Razing Beijing: A Thriller (56 page)

Peifu eyed his father suspiciously. “I have a class in a
few minutes. Why are you here?”

“I came by to say hello.” Deng pointed at the computer
terminal.

It took a moment for Peifu to register his understanding.

Deng sat down at the desk and began to write a note. “It
occurred to me that I have never been to your office.” He slid the note to his
frowning son;
How would you know if your computer contacts had been
compromised?

“You might have called first,” Peifu said while scripting
his reply. “We could have scheduled time to take a tour of the campus.”
An
absence of certain innocuous clues, punctuation marks and repeated words that
signal the sending party has been apprehended and is under duress.

“I’ll remember to call ahead next time.” Deng wondered if
such rudimentary precautions were an adequate bulwark against Rong Peng’s
determined intrusions. Nonetheless, he removed a compact computer disk and slip
of paper from inside his coat. “Maybe we could take the opportunity to drop in
on a math professor I used to know.” He reached over the desk and handed the
items to his son.

Peifu glanced uncertainly at the Internet address.

“But I’m not certain of the man’s address,” Deng added
ponderously.

“I can check for it.” The music professor opened a drawer
and placed the items inside.

“Actually, if you don’t mind, I would like to attend to
that now.”

“I have a class in just—”

“Go—go to your class,” Deng dismissed him with a wave of
his hand. “I have plenty of time. In fact, I have all afternoon.”

Peifu pulled open the drawer and removed the disk.

“MR. MCBURNEY,”
Special
Agent Hildebrandt’s voice greeted with its buoyant familiarity. “I called to
thank you for helping clear up a few leads. Turns out you were wrong about the
Mounties chasing a lark.”

McBurney held the phone to his ear, mystified. “I really
don’t...oh yeah, the diner. You sent someone to the diner.” At the time he had
thought that might be the case. Stuart had been on such a tirade that McBurney
had all but forgotten his retort about the Canadian authority. “You sure took
your time getting back to me. You know, I didn’t intend...I mean, I knew this Stuart
was under surveillance.”

“It’s okay, we were able to figure out most of it. We
already knew about Stuart’s and Chang’s amateur detective jaunt through
Cleveland—very amusing. Although, we are having trouble getting that New York
law firm to open up about Paul Devinn’s storage locker.”

“But it sounds like progress.”

“Enough so that we discreetly advised Thanatechnology of
our suspicion that sabotage played a role in the downing of their test
aircraft. That earned us a plea directly to the Director himself for priority
on the investigation.”

“Wonderful.”

“Cuts both ways, actually.”

“So, why was I wrong about the Mounties?”

“That’s actually what I called about. It took a little
haggling, but the Canadian authorities visited some of the hunting, fishing,
and trapping villages near Lake Manitoba. They turned up a bush pilot who told
them the story of an American backpacker who wandered out of the woods soon
after Devinn supposedly met his demise. This man had been issued a hiking
permit by the province a couple of months ago. The flight with the pilot was
pre-arranged.”

“Did they get a description?”

“Nothing conclusive there—no match on hair and eye color,
of course those can be altered. The bush pilot said the American paid cash to
be flown to Duluth, Minnesota. Both he and the pilot—”

“Passed through Customs. So there’s a passport and name on
record.”

“Neither of which indicate Paul Devinn, of course. Any guy
who staged his own drowning would have prepared an alias. Question is, where
did he go? The pilot and customs official don’t recall him saying. Meanwhile,
we’ve put out an APB for a man fitting either description on suspicion of
murder, conspiracy to commit espionage, felony fraud and violation of U.S.
immigration law.”

“I thought the borders had long undergone some sort of a
clamp-down.”

Hildebrandt chuckled. “Let’s not go there. This guy had a
valid passport—we’re still trying to figure that out. Is it safe to say you’re
still interested in the investigation?”

