The Wrong Man (Complete 3-Book International Thriller Box Set)

by Fritz Galt

  “I doubt my family is there,” Sean said, a note of disappointment in his voice.

  Boris had been busy pecking with his long, slender fingers at the keyboard on Badger’s laptop. “I found a few maps in the CIA collection,” he said.

  Harry leaned over his back to check out the screen.

  Harbin was built along a broad river that froze over in wintertime. Across the river sat an Island called Sun Island. There were no major cities near Harbin proper, but there was a tiger preserve a few miles out of town.

  “Tigers?” Harry asked. “I thought they lived in jungles. We’re on the Arctic Circle.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of Siberian tigers,” Boris asked. “Huge white cats.”

  Harry shrugged. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to an enclosed space just beside the tiger preserve. Boris clicked to zoom in on the area. The CIA had designated the compound as PSB Psn 14.

  “What could that possibly mean?” Harry asked the room at large. He repeated the name aloud.

  “PSB might stand for the Public Security Bureau,” Sean suggested. “They’re the Interior Ministry’s enforcement arm.”

  “Could ‘Psn 14’ denote a prison?” Badger wondered aloud, looking to Sean for an answer.

  “I can’t think of any other reason why the PSB would maintain a facility so far from a city,” Sean responded. He nudged Boris aside and looked at the screen. Could that be the place where his family had been held for nearly a year?

  “Okay, we’re losing time,” Harry said. “Let’s split up. I want Badger and Sean to take the team and check out the PSB facility. Maybe the family is there. Boris and I will isolate Merle and find out from him where he’s keeping the family.”

  Badger quickly prepared his team. They donned their warmest clothing and passed around clubs made from the legs broken off wooden tables. They had no other weapons and would have to be resourceful. Then they departed from the room.

  That left Harry alone with Boris. “Would Merle recognize you?” he asked his language expert who was shutting off the computer.

  “No,” Boris replied. “I didn’t rough him up in Shanghai.”

  “Okay. Let’s see where Merle leads us.”

  At six pm in Maryland, two groundskeepers hacked with spades into the frozen earth.

  Sandi stared at the single tombstone, lovingly placed there by a grief-stricken father. The names on the stones seemed to come to life for her, because they truly were alive. She whispered the names to herself “Kate Stone, Wife of Sean Cooper,” “Jane Anne, Daughter,” and “Samuel Alexander, Son.”

  How empty one would feel to bury their entire family all at once.

  The spadework was not easy going, but it turned out that the grave wasn’t deep. Half an hour into the digging, the workmen unearthed three urns.

  The pathologist wrapped them in plastic, handling them like a piece of evidence. He taped the plastic bag shut and labeled it with a code number related to the special prosecutor’s case.

  “I’ll take these to the lab, now, ma’am,” the pathologist said. “We’ll do a DNA analysis. Do you have any hair or saliva samples to check against?”

  “Do you need to compare the ashes with something? I thought you could just figure out who it was.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s not that easy. I can tell a few things if I have an excellent sample, but these are burnt remains, so what I can deduce from them is limited.”

  “Well, do what you can,” she said. “I doubt if there are any hair samples left.”

  “Sure thing. I’ll get a report to you within a few days.”

  “That would be great.”

  The workmen didn’t bother to fill in the hole. Most likely they thought the ashes would be re-interred shortly.

  If Sandi’s hunch was correct, there would be no need to bury them again.

  The winter parkas and Russian fur hats that Badger had bought were perfect for the arctic air, as Harry and Boris stepped out of the Gloria Inn and headed toward the annual Harbin Ice Festival, the city’s main attraction built upon the wide, frozen Songhua River.

  Harry spotted life-sized buildings built out of blocks of ice below the embankment. Included were a welcoming Arc de Triomphe, followed by a Great Wall, Pyramid, Matterhorn and Lhasa Buddhist Monastery. Children and their parents were sliding down the riverbank on discarded tires. Harry took the stairs.

  In addition to the huge ice edifices, he took in delicately carved ice creations, including colored ice “paintings.”

  Groupings of Chinese tourists walked in silent wonder, dwarfed by the creations around them. But Merle and the blue-clad police were nowhere in sight.

  After an hour in the snow, Harry needed to thaw out. Boris found them a small restaurant, a square one-room structure built on ice in the middle of the river, with all the comradely ambiance of a ski hut. A cup of steaming coffee hit the spot, and Harry began to rethink their strategy.

  They couldn’t just walk around the North Pole like frozen zombies without obtaining any information.

  “We’ve taken up an entire hour and only passed a quarter of the ice sculptures. He could be anywhere and we’d never find him.”

  Boris agreed. “I could ask the waitress.”

  He signaled her, and the petite young lady came over. It seemed to be a family-run business, with her husband opening the beverage bottles and heating the coffee.

  She and Boris exchanged a few clipped phrases, and she left the table.

  “Well, what did she say?”

  Boris had a sneaky look on his long, angular face. “We should look over there inside the mountain. The police were just here.”

  Harry had his gloves back on his hands before Boris finished his sentence.

  Outside, he spotted an entrance to a tunnel in a mountain of piled up snow. “Let’s check this out first.”

