The 3rd Woman

by Jonathan Freedland

  She paced some more. The very idea of it, the Prince of the Princelings, son of the soon-to-be Emperor of China, pursuing the women of this city, hunting them down, then filling their veins with the very drug on which he himself was hooked. Was it a sexual thing? The placing of the poppy suggested it was, though the coroner’s department were adamant that none of the women had been touched. Now that she knew who had made it, that gesture seemed as much political as perverted: a kind of symbolic rape, a Chinese intrusion into America’s innermost place.

  Was that the way to view these killings, as a bizarre act of political revenge, the Chinese finally doing to the West what the West had done to them, poisoning America’s daughters with heroin the way the British had addled China’s sons with opium two centuries earlier? Was this payback, a child of Beijing’s ruling circle visiting on the Occident a taste of the humiliation the Orient had suffered for so long, and doing it in, of all places, the latter-day Treaty Port China had exacted from a supine United States?

  She had to stop herself writing the story there and then. She needed to focus, but questions kept intruding. Was this why Jane Goldstein had given her the brush-off, pretending she was going nuts? Because the Chinese had leaned on her, knowing they had to protect the reputation of their incoming leader? What, Madison wondered, had they given Jane in return? A weekend at the Dominion Hotel in Macau, perhaps at the same six-star suite enjoyed by Doug Jarrett? Or something more permanent? A car? A house in the hills?

  There would be time for that later. Right now she needed to work through what she had. Starting with the origin of this cache of extraordinary documents.

  Madison went back to the machine, reopened it and clicked on the name of the sender, which predictably revealed precious little. The Weibo handle consisted of the word ‘Messenger’ and the current year. He had no followers and had sent a total of one weib: the one addressed to her, Can you follow me so I can DM you? The profile was empty, as was the space for a photograph. Nor was it a surprise that the account had only been set up in the last hour.

  So someone had seen her appeal for information and decided now was the moment to pass on this radioactive material. Were they a whistleblower, an insider on the base who was privy to this stuff and had become sickened by the cover-up?

  Maybe. But they could have come forward so much earlier. Why not make contact the day of Madison’s first story implicating Garrison 41? Or if not then, why not during Mario Padilla’s mass demonstration, when the crowds were circling the garrison and the story was at its most intense? Wouldn’t that have been the moment?

  Cui bono? Come on, Maddy, that’s always the question. Any leak, any move whatsoever, just ask yourself who benefits and you’ll soon understand. So who benefits here?

  Not the garrison, for whom this was only a public relations disaster of epic proportions. She went back to the computer and read through the DMs again, to see if she had missed anything.

  Here you go. Lots of links to come. May be more than 140 characters, so be patient.

  It sounded like a native English speaker. Here you go.

  She got up and paced some more. Think, think. Cui bono?

  For distraction, she clicked on the TV remote. No news, just ads: Tylenol, Tropicana juice, Sigurdsson for Governor, Mercedes car. She went back to the fridge, only to see nothing that could even generously be described as food.

  Hold on. Hold on a damn moment. She rushed back to the computer, still wedged between the towers of books. She went to the Sigurdsson website and saw the main window was filled with video of the candidate’s anti-garrison speech from a few days earlier. Alongside it, her latest op-ed, Ten questions the President of China must answer if he’s to be welcome in America.

  This was their issue, the first and perhaps only way a Republican could make headway in California. They needed to keep this story going, of course they did. And who was a more obvious conduit for that strategy than the journalist who’d first made the link between the murders and the base? They’d have probably leaked it to her eventually anyway. But once she’d issued an appeal for information, they had the perfect cover.

  She could picture it, some Leo equivalent in Sigurdsson HQ tapping out the DM, from an internet café. Here you go. Lots of links to come … be patient. That’s exactly how those people talked; she could imagine Leo sending that very message.

  Did it matter? If every reporter worried about the motives of their sources, they wouldn’t write a word. It might be serving their sources’ political purposes, but that’s life. What this leaker had given her was a huge lead. For the first time, she had a name. One that went to the very top.

  And then another message arrived.

  Chapter 48

  It was from the same sender. And this time it consisted only of an instruction: Go to Dropbox, followed by a username and password, both of which were the same as the Weibo handle: Messenger and the year.

  She did as she was told, logging into the storage service through which people could either back up or share big files. The photographers on the LA Times used it all the time.

  There were four files displayed. She selected ‘Download All’ and in a matter of moments, they were sitting on her machine. She clicked on the first one, represented by the reassuringly familiar icon of a PDF document. It sprang open to reveal what appeared to be a list of just over a dozen Chinese names, written in Roman characters, with a long string of digits by each one.

  Most of the names she did not recognize, though one inevitably stood out. Third from the top was Yang Zhitong. She identified one or two of the others as Yang’s fellow elite junior officers from the garrison, including the young man who had been mentioned in that story about a speeding offence.

  But the numbers were harder to work out. She counted the digits. Thirteen for each one, too long to be a phone number. And also too long to be a zipcode for some address back in China. Were these bank accounts perhaps? She looked for any identifying markers on the document. It seemed to be vaguely official, but the proportions suggested the page had been cropped, perhaps removing the letterhead from the top. All she had were the names and these opaque numbers.

