by Matthew Hart
“Vehicle exiting target,” a different voice broke in. “Apprehend?”
“Wait to see who it is,” Cedric said.
The gates swung open. The camera closed in on a tighter shot. An SUV drove out and turned down the road in the direction of the city.
“ID?” Cedric said.
“Negative. Tinted windows.”
“Alex,” he said. “We’ll put a tail the SUV and proceed with the operation. Agree?”
“Yes,” I said. If we stopped the vehicle and Lily wasn’t in it, we’d have tipped off the house.
At one minute to go, the monitor showed the house suddenly plunged into darkness. Sixty seconds later, our flashing orange light appeared out of the pitch-black night and pulled up at the gate.
43
With the power cut, only the emergency light glimmered in the guardhouse. We strapped on night vision goggles as the guard opened the gate. The truck drove through and stopped. I watched the monitor as the guard came out with a clipboard and gestured for Chen to open the truck for inspection. Chen hopped out of the cab. The guard stepped toward the back, and Chen clamped an arm around his neck and heaved him off the ground in a choke hold that squeezed the carotid artery and cut off the flow of blood to the brain. The guard flailed briefly and then sagged unconscious. Chen cuffed him with plastic ties and gagged him with a strip of duct tape. We tumbled out of the truck and headed for the front door.
The house was a sleek, modern structure of cedar and glass. It had a single floor at the front that became two floors at the back, where the land sloped down to the shore. Cox flattened himself against the wall beside the door. The sound of harsh voices came from the other side of the house—distant, down by the dock. The second unit was creating its diversion. Cox made a signal, and the cop with the pigtails stepped forward with a rubber vacuum disk. Tall panes of glass flanked the door. She pressed the rubber disk against the glass, and quickly incised a line around it. She tapped the rubber, and the glass broke neatly with a light pop. She pulled it out, and Cox reached through the hole and opened the door.
We slipped inside the house and fanned out into the foyer. Two men peeled off to the right and vanished toward some bedrooms. I followed Cox and pigtails into an enormous room that took up the rest of the first floor. The seaward wall was an unbroken expanse of glass. As we moved, the room seemed to capture our shadowy presence and repeat it in the glass; not as a reflection but as a shiver in the light—as if the aqueous quality of the ocean filled the room and we rippled through it like a school of barracudas.
The room was sparely furnished. Groups of leather-and-chrome sofas and matching chairs. Carved Chinese figures in pale stone hid their hands in their sleeves and watched with horrified expressions, like palace mandarins caught in a barbarian invasion. As we swept through the room, our feet made a light patter on the polished surface.
No sign of Fan or Mei. The first floor checked clear, and we made our way quickly to a staircase that descended at one side of the room. Suddenly Cox raised a hand. I heard the sound of a glass door sliding open on the floor below, followed by whispering, and the door swishing shut. Cox pointed at the floor below and made a circling motion, and two of the team slipped away.
We faded back from the stairs. After another whispered exchange, the men below started to come up. By then the two officers had circled behind the house. One of them tapped lightly at the closed glass door. The pair on the stairs whispered again and went back to check. After that the only sounds were the glass door sliding open and the guards stepping out and getting throat-punched.
I followed Cox and pigtails down the stairs. Her hair flew out behind her as she dashed down a hall to the left to check the rooms on that side. A gunshot sounded from the dock, and Cox signaled to me he was heading down to check it out. I pointed to my eyes and then down a short hall to the right, and the only remaining room. He gave me a thumbs-up and disappeared. I crept down the hall to the door and put my head against it. Nothing. I threw it open, dashed in low, and rolled to the side.
The smell told me I’d found her. It pierced me like a knife. The sweet smell of Lily’s skin, and overpowering it, the stench of urine. But the room was empty. There was some apparatus, not clear in the blurry green imaging of the night lens.
I heard a generator kick on somewhere in the bowels of the house. Emergency lights flickered on and cast a dim light into the room. I took off the night-vision goggles. When my eyes adjusted to the low light, my heart went cold.
