Trigger City

by Sean Chercover

  Nothing.

  The prospect that I would never find what I was looking for loomed large. Whatever Steven Zhang may have found on Hawk River’s computers was nothing more than data—he could’ve saved that data onto a USB flash drive smaller than my thumb. Hell, he could’ve saved it on a Micro SD card smaller than my thumbnail.

  I reshelved the books while Joe Strummer sang about police and thieves fighting in the street. I poured another cup of coffee and sat at Joan’s kitchen table with my notepad and reviewed the notes I’d made at Gravedigger’s house.

  Gravedigger and I had talked through various other scenarios, but the only one that made sense was that Joan Richmond had been in possession of some evidence and Blake Sten had been unable to recover it. If that scenario was right and if I could find Joan’s evidence and get it to Special Agent Holborn, it would be Game Over. At that point killing either Amy Zhang or me would be suicide for Hawk River and would serve no purpose for their government friends.

  The only problem was, I couldn’t find it, either.

  But that doesn’t mean you can’t make them believe you’ve found it.

  The idea hit with blunt force. It seemed so obvious. I could run a bluff. Risky as hell, and normally I wouldn’t even consider it. But after what happened the previous day, nothing was more risky than inaction and I was out of options. I had to do something to shake things up.

  So I would run a bluff. First step: plant a story in Delwood Crawley’s “Chicago After Dark” column at the Chronicle. Crawley was the top gossipmonger in town, a man with many contacts and few scruples. I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me, either, but we’d developed a kind of barter system. Occasionally he’d call on me to do some investigative legwork—following up on some scandalous rumor or another. And in return, I could plant items in his rancid column when I needed to.

  I flipped to a blank page in my notebook and tried to emulate Crawley’s hack prose style. My third attempt yielded this:

  Developing story…Whispers in Washington: A little bird—or more accurately, a big hawk—tells me that we can expect shocking developments in the congressional Oversight and Government Reform committee hearings, as early as next week. New information is winging its way to DC and a rushing river of scandal will soon flow all the way back to Illinois. Break out the life vests, Aurora!…more to come.

  It was terrible stuff but it sounded just like Crawley.

  The second step was to feed Crawley the story. If I could get it to him today, it would run in tomorrow’s paper.

  Step three: I’d courier a clipping to Joseph Grant, just to be sure, and he’d have it by the end of the day.

  I knew it wouldn’t save me, but it might buy a little time until I could think of something better.

  When I stopped at my apartment for a change of clothes, the light on my answering machine was flashing “1.” The message was a hang-up. I dialed *69. I recognized the number recited back to me by the phone company Fembot. The call had come from Jill’s apartment. So it was a reasonable assumption that she’d learned about my latest demonstration of why she shouldn’t worry about my chosen profession.

  Still, she’d called. Even if she hadn’t left a message, she’d called.

  I thought back to January, a few weeks after she’d ended our relationship. The Outfit scandal had exploded all over the news and my name was everywhere, along with the names of some dead guys and a bunch of public servants under arrest.

  She’d left a message that time. I was on my way down to convalesce at my grandfather’s house in Georgia and I checked messages from a pay phone in Kentucky. Jill’s message said she just wanted me to know that she was glad I was okay. That was all she said. But that should’ve been enough. I should have called her back. I didn’t.

  There were plenty of reasons. I was badly injured and my mind was a mess and I didn’t know what to say to her. I thought I should wait. Thought I should take some time to get my head together and figure out what I was going to do next. Figure out what I had to offer her. A change of career? A normal life? Kids? I didn’t know.

  So I waited. And the longer I waited, the harder it was to pick up the phone. By the time I did call, months had passed and she had moved on. She was dating the man who would eventually go shopping for an engagement ring while Vince watched from the shadows.

  And now she’d called again. Didn’t leave a message this time, but she’d called. I thought about calling her back. Hey, honey, I’d love to get together right now but I’m a little busy with people trying to kill me. I’ll call you later if I’m still alive. In the meantime, please don’t marry the other guy…

  Maybe not.

  On the way to University Village, I drove around in circles to be sure I hadn’t grown a tail. It was not yet 7:00 A.M. and I knew Delwood Crawley wouldn’t be in but I called and left a message on his voice mail, asking if we could meet later. Then I left a message for Special Agent Holborn, told him that I was available on my cell.

  Again I thought about calling Jill. Again, I didn’t. I drove a circuit of the blocks surrounding Amy’s town house and found no bad guys parked nearby. I pulled to a stop behind Vince’s blue Escort.

  Vince’s empty blue Escort.

  Shit.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I drew my gun, flew up Amy’s front steps and hammered on her door and jabbed at the doorbell. Looked up and down the block. The street was empty. And quiet. I hammered on the door again.

  A few more seconds passed and the door opened.

  Vince said, “Keep your pants on. I had to check, make sure it was you.”

  “Jesus, Vince. I thought you’d be in the car.” I holstered my gun and stepped inside and Vince locked the door behind me.

