by Matt Rees
“I need you to call off the operation.” Feng spoke in Chinese.
Wyatt responded in the same language. “You do not sound happy.”
“What do you know about happiness? Are you in control of the remaining engineers? Are you able to get them a message that they must not go ahead with the plan?”
The line was silent. Then Wyatt spoke again. “I can see to it that the engineers do not carry out the plan. Are you certain? This is your wish?”
“Do as you are told,” Feng bellowed.
When Wyatt’s voice came down the line, it showed no reaction to Feng’s anger and volume. This was the ultimate signal of the American’s superiority. He didn’t need to teach Feng a lesson, to demonstrate his power. He was utterly calm even when abused. “I shall do as you ask.”
“I’m not asking.”
“I shall do as you command.”
“Make sure that you do.”
“What else do you have to say?”
Feng wanted to weep. He wanted to tell Wyatt that no one loved him the way they should. He had taken thousands of images of men and women he had befriended and pasted masks onto their faces digitally, all because no face had ever turned to him with genuine love. “That is all. Report to me through the Silent Circle app.”
Wyatt hung up. Feng tried to replace the handset in the cradle. He couldn’t get it to fit. Twice it clattered onto the desk. The communications woman reached out and slipped it neatly into place, stifling a giggle.
Feng went to the lobby and jumped the line at reception. “I need to make a phone call. It’s urgent. For the trade negotiations.”
The middle-aged man in the brown round-collared jerkin behind the reception desk glanced toward the doors of the hotel. The antiglobalization punks waved placards and yelled their chants about the blood on the hands of the banks and the eco-fascism of Starbucks. The hotel worker was clearly going to be happy once the trade talks were done. He gave Feng the handset with a sigh. Feng dialed and waited. When the Swedish woman picked up, he said, “Let’s go now to the airport. You are still in the hotel? Come to the lobby in five minutes. No, I don’t have any packing to do. Five minutes, okay?” He handed the phone back to the reception clerk.
He went to the bar and sank a brandy in two swigs. He was finishing a second one when Maj found him. He wanted to weep into her breasts. But then he remembered that they were small, and anyhow, he was finished with honest emotion for now. “Let’s go to the airport.”
As they passed the reception desk, a woman with scarred cheeks was spelling out a name in her American accent. “F-E-N-G, first name Y-I.”
The head of the European Union delegation was over by the door. A dozen reporters shoved digital voice recorders at him, and a handful of photographers jostled to the front of the press. “There has been a major breakthrough,” the EU man said. “China and the US have agreed on some important issues, and I think in an hour or two we shall have a full agreement here.”
Feng Yi scuttled into the revolving doors with the Swedish woman. He hustled along the sidewalk past the barricades. The antiglobalization people saw a Chinese man in a suit, so they decided he must be linked to the talks. They started up a chant that rhymed Beijing and the ka-ching of a cash register. He ducked around the corner and came to the row of limos. He spotted Minister Ma’s Red Horizon limo and his driver. He stepped in front of the parked car, perching against the rear of the next long, black vehicle in the line. Ma’s driver glanced at him with contempt. Feng waved and smiled and took a quick photo of the license plate with his cell phone. Then he grabbed the Swedish woman’s hand and climbed over the barricade toward the taxi rank across the street by the State Opera House.
As they reached the rear of the crowd, a short, bearded man in an old Russian army tunic and sweat pants pointed a finger and frowned, trying to put a face to a name. Then he snapped his fingers and said, “Maj. It’s Maj, isn’t it?”
The Swedish woman averted her eyes and moved past him. Feng glanced back at the confusion on the face of the man in the tunic. The protester shook his head, as though he were disappointed in someone. In Maj.
“You know that guy?” Feng said.
Maj skirted around the first taxi in the line and got inside without speaking. Feng craned to see over the heads of the protesters into the lobby of the hotel. The thin-faced reception clerk pointed toward the door. The American woman with the scars headed quickly back out onto the street. Feng Yi threw two fifty-euro notes at the taxi driver as he dived into the backseat. “Go to the airport. Very fast. I will give you four more of those.”
