Island of Thieves

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “And he knew that Hargreaves was willing to break a few laws. That’s Paragon’s whole sales pitch.”

  Karla looked out the window. The train was beginning to move out of the station, picking up speed rapidly.

  Shaw continued. “Paragon supplies Kelvin Welch. Droma places Welch at Avizda, and he hacks their system for the missing information. In exchange Droma gets to do business in China. So why isn’t Chen sitting fat and happy back in Beijing? Why the big meeting on Rohner’s island?”

  “James Hargreaves,” Karla said. “He guessed there was more than what Sebastien Rohner was telling him. He’s holding on to the information that Welch hacked, and he won’t give it up without a substantial payoff from Rohner. The meeting at the island was to confirm that the polymer is legit and for Hargreaves to collect, while Droma negotiated the public deal with Jiangsu.”

  “You brought Morton. Your own chemist.”

  Karla nodded. “And Chen Li had Bao. Both sides with their own expert to verify that the pieces of the molecule fit together.”

  “Why the smoke and mirrors with Bridgetrust and the false names? Why not just show up as Paragon and get paid?”

  “Bridgetrust is our front for business intelligence work. It helps to have an established company for false job histories when you’re investigating other corporations.”

  “Infiltrating, you mean.”

  “Or that. We made use of Bridgetrust as our cover on the island for two reasons. One was so that Rohner’s payment to Paragon would be disguised—laundered, really—through Bridgetrust. He’ll use Droma funds and call it an investment, one that will never pay out and be written off as a loss. The other reason is to keep Chen from knowing about Paragon’s involvement.”

  Shaw looked at her. “Because Hargreaves is former NSA or CIA or whatever. Right?”

  Karla seemed to be growing accustomed to Shaw’s knowing things; she barely seemed startled this time. “Right. Any hint of government involvement might spook Chen. He’s no more interested in serving twenty years for espionage than any of us.”

  Shaw gazed out the window. It all fit. Hargreaves had obtained the missing part of the polymer. But he didn’t dare approach Chen directly. He still needed Droma to complete the deal. The Bridgetrust cover allowed Hargreaves to be on the scene when the polymer was verified and make sure he got his money.

  The train was speeding through the outskirts of Denver now, the long, flat walls of warehouses rushing past and the towers of the power lines running parallel to the tracks marking progress at one every two seconds.

  “You realize Chen’s not a chemical-company CEO,” he said. “Or not only that.”

  “Chinese intelligence?” she asked. “I do. China’s had a major espionage push for more than a decade, recruiting foreign experts or paying them for proprietary secrets. The ‘Thousand Talents,’ they call it.”

  Shaw leaned back in his seat. “But you were willing to look the other way.”

  She gazed at the water bottle in her hands as if she’d forgotten it was there. “More often than not, I am.”

  “I don’t care much,” said Shaw. “I’ve lived by stealing before. Maybe I’ll have to again someday. I wouldn’t do what you do, and I don’t pretend it’s right. But I don’t give a damn what companies and governments steal from each other. It’s been happening forever. It’ll go on forever.”

  “That’s . . . nihilistic.”

  “Or realistic. Sometimes the stealing is direct, like yours. Sometimes it’s done by squatting on patents or price gouging or just refusing to pay the other guy because you know he can’t afford to sue. It’s all theft.” Shaw looked at her. “What I do care about is people getting hurt. Nelson Bao was a thief and a spy, but he probably didn’t deserve to have his head bashed in.”

  “I don’t know why he was killed. Or Linda Edgemont.”

  “I don’t either. But Hargreaves didn’t simply guess why Rohner wanted Avizda hacked. He had an inside source.”

  Shaw opened his duffel, drew out the file he’d taken from Chiarra’s office, and handed it to her.

  As Karla paged through the records, he watched the morning blur past the window. He was tired. Too many miles, not enough real rest. He knew from experience that he could keep going, keep functioning effectively, for a long time at this pace. Didn’t mean the fatigue wasn’t real.

