Swiftshadow

by D S Kane

  But one of the crew spotted her and yelled an alarm. She jolted and then recovered, smiling at the crew member. “Adios and thanks for the ride.” Cassie jumped clear of the ship into the dark waters, thirty feet below.

  The cool water of the South China Sea shocked her body, a deep contrast to the oppressive air. She bobbed to the surface with her inflatable bag and raft floating alongside her. The CO2 cartridge finished inflating the raft and Cassie climbed aboard with her bag. She paddled with her arms, aiming the raft toward the shore, far away.

  * * *

  In the Hong Kong alleyway, they had a clear view of the pier. Hamid watched the ship as it entered the harbor. He signaled Sayed. “When the ship docks and she gets off, shoot her but don’t kill her. Shoot both her legs, so she can’t run. We need to learn what she knows before we dispose of her.” Sayed nodded as he screwed the night scope onto the Dragunov sniper rifle. Hamid thought, it will be an easy shot, two blocks from the pier.

  CHAPTER 8

  July 6, 9:11 a.m.

  Stanley Beach, Hong Kong

  Just before dawn she reached landfall and staggered onto the beach at Stanley, near Repulse Bay, dragging the raft behind her. Her arms and legs ached and burned. The street was empty in the hours before sunrise. For just a second, she turned to watch the tug push the Soochow Dragon toward the harbor piers, several miles away. Squeezing air from the raft, she compressed it, folded and placed it in the bag, along with the life jacket. Cassie pulled the straps from the bag, converting it into a backpack, belted it over her shoulders, and set off toward the city.

  She walked until she found a dark narrow alleyway. It was empty, stinking of garbage. A chorus of rats skittered away from her. She cursed her fates at being forced to live in shadows.

  In the disappearing darkness she stripped off her bathing suit and changed into street clothes. She removed her passport and travelers checks from the bag, along with a small expandable rolling suitcase. Cassie placed everything into it.

  Last, she took a deep breath.

  * * *

  As the ship docked, the assassins waited. But an hour passed and Sashakovich hadn’t left the ship. Sayed shook his head. “Where is she?”

  Hamid frowned. “Don’t know. We’ll wait. She has to show.”

  It wasn’t until noon when Hamid realized what had happened. “I have to tell our employer we’ve failed.”

  Sayed scratched his head. “And then what?”

  “We wait in this forsaken place until new orders come.”

  * * *

  Cassie could see massive Victoria Peak and decided to walk along the shore. She found Stanley Main Street and headed west. The hike to downtown Hong Kong seemed endless. As she approached the city, modern, tall, sleek skyscrapers surrounded her and crowds grew thicker. She strolled through the streets, reveling in the wonderful aromas that emanated from the street vendors and restaurants of the city. Near the Maritime Museum she stopped at a rolling cart and used her counterfeit US currency to buy a char siu bau, a steamed sweet pork bun. Yum. Real soul food.

  Morning rolled into rush hour. The streets of the financial district jammed with noisy people, more crowded and noisy than her recollection of Stanford’s stadium during a crucial football game. Cassie pushed her way to a small newsstand and bought a map of the city and surrounding areas. The map listed hotel advertisements along borders of its page. She flagged down a taxi and headed toward Nathan Road, where she could pose as a tourist.

  At 8:30 a.m. she stood in front of the large, busy Newton Hotel on Electric Road. She would use it as a base of operations for her brief visit. The hotel claimed it was close to the MTR—mass transit—station on Fortress Hill, with easy access to places she might need to go.

  She checked in. Some English-speaking tourists in the well-decorated mirrored lobby were arguing about their choice of tours. Those close enough to smell the acrid stench of her unbathed body walked away and spoke to each other in hushed tones. The hotel clerk didn’t seem to care or notice that her passport bore no entry stamp, probably due to the counterfeit US$100 bill she had placed within the passport.