“If this missing person might really be Devinn, and potentially
guilty as you seem to think, then connecting the dots I’d have to say there’s a
distinct possibility that he may have information relevant to national
security. In that case, I’m very definitely interested.”

“We’ll consider this a pseudo-joint effort?”

McBurney thought it might be a stretch to wrap the
particulars of a domestic espionage investigation under the JCTF executive
order. “Joint effort—sounds good to me.”

“Awesome. So what was it Stuart meant in the diner about
China, and Emily Chang’s parents being blackmailed?”

McBurney leaned back in his chair and gazed out at the
forest that bordered Agency headquarters. There was no point in trying to deny
what Hildebrandt had certainly read in the transcript of his and Stuart’s diner
rendezvous. “As best we know, Stuart was right. Emily Chang’s trip to Tortola
was all about protecting her parents. I think you should dismiss the money
laundering allegation against her.”

“Just like that? First you ask us to reel in Stuart,
apparently because Chang provided you with evidence of sabotage at Thanatech
that seemed to implicate him. Maybe now it’s time you share all the specifics
with us.”

“I cannot do that—sorry. For what it’s worth, I don’t think
the specifics bear on your criminal investigation. For the time being, that
information is sensitive.”

“I could arrange to have Chang and Stuart subpoenaed.”

McBurney sighed. “Would you mind holding off on that? Here’s
the deal: the minute something breaks on the relevance of Chang’s parents to
your investigation—her parents live
overseas
—then we’ll share it with
the Bureau.”

He could hear Hildebrandt tapping something on his desk. “When
is that liable to be?”

“Soon. I’m already under pressure to make it soon.”
Along
with every other goddamn thing on my plate.

SPECIAL AGENT ED
HILDEBRANDT
hung up the phone just as Agent Nicholas Brophy arrived at
his borrowed cubicle.

“Morning,” Brophy said, surprised to see the Cleveland
agent already sitting behind his own desk. “Mind if I sit down in my own
chair?”

“Oh. Got any decent coffee in this place?” Hildebrandt
asked, rising to his feet.

“Sure.” Brophy dropped one of the ubiquitous brown file
folders onto his desk. “This is New York City, we got everything here.”

Hildebrandt eyed the folder. “Anything new?”

“Okay...we know that on the day Carl Smith presented his
passport to Customs, at least three other Carl Smith transactions took place in
Duluth. The field office out there is bird-dogging those. Meanwhile, I ordered
up a cross-reference check on the passport to his social security number—both
seem valid. That’s really strange, because the IRS has no record that he ever
filed a tax return.”

“Nice work.”

“And I’ve started the ball rolling on the storage locker
attorney.”

Among Hildebrandt’s reasons for being in Lower Manhattan was
its jurisdiction under the Second Circuit district attorney’s office, which was
considering his subpoena request to investigate the lawyer handling Paul
Devinn’s storage locker. He said, “I guess we can proceed with a credit card
track.”

“We’ve contacted the credit card issuers. We don’t know yet
if
our
Carl Smith is among any who used a credit card that day.”

“Well, he would had to have—”

“Rented a car, or booked another flight—we’re also running
that down. There are ways to skirt under the radar. He could’ve taken a cab to
the ’burbs and booked a Rent-A-Wreck, or paid cash for a bus.”

“Now, Nick. This being New York City and all, we should aim
for nothing less than being able to flag this guy the instant he charges a cup
of damn coffee.”

STUART REACHED TO WIPE
the
dust off the monitor with the palm of his hand. The inherent passivity of
sitting over a keyboard was something he had never really taken to. Even during
the day at work, it had gotten so that he only begrudgingly surrendered each
tedious minute to his computer. The digital clock in the corner of the screen
reminded him why, at nine-forty in the evening, he was sifting through the hundreds
of messages. A dozen miles outside Logan, Utah, Ashley and her great uncle
would be sitting down to dinner and discussing the day. Actually, he thought it
more likely that Ashley would be discussing, his uncle would be listening.