The driver swung out toward the Ringstrasse. The American woman came onto the sidewalk, scanning the crowd. Then she saw Feng, and she ran toward Kärntner Strasse. She was heading for a taxi when Feng went around the corner.
He didn’t need to know who she was. She was looking for him. No one called his name because they wanted to be nice to him. From Minister Ma to Colonel Wyatt to the American trade delegation, they wanted to use him or to hurt him.
Maj touched her finger to Feng’s chin. He pressed the tip of her nose lightly and made a growling sound. “I have our tickets in my purse,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
“Do you enjoy hot weather?”
“If it’s hot, you will take your clothes off, right? So I like hot weather.” He pressed his mouth to her ear. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Africa? Dubai? Greece? Come on, where?”
“Wait and see.”
He glanced through the rear window of the taxi as they weaved along the Ring. He focused on all the cabs behind him, on their passengers. He didn’t see the American woman with the scars. It was going to be all right.
CHAPTER 25
Jahn stared from her taxi into the taillights of the cars ahead and wondered which one was taking Feng Yi away from her. She guessed where he would go. She told her driver to take her to the airport. Feng was in Vienna for trade negotiations, but the EU diplomat in the hotel lobby reported a final breakthrough in the talks. Feng was done here. Done with Americans, at least—the man at the reception desk of the hotel had informed her that Feng’s companion was a Swedish guest.
The terminal was packed with people stranded by the crash shutdown, all desperate to find flights now that the airports had opened again. Jahn sprinted down the long narrow shopping mall that connected the gates. There were imminent departures to London, New York, Rome, Zürich, and Bratislava. Jahn scanned them all quickly. The next flight was to Palma de Majorca, scheduled to leave soon from Gate 12. She pushed herself to go faster through the crowd. The Austrian Airlines flight flashed “Gate Closed” on the departures board. What was she going to do when she got there? She knew what she should do. But that would’ve been how she’d have handled it before. It was different now. She felt the weight of emotion and doubt and confusion, and it slowed her somehow even as she dashed between the travelers.
She burned down the last stretch of the concourse to the Palma flight. She was so tired. She hadn’t slept since the Special Agent in Charge woke her with the news of the mass crash on Monday. She had watched Verrazzano get a couple of hours sleep on the plane to Europe. But she had been in constant conversation with her husband in her head, ever since the Krokodil spoke his name at the rental car office at the Detroit airport, hissing that he knew where to find him. When Chris called from Beirut, he asked of her the very thing she had no right to give—his life for the lives of so many others. It was Verrazzano who gave her the resolution she needed. At the house south of Bonn, when she told him the story of how she got the ugly wound on her face, she sensed all his scars. She knew then that she must suffer the same way he had. She must reject the deal she made with her husband over the phone in the Jansen Trapp factory. She had betrayed everything she believed in for the sake of her husband. Everything but love. Well, love didn’t count for anything when thousands of lives were at stake and you were a f
ederal agent sworn to safeguard those lives. She had made a choice for which the entire world would condemn her—except Verrazzano. She sensed that he would pardon her if she ever had the chance to tell him what she had done. She wondered if she’d be able ever to forgive herself.
She reached the gate for the Palma flight. The Austrian Airlines staff were packing up their rolls of baggage labels and shutting down the computers. “Stop the flight,” she yelled.
A young man in an Austrian Airlines vest flicked back his blond bangs and half-smiled. “The flight has departed, madam. May I see your ticket? We can reroute you through—”
“There is a man on that plane who is an important material witness in an international terrorism case.” Jahn reached into her jacket for her FBI identity wallet. She showed it to the Austrian.
“Terrorism?” The blond man was quickly panicked. “He’s a terrorist?”
