by Fritz Galt
“How do you propose we do that?” Jake asked.
“Follow me.”
The lack of internal security at the facility was unnerving. It was one of the last remaining pre-9/11 places in America. But, Jake had to remind himself, this was a business, not a public service.
He followed Wu into a darkly lit office where workers hunched over computer screens. There was a lot to monitor in such a complex system, and the big problem seemed to be a pileup of packages headed for Boston. Maybe it was kids moving to college.
Wu leaned over the shoulder of an older man and stared at the rows and columns of symbols. “Which plane is going to China?”
“Hong Kong is Gate 31,” came the reply. “Shenzhen is Gate 32.”
The man never looked up.
Jake and Wu stole out of the command center.
“For that,” Jake said, “you needed a computer degree?”
“Hey. You just have to talk their language.”
“Speaking about talking their language,” Jake said. “Where the hell is Shenzhen?”
“Does it matter?” Wu said. “He said it’s in China.”
“C’mon. You’re Chinese,” Jake said. “Are you telling me you don’t know anything about China?”
“You’re Irish. Where’s Shannon?”
“You got me there. Speak Chinese?”
“Wo hui.”
At least Wu would be good for something.
Now to find their flight.
Jake looked for signs pointing to Gate 32 for the flight to Shenzhen. The gates weren’t labeled like a normal airline terminal.
At last he said, “Let’s just walk outside and find the plane.”
He stepped into the night. It was muggy, and the sweet smell of airplane fuel stung his eyes.
Wu followed him to the first line of planes. They looked intimidating from the ground.
“Watch out,” Wu said.
A tractor hauled past pulling a line of semi-circular metal containers. They seemed designed to fit neatly into the cabin where passengers would sit.
“There’s 32,” Jake said. A plane was being loaded at that very moment.
A giant K-loader lifted containers up to the plane and then rolled them into a large cargo door midway back in the fuselage.
“How are we going to get up there?” Wu asked.
Jake couldn’t believe he was walking among the cargo handlers without being stopped. He was going to make himself into cargo.
He watched the process for a minute. On the ground, handlers made sure parcels were strapped into place. Then they pulled a canvas curtain down over the entire open side of each container and attached it magnetically at the bottom.
Half the containers stood open and Jake could see inside them. Several were empty.
“We’ll ride in an empty container,” he said.
“But they’ll see us,” Wu said.
Jake had to agree. Loading the airplane looked like a precise process. Handlers weighed each container to help balance the aircraft. It didn’t look like he and Wu could just slip into a container without eventually being noticed.
Jake studied the cargo handlers. They were mostly college students, there for the busy night shift. What did they know about what was legal and what wasn’t?
“Follow me,” Jake said.
A young woman with straight red hair and a yellow hardhat was the last to inspect a container before it went up on the loader.
Jake pulled out his wallet and approached her displaying his FBI badge.
She had little time to glance away from her handheld computer where she marked the weight of the container in front of her.
“FBI undercover sting,” Jake told her. “We need to get on that aircraft immediately.”
That got her attention. “For real?”
Wu whipped out his marshal star. “Air Marshals,” he said.
That seemed to impress her more than the FBI badge did. “I can give you a ride on the lift,” she said.
“Understand me,” Jake said with a voice full of authority. “We need to ride this container straight to China.”
She nodded and returned to her calculations. “I’ll have to add in your weight.”
Jake was already pushing the canvas curtain open to look inside. There was plenty of room. “Then add our weight.”
Wu followed him in, and that’s the last they saw of the redhead, or of the airport, or of America.
Chapter 28
Jake and Simon Wu were beneficiaries of the U.S.-China trade imbalance. They were able to spread out in comfort inside the air cargo container on the near-empty flight back to China.
They could stand up to stretch and lie down to sleep. There were no seatbelts, but they wouldn’t be thrown far if there was a crash.
The only discomfort was a rocky ride. The plane hit turbulence over the Great Lakes, and Jake scraped the top of his head against the container. He sat down on the cold metal floor.
His thoughts returned to the innocent face of Stacy Stefansson. She looked so pretty eating a ribeye steak at the Outback. She had openly encouraged him to join her for breakfast in Charlottesville. She had been so carefree riding up to her home in the Appalachians. She had fallen asleep in bliss on the rowboat ride at Mountain Lake Resort.
How could she be working for the hackers?
He was left breathless with the scope of her deceit.
He tried to review all that she had said and done. How had he missed the clues? Was he blinded by her personality and beauty?
Even now, his reputation put through the wringer and hung out to dry, he felt a hole in his heart. No woman had ever had such a spontaneous and devastating effect on him.
He tried to see the defection through her eyes. She knew she would be leaving her parents and her hometown for good. What was she expecting in China? A hero’s welcome?
Any fortune, adulation or respect she might gain from the Chinese or the computing world could not replace what she would have left behind.
Did she expect to find some better version of him there?
