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

by Fritz Galt

  “I could go ahead with the examination of the DNA,” the man began. “But I thought I’d draw something to your attention at the outset.”

  “Go on,” Sandi said, and took her seat. She wasn’t picking up positive vibes from the man’s tone of voice.

  “As soon as I returned to the lab, I opened the urn.”

  “Yes?”

  “There were bones in there. You know how foreign countries haven’t quite perfected cremation yet, and they leave lots of bones.”

  “No, but go on.”

  “Well, it’s clear at first glance—these are not human bones.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One thing is for certain. These are not human remains.”

  “That’s great news,” Sandi said, letting out her breath with relief. But she quickly regained her composure. “Can you write that up in a report and have it to my office by the start of business tomorrow?”

  She could include it as evidence in the brief.

  “Sure thing. Not a problem.”

  She thanked the man and set the phone down with a smile. It was a tired, happy smile. Sean’s family was still somewhere out there.

  On his way to checking out the suspicious PSB Psn 14 site, Badger McGlade passed through downtown Harbin. It was a thriving city with a substantial downtown. Near the highway, some gleaming high-rises overlooked immediate countryside. A computer geek, he was impressed by the heartiness of the human race as people went about their daily routines, such as shopping, working, riding their bicycle carts, gathering trash in their garbage trucks and hauling mounds of crushed rock in oversized dump trucks.

  The taxi sped along the ice-covered highway on bald tires with no chains. Not even studs. Badger could visualize them skidding into a ditch and never reaching the prison.

  The landscape was flat with cropland on the south side of the highway and forests to the north.

  The defroster either wasn’t working or had never been installed. Badger kept shaving frost off the windshield for the driver, who was content to peer through a tiny peephole that he scraped for himself.

  The sun rimmed the horizon that day, casting long shadows over the snow. But the sky was bright blue and the golden glow was cheery.

  “There’s the wild tiger preserve,” Sean Cooper called from the back seat.

  Badger cleared a spot to look out his window. The gateway around the entrance reminded him of a wild animal safari park in the States.

  The driver was grunting, slowing down and heading for the shoulder.

  “No! Keep going!” Badger shouted.

  “Qing jixu. Jixu wang qian zou,” Sean called from the back seat. Keep going straight ahead.

  At least someone spoke Chinese.

  The driver resumed his former speed and direction, leaving Badger sweating at the armpits.

  A minute later, Sean cried out, “There it is! Ting che!”

  This time, the driver didn’t seem to want to stop. Perhaps he felt burned by his last attempt to stop the car.

  “Stop the freaking car!” Badger shouted.

  The driver cowered, but drove on.

  Badger tried to reach around the driver’s plastic protective cage to grab the wheel but couldn’t.

  “Ting che!” everyone was yelling from the back seat.

  The driver took one look at the facility and kept plowing ahead.

  “Oh, man,” Badger said. “This ain’t gonna work. He doesn’t want to go there. How do we stop the car?”

  Sean pried his door open, ready to jump out, but the speed was too great. The open door threw off the driver’s trajectory and they began skidding toward a high snow bank on the near shoulder.

  “Brace yourselves!” Badger yelled.

  But how could they? There were no seatbelts and Sean was hanging halfway out of the taxi.

  The collision sent Badger’s shoulder into the windshield. Likewise, the driver flew forward, engaging himself in the steering wheel and landing hard on the horn.

  Badger heard a torso slam into the driver’s cage, and the other team member knocked over the back of his passenger’s seat. Sean was nowhere in sight.

  The taxi kept moving after impact, flipping onto its side and sliding down the highway. Meanwhile, a huge yellow road grader barreled down on them. Turned on his side and lying on a cracked window, Badger had only a moment to brace for the ensuing impact.

  His seat was wedged up against him by one of the team. His face was pressed to the windshield. The yellow grader loomed above him.

  Sean’s door came slamming shut on top of the car.