A gurney stood in the middle of the room. Armatures stuck out from the sides. It looked like an execution bed in a death chamber, the shape of her body pressed into the stained sheets.
The grim shape looked like what it was, an instrument of terror. The work Fan had wanted to perform at the warehouse, he could accomplish here at his leisure. Everything was laid out neatly. The same instruments he’d had on his desk at the airport. Needle-nose pliers, small knives like scalpels.
Something brushed against my ankle, and I leapt away.
Meow, said Brutus.
Mei swished in and closed the door behind her. Her tiny eyes peered through the thick glasses. Her face was haggard. She seemed shaken. Strands of hair escaped from the blue hair clips and drifted in front of her face.
“Where is she?” I snapped.
“He’s taking her up to the Barrens. He thinks Mitzi Angel is keeping the location of the real discovery secret, and that Lily knows where it is.”
“What kind of shape is she in?”
She stared at the instruments. She pressed her lips tight and shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again she looked at me.
“I stopped it.”
“But not before it started.” A patch of red stained the sheet.
“I tried to protect her,” she said tightly. She pushed her glasses up and pressed her knuckles to her eyes. “He hates her because she cheated us when we bought Russian diamonds. All he thinks of is revenge. All this,” her face recorded her revulsion as she stared at the gleaming instruments. “He doesn’t have possession of his mind.”
Her eyes were red and her cheeks were wet, but when the glasses were back in place her eyes were as steady as flecks of mica.
“But you do have possession of your mind, and you stayed with him.”
She was a woman used to mastering herself, but the struggle to do so now was twisting her face into a mask of loathing. Her eyes burned and her lips trembled and her mouth turned down. I didn’t know if the rumors about incest were true, or whatever private outrage her twin might have committed behind a locked door. But I could see, stark and horrible, the trail it had left behind.
“I hate him,” she hissed.
Pigtails appeared in the door. I shook my head. She gave me a thumb’s up and stepped back into the hall.
“Mei. We don’t have time. I need to know what there is between you and Lily. Because Fan is going to kill her for it.”
She nodded and took a deep breath, lowering her gaze for a moment to compose herself. When she spoke her voice was steady.
“Lily and I—we have a business arrangement. She understands the movement of large amounts of rough, and has helped me understand that. Mitzi Angel too—I have an understanding. Mitzi is not reliable, but she’s smart.” It was as if she were talking to herself, thinking through a business calculation, the emptions of a moment before silenced and locked away. “Fan will not kill Lily,” she said, “until he finds the true diamond pipe. But he might harm her.”
“Does Lily know the location of the pipe?”
“No.”
Pigtails poked her head in the door and tapped her watch. “We have to go. Are we taking her?”
“Give us one more sec?” She nodded and slipped back into the hall. I heard her radio crackle as she went outside. I turned back to Mei.
“Why are you even here? The extradition—it’s been dropped.”
“What did you expect me to do?” she said harshly. “Run?” Her e
yes blazed with sudden fury. “I protect my property! The property of my investors! This is a trust. I don’t run away from it.”
“I’m not writing this down for your profile in the Wall Street Journal, so spare me the noble bullshit. If you’re staying it’s because China Hard Asset told you to stay.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re an American government agent. They pay you to think like that.” She squared her shoulders, and as she lifted her chin defiantly I saw the red mark on her throat. Fan. “But a company is not a country. Your own citizens buy shares in our properties.”
“I’m sure they’d all be grateful to know that the assassination of Jimmy Angel and the seizure of his property and the attempted murder of his daughter were all in a good cause.”
“Don’t fool yourself, Mr. Turner. If it affected their dividends, most of them would close their eyes.” She caught up a lock of stray hair and clipped it roughly into place.
I heard a motor growl to life down at the dock, and then the sound of a boat heading out into the inlet. Cox and the other team must have finished. They would be heading back up now. Pigtails gave me the throat-cut motion to show that we were done.
