Wesley’s eyebrows slowly furrowed as his face grew dark—darker, angrier, more hateful than it had yet appeared. “You need to leave.”
FIFTEEN
“By the end of the interview, that guy wanted to rip your eyes out,” Zhang said as they sat on the edge of the wide steps, away from the crowd, at the Iwo Jima Marine Corps Memorial, back across the river in Arlington. “I figured he might try to stab you through the heart with his pencil.”
“The thought may have crossed his mind,” Severin said, constantly scanning the area, scanning the faces of the other people at the memorial, doing his best to detect any surveillance.
“Did you notice that his office was on the opposite side of the building from where the State Department flunky jumped us on the sidewalk yesterday?”
“That wasn’t Wesley’s office.”
“You don’t think? Well then it’s probably at least on the same side of the building, assuming they cluster offices of the same unit close together.”
“Maybe.”
“He was certainly evasive.”
“But evasive because he’s the killer, or because he’s horrifically embarrassed about being cuckolded?”
“He definitely knew about his wife and Keen.”
“Yes, he did.”
“So we now know he had the motive,” Zhang said. “And being in China on a legitimate U.S. government mission? What a great opportunity.”
“But when did he have the opportunity exactly? Let’s think this through. He got out of the van many miles from Qingdao. That much we know for certain. But then what? He lucks out and hitches a ride to Qingdao Airport to catch his wife and Keen, and then?”
“And then Kristin and Keen miss their flight to Shanghai, as expected. Then Wesley is all apologetic and talks his way into sharing their cab back to the Shangri-La Hotel. But they don’t go to the hotel. Remember, he speaks Chinese and they don’t. So maybe he bribes or coerces the taxi driver into taking them somewhere else. Maybe he even talks Kristin and Keen into going somewhere. Let me show you this beautiful park I visited when I was here investigating mung bean exporters last year. Cab drops them off somewhere and he kills them.”
“With what?”
“His bare hands. A length of wire. I don’t know.”
“Overpowers both of them?”
“Knocks Keen out first, with a cheap shot, rock to the head or whatever. Takes him out by surprise, so he only has to worry about overpowering Kristin. Kills both of them, then buries the bodies in a recently plowed farm field.”
“Qingdao is a major city.”
“Throws them in a dumpster then. Tosses them off a wharf and into the ocean.”
“Without being seen? In a city of 9 million?”
“In a dark alley. In an empty parking garage. On an abandoned pier. I don’t know.”
“Without the bodies ever being found?”
“That sort of thing happens in the U.S. all the time. Point is, it’s feasible.” Not getting any further challenge from Severin, he went on. “So he’s our guy, right?”
“He’s certainly at the top of my list of suspects for the moment,” Severin said.
“What about the other theories Wesley threw at us?”
“They look like red herrings from where I sit. Smokescreen. Like you said earlier, do you really think the company van driver killed them for a couple of passports, credit cards, and loose change?”
“Maybe the van driver’s mother needed medicine he couldn’t afford,” Zhang said. “And if Wesley did it, then who used the credit cards?”
“Wesley could have taken the wallets and passports off the bodies and then left them in plain sight where someone random was likely to pick them up and try to use or sell them. All to make it look like a robbery. To throw us off. And as for his suggestion that someone from YSP killed them … .” Severin shook his head. “No matter how badly the investigation may have gone for them, it seems even more improbable that they would have done something as stupidly bold as bump off two U.S. government employees who were in China on an official mission. People who were, technically speaking and in the diplomatic sense, there at the invitation of the Chinese government. Too much risk. And for what? A difference in their tariff rate of a few percentage points? I don’t think so.”
“Yeah. And what was with the I’m not at liberty to say comment when you asked him why he didn’t want you to use his name on the telephone?”
“Posturing. More red herring bullshit. Maybe trying to muddy the waters by getting us wondering whether there is some sort of espionage angle here. Probably B.S.”
