by Matthew Hart
“Horsepower: three hundred and twenty-five,” he bawled. “That’s the kind of power plant you want for a vehicle with a curb weight of two and a half tons.”
I gazed downriver at the blazing slash of light. The nighttime view of Manhattan gave me a kick of pleasure. Its brashness and optimism and bravado. The city that never says “I’m sorry,” even when it should. Especially then.
We took the ramp that curled down to the Henry Hudson Parkway. The Caddy rose and fell on its springs like a ship on a gentle swell. The lights on the New Jersey side sparkled on the river. I was grateful for the cocoon of wind and traffic as we joined the stream flowing south to the city.
* * *
Yellowknife had gone cold fast, and I don’t just mean temperature. Two days ago Lily and I had been called to a meeting at the RCMP building. We’d arrived on the dot. The desk sergeant in the lobby made a big show of leafing through his logbook. Asked us to wait. Half an hour later Cedric appeared.
“Inspector Savard is in Ottawa for consultations,” he told us. No preamble. No apology. He wore a neutral expression. Only his eyes showed any feeling: curiosity. He was interested to see how we’d react. Like a pair of lab rats whose maze just had a new twist installed.
“We had an appointment,” I said.
“Did you, sir? I’ll be sure to mention it to the inspector.”
“Who’s in Ottawa,” I reminded him.
Cedric spread his hands. “If he calls.”
“We might as well go for lunch,” Lily said as we climbed back into the F350. “There’s a place on the water that sells buffalo burgers.”
“They’re turning over our apartment,” I said. “That’s why they called us here.”
“Of course they are, darling. Let’s give them plenty of time. Otherwise it will just be embarrassing for everyone.”
“The garnets are in the room safe.”
She shook her head. Her big purse was sitting on the console. She lifted it and let it drop. The minerals clicked like a bag of marbles.
“What’s inside the safe, then?” I’d checked it before we left.
“Low-value garnets from that hobby shop at the mall. I mixed in some gravel from the parking lot. I put it all into Ziploc bags exactly like the ones Jimmy Angel used, and labelled them with GPS coordinates from three different places in the Barrens.”
Lily had a Russian’s native distrust of officialdom. She always assumed the worst, and prepared for it. It would take whoever ended up with the minerals months to figure out they’d been had.
We had a great lunch. When we got back, sure enough the place had been done. It was a neat job, but the searchers hadn’t taken pains to conceal their intrusion. Lily’s clothes were put back perfectly folded, but in a different order than she’d left them. Hangers were shoved to the end of the rod. Someone had fanned through Lily’s fashion magazines and left them on a different table. There were no lock-picking scratches on the door, so they’d had a key. The safe was empty. They hadn’t even bothered closing it.
We packed, went downstairs, and paid the bill. I’d already got the message to report back to New York. Lily had decided to move to a Catholic retreat center on a nearby lake. “Excellent security,” she’d explained, and since her private cabin had been arranged by the priest who’d provided the sawed-off twelve-gauge, I didn’t doubt it.
I knew who’d brought me to New York, and it wasn’t Tommy. I’d flown on the secretary’s Gulfstream again. The only authority that could yank a plane from someone with cabinet rank was the White House.
“By the way,” Tommy said as he turned off the West Side Highway at Fourteenth Street, “maybe I should give you a heads-up, in case you want to check your makeup and try not to look too stunned. Tabitha’s waiting for us.”
“So I guess it’s her meeting?”
“See, that’s just the kind of boner I’m trying to save you from. If you can get through the meeting without sounding like an intern, everything will go smoother.”
We turned onto Hudson Street and drove into Greenwich Village. The summer night had packed the sidewalks. People poured in and out of bars and restaurants like schooling fish. We turned right onto Leroy Street. Ancient plane trees spread their branches above the narrow road. Old-fashioned streetlamps splashed the dark foliage with a yellow light. Couples sat on the steps of a redbrick townhouse, talking in low voices and passing a joint. A red dot glowed briefly to life. I heard the sound of a tab being pulled on a can of beer.
“It’s called inter-functionality,” Tommy explained. “People like Tabitha go where they’re needed. I needed her, so here she is.”
The idea that Tabitha would go a quarter of an inch out of her way because Tommy needed her was the flat-earth theory of the day. Tabitha worked directly for the president. She prepared the intelligence bulletin known as the President’s Daily Brief. Her security clearance was higher than mine. It would be Tabitha’s meeting, and that was irritating Tommy. She was half his age.
We turned onto Washington Street and took the first left onto Clarkson. Tommy eased the Eldorado into the restricted space in front of a row of eighteenth-century redbrick townhouses. Most of the property in that part of the Village belonged to the young millionaires with bonus packages who worked on Wall Street, a fifteen-minute ride away on their electric scooters. They’d be surprised to know that behind the black-shuttered row, a team of accountants and code-breakers on the payroll of the US Treasury was tapping their phones, bugging their clients, and reading their email.
