by Brett Baker
“Do you know the coordinates where you picked her up?” Oglesby asked. “We can’t search the whole ocean, but if we can narrow it to a few hundred square miles maybe we’ll get lucky and find some debris. The ocean didn’t swallow the whole thing. Something’s got to be left on the surface.”
“No idea,” Randy said. “And without knowing how long the plane flew after she jumped out it’d be hard to know anyway.”
“Then where do we go from here?” Oglesby asked.
“I’ve got to get back to Washington,” Randy said. “I lost a boat, two men, and somehow survived. I’ve got some explaining to do. Any suggestions on how to tell this story? I assume you’d rather I not mention The Summit.”
“That’s right,” Mia said. “It’s imperative you keep this to yourself.”
“Leadership?”
Mia shook her head. “No one. We’ve all been in positions where it would be easier for us to divulge the existence of The Summit, but we can’t do it.”
“Except when stuck on a boat in a middle of the ocean?” Randy asked.
Mia chuckled. “You fall under the exception created for those who rescue agents from the aftermath of falling from the sky.”
“A common occurrence, I’m sure,” Randy said.
“If you only knew.”
“Let’s give you something though,” Oglesby said. “You helped us. We don’t want to just leave you with nothing.”
“When I get back to land I’m going to have a difficult time explaining how I lost a boat and two men, and I made it back, but I can’t divulge the identity of the people who helped me. Should we create a backstory?”
“I don’t think so,” Mia said. “I don’t like using backstories. They’ll work for almost everyone in the world, but if someone starts asking the right questions they’ll fall apart, and it’s easy to see the bullshit. I think we have to make this authentic.”
“How so?” Randy asked.
“We have to create a situation where you protect The Summit by omission, not creation. Have you experience an alternative version of events that you can describe as if it were the original version.”
“Back to the boat?” Oglesby asked.
Mia nodded. “I think that’s the best thing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Randy asked.
“We need to take you back to the boat and let someone else rescue you. It makes the most sense. Then you don’t have to make up the story. Or, rather, you make up a different story. We can take you back and then arrange for someone else to rescue you. Merchant marine or something. We can report a boat in distress.”
“And what if no one rescues me,” Randy asked. “It’s easy for you to say that it makes the most sense, but it’s not your ass that’s stuck in the middle of the Pacific on a second-rate boat until someone rescues you. And if no one ever comes you don’t have to deal with the consequences.”
“We’ve done it before,” Mia said. “In similar situations. Not quite to this extent, but I’ve left people behind to protect myself or The Summit. We won’t leave you there forever. We’ll drop you at the boat, then put out a mayday call for you. Make sure someone else can come rescue you.”
“How’s that going to work? You can see that someone needs rescue, but you can’t do it yourself? That makes no sense.”
“Sure it does. We just have to seem like assholes. And assholes rule the world, Randy. You know that. There’s never a shortage of them. A boat needs rescue, but we’re on deadline and we can’t stop to help. We lose millions if we arrive late. We choose money over our fellow man. But then we throw you a bone so you think we care about you. People do it every single day. It’s the way of the world.”
“So you just take me out there and hope that someone else will help?”
“Someone will come,” Oglesby said. “There’s nothing a mariner likes more than the chance to be a hero. But we can provide backup. We’ll hang back, and if no one rescues you after two or three days we’ll come back and pick you up and move on to plan B. This is a worth a shot though.”
“You drop me off, someone else rescues me, and then I tell the story of that rescue and just leave out the part about a helicopter coming down from the heavens to save me.” Randy nodded his head in agreement. “There’s a one day gap in the sequence of events. How do I explain that?”
“They don’t need to know that,” Mia said. “You’d be in no worse shape being stuck on that boat three days than two days. The difference is negligible. Besides, it’s not like this boat’s a day spa. You don’t have to worry about sinking or being lost at sea if you’re on this boat, but that’s the only difference.”
“If you say so,” Randy said, agreeing to ignore the other obvious differences.
“You’ll be alone, but we’ll watch from afar,” Oglesby said. “And in case you haven’t noticed, we’re good at that.”
“You guys have anything better?” Randy asked Krasner and Brown. “Anything that doesn’t involve stranding me in the middle of the ocean?”
“It’s up to you,” Oglesby said. “We’re doing this to help you. If you prefer, we can bring you back with us and you can find another way to explain how you made it. But you need to understand that we won’t be around to vouch for anything you say. Barring unusual circumstances, this is the end of the line for you and us.”
“End of the line?” Randy asked, sliding the tip of his thumb across his throat as if slicing it.
“No, as in we’re not working together on this,” Mia said. “If we want to ensure the independence and anonymity of The Summit there’s nothing worse we can do than to work along side Feds. That’s just the way it is. When we part ways, we part ways.”
Randy nodded his understanding. He sat back in his chair and tried to think through his options. It didn’t take long before he concluded that he had no options. The Secret Service would investigate the events surrounding the loss of his boat and the disappearance of Fitz and Graham. Better that he returned to shore with the assistance of Good Samaritans who would cooperate with the investigation rather than with assistance from people who would disappear, which is what The Summit would do.