“So it doesn’t bolster your concern that somebody might be surveilling us?”
“No,” Severin said, only half believing it. “Wesley is full of crap. As for the surveillance, I’m probably imagining things. I probably miscounted the lines on my notepad. I don’t know.”
“So you don’t think there could be something bigger afoot that we’re clueless about?”
“There could be. But I’m tending doubt it,” Severin said.
“What about the shooting death of Elaine Danielson’s secretary, Tyreesha Harris? Just a coincidence?”
“In Anacostia? That neighborhood’s a war zone, if memory serves. Sad though it may be to say so, a shooting there can hardly be called suspicious.”
“Okay, but what about that State Department oaf who accosted us on 14th Street?”
“Again, probably Wesley’s buddy from the local chapter of the Oprah Book Club, called in for a favor. Believe me, if we’d stumbled into something of a sensitive nature, they wouldn’t throw a solo man at us on the street with a half-baked warning like that.”
“And the hand-written note?”
“Wesley again. But now that we’re reflecting, I have to admit that one thing does intrigue me a bit. That Bali flight itinerary.”
“You think they ran off to Bali after all?” Zhang asked. “Dropped off the grid? Now they’re, what, selling beads to Australian beach bums and living on wild bananas and mangoes?” Severin didn’t respond. “According to the State Department report, Chinese customs said there was no record of them ever leaving China.”
“Yeah, but China’s customs records probably aren’t quite as reliable as some. In fact, Kristin and Keen could very well have just slipped the customs officer at passport control $20 to not process their departure. Twenty dollars to just waive them through,” Severin said, opening the web browser on his phone. He looked up the 800 number for Singapore Airlines, instructing Zhang to retrieve the Bali flight itinerary obtained from Keen’s hacked email account. Once he got a ticket agent on the line, he pretended to be Keen, providing the itinerary confirmation number, and asking how he could go about getting a refund for his unused ticket from Shanghai to Denpasar, Bali. After a review of the itinerary, the agent regretted to tell him that, even though the ticket was not used, the fare was nonrefundable.
“I guess that’s life. Thanks anyway,” Severin said, hanging up. “Well, that probably settles that,” he said to Zhang. “They didn’t make their flight.”
“So now what?”
“I doubt very much Thorvaldsson is going to hand us $50,000 just for telling him it’s our hunch that Wesley did it. That’s already his hunch, after all.”
“Wait, $50,000? I thought you said we were splitting $10,000.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
“I mean, uh—”
“Et tu, Brute? You piece of sh—”
“Wallace, come on.”
“Wallace come on yourself, asshole. Is this the part where I crack you in the jaw and walk away? That’s what usually happens in the movies we’re reenacting.”
“Hold on, hold on. Look at it as us being even now.”
“Even? What did I owe you for?”
“Remember our sophomore year, when you took my mountain bike without asking and it got stolen from out in front of Kane Hall? Remember how you refused to admit you’d taken it until we
were seniors, and it had all blown over. You never paid me back.”
“That bike was a clapped out piece of junk.”
“It was an original, first-generation Specialized Stumpjumper. A piece of history.”
“You’re comparing me getting your rusting, $50 student bike stolen to you holding out on me over a $50,000 payoff?”
“You have to factor in inflation. You have to factor in the cost of a bike relative to the budget of your average college student.”
“My budget is still that of an average college student.”
“Wallace, come on.”
“Admit that you’re an asshole.”
“I’m sorry. Really.”
“Say it.”
“Wallace.”
“Say it.”
“I’m an asshole.”
“And?”
“I’ll split the $50,000 with you.”
“Yeah, you will,” Zhang said, glaring, but not with enough intensity to suggest that, given their long relationship, he didn’t half expect such a move by Severin all along. “So I’ll ask again: now what?”
“We keep digging. Keep asking questions.”
