China Strike

by Matt Rees

  Verrazzano thought of the streets filled with smashed cars and dead bodies that he passed as he jogged across the Brooklyn Bridge to the detention center with Jahn moving easily at his side. “I’ll fly you there myself if you can help me get this case cleared.”

  Jahn was silent. Frisch watched her, his eyes tracing along the scars, purple and pure white ridges that lined her face from the temple down along her jaw to her neck. He grinned and stroked out his beard. “Someone got you with a bottle. Those scars go back and forth. He dug it into your face and went like this.” He jerked an imaginary bottle up and down.

  “It’s not your business,” Jahn said.

  “It was a he, right? Of course it was. Was it in the line of duty? Or did your old man get nasty with you?”

  Verrazzano snapped his fingers. “Maintain your focus on your request to see me, Frisch.”

  “Maintain my focus?” Frisch rolled the words over as if they were the smoke from a fine cigar. He leaned forward. “Focus on this—it’s Wyatt.”

  The name was like the sound of all those cars smashing together at once. Verrazzano’s mouth went dry.

  “Who’s Wyatt?” Jahn said.

  “Colonel Lawton Wyatt commanded me and Sergeant Major Verrazzano in the Special Forces,” Frisch said. “And then some.”

  And then some. Verrazzano wondered if she’d figure out what that might mean. She couldn’t possibly know, but she surely would sense the tension that crackled between the two men. It was alive with the electricity of secret shame. Verrazzano had believed he was in Special Ops, only to discover he had been working as a private mercenary, hired out to traffic in weapons, to assassinate politicians and businessmen. All to enrich Colonel Wyatt.

  “You’ve got a few things you’d best explain to your FBI pal, Sergeant Major.”

  “You’re the one with the explaining to do,” Verrazzano said. “What’s Wyatt’s involvement?”

  Frisch resettled himself on the plain chair across the table. “Before the UN job, Wyatt and I disagreed about methods.”

  “You mean, one of you didn’t think it was a good idea to pump nerve gas into the UN and kill the president?”

  “That was our target, and we never disagreed about that. I said we disagreed about methods. I wanted to use direct subterfuge to get my people inside the UN building.”

  “Hiding the nerve gas on some poor schlub and tricking him and his wife into helping you?”

  “It was honest and clean, as far as plans go.”

  “But Wyatt wanted to do it a different way?”

  “Wyatt let me do my thing because he always prefers to let the operative on the ground make the decisions. But yeah, he thought we should try something else.”

  Some people carried evil on them the way rats hosted plague fleas. Wyatt was the very contagion itself, the bacillus of the Black Death in camouflage fatigues. “Which was?”

  “‘Joy arises in a person free from remorse.’ You’ve studied the Buddha, haven’t you, Sergeant Major? Sure you have. Anyone who sees death the way we did ends up in a meditation class, because the other option is to find nirvana with the barrel of a pistol in your mouth. You ever think about being ‘free from remorse?’”

  “Tell me, what was Wyatt’s preferred method? For the UN op.”

  “Except you aren’t free from remorse, Sergeant Major. So you’ve got no joy. If only you knew how little you have to regret. Wyatt wanted to disable the UN security system for a few minutes so that my hit team could get inside.”

  “How did he intend to do that?”

  “He was in contact with some hackers who could take it down.”

  Verrazzano felt the connections he was yet to make forming softly and reaching out toward each other. “These same hackers are the ones who infected the onboard computers of all the new Dariens. The ones who caused the big wreck this morning. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Frisch pointed two fingers and snapped his thumb, cheerfully planting an invisible bullet between Verrazzano’s eyes.

  “How do I find the hackers?”

  “I refused to deal with them,” Frisch said. “I liked my plan. I liked my guys. I didn’t want some outside dipshit screwing me over.”

  “Who are they?”

  Frisch muttered on. He was smart and tough, but he’d been too long in solitary, talking to himself, fretting over the flaws in the way he had worked the UN operations and damning himself for them. “Like I’m going to put myself in a position where I’d be hung out to dry by foreign agents.”

