China Strike

by Matt Rees

  “What I think is that all men want to be killers. See, when you’re a soldier, every guy you meet pretends like you and he are the same. You can hear it in the way they use military jargon, and they get this tone of voice that’s just too casual. Like they know everything. Bottom line: the guy believes he’s less of a man than you because he was never in a war. When I meet a guy like that, I just want to blow him away because I know that he’s envying me for the exact thing that’s making me crazy. The thing that makes me want to die. That’s why I mainline this Russian shit, and it’s what I feel every day—please God let me die real soon.”

  She gazed at him, and this time her pity angered him. “So Maj, what you’re going to do in Vienna is, you’re going to keep me alive because you want me alive. You want to use me for something that you think is important to the future of the world? To fight globalization? What the hell, I’ll go along with that. But you’re going to Vienna for your own sake, baby. Don’t make it like you’re going for me. I’d rather be dead.”

  She crossed her arms over her breasts.

  He crawled toward her, his eyes narrowed and his lip caught between his teeth. He was ready to make love to her now. She seemed not to notice his excitement. She picked up the phone and read the rest of the message from Wyatt. “He wants you to go to Cologne.”

  The message meant that the next victim was ready. Wyatt had found another one of the Chinese guys. The caustic sensation in his liver started again. His sexual excitement died.

  “He writes something else. What does this mean?” She stared at the screen of the phone. “‘The past is all ahead of you.’”

  He means I’m never going to get away from him, the Krokodil thought. He stood up. The skin of his knees tugged around the joints like a severe sunburn. Those were new scabs. He’d be lucky to last long enough to nail the fifth Chinese engineer. He grinned, bitterly. Lucky, indeed.

  CHAPTER 14

  Todd and Kinsella sifted through digests of the accident reports, the news of the dead and injured from the Darien crashes coming in from all over Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, the Pacific. They looked for a pattern or a connection beyond what they already knew—that everything had gone down at the same moment and had affected every Darien car purchased in the last year. Kinsella sat back and watched Todd stare at the printouts on his desk. The concentration on his face made him look youthful, a college kid cramming for a test. She pushed her hair out of her face. The bangles on her wrist tinkled. He glanced up at her.

  “We’ve got to get out there and do something,” he said. “These reports are making me nuts.”

  “Me too. But . . . do what?”

  Todd sighed.

  From the next cubicle, Roula Haddad called out to them. “You guys need cheering up. Just this minute, I happen to have found the very thing.”

  They were out of their chairs and into her small office space in an instant. They crowded either side of her, leaning over her desk eagerly, staring at the dozen browsers and apps open on her two screens.

  “I tracked the Bitcoin transfer,” Haddad said. “The one from China to the dead computer engineer in Detroit.”

  “How’d you do that? Bitcoin’s anonymous, no?” Kinsella said.

  “Up to a point. Once you get a break in the anonymity, you can work away at it until it starts to crumble. That’s what I’ve been doing all night.”

  “So where did it take you?”

  “The dead engineer’s wife, Mo Hui, told me her husband’s Bitcoin address. She looked it up on his phone for me. It’s just a string of numbers.” Haddad called up a file of digits and brief notes on her screen, and pointed at a row of figures.

  “That takes us into the Bitcoin system?” Todd folded his arms. He wasn’t great with numbers. When he was groping intellectually, he did the very opposite with his body.

  “It gets us in. But it doesn’t get us far, unless we get lucky.”

  “Please tell me we got lucky.” Kinsella put her elbow on Todd’s shoulder and leaned against him. She felt confident. Roula Haddad was always lucky. She was also smarter than anyone Kinsella ever worked with, at least when it came to the mysterious realms of the digital world.

  “Not at first. I identified the transaction from China. But it was made with an onion router. So I couldn’t track it to the Internet service provider.”

  “From the ISP, you would’ve got address and bank details.”

  “That’s right. But I had the Bitcoin address of the China guy. So I took it to the exchange.”

  “The Bitcoin exchange?”

  “Not the Bitcoin exchange. There’s a bunch of different ones. This is where Bitcoin turns out not to be as anonymous as criminals and privacy freaks believe. The Bitcoins are issued by an exchange, and they’re subsequently traded through exchanges too. That’s the weakness in the system, if you’re a criminal or a paranoid guy who thinks the government’s going to come whisk you away in silent black helicopters.”

  “What does the exchange tell us?”

  “Like all the Bitcoin exchanges, the exchange that this transaction went through is subject to international banking laws, including money laundering regulations. They’re also evangelists for Bitcoin. They want people to feel safe using the currency, and it bugs them that it has a reputation for criminal activity. So the moment I called them and gave them my tough-guy voice, they threw up their hands.”

  “Can we hear the tough-guy voice?” Todd said.

  “I don’t want to scare you.”

  “I can take it. What, do you model the voice on some bad dude you’ve arrested at ICE?”

  “Bill, I grew up in Lebanon. We learned the tough-guy voice before we learned how to cross the road and write cursive.” She scrolled down her screen to a pasted e-mail from the Bitcoin exchange.

