China Strike

by Matt Rees

  “A Portsmouth Freedom.”

  “What’s that, an SUV?”

  “A small one.” Lyons found himself speaking with the apologetic tone he used when his fourteen-year-old daughter criticized his choice of vehicle. She had read a book on global warming and started bitching at him to take the train to work instead of driving a gas guzzler.

  “When did you get it?”

  “A month ago.”

  “With the payment from me? For your services in the case of our old pal Frisch?”

  The air whistled in Lyons nostrils. “You don’t have to—I’m not going to say anything about—”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t buy a Darien, right, Lyons?”

  He didn’t join in Wyatt’s soft laughter. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You made a fine choice of vehicle. Stay safe. Give my regards to your family.” Wyatt hung up.

  Lyons put the phone down. On the desk, his car keys lay in front of a photo of his wife and kids. He had never talked to Wyatt about his family, never even mentioned that he had one. Wyatt never wasted words either. With a feeling in his stomach like the end of all life, Lyons grabbed the keys and rushed out the door.

  It was a fifty-five-minute drive from the detention center on Atlantic Avenue to the Lyons home in Melville, but it took him two hours through the wrecks and the traffic jams, even with the magnetic siren stuck to the roof. He took his red SUV onto the Jackie Robinson Parkway and onto the Long Island Expressway just as it exited from Queens. He tried to dial his wife on his cell phone, but when he swiped at the screen, it refused to respond to his passcode. Wyatt had hacked the phone and locked it, he was sure. He hammered his hand on the steering wheel and bore down hard on the gas pedal. The radio was a litany of bereaved relatives and stern politicians vowing revenge on whoever was behind the Darien crash and even on some others who surely weren’t. With the siren and his fist on the horn, Lyons made a new lane for himself, forcing the slow traffic to edge aside. He snapped away more than a couple of wing mirrors before the expressway let him off a half mile from his house.

  He roared down the quiet suburban streets toward his split-level ranch. His chest seemed to close tight around his organs. He pulled up in front of the double garage and ran up the steps. Inside the front door, he called his wife’s name. The house was silent. He went to the kitchen and checked the whiteboard scheduler on the fridge. He matched it with the time on his watch. Alison’s neat block letters noted a gathering with a few other mothers at Half Hollow Park. They’d watch the kids play, and they’d talk about their husbands and how the kids were doing at school. Wyatt would strike there, Lyons thought. He’d kill them and he’d escape through the trees. “No, no, no, no, no,” he bawled, as he ran out to his car.

  He sped down the street and onto Old South Path. He was doing sixty-five down the two-lane, the sun flashing through the trees at the roadside, when the gas pedal dropped limply to the floor of the SUV. Lyons bellowed and stamped on the brake, but the car picked up speed. He went along the road, weaving around the light traffic under the afternoon sunshine. A station wagon moved into his path, a woman driving and a row of blonde toddlers in the backseat. Lyons spun the wheel to get by them. He wrenched it back to beat the grasp of the trees that seemed to reach out for him.

  The SUV was doing one hundred and thirty when he passed the gate attendant’s white awning at the entrance to Half Hollow Park. Just before he skidded off the twisting roadway into the trunk of a massive oak tree, Lyons thought of his daughter and her obsession with climate change. Then he whispered, “I should’ve taken the train.”

  CHAPTER 8

  At Theander’s US headquarters in New Jersey, Su Li’s boss was a sandy-haired, bloodless geek, who would have been the nastiest math teacher at the Rockleigh high school, if the Internet had never happened. Instead he ran a floor full of diligent Asian computer programmers and wore a black shirt and a black tie and black Prada glasses with a thin pink stripe around the lens. When Kinsella and Todd showed up, he reported with disgust that Su was absent and hadn’t called in sick, as if the guy might have been taking time away from the office to eat babies.