  She went back to the other three files she had downloaded. She let her cursor hover over the first one, her heart rate accelerating at the prospect of what she guessed would be a damning photo or photos, linking Yang indisputably to one of the killings. She braced herself for what she feared: a CCTV image of this playboy prince with her sister. She clicked.

  Nothing happened. She waited and still nothing happened. Eventually the screen displayed an error message:

  /Users/madisonwebb/Downloads/UNKNOWN_PARAMETER_VALUE could not be opened, because an unknown error occurred.

  Try saving to disk first and then opening the file.

  She followed that vague instruction, but without success. She tried the other files, but they returned variations of that same error message. She tried opening them with a whole range of applications, but none worked. The files just stayed there on her screen, each one a blank rectangle, closed and unknowable.

  There was only one person guaranteed to be able to help in this situation. She picked up one of the disposable cellphones she had bought, checked the time and texted Katharine’s number.

  Katharine, I know it’s Friday night and you’re probably out running right now, but there’s been a very big development. Huge. I have a few files I need to open. Go onto Weibo as me – you remember the password, right? – and check out my DMs. Follow the instructions and see if you can crack it. I’m on my way. You’ll understand when you see the stuff. M x

  She removed the battery from that phone and took the last virgin one she had left. She threw the old computer, the one she’d just used, in a bag and went downstairs, avoiding the elevator. When she saw the black thirtyish woman with the braids, nodding convincingly along to beats playing through what were doubtless mute headphones, she almost felt like waving. Bus, cab, bus. That’s how she would do it.

/>   Madison walked as fast as she could, though with the bruising all over her body it was not easy. It was also unfamiliar. These were streets she had been on a hundred times, but always by car. Only now, on foot, did she appreciate their scale. The width, the space between blocks – they were not really designed for humans at all. Indeed, in the old days, you’d almost never see anyone walking in this kind of area – except for the army of Latino domestics, arriving to clean the houses and tend the gardens at dawn and leaving at dusk. That sight had not vanished. In Crestwood Hills, Quincy’s neighbourhood, that twice-daily human migration in and out was as regular as the tides. But here in Silver Lake and in places like it, not nearly so much.

  She was still a good three blocks away when she saw the flashing red and blue lights of an LAPD squad car. What were they doing here? As she got closer, she saw there were not one but two cars, as well as an ambulance. They were at the junction of Silver Lake Boulevard and a turning, Berkeley Avenue, and whatever had happened had clearly taken place in just the last minute or two because the police had not yet sealed off the road. A couple of cars were backed up, unable to get past, and people were beginning to come out of their houses. Around the paramedics, a small crowd had formed, blocking Madison’s view.

  A road accident, no doubt, though there was no sign of any wrecked cars. Tragic, but Maddy had to press on. She had all but passed the scene, walking north towards Effie Street, when she took one last look back. She squinted to be sure she wasn’t seeing things. But there, kneeling on the road, at the centre of the knot of people, was someone who looked very much like Katharine’s wife, Enrica.

  It was hard to tell. Enrica was always so glamorous, while this woman was hunched over, wearing sweatpants, her hair loosely tied back. Now that Maddy looked properly, there was no doubt about it. And the woman’s back was trembling, as if shaking …

  At that instant, Maddy just ran, pushing past the neighbours and strangers until she was standing by Enrica’s side. When one of the police officers tried to push her back, she pulled his hand away and said, ‘No, I’m her friend.’

  That made Enrica look up and, for a second, Maddy caught her face, her eyes red, as if they had been grated by shock. But it wasn’t Enrica she was looking at. It was Katharine Hu, flat on the ground, wearing running clothes but making no move. Her arm was splayed at an unnatural angle, the hair on one side of her head matted with blood. Her skin still had some colour. But it was draining away.

  Chapter 49

  The rest of the night went by at a tempo that was both slower and faster than regular human time. The minutes seemed to become thicker, each moment viscously full of meaning and emotion and pain. And yet it was also sped by adrenalin, the seconds surging and hurtling past them. When it finally came to say goodbye it had somehow become midnight.

  They allowed only Enrica into the ambulance with Katharine, but Maddy had followed in the police car behind. Once inside, she asked the lead officer if there had been any witnesses. One had seen a car accelerate very fast from the scene; another had heard what they believed was the moment of collision. There were tyre marks, which were being examined. ‘I’m afraid this looks to be a classic hit-and-run accident, ma’am.’

  ‘Looks’ is the operative word, Maddy thought. What about the fact that Katharine had done this same run along the same route at the same time every Friday night for years? That she was always almost neurotically careful, that she never wore headphones or any device that might have impeded her ability to hear the car that had slammed into her? Or that she was an experienced runner and nothing like this had ever happened before?

  But she said none of this. She would have liked to pretend that she was sparing Enrica’s feelings: better surely that Enrica believe the woman she loved had been run down through a tragic mistake rather than a deliberate attempt on her life.

