Dragon: Out of the Box (The Girl in the Box Book 37)

by Robert J. Crane

  Either because of the hard landing or because I caught him by surprise, he let go – barely. I safely rolled backward out of his grip and caught myself, albeit unsteadily, on my own two feet. I bobbled back a few steps, putting my dukes up and staring at the twin burning coals of his eyes.

  “Yeah,” I said, about two good seconds from keeling over from the battering I'd just taken trying to escape his death grip. “How do you like them apples?” I caught myself on an end table, barely keeping from keeling over in a pile of foot stools.

  He must have thought them apples were just fine, because his response was to flip from his back to all fours and stare at me with those flaming eyes for about a second before throwing himself at the far wall again. He crashed through and daylight flooded in as he disappeared beyond that boundary.

  “Oh, hell,” I muttered, and hobbled toward the door at top speed. I just about shinned myself on a low table, shattering the glass and not giving the least of a damn. I burst out of the doors onto the loading dock to find–

  He was gone. Sweat poured down my forehead, my back, my chest, which heaved taking in big breaths.

  “You see him?” Hilton burst out of the doors behind me, gun in hand, sweeping left to right with squinted eyes against the sudden, invasive daylight.

  “No,” I said, looking to the expansive wood line to the left, pretty sure that if he'd run, I wasn't catching him, at least not in my current condition. Hell, I didn't even know if I could run him down on foot, nor if I could beat him if I caught him, given I was having a little trouble standing without swaying at present. His oily smell still hung in the air, though he was long gone. “He got away.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “That was some excellent timing,” I said to Hilton in the midst of the swirl of police and FBI agents combing through the furniture store in the aftermath of our battle. “Not too shabby shooting, either.”

  “Thanks,” Hilton said. She'd been pretty reserved after we'd called in backup. Something about killing a fellow human being brought on a heady air of reality, like a sudden pressure on your chest.

  Or so I thought. It had been a long time since my first kill, and I'd left a rather long trail since, so the feeling didn't really come up on me anymore.

  “We've got two furniture store employees up front for questioning, ma'am,” Agent Santos of the FBI said. He'd shown up about ten minutes after the local police, dispatched from headquarters. Our other backup, Agent Holloway, had yet to show for whatever reason. Possibly hangover-related. Some rank and file agents like Santos, not from our division, had shown up, so the FBI was clearly flying the flag here.

  “Thanks,” I said, sitting next to Hilton on our SUV's open hatchback. “Can I question them?”

  He nodded, then directed a look at Hilton. “You two need to separate anyway. Until we get statements, you know.”

  “It was a righteous shoot,” I said, giving Hilton as close to an affirming look as I could. “Agent Hilton just saved my life.”

  “That's nice,” Santos said. “But you're not allowed to talk to her again until we get both your statements, okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, giving Hilton a last nod of encouragement as I headed into the store. Lucky for me I was such an important asset to the FBI that they didn't make me go through the post-shooting suspension and removal from duty that was common to most law enforcement agencies. Being just about the only person capable of doing my job had certain advantages, and not getting benched during crises just because I fired my weapon at people and occasionally killed them was definitely one of them, at least from my perspective.

  Santos trailed behind me as I entered the store. My earlier suspicion was confirmed; they definitely put on the AC in the customer portion of the store, while leaving the back room in a nearly sweltering natural state.

  “Here's our guys,” Santos said, trying to catch up and overtake me so he could do the leading. I almost laughed under my breath at his little dominance game, but instead I just sped up my pace so he would have had to run to succeed at passing me. The look on his face when he realized what I did was hilarious.

  “Hey guys,” I said casually as I came up on the store employees. They were both Asian, just like all three perps we'd encountered in the back room and the two out in Virginia as well as the vic, which I found interesting. “How's everybody doing today? Good?”