  Blaring his horn, the road grader streaked inches from the windshield, its blade catching the taxi’s trunk. Badger held onto the dashboard as they spun in nauseating circles down the road on their side.

  The driver flopped lifelessly in his cage. Behind Badger, there was silence. Was he the lone survivor? And where was Sean?

  With a bone-jarring jolt, the taxi finally came to a halt. Badger squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself, but went flying through the air with a windshield’s worth of shattered glass. He landed on his back atop a snowdrift, several yards from the highway.

  He might as well keep his eyes closed. And make angels in the snow.

  Badger McGlade gradually regained consciousness, but couldn’t open his heavy eyelids. He was on a cold surface. God, Harbin was cold. Everything about it was cold.

  But he wasn’t lying on snow. It felt hard, like a table.

  Then he noticed that the sun shone directly overhead. How could that be possible? He was in the far north, unless someone had transported him to the Equator. He felt slight warmth from the light above him. Perhaps he was back on Hainan Island.

  If so, he had died and gone to heaven.

  At last, he pried his eyes open, slowly letting his new environment seep into his consciousness.

  That was no sun directly overhead. It was some sort of medical light in an operating theater.

  “Easy now,” came an old man’s heavily accented voice.

  In the lamp’s reflector, Badger made out a familiar face next to him. It was the famed Sean Cooper, his eyes closed as if he were asleep, his body laid out on a second slab. Along the side of his face, poor Sean had sustained a bruise that was just beginning to puff out and turn colors.

  Then Badger smelled the strong odor of garlic. He looked overhead. An old Chinese doctor was leaning over him, breathing in his face.

  “You’re a lucky man,” the doctor said in English.

  Badger couldn’t believe his ears.

  The doctor laughed nervously beneath his white surgical mask. “Oh, don’t worry. You’re still in China. See?”

  He pulled off his thick eyeglasses and revealed two oriental eyes.

  “I speak English because I learned Special English over the years on VOA and BBC. And you’re a lucky man. All of you foreigners survived the crash, but the taxi driver did not.”

  Badger tried to sit up and look at Sean.

  “I can’t move,” he said.

  The doctor laughed again. “That’s because your brain needs time to fully recover.”

  “Am I paralyzed?”

  “Not at all. But you’re still in shock.”

  Did the doctor learn medicine over the radio as well? “Am I hurt? I can’t feel a thing.”

  “Good,” the doctor said, and reached toward Badger’s temples with a pair of long, thin needles.

  “No!” Badger cried.

  But he couldn’t move, and the acupuncture needles only felt like a pair of thumbs pressed lightly against his temples. The effect of the needles was instantaneous. Feeling rushed to his toes. He wiggled them.

  “More!” he shouted. “Give me more needles!”

  The doctor laughed, his facemask billowing in and out with every labored breath. “You still need your rest.”

  Two pins approached just above Badger’s eyebrows.

  “These will help you sleep.”

  The room blu
rred as his eyes crossed. He knew he was in good hands and fell into a peaceful slumber.

  Harry Black and Boris spilled out of the dogsled as they came to a halt at the far side of the frozen Songhua River.

  A hundred yards to Harry’s left, the gondola disappeared among the trees.

  Rubbing the soreness from his arms, he dragged himself up a path through the snow toward the sound of voices. Who else would be out on the frozen island?

  He emerged from the woods with Boris and had to blink several times to believe what he saw. He was surrounded by frosty white architectural edifices, elephants, giraffes, wolves and mermaids carved out of solid chunks of snow.

  He stumbled about. Was he in a trance?

  Crowds of spectators milled about the feet of the statues. They frolicked in the foot-deep snow amidst the awe-inspiring sculptures that rose up around them.

  Flags from different nations fluttered in the snow beside the gleaming sculptures. Harry approached the American team that was hard at work on an amorphous blob carved out of blocks of snow. Perhaps they had seen Merle and Carmen and the policemen.

  “Hi,” he said.

  The two men didn’t look up, but responded in a friendly way. “Are you enjoying yourselves?” one asked as he carved some snake scales into the rear end of the blob.

