the room was a twin-size bed. She couldn’t hear city noises, so she assumed she was either in the country or a quiet residential neighborhood. The one window in the room had a square of plywood nailed over it but there was still plenty of light. In fact there was too much light in the room. The light came from an overhead fixture with an abnormally bright bulb and there was a wire cage protecting the bulb. She could probably break the bulb if she wanted but the effort to do so was just…just too much.
They’d taken her so easily that she was embarrassed. When it happened, she’d been sitting in her car half a block from the restaurant on East Pender Street. From her car she had been able to see the front of the restaurant but not the rear, and Harris’s agents were invisible, staged in nearby buildings and a panel van. Emma remembered checking her watch; Carmody’s controller should have arrived fifteen minutes ago.
It had been a warm morning and her car windows had been rolled down. She had been sitting there, holding her cell phone in her hand, between her legs, thinking about calling Harris. There was one man, a stocky Asian, looking into the window of a kite store across the street from the restaurant where Carmody was waiting. The man had been there an unusually long time and he kept glancing over his shoulder at the restaurant. Emma was on edge— she knew something was wrong with the meet— and she was thinking of alerting Harris to the kite shopper, although she imagined Harris’s agents had already spotted the guy.
At that moment a Range Rover had pulled up next to her car and the vehicle blocked her view of the restaurant. She had been about to get out of her car so she could continue to watch the restaurant when a woman put her head into the passenger-side window of Emma’s car. Emma saw the gun in the woman’s hand before she saw the woman’s face. As soon as she saw the gun she pushed the send button on her telephone three times; her phone would automatically dial the last person she’d spoken to: DeMarco.
She wasn’t sure her voice would be audible with the phone in the position it was, on the seat between her legs, but it was her only chance. She had identified Li Mei for DeMarco’s sake and made the comment about her being a rogue agent. That would help Smith’s people— assuming DeMarco answered his phone, assuming her voice was audible, assuming Li Mei didn’t see the phone. The phone call wouldn’t keep Emma alive but at least Smith would know who had killed her.
At the same time Li Mei had pointed the gun at her, a man appeared at the driver’s-side window of Emma’s car. Even if Harris’s people had turned to look in Emma’s direction, with the Range Rover in the position it was in, she would not have been visible. Both the man and Li Mei appeared to be leaning casually into the car, like a couple talking to a friend. The man had a hypodermic needle in his hand and he pressed it against Emma’s throat. Li Mei said something in Chinese, and the man shifted the needle from her throat to her upper left arm. With Li Mei’s gun pointed at her, Emma didn’t move when the man pushed down the plunger on the hypodermic. It took about sixty seconds for the drug to have an effect, and when the man opened Emma’s door to escort her from her car to the Range Rover, she went with him as docilely as a child. She had just enough awareness to push her cell phone to the floor of the car as she exited. If Li Mei and her partner hadn’t been so focused on looking out for Harris’s agents, they would have seen the phone lying on the floor mat. Emma passed out seconds after entering the SUV.
And so now here she was, locked in a room in an unknown location, her mind and body turned to pudding by narcotics. She decided to try to get up, and with great effort managed to push herself to a sitting position on the edge of the bed, her feet touching the floor. Her next job was to push herself to a standing position. She was almost certain if she tried to stand she’d fall on her face, but she had to try. As she was commanding her muscles to move, the door opened and Li Mei entered the room.

D
eMarco pushed open the door to the office that Smith was using in Vancouver. Smith was on the phone but when he saw DeMarco— or the expression on DeMarco’s unshaven face— he told whoever he was talking to that he’d call back.
“Tell me what’s happening,” DeMarco said without preamble.
“You want some coffee? You look like you could use some.”
“No, I don’t want any damn…” DeMarco stopped and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yeah,” he said, “some coffee would be good.”
“That red-eye’s a bitch, ain’t it?” Smith said as he handed DeMarco a cup of tepid coffee in a Styrofoam cup.
“Yeah. Now tell me what’s going on.”
“Well, we’re doing everything that can be done to find her. The FBI’s involved and so are the Canadians. Thank God for Dudley.”
“Yeah, but what
exactly
are you doing?”