He rubbed his arms as the cargo cabin grew chillier. He was disposable in her overall scheme.
She had been so calm. She must have been preparing for this for a long time. And she had just played with him and toyed with his heart.
The image of her smiling over the ribeye steak changed in his mind. The blonde hair gave him a chill. The red lips seemed painted on. Her admiring eyes were made of pure ice.
He was glad he was flying to China. It might be a big country, but he would find her and he would bring her to justice. The world would be a better place without her.
He could imagine the look on her face when he met up with her and exposed her to the world. Would she be so calm then?
He reflected back on the past week. There was only one time when he had seen through her veneer. He had heard her voice crack on the 9-1-1 recording as she reported the murder on the bike path. She sounded afraid, cautious, uncertain.
Ever since then, however, she was a profile in self-confidence.
What had changed her in such a short period of time?
“Simon.” He rose to his feet and kicked the deputy marshal.
Wu was nearly asleep. “Yup?”
“You know Stacy better than I do.” Jake didn’t mind admitting it now. “What would make her want to defect?”
“Beats me,” Wu muttered. “It’s not like defecting from North Korea. She has a lot to lose.”
Jake agreed. But, “You knew her before she took this drastic step. Did you have any inkling that she was contemplating or even capable of leaving it all behind?”
Wu lay motionless for some time. Jake thought he might have even fallen asleep. Then, “I never saw it coming.”
“What does she even know about China?” Jake said. He thought about how little he knew of the inscrutable people, their land and their ways.
“I suppose she dealt with Chinese programmers,” Wu said.
Jake didn’t think that was much of a connection. “Do you think she did this on a whim?”
“People weren’t getting murdered on a whim,” Wu said bitterly.
Jake could only agree. Stacy was part of some well thought-out scheme.
Wu’s boss Oscar Walsh had assigned Wu to keep an eye on Stacy and report her every move. Then Walsh had left his fingerprints on the weapons to incriminate Wu for murder.
Looking back, there was nothing accidental about the week. In all likelihood, Walsh was eliminating all those who knew about the hacking into the A root server, and he had probably made off with the sweet young woman who alone knew the password.
For all Jake knew, Stacy and Walsh were lovers, or on the same plane as hostage and captor.
The airplane dipped in a trough of air, and Jake grabbed for the curtain to keep his balance.
There was just one piece missing to the carefully orchestrated string of events. If hackers had initiated the attack, how had they targeted Chu’s company? And how had they found a willing partner in Walsh?
“Who came first, Walsh or the hackers?” he asked aloud.
“Huh?”
Jake explained. “Either Walsh came up with this plan and recruited hackers or hackers found him.”
“That’s an intriguing question,” Wu said. “But I’m half-asleep.”
That left Jake to work it out himself.
He lay back on the floor and tried to imagine what might make Walsh go bad. As head of the Witness Protection Program, Walsh knew a lot of people and a lot of stuff people had done. He had the key to pasts many people were trying to forget.
Did Walsh have something on Stacy Stefansson? Was there some dark secret he could threaten to expose? But Jake had been to Bluefield. That was her hometown. She couldn’t have been relocated there from a previous life.
Then Jake remembered Han Chu, slumped against the bushes along the bike path. It reminded him of why he’d been called in on the case in the first place.
Chu had a tattoo on his chest of a dragon’s head in a triangle. He was a man with a past.
Chu had been in a Triad gang that relied on extortion to achieve tremendous wealth.
It was hard to imagine the man with the flabby body as part of anything so violent and sinister. But that was most likely years in the past, and Chu had built up a successful business with lucrative government contracts.
Walsh would have been able to find out and exploit Chu’s past.
The blue image of the dragon remained fixed in Jake’s mind as the airplane made an adjustment in altitude and rose higher as it headed for the North Pole.
Jake would make that Triad symbol the starting point of his search in China. Once he found the Triad, he suspected he would find Stacy, too.
Chapter 29
Jake and Simon Wu were shivering violently when the UPS plane finally landed in China.
But when the cargo door opened, a flood of humid warmth washed over the cabin. Jake could hear the steady white noise of rain splashing against the airplane.
He peered around the canvas side of the container in which he and Wu stood. It was dark outside, just like when they had left Louisville. UPS was a real nighttime operation.
Voices carried up from the tarmac, and a K-loader rose with men onboard.
The first containers rolled off the airplane.
“How are we going to swing this?” Wu whispered.
“Let’s stay inside the container as long as possible. Maybe we can get past the ground crew.”
They squatted in the center of the container and tried to make themselves hard to see. Soon, a pair of handlers gripped the container and rolled it toward the cargo hatch.
Jake grabbed the side for balance.
Outside, a warm, greenhouse smell greeted him, much like he had experienced in Washington’s Botanic Garden. Not the desert room of the greenhouse, but the tropical jungle room.
The K-loader lowered them smoothly to the ground, and they landed with a jarring thud. Wheels splashed as the container they were in was pulled away from the aircraft.
