The second perimeter

by Mike Lawson

  “What’s that mean?” Smith said to DeMarco. “Does that mean Li Mei’s dead or she’s disappeared?”

  “How would I know?” DeMarco said.

  “Emma, is Li Mei dead?” Smith said. Emma didn’t respond. Smith shook her again. “Emma! Emma! Wake up! Is Li Mei dead?”

  “Leave her alone,” DeMarco said. “We can try again in the morning.”

  Smith turned to the doctor. “Is there something you can give her to wake her up?”

  “Fuck you, Smith,” DeMarco said. “You can see by her arms that she’s been pumped full of shit. You’re not giving her—”

  “Your friend is correct,” the doctor said. “Until we get the tox screen back, sir, I’m not giving her anything. And that’s final.” For a guy with a cartoon tie, he sounded damn serious.

  “How long will the tox screen take?” Smith said.

  “Four hours, if we rush it.”

  “Well rush it. This is a national security issue.”

  “Which nation’s security are we talking about?” the doctor said, smiling slightly.

  “Fucking Canadians,” Smith muttered. He handed the doctor a card. “Look, just call me as soon as the tox screen is complete or if she wakes up. Okay?”

  “I’ll do that,” the doctor said.

  “Come on, DeMarco, let’s go get something to eat and you can tell me what the hell you did.”

  “Wait a minute,” DeMarco said. He pulled out his cell phone and called Fat Neil back at the motel. “I’ve got, Emma,” he said. “She’s okay but she’s in a hospital recovering.”

  “Thank God,” Neil said. “So she was at the address I gave you.”

  “No, Neil, she wasn’t at the address you gave me. At the address you gave me there was an old Chinese woman who I scared the crap out of. But never mind that. I picked Emma up at a Shell station on the King George Highway in Surrey. She walked there from wherever she was being held. Look at all those rental addresses again, and see if there’s one close to the gas station.”

  “Can’t Emma tell you where she was?”

  “No. She’s all drugged up.”

  “Okay. I’ll see if we can find something. What’s the zip code there?”

  “How the hell would I know, Neil! Look it up!”

  “Who were you talking to?” Smith asked DeMarco.

  “Somebody who’s been helping me.”

  “You’ve been a real busy beaver, haven’t you, DeMarco?”

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO IHOP near the hospital, but they did find a Denny’s. It seemed lately that DeMarco had eaten nothing but chain-restaurant cooking and he was getting damn tired of it. While Smith was eating eggs and a piece of cow advertised as steak, DeMarco told him what had happened.

  “You pointed a shotgun at this poor woman?” Smith said, laughing.

  “Yeah. She was damn lucky I didn’t kill her, I was so keyed up.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Smith said.

  “I did call you! I got your voice mail.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Well you could have called…”

  DeMarco’s cell phone rang.

  “There are two addresses near the gas station that fit the profile,” Neil said.

  “I’m not too sure about the profile anymore,” DeMarco said, “but give me the addresses.” He motioned for Smith to give him a pen and wrote the numbers on a napkin. He hung up on Neil and said to Smith, “Tell RCMP to check out these two addresses, right away. One of them might be the place where they were holding Emma.”

  “What makes you think so?” Smith asked. DeMarco ignored him and ate his French toast. With enough maple syrup anything was edible.

  Ten minutes later, Smith had convinced the Canadians to dispatch SWAT teams to the two houses to see if Li Mei and her companions were at one of them. Thirty minutes later, about the time they were finishing their meal, Smith received a call.

  “They found the place,” he told DeMarco. “Two guys were inside. Dead. One of them had a piece of glass jammed into his carotid artery. The other guy had been shot in the head. That Emma. She’s somethin’ else. They also found a bunch of videotapes. They looked briefly at one of them. They’re tapes of Emma being interrogated. I gotta get over there and pick up those tapes. Right away. God knows what’s on ’em.”

  “What about Li Mei?”

  “No sign of her. I told the Canadians to grab all the tapes, leave the bodies, and get out of sight and watch the house. If Li Mei comes back they’ll pick her up.”

  57

  Emma, wake up,” DeMarco said.

  “Go away,” Emma said.

  Her voice sounded much stronger. The doctor said they’d found lots of different chemicals in her body— sodium amytal, scopolamine, thiopental sodium, amphetamines, and a few things that their lab didn’t recognize that might be Chinese herbs or designer drugs— but nothing that required them to take any immediate medical action. Depending on the amount she’d been given, one of the drugs could cause liver damage, the doctor said, but it was too soon to tell. She’d need to have her liver tested every month for the next six months.

  “Emma, wake up,” DeMarco said again, this time giving her shoulder a little prod.

  “If you don’t get away from me, Joe,” Emma mumbled without opening her eyes, “I’ll break your big nose.”

  “Emma, we have to talk about Li Mei.”

