The Risk Agent

by Ridley Pearson

  At this same time, the day laborers left the compound on foot as they always did: gardeners, mechanics, maintenance men, waitstaff, housecleaning.

  Among them were Knox and Grace. He slouched and wore makeup to darken his face, and a tam to cover his head. Twelve workers walked the length of the street and rounded the corner to a bus stop. Two of them kept on walking.

  41

  5:00 P.M.

  THE BUND

  On the deserted seventh-floor terrace of M on the Bund, Knox looked down through binoculars at the congested swarm of people populating the Bund’s riverside promenade. The sunlit afternoon had brought twenty thousand tourists, mostly Chinese, crammed in to get a piece of the famous view across the Huangpu River. Among the steel and glass towers rising into the sky was the Xuan Tower, its scaffolding torn and dangling, shredded tarpaulins flapping. In the aftermath of the typhoon, there was no manpower to clean it up. Every construction project in the city had suffered staggering losses due to the storm.

  His iPhone in hand, Knox kept watch on the promenade for a red umbrella carried as a parasol, despite the setting sun. Eventually he spotted it coming from the proper direction, knowing Grace hid beneath it as she climbed the promenade steps to join the masses on the river walk.

  It joined other umbrellas and parasols, along with baby strollers, balloons and stick kites. The umbrella stopped in the center of the choke. And waited.

  A black Bentley arrived at the curb. A man wearing a dark suit was let out the back by a busy chauffeur. Though the passenger appeared to be alone, Knox and Grace knew better. Yang Cheng was never alone.

  “I’ve got you. He’s on his way up,” Knox said, speaking into the iPhone.

  “It is so crowded,” came her reply. “Police?”

  “I’ve got two by the subway entrance on your side of the street. Two more up by the Peace Hotel.”

  “This is normal.”

  “Yes. All right. Stand by.” She left the call open, as planned, allowing Knox to overhear. She would dangle the ear bud/microphone around her neck, like an iPod on pause.

  Grace hid below the red umbrella, finally angling it to make eye contact with Yang Cheng as he stood next to her. The claustrophobic press of Chinese tourists disturbed her. She tried to blot them out, to make it only her and this man, as she’d been trained. But it wasn’t so easy.

  They spoke English because the majority of those around them did not.

  “I can deliver the name of a minister, with accompanying evidence, to the anticorruption authorities. There will be no choice but to void The Berthold Group’s contract on the Xuan Tower and reassign it.”

  He drew in sharply, as if she’d hit him. If there hadn’t been so many people around, she might have heard his heart beating from three feet away.

  “While interesting, it is not this I seek,” he said calmly.

  “What you seek is fool’s gold. The strike price for the New City bid,” she said. His eyes widened, despite his attempt to keep them from doing so. “It is a trap meant for the waiguoren.”

  “Is that so?”

  “The parcel was annexed to include what will turn out to be a contaminated site.”

  He whistled unintentionally as he drew a breath in through his teeth.

  “I save you much face and a great deal of money.”

  “You would say anything to improve your situation. You and the foreigner are wanted by police.”

  “Fourteen billion, seven hundred million yuan,” she said.

  He was focused on her, unmoving, as people teemed around them.

  “But if you act upon it, you will rue the day, believe me. The plan was to have the expense fall upon Marquardt. What I have for you is far better: the name of the person who leaked the number. You may not be praised publicly but we both know you will be richly rewarded for bringing such a man to ground.”

  “And in return?”

  “An insignificance.”

  He huffed. “That, I doubt.”

  “An American in hospital. A trifle. It’s a standing request of the consulate’s.”

  “This American?”

  “His release. Yes.”

  “From the hospital.”

  “There may be the intent to question him, to trouble him. But he is not well.”

  “An insignificance? Hardly.”

  “By comparison,” she said.

  Yang Cheng debated all this internally.

  “The choice is yours, but the offer will be made elsewhere if you pass.”

  “What else?” Yang Cheng asked, sensing it in her.

