The Risk Agent

by Ridley Pearson

  The man replied: “These metals are in densities twenty-three percent higher than Shanghai garden soil.”

  Shanghai garden soil? Who the fuck asked about Shanghai garden soil?

  “This is soil from Chongming Island.”

  “Say again,” Kozlowski said.

  “Soil on Chongming Island is the only location for a radius of several hundred kilometers with this same approximate concentration of heavy metals.”

  Kozlowski swallowed hard. He’d had two men following Inspector Shen Deshi since their meeting at the KFC. His men had lost him to a river crossing in the storm but had reconnected and followed him onto Chongming Island.

  “What kind of chemicals, exactly?” Kozlowski had asked, continuing the conversation.

  “In combination with the chemical agents discovered on his wrist: sodium hydrosulphide, soda ash and sodium metabisulphite. I might suggest a livestock tannery.”

  “A tannery on Chongming Island,” Kozlowski had mumbled.

  “Correct,” the lab man said.

  Kozlowski had hung up fearing Shen Deshi was about to beat him to the physical evidence of an American videographer’s murder. Evidence the man would destroy as quickly as possible. Any chance at justice lost.

  Kozlowski made contact with his two agents.

  “He’s in a police precinct in Chongming.”

  “Stay with him,” Kozlowski ordered. “If he so much as farts, I want to hear about it.”

  36

  1 P.M.

  CHONGMING

  CHONGMING ISLAND

  Inspector Shen Deshi sat imperiously, legs crossed, in the corner of the brightly lit assembly room of Chongming’s PSB, fifth precinct. He wore dark glasses. He studied the group, amazed at the youth of the precinct’s few patrol officers, trying to remember if he’d ever been that young.

  His decision to keep the money had put him in a reflective mood. The surprise on the Mongolian’s face as he’d slid off the ferry would not leave him. Perhaps he’d been too hasty. If well-connected, the Mongolian’s employer could make hell for him. So could Kozlowski, if any evidence surfaced that the Mongolian had chopped the American cameraman to pieces. He needed to pull a blanket over all of this and let it go to sleep. A deep sleep. And quickly, before it got out of hand.

  The police captain called his group to order. Their uniforms were loose and ill-fitting; three were women, two old dogs not yet thirty and one quite the stunner, who managed to fill out her uniform nicely. He thought this woman might accompany him on his rounds.

  He listened to the captain detail the situation: a fugitive foreigner, considered dangerous, in league with a Chinese woman, both wanted for questioning on multiple assaults, possible kidnapping, extortion and a homicide. A big case on Chongming Island was a stolen water buffalo; the patrol officers were collectively drooling at the thought of pursuing a real-life fugitive, not because they would enjoy the pursuit, which they would, but because the only way out of a hellhole like Chongming Island was to gain the attention of one’s superiors and request reassignment. For the nine officers gathered, their captain was waving a lottery ticket in their faces.

  Shen considered the stop a necessary diversion. He wanted to establish himself with the local police in the event things went as badly as he expected they might; and he hoped to wave the scent of the fox in the face of the hounds and send them scampering in the wrong direction, leaving him to pursue the prize alone. Or almost alone. The young female officer seemed worth taking along.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were seated side by side in his car; she hung on his every word, knowing better than to ask where they were going.

  “I have contacts in the private sector,” he told her, knowing he impressed her. “In this case, it’s a crime lab used by the Europeans and Americans. I was offered information an hour before the Americans were to receive it. I am looking for a tannery on the island. One in operation in the recent past.”

  “Chongming Tanning,” she said immediately.

  “What of it?”

  “My late uncle on my mother’s side worked there until it was closed by authorities. The closing brought his family much hardship.”

  “A blue building?” he said. “Near water?” He’d seen the Mongolian’s video. He was guessing it was near water because the cameraman’s hand had been found in the river.

  “The same.”

  “Please, direct me to this place.”

  “Take a right at the next street,” she said.