  The agents raced for Su’s home, a quarter mile away, with Haddad in the back seat to handle any computer issues they came up against. At a stop sign, a big Ford hit the back of their car with moderate force. Kinsella and Todd leapt out of their car, holding their weapons at the driver. He was a burly, middle-aged guy in a white T-shirt and red baseball cap. He raised his hands and stared at the agents with terror. They got him out of the car. Kinsella braced him against the rear door.

  “The car went out of control, officers,” he moaned. “Way all them Dariens did.”

  Todd came around from the passenger side. He held up a cell phone on the dial screen. It showed an area code and three digits entered. “He was halfway through dialing. Had his eyes on the phone instead of the road.”

  “I swear it was the car.”

  “Don’t push your luck.” Kinsella went back to the ICE car. “Come on, Bill. We don’t have time for this.”

  Todd made a quick assessment of the damage to their vehicle. He tossed the cell phone to the man. It slipped through his sweaty palms, and the screen shattered. “Drive safely, buddy.”

  Two blocks farther on, they reached Su’s house. It was a big colonial just across the state line into New York. In the drive sat an old Theander station wagon.

  “He’s got a nice house and a good job, but he’s not driving a new car?” Kinsella said. “Guess he knows something we don’t know about new vehicles going to crash?”

  “Everybody knows something we don’t know.” Todd passed the station wagon and headed for the front door.

  Kinsella drew her Glock from her holster. Haddad gave her a frown. Kinsella pouted. “You think I’m going to scare him? If this turns out to be a guy who’s prepared to help us with our inquiries, I’ll put the gun away and make nice.” She flipped her long, dry auburn hair across her shoulders. She went up the steps. Todd also had his pistol out in front of him with stiff arms.

  Through the door, loud music vibrated with a two-step beat. “Su Li’s a country fan?” Kinsella thumped the door.

  “He’s not going to hear you knocking. Music’s too loud,” Haddad said.

  Kinsella went around the side of the house. She put her face close to the screens on the bay window. Inside, the room was sparsely furnished: a couple of sofas and a wall-mounted flat-screen. At first she thought the maple floor was spread with rugs. Then she saw it was two people flat on their backs. She sprinted to the front of the house.

  “Kick it in,” she shouted.

  Before Todd could move, Haddad raised her leg and brought the heel of her boot down just below the door handle. It shattered and sprung open. The burglar alarm wailed.

  Kinsella went in first, her pistol held straight out before her. Her heart was loud enough to overwhelm the noise of the alarm and the country song blaring through the speakers of a Danish hi-fi system in the far corner of the living room.

  She swung around, gesturing for Todd and Haddad to check the other rooms. She went to the living room and knelt beside the two people on the floor. A Chinese man and woman, side by side. Both dead, throats slashed, each with a single sharp strike. The man had been scalped.

  Kinsella turned away. She had seen corpses in much worse condition, but the scalping was a psychotic gesture that disturbed her.

  Haddad came into the living room. They heard Todd upstairs. His footsteps relaxed, the lightness and poise of a search replaced by slow, heavy treads. No one up there. Haddad holstered her weapon.

  Kinsella tucked her long hair behind her ear. She opened the picture of Su Li’s New York State driver’s license on her cell phone and compared it with the stricken face of the corpse. “It’s him.”

  “I guess that’s Missus Su?”

  Kinsella wiped the back of her wrist across her mouth. “I guess.” She forced herself to take her focus away from
the gore. She needed to look for clues in the details of the room. She shut her eyes. When she opened them, she frowned at the hi-fi on the coffee table. It repeated the same couple of seconds of music over and again. Johnny Cash at high volume. Haddad went to turn it off.

  “Don’t touch it.” Kinsella shouted.

  “Come on, I can barely hear you—”

  “Wait.” Kinsella went toward the hi-fi. It played a single line: “I know you hate me, and you got the right to kill me now, and I wouldn’t blame you if you do—”

  “It’s a loop,” she said.

  Todd came out of the hallway and into the room with the two scalped bodies. “Why would they be listening to a loop?”

  “They wouldn’t be listening to a loop. The killer put it on.”

