The Rice Thieves

by William Claypool

  “No, I have a morning connection to Heathrow.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m taking a cooking class.”

  “I bet it’s in Tuscany.”

  “No, wrong. Lyon.”

  “Good for you. Call me in about three months. You’ll probably have to come in to Langley for a while.”

  “Okay.” She pointed toward the van. The other men were sitting Chao a little straighter in his chair to make sure his blood pooled in the right spots for later. “What time are you dropping him off?” she asked.

  “Probably about two. We’ll have plenty of time to clean the van before we ship it out.”

  “Make sure you find my business card and destroy it.”

  “We will.”

  “Where’s the van going?”

  “I think Australia. It should be loaded on the ship by 0800 tomorrow and on the water by 1300.”

  “Are you done after that?” she asked.

  “No. I have another job here and then I have to go back to Hawaii. After that, I’ll go away for a little chill time.”

  “Good. Nice working with you again, Hal.”

  “You, too,” he said. “I have a car parked on the street. I’ll drop you off at a cab stand near the Hilton.”

  Hal hesitated. “You know, I have to say this. Even though I know you’re putting the drug in the drink, I watch your hand closely but I can’t see how you do it.”

  “I know. I’m very good at what I do, Hal. That’s why the Company likes me. I practice. You should see me do card tricks.”

  “I guess the magic is all about misdirection and distraction.”

  “It is. I hate to say it, but my magic act works much better when I’m wearing that damned push-up bra.”

  CHAPTER 30

  It was Sunday night, about 9:00 pm, and the streets were not crowded. In fact, they were almost empty. Rain was in the forecast, so it was not surprising to see the woman walking down the sidewalk in a long raincoat. She was tall by Hong Kong standards. Her long black hair draped down her back from under her wide brimmed hat. She also carried a large shoulder bag. It was odd that she was wearing sunglasses, but no one was around to comment. There was little additional detail apparent, especially if viewed from a low-resolution city security camera.

  Just before coming to the park district with its zoo and botanical gardens, the woman swung away from her course and tacked left to a small side street that was far darker, although she was not on it very long. After about half a block, she turned into an alley and walked past a large dumpster to a door. The stick in the door was crude, yet effective. After pausing to make sure no one was passing on the street behind her, and with her hands protected by light leather gloves, she pulled open the building’s back door and entered a stairwell. She knew that Hal’s people had disabled the door alarm and the alley security camera. There were no security cameras on the stairway.

  Taking a big breath, she began to climb the stairs in front of her. Although she ran daily, the stair climb was still sixteen flights and on the sixteenth landing, she sat on the steps and rested. After catching her breath, she removed the wig, her shoes, and her gloves. She combed out her red hair slowly, careful to not let any hair leave her brush. She applied more lipstick, and slipped on a pair of pumps from the bag. From the large bag, she pulled out a smaller purse, slung it over her shoulder and left the larger bag with the hat, sunglasses, gloves, and wig on the landing. Opening the door to the hallway, she was careful to hold the door handle with a Kleenex. She walked to Jun’s apartment and tentatively rapped on the door. He opened the door slowly, and wordlessly let her in.

  “Am I interrupting?” She knew the answer, as Hal had informed her that the last of his company had left an hour earlier. She ignored her own question. “I heard the news on the television and I had to come over to tell you how sorry I am. Your doorman let me come up. I know how much you loved Chao.”

  Jun nodded weakly at her. It was clear he had been crying. “I told him to stop using those drugs,” he said quietly, and with difficulty. “He wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “I’m sure you tried to help him,” she said.

  “I did,” he said, suppressing a sob. “He was my only relative in the world besides my Uncle Quan. I need to send word to Quan. He lives alone on Lantau and has no phone or neighbors. I’ll have to drive out there tomorrow to tell him. It will break his heart.”

  “I’m sure, “said Rorke. “I’d be happy to drive out there with you if you need company.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate the offer,” said Jun. “You are too good to me. I may call you.” He started to cry openly. “I feel that I let him down, as the responsible member of the family. I feel that I should have done better.”