  In her tiny room, she removed the puke and sweat-stinking clothing she’d worn. She thought about tossing the clothes into the trash, but decided to have them dry cleaned by the hotel. As she stripped, the odors coming off her body were so strong it made her sick. She dropped the garments into a plastic bag and knotted it.

  Her room had a private bath, and she enjoyed her first shower in nine days. Scrubbed herself for almost forty minutes until she was sure she no longer stank. Passing by the mirror as she got out of the shower, she was surprised to see her breasts were larger, and her nipples larger and darker than they’d been before she left New York. Cassie had several padded 32A bras, none of which fit. Rather than enlarging them by cutting the padding from them, she decided not to bother with one. She often missed periods and guessed now one might be about to start. This sometimes caused her breasts to swell. But she admired herself in the mirror. She’d always felt deprived, having no breasts, and now, suddenly, there they were.

  She dressed in a casual outfit as clean as herself and placed the dry-cleaning bag outside her door for the hotel to process.

  I’m ready to work.

  Cassie sat at the desk and reviewed her notes. The trade secrets she sought had been hacked right out from her client’s own servers. It wouldn’t have been difficult for a decent hacker to do this.

  Although it would have been easier for an insider to steal paper or electronic records while on site, she didn’t believe this was probable. She’d found no electronic traces leading from their servers to the Silicon Valley “Mae West” facility in San Jose, which coordinated all Internet telecommunications going into or out of the West Coast to the Far East, including Hong Kong.

  Therefore, Hong Kong was where the hacker did his work. Even with her client’s tight network security, there were holes big enough to permit a professional to arrive electronically, undetected, scan the systems, and leave with copies of the documents.

  It might be possible the hacker hired an insider, possibly an employee of her client. Someone whose job it was to monitor the network on the night the hack was done. The accomplice would erase all traces from the client’s server. But it would be more dangerous to involve anyone else. No. Hackers almost always worked alone.

  Does the hacker live here in Hong Kong? Is there an insider helping the hacker? No way to know the answers.

  She put her cell phone in its case and hooked it to her belt.

  Cassie left the hotel and walked the busy streets. Hong Kong seemed a mixture of ancient and brand new, but unlike Riyadh, the streets were more crowded than any city she’d ever visited, with the nonnatives speaking mostly English or German. A tide of noise followed her, voices and traffic. The sidewalk was so densely crowded that she found progress difficult and slow, at best, unless she moved with the human tide.

  A Starbucks in downtown Hong Kong advertised a “pay as you go” wireless connection. Traceback from the Starbucks would be virtually impossible. Cassie entered, relieved to be off the steamy, congested sidewalk. She bought a latte and occupied a lounge chair where she could use the cell phone to vet the threads she’d discovered back in New York.

  Scouring the Internet, she determined the hacker’s efforts had originated over a two-week period, ending sometime about three weeks ago. She found one of the hacker’s traces left behind with a few details he or she hadn’t erased.

  She searched for a server address and an email address. Success. A bit more hacking and she determined the physical location of the server he or she used. The New Territories, a short distance from my client’s competitor. This led to more questions. Who was the person who’d sold the stolen data to my client’s competitor? Would one of the competing company’s employees have had the audacity to hack the data?

  Cassie left Starbucks and looked for a pharmacy where she could buy some items she wanted before travelin
g back to the hotel. She walked down one of the store’s aisles and picked up a “Guide to Doing Business in Hong Kong.” Most of the signs in the pharmacy were in Chinese and English, but the signs for things a local would want seemed to be only in Chinese.

  She found a sales clerk and tried to explain what she wanted to the clerk, but Cassie didn’t speak any dialect of Cantonese or Mandarin. Her area of expertise was the Middle East, not the Far East. The female sales clerk’s English was limited. Frustrated, she slowly used her hands to illustrate the things she wanted, but the sales clerk seemed unable to understand her.

  Suddenly, the sales clerk’s eyes widened and she pointed to Cassie’s chest. Cassie looked down and saw small, spreading, seeping wet circles where her blouse covered her nipples.

  The clerk’s hands mimicked a cradling motion. “Baby?”