  “To cover the sound of their screams? Why not just put on the whole song? Why loop that line?”

  Kinsella found a pink iPod shuffle at the side of the hi-fi connected by a white wire to the USB port. “I don’t think they screamed. They went quickly and cleanly. The one that died second had a moment to cry out, but I’d bet they were too scared to open their mouths.”

  “So what’s the loop for?”

  “Maybe it’s a message. Something in the song. These words are being highlighted for some reason.”

  Haddad shrugged and cocked her head, searching for something significant in the music. “Do you know the song? It’s country, right?”

  “You don’t know who Johnny Cash was?” Todd said.

  “Give me a break, Bill. I was born in Lebanon, and I grew up in Jersey.”

  “Didn’t you ever get farther south than Philadelphia?”

  Haddad’s cheeks colored. She was as American as you could be, given that her first years had been spent in a Middle Eastern war zone. But these gaps in her cultural knowledge still embarrassed her.

  “It’s okay, hon,” Kinsella said. “It’s music for rednecks like Bill. This one’s about a boy named Sue. Maybe it’s someone’s idea of a joke on Mister Su here.”

  “We’ve got to make a connection,” Todd said. “To get us to the next step in the chain.”

  “To another Chinese programmer?”

  “At another auto company. It started with Darien. You’ve got to think that this killing means the crash has the potential to extend to Theander vehicles too.”

  “We have to figure out which auto company is next. Roula, go check out Mister Su’s computer. There’s a desktop in the room across the hall. Bill, call this in to the local police department and FBI. I’m going to call Dom and let him know what we’ve got.”

  Kinsella stepped out of the front door as her phone connected to Verrazzano. “Dom, it’s Noelle. Su Li and his wife are dead. Roula’s checking out his computer right now to see if it gives us a lead to any more Chinese programmers.” She put a finger in her other ear. “What’s that? I can’t hear you.” She pulled the door shut behind her. “What’d you say, Dom?”

  Verrazzano’s voice came down the line. “What’s that music?”

  “It’s Johnny Cash. Real loud, a loop of a line from ‘A Boy Named Sue.’ It was playing when we got to Su Li’s place. Like the killer put it on to send a message or something.”

  Verrazzano’s voice was quieter when he spoke again. Kinsella wasn’t sure if he said, “I heard you,” or “I heard it.” What was it, she wondered? Verrazzano said, “Let me hear the loop.”

  She opened the door and held her cell phone up while the loop played through. “Did you get it?”

  “I got it.”

  “You know what it’s about? I mean, why is it playing?”

  “It’s a message. You’re right about that.”

  “A message for who, though?”

  “For me.”

  Kinsella listened to the words of the loop again. “Unless your daddy came in here and killed Mister and Missus Su, I don’t get it, Dom.”

  “Not my daddy. Someone like my daddy. I’ll explain later.”

  Haddad opened the front door. “Noelle, come check this out.” She went back down the hallway and into the computer room.

  “Roula’s got something, Dom. Stay with me.” Kinsella entered the house and followed Haddad. “What’ve you got?”

  Haddad sat at the laptop on the desk. Todd paced behind her in a room that was otherwise entirely empty. “Mister Su was using Vuvuzela. It’s an anonymous messaging system developed at Harvard last year.”

  “Vuvu-what?” Kinsella asked.

  “At the soccer World Cup a few years ago in Africa, the crowds blew on these long plastic horns. They made a god-awful noise that filled the stadiums and everyone hated them. This message system took the same name because it’s designed to create a big, confusing mass of noise. It makes any single message almost indistinguishable.”

  “Su sent a message on this system?”

  “Here it is.” Haddad called up a screen with a few brief Chinese sentences.

  Kinsella leaned over and read, “Gao Rong is dead. Soon I will be dead. You must contact Turbo and the others.”

  Haddad blinked in surprise. “You speak Chinese?”