Jahn tried to figure out what Verrazzano would have done. Then she thought of her husband again, and her determination melted into despair. She could have been the best agent in the FBI. Now she was barely even able to believe that she was one of the good guys.
“Are they going to blow up the plane?” The Austrian Airlines man’s eyes were wide and innocent and horrified.
Quietly, Jahn said, “The person on board is a witness in a terrorism case. Not an actual terrorist.”
“Then the plane is safe?”
“Well, yeah. But look—”
“Let’s go and see the security chief.”
“We don’t have time.”
“Do I look as though I have the authority to turn a flight around?” He waved the roll of baggage stickers, a badge of his menial status.
“Show me the passenger manifest.”
The young Austrian flipped a couple of pages on his clipboard and turned it toward her. There was Feng Yi’s name, and beside it under the next ticket number was a Swedish passport holder. Jahn dialed Haddad. “Feng Yi is on Austrian Airlines flight 8873 from Vienna to Palma de Majorca, Spain. He’s in the company of a Swedish woman named Maj Sand. I couldn’t catch them before they got on the plane.”
“It’s going to Majorca? Bill Todd is in Majorca,” Haddad said.
“How in hell did he get there?”
“Bill can meet the plane and track Feng Yi.”
“Okay. Keep me informed.” She hung up. She pictured her husband in the torture rooms of Hezbollah. She had believed that if she saved him, she could heal him. But if she saved him this way, she’d be destroyed and he’d go down with her anyway. His voice came out of the silence. Not the brittle, dry whine she had heard over the phone from Beirut. It was the strong, loving voice that held her together when she was at her most despairing—back when he said, “There’s no one like you, Gina. Don’t ever change.”
The Austrian held out his phone to her. “The head of security is on the line,” he said.
She took the phone and hung up the call. “How soon could you get me to Palma?”
CHAPTER 26
The Czech patrolmen shut Verrazzano in the back of their squad car and left him there. Maybe they hoped he would simply bleed out and make a complicated situation less tricky. He used one of his socks to stanch the bleeding from the gunshot wound they had inflicted on his upper arm, then he ripped away the sleeve of his shirt and used it to bandage the gash in his deltoid. He thought about Frisch’s final words. Verrazzano hadn’t after all committed the terrible crime he had confessed to his wife and for which she had divorced him. He had not killed the Lebanese prime minister, had not doomed the Middle East to more years of war. For a moment, he thought that he could tell Melanie this news and she would forgive him. But it wouldn’t work. She’d only think he was lying again. He couldn’t go back to a time before his marriage died any more than he could return to the stairwell in Beirut before he killed Maryam Ghattas. Besides, Frisch hadn’t absolved him of that.
The street filled with ambulances and forensics teams and plainclothesmen. Eventually a squat figure in a cheap leather jacket climbed out of the kind of battered little BŠZ that used to make Czech cars and lawnmowers so hard to tell apart. The plainclothesmen gravitated toward him. They gestured at the squad car. The short man walked purposefully across the cobbles, lighting a cigarette.
On Verrazzano’s phone, Haddad updated him about the movements of Jahn, Kinsella, and Todd and of Feng Yi and his Swedish girlfriend. He tried to figure out the link to Palma. Everything was converging there. Wyatt killed the Irish banker at the Palma Aquarium. He felt the blood seeping into his bandage. Was he the shark right now? Or the chum, sinking through the murky water?
The Czech detective slipped into the back seat. He had Verrazzano’s ICE ID in his hand. He pushed the button on the overhead light and examined it. “Verrazzano, like the bridge?”
The bridge across New York Bay was deliberately misspelled with a single Z by a sixties bureaucrat because the name of the Florentine explorer who first passed through the Narrows in 1524 looked too Italian. Verrazzano refused to acknowledge any connection to the bridge. “No, like the first guy to sail into Narragansett Bay.”
“I thought that was Leif Ericson and the Vikings?”
“That’s unconfirmed. Not historical fact. The Italians got there first.”