  Cassie caught the sweet and creamy odor emanating from her blouse and it added to her shock. This couldn’t be happening to her. Pregnancy was supposed to be a joyous event. But not for her. It was a nightmare. How could she be pregnant and lactating only ten weeks after the assassin raped her? Was lactation this early even possible?

  First Abdul tried to kill me, and then he leaves me pregnant.

  She vowed to research lactation on the Internet. Desperate, she searched for some way to quell the building panic.

  She shook her head with regret and quietly answered the clerk’s question, “I guess so. Yes.” After seeing the breast milk seeping through Cassie’s blouse, the store clerk brought Cassie a pregnancy self-test and a hand-operated Medela breast pump. Cassie steeled herself. She tried to quell her anger, forcing her disappointment down. A steely resolve built in her. She’d just have to find a way to look past her problems until she could fix them. Shit.

  She obtained the items on her shopping list: a flashlight, several pairs of surgical gloves, a ferry and bus map of Hong Kong and the New Territories, and a fresh blouse. The pharmacy didn’t sell nursing bras, but Cassie suspected her breasts were too small to fit one.

  She found a dark alleyway on the way back to the hotel and changed her blouse, keeping the damp one for dry cleaning. She cried uncontrollably as she walked along Nathan Road.

  Back in the hotel, Cassie read the instructions for the self-test and then confirmed her worst fears: she really was pregnant from being raped by the man hired to assassinate her. She sulked as she read the instructions for the breast pump. She continued sobbing as she expressed a small amount of milk from each of her breasts. Tears fell as several drops of her milk dripped through the pump.

  Her nipples were excruciatingly sensitive. Would this be a continuing problem? Was this something other women in her family had occur so early in their pregnancies?

  She wiped the tears on her sleeve. One bad day in Riyadh had ruined her life in so many ways.

  Cassie walked to the bathroom sink to toss the milk. She sniffed the liquid. It had a strong, sweet, almost buttery but pleasant aroma, somewhat like a fine Gouda cheese. Cassie dipped her finger into it. She drank it, and her curiosity sated, a thought occurred to her. This might be a mixed blessing on the freighter back to the United States, if she ran out of bottled water.

  She was starting to hate herself.

  Was there an upside? She realized lactation would motivate her to closet herself. It could be useful. Now I have a good excuse to remain by myself. Who would want a lactating woman as a girlfriend? Besides, anyone she met might be the next one trying to murder her.

  She needed solitude until she could make sense of her future.

  It was time to get to work. Cassie dressed in the darkest clothing she had, to keep from showing any subsequent leaks while she was outside the hotel. She couldn’t decide whether to bring the breast pump or just a fresh blouse—the last one until the others were returned clean by the hotel. But she’d need to keep her reserve blouse clean until the remainder of her clothing was returned, so she stuffed the breast pump into the attaché case.

  Cassie studied the map. She found the ferry building. Exiting the hotel, she took a bus to the ferry terminal and boarded the next boat to the New Territories. It was early in the afternoon, but she didn’t feel at all hungry. Nor did she feel nauseous. It had been morning sickness on the freighter and Cassie realized she’d been too damn concerned with her survival to recognize its symptoms. I’ve lost focus. I must not let that happen again.

  Her client’s competitor was a short taxi ride from the embarkation point at the ferry terminal. As she walked from the boat, she battled tourists and business people for a taxicab. It took over an hour to get one. And only fifteen minutes to get there.

  At her destination, she watched the empty taxi disappear from view before she began reconnoitering the area. She made her way around the building, sticking to the shadows, until she sighted the garbage bins the company used for paper trash. Looking inside one, she found they weren’t using cross-shredders. It would be easier to reassemble paper back into sheets.

  Before they’d fired her, the agency had completed its testing cycle for the “shred reassembler” computer program for Chinese printed text. She’d brought along the beta version of the program on a DVD. A decade ago, agency management demanded the program be created as a part of one of the appendices of “The New American Century” document.