  “The four of us will not appear on any watch lists or wanted lists. My citizenship and visa status, and that of Lu Hao, remain unblemished. Clean slate.”

  “Face.”

  “Yes.”

  “A man cannot promise such things. These take time and expend much guanxi.”

  “Precisely why I have come to you, honorable Yang. You have twenty-two hours to free the man hospitalized,” she said.

  “Absurd! Two weeks or more! A single week if I’m lucky!”

  “You will explore possibilities. When the man called David Dulwich-the American in hospital-arrives to the consulate, you shall have the name of the corrupt official. And all evidence. By this time tomorrow I will seek another to do business with.”

  “This is not business, it is extortion.”

  “Business makes for strange bedfellows,” she said.

  “We will always have a place at Yang Construction for one as cunning as you, Ms. Chu. You have my number.”

  Grace collapsed the umbrella-her signal to Knox-and moved into the throng.

  Yang’s man joined him at his side and shot a look back at her. She recognized him as one of the two from the alley attack.

  She pushed north through the crowd, trusting that Knox was watching her. She returned an ear bud.

  “Do you have me?” she asked.

  “Wave,” he said.

  She lifted her arm.

  “I have you. You’re clean.” He paused. “What was all that visa nonsense?”

  “This is my family home. Lu Hao’s family home. We cannot return here if we are fugitives.”

  “You attached it to Sarge. That wasn’t our agreement.”

  “We did not have an agreement, John. We had an understanding.”

  Ten minutes later, a black Range Rover pulled to the curb in front of the Peace Hotel. The car’s rear door swung open. A tall man and a petite woman climbed inside and the door closed.

  The Range Rover pulled back into traffic.

  MONDAY

  October 4

  42

  10:00 A.M.

  LUWAN DISTRICT

  SHANGHAI

  The rain had begun falling heavily again an hour earlier. Knox, Grace and Kozlowski stood on the mansion steps, under the cover of an awning.

  Just beyond the consulate gates, still in Chinese territory, an ambulance waited, a single red light spinning above the windshield.

  The gates opened and the security blocks lowered. The ambulance did not move.

  “Come on…” Knox said, willing it to cross onto American soil.

  Grace held Knox’s iPhone to her ear. “Katherine, please,” she said. “The ambulance is at the gate.” She rolled her eyes at Knox. They had been waiting for Yang Cheng to pick up.

  She covered the phone with her palm and whispered, “He is not going to do this over the phone. He is too careful.”

  “Then, what? Here?” Knox said. “Where?”

  “I believe it is more a question of how,” Grace said. “Yang will not risk being seen or overheard taking a name of a Chinese official from an American, and then later turning this same man over to authorities. He obviously understands we could be playing him, that it all could be an elaborate trick of U.S. Intelligence.”

  “And of course he’d be right,” Kozlowski allowed. “Given that U.S. Intelligence was smart enough to dream up such a ploy. To remove a top official by rum
or and innuendo would be a coup.”

  Grace cradled the phone to her cheek. “Katherine? Please inform Mr. Yang the offer is good for forty minutes. I will be waiting at the front gate at the U.S. Consulate on Wulumuqi. I will turn over the information to either you or Mr. Yang. No one else.” She ended the call.

  The red light pulsed across their faces.

  “Why?” Knox said, imploring her.

  She answered. “If they send someone from the Ministry, for instance, there is no guarantee the deal for Mr. Dulwich will be honored.”

  “But Yang will honor it?” Knox asked sarcastically.

  “Of course.”

  “Because?”

  “Face,” she answered absolutely. “He will not go back on his word. This, I promise.”

  Knox carried an umbrella for Grace as he escorted her to the front entrance security check and then stood at the gate to get a better look at the ambulance. The music of U2 escaped from a Humvee, manned by a lone Marine who guarded the gate. The wipers of the Humvee were out of sync with the music; the engine was not running.