The cat meowed. Mei looked at me with her mica-chip eyes. “You’ll have to kill him.”
* * *
“It will be safer to make the interception at Yellowknife,” Cedric’s voice crackled in my earpiece. He was up front. I was sitting in the back of the truck, watching the screen that showed Fan’s SUV exiting the main road and entering a corner of the airport through a guarded gate. “If the pursuit team tries to take him now, she could get hurt in the crossfire, or he might kill her. We have lots of time to get snipers into position in Yellowknife.”
“Agreed,” I said.
Fan’s SUV pulled up beside Fan’s jet. He got out and boarded with the waif. Tinkerbell and the kid with the tats opened the back of the truck and pulled out a crate shaped like a coffin and loaded it in the cargo door.
44
There wasn’t any rescue at Yellowknife. There wasn’t anyone to rescue. The snipers packed away their rifles and stood down.
“Fan’s jet filed a flight plan for Yellowknife,” Tommy told me as we stood on the windswept tarmac when I got back. “They stayed on course until they were on final, then they turned off their transponder, dropped below radar, and we didn’t know where they were until an AWACS picked them up.”
“And by then they were landing at Ekati,” I said. It was a smart move. Fan had already worked out a deal with the diamond mine to use their strip, so he was cleared to come right in. From there it was only ten minutes by helicopter to the camp at Clip Bay. That’s where he’d move her first.
The airport hummed with purpose. I stood with Tommy in a small group, looking at the Reaper drone. Its blunt nose poked out into the dawn light. It crouched on its spindly legs, most of its thirty-six-foot length inside the hangar, looming over the soldiers who were arming it.
“Hellfire missile,” I said.
“New type, though,” Carstairs said. “No bang-bang.” He glanced at me with a self-satisfied expression. The office weapons nerd.
“R9X kinetic warhead,” I said. “Excellent on soft targets.” His face fell. The ground crew finished with the missile and wheeled the arming rig away. “I had you made for military intelligence from the first act of the bulldog show,” I told Carstairs. “Please don’t tell me MI is running this operation.”
He shrugged deeper into his air force parka. “Officially it’s NORAD.”
We were standing in a corner of the airfield with the small group looking at the drone. Carstairs tugged his woolen hat lower. Tommy’s concession to the biting wind was a thermal top under his indigo bowling shirt. It had the name “Elvis” scrawled on the front.
“Do we know where Fan is now?”
“No,” Tommy said. “Today his crews staked four more properties and set up tent camps. They’ve been ferrying staking posts into the Clip Bay camp, and from there, out to the other camps by chopper.”
“Is there any traffic that looks different from the rest—maybe only a single chopper?”
Tommy looked at me suspiciously. “We can’t keep track of every flight. He could be holding Lily anywhere.”
I shot a quick text to the priest. A Canadian army Chinook came in and landed behind the hangar. A file of soldiers debarked and assembled beside a concrete-block structure. They were armed with Heckler & Koch MP5s. Some with FN Minimi light machine guns, and a few Benelli tactical shotguns—Italian semiautomatic twelve-gauge guns that can carry seven shells. The helicopters might be stealth, but the quiet part of the operation was going to end the second those guys jumped out of the chopper.
“They’re JTF2,” Carstairs said. “Joint Task Force 2. Their top special-forces unit.”
I pulled Tommy aside. “You’ve figured out that this is a decapitation, right? We dropped the charges on the sister. We got rid of the Galaxy. Xi Fan is a mad dog, so crazy even his sister wants him dead. So all this staking rush bullshit? It isn’t going to give him cover. It’s going to give us cover. It’s going to give the Canadians cover. To kill him.” I jerked my head at the drone. “That’s why nobody shut down the depot full of posts. They want Fan out there dicking around. There is zero part of this operation that is about extraction.”
“Alex, they’ve all been briefed on Lily. They know he has her. They know she’s not to be endangered.”
My phone pinged. I read the priest’s reply. “Catch you later,” I said, and walked away.