  I didn't expect much response to that, and boy did I get it. Hangdog looks from both of them. They wore dress shirts and ties fully buttoned with dress slacks, every piece of their ensembles off-the-rack and a size too big for them. They were both very slender, and the looks in their eyes as they took in my approach reeked of defeat.

  Picking which of them to talk to first was an exercise in eenie meenie miney moe. There was roughly no difference in their attitudes; both looked to be in their early twenties, with black hair cut in almost the same style, and both seemed about a quarter second from hurling themselves over a bridge if a sufficiently high one suddenly presented itself.

  “All right, you're with me,” I said to the nearest, gently seizing his wrist and pulling him my way.

  He offered no resistance, coming along like a whipped dog as I pulled him out of earshot of his colleague, who watched him go with marked disinterest, as though keeping an eye on a small argument between co-workers as it unfolded during lunch.

  “What's your name?” I asked, trying to keep my voice in the range of “compassionate, yet tough,” as I made him walk toward the storeroom. He complied easily.

  “Ru Sung,” he said in a low, dead voice. He hung his head as he walked.

  “You know who I am, Ru?” I asked. He nodded pitifully, and that was it. “Do you know why I'm here?”

  He lifted his head. We passed through the swinging doors into the back room, and he looked around as we did so, taking swift note of the giant hole in the break room wall. FBI agents and local PD were inside poking around, but he seemed unsurprised and not particularly reactive to this turn of events. “It's about our new arrivals,” he said at last, in a voice heavily accented.

  “Yep,” I said. “How long have these guys been here?”

  “Two weeks,” Ru said, completely miserable.

  I nodded. “What else do you know about these guys?”

  “I don't know anything,” he said. “Not their names, nothing. I have not met them or talked to them, just seen them. They don't tell me anything. They don't allow us in that room.” He pointed to the break room. “All I do is my job – sell furniture. Then sell more furniture. Every day, so they don't send me back to China.”

  I raised an eyebrow at that. “Why would they send you back to China?”

  The slump of his shoulders suggested there was not a lot of guile to be found in Ru. “I am here on an H-2B visa. Save Much sponsored me. Without their backing, I have to return.”

  “What's so bad about going home?” I asked, more because I was fishing than because I didn't know. I read pretty extensively about foreign affairs, and of all the big powers, China made me the most uneasy.

  Ru stiffened, looking around like he was being watched. “Nothing,” he said robotically, eyes flitting about looking for cameras or listeners. “I just...like it here.”

  I didn't feel like pressing the poor guy, so I let that one go. “How long have you been here?” I asked. “And how long have you been working for Save Much?”

  “Twelve months,” Ru said, back to quiet despair. “For both. I studied English in Tianjin and signed up with Save Much to bring me over.” He looked around again. “Do you know if I can transfer to another Save Much location?”

  “That's really a question for your boss,” I said, pressing on. “Speaking of – who is your boss?”

  “The store manager is Jiahao Lam,” Ru said miserably. “He's not here today.”

  “You know where he lives?” Ru shook his head, so I asked another question. “Where do you live?”

  He pointed toward the far wall. “Company
apartment. Two miles that way. We all live there together. The workers, I mean.”

  That was unsurprising given his H-2B status. “How many of you?”

  “Fifteen,” Ru said. “In two apartments.”

  “You guys must be sleeping on mattresses on the floor,” I said. “Do you know the address?”

  He nodded, and I offered him my pad. He wrote down an address and I passed it to a local officer moving through from the break room. “Can you send a squad car over there and detain the occupants for questioning? It's where the store workers all live. H-2B visas, company housing.”

  The officer nodded and disappeared out the door, and I turned my attention back to Ru. “How are the working conditions here?” I asked.

  Ru stiffened again. “Fine,” he answered, a little too quickly.

  “Mmhm,” I said, again not pressing. I jotted a couple nothings down in my notebook. “What do you do in your off time?” I asked, looking back up at him.

  Again, Ru froze. “Not...much,” he finally said.

