Her primary interest during the evening, per a set of informal orders given her by Reardon and Frank, was to scout the boat for any activity more closely related to Chinese national interests, rather than those of the commercial variety. Since seeing the Chinese soldier descend to lower levels when they’d first boarded, her intent was to descend to the bottom levels of the boat, if possible, just to see what was there and then maybe up to the top levels if she had enough time.
She made her way quickly back to the stairwell Xiang and she had ascended after boarding, and descended down to Level E.
The environment of the lower levels was one of narrow passageways, metal walls, and pipes. It was darker, as well, as the only light was provided by a series of bulbs hanging from the ceiling. As she progressed toward the center of the vessel along Level E, she noticed that her heels suddenly began reverberating on the floor. The floor beneath her had essentially disappeared, the beige tile now replaced by a steel walkway. She found she could see through the walkway to a metal passageway below.
She’d progressed a few more meters toward the center of the boat when a loud metallic clunking sound pierced the silence. Up ahead just a few feet, someone had lifted a latch cover and was now climbing up out of a room or hold of some kind at a lower level. It was a thin male dressed in brown military fatigues. Lee froze, uncertain what to do. Before she could react, the man had his torso out of the hatch and had spotted her. Lee stood, frozen, as the man scrambled up, never taking his eyes off of her.
“What are you doing down here?” the man said tersely in Mandarin.
At least I understand him, Lee thought.
“I’m sorry, I’m lost.” She struggled with her Mandarin, but she was certain her intended meaning was conveyed reasonably accurately.
“You’re going to have to go back. You can’t be down here.”
Lee, still frozen, was terrified the man was going to seize her and haul her back up top. But he merely waved at her to reverse her course, back along the walkway.
She reversed her steps back to the stairwell, went up to Level B, and tried again. Level B proved to be an easier trek as it was clearly used solely for passenger quarters, and she was able to traverse the entire length of the boat unnoticed down a well-lit corridor. At the end of the passageway, now at the rear of the vessel, she descended another set of stairs identical to the one at the front of the boat. Once down to Level E again, she paused and stood motionless, listening for sounds. She immediately heard a faint, generalized din.
Unwilling to risk being heard again, she reluctantly removed her high heels and began walking tentatively down the passageway. As had happened when she’d progressed from the front of the boat, the floor of the passageway gave way to where she was effectively walking on a metal walkway with a passageway open below her. As she progressed toward the center of the vessel, the noise gradually increased.
Eventually, the passageway below her was blocked by a steel partition, which rose clear up to the underside of the metal walkway. The partition had a small door at the center. The voices, the volume of which would’ve been considered low in normal circumstances, seemed very loud to Lee as they reverberated along the metal passageway.
She trod very carefully now. She could now see that on the opposite side of the partition was a narrow room with no ceiling that extended further along Level E toward the front of the boat. From her vantage point, she was now able to see inside. In the depths of the boat, there was a constant, low thrumming sound as well as a miscellaneous assortment of other metallic sounds that reverberated intermittently. Despite this interference, she could hear a number of individual voices speaking softly in Mandarin. The voices were coming from the room below.
Lee hiked her dress up, carefully dropped down onto her hands and knees, and began crawling slowly forward. Appearing gradually into view were two rows of metal desks with computers on them. There were Chinese soldiers in fatigues, some male and some female, sitting at the desks. Many of them had earphones on and were speaking into small microphones clipped into the earpieces. It appeared to be a communications center. On the wall was a white marker board with some Chinese characters written on it with a black marker.
Two male soldiers were walking slowly around the room from desk to desk. They seemed to be the managers, assisting the other soldiers at their desks as problems arose. Further down, toward the center of the room, she could see a smaller room—closet-like in size—with a window and a door that was slightly ajar. The light inside was turned on.
She continued slowly forward on her hands and knees. She’d progressed as far as she dared, until her torso was now beyond the partition, hovering directly over one of the desks where a young female soldier was at work. The soldier was talking into a mouthpiece and typing quickly at her computer keyboard, oblivious to Lee’s presence.
Lee positioned herself near the edge of the steel walkway and, reaching underneath, attached a tiny camera and microphone. According to Reardon and Frank, the clay-like substance on the device would bond to the metal, creating a strong, permanent seal. Having accomplished her mission, she backed out slowly, still on her hands and knees. Once clear of any direct visual line with any of the soldiers, she stood up again, walked back to the stairwell, put her heels back on, and made her way back up to level 3 to rejoin Xiang.
New York City
Monday, February 16, 11:16 p.m. EST
Sonya Burghoff sipped at a small cup of coffee and closed her eyes. Having been confined indoors for the past several hours and with little room for any loss of focus in her concentration, she found the constant movement and noise of the city around her to be a little overwhelming. In her fatigued state, it was giving her a headache and she found that it made her borderline nauseous.
“How’s Mr. McGee doing today?” Burghoff asked, her eyes still closed.
The reply came in the form of a gruff male voice. “Same as I’s a doin’ yesterday.”
“Still feelin’ like a tired, wretched, beat-up old dog?”