“All the usual stuff,” Smith said. “The lab rats have gone over Emma’s car looking for fingerprints, fibers, that sorta thing. They got zip. The Bureau listened to that message on your cell phone using all their high-tech shit to see if they could pick up anything. Again zip. The Canadians questioned people in the area where Emma’s car was found. They got something. One witness saw two people talking to Emma— a man and a woman— and they saw Emma leave her car and get into a dark green SUV with the two people. But that’s all. No model or license plate on the SUV, no clear description of the man with Li Mei. The witness wasn’t even sure if the man was Asian.
“So now,” Smith said, “we’re watching airports and cruise ships and train stations and borders. We have their pictures— Emma’s, Carmody’s, and Li Mei’s— plastered all over the place. For Carmody, we’re using the mug shots we took when we arrested him here in Canada. For Li Mei, we found a photo of her from the Olympic Games, it’s more than twenty years old, but we had some artist age the picture. It was the best we could do.” Smith took off his black-frame glasses and rubbed his eyes. Without the glasses he looked older. “I gotta tell you, Joe,” he said, “the odds aren’t in our favor. If I was them, and I wanted to get Emma out of Vancouver, I’d put her in a cargo container and load her onto an outbound ship. She’s probably gone already.”
“Oh, man,” DeMarco said. “Don’t say that.”
“Sorry, but it’d be almost impossible to stop them if that’s what they did. But the good news is that we don’t think the Chinese government’s involved in this thing.”
“What are you talking about?” DeMarco said.
“Sit down, DeMarco. Quit pacin’ my office and I’ll tell you what we think happened here.” After DeMarco had taken a seat, Smith cleared his throat and took in breath like a man about to give a speech. “Okay,” he said, “it’s like this. Li Mei was controlling the shipyard op and at the same time she was turning John Washburn. She’s a beautiful woman and we’re guessing she screwed ol’ John’s brains out to turn him. Probably offered him money, too. So anyway, she’s got two ops going and they’re going great. She’s getting stuff on nuc ships from Carmody and she’s getting ready to get Washburn out of the country, back to China, where they can empty out his head. She probably got files from Washburn, too. Okay?”
DeMarco made a move-it-along gesture with his hand— he knew all this— but Smith continued with his summary.
“Then you and Emma show up at the shipyard. You’re there lookin’ into what you think is some little whistle-blower contract thing, but then you figure out that Carmody and his boys are really spies. You don’t have anything solid, but you spook Mulherin which makes Li Mei think that you
really
know something. Now you gotta remember, Li Mei’s dealt with Emma before. Emma’s beat her before. She knows how good Emma is.
“So Li Mei decides to shut down the shipyard op and concentrate on Washburn. She kills Mulherin and Norton and sends Carmody running around the country. This gets everybody— FBI, NCIS, navy security— focused on
Carmody
, trying to figure out what he took, trying to find him. And while everybody’s looking for Carmody, she fakes Washburn’s death, hoping nobody’ll notice until she gets him on a plane. But then Emma gets lucky again. She finds out Washburn’s missing, gets airport security looking for him, and TSA nabs him. Li Mei has Washburn’s files but Washburn,
he’s
not going anywhere. Emma’s beaten her again.
“And so Li Mei decides to take Emma. It’s no longer just business— it’s personal, too. She uses Carmody for bait and sends him up here to Vancouver and lets us catch him, knowing Emma will follow.”
“But Emma’s retired,” DeMarco said.
“But Li Mei doesn’t know that,” Smith said. “The fact is, Li Mei got lucky, too. It happens. Sometimes the bad guys get lucky. Emma didn’t have to come up here but she did, just like Li Mei wanted.”
“But why Vancouver? If she wanted to kill or kidnap Emma, why didn’t she just do it in Bremerton?”
“She could have,” Smith said, “but we think there’re three reasons she didn’t. One, she may not have had the time when she was in Bremerton because she was busy trying to get Washburn out of town. Two, and more important, Canada ain’t the United States. So if Li Mei does the snatch up here we’re not as effective as we’d be back home. What we have instead is a two-government tango: jurisdictions all screwed up and our guys not completely in charge, having to coordinate everything with the Canucks. So she does it up here partly just to slow us down, to make it harder for us.”
“And the third reason?”
“The third reason is we think she had assets up here, contacts she didn’t have in the States. Like the guys who helped her snatch Emma.”