  “How much do they pay you here?” I asked.

  Ru stiffened further, making him look like his entire musculoskeletal system had gotten a good jolt of electricity. No answer was forthcoming.

  “Where's your passport?” I asked, figuring I'd ease off on him on one vector of attack and see what I could pull up from another.

  Once more he sagged, and his answer came mumbled, his eyes locked to the storeroom’s dull concrete floor. “I...don't know.”

  I squeezed the notepad between my fingertips, leaving a nice impression of my thumb at the bottom corner. “The manager took your passport, didn't he?” I asked, trying to look him dead in the eyes. “This Jiahao Lam, right? As soon as you came over?”

  If Ru had sagged any further, he would have melted into a pool on the floor. But he nodded, and I knew he wasn't lying.

  “Okay,” I said, giving him a pat on the arm. “You can go on back out there with your friend.” I pointed him toward the doors. “Just–”

  “Ma'am?” I turned to find a tall, black agent standing at the door to the break room. “You might want to come take a look at this.”

  I snagged a nearby chair and dragged it over, gesturing for Ru to have a seat. “Wait here,” I said, and he sat down meekly. I made my way through the aisles of furniture, shooting only one look back at Ru before I made it to the break room door. “Need someone to come keep an eye on my witness,” I said, and a local cop hurried to oblige me as I entered the swinging doors.

  Every cabinet in the room had been opened since last I'd left through the giant hole in the wall that didn't look even a little Sienna-shaped. A variety of papers had been dumped out, and a lock box sat on the battered table in the middle of the room. It had been pried open, its contents dumped out across the surface.

  And that...that caught my eye immediately.

  Because in addition to a pile of US twenty-dollar bills that easily added up to a hundred K or more, there were dozens of red passports sitting on the table.

  I sauntered up to the pile as Agent Santos handed me a pair of latex gloves and I snapped them on, then picked up a handful of passports to leaf through.

  “Well, here's Ru's,” I muttered as I thumbed through the third in the stack. When I hit the fifth, I found a familiar face.

  It was Firebeetle Bailey. “'Cheng Yu,'” I said, reading his name, and putting it off to the side.

  Then I opened the next passport in the stack and got a rude surprise.

  It was another one with “Cheng Yu,” except here his name was listed as “Xue Wu.” The next was for him as well, under another name. The next three were for someone else – one of the perps dead out in Virginia, I thought – and the rest of the pile was the same story. I'd hit a singleton from what I suspected was a store employee, like Ru, a captive of the store owner, then three with the same pictures – an operative like Firebeetle Bailey and the other kidnappers.

  And every single passport was from the People's Republic of China.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I was still looking around the scene an hour or so later when my phone rang. I had filed an initial report with my boss's assistant, so the call wasn't entirely out of the blue, but still, when my phone lit up with the Caller ID note of Heather Chalke, I always had to mentally brace myself before answering the call.

  “Hey, boss,” I said, steeling myself for what could either be a quick and formal or long and uncomfortable conversation. With Chalke, it was a coin flip as to which I'd get. “What's up?”

  “Just paged through your report from the scene,” Chalke said, sounding brusque, business-like, and to the point. “What's your read on this situation?”

  I paused, composing my thoughts. “Um, well,” I said, “it's still forming in my head, but I have a couple of thoughts, I guess.”

  “Go,” she said, sounding like she was reading something as she listened, like I didn't warrant her full attention.

  Go? I shook my head as I stood in the back room of the furniture store, looking around to make sure no one was listening in. The cops were all still poking around the break room and the front of the store, though I had a feeling they'd start turning over furniture back here in case someone had written a coded message on a packing invoice or something. Being thorough was rather important in our line of work, after all.

  “My thinking goes along a couple lines,” I said, trying to put into words the ideas I'd had bouncing around in my head for the last hour. “One, that these kidnappers came into town with multiple passports because they're part of a Chinese criminal enterprise like the Triads, and their corruption has allowed them to take over a passport office somewhere in the country with impunity, get all the passports they want.”