  Kinsella read it aloud. “The source of the funding is a bank account in Luxembourg?”

  Haddad moved her cursor to the next paragraph. “Here it is. Bainc Príobháideach.”

  “Is that Gaelic?”

  “Congratulations to the Irish lady with the red hair.”

  Kinsella growled.

  “Apparently you pronounce it more or less like the word ‘private,’” Haddad said. “Which is what it means. Private Bank.”

  “But it’s based in Luxembourg?”

  “A lot of financial services companies have at least an address there. Luxembourg doesn’t ask too many questions, and it has a very, very easy corporate tax regime. The bank uses Irish Gaelic for its name because it makes it different from any other Luxembourg bank, I guess, so no one gets confused—and because it’s run by an Irish guy.”

  “You called him up?”

  “Mister Dermot McCarthy was very polite at first. Then a little nasty.”

  “I assume you said something that turned him nasty. The tough-guy voice?”

  “IRS is conducting tax evasion investigations into one hundred and twenty United States citizens with accounts at Bainc Príobháideach. The probe is at a very early stage. I contacted one of our counterparts at IRS and asked him to give me a stick to beat Mister McCarthy with.”

  “Talk or we fast-track the investigations of his American account holders?”

  “Bingo. But I offered him a carrot too. When IRS heard the connection to our investigation of the Darien mess, they okayed me to make an offer to McCarthy. If he gives up the details behind the Bitcoin account, we give him six months’ grace. Time he can use to protect his American account holders and shuffle their cash off to his bank’s subsidiary in the Bahamas.”

  “So he doesn’t lose the clients, who in turn love him forever for beating the Feds. Did he go along with it?”

  “As enthusiastically as if I had offered him a trade-in for his new Darien sedan.”

  “Who’s the account holder linked to our Bitcoin transfer?”

  “It’s a guy named Nabil Allaf. It’s a pretty common Arab name, and I don’t have any further trace on it. I’m also not yet certa
in that it’s a real identity. McCarthy says he opened the account remotely. He’s never met Allaf.”

  “Do we have documentation from the bank?”

  “McCarthy is sending it.”

  Todd shook his head. “We can’t trust him to be open with us. Bankers are bigger scum than dope dealers. We’ve got to go there and lean on him.”

  “To Luxembourg?” Kinsella said.

  “You can work your Irish charm on him.”

  “Christ on a bike, Bill. I pride myself on being the only charmless Irish person in the world.”

  “Even better. You won’t fall for his blarney.”

  “Don’t use that word. No more Irish stuff.”

  “We’re going, though?”

  Kinsella showed her crooked teeth. “We’re going to Luxembourg.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Behind the straggling early commuters, the bulbous dome of St. Mariä Himmelfahrt squatted at the top of its square, cream-colored steeple and Cologne’s massive Gothic cathedral reached up into the gray sky. Jahn craned her neck and peered at the flying buttresses and the prickling stonework of the spires. “We’re surrounded by God,” she whispered.

  Verrazzano ignored her and strode faster toward the main railway station. No heavenly power was about to swing down from those medieval towers to drive out evil. That was his job.

  They entered the station and went down the steps to the broad tunnel that accessed all the trains. Under platform four, a young woman dealt out espresso beneath the canopy of the Lavazza store. Verrazzano greeted the woman in Italian and ordered an espresso. Jahn frowned at the menu above the counter. “Americano.”

  The Italian barista slipped an extra couple of tiny square chocolate mints into the saucer of Verrazzano’s coffee and smiled, rewards for speaking Italian and ordering his coffee made the right way. She set Jahn’s coffee on the counter with the dismissiveness of any Italian who’s asked to dribble way too much water through a perfectly good shot of espresso. Verrazzano took his cup, sank it in one gulp, and set it down. “Bravo,” the barista said.

  Jahn’s phone buzzed. She took it from her pocket and read a text message. “It’s from Hemming at FBI Detroit. No luck finding Frisch. He’s going to keep trying, but the Detroit field office is stretched pretty thin with all the fallout from the crash. He has to go interview a bunch of executives at Darien today.” She put the phone away.

  Verrazzano glanced about him. Someone was watching, he sensed it.

  “What is it?” Jahn sipped her coffee. Then she picked up on his alertness and rattled the cup into her saucer. “Is it Frisch? Is he here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said he’d get to Germany. The Detroit office couldn’t track him down. It’s him, isn’t it?”

  Verrazzano felt a hand against his elbow. He looked down. An eight-year-old boy watched him with a pale, blank face. He wore a black hoodie and sweat pants. Without a word, he turned and ran, ungainly and stiff, through the commuters dodging for the steps to the platforms.

  “Let’s go, Gina.” Verrazzano set off, tracking the boy by the red lights that glowed in the heels of his sneakers with every step.

  They came out of the tunnel at the rear of the station. The eight-year-old ran past an impromptu shrine to the victims of the big crash, candles and flowers and smiling photos of the dead attached to a Darien van that had run up onto the curb and smashed into a lamppost. The kid jumped into an orange Mini Cooper. The car sped away east, dodging between the traffic and the roadblocks created by wrecked Dariens that were still to be removed. Verrazzano dashed for a taxi and jumped into the passenger seat beside the driver, a trim, young Turk with tired eyes and his hair done in a fauxhawk. Jahn climbed in the back.