  “You can’t beat yourself up, Jun. You told me many times that Chao loved his wild living.”

  Jun said nothing, and Rorke added in a quiet voice, “I’m sure he died happy.”

  He looked at her and said softly, “Yes, I’m sure he did.” He sighed and asked, “Would you like a drink?”

  “Only if you’re having one,” Rorke said.

  “In that case, I will,“ he said.

  “Here, you sit down,” she said. “I want to bring it to you. You need a little pampering today. What do you want?”

  “How about a glass of the port you’ll see on the bar top. I had some earlier.”

  Port, she thought. Perfect. She stood and walked to the bar, stopping to kiss him on the top of his head as she walked by. “You relax, I’ll take care of everything tonight.”

  She poured the port and a glass of white wine for herself. The sedative flowed easily from the small vial and the bottle fit easily back in her pocket when emptied.

  She handed him the drink and stood behind him to rub his neck.

  “Tell me what you most loved about your brother,” she said.

  Jun turned to her again, choking back tears as he worked to tell stories of his little brother. He told her about how he counted on Chao to comfort his mother after their father had died and about his brother’s ambition and his zest for their business. He talked about Chao’s continued optimism and his unfailingly sunny outlook on life.

  Jun finished the first glass of port and didn’t object when Rorke offered to fill a second glass. She had a second vial.

  Halfway through the drink, he became incoherently emotional and was teetering on falling into a near permanent drug-induced sleep.

  She stood and said. “Finish this glass, and I’ll put you to bed. You’ve had a terrible day.”

  He looked up at her. She thought he looked so needy, so weak, so vulnerable. She also remembered the broken man her father had become after the Chinese government crushed him years ago.

  He drained the glass as she instructed. She helped guide his head to the couch pillow and lifted his feet. After a few minutes, he was snoring heavily.

  Rorke went to her purse at the sound of his deep, rhythmic breathing, and pulled out a pair of latex gloves. She took the wine glasses, wiped them and washed them, making sure all traces of powder were washed off the gloves. She wiped down the Port bottle and everything she had touched in the room. Although there was a perfectly good reason for her latent fingerprints in the room, the fewer the better.

  With Jun still deeply drugged, she went to his desk. The stationary and pen he had used for his investment wish list were still in the top drawer. Before starting her work, she went to him and pressed his hand to the pen and the paper. She would do it again when she finished.

  From her purse, she pulled Jun’s investment plan and began to write, using his characters as references. She thought to herself that by any standard she was an excellent forger, and could do it in multiple languages with multiple alphabets. From her purse, she withdrew a prescription bottle of Xanax that had been filled for a pati
ent named Liu Jun when the brothers were in Bangkok on business a year before. After writing, and re-finger printing the pen and paper, she placed the bottle of pills on the lamp table.

  When she finished, she read over the letter several times. As suicide notes went, it was pure gold. From the dead or nearly so, in his elegant suicide note, Jun wrote of his love for his brother and of his brother’s wonderful attributes, many of which he had shared with her just a little while earlier. He wrote about the great responsibility he felt for his younger brother, since Jun was the older brother and head of the family. He wrote of his own failings. He had let his parents down by allowing Chao to stray all these years. His terrible shame and guilt were now overpowering, due to his brother’s untimely end and legacy of overdosing on a bench outside of his after-hours club. Without his brother, Jun had no family, few friends, and nothing to live for anymore. He had to do the honorable thing.

  She finished her work and was still admiring it when a single knock hit the apartment door. She opened the door to Hal Chen and two other men. One of the men carried a long tube coiled in his hand.

  “You’d better load the stomach quick before he’s dead. Be careful and go slow, I don’t want any sign of trauma.”

  The man propped Jun up while his colleagues snaked the wide tube into his mouth, down his esophagus, and into stomach. His colleagues helped load several of the pills down the tube and, with a large syringe, used water to push them along.

  Rorke turned to Hal.

