Backfire (22 page)

San Francisco General Hospital

Xu walked at a brisk pace through the San Francisco General Hospital campus to Potrero Avenue. He turned right and walked to Twenty-second Street, where he’d parked his Audi on a quiet residential side street.

The San Francisco air was fresh and chill, clouds scuttling across a gray sky. Finally he could take a second to look at them and breathe a sigh of relief. He grinned. He’d taken a huge risk coming to the hospital, and now that Cindy had had the grace to die, he hadn’t had to take the even greater risk of trying to kill her himself.

That little scrap of a woman, Lin Mei, had ended up a murderer after all.

He’d worried at it like a dog’s bone. Cindy would have had every reason to talk to the FBI now, and if she had told them what she knew, they would eventually have found the Xian Xu who became Joe Keats. The National Security Agency would have no record of a Joe Keats or of his connection to Chinese intelligence, but he could never have been Joe Keats again. He would have become an international fugitive wanted for murder, dependent on the Chinese for his very life, if they chose to let him keep it.

Had Cindy managed to speak to the FBI agents he’d seen leaving the ICU before she died? He couldn’t be sure, but it was unlikely. She’d had major surgery; she’d had a tube down her throat until this morning. If she’d been conscious at all, it wasn’t for long. He’d heard the frenetic beeping from the monitors, watched the staff rush to her cubicle. They’d been in there a long time. When they’d come out, he knew she was dead by the expressions on their faces.

Cindy had gone to meet her maker, whoever that was, and she’d taken his secrets with her. He thought about her death, wondered if she’d even known she was dying or if she’d been too drugged out to even recognize what was happening to her. To his surprise, Xu saw his mother’s face, saw her heaving for breath as he’d stood there, a bloody knife in his hand, watching her in the kitchen of their small vacation house, grabbing her throat because she couldn’t breathe as she sank to her knees on the floor.

He walked faster. His mother’s death was long ago, long over and done
.
He’d been trained to block out memories that were of no use to him, to focus on what was important, and immediate, not wallow in the past, reliving moments he couldn’t change. His immediate task was to get back to his superior in Beijing, Colonel Ng, a tough-as-nails little man with a gold tooth in the front of his mouth. He would have to rehearse carefully, convince Ng that there were no more witnesses to hurt them, that Ng’s cyber-intelligence unit could not be tied to anything that had happened. Xu had, after all, brought them a great prize, the latest American Stuxnet research, or a good part of it. Who could fault him if he’d had to dirty his hands, so long as they were all safe? In the end they would do as they wished, of course, but he hoped they would find him too useful to waste.

After eight long months, things had finally turned around for him, and he no longer needed to stay. After he picked up his luggage at the Fairmont, he and his Audi would make the six-hour trek to LAX. No way was he going near SFO airport. He momentarily pictured himself waving good-bye from thirty-three thousand feet on his way to Honolulu to the idiot FBI agents still looking for him.

Xu was whistling when he reached his Audi ten minutes later. He fobbed open the door and slid in. He paused for a moment, staring out the windshield. The sun had peeked out from behind the clouds, full and hot. He loved this beautiful city, with its swirling pristine fog that rolled in through the Golden Gate and left again. No one should live in Beijing with the lung-rotting pollution and its sandstorms blowing in from the Gobi Desert that turned the sky brown, choking its people even through the masks they wore. Crowds of people, endless millions of them scrabbling to survive in a city where buildings seemed to go up every second, so poorly constructed they began to fall apart around you the next day—that is, if some unscrupulous local officials didn’t evict you first.

As he drove north toward the city, he thought back to his college days at Berkeley, where he’d protested with all the vigor and ignorance of youth against the cause du jour, usually a variation of the theme of America as a decadent wasteland. He smiled now at how he’d lapped it up, with Joyce’s help, both of them ardent young Communists. Except Joyce had been more, so much more. He hadn’t realized until he’d lived in Beijing that the Chinese government at all levels could give the bozos here in America lessons in corruption. His idealism had died there, drowned in all the bureaucratic inanities and the fraud that permeated everything. He’d watched groups protest, watched them shout their pitiful truths, watched them get the Chinese government’s boot on their necks. How could you continue to believe in a society in which you couldn’t even trust the food you ate, or the air you breathed? The only people you could trust in China were your own family, and he had no family left.