  “Amy invited me in after she saw the news on TV.” He offered up a sly man-to-man smile. “I think she likes you. She was really worried about you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Upstairs, sleeping.” Vince stretched. “And speaking of sleeping, I’m beat. Can I go now?”

  “You see anything?”

  “Niente. No bad guys, no nuthin’. Just a regular night on a quiet street.”

  “Okay, thanks. Get as much sleep as you can and be back at four.”

  “Will do.”

  “Also, pack a bag. I want you to stay on Amy’s couch awhile.”

  Vince nodded. “Listen, uh, if I’m gonna be here 24/7, working…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I’m not gonna be able to take any process-serving gigs for Argos.”

  “Right. You’re working for me full-time for the next while.”

  “But, see the thing is, I don’t have a daily rate. We never talked about that. What’s the job pay?”

  “Oh yeah, sorry. Four hundred bucks.”

  “For how many days?”

  “Per day. Four hundred per day.”

  Vince broke into a wide smile. “Excellent. Cool, thanks.” He turned to leave.

  “Vince.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is Jill on days or nights right now?”

  Vince thought for a second. “She had yesterday off, goes back on days this morning. Shift starts at eight.”

  “Thanks.” He headed down the front steps. “Get some sleep,” I called after him. I needed some myself, badly, but that would have to wait until Amy was awake and could stand watch. In the meantime, breakfast would keep me going.

  I fried a couple eggs and some bacon, read the morning paper while I ate. The police still didn’t know the identity of the man who attacked me. Not at press time, anyway. The story told me nothing new but Terry had indeed quoted me, against his better judgment.

  When reached by the Chronicle for comment, an angry Ray Dudgeon said, “I have some advice for the people responsible for today’s attempt on my life. Next time, send someone who can fly.”

  Perhaps not my finest moment. But Terry had helped sell the quote by describing me as an angry Ray Dudgeon, and it didn’t read like
false bravado. Rather, like a guy come slightly unhinged. Maybe a little more than slightly.

  And despite the obvious attempt at humor, I didn’t think Jill would love the quote a whole lot. Of course, I hadn’t been thinking of how it would read to her when I said it.

  “Good morning.”

  I looked up from the paper. Amy stood in the kitchen doorway. She wore blue jeans and a red UIC sweatshirt. Her hair was in a ponytail, her hands jammed into the back pockets of her jeans. Bare feet, toenails painted red.

  I closed the paper, tried to control my anger, failed. “I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to read the paper.”

  “I saw it on television.” Amy looked at her delicate feet. “I’m sorry. I wanted to believe you but…I was scared, I didn’t know what to think. When I saw the news, I knew for sure you weren’t with them.”

  “You sure? Because I can go back out there and get myself killed if you need more convincing.” You’re being childish, Dudgeon. She was trying to protect her daughter. Let it go. I took my plate to the sink. “It’s all right, forget it. Just tell me what you know and don’t leave anything out this time.”

  We sat in the front room and Amy told her story again. It was the same story, right up to the point when Steven Zhang went nuts.

  She said, “You asked before if Steven was faking his illness. I still find it hard to believe…”

  “But he was, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. God…yes I think he was. I mean, he put on a good act but I didn’t really…you know, like when you see an actor in a movie and you can’t point to anything specific that he’s doing wrong but you just don’t believe him? I asked him—I said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and he responded with all sorts of delusional raving, but…” Amy shrugged. “And there was something in his eyes. Like he knew what he was doing was hurting me and he felt terrible about it.” She let out a long sigh. “If he really had been as disconnected from reality as he was acting, he wouldn’t have looked at me like that.”

  I’d already concluded that Steven Zhang’s illness was phony. The fact that Amy thought so too was fine, but ultimately useless to me. I needed something concrete, something I could work with.

  “You thought Steven had learned something bad on Hawk River’s computers.”

  “Yes.”

  “And whatever he found, he had to save. On a CD-ROM, a flash drive, SD card, portable hard drive, whatever.”

  “Yes.” Amy’s eyes grew wide. “Yes, that’s right! A week after Steven started acting crazy, Joan called me. She asked about his sudden illness and I told her I didn’t understand it, either. Then she said that Steven was supposed to give her something; he had some important computer files and she needed them very badly. She was extremely agitated about it. Most of all, she sounded frightened and I remembered when Steven was fired from Hawk River, he said that it was for my own good not to know any details, that he was trying to protect me. In my mind, the two things fit together.”

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  “Joan asked me to ask Steven about it. She wasn’t able to get through to him and she thought maybe I could. I asked him a number of times, whenever he seemed lucid, but he immediately started ranting about how everybody was in on some giant brainwashing conspiracy against him. Like my asking triggered him to amplify the craziness.”

  “Do you know if Joan ever got what she was looking for?”

  “I know she didn’t. She called a few times to see if I’d found out from Steven. The last call was the day before…” Amy kneaded her hands in her lap.

  So I’d spent a night tearing through Joan’s apartment for nothing. She never even had the damn thing to hide.

  Which means it could still be right here…

  “I need to search Steven’s office upstairs.”