  Karla stared at one sheet. “I know this shell company. We’ve used it before, for transactions we don’t want linked to Paragon.” She held up a page. “If this is what you say, a bribe to Linda Edgemont, then the first payment to her was made at nearly the same time as Kelvin Welch joining Avizda. James was working both angles from the start.”

  “Linda was the person who recruited me, too. She probably told Hargreaves that Rohner was hiring a former thief.” Shaw leaned his forehead against the cool glass. “I was burned before I started.”

  “Where did you find these papers?”

  “Ed Chiarra’s office.”

  “I know how James works. He would have approached Linda or had Ed do it for him. He’d say he was worried about whether Avizda was involved in work for the U.S. government. A Paragon operation that interfered with a military or federal contract could blow up in our faces. It might even be considered treason. He’d ask Linda for assurances, covertly, on what Droma was looking for. And he would let Linda know that in return he’d pay a consulting fee.”

  “And once she accepted the money, he’d own her.” Shaw stood up and stretched, more a reaction to his agitated thoughts than to exercise his limbs. “Is James Hargreaves his real name?”

  “It might be his real name now. The one the government created for him when he left.”

  Shaw grunted. Hargreaves’s whole life had been redacted. No wonder Chiarra hadn’t had a file on him.

  “I’ve got a lot of guesses about what happened, theories that fit the facts,” he said. “Bao’s death had no premeditation. Everyone thinks he was killed for the chemical sample. Everyone figured me for the crime. Rohner offered me a guaranteed job and a trip around the world as incentive to hand over the chemical. A team of thugs has been trying to grab me off the street. Give us the sample or else. But I don’t have it.”

  “Well, someone killed him.”

  “Yeah. The idea I keep coming back to is that Bao was murdered by mistake or out of panic. Maybe he saw something he shouldn’t have. Someone poking around where they shouldn’t be. And Chen was left with his chemist dead and maybe feeling he was in some danger himself. So Chen decided to tell Rohner and Hargreaves that the magic chemical was missing.”

  “When he had it all along. That makes sense. Everyone else has been setting fire to the brush, trying to flush out whoever has the sample. Chen’s the only one who seems calm.”

  Shaw sat back down. His ribs objected to the movement.

  “Linda Edgemont’s death is easier to guess,” he said. “Bao had been murdered. Maybe she got nervous. Or Hargreaves was just eliminating a potential risk.”

  “You think it was James?” Karla smoothed her pant leg, as if wiping away the thought. “He can be cold. Even ruthless, in business. But that level of brutality . . .” She shook her head.

  Shaw took out his phone and held it up to flip through personnel photos. “Vic Urbaniak. Louis Paolo. Emmet Tucker. There’s your brutality, times three.”

  She looked at the last picture, the one of Tucker staring stolidly from his driver’s license.

  “I’ve seen them. Not often, but they’ve been around the Paragon office. Field operatives. They’ve worked for James for a long time, from what I hear. They’re the men who attacked you? After . . . after you left my room?”

  “And the ones who broke me out of the cop car at Westlake. With the intention of finishing what they’d started outside your place.” Shaw tapped at his phone. “I don’t know if one of them pulled the trigger on Linda, but they’re my first pick in that draft. And there’s this.”

  He handed the phone to her. The
screen showed the news story of Kelvin Welch’s murder in New Orleans.

  Karla stared. Long enough to read the article three times over if she chose to. She didn’t say anything.

  “You’re in with bad people,” said Shaw.

  She turned to the window.

  “Maybe you already knew that.”

  They sat for a time as the buildings flashing past the window became fewer and farther between. The train slowed and stopped at a station for a few minutes. The announcement warbled over the car’s speakers. Then the train gathered speed again. Karla stayed silent. Shaw felt the weight of the quiet in his shoulders and neck.

  “I told myself it wasn’t much,” she said at last. “That if I broke any laws, it was just one megacorporation stealing from another. That they probably deserved it.”

  Shaw waited.

  “And I wanted the money.”