  “Somewhat,” Harry said. “Seen any other Americans around here?”

  “We’re the only ones for miles around,” the other man said. “We’re the only American team here in Harbin. Brad’s from Arizona and I’m here from Chicago, where we love the cold.”

  “I see,” Harry said, looking past the men for any sign of the Public Security Bureau police.

  It was hard to take his eyes off the strange, horned head that the other man was sculpting fifteen feet in the air.

  He circled under the head to get a better look. “What in the world are you making?”

  “We’re doing a half-buffalo and half-snake creature,” the young man from Arizona said enthusiastically. “It has symbolic meaning to the Chinese.”

  Boris looked dubious. “Okay.”

  “Well, good luck,” Harry said.

  Stomping his feet for warmth, Harry ran from sculpture to sculpture. Peering ahead through the smooth edged lines of ice, he looked for any sign of Merle and the Chinese. But all he found was a continuous stream of happy tourists wandering through the forest wonderland.

  The cold was getting to him. His face began to hurt. It felt squeezed by some cryogenic technique and pinched in such a way that he would look distorted for the rest of his life. The world was out of focus, and his head pounded.

  “There they are!” Boris rasped under his breath. “Near the gondola station.”

  Sure enough, the last pair of policemen was standing in line to take a gondola back to the city. Guarding them at the rear were Merle and Carmen, their backs to the station, a pistol in Merle’s hand.

  They stood beside a grizzly bear rearing on its icy hind legs. Harry could see Carmen glancing around alertly.

  Harry summoned Boris to follow him. He circled through the crowd and then through a stand of trees to the far side of the grizzly bear statue. A team from Singapore was patching on fur icicles and adding some final touches to the precariously tall beast.

  Harry removed a glove and gripped the Glock in his pocket. In the minus twenty-degree chill, his exposed fingers had frozen around the grip.

  Great. He was frozen to his gun.

  Peeling his fingers away would be painful. Then Carmen turned his way. Her back was to Merle, and Harry could see the anxiety written on her face. He signaled her with a half-wave, and their eyes locked. She instantly relaxed and forced a wink.

  The two policemen in their navy blue overcoats were piling into a gondola, leaving Merle and Carmen alone.

  Harry advanced to the shadows of the bear and pulled the Glock halfway from his pocket, enough for her to see it. She nodded.

  Spinning around on the toes of her boots, she kicked out at the pistol that extended from Merle’s hand. The dull black gun arced out of his hand, and Harry jumped out from behind the bear.

  “Freeze!” he yelled, the blunt muzzle of his Glock pointed squarely at Merle’s head.

  “What an unfortunate use of terms,” Merle said, suave despite his predicament.

  Carmen tore herself free of him, picked up Merle’s firearm and ran to Boris. The Singaporeans paused in their work to watch the two men facing off.

  “Now what?” Merle asked, eyeing Harry suspiciously and trying to circle away.

  “Now you take us to Sean’s family.”

  Merle ruefully shook his head, as if Harry didn’t understand. “Don’t you see? As long as the Chinese hold them, the president is safe. You release them, and the entire Administration will go down.”

  “I don’t care about the Administration,” Harry said. “And something tells me you don’t either. So don’t try to wrap yourself in the flag.”

  “I am an officer of the United States Government,” Merle said impressively, if not defiantly. “You don’t understand what’s at stake here.”

  “Yeah, I know what’s at stake. Your scam, that’s what you stand to lose. But I’m here to tell you something else, buddy. You stand to face life behind bars for covering this one up for the president. And I’m thinking Guantánamo is too good for you.”

  Merle’s grin was frozen on his face. “Why? Is Sean Cooper enjoying his time there?”

  “Make that past tense,” Harry said. “He’s here with me in Harbin. And he wants his family back. And there’s nothing you can say that will change that.”

  “He seemed to be getting along quite well without them,” Merle said with a lewd twinkle in his eyes.