  They left the brilliant sunlight and entered a blue world carved out of the snow. Bending slightly to fit in the tunnel, Harry climbed up slippery steps that took him higher into the mountain. Occasionally, they passed intersections where other tunnels crossed theirs.

  At one point, Harry stopped. Footsteps were crunching in the snow, receding down one of the branches of their tunnel. He heard no voices, only the chilly echo of feet.

  “This way,” he whispered.

  They emerged from the darkness, only to find themselves high above an icy crevasse with a slatted wooden bridge spanning the gap. Balancing himself and careful not to let his street shoes slip on the bridge, Harry began to creep across.

  He steadied himself midway over the empty space. He knew enough not to look down, but he had to keep an eye on where to place his next step. Why couldn’t he be back in Georgia where he belonged? He took another step, his street shoes sliding all over the board before he found his balance. Couldn’t Badger have bought him boots? Leather-soled shoes were less than worthless in the slippery and cold conditions. He had to continue before his toes froze.

  He took a deep breath, which he regretted immediately. It filled the last pockets of warmth in his chest. He felt one of those dry hacking coughs coming on. He clasped a gloved hand over his mouth and skittered across the remaining three boards to safety.

  Boris walked casually across the bridge and joined him.

  “Not big on winter sports?” he asked.

  Harry shook his head. “I’d rather be wrestling an alligator.”

  Then he put a finger to his lips and listened. The group was leading them through more ice tunnels and up and down more stairs on a trek through the huge mountain. Harry remained several corners out of sight, listening for any clues to who the silent party was.

  Harry saw daylight around one corner and paused to peer around it. Several Chinese police were sliding on their backs down a final slippery tunnel that led to the ground.

  He summoned Boris closer to have a look.

  As the troops reassembled, Harry could see six pairs of fur-lined military boots through the s
mall opening. Their leader gave a brief command that echoed up the tunnel.

  Harry turned to Boris for a translation.

  “They’re spreading out further, into groups of two. They’re looking for four male foreigners, and they have sketches of their faces.”

  “Well, they don’t have your face or mine,” Harry said. “But we are male foreigners and almost everyone else seems to be Chinese around here.”

  A full minute after the last set of boots tramped out of view, Harry prepared to exit the mountain. He wedged his feet against the corners of the tunnel and tried to work his way down without falling, but one foot gave way immediately and he found himself sliding on his back, feet first. He arrived at the bottom flushed with embarrassment, sprawling in front of a crowd of young couples.

  Amid their laughter, he turned to look back and make out the shape of the mountain he had just left. He had been crawling through an enormous statue of Buddha, its round belly and bald head forming the bulk of the mountain of snow.

  The group suddenly let out a scream, and Boris came barreling down the tunnel, emerging from the Buddha’s navel. His boots rammed directly into Harry’s side. The group scattered in all directions for safety, leaving Harry and Boris groaning and writhing in the snow.

  The group’s scream had attracted the attention of all who were in the area. Two foreigners on their backs in the ice must have made a funny sight.

  But not to Harry.

  “Let’s go,” he whispered. He regained his feet and clutched the bruise in his side where Boris had hit him. He staggered toward a row of townhouses elaborately carved out of ice blocks to form a warren of white buildings.

  Suddenly a shot rang out and echoed around the frozen structures. Harry felt the heat of the bullet searing the air just overhead. He didn’t wait to find out where it had come from.

  He ducked into the nearest doorway and pulled Boris with him.

  One look at the sparkling ice formations and he got the theme. There was a three-story Great Hall of the People, a towering replica of the Kremlin and a detailed ice sculpture of the White House.

  He looked above him. “10.” He was at the Prime Minister’s residence in London.

  Unfortunately, the door wasn’t real, and there was no escape through the building. They were precariously exposed. They would have to flee along Downing Street.

  “Aim for the White House,” he said, then launched himself into plain sight. Two more shots rang out. Kicking up chunks of snow, he slid several doors down the alley and came to a stop behind a pillar.

  He had to shade his eyes in the glinting rays of sun. The White House was whiter than the real one.

  Gasping for breath, Boris joined him behind the next pillar. “The shots are coming from the Kremlin,” he whispered fiercely.

  Harry could make out the onion-shaped domes, but not the rest of the building.

  “Let’s circle behind the Great Hall of the People,” he suggested. They could make their way closer to the police without being seen. Maybe they could attack from behind and disarm the men. He could do with a weapon or two.

  They slipped between the White House and the Great Hall of the People, then alongside the long, pillared building past a replica of the statue on Tiananmen Square. Even the ice underfoot was etched into the large stones that made up the famous square. When they came into view of the Kremlin, he could make out a pair of policemen aiming their pistols along Downing Street.

  “Now,” Harry ordered under his breath and pointed to the two policemen. He and Boris walked briskly up to the tower behind which the men stood, and they chopped each policeman behind the neck. The two men crumpled to the snow without a sound.

  Harry grabbed the pistol that had landed in the snow. It was a GLOCK 17, a locked breach, short recoil 9mm with a capacity of seventeen rounds of ammunition in the grip. He unfastened one belt holster, and Boris removed the other.