  He nodded.

  “Maybe I knew the truth then. But . . . I’d gotten used to not asking the follow-up questions. Not looking too close.” She regarded him. “Did you think that I set you up?”

  “I knew it was possible.”

  “You called me here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you still think I’m on his side?”

  “Less than I did then.”

  She sighed. “I’d feel that way, too, if our positions were reversed. Worse. I would have assumed you were my enemy right away.”

  “You came here. Alone.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Did you tell Hargreaves you were coming?”

  “No. He knows you contacted me. He would have known even if I hadn’t told him. I doubt there’s a single line of communication to a Paragon employee he doesn’t monitor, at least while we’re in the field.”

  “Why’d you keep it a secret?”

  Karla was still holding his phone, turning it over and over in her hands. She might not realize she was doing it. “I knew it was time to choose.”

  Shaw raised an eyebrow.

  “I didn’t sleep with you to trick you,” she said, “or to find out if you had the missing sample. By that point I was pretty certain you weren’t the thief.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the way you talked about finding Nelson Bao. You had empathy. More than someone who’d murdered him for some chemical could muster. Also because of all the people on that island, you seemed like the only one without a map to what was really happening. I couldn’t fit that together with you killing someone for profit.”

  Shaw smiled. “So why did you seduce me?”

  She laughed. “Oh, that was mutual, and don’t try to tell me different.” She leaned back in the compartment’s lone chair, the first show of relaxation since they’d arrived. “I went to bed with you because I wanted to. Because we’d had a nice night and you’d made me laugh and I thought we’d be damned good together. In case you thought I had any other motive.”

  “Crossed my mind.”

  “That’s the only reason I sleep with anyone. I don’t use sex to advance my career. Or play Mata Hari with investigation subjects. Ever.”

  “Okay,” said Shaw, hearing the force behind her words.

  “Every woman gets accused of shit like that. Even if her work isn’t dealing in secrets and lies.” Karla brushed a hand over her cheek, wiping at a flush that was just beginning to bloom. “And I’m well aware that drawing a line at using my body while I’m bartering for trade secrets from Avizda might be fatuous. And hypocritical.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything.” Shaw stretched to prop his feet on the sink counter. “I grew up burgling houses and stores. Doesn’t mean I was a street hustler. And the kids who were hustlers and pros around Broadway probably wouldn’t break into houses to steal either. Everybody chooses their own limit.”

  “You knew prostitutes? When you were a child?”

  “I knew kids my age. Home lives worse than mine, and mine was all kinds of fucked up. A few of them hooked part of the time.” He shrugged. “Survival.”

  The morning sun was bright. Shaw closed his eyes.

  “What do we do now?” Karla said.

  “Now,” said Shaw with his eyes still shut, “I’m going to sleep.”

  “I mean after that, smart guy.”

  “We fight. We kick them right in their shiny white teeth.” His voice seemed a long way off. “Wake me when we hit Utah.”

  Bridgetrust and Jiangsu and Lokosh and Hargreaves. Shaw fell asleep. He dreamed of rows upon rows of porcelain masks, all staring balefully at one another, waiting endlessly to see who would be the first to blink.

  FIFTY-SIX

  The smell of coffee woke him before the click of the train compartment door closing. He rose from the settee. His coat was off. He vaguely remembered removing it before lying down and peeling off the curling bandage under his T-shirt to toss it in the trash. Karla extended the miniature table from the side of the compartment and placed paper boxes with the Amtrak logo on it.

  “Dinner,” she said. “I guessed you might not feel up to visiting the dining room.”

  “Thanks.”

  Karla was right, but not because Shaw still felt tired. He wanted to keep his face with its memorable scars away from as many eyes as possible. Hargreaves’s net might be wide.

  He checked his watch. Five o’clock in the afternoon.

  “You had to rest,” she said by way of explanation. “You didn’t tell me you were injured.”

  “A mere scratch.” Shaw touched his ribs under the shirt. It didn’t twinge at the pressure, which he took for a good sign.