  “You’re in the apartment downstairs?”

  “Yes. I’ve been living there off and on for a couple of months.”

  “I assume you’ll stay there until people go to work tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s been my pattern.”

  “Okay. I’ll need about an hour to pack my things and make it to the airport. Make sure his fingerprints are on the railing.”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you reconnect the alarm and the security camera after I go, but before Jun leaves us?”

  “Sure.”

  “Also, don’t let him hit anyone on the way down,” said Rorke.

  “No worries,” said Hal.

  “When you’re done here, we’re almost home.”

  “Yes,” said Hal, and then he added, “There’s a Rolls parked on the street just below us. I think it would make a pretty good target.

  “That sounds like fun,” Rorke said. “Just make sure it’s empty.” She looked at the men and turned back to Hal. “I’ll see you in Honolulu.”

  She let herself out of the apartment and went down the hall to the stairwell. She would walk down the sixteen floors.

  CHAPTER 31

  When Sloan arrived in Honolulu, he was still half drunk. He hadn’t had a drink on the trip until the layover in Narita. After that, it was an easy slide. The first vodka was good and the next several were better. The vodka made the news he carried seem lighter and farther away. He didn’t eat the airplane breakfast. He was consumed with the thought of finding a bottle. Realizing that might be a challenge due to the early morning hour, he asked for a few “travelers” from the flight attendants before deplaning.

  There were no liquor stores on the arrivals side of the terminal, and Sloan walked with the passenger flow to clear customs. His bag was transferred to the island hopper to the Ho’olehua airport on Molokai, and he carried nothing except a small leather case with papers. He found the island hopper gate at the Honolulu terminal, too lost in his thoughts to enjoy the amazing island views on the short flight from Oahu.

  After arriving on Molokai, he reclaimed his bag, found his car on the lot, and drove to the package store near his home that opened early. He bought a quart and two pints of vodka and went home to think about what he should do. He drank through lunch and did not make it to dinner, passing out on his couch. When he awoke at 10:00 pm, jet lagged, hung over, and still high, he decided what he would do, what he must do. He found the bottle, took a few drinks and tried to sleep.

  His conscience did not surrender easily to the peace of sleep. He was tormented by thoughts of the rice shoots and how they popped up so quickly beyond where they had been planted. The realization that there was no guarantee the rice would stay confined to China also tormented him. The image and memory that haunted him most was the recollection of the children he had met on a joint USDA-State Department visit. That trip had been to Cambodia to assess the results of an aid program. Previously, the kids had been malnourished, then their lives had been changed with the gift of U.S. agriculture, specifically U.S. rice.

  He remembered the children who had learned his name and took great delight in saying it. The kids were by then well fed, and followed him around happily. They laughed and laughed with him. It had been one of the best days of his life.

  Sloan tossed and turned for another six hours before deciding that sleep was futile. He left his bed and took a long shower. After eating toast for breakfast, he picked up his papers, and both pint bottles. Sloan walked out to his car and began the drive down the quiet, two-lane road between the scrub palms. No other cars were on the road at that early hour. When he arrived at the USDA quarantine station, most of the staff had not yet come to work. He entered his code at the gate and drove in as the motorized gate parted.

  In the enormous greenhouse, only two of the staff were at work tending various plants. The office area was empty and the door to the seed closets was closed. Sloan waved to the staff when he arrived and shouted a response to their welcome back greetings.

  In his office, he placed his leather case on the desk, walked to the seed closet, unlocked the door, and entered the room. Locating the vault where Buddy’s seeds had been stored, he opened the drawer. It had been wiped clean of any plant material. It all made sense to him now.

  When he looked at the facility’s written logs, all pages referring to Jerome’s plants were missing. As he searched the files on his computer, there was no trace of Buddy’s seeds ever having been at the USDA. They’d scrubbed Buddy’s rice completely out of the records. The only remaining evidence of Buddy’s rice ever having been at the USDA was sitting on Sloan’s desk in the leather case. There he had carried the copies of the logs, the hardcopy printout of the seed history, the description of the growth characteristics, the protein analysis of the plant, and the USDA report of the theft. It was all there. It was all that was left of the records, and no one knew about it but him.