“Of whom?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’d like to have a chat with the team’s interpreter. She wasn’t in the van, right? Wasn’t she in the other car? Regardless, she might at least be able to tell us about the lead-up to their departure from Yinzhen. We can also take a swing at running down that company van driver. Maybe even a couple of the head honchos at YSP, to eliminate them as suspects if nothing else.”
“So we’re definitely going to China then?”
“Interpreter lives in Shanghai. The van driver and any other YSP people we might want to talk to probably live in Yinzhen or somewhere nearby in Shandong Province. We need to talk to some folks who were closer to whatever went down.”
“What do you think you’re going to learn from them?”
“Well obviously, if the van driver did it, we’re hoping his guilt will shine through as it does with most moron criminals. If it was Wesley, maybe somebody overheard him make a threat, saw him pocket a big knife, or who knows what. If it was somebody else, like one of the company people, hopefully we’ll be able to sniff it out. Honestly, I don’t know what we’re looking for exactly. But we aren’t going to learn anything if we don’t go over there and mix it up with the locals. Stir the pot a bit. See what floats to the top.”
*****
They spent the rest of the day taking cabs all over Arlington and Fairfax counties, on a wild goose chase of a search for the bug-finding SDR kit Severin insisted they get hold of. They tried calling various stores first. But the minimum wage clerks who answered the phones never seemed to understand what Severin was asking for. So they had to resort to going to each store and digging around in their shelves of equipment. The quest took them from Alexandria to Annandale to McLean before they finally found what they were looking for at a tiny electronics shop in Dunn Loring.
Upon their return to the hotel, they went straight to Zhang’s room, where Severin fired up Zhang’s laptop, installed the SDR kit—which looked just like a USB flash drive—and clicked the “run” button on the scanner software’s control screen. The software churned out several columns of alphanumeric data under headers labeled access point MAC address, associated station MAC address, signal level, channel, and so forth. Then he and Zhang went back out into the hallway.
“What does all that mean?” Zhang asked.
“It means there are a lot of wireless signals beaming through your room. The hotel’s WiFi. Personal WiFi hotspots on guests’ phones or laptops. Nothing that looks like it could be from hidden micro-cameras or microphones. Nothing suspicious. Still, if your computer had a GPS receiver, we could pinpoint exactly where each of the signals are coming from and—”
“I get it,” Zhang said. “So, we’re in the clear?”
“Probably. No guarantees.”
“You going to scan your room too?”
“Later.”
“Where’d you learn how to do all that?”
“Here and there.”
“Here and there?”
“YouTube.”
“YouTube, my ass.” Zhang waited for Severin to offer more of an explanation. He didn’t. “But really Lars, you probably miscounted the lines in your little notebook hair trick. You watch too many movies. Seriously, who would give a crap that a couple of irrelevant blockheads like us are chatting with people about Kristin Powell?”
“What about the guy in the parking garage?”
“Lars, if I listen hard enough when I’m at home in bed in the middle of the night, I can usually convince myself that I hear someone outside my parents’ house trying to break in. Probably a serial killer. Of course, it always turns out to be the heating ducts flexing and pinging, or the breeze-blown branches of their plum tree tapping against the vinyl siding.”
“Look, Wallace, just … .”
“Just what? What am I missing? We’re talking about a rank and file employee of a U.S. government department that every Republican on Capitol Hill wants to dissolve, who worked in a sub-agency that nobody has ever heard of, and on a case that nobody cares about anymore. Am I on target?”
Severin was half tempted to reveal a few of the many espionage related secrets of his Customs career—half tempted to enlighten Zhang as to the intelligence community’s love for pressing straight government employees into using the cover of their legitimate positions to facilitate spying. Half tempted to explain that this might have happened to Bill or Kristin. But gruff, grave voices of indoctrinators and instructors echoed from the training courses of his past, warning him, in no uncertain terms, of the many wicked penalties that could be brought to bear were he ever to reveal anything about his training and accumulated secret knowledge. So he held back. Told Zhang that it was up to him, but that he’d definitely recommend implementing a few precautionary measures. “A little heightened awareness,” he said, “never hurt anyone. We probably don’t know the whole story here, Wallace. And keep in mind that sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you. There could be more going on here than we think.”
