by Fritz Galt
Gabe Starr, head of military affairs, cleared his throat. Not looking directly at her, he said, “Someone’s got to say something before China sends her boys over here and does something we’ll all regret.”
“Don’t fret,” she said. “We may disagree with their political philosophy, but Beijing is not run by malevolent fools.”
“I beg to differ,” Bronson said, barely restraining his emotions. “You never know. There’s always the upstart politician or the renegade colonel ready to throw the world in peril for personal gain. And if this thing turns out badly, I know whose career goes up in smoke.”
She found him glaring at her. Nobody in the room jumped to her defense.
At last, Kevin Yew broke the silence. “Is there anything constructive that we can do?”
Bronson shook his head. “We’re out of the ballgame now. I contacted State, and they confirmed Beijing’s announcement. The White House will take it from here.”
As they passed out of the room, nobody looked Natalie in the eye.
She wavered between smarting at the rebukes and laughing at the overreaction. Were they being played for fools?
Mick drove downtown to Tony Chen’s office at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in his very own car. He had Tony to thank for protecting it during the chase.
Along the way, he passed many legacies of Japan’s imperial occupation. He glanced at the neo-gothic presidential office and the neo-modern Central Library and finally pulled up to the parking gate of the neo-classical Greek style Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He yanked out his “Permanent Guest” ID that was given to diplomats from countries with no official relations with Taiwan, and the uniformed guard waved his car through.
Tony stood by the receptionist’s desk bathed in light from the street.
He bowed and led Mick into a dark, damp hall and down a spiral staircase. Mick’s plastic golf cleats clacked like a tap dancer’s shoes on the terrazzo floor.
“Aren’t we going to your office?”
Tony shook his head, and opened a door to what looked like a small classroom. He offered Mick a seat in the front row and stood at attention at the chalkboard.
Within a minute, two men and a woman had joined them and taken seats.
Tony turned to the board and picked up the chalk. Only then did Mick notice that his left hand was wrapped in gauze.
Tony wrote slowly in Chinese characters.
August 8-15.
No PRC support.
Shanghai Class A.
The others in the room waited for him to explain.
Mick didn’t have all day. “What’s it mean?”
Tony took a seat under the three phrases and picked up a wooden pointer. “This was written by hand on a note carried by Captain Leng just before he murdered the cab driver at Eternal Sun Cemetery.”
Mick was intrigued. “Where did you find that note?”
“Before he entered the parking lot, Captain Leng removed a note from his pocket, read it, wadded it up and tossed it into a furnace. I managed to save the slip of paper from burning.”
“Is it in Leng Shi-mung’s handwriting?”
“No, it isn’t,” the woman said behind Mick.
He didn’t turn around. “Did the half-brother, Captain Leng, write it?”
“We believe he did,” the woman said. “We could only find Captain Leng’s handwriting on one other official document.”
“I didn’t see Leng Shi-mung pass a note to Captain Leng,” Mick said. “But then again, I didn’t see the entire conversation.”
“There are two mysteries here,” Tony said, breaking his silence. “Number one mystery: Why did he kill the taxi cab driver? Number two mystery: What does this note mean? Let us start with number one, since here we have more information. Mr. Pierce witnessed the murder. Could you describe it, please?”
Mick frowned. He had managed to suppress the memories until then.
He spoke as objectively as possible, relating all that he could recall. He hadn’t had a clear view through the women who were approaching the parking lot, and he couldn’t be absolutely certain who drew the murder weapon, but he did see the two men exchange words. And he did see the knifing.
“Do you want details on how he was stabbed?”
“No thank you, Mr. Pierce,” Tony said, swallowing hard. “Inspector Ho has obtained details on the cab driver. Inspector Ho?”
“Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chen.” A young man stood up and spoke from memory as if reading from a paper. “The murdered cab driver, Kao Sou-wa, died of multiple stab wounds from a dagger. He was 31 years of age at the time of his death. Kao graduated from Neihu High School in northeast Taipei in 1981. He served his two years of military duty immediately thereafter. Upon completion of military service, he enrolled in Tainan’s Cheng Gong University where he studied political thought for four years. He graduated with honors in 1988. Since then his household registration is in Neihu. He was not married. Neighbors report that he drove a relative’s cab at night and otherwise was seen infrequently during the day. His registered occupation is taxi cab driver.”
“His income?” Tony asked.
“Last year, he earned twenty thousand dollars US.”
“Family connections?”
“Parents are dry cleaners.”
“Does any of this connect him to Captain Leng?” Mick wondered aloud.
“Yes,” a second, older voice said.
Mick still didn’t turn around.
“Captain Leng was a military instructor at Cheng Gong University in Tainan for the last two years of Kao’s study there.”
“So, conceivably, Leng was the victim’s instructor?” Mick inferred.
“We’re checking school records.”
“Could they also have met in the military?” Mick asked.
“It appears possible,” the second voice said. “Kao served at Fengshan Air Force Base as a pilot’s mechanic. At that same time, Leng was a drill instructor. It is likely that their paths crossed there.”