  He tried to remember what had prompted him to duplicate the USDA records of the rice. Initially, he copied a few reports to evaluate them further at home after hours. When the amazing growth and protein production data of the rice strain started coming in, he was so excited that he copied the records as a historian might, to preserve an epic event for later posterity. Finally, it became his private habit, and when the seeds were stolen, a small voice inside told him to continue what he was doing, and to keep it completely secret. He obeyed that small voice and no one knew of the dossier he still retained.

  Sloan fumbled through a few unrelated e-mails even though he could only focus on the dossier in front of him. From time to time, he took a pull from the pint bottle when he was sure no one was near. By lunchtime, the bottle was empty and he felt the need to eat. Rather than lunch at the usual place nearby the facility, he drove toward the village and the small strip mall near there. He knew of a public telephone that was still there next to the rusting cluster of shops. He parked his car and fingered the number he’d looked up earlier. As he readied to make the call on the public phone, he opened the other bottle and took a long drink before punching in the number.

  The strip was largely empty. However, Sloan looked at the few shoppers suspiciously while he entered the number and while the phone was ringing. When the voice on the other end answered, “Associated Press Bureau, Honolulu,” he finally felt the dull pain in his head subsiding. It was a welcome wave of relief that improved o
ver the thirty minutes of the phone call. It was not the healing absolution of the confessional, although he believed he was coming closer to that. What he was doing was important. It was necessary. It was for the good of the world. It had to be done, and he was glad he could do it. Yes, the government would eventually handle the situation, but this would make it happen more quickly. It had to happen quickly.

  Sloan agreed to meet the bureau chief the next day at 3:00 in Honolulu, not far from the airport. They would meet in a park, not in an office or a restaurant. Sloan would arrive first and they agreed on what he would wear so the reporter could easily find him. The horrible secret would be exposed to the sanitizing light of public opinion. It would all be made right. He felt free. He could profess to himself, and to anyone else, that he was not part of this terrible enterprise. Sloan hung up the telephone and drove to the package store for another pint and another quart. There was a risk. He knew that. But after the news was out, what could they do? It had to be done and it had to come out in the open to save the millions and millions of innocent people at risk.

  Sloan drove home and heated a frozen meal. He had a few more drinks to help him sleep. All he could imagine was the rapidly spreading rice plants in multiple places in China and the looks of the children and their parents with advanced cancer. He downed more drinks to blur that image.

  Sloan had looked forward to being home again, and being able to fly his cherished plane. He woke early and was greeted by another beautiful Hawaiian morning. He ate a modest breakfast on his patio enjoying this gift of a perfect day. After breakfast, he put on the blue shirt and red tie as they had discussed, and picked up the soft leather case containing all the documentation he needed to prove his story.

  The airport was a short drive from his home and the roads were wide open. The trip took just ten minutes and even though he would be a few hours early for the meeting, he decided to take off mid-morning.

  He parked his car in the airport lot and walked, proudly, as he always did, to the tie-down area of his small high wing Cessna. He again checked the contents of the leather case. He was preoccupied and did a hasty pre-flight inspection of the plane. When he entered the cockpit, he confirmed the fuel tank was full, as he had left it a few weeks earlier. The rest of the cockpit pre-flight was uneventful and he started the engine. It purred like a contented kitten and he checked with his tower and with Honolulu control for the short trip across the channel. He took out a fresh pint bottle and had a deep drink. He was happy, and steered the plane out onto the taxiway toward the end of one of the two runways. As excited as he was to be flying again, he was even more excited to be talking with the reporter. He again looked to be certain the papers were in the case before take-off. Consumed with his meeting and with the take-off procedure, he had no reason to look behind one of the hangers as he taxied out. Had he looked there, and noticed Hal Chen watching him, it might have saved his life.