  It was one of the longer walks of Knox’s life. Careful to remain on the consulate side, he craned to peer through the ambulance windshield, its wipers thumping. The ambulance driver, believing Knox was looking at him, pointed to a cutout of Kobe Bryant hanging from a mirror and, pointing to it, offered his index finger to signify “Number 1.” Knox was looking past the spinning Kobe at the man on a side bench in the back. A paramedic, a woman, sat next to him while the knees of a dark blue uniform could be seen, sitting across. Police. Dulwich held his arm in a sling and was wearing gauze on his head like a yarmulke. He looked like shit. Knox nodded faintly at him and Dulwich squinted back, either not seeing him or choosing not to acknowledge him.

  Behind and alongside the ambulance were two police cars, each with four officers inside. Knox considered an extraction, but eight-against-one, nine, counting the cop inside, were not the best odds. Still, if the ambulance backed up-if the brokered deal fell through, he didn’t rule it out.

  He looked both ways down the unusually quiet street, searching for Yang’s black Bentley he’d seen at the Bund. A few cars and taxis moved in both directions, along with a few dozen bikes, but no Bentley.

  He cursed the Chinese for erecting walls within walls of honor and shame, defenses to rival an Umbrian hill town. Rules within rules. Codes within codes. They seemed to shift according to need; despite his claims, he did not understand it.

  Ten minutes passed more like forty and he was still standing in the same spot, rain drumming on the umbrella. He was still looking when a taxi pulled to the curb. A woman climbed out, shielding her hair. From a distance she could easily have been Katherine, if memory served. But his memory was crippled by fatigue and he couldn’t be sure. The woman went through to security.

  Knox waited. The taxi idled.

  She couldn’t have been inside more than thirty seconds before she reappeared on the sidewalk and climbed back into the waiting taxi, which then drove off. Knox looked to the ambulance, expecting it to move. It did not.

  Grace came out of security and hurried across the carefully manicured pebble walk and atop the close-cut grass-like a putting green-and joined Knox under the umbrella.

  “It is done,” she said.

  “So?”

  “Now it is up to Yang Cheng to judge and value the information, perhaps verify, even partially, that Zhimin could be culpable. To determine if he is important enough for Yang to risk his reputation and the expenditure of guanxi.”

  “Perfect.”

  “You are considering a move on the ambulance,” she said.

  Knox stewed. He didn’t appreciate being read like that.

  “It is all well and good. That is the expression, is it not?”

  “It is the expression. It’s not the case.”

  “If the ambulance leaves, then we know we have failed.” Said so calmly.

  “If the ambulance backs up, it won’t make it ten feet.”

  “John.”

  “Grace.”

  She placed her hand on his upper arm and stood close to him, out of the rain. “There has not been a minister to fall in many years. The government will gain great value from it. The Party, no. But the number one grievance of the Chinese people is corruption. The government cannot possibly resist such a trophy as Chairman Zhimin.”

  “But bringing down a politician…” Knox said.

  “You will see.”

  But the ambulance did not move, forward or back. The driver toyed with Kobe Bryant, while Dulwich hung his head, looking defeated.

  Another five minutes passed.

  “Yang is not going to do it,” Knox said.

  “Give it time,” Grace said.

  Through beating wipers, Knox saw one of the policemen respond to a dashboard radio call, and watched as a heated discussion ensued between him and the driver, who pointed back, clearly explaining they were boxed in.

  The cop who’d taken the radio call climbed out of the police car and headed for the second cop car, the one blocking the ambulance. This man shot a smug look in Knox’s direction. In that look was confidence and spiteful victory. Knox saw it in slow motion-malicious superiority.

  Knox looked back through the gray toward the mansion, where Kozlowski stood keeping his distance. Back at the ambulance. Then to the Marine behind the wheel of the Humvee. And finally, to the winch mounted on the front of the Humvee.

  Knox jogged to the winch, slammed down the release lever and spooled off fifteen feet of steel cable. He walked the hook on the end of the cable toward the gate.

  “Knox…” Grace called out anxiously.

  The Marine was out of the vehicle. “Hey!”