They waited in the rain for another ten minutes, before Jake heard a series of chains snapping taut, and they were towed on a brisk ride out of the rain.
The sounds changed from the whine of jet engines to the clatter of air conditioning units. The air smelled like cardboard boxes.
They were inside the UPS sorting facility.
Voices met the tractor that pulled the string of containers. The words were barked and not in English.
“Let’s get out,” Jake said. He released the magnetic strip at the bottom of the canvas and raised the curtain.
The receiving area for parcels was semi-lit by widely spaced lights on a distant ceiling.
Jake and Wu stepped down to the cement floor and closed the container flap. Jake looked around for cover. Wet raincoats hung by the opening onto the airfield.
“Grab a coat,” he said.
The coat was damp inside. From the garlic smell, he decided that it was probably sweat. He pulled the hood over his head to hide his features, and looked around the facility.
Just as in Louisville, it was an enormous cargo hub.
There was a frenzy of activity under the row of airplanes as they were unloaded and then reloaded. A steady stream of containers exited the building for the planes. A brief glimpse at some of the boxes being pulled past revealed a commonality. Most were Apple products.
Wu had been listening to the Chinese conversation where the air cargo containers were entering the building. “Those are Customs inspectors,” Wu said. “They’re checking all the packages and pulling some aside for inspection.”
“Good thing we got out of the container,” Jake said. “How do you suggest we get out of this facility?”
“I’m sure pilots have to go through Immigration,” Wu said.
“I have my passport,” Jake said, feeling it in his back pocket. “But I certainly don’t have a visa.”
“I have a visa,” Wu said. “But I left my passport back in Virginia.”
“We’ll have to walk out with the ground crew,” Jake said, and looked for an exit.
Above the main floor, large windows faced down on the sorting facility. He could see office workers inside, none of them paying attention to the fast-moving parcels and bags of envelopes that hurtled along the complex, multi-layered system of conveyor belts.
“I changed my mind,” Jake said. “Let’s leave through the office.”
“They won’t recognize us, so they’ll report us,” Wu protested.
“Who to?”
Wu shrugged and followed Jake toward the metal staircase that led up to the offices.
It was a new facility, built to last a few decades at least. The cargo handlers they passed weren’t young like the college students Jake had seen in Louisville. But they worked every bit as hard. It seemed like a Chinese man with a smaller frame could handle just as heavy a container as a beefy American guy.
The Customs officials wore uniforms and carried around handheld computers. They seemed overwhelmed by the deluge of parcels entering and leaving China, and only pulled out one in every hundred to put in a holding area. There, a colleague looked it over, scanned in the label, checked his computer, and let it re-enter the stream of packages.
Jake’s leather soles clanged on the stairs as he mounted up to the well-lit offices. At the top landing, he ditched his raincoat and hung it over the railing.
“Who are we supposed to be now?” Wu said.
Jake had already pulled out his wallet and pointed to his badge. “Department of Homeland Security.”
“But that’s an FBI badge,” Wu protested.
Jake took a second look at it. It looked official, but was kind of elaborate with small wording. “I doubt if anybody’ll read the fine print.”
Wu didn’t protest.
Jake pulled the door open and felt a rush of cold air.
Nobody turned around from the computer mon
itors.
Jake led Wu in front of the windows and pointed out at the layers of conveyors.
The distribution center was highly mechanized and running smoothly, with delivery trucks backing up to one side of the building, and airplanes loading and unloading along the other side. While parcels zoomed to where they had to go, it took a watchful office staff to make sure that nothing went wrong.
“Good work,” Jake told Wu in a loud voice. “The packages meet Customs requirements.”
“Thank you, sir,” Wu said.
“You may proceed.”
Jake wasn’t sure if what they were saying made any sense, or if the Chinese office staff could understand what they were saying, but nobody questioned their presence.
“Let’s get a coffee,” Jake said, once again loudly enough for everyone to hear.
And he and Wu moved out of the room.
Jake and Wu headed outside as soon as they could and joined a group of workers getting off their shift.
They followed the workers out through a security gate and onto a crowded sidewalk where people waited for city buses.
The airport seemed slightly outside of town, and they needed to get somewhere more central.
“Follow me,” Wu said, and squeezed onto a city bus along with a horde of people.
Jake stood a foot taller than the other passengers, and bowed his head to hide his differentiating features. He had never seen so many Chinese all in one place. The air was a torrent of babbling voices, and all he saw was a sea of black hair.
Outside the window that was smeared with rain, he watched the UPS symbol blend into the headlights of traffic. The enormous facility disappeared behind another massive building with large, illuminated oriental characters.
How was he going to get anywhere in this country?
He felt dizzy. Maybe it was the long flight, or the lack of a comfortable place to sleep.
He looked around for Wu, who stood calmly latched to a vertical pole contemplating space. Jake edged closer to him and wouldn’t leave his side.
He took a deep breath and tried to relax.