  “You won’t find anything.” Amy reached forward and touched my arm to stop me from standing. “I’m sorry, I should have told you all this before—”

  “Don’t worry about that now,” I said. “Just tell me, why won’t I find anything?”

  “Well, this goes back a long time,” said Amy. “All the way back to China.” Her voice echoed reluctance. This was not an easy topic, but then none of our conversations were easy.

  “That’s okay,” I said, “go ahead.”

  She took a deep breath, let it out. “All right. You need some background. In 1989, Steven and I were both student organizers in the June Fourth Movement.”

  “Tiananmen Square?”

  “Yes, Tiananmen was what the world saw on television and that was the largest of them, by design. But there were protests all across the country…it was massive. And it was carefully coordinated, timed to coincide with Gorbachev’s visit, when there would be news media from all over the world. Planned for many months on university campuses, in dorm rooms and study halls and cafeterias. The universities in Beijing were the main planning centers.

  “Steven was a leader in the prodemocracy student movement. He had written influential dissident essays that were secretly distributed among the campuses. Those essays inspired many students to join. To me they were like the writings of Thomas Paine, forbidden in China but widely read in secret. I was eighteen years old, an undergraduate studying languages. The prodemocracy movement soon became my passion. And I became an organizer on campus.” As Amy told her story, she stopped looking at me and seemed to retreat into herself. Like she was alone in the room, telling herself the story.

  She was silent for a minute. Then she said, “We believed that the Americans would stand up. The UN. The whole Western world would stand up for us when they heard our cries, and the Party would be forced to enact some democratic reforms. We weren’t expecting utopia, just a few reforms. A little less corruption. A small step toward democracy. We really believed it was within reach. Of course we were wrong. No one stood up for us. And the government crushed us.”

  Television images of Tiananmen Square flashed through my mind. A sea of people standing together under the glare of Mao Zedong. Student leaders making speeches through bullhorns. Thousands of people, the young and the old, sitting cross-legged on the ground, staging a mass hunger strike. The statue of the Goddess of Democracy, hastily carved in Styrofoam, facing Mao’s portrait, staring him down. Tanks and trucks full of soldiers with rifles, surrounding the square, waiting for the order to move in.

  And as they made their approach, the solitary young man who stood defiant before the tanks, daring them to run him over.

  And then chaos. Truncheons cracking heads and rifles firing into the crowd and clouds of tear gas choking protesters. Limp and bloody bodies being carried away, buses burning in the streets, the Goddess of Democracy felled by a tank and quickly reduced to Styrofoam rubble by the People’s Liberation Army.

  People’s Liberation Army. What a name.

  “I was rounded up with the rest of the organizers and sent to prison,” said Amy. “I was given a ten-year sentence. It was very bad in prison. We were not treated well. After a year, I was given medical parole.”

  “What was wrong?”

  Amy looked at me again and smiled without any humor. “A medical parole is just an excuse to send a political prisoner into exile. You see, because I was well known to the movement I became one of the June Fourth martyrs, as we were called. And martyrs inspire. So the government offered us medical parole, on condition that we leave the country—for medical treatment, is what they say in public—and never return. It’s a common practice—a convenient way to get rid of troublemakers without creating more martyrs. I was put on a plane to America and told that if I ever returned, I would disappear into a prison labor camp and never be seen again.”

  “Did Steven come with you?”

  She shook her head. “Steven was offered medical parole,” she said, “but he refused it.”

  “Why?”

  “If you leave the country, you have turned your back on the struggle. You have taken the easy way out. Exile is not honorable for someone consi
dered a martyr.”

  “That’s pretty harsh.”

  “In China, life is harsh. You couldn’t understand.” She was right; I couldn’t even imagine. “For three years Steven refused medical parole. Finally he gave in. He came to Chicago and we were married.”

  My cell phone rang. The call display said it was coming from the FBI. I held my finger up in a “one minute” gesture and answered as Amy went into the kitchen.

  Special Agent Holborn said, “I’ve got to admit, you’re harder to kill than I ever would’ve guessed.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Got anything for me?”

  “Two things. First, the plate number you gave me.”

  “The DHS guys.”

  “Are you sure they were Illinois plates?”

  “Absolutely. Land of Lincoln and everything.”

  “Then either they’re counterfeit or you wrote the number down wrong.”

  “I gave you the right number,” I said.

  “Then it’s counterfeit. No such plates exist. Not in Illinois.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “I thought you’d think so.”

  “You guys ever use counterfeit plates? Like when you’re undercover and you want to dress your car as a civilian?”

  “Ray, we’re the government. We can get genuine civilian plates whenever we want. Genuine civilian cars, too, if we need them.”

  “Yeah, I’m just looking for a reason why a couple of DHS agents would ride around with counterfeit plates on their car.”

  “If you think of one, I’d love to hear it.”

  “You said two things. What’s the second?”

  “I spoke to the China desk. Your Blake Sten never brought them anything about Jia Lun meeting with any Steven Zhang. They’ve never heard of Steven Zhang. Or Blake Sten, for that matter.”