by Sam Powers
The simplest plans usually worked best, Lee had found.
18/
LOS ANGELES
‘You wanted to see me, Cap?’ Drabek closed the captain’s office door behind him.
‘Norman.’ Capt. Forrest Dean was in full dress uniform, as usual, an irritated expression on his face. ‘You know why I’m calling you in here, right?’
Drabek played dumb. He raised both hands in an expression of befuddlement. ‘You got me.’
‘Really? So, you haven’t been stepping all over a homicide investigation for the last couple of days because of some missing persons bug you have up your backside?’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Oh that, indeed. Detective Cummins tells me you’ve ignored his emails asking for updates on whatever angle you’re working.’
‘Well... not ignoring exactly; I just don’t check email that often...’
‘It’s a new century full of new technology, Detective Drabek. Please do us the courtesy of catching up to the rest of us.’
‘Yes, cap.’
‘And send everything you’ve got to Cummins tout suite. You got it?’
‘Sure.’ Dean wasn’t exactly his biggest fan, but he wasn’t a ballbreaker either. He played it straight. ‘Anything else?’
The captain’s gaze narrowed. ‘Norman, do you have anything else you’d like to talk to me about?’
‘I... don’t think so,’ Drabek said uncertainly. What was he getting at?
‘Look, this is the third missing person’s in the last six months that has quickly become someone else’s file, and each time, I’ve had to get involved to tell you to stick with your own case load and let it go. You’re a great detective, Norman, and you know we think the world of you. I can’t help but think this relates to your daughter’s passing.’
Drabek just nodded a little at that. ‘Uh huh,’ he said. ‘Uh huh.’
‘I know that prior to her body being found she’d been missing for several weeks, and we accepted that it may have been part of your motivation for asking to come over to Detective Support and Vice.’
‘Sure.’
‘But you can’t hang on to every missing kid like it’s your personal responsibility to fix humanity. Do you need more time to speak with a professional...?’
Drabek waved that off. ‘No! No, no, absolutely not. Look, I get it cap...’
‘The Los Angeles Police Department is a team...’
‘A team. Absolutely.’
The way the officer looked at him, Drabek knew he wasn’t convinced. But he didn’t have to worry about that. He just had to send his file up to Cummins by email. Of course, if he spelled his name wrong in the email address, which can happen, it might get delayed by a few days.
And surely everyone would understand that.
MERIDA
The elevator doors slid open abruptly. Brennan’s eyes widened. The couple were deeply embraced in a lip lock. He knew the woman: Daisy Lee. The man looked a little like the mugshot he’d found of Ramon Santerra, only shorter than he’d imagined and about a hundred pounds heavier.
The woman’s right eye opened in mid lip lock and spotted him, widening in surprise. She pulled back from the shorter man slightly, then used her right hand to slam his head into the side of the elevator car. Santerra crumpled to the floor. Lee took three steps forward and launched into a high snapping kick that Brennan blocked with crossed forearms. She was on him in a split second, following the move with a flurry of blows that he blocked with precision, before finding an opening and returning a punch of his own, catching her hard.
Lee went down and Brennan tried to pin her so that he could rain blows down, finish the fight quickly. But she managed to sweep her feet up and around his neck, yanking him over sideways and onto the floor then following it with a hammering side fist to the solar plexus. The spy felt his wind go out.
Before he could roll away, she spun on one hip and rose to a crouch, the silenced pistol emerging from her thigh holster. Lee had the winded American in her sights. She squeezed the trigger... and then the lights went out, and Lee found herself dreaming, floating through a dark space, her unconsciousness sudden and complete.
Brennan wheezed his way back to breathing. Prof. Pon was standing over Daisy Lee’s prone body, a large standing ashtray in both hands. There was no sign of blood, which suggested maybe he hadn’t killed her.
‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry about her,’ he said as he got up. ‘She doesn’t deserve it.’ Brennan looked back at the elevator doors, which had closed. ‘Come on, we’ve got to move.’
They crossed the atrium to the stairs. Brennan was about to yank the door open when he saw the elevator doors slide open again. Santerra stumbled out, a pistol in his right hand and a groggy look on his face. ‘You sons of bitches!’ he said in Spanish. He raised the gun, but before he could squeeze off a shot, Brennan had closed the gap between them, a stunner blow to the wrist forcing the gangster to drop his weapon. A sharp kick to the side of Santerra’s knee forced him down to the ground. Brennan threw a hard uppercut, and the fat man went down again, his body spasming slightly as it fought to regain consciousness. Brennan kneeled beside him and removed the two zip ties from his pouch. He looped one over Santerra’s wrists, another around his ankles, then pulled them tight.
They took the concrete stairs to the first level. ‘I’ve got a car parked across the street from the backdoor,’ Brennan said as they approached the emergency exit to the rear corridor. ‘Chances are good there are still exterior guards, but they’re looking for people coming in; they won’t be wary of anyone leaving, which gives me a few seconds to act. When that happens, you hit the deck.’
The older man nodded. ‘If anything happens, I would like you to know...’
Brennan shushed him. ‘Save it, professor. I’m just here for information, I’m not your savior.’