During his year-and-a-half stay in the area, Xu had come to hope he could live there, though it would surprise his masters that he would leave behind the splendid apartment they’d given him near the Forbidden City. Perhaps in a year or two, when all of this was behind him, he could think about working for himself. He had a reputation in some important circles. He would see.

He honked at a driver who cut in front of him as he turned onto California Street. He knew the locals thought the traffic here was insane, and he snorted a laugh. Even L.A. couldn’t compete with Beijing, the traffic-snarl capital of the world, with its endless streams of bicycles weaving in and out of traffic on the overcrowded roads. Once he’d even seen a skinny little kid pedaling away on top of a thick stone wall.

He looked at the people walking on the sidewalks, most of them with phones attached to their ears, most of them busy with the little problems in their little lives. They had no idea what was going on in the world around them.

It was time to go back to Beijing and make his case. He hadn’t contacted them since he’d taken O’Rourke, and now he decided he’d wait. Best to do it in person.

Xu felt a taste of fear in his mouth. It was viscous, foul, like the pumping blood from Mickey’s throat spraying the walls of that miserable little shack.

He started whistling again. He’d be in and out of the Fairmont in ten minutes, no longer, and on his way to LaLa Land.

Fairmont Hotel

California Street

Xu left his Audi with the valet. He’d be back in ten minutes, he told her, pressing a ten-dollar bill into her hand. Pretty girl. He walked through the elegant hotel lobby, with its yellow granite columns, scattered huge palm trees, and sculpted seating arrangements spread throughout, and arrived at the elevators. He punched the button for the sixth and top floor. There were two couples in the car with him who obviously knew one another, the men carrying shopping bags, the women flushed and happy and chattering about lunch.

Both couples got off at the fifth floor. He wondered if they had views as incredible as his. He’d miss seeing the Golden Gate in the distance, and the downtown beneath him to the east, a tight knot of multifaceted buildings shining with reflected light in the bright afternoon sun.

He got off the elevator and walked down the beautifully carpeted hallway to his suite at the end of the wide corridor. He didn’t see a soul except a maid standing beside her cart in front of the door across from his suite. He didn’t recognize her, and he always made a point of knowing who was around him when he was in an unfamiliar place, staff included.

She looked up at him, smiled and nodded, then said, “Is there anything you need, sir?”

He shook his head and thanked her. He watched her sort through a stack of towels. There was something about her he couldn’t quite pinpoint that was a bit—off. Was she new? Was it simply because she was working a different shift? Or had he simply not seen her before? He smiled back at her. “You having a good day?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, it’s splendid today, after the rain,” she said, and turned her back to him to open the room across the hall.

Something was definitely off, but what was it? They couldn’t have found him, simply couldn’t have. But he hadn’t stayed alive for the past twelve years by taking chances. He carefully eased a small canister out of his jacket pocket, slipped his finger through the ring and pressed it against his thigh. When he slid his key card down the slot, the green light flashed and the door opened, quiet and smooth, as it always did. He let the door open a crack.

He stepped into the very modern living room of his suite, with its view of the city spreading out before him.

A man’s voice yelled, “FBI! Hands in the air! Now!”

“Don’t shoot me!” he yelled. He flung his hands into the air, and let the safety ring remain on his finger as the canister crashed to the floor. There was a deafening blast, and thick smoke billowed like a black curtain in front of him. A sheet of flames burst out hot and high, and Xu was down, rolling. He’d closed his eyes as he’d hurled the canister and turned his head away, but he still saw lights, felt his eardrums throb from the deafening noise.

He heard shouts, heard bullets flying around him through the flames and smoke. He knew they couldn’t see him any more than he could see them, even less if they were still blinded by the light with their ears ringing. But they’d know if they didn’t do something fast they’d burn to death. He felt a bullet sting his arm, ignored the shot of pain, crawled to the front door, and rolled out into the hall. His last view of his suite was through a wall of flames, the FBI agents yelling to one another from the other side.

He jumped to his feet to face the maid, who was raising her SIG. “Freeze!”