  Verrazzano stiffened. He sensed Jahn’s heightened awareness. She had heard it too. “Agents of a foreign government?” he said.

  “They weren’t from a country where a lot goes on without the government knowing. So agents of a foreign government, yeah.”

  “Which government?” Jahn said.

  “Wyatt figured he knew how to deal with them. He’d worked in their neighborhood since he was a lieutenant in Vietnam.” Frisch directed his explanation toward Jahn. “The last couple of decades, he’d mostly operated around the Mideast, as Sergeant Major Verrazzano knows to his cost. But old man Wyatt got his start killing and torturing his way across Southeast Asia back in the early seventies. I guess he kept up his contacts there. Either that or he’s a sentimental old bastard.”

  “An Asian country? Which one?”

  “Well, it sure ain’t Bhutan. Take a guess.”

  “Wyatt’s working with the Chinese?” Verrazzano said.

  Another playful bullet from Frisch’s fingers.

  “How do you connect that with what happened today?”

  Frisch stroked his beard. “Wyatt doesn’t share much, Sergeant Major. You know that. You have to add things up yourself when you work for him. That’s what I’m doing now. The kind of chaos you got this morning could only be the work of a big, big organization. The Chinese Army has an entire tower block in Shanghai filled with hackers trying to bring down US government and commercial websites, breaking into proprietary industrial systems and copying them for their own companies to make the same stuff at cheaper prices.”

  Frisch was working his way around the perimeter of what he knew, probing, just as he’d have broken into a hostile camp. Verrazzano tried to hurry him. “What’s the end game, Frisch? For Wyatt? For the Chinese? Did they intend to create this chaos? Or did one of their hackers mess up?”

  “I don’t know where it’s all going, but Wyatt’s in it for sure.”

  Jahn strode around the table behind Frisch. “This is crap. We came over here because this mope thinks he can squeeze us with suspicions and suppositions. Let’s go.” She moved toward the door.

  “Sit down, baby.” Frisch spoke to Jahn, but he kept his eyes on Verrazzano. “Sergeant Major Verrazzano is just about to show you why he’s stayed alive all this time.”

  “Agent Jahn is right. Bringing us over here for what you’ve told us so far would be dumb, and you aren’t dumb,” Verrazzano said. “You’ve got something else.”

  “Maybe I’m bored? In need of charming company?” He smiled at Jahn as though he had just spotted her across a crowded bar.

  “Tell me what it is you know,” Verrazzano said. “Something concrete. Proof that Wyatt’s connected to the Chinese. Then I’ll get you out of here.”

  Jahn reached for Verrazzano’s shoulder. “This guy tried to kill the president. He shot a man dead inside the UN building.”

  “The UN operation failed. The man who ran it is an unforgiving type. If we free him and Captain Frisch hits the streets, it’ll take all his ingenuity to stay alive. We won’t have any more trouble from him. But this issue, this case with the cars—we need to fix it right now.”

  Jahn waved her hand dismissively, but there was surrender in it too. Verrazzano snapped his fingers for Frisch to continue.

  “Wyatt knows the way the world’s going,” Frisch said. “He always did. Always picked out the tilt of the deck, so as he could stay dry and tip the other guy into the water, so to
speak.”

  “The deck’s tilting to China?”

  “It was tilted very clearly their way until about ten years ago. Then their economy hit the crapper, and that made them desperate.”

  “Which means they’re looking for anything to give them an edge.”

  “And Wyatt specializes in giving someone an edge.” Frisch leered. “During the UN operation, I received payments from the colonel to finance certain arrangements I had to make.”

  “Storing and transporting nerve gas? Paying off officials?”

  “You’ll get their names, don’t worry. Yeah, so he paid me to do those things. He transferred the money to me in Bitcoins.”

  “How did you know it was from him?” Jahn said. “Bitcoin is anonymous.”

  “Because he called me up and said, ‘Hey, I sent you the money on Bitcoin, asshole.’”