The place was deserted. We made our way along the hall and upstairs to Tommy’s top-floor office. Tabitha looked just as she had when we still shared a pair of crummy offices in the basement. The same mass of untamable auburn hair floating around her head, the same tendency to blush. Terrific clothes that looked as if she’d just hauled them out of a footlocker. The combination of untidy appearance and expensive clothes made people suspect she was the product of an old, eccentric New England family holed up in a mansion somewhere. But Tabitha’s last name was Kowalski. Her dad raised pigs in Minnesota. She’d gone to Vassar on a scholarship. She was an intelligence officer who’d been through Camp Peary, the CIA training base in Virginia that spies call The Farm.
“Wow, Alex,” she said. “It’s been so long.”
She stretched out her arm and clasped my hand in a cool, dry grip. A flush bloomed briefly on her throat. The top three buttons of her shirt were undone, so the throat had extra room to run. I wouldn’t call Tabitha sexy. She was more dangerous than that. I didn’t mind. Whatever she was spreading, I had the antibodies.
We liked each other. I didn’t hold it against her that she’d concealed her real assignment from me. I’d always suspected it. She’d been too qualified to be an assistant to a Treasury spook. She’d done what she’d been paid to do.
But feeling OK with it is one thing. It’s wise to keep in mind the thing about deceit, and I’m speaking from experience—it gets easier with practice.
20
You could cut the rancor with a chainsaw. Tommy practiced scowling at the ceiling. Tabitha blew the hair out of her eyes and gave him her warmest smile. That office had been made for warfare.
Tommy hadn’t changed a thing. It was as if my former boss, Chuck, had just stepped out for a minute to screw up somebody’s life but would be right back to finish with mine. He wouldn’t, though. Chuck had transferred to Washington, where someone shot him in the head.
Chuck had smashed out walls to create the huge office, and filled it with a custom-made steel desk and a conference table made of what looked like bleached railway ties. On the walls he’d hung a series of monochrome oil paintings, alternately black and white. Whenever he felt cornered at a meeting, Chuck would leap up and stride around the room, pausing at a painting to cock his head and utter a little chuckle so everyone would know how perfectly he understood it.
Chuck had tried to take the furniture with him to Washington. He’d hired a truck and moving cre
w to come around on a Sunday, when nobody would be there. But Tommy, like all lawyers, thought of his fellow human beings as fundamentally dishonest. Let’s face it—it’s the safe bet. So he’d already canceled Chuck’s pass, and ordered his iris scan and fingerprints deleted from the entry system, as Chuck discovered when he got there with the movers. When he tried to sweet-talk the security detail into letting him pick up his “personal effects,” they checked with Tommy. Tommy instructed them to call the police immediately and report that an unauthorized individual was unlawfully trying to remove material from a top-secret federal agency. It had taken Chuck a day to get out of the precinct holding cell.
Tommy kept the furniture. Not that he thought it looked good. He didn’t care. Vintage bowling shirts and cars from the 1950s were as far down the road of aesthetic appreciation as Tommy was prepared to go. But the pieces suited his immense bulk, and the pictures gave him something to sneer at. Two for two.
He dropped his massive frame into the black leather executive chair. It didn’t make him look any more in charge, and the problem wasn’t the lilac bowling shirt. Tommy had wangled the rank of deputy assistant secretary when he took over the department, but the dominant scent in the room was the one you pick up in the Rose Garden.
Tommy stabbed a button on his desk. The lights dimmed, the windows tuned opaque, and a deadbolt in the door shot home with a loud chunk. In the hall outside, a winking red light would be warning that a secure meeting was underway. A slot in the ceiling opened, and a sheet of glass slid down. The glass was imprinted with circuitry. The software that ran it connected us to the supercomputers at Fort Meade.
“It’s your show, sister,” Tommy said.
* * *
A film started running on the screen. The view was a high aerial shot of a busy sea lane through a group of islands.
“The Haro Strait,” Tabitha said. “On the right are the San Juan Islands off Seattle. The large land mass to the left is Vancouver Island. This is the main sea approach to the city of Vancouver.” The camera zoomed in on a single vessel, a large container ship. “Left the port of Tianjin two weeks ago and offloaded in Vancouver.”
The picture switched to a nighttime shot of a dock. Huge cranes trundled into the floodlights and hoisted steel containers from a ship directly onto flatbed trucks and railcars.
“Vancouver container port. We know where these containers are going and what they’re supposed to contain. Canada logs them into a database. We can access it. The trade patterns are well established. Usually, no surprises. The same people order the same stuff one month as they did the month before. Like us, Canada imports billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods. Impossible to check it all, but we can watch the patterns and see if anything jumps out. This time it did.”
She pursed her lips for a moment as she studied the screen.
“That ship was a medium-size container vessel. It carried 6,400 standard forty-foot containers. Most of them fit neatly into the distribution patterns. But eighteen didn’t. And we couldn’t find them.”
The image changed to a map that showed a section of western Canada. Three bright red squiggles ran from west to east.
“Those are the highway routes through the Rocky Mountains between British Columbia and Alberta. When we lost the containers, we threw it over to the NSA. We knew the containers had left the city by truck at night. They weren’t headed south to the border, or we’d have known about it from US customs pre-clearance data. So we knew what to ask the satellite to look for—a night convoy through the mountains. We found them in the Rockies. Eighteen semis in a line at night. We followed them to Edmonton, where they refueled and headed north.”
