Backfire

by Catherine Coulter

  San Francisco General Hospital

  Cafeteria

  Sherlock set down her coffee cup as she looked over Dillon’s shoulder. Xu had been born and raised in Lampo, Indiana. He was the son of a Caucasian mother, Ann Xu, a history teacher at Lampo High School, and a Chinese father who had first immigrated to the Gulf-side town of Paxico, Florida, before moving to Indiana and buying a gas station.

  At eighteen, Xu and his parents had left Lampo for a long summer vacation at Bronson Lake, fifty miles from Lampo, Mrs. Xu had told neighbors.

  The family had simply never returned. The gas station Mr. Xu had owned remained vacant; the history position at Lampo High School had been filled when Ann Xu hadn’t returned for the fall term. No one ever heard from the son. Cursory inquiries were made, but there was simply no sign of the Xu family after they’d gone on vacation. They were eventually forgotten, since no one knew of any family on either the mother or father’s side to contact.

  Sherlock said, “Do you think Xu killed his parents?”

  “Oh, yes,” Savich said. “There’s no trace of Xu after that. If he changed his name legally to Joe Keats, we’ll find him.”

  The critical thing was that they had Xu’s first Indiana driver’s license, with a photo taken of him when he was sixteen. Dillon had already sent the photo to the image-processing lab at the Hoover Building to have it updated to show how he would look now, nearly twenty years later. They were waiting for the aged picture now, ready to compare it to the sketch Lin Mei had given the police sketch artist, and then would forward it to Hammersmith and his team as soon as it arrived.

  “His features really are Caucasian,” Sherlock said, looking at the driver’s license. “Look at those green eyes. There doesn’t seem to be any resemblance at all to his Chinese father, except they are both on the slight side. He’s a good-looking kid, isn’t he?”

  “Look closely,” Savich said. “He’s already got an arrogant tilt to his head, and there’s a dead-on look in his eyes, staring you right in the face, like he doesn’t care what you think or about much of anything.”

  A message notification popped up, and they were soon looking at the same face, though more filled out, lines about his mouth and eyes, yet his eyes were more intense, and still had the same dead-on look, easily recognizable. Savich forwarded it to Hammersmith, waited a few seconds, and called him on speakerphone.

  Savich said, “Griffin, did you get that picture of Xu I sent you?”

  “It’s going out over the network now. I was wrong about Xu moving from the Atherton B-and-B to a middle-of-the-road motel on Lombard or down by the wharf or any of the motels in the Tenderloin. We’ve checked; he ain’t there.

  “I’m still convinced, though, he’s got to be close by. I don’t think he knows we’ve identified him yet. It could be he’s staying at one of the most exclusive hotels, like the Stanford or the Fairmont or the Mandarin, figuring we wouldn’t expect that. I’m thinking the Fairmont.”

  “Why the Fairmont in particular?” Sherlock asked.

  A pause, then Griffin said, “A feeling, just a feeling. No guarantees.”

  None needed, Savich thought.

  “Also, from what we know about him and his contacts, he’s not short on money, so why not be comfortable?”

  “Then why did he stay at that bed-and-breakfast in Atherton when he first arrived to kill Judge Hunt?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve realized he’s not so easy to figure out.” Griffin sighed. “Until he killed Mickey O’Rourke, I had him pegged differently. We’ll canvass all the hotels we can, this time with Xu’s photo in hand. We’ll have them put up his photo behind the registration desks. He might still be wearing that ball cap and sunglasses—well, there’s nothing we can do about that except give them a heads-up.”

  “Griffin, do me a favor.”

  “Sure, Sherlock, whatever you need.”

  “Be careful, Griffin. He’s a very dangerous man. Please don’t forget that.”

  “I will. Listen, I could be all wrong about the Fairmont.”

  “They tell me that doesn’t happen often,” Savich said. “Call when you get something.”

  —

  When Eve and Harry got off the elevator on the fourth floor, Eve looked up the hallway at an SFPD officer and a deputy marshal, on their feet when they spotted them.