*****
When Severin returned to his room, he was moderately relieved to see that his door wedge was still in the position in which he originally placed it. But then again, he thought, a really good operative would probably have been looking for door wedges as well as notebook hairs, and could have opened the door slowly, just a crack, before spotting the wedge and recording its position for future replacement. At least he knew that if anyone was indeed watching him, they were pros. That whittled down the list of possible suspects.
After turning on Zhang’s laptop, he scanned his room with the SDR program with similar results. Then he slid his desk over against the door, reassembled his stacked empty beer can break-in alarm system, and dove into bed, utterly spent.
SIXTEEN
Over the next day and a half they booked flights, received their passports and visas from the express visa service via overnight mail, made a rough outline of their plan for China, and took a couple of hours to blow off steam by touring the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. They constantly checked behind themselves for followers whenever they were outside the hotel. Severin obtained the telephone number of the Shanghai-based interpreter, Ms. Yu Lin, from Sergei Vladimirovich, and Zhang began a preliminary examination of the case files they’d been sent by the new hire who took over the YSP case, looking for names of any YSP personnel who might be able to help them locate the missing van driver, or who may have witnessed any interactions between Wesley, Kristin, and Keen. “Some of those case files are hundreds of pages long,” Zhang complained when they met for lunch following his initial look.
“Lucky for you, it’s going to take us almost 20 hours to fly from here to Shanghai tomorrow. You’ll have plenty of time to give them a good look.”
“Great. Thanks.”
For reasons he refused to ex
plain, and despite Zhang’s troubled perplexity over it, Severin insisted that Zhang, on the promise of reimbursement, book and pay for his flights separately. He also told Zhang that when they arrived in China, Zhang was to go through customs on his own. From the moment they unbuckled their seatbelts, under no circumstances was Zhang to acknowledge or in any way indicate that he was traveling with or even knew Severin. They would clear customs, take separate taxis, and then rendezvous at the hotel.
“You’re giving me the creeps,” Zhang had protested.
“It’s just a basic precaution,” he’d said as nonchalantly as possible. “In case one of us, for any reason at all, gets held up, at least the other of us won’t get entangled.”
“For any reason such as what?”
“I have no idea. You just never know when traveling abroad,” Severin said. “Especially in security-conscious places like China.”
Severin was relatively confident that if his cover had ever been blown—that is, if the Chinese had ever figured out that he was facilitating espionage operations way back in his customs days—their security services would have grabbed him then. Still, there was a little voice in his head imploring him not to take the risk—not to tempt fate by going back. But it wasn’t loud enough to deter him from going after his big potential payday. All the same, he wasn’t about to let Zhang get taken down with him in the unlikely event that they were ready and waiting to arrest him at the airport.
SEVENTEEN
Severin woke with a stiff neck in his coach class window seat, nearly six hours into the second leg of their journey. The cabin was dark, but for a few overhead lights illuminated above passengers who were reading. He was tempted to ask for a couple more vodka tonics to take the edge off his discomfort and growing sense of unease and hopefully knock himself back out. As he thought about it, a little girl peeked over the seat back in front of him. He could only see her eyes, nose, and the top of her head. But she looked Chinese, and couldn’t have been more than 3 years old. Severin smiled at her. Her facial expression—what he could see of it—changed, her smiling eyes making her look as though she was about to laugh. She quickly dropped back down, only to slowly rise and peek over the seat back again. Severin waved, and she dropped down. They went through this cycle several times, with Severin leaning forward and lowering his head to hide from her until he thought she’d be up and trying to see him. Then he’d pop up and smile at her again. She began to giggle. “What’s your name?” Severin asked her, unsure whether or not she spoke English.
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