Burghoff opened her eyes just long enough to turn to her right and glance at A.J. McGee, a slender, aging black man with short gray hair dressed in a T-shirt, aged olive-green denim pants, and a heavy, lined gray winter coat.
McGee choked out a low growl from his throat that Burghoff lost amid the low rumble of a motorcycle traveling along 42nd Street. McGee laughed, raspy from heavy use of cigarettes.
“It’s ’cause I am a tired, wretched, beat up old dog,” McGee said. “Always have been, always will be.”
Burghoff nodded. “Say hello to Janice for me.” Janice was McGee’s wife and co-owner, alongside McGee, of the apartment complex she was currently residing in.
McGee’s eyes lit open so she could see his whites. “Back already?”
Burghoff exhaled and watched her breath fade into the New York smog. “Yeah, just finished takin’ a short break.”
“You study too much,” McGee said. “Too, too much.”
“Tell me about it,” Burghoff said. “You enjoy the rest of your evening. I gotta get back up. It’s freezing out here.”
“Don’t study too hard.”
Burghoff heard only the first part of McGee’s words, as she’d already turned and opened the front door to the complex. But she knew what he meant. She didn’t need to worry about that, however, since she wasn’t really a student anyway. At least, not anymore. Being a student was the easiest and most convenient cover for her current role.
Burghoff made her way up five flights of narrow stairs, coffee in hand. On the top floor, she turned left and made her way down a narrow hallway until she reached room fifty-four. She pulled out her keys, unlocked the door, and entered into the little apartment.
Terry Phong sat with his legs underneath one of four portable desks in the room, right leg crossed over the left. He wore a pair of headphones with thick ear pads on them. The thickness helped to cut out the cacophony of sounds from the street below. He sat with both hands folded gently
on the desk, his head tilted slightly to his right as it always was when he was engaged in his work.
Burghoff slid her winter coat off, walked over to the table to the left of the one Phong was at, and placed her coffee on the table. Phong glanced toward her, greeting her with a slight wave of his right hand.
Phong slid his left ear pad off and nodded toward her. “I think we’ve got something interesting. Take a look.”
“Let me see,” Burghoff said. She focused her attention on one of five twenty-inch TV monitors sitting on the tables.
Phong pressed a button on a remote control, which triggered the film to speed up and reverse. The movements of a handful of Chinese men and women in military fatigues sitting in front of computer consoles began twitching and twisting as the film played rapidly in reverse. Phong allowed it to backtrack until a point where one of the supervisors rose from a seat at a desk located near the entrance to a small office.
“This man here,” Phong said, pointing to a man who’d stood and walked to a white marker board, “ranks as a major in the People’s Liberation Army. General Fang is his name. You see him here—”
“Yes, go on.”
“General Fang is writing something on the marker board.”
Burghoff watched the monitor in silence as Fang scribbled some more characters and then drew a circle around them. She pointed at the characters within the circle and said, “That says ‘black dragonfly’ doesn’t it? The word in the circle?” Burghoff had been trained in Mandarin, but she wasn’t on par with Phong, who was fluent.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Fang made five lines radiating outward from the circle, like rays from a sun. He then appeared to write another group of Chinese characters at the empty end of each line.
“What’s Fang writing at the end of the lines?” Burghoff asked.
Phong was straining with his eyes to see the writing. “They’re phrases or, rather, names of locations, I think. Dragon’s Nest One. Dragon’s Nest Two, and so on. Five of them total.”
They watched Fang for a while longer as he continued writing. He drew four more diagrams in a similar manner along the whiteboard: a series of Chinese characters with a circle around them and some lines radiating outward.
“What’s the writing inside the circles in those other diagrams?”
“Blue Chimera, Jade Shark, White Lion, and Green Rabbit,” Phong said. “Some kind of color and animal naming scheme.”
“What is it that they’re describing, do you think?”
Phong shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe names of locations, or possibly entire operations. Not enough info to tell.”
After writing the last of the diagrams, Fang disappeared from camera view.
Phong clicked a button on the remote, bringing the camera back to real-time. Fang was nowhere to be seen. “He still hasn’t resumed writing.”
A few seconds later, General Fang reappeared standing in front of the Black Dragonfly diagram. Under the diagram, he wrote the words ‘Brooklyn Capital,’ followed by four names: Wu Wencong, Fu Yong, Leo Liu, and Yang Dongping. Upon finishing, he disappeared from the camera again. Phong and Burghoff waited a few minutes longer for Fang’s return, but he didn’t reappear.
“I’ll update Reardon,” Burghoff said.
New York City
Tuesday, February 17, 7:15 a.m. EST
Cynthia Green mentally shifted gears as she shortened the length of her step and forged onward from a flat area of the road into a slight incline. She felt her body slightly de-emphasize some muscles in favor of others to account for the incline. She instinctively checked around her in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arc, a subconscious security precaution that she completed routinely. There was nobody else around. Nothing to worry about here. Not that this was surprising. She’d been running this route through Prospect Park in Brooklyn for eight months and had never had any real concerns. Therefore, there really was nothing to concern herself with, and the information barely registered in her mind. It was not information useful for any reason beyond the here and now, so she let it slip out of her mind without a second thought.