  Once inside Ramsey’s room, Deputy Marshal Haloran said quickly, “What’s going on?”

  Eve said, “I really made a mess of it, Joe.”

  Harry squeezed her arm. “She means Cindy Cahill is pretty bad off. But she may have finally given us something useful. We’ll know soon.”

  To Eve’s surprise, Ramsey was reading a spy novel, and wasn’t that perfect? She wondered what Savich would find out about Xu, the spy and cold-blooded murderer who wanted Ramsey dead.

  She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You look really hot, you know that?”

  He also looked tired. But he was back, all hard, dark edges, and the killer smile, Judge Dredd in the flesh. “I look hot? That makes you as much of a liar as my wife. Happy to see you, though, liar or not.” He paused. “Eve, I can tell by looking at you that something’s happened. What?”

  Eve said, “Cindy Cahill told us the man who’s been trying to kill you is called Xian Xu. He’s Chinese American, born in Indiana, and looks as WASP as you do. Dillon and Sherlock are trying to track him down. I don’t suppose the name means anything to you?”

  “Not any more than the name Xu by itself,” Ramsey said. “If they can find him, maybe I can start making some plans to get out of here and back to work.”

  “We should get him now, Judge Hunt,” Harry said. “He won’t come after you again.” Ramsey stared from Harry to Eve, considering that, and Eve said, “Hey, do you think you’ll be going home in time for Thanksgiving?”

  Ramsey became aware that the pain meds were tugging on his brain, and evidently his hearing as well, because he thought in that moment that Eve had a beautiful speaking voice. He forgot about Thanksgiving, forgot everything but her voice. He stared up at Eve. “You ever have voice lessons?”

  “Me? Goodness, talk about playing a rusty saw. That’s what my vocal cords feel like. Ramsey, have you had your pain meds recently?”

  “Well, yes, a couple of minutes ago. You’re lucky I’m still awake.”

  She took his hand, squeezed it. “Hey, Haloran. If you want to play more poker with Judge Hunt, now’s the time.”

  —

  Sherlock and Savich were seated in the security office off the lobby, Griffin on the phone. He sounded so hyper she hoped he wasn’t driving.

  “We’ve got him! Amazing what a difference that picture made.”

  Sherlock said, “Let me put my cell on speaker, Griffin. Okay, make our day.”

  “Xu’s here at the Fairmont Hotel. The registration clerk on duty recognized him after studying the photo. She was used to seeing him in sunglasses and his ball cap, but this morning, he came trooping out of the restaurant after he’d had breakfast and asked the concierge a question. She said good morning to him. He said good morning back to her and smiled. She added he had a very nice smile. So it appears our Mr. Xu either forgot his sunglasses or he didn’t care this morning about hiding his face from prying eyes. Maybe he doesn’t intend to stay much longer.”

  They cheered loud enough for Griffin to grin. The guard at the hospital video console turned toward them and toasted them with his coffee, since they looked ready to high-five the world.

  Sherlock said, “Griffin, you’re a genius. I worship at your feet. Tell us everything.”

  “He’s not at the hotel now. The registration clerk told us the last time she saw him, he was headed toward the hotel front doors.”

  Savich asked, “Griffin, did the registration clerk say he was carrying anythin
g, like luggage?”

  “I didn’t ask her. Hold on.” Two minutes later, Griffin came back on line. “She doesn’t remember seeing him carrying anything.”

  Savich said, “If he believes Cindy is dead, he may think his job here is done. He could have put his luggage in his car before he went in to breakfast. Griffin, speak to the concierge. Find out what question Xu asked.”

  Griffin was back on the line in a minute. “The concierge who spoke to Xu is off-duty. I’ll try his cell to see if he remembers what Xu wanted. I’ll get back to you.”

  Savich said, “Griffin, stay around the lobby. If Xu comes back, call us, but don’t try to apprehend him, okay? How many agents are with you?”

  “There are two of us.”

  “Make sure you all look like happy tourists. Cheney or I will call you.”