Mick rubbed his jaw. “Okay. So the connection is that they knew each other.”
Tony stood up and took back control of the meeting.
“Mr. Pierce, did it appear to you that the two men recognized each other before the argument?”
“I can’t say. I would, however, characterize their quarrel as emotional.”
“Like bad blood between drill sergeant and recruit?”
“Possibly. Possibly not. They could have been arguing over the cab fare, for all I could tell. Has anyone determined whether the motor scooter that Leng used was his own?”
“It was not,” Chen said. “It belonged to a woman in Hsinchu who died two years ago.”
Mick tossed up his hands. “And I don’t suppose anyone wants to claim it now.”
“Can we say,” Tony said, “that the killing was not random? Kao may have been driving that cab to the cemetery for a purpose. And that purpose may have had something to do with Leng.”
In the windowless room, Mick had lost all ability to visualize the scene.
“Mr. Chen,” the second voice said. “With all the likelihood of these two meeting at Kao’s university, then at the air base, along with one man murdering the other for no apparent reason, I would say there’s a high probability they already knew each other. However, I don’t see how we can determine the nature of their relationship from the facts we’ve just examined.”
“Okay, I concede that, Major. We’ll need more first-person accounts.”
“Mr. Chen,” the major continued. “My superiors are concerned that you at MOFA might leak Captain Leng’s name to the public. I’m determined that the military stay out of this investigation.”
Mick nodded to himself. Asia had a long track record of burying blame, rather than exposing an individual’s faults to the world.
“You will cooperate, however,” Tony said.
“Of course. I came here in good faith. We don’t like to see one of our officers behaving like th
is. But out of respect for his family, I’d rather we didn’t prosecute this case in criminal court. It seems that there’s much more involved. There may even be justification for the murder, and Captain Leng just might have helped preserve our national security.”
“Of course,” Tony said. “Our ministry will bear that in mind. Naturally, our national security is foremost on our minds.”
Mick tried to keep his temper. He was witnessing politeness, patriotism and a penchant for face-saving block key avenues of the investigation.
He diverted his attention to the Chinese characters on the chalkboard. They were written in modern, simplified script, the characters adopted by Chairman Mao and outlawed by Taipei. Taiwan’s Nationalist government punished any such nod to the communists.
“Now we turn to mystery number two: the message that Captain Leng was carrying,” Tony said. “Let us assume that this message was passed to him from his half-brother, the Chinese negotiator, as they met at the cemetery. My best interpretation is that some event will occur in Shanghai between tomorrow, August 8, and the following Friday, August 15. Can anyone offer any further analysis?”
The major spoke up. “At first glance, it appears that the People’s Republic of China will not intervene in a student rebellion in Shanghai.”
“Then you take Class A to mean a university class?” Tony clarified.
“I don’t understand the word ‘support,’” Mick said. “Why would the communist government not support something, unless it was something it condemned. Hence, why the wording ‘won’t support’?”
The room fell silent.
“I can see that we’ll need to explore this question in our own ways,” Tony said. “I ask everyone to regard this information as sensitive and vital to our national security. Keep the mouth sealed like a bottle.”
In a cloud of white dust, he scrubbed the message off the board. “That’s all we can talk about right now. Remember that whatever this refers to will begin tomorrow. Please keep in direct contact with me. Thank you.” He bowed and the others bowed.
Mick merely closed his eyes and thought.
Chapter 14
The carpet in AIT’s hallways muffled Mick’s cleats unlike the stone hallways of the Foreign Ministry. However, his pink golf pants and striped shirt were somewhat noisy.
“Hi, honey.” He leaned over his wife’s desk and gave her a kiss.
“Did you get hold of Alec?” She looked unusually pale.
“I left a message at his hotel for him to call me.”
Her thin eyebrows knit into a frown. “Sean Petit found me names of contributors to Alec’s project.” She handed him a sheet of paper.
“Swell. Now I gotta go. The golf course beckons.”
She screwed up her face. “I hope you shank the ball.”
He grinned. “Has the director been on your case?”
“Not only him. The whole staff of AIT, not to mention the vice president of Taiwan calling for official clarification.”
“Aw hell. It’ll all blow over.”
“I wish it would.”
He tucked the sheet into his trouser pocket and blew her a kiss.
As he walked toward the building’s back exit, he veered at the last moment into his section’s office. There he punched in a cipher lock code.
Bill Fellows was gone, and Juliet sat alone behind a typewriter. Office life was quieter behind a wall of security.
“Writing up a juicy report?” he asked with a smile.
“Requisitioning more staples,” she said.
“Go to the Admin storeroom. They have plenty of staples.”
“Not secure staples,” she said, with disgust at his ignorance. “You know, cleared staples.”
“Oh, that kind of staples. Those are much better. Listen,” he swung into the seat beside her. “Do you mind if I pound out a cable on your machine?”
It wasn’t the only typewriter in the office, but it was the only one with a typeface that could be read by the communication room’s optical character reader.