“Bravissimo for them. Let’s stick with facts, then. What happened here?”
“I was shot by Czech policemen.”
“We have witnesses who’ll say that’s not what happened. We always do. So tell me what really happened, and I won’t punch you on your wounded arm.”
“Tell me who you are first.”
The man scratched his bald scalp and exhaled enough smoke to make the cop car feel like a nightclub in 1972. “I am Sliva. The guy who has to sort out the crap from the shit here.” He jerked his thumb toward the graveyard. “You want my rank and department? You’ll find out soon enough if you don’t cooperate fully. Now kindly explain why there is a dead Asian woman in the graveyard with bullet wounds to her chest and lacerations on her upper brow from a sharp blade. And continue from there to give me details of why there is also a Caucasian male a couple of meters from her who appears to have expired from a bullet that pierced his lung.”
“I’m going to be straight with you. First you have to know that the stakes are even higher than they seem.”
“For you the stakes are pretty high, that’s for sure. But okay, I’m impressed. Go on.” He took the window down a couple of inches and flicked his cigarette through the gap. He lit another, examining its tip thoughtfully.
“The dead guy in the graveyard is an American. He’s a former Special Forces operative who has been helping me in an investigation. The Asian woman is Chinese. She’s a witness and perhaps a suspect in the investigation.”
“The investigation of what?”
“Of the mass crash of Darien motor cars last week.”
“Names?”
“The American is Thomas Frisch. The Chinese woman is Jin Ju, also known as Julie.”
“Why are they here?”
“In Prague?”
The cop gave a slow nod. “Start with that. Then why are they in the graveyard? Then you can get to why they are dead.”
“Frisch abducted me because he knew I was coming to Prague to trace a Chinese computer engineer, Julie Jin. I believed Jin could lead us to the people behind the Darien crash. I knew Jin would eventually come to a loan shop on this street to convert a Bitcoin payment into cash. Bitcoin is a virtual currency—”
“This is central Europe, Special Agent Verrazzano. We have bigger mafias than you New Yorkers. I know what Bitcoin is. Proceed.”
“Julie Jin arrived to collect her money. I intended to apprehend her as she left the loan office. The situation was complicated because Frisch was armed, and I wasn’t. Right then we were surprised by a sudden attack from another source.”
“What source?”
“I can only assume it was someone associated with the Darien conspiracy.”
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“He killed Jin and Frisch? Who was this guy?”
“I don’t know.” There was only so much explaining Verrazzano was prepared to do for someone whose officer had put a bullet through his arm.
“You don’t know.” Sliva’s blink was long and disappointed. “Sure you don’t. Who died first?”
“Jin. But Frisch was shot first. The killer thought Frisch was dead. He went in pursuit of Jin. I took my weapon back from Frisch and was holding the killer when your officers tried to get me to drop my gun. Then they shot me, and the killer escaped.”
Sliva clicked his tongue. “Frisch was shot just down the street. There’s a bullet lodged in a Wolfwagen van and blood on the cobblestones. But he died in the graveyard.”
“He followed me there. He had great ability to withstand pain. He was trained for it. Any other man would’ve lain down and died where he was.”
“A real American Superman. What happened to Julie Jin’s head?” Sliva drew his finger across the point on his bald scalp where his hairline had once been.
“Some of the other Chinese computer engineers involved in the case have been scalped by their killer.”
“Scalped? Like in the Westerns?”
“Julie Jin is the only one to die and not lose her scalp.”
“Because you intervened just as the scalper was starting his work?”
“Because Tom Frisch showed up, still alive and holding a gun on the killer.”
“I’m sure her husband will be deeply grateful to you and Mister Frisch. I’m serious. The dead woman has a crucifix around her neck. We do open casket funerals here. A scalping would have made for a pretty miserable time at the church.”
The cop already knew Julie Jin was married. What else did he know? “She’s Catholic?”
“I assume she converted when she married—” Sliva took a notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. “When she married a guy named Dusan Salac.”