He opened the door slowly. There was a guard immediately to his right. Brennan grabbed him quickly by the shirt collar and pulled him through the door into the stairway, his left arm snaking around the man’s neck to choke off his air while the other hand covered his mouth. The guard pulled at his arm and kicked for a few seconds before passing out. Brennan reached into the small pouch at his waist and took out duct tape and a steel-reinforced zip tie. The tape went across the unconscious man’s mouth and the zip tie around his left wrist and right ankle.
‘I don’t understand...’ Pon said as he worked. ‘Why don’t you just leave him? Why did you stop to tie up Santerra?’
As he said the words, the man’s right leg began to spasm involuntarily, kicking slightly. Then his eyes opened and he looked surprised, kicking hard at his shackles.
‘That’s why,’ Brennan said. ‘In the movies, they stay unconscious for hours. In real life, you get maybe a minute, if you’re lucky.’
Pon looked over at the closed door. ‘Then your lady friend will be right along, I imagine. There was another door at the end of the hallway...’
‘That’s where we’re headed.’
They walked the length of the hallway to the back door. ‘I expect two more guys standing outside of it. If we’re lucky, neither of them is Einstein...’
He reached the door and gently depressed the latch button and pushed it forward just enough to hold the lock mechanism in place. Then, with the door resting ajar, Brennan kicked it as hard as he could. The door flew open a few feet then smacked resoundingly with a thunk that sounded a lot like a grapefruit hitting pavement. Brennan charged forward, lowering his shoulder to barge the door open again. This time it flew mostly open, once again hammering someone standing behind it. Just ahead of the steps, on the sidewalk, a second guard was fumbling for his pistol. Brennan raised his suppressed Smith & Wesson, the angry shot muted but still loud, the bullet striking the man between the eyes. He dropped his weapon as he fell to his knees before pitching face forward on the cement.
Brennan turned to the dazed other man, the s
ide of his hand travelling in a quick arc, hammering the man in the face, smashing tooth and bone. Traffic passing honked their horns at the sight but didn’t slow down. The guard went down to one knee and Brennan followed with a hard kick to the jaw that knocked him senseless.
He nodded across the street to his rental. ‘That’s our ride.’
The darkness and fog of unconsciousness gave way to sound, and light, and the creeping reassertion of self. Lee shook the cobwebs out and looked around, squinting against the migraine headache that had resulted from the blow to the back of her head.
Damn it. She’d had the better of the American again and someone else had snuck up on her. The professor? Probably.
‘Hnnngh...’ Someone was groaning a few feet away. She shifted her view to just in front of the elevator doors. Santerra was trying to pick himself up. That wasn’t going to help anyone. She rose to her feet and walked over to him, then took a healthy backswing with her leg, before kicking the gangster hard on the chin once more. His eyes rolled back into his head and he slumped back down to the ground.
The door on the other side of the lobby clicked and began to swing open. Lee sprinted toward it, arriving just as a guard’s head poked its way into the room. She continued in full flight but leaped forward, spinning head over heels in mid air, the overhead kick striking the crouching guard on top of the skull, his body clattering to the ground and propping the door open. Before the man behind him could react, Lee sprung back to her feet, a fist flying into the open gap, catching the second guard in the solar plexus and driving the wind out of him. He heaved for breath and clutched at his chest, opening him up for a series of hard shots to the face. He slumped down to the cement in the stairwell.
She grabbed a proximity security card from one of the men, then clambered over them and took the stairs down toward the rear exit. Perhaps she’d gotten lucky and the American was still within distance.
At the top of the final flight of stairs, Lee heard a commotion below and slowed to a halt. She peered around the corner; a man in sunglasses and a short-sleeved dress shirt was trying to drag an unconscious guard into the building. The back exit made the most sense; doubtless Brennan had already passed through, with the professor.
She quietly made her way down the final flight. The man saw her once she was all the way down, and even while concerned for his friend and crouched at his side, his hand immediately went for the gun inside his coat. He was quick, quicker than most, and he had it clear of the holster for just long enough to have Lee launch a spinning side kick that knocked it from the gangster’s hand. He smiled, reaching into his coat pocket and withdrawing a butterfly knife, spinning its two sides apart and together again so that the long, sharp blade was exposed.
He ran forward, swinging it in a pair of wide arcs, Lee backing up to the opposite wall. She looked around for a weapon; seeing nothing, she pulled the long strand of white pearls over her neck, bunching them at one end for a handle then swinging them like a short lariat. The guard smiled wickedly, noting his advantage, then thrust quickly for her stomach with the tip of the blade. Lee dodged sideways, slapping the pearls toward his knife wrist, the strand wrapping around it and the baubles tangling up so that he was snagged. She yanked sideways, the knife flying from his hand and his arm pulled away from his body, exposing his face; Lee rose onto her right heel and delivered four rapid, sharp kicks to the man’s face and throat. He collapsed, and at the last second, she let the pearls go, the strand breaking, the little white spheres cascading across the concrete floor.
Thank goodness they were fake, she thought. At least, I think they were fake. I hope to hell they were, or that was expensive.