“I’m not following you,” DeMarco said. “She works for the Chinese government. They could have provided the assets she needed in the U.S. just as easily as up here. And they could have provided extra people to deal with Emma while Li Mei was worrying about Washburn.”
“Like I said, Joe, we don’t think the Chinese government was involved in this thing with Emma. You heard what Emma said on that voice mail: she said that Li Mei’s gone rogue, and we think Emma was right.”
“I don’t know what all this ‘gone rogue’ crap means.”
“It means Li Mei did this thing on her own. Governments don’t pull this kinda shit, DeMarco. Believe it or not, there’re a few rules that apply to international espionage. The Chinese government wouldn’t kidnap a retired American agent. Hell, they don’t even capture
active
American agents unless the agents are on their turf. And they sure as hell don’t go around killing FBI agents and Canadian cops. At least normally they don’t.
“But in case the Chinese government is involved,” Smith said, “Dudley has his people watching their embassy on Granville Street. They know most of the intelligence agents who work there— as opposed to diplomats and trade reps and cooks— and they’re watching those guys in case one of them runs to Li Mei.”
“I still don’t get it,” DeMarco said. “If all Li Mei wanted was revenge for what happened in Hawaii, why didn’t she just kill Emma? Why kidnap her?”
“Yeah, well, we think…” Then Smith stopped.
“Come on, Smith. What?”
“Joe, I hate to tell you this, but we think that since Li Mei didn’t get everything she wanted in Bremerton she decided to give her bosses something extra: everything inside Emma’s head. Emma worked for us for almost thirty years and she had a security clearance higher than God’s. So Li Mei can kill two birds with one stone, as the ol’ saying goes. She can have her revenge on Emma and at the same time make her bosses a present out of all the classified stuff that Emma knows. And again, keep in mind that Li Mei doesn’t know Emma’s retired, so Li Mei thinks she’s going to be getting current info.”
DeMarco didn’t say anything for a moment, then he said, “You’re telling me she plans to torture Emma to get her to talk.”
“Sorry, Joe, but that’s a possibility.”
“Jesus,” DeMarco said. The word “torture” instantly flooded his mind with too many images from too many movies. Just to stop what he was thinking, he got up and poured himself another cup of bad coffee. “Okay,” he said, sitting back down. “So what’s the story with Carmody?”
“There is no story. He obviously worked with Li Mei to set this up. He allowed himself to be caught and then led us to that restaurant in Chinatown with a ring through our noses.”
“But why would Carmody take that kind of risk, allowing himself to be captured the way he did?”
Smith shrugged. “Because Li Mei told him to. He works for her; she’s his boss. And Li Mei probably told him she planned to spring him and he was just as surprised as we were when she tried to blow him away.”
“But why would she try to kill him?”
Smith shrugged again. If he didn’t quit doing that, DeMarco was going to hit him.
“Probably because Carmody could ID her,” Smith said. “You gotta remember something else: Li Mei doesn’t know that Emma identified her on that cell-phone call to you. She’d told Carmody to tell us that this was a North Korean op. Li Mei figured if she killed Carmody, not only couldn’t he ID her but we’d go on thinking it was the North Koreans that had penetrated the shipyard, that it was the North Koreans that tried to get Washburn, and that
they
were the ones that snatched Emma. That was one of the smartest things she tried to do— use Carmody to lay all this on the Koreans. But once she had Emma, Carmody became a liability. An expendable one. Li Mei Shen is one cold-blooded, murderous bitch.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” Smith said. “This woman is incredibly bright and if she had balls, they’d be the size of cantaloupes. She decided from the get-go that she was going to snatch Emma and get rid of Carmody at the same time. Now she’s probably been following Emma, so she knew Emma was here in Vancouver, and she knew the setup at the restaurant where Carmody would be, but she had no idea where Emma would be. Emma could have been with me or in the restaurant or with the cops. So Li Mei gets there early— we don’t know what she looks like, so she was probably walking around watching the whole time Harris was setting up— and then in about an hour and a half she figures out a way to get Emma and shoot Carmody and escape. She’s so good, she’s scary.”
Scary? A woman who had killed six people, three of them cops, and all Smith could say was that she was
scary
.