  Knox slid through a puddle across the threshold into Chinese territory, where he was a wanted criminal, and partially under the ambulance, as beneath the vehicle he saw the police car to the rear backing up. He hooked the ambulance’s tow bar, and scrambled back out as the sound of car doors signaled the police coming for him. He crawled and dove back across the gate line, a border defining the consulate property, and rushed to the winch, opening a plastic box and throwing a switch. The Chinese police had missed him by inches.

  “You can’t do that!” the Marine said to Knox. But the man was clearly more engaged with the two Chinese policemen whose toes were nearly touching the consulate boundary. The Marine marched toward them and stood nose to nose.

  The winch cable tightened.

  The Marine held himself rigid, the spit from his words mixing with the rain on the face of the policeman directly across from him; but his message was for Knox.

  “Cease and desist, sir!” he shouted. “That is United States property!”

  The slack out of the winch, Knox hurried to the open door of the vehicle and set the brake. As the cable tightened, the ambulance groaned and jumped. The Humvee buckled and skidded forward. A tug of war.

  Knox dislodged a large stone that defined the pebble walkway and used it to block the vehicle’s front tire. Now it was all Humvee: the ambulance crept forward, skidding on the wet surface, slowly drawn toward the gate.

  The two policemen understood the physics and the mechanics. They grabbed hold of the steel cable, but to no avail.

  Kozlowski arrived at a run, out of breath. He headed straight for the door to the Humvee, where Knox blocked him.

  One of the Chinese policemen ran to the police car. He pounded on the trunk and the driver released it and the trunk popped open. The policeman came away with a pair of bolt cutters.

  The ambulance’s front bumper was only inches from the gate.

  “That’s a U.S. service veteran in that ambulance, Marine,” Knox hollered. “He’s headed to Chinese jail if we don’t get him across that line.”

  The message was meant for Kozlowski as well, who stood eye to eye with Knox as the Humvee’s electric winch ground steadily away, and the ambulance slid forward.

  It was clear to Knox that the distanc
e between the ambulance and the Humvee wouldn’t allow the ambulance to make it all the way inside the compound. He waved Dulwich forward and watched as a man with a head compress and an arm in a sling took out a police guard sitting across from him on the opposing bench.

  Dulwich ducked and moved to the front of the ambulance as the cop with the bolt cutter aimed the tiny jaws at the steel cable. The Marine kicked out across the line, knocking the bolt cutter off its mark. The ambulance bumper crossed into U.S. territory.

  The policeman stepped across the line in an effort to cut the cable, and the Marine pulled his weapon. The cop backed off, resigned now to watching.

  “Corporal!” Kozlowski shouted, leaving Knox. But not before whispering, “You motherfucker,” under his breath at him.

  Knox smiled at a worried Grace.

  The ambulance windshield was in the compound.

  The rear door of the ambulance flew open and three cops piled inside and rushed the front of the vehicle, after Dulwich. Dulwich threw himself up onto the dash of the ambulance while the driver recoiled.

  Kozlowski was shouting for the Marine to holster his weapon.

  “Sir! This is my duty, sir!” the Marine called back as he raised the weapon and trained it on the first of the cops in the ambulance.

  “Hey!” the Marine hollered, winning the cop’s attention. The man blanched. “Remove yourself from U.S. soil!” the Marine shouted.

  The ambulance skidded forward at an angle, snagging the wrought-iron gate and collapsing it inward in a metallic cry. The Marine held his weapon on the policeman, who did not move. It took two more minutes for the ambulance’s passenger door to cross the threshold. Knox stopped the winch.

  Dulwich climbed out of the vehicle, met there by Kozlowski and Grace, who helped him deeper into the compound. Knox released the cable.

  The Marine kicked at the cable. Knox reached under and cleared it.

  The Marine shouted at the ambulance driver, looking down the barrel of his pistol at him. “Sir! Your vehicle is improperly on U.S. soil. I ask that you remove it at once!”

  It was doubtful the driver understood English, but the ambulance jumped back so quickly that the cop in front lost his balance and fell over, and the ambulance then rammed the police car behind it, knocking the cop fully to the ground.