  “Joe, I swear…”

  Emma suddenly sat up in bed. She was still groggy but she was now remembering what had happened to her. “Where am I?” she said.

  “A hospital.”

  “I can see that. What city?”

  “Vancouver,” DeMarco said. “Surrey, actually.”

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Fourteen hours.”

  “Well, it wasn’t enough. Now get out of here while I go to the bathroom and wash up.”

  “I better make sure you can walk,” DeMarco said.

  Emma arched an eyebrow. “It feels like I’m wearing one of those hospital gowns that’s split up the back. If you look at my ass, I swear I’ll break your nose. I mean it.”

  DeMarco wondered what she’d do if she knew that he’d seen her naked.

  “I promise I won’t peek,” he said.

  Emma pushed back the bed covers and slowly lowered her feet to the floor while DeMarco held on to one of her arms. She took a couple of steps and said, “I’m fine. Now get out of here and come back in…Oh, my God! Does Christine know what happened to me? Does she know I’ve been found?”

  “Yeah,” DeMarco said, and he explained.

  After Emma was kidnapped, DeMarco had been preoccupied with finding her and it hadn’t occurred to him to call Christine and tell her what had happened. The media had, of course, become aware of the debacle in Chinatown, and the U.S. and Canadian governments were both putting the best spin they could on what had happened and why, but Smith and the FBI had decided not to go public with Emma’s kidnapping for a number of primarily self-serving reasons. But then Christine had called DeMarco after she hadn’t heard from Emma in several days, and he’d been forced to tell her what had happened. He’d emphasized that a large number of highly trained people were doing everything they could to get Emma back, and he had called her every day after that to keep her apprised of what was happening, sounding as optimistic as he could, knowing that no matter what he said it wasn’t going to make her feel any better. While Emma had been sleeping, he’d called her to tell her that Emma was safe, and as Christine sobbed in relief, DeMarco had wondered what it would be like to be loved that much.

  “Well, give me your cell phone,” Emma said. “I need to call her right now. Oh, and I’m hungry too. Get me some food.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” DeMarco said. He could tell she was recovering rapidly.

  * * *

  “I REMEMBER KILLING the two men,” Emma said. “Li Mei called them Bao and Loc. I don’t know if those were their real names or not.”

  “They w
ere,” DeMarco said. “Loc Zhongyu and Bao Jiang,” he added, stumbling over the pronunciation of the Chinese names. “They were a couple of lowlifes— cousins— who freelanced for the Asian gangs in Vancouver.”

  Emma was sitting up in bed, and her hair was combed. She still looked tired and her face was pale and painfully thin. Her cheekbones were like knife blades. But she was alert and she was mad.

  “Anyway, I remember killing them,” Emma said. “But I can’t remember too much else. I know Li Mei interrogated me, but I don’t know what I told her.”

  “Smith said they found tapes in the house where you were being kept.”

  “They found the house?”

  DeMarco filled her in on how they’d found it.

  “Neil’s here?” she said.

  “Yeah, and his assistant, that little guy Bobby with the dreadlocks.”

  “Damn it,” Emma said. “Neil will never let me forget this.”

  “Anyway, they found the house, the two guys you killed, and a bunch of tapes. But Li Mei wasn’t there.”

  “I think Li Mei was trying to contact the Chinese,” Emma said. “She was going to convince them to transport me to China to finish the interrogation. She may have given them a transcript of what I told her. If she did, that’s not good at all.”

  “Do you have any idea what you might have told her?”

  “Not really. I remember some things, but it’s all scrambled inside my head. Sometimes I babbled like a…like a magpie for hours. We have to find her.”

  “Right now you have to recover.”

  “No, we have to find her. The last time we talked, she said she still had John Washburn’s files and the stuff Carmody got from the shipyard. We have to find her before she turns all that over.” Emma paused then added, “If she hasn’t turned it over already.”

  “Smith’s looking for her, Emma. So are the Canadians and the FBI. You don’t have to do anything right now.”

  Emma was silent for a minute. “Did Smith give you the background on Li Mei?” Emma said after a moment.

  “Yeah.”

  Emma nodded. “This whole thing here in Vancouver, kidnapping me and torturing me, that was as much about revenge as intelligence collection. It was about humiliating me, disgracing me.” Emma sighed. “Joe, she’s insane. Literally. She’s been driven over the edge. And she’s going to come after me again.”

  “Don’t worry. Smith will—”

  “I’m not worried. I want her to come after me. It’s the only way we’ll get her.”

  Emma shook her head sadly. “Ah, Joe,” she said. “We screwed her up so badly. We just destroyed her, and it didn’t have to be that way. I feel so bad for her.”

  58

  It’s not too bad, Emma,” Smith said.

  Smith and Emma were sitting in a small visitors’ lounge down the hall from Emma’s hospital room. Emma was wearing a borrowed robe and sitting in a wheelchair. The wheelchair wasn’t necessary but Emma had decided to use one in case anyone was watching.