His eyes drifted from the monitor to the darkness beyond
the window. He had considered hiring professional guards, but the idea of
paying total strangers to hover over Ashley and his property seemed only
marginally better than not knowing who might otherwise be out there. Bodyguards
or not, what he’d found intolerable was the thought of his daughter at school,
playing with her cousins outside his sister’s house, walking her dog or being
anywhere out of his sight while stalked by a man cowardly enough to threaten a
child as a means of getting to him. Rearranging his life to be with his
daughter had had the perverse irony of putting her at risk. It was frustrating
how circumstances again demanded that he place responsibility for her well
being into somebody else’s hands. He looked down to find that his own were
clenched into fists.

Further down the scale of importance, he had received
notice that afternoon by registered mail of his scheduled appearance before the
Cuyahoga County district court—a joke, now that a conspiracy appeared to be the
cause of the deaths and not professional negligence. But was that
really
the case? Was it negligent to have presided over a process vulnerable to the
whims of terrorists, or whoever was behind the sabotage of the aircraft? Perhaps
he should have taken the advice of this CIA jerk after all, and made a proper
appeal to the FBI to protect his daughter. It wasn’t too late to approach them;
for that matter, he was going to need someone credible to vouch for his
integrity in court. He would be of little use trying to raise his daughter from
inside a prison cell.

AS THE SOLAR TERMINATOR
RETREATED
over the western half of the country, a smattering of stars
penetrated the cobalt twilight sky over Baltimore, Maryland. On this particular
night, the full veil of Earth’s atmosphere combined with the urban profusion of
lights to obscure the radiance of most celestial objects.

Looking down from a low-earth orbit of two hundred forty
miles, the effect on clarity was similar. A comparatively low altitude slightly
complicated the kinetic solution for acquiring a focus on-target, which the
satellite approached along its designated ground track at roughly five miles
per-second. As with any representative experiment, there were secondary effects
to consider—seasonal variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, for instance,
and heliocentric parallax as a result of deviation from mean altitude—but the
satellite designers believed they had whittled down the primary obstacles so as
now to address even these. Among the many complicating factors to be
compensated for by the on-board computers, there happened to be one offsetting
simplification. The satellite’s ground track permitted a nearly vertical
orientation over the selected target. This eliminated the need to correct for
atmospheric refraction, a phenomenon similar to that challenging ancient
archers who, centuries earlier, had learned to adjust their aim at fish below
the water’s surface.

Sol Bernstein liked to think of M&T Bank Stadium as his
own, which for all practical purposes it was. For the average sporting event,
the stadium was occupied by as many as sixty-nine thousand cheering fans. The
owner of the Baltimore Ravens loved the game and the crowds as he had his entire
life. He considered his acquisition of a National Football League team the
quintessential achievement of a lifetime. But when the stadium shook with the collective
roar of the fans, the concept of ownership was abstractly surreal. On nights
like tonight, when the stadium was empty and his staff already gone for the
day, Bernstein liked to gaze from the office into the vastness of the stadium. When
time came for him to leave, he would walk to the door and do what he relished: extinguish
the lights. There was something about being the last one out. Maybe it reminded
him of running his billboard advertising company, the little business with
which he had built himself a fortune.

But the good times were becoming infrequent; there were
headaches to owning a team that he hadn’t foreseen. That wasn’t actually true;
in his zeal to become an owner he’d simply been too quick to dismiss these, as
tonight’s review of the numbers bore out. Two full seasons of decline in both
ticket sales and advertising revenue had taken their toll. The Ravens—
his
team—had
limped to the end of the season. Far from a slot in the playoffs, Bernstein and
his partners had lost some eight and one-half million this season alone. The
economy seemed sure to remain punk. Things were bad enough that his staff were
suggesting that he begin the fall season by discounting ticket prices
fifteen
percent—
across the board
—to stimulate demand and bring back the fans. Such
tactics were unheard of in the boom times before the double whammy of terrorism
and recession.