  Shen steered the car sharply right. She reached out to brace herself, and leaned against him, exactly as he’d wanted.

  “How long?” he said.

  “Ten, fifteen minutes, at the outside,” she said.

  “I like your mouth,” he said. “The shape of your mouth.”

  She blushed and looked away. “Thank you.”

  He took her by the hair and turned her head to face him. “I would like it better in my lap.”

  She flushed. Her lips went white.

  “You do not wish to displease me, neh?”

  He enjoyed seeing terror on her face, the sense of power it instilled. Officers took sexual favors all the time, but not Shen Deshi. He intended to make up for lost time. He slid his seat back and pulled her face into his lap. “You are about to earn yourself a promotion,” he said.

  He nearly drove off the road as she finished him off, his right hand down her shirt, his left choking the steering wheel.

  She collected herself and then it was as if it had never happened.

  “You will direct me to within a quarter mile of the tannery,” he said. “I will park someplace out of the way. You will stand watch and notify me of anything out of the ordinary.”

  “It is a deserted area,” she said. “After the tannery closed, other companies moved out as well.”

  Land, any land, was too precious to abandon. “Why would they do this?”

  “Local committee declared the area a future park.”

  “What was the real reason?” he asked. There was no point in building a park on a sparsely populated island.

  “This was the only reason I ever heard.”

  “Tell me, how did your uncle meet his end?”

  She said nothing for a moment. “Illness. Cancer of the blood.”

  “Was he alone in this?” Shen Deshi said.

  “You’ll turn left soon,” she said, pointing.

  He swung the car left.

  “This road leads to River Road. Then right on River Road.”

  “I see I picked the right partner,” he said. “You have done well.”

  She flushed with anger and embarrassment.

  “I am glad for the chance to work with you,” he said. “Cooperation between departments is to be rewarded.”

  “Take the next right.”

  He traced her jawline. “We work well together, is it not true?” he said.

  She shivered. Looked as though she might be sick.

  “Pull over please!” she called out softly.

  Shen Deshi yanked the car to the side of the road.

  The woman threw open the door and vomited.

  37

  6:00 P.M.

  CHONGMING ISLAND

  Through the haze, the air over Shanghai bulged as a pink smudge on the horizon. Nearing the confluence of the Yangtze River and the China Sea, the shipping traffic spread out; low-slung barges lumbered alongside towering container ships. Jets floated on final approach into Pudong International.

  Grace drove the Toyota, now sporting a third set of license plates. She turned the car off the River Road onto a rutted mud drive, entering an area of dirt and weeds and abandoned warehouses. A gravel yard’s towering equipment was silhouetted by the last vestiges of the sunset.

  “It’s a ghost town,” he said, climbing out. Grace joined him.

  “National Day holiday.” Cinder-block walls separated the abandoned buildings. Grace kept close to one as she led them away from the gravel yard.

>   “I suggest you take up position there, on the sand pile,” said the former army officer, pointing to the gravel yard. “From there you will be able to see all the buildings. It is good cover.”

  “Agreed,” Knox said. “But you’ll be the one standing guard, not me.”

  “A Chinese woman wandering around these places will be treated much more gently than a waiguoren.” She stopped, too small to scale the wall.

  “But I can climb the walls without someone’s help,” he said, smugly.

  Knox helped her over the wall, then followed. They cut across a mucky, foul-smelling stretch of saw grass and mud and scaled a second wall into the gravel yard. The sun sank into the layer of smog. Night fell quickly, dusk lasting all of five minutes.

  Together they crawled up the sand pile, winning an elevated view of the industrial buildings to their left.

  “Third building over,” Knox said. “That’s not dirt.”

  “Asphalt. I cannot read the sign from here.”

  “If you could, it would be the same sign as in the Mongolian’s video.”

  “Speculation.”

  “If you climb that conveyor, you’ll have an even better view.”

  “You have an extra phone or two.”

  “So what?”