  “Well, that scratch is flirting with infection. Here.” She motioned to a small pile of gauze and tape and antibiotic ointment packets in the sink. “I told the conductor you had scrapes from a motorcycle spill. He raided the train’s first-aid kit.”

  Shaw saw her phone on the little seat. Had she contacted anyone while he was out?

  “I’ve kept it off,” she said at his look. “Gave me a chance to catch up on what was happening at the Battle of Monmouth.” She held up her thick paperback.

  “History buff.”

  Karla smiled. “It might have been my major, if dance weren’t such a lucrative field.”

  “And an M.B.A. And a PI license. You keep busy.”

  “I might have a lot more time to read soon,” she said, her smile vanishing as quickly as it had come. “We have to go to the police. I have to go to the police. With or without you. I need to come to terms with this.”

  “Even if that means prison?”

  “Even if.”

  Outside, a field in the full burst of summer made a haze of emerald green past the window. With Karla’s red hair and the sound of the wheels on the track, Shaw had the impression of another era, another continent, an early diesel locomotive driving the train past farm country where his grandfather would someday be raised in County Antrim. Another time. Not a simpler time. That was an illusion, he knew.

  “Okay,” he said. “If you’ll give me a couple of days after we reach Seattle, I might be able to help. Put the cops in a better frame of mind to hear you out.”

  “How?”

  “You’ll have to give evidence.”

  “I assumed as much,” she said.

  “And someone else will have to join you.”

  Shaw told her what he had in mind, or at least as much plan as he’d formed so far. She thought he was crazy, which was no surprise. He thought the scheme was more than halfway to howling at the moon himself. But better than walking into SPD headquarters and placing his head on the chopping block.

  By the time they’d talked it through, night had fallen and Karla’s jaw creaked with yawning. Shaw pulled the bunk down, and she went into the bathroom. When she came out, she was wearing shorts and an extra-large pink T-shirt with killington resort over a picture of snowy peaks. The shirt so old and softened from countless washings that the cracks in the printed image looked like huge crevasses in the mountains.

&nb
sp; She climbed up into the bunk to lie on her side and regard him with her hazel eyes. With Shaw standing, their faces were nearly even.

  She smiled. “Thanks. For talking it out. And giving me a chance.”

  “Same here.”

  Her fingers curled over the crisply folded top edge of the bedsheet beneath her. “I’d invite you in, but . . .”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe when we’re on the other side of all this.”

  Shaw picked up his jacket to step out into the corridor. He drew the compartment’s curtain closed again and shut the door. The passage lights had been dimmed for the night, save for a line of safety bulbs running along the edge of the floor. Their bedroom was at the end of the car, next to a luggage rack. The only occupied room in this half. At the front end, past the public toilet and the cramped stairwell at the car’s center, was a row of unoccupied roomettes. Shaw stepped to lean against the wall by the rack.

  His first call was to Professor Jemma Mills. He got her voice mail and described in detail the favor he needed. A tiny batch of chemical to mimic the sample he’d seen in Bao’s apartment. Any mixture would do, so long as it looked the same. He said he couldn’t be reached directly but that he would call back tomorrow.

  Hollis picked up his own burner phone on the second ring.

  “Van. You all right?” he said.

  “Enduring. Maybe even turning the tide. I need some transport, if you can stand a long drive.”

  “I can leave straightaway. Where?”

  “Reno. That’s twelve hours of road. If you leave now and don’t spare the horses, we should hit the Amtrak station about the same time as you.”

  “We?” said Hollis.

  “Me and the redhead. I’ll explain everything on the drive.”

  “Should be a tale. See you there.”

  Shaw’s last call was to a number in San Francisco. He’d looked it up outside Kansas, memorizing it in the event he needed to take a wild swing.

  “Good evening, Consulate-General of the People’s Republic.”

  “Good evening,” said Shaw. “I have an unusual request. I’m trying to get a message to one of your citizens currently traveling in Seattle.”