She came up to the top of the rise and extended her stride again as the road flattened out. She checked her runner’s watch. 7:15 a.m. She’d approached her current position from the south along Well House Drive and then followed a smaller trail, which took her to the center of the park. She’d wound her way through a heavily wooded section of the park where the trees grew right up alongside the trail. She glanced skyward briefly as the trail began to open up into the center of the park, which had been cleared of timber. She did another quick three-hundred-and-sixty-degree search of her surroundings to check for any other people in the near vicinity. That was when something off to her right, along the timberline, caught her eye. She retraced her vision back to that spot and spied a knot of color unnatural to the forested surroundings.
As she approached and her eyes adjusted to the morning light, the colors took the form of a human lying in a tangle between two trees at the edge of the clearing. She couldn’t determine the sex since whoever it was had a black bandana wrapped around his or her head. The person was wearing runner’s clothing: a red polyester runner’s jacket, black running pants, and running shoes. As she approached to within ten feet, she saw that it was a male. He wasn’t moving. At all. She circled around to a different viewing angle and saw that his head was tilted grotesquely in an impossible position and his neck was dark purple and black in color.
Green involuntarily took several steps back, trying to control her revulsion, and hurriedly pulled a can of Mase from a waistpack. No telling who may be around. She retched next to one of the trees. Get yourself under control, Cynthia. She ran away from the body, to another part of the clearing, where she pulled her cell phone out and dialed emergency services.
New York City
Tuesday, February 17, 8:04 a.m. EST
During his time with the New York branch of the FBI, Cardenas had grown fond of the Brooklyn borough and, as a result, preferred to volunteer for duties there whenever he had a chance. So it was that he was located closest to Jonas Craig’s body and was the first FBI agent to arrive on the scene.
The park was quiet this time of morning, save for a lone woodpecker knocking away somewhere off in the forest. The leafless trees cast long shadows across the park as Cardenas made his way along the trail and into the clearing where the body lay. During a winter storm, winds had deposited snow in small pockets throughout the immediate area. He’d left his sedan parked along an access road he’d used to gain entrance to the park.
Cardenas flashed his FBI badge to NYPD Officer Milsap, the only police officer that had beaten him to the scene.
“G’ morning,” Milsap said as Cardenas approached. They shook hands.
“Morning,” Cardenas said. “How long have you been here?”
Milsap checked his wristwatch. “Oh…about twenty-five minutes or so.” Milsap had already dutifully marked a perimeter around the body.
“We need to maintain a very strict perimeter around the body for the time being,” Cardenas added, for emphasis. He was obliged to establish his authority earlier, rather than later. “Portions of the grass and dirt are still wet from the snow, so the perp or perps may have left footprints in the immediate area.”
Milsap grunted a quick “Affirmative.”
“Were you near the body at all?” Cardenas asked.
“Just once, when I first arrived.”
Cardenas nodded. “I need you to stay away from the body. Help me keep other pedestrians away until the forensic team arrives.”
“Of course.”
Cardenas slipped on a pair of white rubber gloves and proceeded carefully toward the body. He immediately found two separate sets of footprints leading to and away from Craig’s body
He could see how twisted around Craig’s head was as the body lay face down. He muttered dios mio under his breath, more for himself than anything else. It wa
s small things such as this, Cardenas thought, that kept a murder investigator sane.
He reached down and pulled a bit at the collar of Craig’s jacket. Craig’s neck had turned a dark purple where he’d been strangled. Whatever instrument had been used, it had severely cut through his neck to the point that one of his vertebrae was exposed. It had been a hell of a struggle.
Cardenas noticed a flash of white from within Craig’s jacket. He carefully unzipped the zipper, being careful not to move the body from its position. When he finished, he slid a folded piece of paper out. On it was a message very similar to, if not a duplicate of, the one on Halberstom’s body.
TO CHARLIE MONROE,
COPY AND DROP CHAPTER 10 SUBCHAPTER D THROUGH CHAPTER 14 SUBCHAPTER Q OR THE INFORMATION THEREIN INTO THE LINK IMMEDIATELY OR ANOTHER WILL PERISH. PDF FORMAT PREFERRED
www.http://globalfront.hk/56233252212478578744123329525856471
Cardenas re-folded the paper and slipped it into a plastic bag as he carefully stepped to a position away from Craig’s body. He’d call Reardon with the news and wait for the Evidence Response Team and other reinforcements to arrive. Even as he stood there, he wondered if there’d been another abduction elsewhere in the city.
Chapter 23
New York City
Wednesday, February 18, 7:01 a.m. EST
Supervisory Agent John Rose accelerated his black Corvette ZR-1 eastbound on Highway 3. The car’s movement felt smooth in the milky morning blackness as it hurtled toward Manhattan. He reached forward and turned the air down a notch. Underlying the sound of the wheels on the concrete was the low rumble of a deep voice emitting quietly from the stereo, barely audible. It was a New York City station, and it was currently providing a rundown of local politics. The political discussion held only minor interest for Rose, which was why he’d turned the volume down.
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