The film switched to a high aerial shot again. The picture quality was razor-sharp. The long line of semis wound their way along a highway through bush.
“The satellite we’d used before was tasked to a military mission, so we asked the air force for help. They put up a U-2 from Beale Air Force Base near Sacramento. This is from seventy thousand feet. As you can see, we could read the registration numbers on the containers.”
The forest was thin spruce and pine. Patches of gray rock showed through. Here and there, the shoreline of a large lake came into view to the right. I knew it was Great Slave Lake. The film was edited, so we didn’t have long to wait to watch the trucks arrive in Yellowknife and park in a large depot on the far side of the city. Night was falling by that time. The editors put in a few seconds of black for realism, and when daylight returned, the timecode showed that it was the next day. The trucks were gone.
21
The lights in the room came up as the sheet of glass slid back into the ceiling. We sat in silence for a minute. Tommy and Tabitha waited for my reaction.
“And this just happened.”
“You saw the time code,” Tommy said. “Two days ago.”
“You already know it has to be Fan,” I said. “This was an operation that took a high level of industrial expertise and planning. It involved originating a large cargo in northern China, because that’s where Tianjin is. The cargo wasn’t checked in Vancouver, so the Canadians pre-cleared it, even though it didn’t fit the usual pattern of trade traffic. You ran the container numbers?”
“The manifests just gave a general description,” Tabitha said. “Scientific mineral-exploration equipment. The shipper was a company with a long history of trade with Canada.”
“And the ownership?”
“Mining supply company in Beijing,” she said. “But that’s a front. The computers practically blew themselves out trying to figure out who ultimately owns it. The title goes back and forth through a web of trading companies all over China.”
“Will you guys cut to the chase,” Tommy snarled. “We all know who it is.”
“The twins wear a lot of hats,” I said. “We need to figure out which one they’re wearing now. If we know which of their companies is the true originator of the cargo, we are closer to knowing what they’re up to. We’ve managed to get Mei held for extradition by cooking up fraud charges against her. We said she was concealing one of their company’s connections to Iran from an American bank. But it’s not financial crime that’s making Washington wake up screaming in the middle of the night, is it, Tab.”
Tabitha crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt. “We consider iDragon’s 5G phone technology a threat to national security,” she said. “We oppose any ally of the United States allowing it in. The Chinese government is the main owner, and they will use iDragon’s position to back-door into our secure networks. Most of our allies in Five Eyes have agreed to exclude them. Canada is the only holdout.”
Five Eyes was the intelligence-sharing cartel of the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. Washington had threatened to withhold the most sensitive intelligence from Canada if they greenlit iDragon. I doubted anybody was getting the most sensitive intelligence anyway. Otherwise we wouldn’t all be spying on each other.
“The short story is that the Canadians don’t trust us,” Tabitha said. “They believe we’re not a reliable partner and don’t honor our obligations.”
“I wonder where they got that idea.”
“Maybe we can skip the dirty laundry of the Western world,” Tommy growled. He gave me his take-charge look. “We have to know what that shipment is. If it’s part of some 5G scheme, how does it further their aims? If it’s a take-over-the-diamond-field game, then OK, how does that work?”
Tommy got up and paced around behind the desk. The machine that was Tommy’s body couldn’t sit on idle for long. He had to take it for a maintenance spin, a task he managed by suddenly performing some macho demonstration, such as lifting the end of his steel desk with his fingertips. This time he settled for a few squats, placing his hands on his hips and blowing out noisily to underline the exertion. The performance didn’t work as well as he’d hoped. He grunted loudly as he wobbled up from the last squat and collapsed into his chair.
“And another thing,”
he said brusquely, “I thought you were supposed to be an American agent. You’re spending a lot of time with the Canadians.”
I’ll give Tommy credit. If he could have swallowed that remark, he would have. Because, dumb thing number one: Who else would I be spending my time with? And dumb thing number two: He’d just confirmed he had somebody watching me.
Tabitha ran her hands through her hair, lifted her arms, and released the hair in a wild cascade. She watched Tommy with the cool expression of a butterfly collector who has netted a rare specimen and is wondering whether to let it go or kill it for the collection.
“Maybe whoever you have spying on Alex is the one who sprang a leak, Tommy. I mean, your operational security hasn’t been watertight, has it? Or Jimmy Angel might still be with us.”
Tommy actually smiled. He was only really happy when a fight moved into the open.
“Nice try,” he said. “I’m not the one in the room who can pull the secretary of the treasury’s Gulfstream and tell it where to go and when. You laid on the jet for Alex. How did the people waiting for him in Yellowknife know when it was coming?” He leaned back in the big chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “We all know somebody’s reading our plays. So let’s try to steal theirs. Take us back to first principles, Alex. Even if the twins are spearheading some kind of operation against America, they still need a credible reason to be in the Arctic. We can’t just say the Canadians are patsies and China’s pushing them around. Investing in Jimmy Angel’s company has to make sense on its face.”