  Each of the bins was full past overflowing. She decided the trash hadn’t been picked up for several days and maybe quite a bit longer. This was lucky for her. Making as little noise as possible, she opened the top of one of the large trash bins and slipped inside. She was thankful it contained only recyclable paper and emitted no odors.

  Opening her attaché case, she took out the flashlight, turned it on, and examined the paper scraps, both whole sheets and shredded pieces. She couldn’t read Chinese. There was no way to guess which scraps of paper were important. After visiting all three bins, she left with the attaché case filled to bursting with paper sheets and paper shreds.

  Cassie rode the ferry back to the city and stopped at a Starbucks for a cup of coffee to go. She found a copy center where she could piece together the document scraps in the attaché.

  The woman she saw reflected in the windows was truly a stranger to the person she’d been before her visit to Riyadh. Cassie sighed and tried to accept who she’d become, knowing that if there was a future for her it would likely be very different from her past. She wasn’t just going to think like a Islamic extremist. She was going to become whatever it took to save her own life. Her intention to survive—come what may—gave her a sudden surge of confidence.

  Out from the restroom, she waited in line to use the copy center’s computers and scanners. When it was her turn, Cassie removed the paper shreds from her attaché case and photocopied them. Then she scanned them into compressed TIFF computer image files. She used one of their computers to run the agency’s stolen shred reassembler program. The program aligned the scanned images and arranged them into cohesive language. She saved the images as graphic image files before processing them through the program’s optical character recognition protocols. Cassie gathered several hundred pages of Mandarin and saved them to the USB drive that had been embedded in her belt buckle. Then she erased the files and the programs from the copy center’s computer.

  The copy center employees waited for her to complete packing up before they closed for the night. She exited tired and hungry.

  She was back the next day when they opened, and worked straight through the day until an hour before they closed at 6 p.m. Cassie finished processing the paper trash by running another program she’d stolen from the agency, translating Chinese into English. Now she had English translations of all the files and would know if anything in the trash could lead her to the stolen documents. She tossed the paper pages and shredded paper.

  Cassie hadn’t eaten much—just snacks at Starbucks—for two days. And she had eaten only emergency rations on the freighter. As she left the copier center her stomach grumbled. She rubbed her famishe
d belly and remembered the restaurant and lodging guide she’d bought at the pharmacy. She pulled it from her backpack. She wanted—no, she needed—an excellent meal to celebrate the modest successes she’d had so far. In the guide, she found a famous and expensive Cantonese gourmet restaurant, the Fook Lam Moon on Johnston Road, a short walk from her hotel. She decided to drop her computer files and equipment in her room before dinner.

  She craved braised ginger shrimp in tomato sauce, her favorite Mandarin dish, and one she had prepared in her Washington apartment the last night she and Evan were together. She could almost smell the ginger root and sesame seed oil as she conjured it in her mind.

  She’d remembered her mother’s kitchen, where she started cooking before she was ten years old. She’d been good enough to enroll in the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, where she spent a year, but she couldn’t stand the strong aromas of the ingredients before they were cooked. Her passion for cooking continued even though she dropped out of the academy and wound up at Stanford, excelling in the graduate economics seminars taught by her father, among many other professors.

  The restaurant was a beautiful place, unmistakably Chinese in its decoration and use of red as its primary color. Already hungry when she opened the menu, her eyes grew wide at the myriad of appetizing choices available. The cuisine seemed to be a mix of high-end Cantonese. No Mandarin on the menu. Everything very expensive.

  The waiter was older than her father, busy and curt. She asked, “What do you recommend?”

  The old man slowed, then smiled. He said, “Your first time here?” She nodded and smiled back.

  He said, “We are famous for Braised Most Superior Shark’s Fin with Brown Sauce, Braised Abalone with Goose Web, Sautéed Fresh Lobster in Fook Lam Moon’s Stock, and for dessert, we have Double Boiled Bird’s Nest with Coconut Milk Inside Coconut. All are classic, fabulous dishes. What you want?”