“I guess it’s back to the boat then,” Randy said. “Assuming it’s still afloat. If it’s not, then I’ll just stay with you. I’m not going to float in the middle of the ocean.”
“Yeah, it’s not as fun as it sounds,” Mia said.
21
Chapter 21
The knock on the door woke Fabrice just as the first rays of sunlight peeked over the horizon. He balanced on the divide between sleep and coherence, and dismissed the knocks. The person knocking on the door of his room, 1408, at the Wanda Vista Quanzhou persisted though, and Fabrice shook remnants of sleep from his mind, and got out of bed.
“Who is it?” he asked as he took two steps toward the door. He then remembered where he was, and that the only person he knew, Dian, would have called his name through the door to ease his mind about knocking.
Fabrice assumed the worst and looked around the room for a way to defend himself. Nothing else seemed suitable so he removed the belt from his pants, wrapped it around his hand like brass knuckles, and proceeded toward the door. The knocking stopped, but his paranoia didn’t. “What do you want? I’m trying to sleep.”
“Open the door or I can’t help.” Three more soft knocks, almost too quiet for Fabrice to hear.
Fabrice approached the door, took a deep breath, and cracked it open. A man’s face leered back at him, inches from his own.
“I’m here to see you Fabrice. Let me in.”
“I’m sorry, buddy, but you’re going to have to give me more than that. I’m not letting you in just because you tell me to do so.”
“If I stay in this hallway much longer I’m a dead man. So you can let me in and hear what I have to say, or you can leave me out here and I’ll go to the grave without talking to you. The choice is yours.”
“What’s this about?”
“You said to come to your room at the Wanda Vista Quanzhou. I’m at your room. I’m sure you know what it’s about.”
“How did you know I was here?” Fabrice asked.
“You told us,” the man said. “You came to talk to us at the airport. I saw you. I’m here. Are you going to let me in or not, because either way I have to get out of this hallway.”
Fabrice closed the door, and looked back toward the room. He half-expected someone to emerge and attack him, feeling as if the man at the door couldn’t act alone. He had to be involved in some great deception. But Fabrice dismissed his concern as part of the paranoia of adjusting to life in another country.
He opened the door, stepped out of the way, and let the man inside.
“It’s about damn time,” the man said. “Are all of you fucking Americans so paranoid? You’re not the one who’s life is on the line here. I don’t know what you’re so fucking scared about.”
“Your life is on the line?” Fabrice asked.
“Probably. Unless you toe the line here your life is always on the line. And maybe you can’t tell by the way I’m providing covert information at an obscene hour, but I don’t toe the line. That puts me in danger. Constant danger.”
“Thanks for coming. But why should I believe you? I mean, if things are as bad as you say, and as bad as Dian said, then it’s just as likely that you’re a spy for the government, and you’re just here to collect information to act against me.”
The man walked to the window and looked down at the street. After standing at the window for a minute, he pulled the curtains closed. He turned toward Fabrice and motioned out the window. “After I leave here, come to the window and watch. If I take a bullet to the head as soon as I leave the hotel, then you’ll know that I wasn’t a spy.”
“Might that happen?” Fabrice asked.
“I’m not a spy, so it’s always a possibility,” the man said. “The Chinese government doesn’t like when people act against it, and they might view conspiring with an American as acting against the government, regardless of how I’m helping you.”
“And if you’re not shot in the head?”
“Then you still don’t know,” the man said. “Either I’m a spy and I’m protected, or I’m not a spy and they just didn’t get to me yet. You decide what you want to believe.”
“What’s your name?” Fabrice asked.
“Are you kidding me? I tell you that there’s a chance I might end up with a bullet nested in my skull as soon as I leave here and the first thing you do is ask me my name? You might as well just shoot me yourself. My name doesn’t matter. If you have to call me something then you can call me Charlie.”
“All right, Charlie. Why are you here?”
“I work at the airport. I listened to what you and Dian said yesterday, and I think I can help.”
“I’m listening.”
Charlie continued pacing around the room. He disappeared into the bathroom for a moment, and made sure that no one hid there. He looked under beds, opened closet doors, and peered inside heat ducts. “You know, just because there’s no one here doesn’t mean that there’s no one here. They’re listening all the time. Everywhere. I assume that everything I say or do is monitored because that’s the way it seems much of the time. So before we get too deep in this, that’s something you might want to acknowledge. Even though you think it’s just the two of us, my experience has been that it’s never just the two of us.”
Fabrice scribbled a message on the notepad at the desk in the corner, “Should we talk elsewhere?”
“The only thing more dangerous than talking in a room that’s monitored is talking out in public. It’s best to stay in here.”
“I’ll defer to you,” Fabrice said.
“Smart move,” Charlie said.
“Who are you?”
“I know Yuzhan Li. None of the other men know him by name, and I’ve only met him once and talked to him a couple of times, so I’m not sure how helpful I’ll be, but as soon as you mentioned his name I knew why you were there.”