  “My Korean’s better.” Kinsella smiled. She liked to shock people with her knowledge of Asian languages, the result of assignments two decades ago as an immigration investigator on the Chinatown squad. She pointed at the address line. “It’s to a guy named Du An.” Then she spoke into the phone. “You heard that, Dom? Roula, can we figure out where this guy is?”

  “That’s where the noise comes in. Vuvuzela sends the message through three different routers. At each router, it sends out the message to a bunch of fake addresses, along with the actual address. So you can’t pick out the real address.”

  “Where are the addresses?”

  Haddad called up a list of server locations that scrolled over her screen. “This list tells us where the computers are, basically, for all the messages—the fake ones and the real one.”

  “How many are there?”

  “One hundred sixty-five.”

  “But only one of them is the real address of the guy Su wanted to contact?”

  “Yeah, the address of this Du An.”

  “Christ, how in the hell are we—?”

  Verrazzano broke into Kinsella’s thoughts. “Put the list in a file and send it to my phone.”

  Kinsella put her mobile on speakerphone. “Send the addresses to Dom.”

  Haddad tapped at her keyboard. “They’re on their way. But the addresses are all over the place. Look, there’s about”—she counted quietly as she glanced down the screen—“about one hundred in the US. They’re in big cities, Chicago, Seattle, and small towns I never heard of too. Same thing with the foreign addresses. That’s how the program works. Confusing information from a wide range of locations, so you can’t detect a pattern.”

  “We’re looking for a place with a big auto industry.” Verrazzano’s voice came through the speakerphone. “I’m reading over the list now.”

  Haddad and Kinsella scanned the addresses too. Todd squinted over their shoulders.

  “Motor companies. I don’t see an address in Detroit,” Haddad said.

  “There,” Verrazzano called. “Near the end of the list. Rüsselsheim.”

  “Where?” Haddad said. “Where’s that?”

  Verrazzano’s voice came down the line, terse and already seeming to be on the move to his next destination. “I spent some time near Frankfurt on an operation a while back. Rüsselsheim is just outside that city.”

  “So what is it? A little German village or something?”

  “Not a village. A town of about fifty, sixty thousand. There’s only one industry in Rüsselsheim.”

  “A car factory, I’ll bet,” Kinsella said.

  “It’s where Mister Jansen and Mister Trapp made their first car. Now the company has a big plant there. We need to find out if there’s a Du An working there.”

  Haddad went to work on her keyboard. “I’m checking with one of my guys at German Immigr
ation.”

  “Let me know as soon as you get anything,” Verrazzano said. “When you’ve done that, I want you to try to track a hitman who’s a known user of Krokodil, the Russian street drug.”

  “The killer in Detroit was a Russian?” Kinsella asked.

  “A user of a Russian drug. Maybe a guy who’d been in Russia recently enough to have become addicted to Krokodil and not died yet. It puts you in the ground pretty quick. Within a year or so. Check it out for me, Roula.” He hung up.

  As Haddad wrote her message to Germany, Kinsella went into the living room. She shut off the music. The suburban quiet enveloped her. She stared down at Su Li and his wife. A message for me, Verrazzano had said of the music. From someone who was “like” his daddy. She shuddered. She couldn’t tell if it was the silence of the midday neighborhood that chilled her or the fact that somehow this was all personal.

  CHAPTER 9

  Jahn drove into the rental car lot in the northeast corner of Detroit Metro Airport to pick up the government jet for their flight out of town. Verrazzano saw her looking across at him in the passenger seat, trying to catch his eye. Frisch napped in the back.

  “My husband was military too,” Jahn said.

  “Uh-huh.” He didn’t want to talk just then. He wanted to figure out the connections to Wyatt and trace a map in his head of what he knew now and what he would need to know to make everyone safe. Then he thought of the scars on Jahn’s cheek. The wounds that became scars had no doubt left her with the memory of that powerless moment. The hardest thing to face in life, whether you were a small child beaten by an angry parent or a Special Forces operative tied to a chair in a basement, was the realization that you were defenseless. He wanted to ask how it had happened. Instead, he said, “What branch did he serve in?”