  When he punched off his cell, Savich said, “I’m thinking keep it simple. We wait for him in his room, that way there’s no chance of any bystanders getting hurt.”

  Sherlock cocked her head at Dillon. “Do you think he’s leaving for good?”

  “I don’t know. He’s careful and he’s smart. He didn’t check out when he left the Fairmont this morning, but if he’s got luggage with him in the car, he may not go back.”

  “I would bet he knows Cindy is alive by now, and of course Ramsey is, too. Do you think he’s giving up on it all, running?”

  “Nothing he does would surprise me. There are only three places we know he might go—back to the Fairmont, one of the airports, or here, the hospital.”

  “He’s got to know we’re ready for him here, Dillon, and that Ramsey and Cindy Cahill are well protected,” Sherlock said.

  “So was Ramsey in the elevator. Call Eve, have her alert the deputies with Ramsey. Something big is going to happen today. We just don’t know where.”

  They were walking toward the parking lot when Savich got a call from the ICU.

  Cindy Cahill had gone into convulsions. She hadn’t made it. She was dead.

  San Francisco General Hospital

  Xu walked at a brisk pace through the San Francisco General Hospital campus to Potrero Avenue. He turned right and walked to Twenty-second Street, where he’d parked his Audi on a quiet residential side street.

  The San Francisco air was fresh and chill, clouds scuttling across a gray sky. Finally he could take a second to look at them and breathe a sigh of relief. He grinned. He’d taken a huge risk coming to the hospital, and now that Cindy had had the grace to die, he hadn’t had to take the even greater risk of trying to kill her himself.

  That little scrap of a woman, Lin Mei, had ended up a murderer after all.

  He’d worried at it like a dog’s bone. Cindy would have had every reason to talk to the FBI now, and if she had told them what she knew, they would eventually have found the Xian Xu who became Joe Keats. The National Security Agency would have no record of a Joe Keats or of his connection to Chinese intelligence, but he could never have been Joe Keats again. He would have become an international fugitive wanted for murder, dependent on the Chinese for his very life, if they chose to let him keep it.

  Had Cindy managed to speak to the FBI agents he’d seen leaving the ICU before she died? He couldn’t be sure, but it was unlikely. She’d had major surgery; she’d had a tube down her throat until this morning. If she’d been conscious at all, it wasn’t for long. He’d heard the frenetic beeping from the monitors, watched the staff rush to her cubicle. They’d been in there a long time. When they’d come out, he knew she was dead by the expressions on their faces.

  Cindy had gone to meet her maker, whoever that was, and she’d taken his secrets with her. He thought about her death, wondered if she’d even known she was dying or if she’d been too drugged out to even recognize what was happening to her. To his surprise, Xu saw his mother’s face, saw her heaving for breath as he’d stood there, a bloody knife in his hand, watching her in the kitchen of their small vacation house, grabbing her throat because she couldn’t breathe as she sank to her knees on the floor.

  He walked faster. His mother’s death was long ago, long over and done. He’d been trained to block out memories that were of no use to him, to focus on what was important, and immediate, not wallow in the past, reliving moments he couldn’t change. His immediate task was to get back to his superior in Beijing, Colonel Ng, a tough-as-nails little man with a gold tooth in the front of his mouth. He would have to rehearse carefully, convince Ng that there were no more witnesses to hurt them, that Ng’s cyber-intelligence unit could not be tied to anything that had happened. Xu had, after all, brought them a great prize, the latest American Stuxnet research, or a good part of it. Who could fault him if he’d had to dirty his hands, so long as they were all safe? In the end they would do as they wished, of course, but he hoped they would find him too useful to waste.

  After eight long months, things had finally turned around for him, and he no longer needed to stay. After he picked up his luggage at the Fairmont, he and his Audi would make the six-hour trek to LAX. No way was he going near SFO airport. He momentarily pictured himself waving good-bye from thirty-three thousand feet on his way to Honolulu to the idiot FBI agents still looking for him.