“Help yourself,” she said, and guardedly pulled her requisition out of the scroll.
As Mick began typing up Tony’s discovery and all the questions that arose from it, the door popped open and Bill Fellows stepped in.
“Personnel action cable,” Mick lied between keystrokes.
“Pay stub problem?”
“Yup. Wrong number of sick days.”
“Keep on their backs,” Bill said in a comradely way.
Mick finished the cable and cleared it himself. He signed his initials, said his good-byes and dropped it off at the even more claustrophobic communications room.
“It should scan okay,” he told the technician. “Please send it ‘Immediate.’ I need a response by tonight.”
The cable was addressed to Mr. Eli Shaw, American Embassy, Beijing.
On his way through the well-manicured courtyard, he ran into a distraught young man from the U.S. Trade Office.
“Mick, Dr. Morisot is causing trouble for us. He insisted on stopping at two pharmacies and he wants a new translator. Several members of the press are with him and he’s making a scene.”
“What’s wrong with his translator?”
“I guess she didn’t know how to translate the dense hair-like material that comprises a rhino’s horn. God, I don’t even know the word in English.”
“Well, I wish you luck.”
“Is there any way you could go to Yehliu and straighten things out?”
Mick looked at the desperate pair of eyes. “I fully believe in saving wildlife. But there’s no way I can rescue that jackass. I’ve got better ways to waste my time.”
At midday, the deep-sea divers resurfaced for a lunch break.
The Dolphin swung by and picked up the entire crew from the floating dive platform.
On the shade of the aft deck, Alec slurped down his fish flake and oyster soup. Looking around, he saw that the others had not yet finished.
Perfect. He belched loudly and wandered below deck to the control room.
Wearing a half-opened wetsuit, May-lin hunkered over one of the many computer displays.
“Give the computer a break,” he said. “It’s trying to think.”
She didn’t turn around. “Hi, Alec.”
“Can the computer handle all the data?” he asked.
“So far. The iron readings are clear, and the magnetometers are matching the topography map as we are expecting.”
“Great.” So the Rover was functioning well by finding iron exactly where the older maps showed it. “How deep below the ocean surface are the readings?”
She consulted a line graph with a smooth upward curve. “We have one reading on a ridge fifty meters deep.”
“How strong a reading?”
“Thirty over signal. This is translating to about twelve thousand metric tons of iron. I don’t want to be sitting on this water when that volcano blows up.”
“Or anywhere on the coastline when the tidal wave hits.”
She turned to face him. She looked more serious than usual. “Or anywhere on Taiwan when the earth begins to shake like tofu.” She shook her body to demonstrate a violent earthquake.
He tried to keep his eyes off the jiggling motion under her open zipper.
“An earthquake that big?”
An earthquake with enough magnitude to affect the entire island of Taiwan only occurred once every few hundred years. However, he had felt several quakes over the past two years with aftershocks that lifted him clear out of bed. Sometimes he would find ceramic tiles dislodged from his bathroom and kitchen ceilings. Taiwan was definitely in a live earthquake zone.
“This particular mound is the grand-papa of this undersea fault,” she said. “If Rover is not picking up this geomagnetic range, she is useless.”
“Well, after this week, the rest of the mapping should be routine.”
“You never know what you will find.” She looked closely at him. “You do not mind work
ing hard, do you?”
He thought he knew what she meant.
“Not at all. Once the data come in, I can start performing my analysis. Until then, I’m focused on collecting accurate data.”
“This stuff is mostly engineering,” she said. “I am here verifying his measurements.”
Then she turned back to her work.
He took one last look at her slim figure silhouetted against the oscillator screens, the sonar screen, the computer screens, the video screen, the plotter and the radio dials. She worked a joystick tenderly between her slender fingers.
Time for some fresh air.
He climbed up the dimpled companionway steps toward the bow.
A high-pitched beep came from the bridge. Maybe he could sneak a peek inside.
The captain ran a tight ship and only allowed official crew members near the helm.
His back to the door, he leaned slightly against it. It creaked and gave way as if on a tight spring. He turned and pushed it open.
The beep was excruciating now.
Nobody was in the semi-circular command center. The gleaming brass helm was latched into position. A black hood shielded the ship’s old radar screen, allowing only one pair of eyes at a time.
The beep seemed to originate from the navigator’s room. He peered inside and saw a digital celestial navigation system glowing in the dark. He had to cover his ears. It shouldn’t be causing such a beep.
Somebody was moving deep within the dark room.
“This area is off limits,” a gravelly voice said in Chinese.
Alec peered into the gloom and effected a surprised expression. “Nobody can come up here?”
The short, round-chested captain stepped into full view. His eyes were cold and unwelcoming. His look and the spanking white uniform were meant to convey authority.
“Okay. I get you,” Alec said. “I was just responding to the warning.”
“What warning?”
“The beep sound.”
“That isn’t a warning.”
The captain barged out of the room, crossed the bridge, flung the door open and pointed a toe at the double yellow line taped over the black deck. “Officers only beyond this point.”