  “I’ve got six people transcribing the tapes and they’re almost done. What they’re telling me is, you just babbled about half the time. You told her about operations that happened twenty years ago and mixed those up with ops that happened five years ago. The good news is, since you’ve been retired almost three years, you didn’t have anything too current to give her.”

  Smith didn’t know that Emma hadn’t completely retired, but all she said was, “Plus, my last five years, I was mostly on Mid East ops.”

  “Yeah,” Smith said. “And sometimes you lied, whether intentionally or not, we couldn’t tell. I really got a kick out of you telling her we used carrier pigeons for sending messages. They’ll probably wipe out the entire pigeon population in China when they hear that.”

  “So I didn’t give her anything vital?” Emma said.

  “I didn’t say that. I said it wasn’t too bad. So far we’ve picked up three things, things that if the Chinese heard those tapes and interpreted what you said correctly, could cause problems. We got one guy out of the submarine base at Qingdao last night just in case and we’re disbanding a team in Beijing that we’ve had in place for almost a decade.”

  Smith took a sip from a bottle of ice tea he was drinking and grimaced. “I hate this fruit-flavored ice tea,” he said. “I go to the damn vending machine down the hall there, and I can’t read the whole label on the bottle. But I figure, tea’s tea, so I push the button and I get this raspberry-flavored shit. Christ, why do they have to screw everything up?”

  “Bill,” Emma said, her impatience showing. “What else?”

  “Well, there really isn’t anything else. We listened to the tapes real quick, and now we’re transcribing them so we can go over them in detail. You’re going to have to work with us on that, Emma. You know, review the transcripts and see if you can tell us where you lied and where you didn’t.”

  Smith paused. “She really wasn’t a very good interrogator. Certainly not a pro. If she had been, she’d have known that it’d take at least a couple of months to get what she wanted, to duplicate questions and cross-check your answers. And we think she over-doped you. A lot. You’re really jacked-up on some of those tapes. A pro would have used smaller doses but taken longer to debrief you. Li Mei knew the basic technique— what drugs to use, sleep deprivation— but she didn’t have the experience. Or the patience.”

  “Do you think she could have transcribed the tapes and given the transcripts to the Chinese?”

  Smith shook his head. “We don’t think she had the time to transcribe them and we didn’t find a computer or a typewriter in the house. But she may have made duplicates and we’re pretty sure one tape is missing. She recorded the dates and times of the interrogation sessions on the tapes, and there’s a gap. So she may have taken that tape with her to impress her bosses, to show them what a gold mine she had in you.”

  “Goddamnit,” Emma said, hoping that the missing tape didn’t contain anything vital. “Where do you think she is right now?”

  “If I had to guess,” Smith said, “I’d say she’s out there in the wind. I went to see the head spook at the Chinese embassy while you were getting your beauty rest, and I don’t think they have her. If they did, this guy would have looked, you know, relieved. But he just looked frazzled, like his bosses have been screaming at his ass every day to put this thing back in the box. So, it’s just a guess, but I think she’s still on the loose.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” Emma said. “She could quit while she’s ahead, but she won’t. She could give them Carmody’s and Washburn’s files and go back home and take her medicine but—”

  “Hah,” Smith snorted. “Her ‘medicine’ is going to be a bullet in the back of the head, that bullshit she pulled in Chinatown.”

  “There’s that, but there’s something else. Bremerton was Li Mei’s chance to restore her reputation, to become a star once again in the Chinese intelligence community. But she failed. Again. She had to close down Carmody’s operation in Bremerton prematurely because of me and then we caught Washburn before she could get him out of the country. So she was going to give them me to make up for all that, but now she’s failed at that, too.”

  “It’s like you’re her…what’s the word? Nemesis,” Smith said and laughed.

  “You may think you’re joking, but that’s exactly what she believes. I’m the source of everything bad that’s ever happened to her. She’s not going to leave until she kills me or kidnaps me again.”

  “Maybe,” Smith said, “or maybe she’ll just decide to run for her life.”

  “No, Bill, she’s not going to run away. That’s not in her makeup.”

  “Am I sensing that you have a plan?” Smith said.

  “I do. We’ll tell the newspapers that a woman my age was found wandering along the King George Highway, out of her mind, no memory, no ID, and she’s here at this hospital. We’ll make it sound like it’s just your typical lost lunatic, no big thing, but Li Mei will
realize it’s me because of the location and maybe she’ll bite.”

  “I like it,” Smith said.

  “But your team is going to have to be invisible. She may not be an interrogator but she’s a hell of a field agent. She proved that when she snatched me and killed those agents in Chinatown. She’ll spot the guy lurking in the janitor’s uniform, Bill, and she’ll get by him— or kill him.”

  “What do you shoot these days, Emma?” Smith asked, his eyes bright behind the lenses of his glasses.