  Xu was whistling when he reached his Audi ten minutes later. He fobbed open the door and slid in. He paused for a moment, staring out the windshield. The sun had peeked out from behind the clouds, full and hot. He loved this beautiful city, with its swirling pristine fog that rolled in through the Golden Gate and left again. No one should live in Beijing with the lung-rotting pollution and its sandstorms blowing in from the Gobi Desert that turned the sky brown, choking its people even through the masks they wore. Crowds of people, endless millions of them scrabbling to survive in a city where buildings seemed to go up every second, so poorly constructed they began to fall apart around you the next day—that is, if some unscrupulous local officials didn’t evict you first.

  As he drove north toward the city, he thought back to his college days at Berkeley, where he’d protested with all the vigor and ignorance of youth against the cause du jour, usually a variation of the theme of America as a decadent wasteland. He smiled now at how he’d lapped it up, with Joyce’s help, both of them ardent young Communists. Except Joyce had been more, so much more. He hadn’t realized until he’d lived in Beijing that the Chinese government at all levels could give the bozos here in America lessons in corruption. His idealism had died there, drowned in all the bureaucratic inanities and the fraud that permeated everything. He’d watched groups protest, watched them shout their pitiful truths, watched them get the Chinese government’s boot on their necks. How could you continue to believe in a society in which you couldn’t even trust the food you ate, or the air you breathed? The only people you could trust in China were your own family, and he had no family left.

  During his year-and-a-half stay in the area, Xu had come to hope he could live there, though it would surprise his masters that he would leave behind the splendid apartment they’d given him near the Forbidden City. Perhaps in a year or two, when all of this was behind him, he could think about working for himself. He had a reputation in some important circles. He would see.

  He honked at a driver who cut in front of him as he turned onto California Street. He knew the locals thought the traffic here was insane, and he snorted a laugh. Even L.A. couldn’t compete with Beijing, the traffic-snarl capital of the world, with its endless streams of bicycles weaving in and out of traffic on the overcrowded roads. Once he’d even seen a skinny little kid pedaling away on top of a thick stone wall.

  He looked at the people walking on the sidewalks, most of them with phones attached to their ears, most of them busy with the little problems in their little lives. They had no idea what was going on in the world around them.

  It was time to go back to Beijing and make his case. He hadn’t contacted them since he�
��d taken O’Rourke, and now he decided he’d wait. Best to do it in person.

  Xu felt a taste of fear in his mouth. It was viscous, foul, like the pumping blood from Mickey’s throat spraying the walls of that miserable little shack.

  He started whistling again. He’d be in and out of the Fairmont in ten minutes, no longer, and on his way to LaLa Land.

  Fairmont Hotel

  California Street

  Xu left his Audi with the valet. He’d be back in ten minutes, he told her, pressing a ten-dollar bill into her hand. Pretty girl. He walked through the elegant hotel lobby, with its yellow granite columns, scattered huge palm trees, and sculpted seating arrangements spread throughout, and arrived at the elevators. He punched the button for the sixth and top floor. There were two couples in the car with him who obviously knew one another, the men carrying shopping bags, the women flushed and happy and chattering about lunch.

  Both couples got off at the fifth floor. He wondered if they had views as incredible as his. He’d miss seeing the Golden Gate in the distance, and the downtown beneath him to the east, a tight knot of multifaceted buildings shining with reflected light in the bright afternoon sun.

  He got off the elevator and walked down the beautifully carpeted hallway to his suite at the end of the wide corridor. He didn’t see a soul except a maid standing beside her cart in front of the door across from his suite. He didn’t recognize her, and he always made a point of knowing who was around him when he was in an unfamiliar place, staff included.

  She looked up at him, smiled and nodded, then said, “Is there anything you need, sir?”

  He shook his head and thanked her. He watched her sort through a stack of towels. There was something about her he couldn’t quite pinpoint that was a bit—off. Was she new? Was it simply because she was working a different shift? Or had he simply not seen her before? He smiled back at her. “You having a good day?” he asked.