“And why was I there?” Fabrice asked.
“Gold.”
Fabrice nodded his approval. He’d mentioned nothing about gold or why he wanted to find Yuzhan Li, so Charlie must have known Li if he mentioned gold.
“A few weeks back Li came to talk to us in the same way that you did. In fact, when I saw you pull up in the car, I assumed you were Li. He arrived at the same time, in the same way, but he had no interpreter. He’s from here so he can speak the language. He told us he had a special shipment coming in, and he needed some help managing it. He didn’t say what was coming or what he needed. He was very vague. When the other guys hear something like that they assume that there’s money in it for them. They’re all chomping at the bit to get involved. Not quite falling before him and pleading to help, but not too far from it. He didn’t hire any of them and left. I assumed that was the end of it, until the end of the day when I was walking home from work and he pulled up next to me. I was the only one who didn’t beg to work for him, so he assumed that meant one of two things, either I’m a proud man who won’t beg, or I’m a lazy man who won’t work. He wanted to know which was correct. We talked for a little while, he liked what he heard, so he hired me.”
Charlie walked to the window, opened the curtains, and then looked back at Fabrice, smiled, and said, “I’m not dead yet.”
“Hired you to do what?” Fabrice asked.
“Manage things for him. He said they had shipments of gold arriving a few months later and they needed a local connection to manage the airport operations.”
“Someone to do the work and keep their mouth shut,” Fabrice said.
“That’s right.”
“What was the work as Li explained it?”
“Airplane comes in filled with pallets of gold mixed in with pallets of other items used as cover. He wanted me to find a team of five guys who could unload the planes and transfer the gold to a holding area here, without completing the paperwork that such transfers require. And he wanted me to coordinate the movement of that gold to a warehouse he had chosen outside the city. He said the entire operation required complete secrecy. He sold it as a partnership, as if this were a great opportunity for me, but he also implied substantial consequences if I had loose lips.”
“And you agreed to help?”
“I did. I needed the money, and the excitement of taking part in something so secretive appealed to me.”
“No gold has come in yet,” Fabrice stated.
“That’s right. I assume you’re involved with the operation in some way?” Charlie asked.
“I am. I’m here to find Li. He’s gone missing and we don’t know if he’s selling us out, or if something happened to him.”
“I can’t help you with that. I haven’t seen him for eight or nine days. He came to see me and wanted to make sure I hadn’t changed my mind, and he also said that he decided to move up the timeline. Instead of a few months, he expected the first shipment in a week or ten days. I still had to find a couple of more guys to help, so I was a little panicked. He told me to get on it, said the shipment wouldn’t wait for me to be ready. I had to be ready when they were ready, and if I couldn’t do it then he’d find someone else who could.”
“And did you find more guys?”
“I did. Li came back a couple of days later and I had all of my guys in place, and he gave me all of the shipment details, day, time, plane, personnel. Everything seemed in place, but the shipment never came. The plane didn’t land. I waited the entire damn day and into the night, and nothing. I never had any contact information for Li, so I can’t call him or go see him. But when the plane never came I assumed Li would show up and let me know what happened, and tell me when I could expect the next plane. But nothing so far. Then you showed up instead. Seems clear to me that something’s falling apart.”
“I think you’re right,” Fabrice said.
“What’s next?” Charlie asked.<
br />
“I don’t know. Li’s missing, that’s for sure. I’m on the other end of operations and we can’t find him. We haven’t heard that the shipment arrived. We haven’t heard from any of the personnel that should have accompanied the shipment. Up until just now you knew more than I did.”
“Li made it clear that this would work out to be a lucrative deal for me. He said that without my assistance the whole thing couldn’t work, and with the risk I took on he wanted to ensure that I benefitted. And now, even if it falls apart, I’m still working with you on this.”
“And you want to get paid?” Fabrice said.
Charlie nodded.
“Fair enough,” Fabrice said. He opened the safe in the closet, retrieved some bills, and gave Charlie two thousand dollars. “I appreciate your help, Charlie, but this money assumes that you’ll come to me if you obtain any other information. If you hear anything from Li, or hear about any gold coming through the airport, or anyone else contacts you about this you come to me right away.”
“How long will you be in Quanzhou?” Charlie asked.
“As long as it takes,” Fabrice said. “This is a major undertaking. When the cornerstone of the whole plan goes missing we don’t just throw in the towel. We figure out what the fuck happened. At this point, Li is worth almost as much as the gold.”
22
Chapter 22
After talking to the detectives, Buster spent the rest of the afternoon alone in his office, doing what he always did when faced with a complex problem: brainstorming. He wrote every aspect of the current situation on sticky notes, and posted them to a whiteboard wall. With a dry erase marker he drew arrows to show how different entities connected, and how they might impact each other. Black lines indicated actions to avoid at all costs, red lines indicated actions to be used with caution, green lines indicated the preferred course of action. He’d built his business using the same technique, and had solved complex problems in an unfamiliar culture with almost flawless execution.