  “On the contrary, you brought him to his knees with their supposed deaths. You turned him into a common criminal, not unlike yourself. Now you’ll show us where you’re keeping the family, or…”

  “Or what? You’ll shoot me?”

  Harry hesitated.

  “Or what?” Merle taunted, edging closer to the gondola. “If I die, you’ll never find his family. You need me.”

  Bone-dry wind whipped out of the blue sky and whistled through the barren trees. Harry turned to Boris. “Get me a bucket of water from the cable car station.”

  Merle’s handsome eyes focused on Harry, who was having a hard time keeping his head from exploding in the cold.

  “You don’t have the right to do anything to me,” Merle said. “Killing a federal officer is a capital offense.”

  “Give me your coat.” Harry reached out and began unzipping Merle’s coat. Merle grinned in his face, as Harry pulled off the parka and threw it against a low snow wall built around another exhibit.

  Boris arrived with a bucket from which steam was rising.

  “Pour it over him,” Harry ordered. “We’ll turn him into a living ice sculpture. That ought to take the prize.”

  Boris lifted the bucket over Merle’s head.

  Curious onlookers closed in on the small group. Perhaps it was some sort of demonstration, whereby a man could survive despite wearing a sheet of ice.

  “Give me my coat,” Merle grumbled in resignation, unable to keep the shiver out of his voice. “I’ll take you to his family.”

  Boris lowered the bucket halfway.

  “First tell us where they are,” Harry demanded.

  “They’re in a prison just beyond the tiger park,” Merle said, clutching his arms for warmth. “But knowing that won’t do you any good.”

  “Why not?”

  Merle’s beautiful teeth were chattering audibly. “They won’t give up the prisoners unless I authorize their release. You have to take me with you.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Harry said, waving his free hand at Boris. “Grab his coat and let’s go.”

  Boris set the bucket down in the snow. A disappointed groan rose from the crowd.

  “There’s a shuttle bus,” Merle said. “That’ll take us there.”

>   Boris scooped up the coat and threw it to Carmen, and they began to trudge through the dispersing crowd. Merle took them to a vast, icy parking lot where exhaust rose from cars and buses as they nudged toward the single exit.

  Merle took them to a twenty-seater, its windows steamed up from a heater inside.

  “Good enough,” Harry said, and directed the small team and captive there. The warmth sucked them up at once, and the driver slammed the door shut behind them.

  Harry could barely balance on his frozen feet. He pushed Merle into the seat opposite the driver and stood rocking over him. “Tell him where to go.”

  Merle spoke in Chinese to the driver, who responded in what sounded like an explosion of shrieking expletives.

  Merle calmly indicated the gun in Harry’s frozen hand.

  Wordlessly, the driver put the bus in gear and began to angle them between cars toward the exit.

  Chapter 36

  Sean Cooper stirred comfortably on the examination table. All his body parts were sending back pleasurable reports, and his skin tingled reassuringly.

  He adjusted his glasses and rolled his head to one side. Lying there was the man they called Badger McGlade. His shirt and pants had all been rolled back, exposing an entire body punctured by needles, as if he were some sort of voodoo doll. And the strange thing was the smile on the poor guy’s face!

  Then his eyes fell on a pack of paper diapers, the tiny kind that only the smallest babies used. He hadn’t seen diapers like that in five years.

  The next thing that entered his awareness was the sound of firecrackers. Someone was celebrating outside the building.

  What sort of a building was it, anyway? The bright, overhead lamp looked like it belonged in a dentist’s office or hospital operating room.

  Then the car crash came back to him in fragmented images. He associated no pain with the event as he had smashed into the back of the taxi driver’s cage.

  Badger had been sitting in the front passenger’s seat, and the two members from Harry’s team were sitting in the back seat beside him. Where had they gone?

  He rolled his head in the other direction. Two prone bodies lay crammed between a cabinet and his examination table. Their heads were wrapped in bandages, and IV tubes dripped into their forearms. They were either asleep or still passed out.