Closed to civilian traffic, the airport was a desolate expanse where nothing moved but the military vehicles patrolling the perimeter. Across the city, it was a different story. I watched another set of navigation lights blink across the sky as a Twin Otter lined up on the floatplane dock and sank from sight. It was the third bush plane in five minutes. I scrolled through my phone and found the bomb that Fan had just dropped on the market. Angel Minerals had made a diamond strike in the Barrens. The staking rush was on. Exactly the cover Fan wanted. The more activity, the better his chances of moving undetected as he hunted Mitzi Angel.
* * *
Tommy caught up with me in the empty passenger terminal.
“Don’t you have a career to run, Tommy?”
“Hey.” He clamped his hand on my arm and made me stop. “I have a job to do. It’s not the same as your job.”
“I doubt you have a clear idea of what that job is at the moment. You seem to think that planting agents behind my back and letting Tabitha enroll you in her schemes makes you the shadow master.” I took his hand away and headed for the exit. He lumbered after me. “Here’s the scoop,” I said. “You’re not running anything. They’re running both of us. This has been a Pentagon op from the get-go. They needed someone to help put Fan in the crosshairs, so they could browbeat a weaker ally into taking action. You think we’re going to find Chinese missile-silo kits hidden in the equipment shed like IKEA flat packs?”
The priest was waiting in his crumbling Econoline outside the terminal. His head was bent to the little black book that contained the liturgy of the hours—the prayers that Catholic priests say every day.
“It must be hard for you,” Tommy said to me as I pulled open the van’s sliding door. “All this time you thought you were working for the Boy Scouts of America. Now you’ve found out that we are bad and devious people, and our only excuse is that 350 million US citizens depend on us to keep them from being annihilated by bastards like the people Fan works for.”
I tossed in my bag and started to close the door, but Tommy stuck out his arm and held it open.
“You’re going after her,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“They’re going to kill her. She’ll be collateral damage. She won’t even show up in the report.”
Tommy reached in, moved my bag aside, and climbed in.
“This is not your fight, Tommy. I don’t need you.”
“Bullshit,” he said. He held up th
e sat phone. “Eyes and ears, muchacho.” He slid the door shut with a bang.
45
We drove out of the city and took the highway south. “Silver Bird One, this is forward base dispatch,” a voice from Tommy’s phone said against the background chatter. “You are clear. Proceed to target.”
Thirty seconds later the first Black Hawk appeared above the trees and went whispering across the highway heading north.
“Silver Bird Two, advise when embarkation complete.”
By the time we reached the turnoff for Behchoko an hour later, the Black Hawks were closing on Clip Bay. The AWACS planes had jammed the camp’s communications. We listened to the laconic voices of the Black Hawk pilots, reporting their positions as they came up the inlet fast, low on the water.
We drove through the village and pulled up at the wooden church. The priest went inside. He returned a few minutes later with his hockey bag, a small black leather case, and a couple of extra parkas. We drove down to the water and across the little bridge and onto the island.
The beat-up yellow Beaver with the black pontoons was moored to the stubby dock. The wind was picking up. Gray waves slapped against the plane, and whitecaps flashed in the channel. Pete had his hands shoved in the pockets of his overalls.
“This isn’t fair,” he said to the priest when we got out. “These guys are spies for the American government. Mitzi’s business is Mitzi’s business. I thought it was just going to be you. I agreed to meet because you said she was in danger.”
“Pete,” I said, “she’s in trouble. I don’t know exactly what she’s planning, and I doubt you do. But if it involves cheating Fan, she picked the wrong sucker. Maybe you noticed the traffic on your way back here.”
“We expected that. It’s part of his plan. It’s a staking rush. Of course it would happen. It’s an area play. Anybody who can get a plane or helicopter and some stakes will form a little company and sell shares into a hot market.” He glared at Tommy. “You have people all over town,” he said to him, “asking about Mitzi and me. It’s a small town, mister.” He faced me. “I respect you, Alex, but we knew this was going to happen.”