A shout and three more bullets came through the smoke, striking the wall behind her close to her head, and she flinched. He kicked the SIG out of her hand, backhanded her face, knocking her to the floor, and took off down the nearest stairs. His left arm hurt like the devil, but he took two, three steps at a time, hoping he wouldn’t go flying on his face. With his useless arm, he’d break his neck if he did. He forced himself to slow and straighten his clothes before he reached the lobby, and took a second to regain his breath. He saw blood had soaked through his jacket sleeve. It was a dark material, thankfully, it wouldn’t be all that apparent at a glance, but it hurt, really hurt. He knew he should be applying pressure, but there wasn’t time.

He forced himself to walk, not run, across the lobby and toward one of the smaller front doors. The fire alarm went off, the people in the lobby started looking around uncertainly, wondering what to do while the staff took their places to usher them to the doors. Very soon there would be pandemonium, he would see to that, enough craziness that even the FBI agents would be too busy trying to save their own butts and protect all the innocent bystanders to care about catching him. He heard a shout from behind him over the alarm bells. “It’s Xu! Stop, FBI!”

He kept walking as he reached into his pocket and pushed a preset number on his cell phone. There was a loud explosion, and soon there were screams and the sounds of people running—the chaos was beginning, and the FBI agents waiting for him in the hotel lobby would be drowned in the stampede.

He held his arm as he walked quickly to the valet station. He saw his car, but the girl wasn’t there, no one was, none of the bellmen, none of the valets. He saw her then, but she was dashing back into the lobby, yelling something to the doorman. Where were the keys to his Audi? He didn’t see them, and he couldn’t wait. He had to get out and grab a taxi, and where was a taxi stand?

He didn’t register the dark van parked across the street until the van door slid open and a redheaded woman jumped out. He saw a gun pressed against her side. Another fricking FBI agent, he thought, and she was running right at him.

Xu took off, weaving through the growing crowd of panicked people clogging the sidewalk. He heard sirens in the distance. How had the FBI found him? How?
Cindy,
he thought, she’d been able to talk.

He could hear her, knew she was gaining on him. She was a woman, and if she made the mistake of getting too close, he could kill her in an instant. He could nearly smell her now. He heard angry, panicked voices as she shoved people out of her way.

—

Sherlock heard an explosion.
Her heart stopped as she looked up to the top floor and saw a window flying outward, sending shattered glass raining down, smoke and flames gushing out after it.

It was Xu’s room. What had he done? Eve, Harry, and Griffin Hammersmith had been in that room waiting for Xu, and Agent Willa Gaines outside in the hallway, dressed as a maid. Were they still there?

Sherlock couldn’t believe it was Xu she saw coming out through the luggage door of the hotel. She saw people running out of the hotel behind him, heard yells, felt the rising panic.

She jerked open the van door and jumped down. Two agents monitoring the hotel exits shouted after her, but she paid no attention. She ran full speed after Xu. He was fast, but there were so many people around, all of them excited and looking up, wondering what had happened.

He disappeared for a moment. She stepped around a couple of tourists, saw a blood trail on the sidewalk. Good, he was hurt. Who else was hurt?
Stop it. Focus.
Sherlock saw him again, holding his arm as he ran. She took a flying leap past two civilians who stood in the middle of the sidewalk gaping up at the flames and landed on his back, her arms around his neck. The force drove him to his knees. He was larger than she was, and stronger, even wounded, but she was well trained, her adrenaline level off the charts. She had to flatten him, get his face against the sidewalk.

She struck her fist as hard as she could against his wounded arm, and he howled. He fell to his belly, yelling in fury and pain, cursing, trying to flip her off him. With his good arm, he tried to grab her to pull her beneath him, but she didn’t let that happen.

People were standing around them now, looking to see what was happening, but not understanding. “Keep back!” she yelled. “FBI! This man set the bomb in the hotel!”

Sherlock raised her SIG, shoved it against the back of his head. Xu froze. Sherlock leaned down beside his ear. “Give me an excuse, Xu, come on, twitch or move your finger, anything. Let me blow your brains out.”

“How did you know?”

“We’re FBI. You’re not.” She leaned back and clipped a handcuff around his right wrist. “And it turns out you’re not as good as you thought you were. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to—” She grabbed his wounded arm and was pulling it back, Xu yelling in pain and fury, to fasten them together, when her brain registered the sound of a shot and a spear of sharp bright light before everything went black.