  “Don’t call me an asshole.”

  “I was quoting him. He called me ‘asshole.’” Frisch waited for Jahn to release her tension. Then he added, “Asshole.”

  Jahn turned to Verrazzano and raised her palms. Verrazzano gave her the hint of a smile. It said, “You know what this is about. You know he’s trying to wind you up until you snap.” The flicker of impatience in her eyes let him know that she got it. A female agent had to deal with this more than a man. She was tough, but toughness didn’t make it easier.

  “Go on. Make the connection,” Verrazzano said.

  “I got a bunch of payments from him. Bitcoin transactions are recorded anonymously in the block chain, to protect against fraud. Still there’s ways around that, sometimes. I wanted to know what Wyatt was doing and where he was, just in case he decided to leave me hanging. To get hold of anything that might help me anticipate his double cross. So I tried to track the Bitcoin payments back. I couldn’t trace them. He was using a Bitcoin laundry service that mixes up the payments along the way so that you can’t trace the breadcrumbs.”

  “You couldn’t track them, but you did have the address they came from.”

  “You’re getting the idea.”

  “Then a payment came that hadn’t gone through the laundry site.”

  Frisch smiled at Jahn. “Didn’t I tell you the Sergeant Major was a smart guy? You’re right, Verrazzano. Finally I got a payment that came direct to my Bitcoin account. That meant I could cluster the address with the information from the previous payments. By tying the address to those other known addresses, I could follow it back to its source.”

  “Which was?”

  “The whole time we were planning that operation, Wyatt told me he was in Cyprus. He said he wanted a base close to the Middle East, so he could make his deals with the Islamic State head cases and all the other gangsters around that neighborhood.”

  “That’s where he was when he sent you the laundered payments?”

  “Cyprus is chock-full of rich Russians and dirty banks. Where you have rich Russians, you also have people prepared to offer them financial anonymity.”

  “And fraud,” Jahn said.

  “What else do you need financial anonymity for? Rich Russians, fraud, and extreme violence. Those things pretty much always come together.”

  Verrazzano made a come-on gesture with his fingers. “But Wyatt was somewhere else when he sent you the traceable payment?”

  “He sure was. Our friend the colonel was in Beijing.”

  “So what? He was in China,” Jahn said. “You said you had proof of his involvement in the Darien crash. He could’ve been in Beijing sightseeing for all we know.”

  “The last time Colonel Wyatt travelled anywhere for pleasure, rather than business, it was when his mom and dad took him to Disneyland in first grade, and he probably moonlighted as hired muscle even then.”

  Verrazzano restrained the urgency he felt. He didn’t want Frisch to hear it, didn’t want to give him leverage. “You’ve connected him to China. Now connect him to the car wrecks.”

  Frisch smiled broadly through the heavy beard. His posture was expansive. He was like an athlete telling the story of how he made a fantastic play. “Once I traced the address to Beijing, I was able to access the Bitcoin wallet that the good old colonel was using. I still couldn’t track any of the payments he made when he used the Bitcoin laundry. But all the payments he made out of Beijing were visible. There were five of them.”

  “Who got the money?”

  “Three of the payments went to Europe. I couldn’t find the precise locations. Same with another one that was in North America somewhere.”

  “The last one?”

  “The address on that last Bitcoin wallet was—well, that’s the one that’s going to get me out of this place. It was in Dearborn, Michigan.”

  “That’s where the Darien Motor Company is headquartered,” Jahn whispered.

  Frisch mimicked the FBI agent’s shock. “Oh, hey, you’re right.”

  “What was the address?” Verrazzano said.

  “I’ll take you there.”

  “Give us the address and we’ll check it out.”

  “I’ll tell you when I’m outside these walls, man.”

  “You’re going to have to make me certain that I can’t do this without you, Frisch, before I get you out of here. You haven’t done that yet. What’s the address?”

  “It checks out, Sergeant Major.”

  Verrazzano read the smugness behind the beard. He got it. Frisch had sent someone to scope out the address. “How did you do it?”