She opened the back door slowly.
The guard was trying to rise from the parking lot asphalt. He was young, she figured, barely twenty. He scrambled for the pistol nearby and Daisy drew hers from her thigh holster, both turning at the same time, guns trained on one another but the guard still down on one knee, beaten and frightened.
His hand was shaking, the gun vibrating visibly.
‘What’s the point?’ she said directly. ‘At worst, we shoot each other. At best, one of us walks away. Santerra won’t give a shit either way. Drop the gun and kick it over and I’ll let you live.’
The young man ignored her, saying nothing. But his hand continued to shake, worsening by the second.
‘If you try to shoot back at me right now,’ she said, ‘you could miss me by ten feet based on how much the muzzle is moving. Whereas my hand is stable, calm, and I will kill you if you don’t drop the gun.’
The shaking increased. He leaned up onto one elbow and used his other hand to steady it. Then he frowned and looked right through her, as if there were just bigger matters to consider. He let the gun drop to the asphalt and timidly raised both hands.
Twenty yards past him, a taxi pulled up across the street to let out a passenger.
Timing is everything, Lee noted.
At the hotel, Brennan squired the professor to his room. Both men were nervous, but the old colonial building was dark, quiet and private.
Brennan gestured for him to take one of the two guest chairs. ‘Okay, professor. This better be a hell of a story after all of that.’
Pon relaxed a little. ‘It was believed to be the pet project of Dorian Fan, the high-ranking committee member who disappeared in the Nineteen Eighties whilst under investigation.’
‘We know that much already.’
‘What you don’t know is that after he murdered his colleague, who was charged with auditing his expenses, Fan travelled to Harbin where he met with Master Yip Po, the former head of intelligence training for the People’s Army. Yip was under house arrest at the time and, as you may already be aware, later disappeared completely. The feeling at the time was that he was smuggled out of the country by Jiang Qing loyalists. But first, he met with Fan and they discussed Legacy.’
‘Okay, but what is it? I mean, operationally?’
Pon shrugged a little. ‘Vague. Initially it involved placing sleepers into dozens of different American communities, but the logistics were apparently too haphazard, and the methodology was experimental. It fell apart.’
‘So then...?’
‘As I said, it’s vague. But the authorities were sure Fan had used some of the millions he stole to procure elements of the plan.’
Brennan wasn’t buying it. ‘Where would he find dozens of sleepers able to adapt to American life and disappear? That doesn’t seem feasible. Getting past the recruitment aspects, and that there would be little point in pursuing this without trained agents, there’s the fact that this was thirty years ago; surely they’d have long since exposed themselves or gone home.’
‘As I said, the methodology was innovative, but shaky,’ said Pon. ‘They were going in quite a different direction. They used Americans.’
19/
June 18, 1985
A VALLEY SOUTH OF PLENTY, MONTANA
In the dark of the evening, Dorian Fan felt physically uneasy. It was a different sort of discomfort from the nervous tension of possible discovery, and he was past that. This was purely a matter of being thrown into an uncomfortable scenario and feeling like a fish out of water.
As he kept his eyes on the road ahead and his left hand on the wheel, he tugged at the collar of his dress shirt with his right. It was foreign clothing and although it had been cut perfectly to fit him, the material felt wrong. Not itchy, but noticeable, and anything that is ever-present can become just as irritating as something obvious.
But it was part of the procedure. Everything had to be perfect, without a thread out of place to make him appear from China. The car was equally foreign to him, a modern sedan, built in Detroit, Michigan a year earlier, complete with wood-grain finish on the dash, tilt steering and auto-reverse cassette deck. The pennyloafer shoes pinched his feet as he pushed down on the accelerator.
It was not going to be an enjoyable trip, he knew. He had spent enough time during col
lege in the United States to know that he did not care for western mores or customs; the food was bland and banal, the discussion and debate near-non-existent, the people reliant on personal Zara and the joy of acquisition to relate to one another. And from what he’d read in Master Yip’s dossier, there was nowhere on the planet more American than Plenty.
It was his first trip to the town. He knew basically what to expect and that it was just a quick assessment, an assurance that everything was on schedule. They had three years left until deployment and there was no time to spare. And just as Jiang Qing had sacrificed herself for them, he knew he would soon have to disappear from public life and his increasing authority. The financial matters would be discovered, they would be traced to him. The money would not be found, nor any physical hallmark of Legacy. But were he to be questioned, they would have ways to pry the information from him. Steps to prevent that had to be taken.
The road was shrouded in night, the car’s high beams cutting a wide swath that illuminated just enough of the periphery to see the fields of corn, a wall of crops that set the scene permanently. He checked his watch, a battered Casio digital with a built-in calculator. It was just after ten o’clock, and it couldn’t be much further.
On his right, a sign appeared, the white letters in a flowing, stylized font against a pale blue background. ‘Welcome to Plenty!’ Underneath, it stated ‘Home of Matilda, the World’s Biggest Bison’. Pop: 1,412.’
If Yip’s information was as accurate as always, the sign was about a thousand souls optimistic, even into its second generation; but appearances were important. There would be a gas station coming up on...