  Two of the six police had been felled.

  He looked at the fur-lined boots for a moment. He could sure use them. But he ordered himself to snap out of it. Time was more important. Boris was reloading one pistol and handed it to Harry, retaining the other.

  They strapped on the fallen policemen’s holsters, giving them dozens more rounds of ammunition.

  “Watch out!” Boris whispered as he straightened his back and buckled his belt holster.

  A sudden cry burst in Harry’s eardrum from the direction of the Luxor and Pyramid exhibit. He heard a boot turning in the snow, and he ducked to the icy ground.

  A moment later, a policeman plowed into him. Harry rose and buried an elbow into the man’s solar plexus. The policeman fell on his face and didn’t move. Harry stepped around the corner and saw three other policemen sliding and reeled to a halt as they tried to reverse direction. Boris plugged one of them in the leg.

  “After them,” Harry cried. He picked up the policeman’s Glock and emptied the compartment of spare bullets from the man’s belt into one hand.

  They had dropped four of the six policemen and hadn’t even gotten to Carmen and Merle yet.

  They broke into the open and took after the pair of fleeing policemen. The men stretched their legs to reach the mighty pillars of Luxor. There, two more figures joined them as they bounded for safety behind the tall ice columns.

  One was limping badly.

  “That’s Stevens!” Boris said huffing in the bone-dry air.

  “The other must be Carmen,” Harry surmised. He fired a shot over their heads to force them to turn back.

  The pair and their police companions veered away from the fifty-foot pillars and made for open ground.

  Why were they risking exposure?

  Harry and Boris took chase. But they didn’t gain much ground as they passed a large rectangle cut into the ice. It was the size and shape of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Water flowed swiftly under the opening. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry caught several bobbing swimming caps. A group of old men was swimming bare-chested in the cold water. Their sure, even strokes kept them in place as they swam against the swift current.

  Then Harry looked forward at Carmen’s group. They were sprinting away from the cover of the ice sculptures. He fired another shot above their heads, and they veered like a group of antelope.

  Then he saw where they were headed. Glistening in the sunlight like a string of pearls, a line of gondolas was heading out over the frozen river.

  “They’re headed for Sun Island,” he breathed.

  Merle, Carmen and the two policemen piled into a gondola. Just as Harry arrived, the door slid shut and locked in place. An arm reached out the open gondola window.

  “Run for cover,” Harry cried, and they plunged into a snowdrift behind the station.

  The policemen began pouring lead into the snow around Harry and Boris. The two weren’t alone. Several families joined them trying to escape the mad gunfire. In the distance, the gondola swung back and forth as it vanished into the sunlight.

  Using his Chinese, Boris threw some questions at the people huddled beside him. They answered in frightened voices.

  “There’s another way across,” he translated. “Dog sled.”

  Then Harry spotted a team of Huskies just beyond the station. “Let’s go!”

  The two men commandeered the sled, with Harry taking the reins. Sensing a pair of riders, the dogs sprang to their feet. A solid flick of the reigns across their backs sent them flying on their fixed route across the river.

  Squatting to lower his center of balance, Harry trained his eyes on the swinging gondola. Hunched in the front of the sled, Boris fired away at the gondola, but his shots flew erratically off the mark.

  The gunshots only served to frighten the dogs, which ran faster. They jumped over snowdrifts while Harry fought for balance on the wooden sleigh.

  Ice pellets spat up around them. The policemen had spotted the sleigh and were emptying their clips on them. Harry heard Carmen’s screams from within the gondola. Gunpowder stu
ng the air.

  The dog sled was faster than the gondola, but it didn’t take long for Harry to realize that the dogs weren’t headed in exactly the same direction as the gondola. The frightened dogs were veering under it!

  Within seconds, they would pass directly beneath it, and Harry had no way of stopping the dog team.

  As they approached the gondola, Boris’s pistol appeared to jam. The policemen’s firing also came to a halt. In the eerie quiet, all Harry heard was the dogs’ rhythmic breathing, their soft paw steps and the smooth blades of the sled against the snow.

  A man’s face appeared at the window just above them.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” the man shouted in English. It was Merle Stevens.

  “I’m trying to find Cooper’ family.”

  “No, you’re trying to throw the presidential elections for the terrorists, just like in Spain. You’re trying to kick us out of the Middle East.”

  “I’m just trying to kick a crook out of the White House.”

  At that point, the sled passed under the gondola, which glided along, suspended forty feet overhead.

  Merle didn’t try to communicate after that. Instead, a hail of bullets sprayed the snow in front of them as the valiant Huskies emerged on the other side.

  “Mush!” Harry cried as they raced for the banks of Sun Island.

  Chapter 35

  Sandi DiMartino returned to the Chinagate special prosecutor’s office from the Maryland cemetery and heaped her trench coat over the back of her desk chair. She was determined to help review the final brief that Stanley Polk would present to the federal judge. Suddenly, her female assistant signaled her from across the room.

  “It’s the coroner,” the assistant shouted, pointing to the phone.

  “Don’t you mean pathologist?”

  The woman shrugged and handed her the phone. Sandi was right. It was the pathologist.