  That sounded plausible enough, but Madison knew it was not the truth. She knew that Katharine had caught the attention of the Chinese authorities, to the extent that they had – ineptly – sought to entrap her with some male bait. Of course they would have monitored her phone, picking up her text messages even before she did. How naïve Maddy had been to think she did. True, she had not revealed her password (and she and Katharine had set up an elaborate verification process that made that very hard to hack) but she had revealed that there was something there, even if she had not spelled out what that was. She had, in other words, protected her information but exposed her friend.

  This was what she could not say to Enrica, even as she sat with her outside the operating theatre at the Silver Lake Medical Center, holding her tightly, waiting for news. That that car had not come out of a clear blue sky, or even a smoggy February one, by sheer, unlucky coincidence. It had gone there on a mission, to take out Katharine before she unlocked whatever was in that file. Garrison 41 clearly understood its significance even if Maddy did not. And they had known what to do, to find Katharine out running in her neighbourhood, because Maddy had, unwittingly and via a careless text, told them.

  This was what Madison could not say, even though she felt it so keenly. ‘I’m sorry’, she could manage, with its bland ring of generic sympathy. ‘I’m so sorry for making this happen’ – that she could not say. But she felt its truth drilling into her, into that same part of her heart that had had to grow hard all those years ago.

  It was time, surely, to give up. Whatever good she once thought she was doing was outweighed, if not cancelled out, by this possibly fatal blow to her kind, generous, whip-smart friend Katharine Hu. In the space of a week, Madison had lost her sister and now, perhaps, her closest friend. She had asked too much, making one pay the price for the loss of the other.

  It struck her that she had failed in a basic, elemental duty not once but two – no, three – times. She was meant to have been Abigail’s protector. But she had failed in that task as badly as any person can ever fail. And Katharine? She was Madison’s friend and most loyal co-conspirator. Again and again, Katharine had kept Maddy out of trouble, saving her skin, professionally and, more than once, physically. Tonight was the one time when it fell to Madison to do the same. And she had done the very opposite: she had placed her friend directly in the path of lethal danger.

  She should leave this whole business alone, retreat and let the police find the monster responsible for all this hurt. Yes, it was true that in Chief Jarrett they were led by a man in the pay of Beijing, a man who had bent the entire Los Angeles Police Department to match the shape of his own corruption. He had somehow diverted the homicide squad away from the truth, preventing them from making the connections between the deaths of Rosario, Eveline and her sister, the connections that would lead them to the killer. But somewhere in the LAPD, there would, surely, be at least one good person who would refuse to be corrupted. Maybe, who knows, it was Barbara Miller. Or perhaps her partner. All it would take was one member of that whole, rotten organization determined to find the truth.

  But she was not persuading herself. She knew that, even if such a person existed, someone as determined as her, another one or two or more women might die before that individual finally began to look in the right place. Meanwhile, the rest of Jarrett’s crooked LAPD would doubtless try at least once more the manoeuvre that had unravelled in the last twenty-four hours: finding someone else and pinning the blame on him. That could keep happening, each time the killer taking another victim just to prove the police had got the wrong man.

  No, she couldn’t leave this, even though she was so tired her body was crying out for surrender. Back in her apartment, back in her feeble cocoon of books and papers, with her puny attempt at encryption, she would have to try doing alone what she had needed Katharine to do with her.

  How strange that they had acted so fast to stop Katharine, yet they had – so far at least – refused to do the same to her. They’d had ample opportunity. It wouldn’t have taken much to make that beating during Mario’s demo fatal. But they had held back. The same with her �
��enhanced interrogation’. Indeed, they had gone to some lengths to leave even the assault on her wholly deniable. They must have concluded that she had become too high-profile a critic to eliminate. After that initial story of hers was published, however briefly, it became impossible for her to disappear or be found dead, even in a car accident, without Garrison 41 facing the charge that it was killing its opponents on US soil. Whatever trouble they were in now, that was an escalation they did not need.

  Maybe it was an illusion, or a delusion, but it gave her a kind of comfort as she got to work. She had DM’d the self-styled Messenger, asking for help but had had no reply. So, for the next hour or more, she searched and scoured both realms of the internet, above and below ground, visiting forums and online support sites, reading her way through the gobbledegook and tech-talk. She read about file extensions and compressions, compiling and disassembling, at every step hoping to hear the voice of Katharine, guiding Madison to what was important and what could be safely ignored, until she could see a way of cracking open the first of these opaque parcels that had been sent to her.

  At last, she followed the steps her research had suggested, installing one bit of software, then another, before making the crucial click.

  No error message, but an encouraging delay. After a few moments, the file did indeed send out the graphic signals that suggested it was buckling under her sustained pressure and preparing to expose itself. After another delay, a new window opened on her machine – but it was filled with sequences of numbers.

  At first she assumed this was yet more garbage, the strings of indecipherable nonsense offered up when she tried to display a music file or a photograph as just plain text. Except these looked like actual numbers, rather than meaningless lines of symbols. They were punctuated only by specific groups of letters, which appeared anything but random. After ten digits, there would be an SSW or an NE or an NNW.