  “Give one to me and call me from up there if you see anything.”

  Knox smiled at her. “Nice try.”

  “As a woman,” she said, “and a native of this island, I have much better chance of talking my way out, if caught.”

  “As a man, I don’t talk my way out,” Knox said.

  “My point, exactly. Should talking fail, neither will I. If I need help, I have you.”

  “And how do you intend to get over the walls?”

  “There is only the one wall,” she said, pointing. “You see? The second wall is crumbling. Not a problem.”

  “Then we go together,” he said.

  “You are a waiguoren.”

  “I noticed.”

  “It would be asking for trouble. Be reasonable.”

  “Don’t ask the impossible.”

  “Help me over that first wall. If I am not approached, we will investigate together.”

  It was a compromise he could live with-though reluctantly. Knox handed her the phone. Minutes later, he helped her over the wall and then watched as she climbed the conveyor that rose on a steep angle into the sky.

  Reaching the freshly paved compound, Grace stayed in shadow, close to the wall. Her chosen route screened her from Knox but was preferable to crossing the yard out in the open.

  As she worked around the interior perimeter, the building’s faded blue sign became not only legible but also recognizable: CHONGMING TANNING. Only the first word had been captured in the video.

  She bided her time in a dark corner and watched. Five minutes stretched to ten. In the background she heard the rumble of passing ships, the slap of river water, the steady roar of frogs and night insects. Finally, she positioned herself to match the angle of the video, wondering about the late-night paving. She crossed the asphalt, trying to do so casually, not sneaking up on the place, but just out for a walk, in case she was spotted.

  She felt Knox’s eyes on her back.

  A pair of huge sliding doors formed the center of the structure. They were padlocked with a new lock. A second door for people was to the right. It, too, was padlocked, all the windows barricaded with a grid of welded rebar.

  She returned to the center doors and found a few centimeters of play in the assembly. She improvised a pry bar out of a section of discarded pipe. With upward pressure, the door on the right pulled off its track, revealing a gap at the bottom. She rested and then pried a second time. When she leaned hard on the pipe, the door swung out a foot at the bottom. If she could block it there, she thought there might be enough room to crawl through. A two-person job. No doubt Knox was watching her, thinking the same thing.

  She resented needing him. To ask for his help was to invite him to join her, and she did not want that.

  The phone he’d given her vibrated in her pants pocket. She made no effort to retrieve it. She didn’t need his cynicism and sarcasm.

  She spotted a pile of discarded cinder blocks. Ingenuity, she thought. Focus. Commitment. Her army training returned effortlessly.

  Minutes later, she heaved once again on her pry bar and simultaneously shoved a cinder block into the gap with her foot.

  She lay flat and crawled through the narrow space, elated that Knox would never have made it.

  She was inside.

  Perched on the exoskeleton of the conveyor’s steeply angled arm, Knox willed Grace to answer the damn phone. He’d lost a pair of headlights coming up River Road from the direction of Chongming. Of the many explanations he considered, the most likely was that the vehicle had pulled off the road and switched off its lights-a pair of teenagers seeking back-seat romance; a cop settling into a speed trap; or something much worse.

  As if to confirm her independence, she wouldn’t answer her goddamned phone. Never mind that he’d been impressed by the ingenuity of her entering the building, he’d have gone after her if he’d thought he might squeeze under those doors as she had. But there was no way.

  Instead, he concentrated on locating the vehicle belonging to the missing headlights. A minute passed. Two. Three. Nothing.

  Maybe it had been lovers after all.

  Using the phone’s screen as a flashlight, Grace followed the bluish glow deeper into the tannery. She passed steel carts fixed to tracks laid in the concrete floor. Giant metal vats lined the aisle on either side of her. A tangle of plumbing. The stench of bleach and chemicals over which hung the unmistakable fetid odor of decay.