  “Mmhmm,” Chalke said. I could picture her nodding along as she...I dunno, trimmed her fingernails or approved color swatches for her condo on the other side of the call.

  “But that's questionable,” I said. “Option two is that the passports are fake. I sent an inquiry to the State Department, though, to go through channels to the People's Republic to ask about them–”

  “You should have consulted with me before doing that.” There was a dangerous edge to her voice, and now she seemed focused on me.

  “Uh...sorry?” I was more perplexed than apologetic.

  The storm in her voice passed quickly, though. “Go on.”

  “Anyway, I just wanted to see if the passports were legit and if we had records of the multiple personalities for our kidnappers entering the country,” I said. “Or if they were sticking to traveling on one passport and using the others as backups in case of emergency or being outed. Regardless, haven't heard anything from State yet about their authenticity.”

  “Fine, fine,” she said, and mostly, she sounded like it was. Chalke was a little bit of a cipher, except when pissed. Then it was very obvious what she was thinking. “Any other thoughts?”

  “One,” I said, kind of hesitating to say it because of the political implications. “But it's uncomfortable.”

  There was a pause. “When has 'uncomfortable' ever stopped you before?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “What if the passports are real? All of them.”

  Chalke didn't reply at first. “That seems improbable. Corruption happens in the People's Republic all the time. Just a few years ago they had a poisoned milk scandal–”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, feeling the discomfort build. I was fully aware I was voicing an uncomfortable sentiment in Washington politics right now. The elephant in the room that a lot of people didn't want to discuss: China's bad behavior. “But what if this is a sanctioned activity?”

  “What you're suggesting,” Chalke said, drawing out her words, “is that the People's Republic of China sent a squad of kidnappers into the US to abduct a college professor in Northern Virginia?”

  “I'm not suggesting it,” I said, aware of the thin ice I seemed to be perpetually skating on with my boss – well, always. “I'm
just trying to float all the possibilities.”

  “What's the motive?” Chalke asked. “Because the act – doing that – would be cause for a major diplomatic incident. Maybe even war.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, tiptoeing more than I would have a few months ago, when I'd been in New York, reporting to Willis Shaw. Life had been simpler then, before I'd been force-moved to DC and put under the not-so-gentle auspices of Director Chalke. “I don't have a motive. Hell, I don't even have all the kidnappers. All I have is a pile of passports that defies explanation and what looks like a professional snatch and grab that went wrong only because of random chance. That, plus the involvement of a meta...” I shrugged. “It all adds up to something, but I need more data.”

  “Why does the involvement of a meta matter?” Chalke asked. There was a steely heat in her voice.

  I kicked myself for throwing that in. It was a thought that had been percolating in my head, though, and now it had to come out because trying to hold it in seemed unwise right now. “This might have happened before you got cleared into metahuman affairs, but back during the war, as one of his opening moves, Sovereign destroyed the official government facility for training and housing metahumans in China.” I paused, letting that sit for a second. “It was suspected to be a special unit where the PRC trained metas for government service and it resulted in the deaths of pretty much their entire meta population.”

  “Interesting.” Chalke was taking all this in, I could tell, because her voice no longer held the aura of distraction.

  “Metas are – or at least were – pretty tightly leashed over there,” I said. “If that move cost them almost all their meta numbers, and this guy is, in fact, a Chinese national? The smart money is that they know he's a meta, and that he's roped in with the government somehow. Which leads me to believe–”

  “Understood,” Chalke said. She paused for a second, then cursed under her breath. “All right. Well, a good portion of this is already in the open thanks to you passing it along to State. Nothing to be done about that now.” She stopped again, tapping her fingers loud enough I could hear them on the other side of the call. “Okay. I need you at 1600 Pennsylvania in an hour for a briefing.”