  “Some of the guys who work at the detention center here are a bit more corruptible than you, buddy.”

  “You paid off an ICE agent in the detention center?”

  “Where would I get money for a payoff? Nah, I put a scare into him. A guy should never have a wife and kids if he’s going to hang around with people like me and you. Makes you vulnerable. So yeah, I had someone go along and meet the nice couple in Dearborn who got the money from Colonel Wyatt. The husband’s an employee of Darien.”

  “A Chinese computer engineer?”

  “You’ll know that when you and I have made a deal and I’m out of here. If you leave me sitting in here with my mouth shut, you’ll be gambling with time you don’t have.”

  “Is it in the New York area?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “If we’re flying somewhere, I’m going to have to work some angles to get us on a government flight. Domestic air travel is already shut down because of the crash, in case it’s a bigger terror threat.”

  Frisch hesitated. “Put us on a plane to Detroit.”

  “You’ve got a deal.”

  Frisch watched Verrazzano take out his cell phone. “I’m not doing this just to get out of here.”

  “You’re doing it because you love America?” Jahn clenched her fists.

  Verrazzano snapped a photo of Frisch with the phone. “He’s doing it because he hates Wyatt.”

  Frisch laughed. “As Chairman Mao said, ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins by stepping on one single asshole’s face.’ This is the start of my new journey.”

  “Wyatt’s the guy you’ll step on?” Jahn said.

  “I’m going to need to step on more than one asshole to get where I’m going.”

  Verrazzano went to the door. “Mao also said, ‘It’s not hard to do some good. What is hard is to do good all your life and never do anything bad.’” Frisch stared at him. They had both committed some of the worst acts a man could perform. Verrazzano knew they had come out of it with different ideas about their guilt, about who they were and how they could make amends. It wasn’t only joy that was missing for a remorseful man. To regret was to be mostly dead, and Frisch’s Special Ops training meant that he placed a high value on remaining alive. Maybe I’m taking Frisch to Michigan to give him another chance, Verrazzano wondered. Everyone deserves one.

  He opened the door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Frisch. You think real hard, meantime. Make sure you’re ready to do some good. Because if you’re not, the moment you leave this detention
center, you’re entering a world where one bad action is fatal.”

  “Bad or not, I can stay ahead of Wyatt,” Frisch said.

  “But you can’t stay ahead of me.” He shut the door behind him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Verrazzano sat in the corner of the observation room with his laptop across his thighs and his feet on the desk. He kept his back to the wall, his screen angled away from the security cameras. He logged into the ICE system with an anonymous username that he had persuaded Haddad to give him.

  He heard the door of the interview room slam and footsteps in the hall. Jahn entered the observation room. “How’re you intending to play this?”

  The Panasonic’s bright backlit screen flickered over Verrazzano’s face. He called up Bill Todd’s personnel file. “Like a guy with four arms plays foosball.”

  “Is your SAC going to authorize it? Getting Frisch out of here.”

  Verrazzano found the template for Todd’s ICE identity card. He copied it to a password-protected file on his laptop, logged out of the ICE system, and opened up the identity card template again. “Sure he is.”

  Jahn’s laugh was low and cynical. “I didn’t think so. I’ve heard about you. About how you brought Frisch in. What you tried to pull at the UN. You damned near cost the president his life.”

  “I damned near cost me my life.” Verrazzano took his smartphone from his pocket and found the photo he had snapped of Frisch. He sent it to his e-mail account and put the phone away. “As for the president, any day he doesn’t die is a day at least a dozen plots to kill him don’t pan out, which means it’s a good day. And he didn’t die at the UN.” He downloaded the photo from his e-mail onto the laptop. He pasted it into Todd’s identity card.

  Jahn had her hands on her hips. “I can’t just show up in Detroit. I have to inform the FBI field office there, work with a local agent. Doesn’t ICE have an office there?”

  “Sure. They even have one inside the airport. Everywhere you have international flights landing, you have ICE agents on call.”

  “So what’re you going to tell them?”