  Her eyes adjusted, allowing her to navigate by the phone’s glow more easily. She passed beneath an elaborate network of catwalks, tracks and winches. A pair of forklifts sat like tusked animals alongside a central doublewide trailer. An array of dozens of stacked fifty-five-gallon steel drums.

  Only as the buzzing of bluebottle flies rose like a chorus and the decomposition choked her did she sense what had happened. Rounding the corner of the doublewide, she faced a line of steel-framed, butcher-block dressing tables beneath a set of fluorescent tube lights. The dressing tables had their own sets of knives and cutting tools. Drains and PVC tubing ran to grates set into the floor. She turned and retched. The table nearest her had been cleaned too hastily. Flies clustered around bits of bone and flesh. Blood coagulated along the edges and the drains.

  But it was the shredded pieces of bloodstained clothing that caught her eye. Frayed cotton and bits of denim. A human slaughter, not cattle for tanning.

  Yao Xuolong’s death had appeared to be a hit-and-run, not a butchering.

  Instinctively, she backed away from the crime scene. Her shoes caught and she tripped, reaching out for purchase. She grabbed at a hanging chain, but let go immediately, the chain sticky with what she was certain was blood.

  She brought the phone’s screen close. Not red, or black, but a leather-colored brown goo. Whatever it was came from overhead as a steady drip to the floor, where it collected in a syrupy puddle by a drain.

  She wiped her hand on a butcher’s apron hanging within reach. Her fingers began to warm. Then, sting. Then feel as if they were rotting off her.

  She hurried through the maze of floor machinery, left, right, down a narrow aisle in search of a sink. She reached an emergency chemical wash station, placed her hands under the sunflower showerhead and bumped the lever with her knee. Nothing.

  She hurried along the wall, half-blind, knocking tools and cans to the floor. She found a wall sink, turned the faucet and plunged both hands beneath the spit of water just as her phone rang.

  The pain was too great to remove her hands. She would call him back as soon as she got the chemical off her skin.

  She grabbed a worn bar of soap and worked up lather. Slowly-too slowly-the pain subsided. Her palms were raw and close to bleeding.

&nbs
p; She connected her burns with Knox’s. From handling the surveyor’s shoes. She wanted to tell Knox what she’d found, but as she withdrew her hands from the water, they hurt so badly she doused them again.

  Her phone buzzed for a third time. She braved the pain and reached for it, stuffing it into the crook of her shoulder and thrusting her free hand back into the water.

  She awkwardly worked the phone, shoulder to ear. The device slipped and squirted out, landing with a clunk and the sound of shattered plastic. Its screen went black.

  38

  6:40 P.M.

  CHONGMING ISLAND

  An imposing figure took long strides toward the tannery and made no attempt to conceal himself. A cop. He was large-headed but not wide-shouldered enough to be the Mongolian. Not tall enough for Kozlowski.

  Knox called Grace for a second and third time. The phone jumped to Chinese voice mail-the building’s superstructure defeating the reception, he thought.

  He kept track of the cop as he backed down the conveyor arm, fearful he was silhouetted against the sky.

  The cop turned once he made it through the yard’s front gate, carrying something at his side. A gun? A tire iron?

  Chinese police were not permitted to carry handguns, although People’s Armed Police officers were. Could this possibly be Kozlowski’s guy?

  Knox paused as the man angled toward him, then continued down the rock conveyor as the intruder turned toward the tannery’s doors.

  A moment later, a pair of loud metallic pops pierced the air.

  Knox vaulted one wall, then the next. He pulled himself up and held his head over the wall of the compound.

  The man had pried the lock off the doors.

  He was headed inside.

  With the loud sounds at the doors, Grace shut off the water and ran for cover. Only as the pulleys whined did she realize it had been the doors coming open. She cowered within the equipment as footfalls-Knox?-moved deeper into the building.

  Not Knox. The man trained a small flashlight on the floor. She caught punctuated glimpses of his dark silhouette walking past the vats. Not as tall as Knox, but thick-necked with a head like a caveman.