  “Go this way,” Verrazzano told the driver.

  The Turk rolled his skinny shoulders under his tight T-shirt and swung across the traffic.

  The Mini led them down a broad tree-lined avenue of plain sixties architecture. It moved carefully. Verrazzano figured the driver of the little car was probably the eight-year-old’s parent—worried enough about being recognized to send the child to signal Verrazzano but not sufficiently reckless to crash the car with their son on board. In any case, the roads in the city had seemed unnaturally calm and silent as he drove in from Frankfurt that morning. Drivers were still in shock from the Darien crash, piloting their cars delicately and with an awkward awareness of death, like people whispering at a funeral. He laid his hand on the taxi driver’s forearm. “Stay back a bit,” he said.

  The driver frowned lazily and shifted down to third.

  Verrazzano watched the sideview mirror. A man on a motor scooter weaved along the street behind them. He wore a white helmet with the visor pulled down and a brown bomber jacket.

  “What did you see?” Jahn said.

  “Don’t turn around. Someone is onto us.”

  Jahn keep her eyes to the front. “If the Mini is taking us to where we want to go, we can’t stay there long. Whoever’s on our tail might intervene.”

  The orange car turned onto a narrower street of Internet cafés, Indian restaurants, and Turkish bakeries. A quick cut into a side street, and the car was out of sight. Verrazzano tapped at the driver’s elbow urgently. The taxi pulled around the corner.

  The Mini was nosed up to the curb beside a row of green plastic trash cans. Verrazzano got out of the car in a hurry. The scooter hadn’t made the turn into the side street behind him. He passed the orange car. It was empty. Across the sidewalk was a boarded-up storefront. Posters for DJ nights at the local clubs covered the planking. A door sawed from the wood creaked open.

  Verrazzano pushed the door in the storefront boards and went inside. He crept through the darkness, carefully and decisively. Jahn stayed a couple of paces behind him. Verrazzano used his peripheral vision, where the rods around the edge of his eye were less sensitive to changes in light than the color receptors in the central cones. The room was a profoundly messy office, maybe a reception room for a bigger office beyond the back wall. Papers were stacked all over the three desks, on chairs, on top of filing cabinets. On the walls, posters showed lonely polar bears on shrinking ice floes, Indian children starving, ugly fat cats in mammoth SUVs. In the half-light, he saw the open door in the back of the room. He went silently through the door. The room was darker still. He made his eyes wide.

  A desk light flicked on, directed at his face. He dropped his glance to the floor. Behind him Jahn covered her eyes with her hand.

  “Put your guns on the ground.” A woman’s voice, German accented. The woman who had told him over the phone to come to Cologne.

  Verrazzano drew his H&K and set it on the floor.

  “You too,” the woman said.

  Verrazzano gestured for Jahn to put her pistol down. Reluctantly she bent and set it beside his H&K.

  The woman whispered, and the boy scuttled through the dark to pick up the guns. He held them flat in his hands and disappeared beyond the spot lamp. The woman reached out and took the H&K. “Sit down. On that chair beside you.” She held the gun on Verrazzano.

  He stumbled against a bent-chrome chair and lowered himself onto the worn fabric of the seat. “I’m going to show you my ID.” He waited a moment, then took out his wallet. He held up his ICE picture card.

  A striplight in the ceiling flickered into action. The room went ice blue. It was as cluttered as the reception office. Aung San Suu Kyi and Bono looked inspiring and compassionate in posters above the desk. Beside them, George W. Bush wore a pair of cartoon devil’s horns and a stiff breeze lifted Donald Trump’s hair to give away the secret of his double comb-over.

  The woman was less than five feet from Verrazzano even though she kept her back against the far wall. She was about fifty, her hair gray and layered short all over her head. She wore a dirty green parka, though the room was warm. She blinked her eyes hard. Verrazzano wondered if the tic was permanent or only a result of the stress of having two law enforcement officers in fro
nt of her and, he believed, knowledge of a series of deaths. She raised Verrazzano’s H&K toward him. “Why do you want to see Turbo?”

  Verrazzano glanced about him. On the desk was a pile of letters, ready to be folded into envelopes. The letterhead was a cartoon of a kid filling his lungs and swift marks suggesting the air he sucked in. The cartoon boy leaned back happily against the words Luft und Leben—Air and Life. Verrazzano figured that was the name of the organization that kept its offices in these rooms under the railway embankment. The top letter asked for help, a fund raiser. It was signed Saskia Hütz. Probably the woman in front of him, and hopefully the Saskia whose number the dead Chinese engineer had erased from his whiteboard at the factory in Rüsselsheim. The walls showcased still more misery and injustice from around the world. The photos were stark and hard to bear. If Saskia only knew the true depths of that injustice, she’d rip this shit right off the walls in frustration, Verrazzano thought. But God bless her for caring.

  “What’s Turbo’s real name?” he said.

  “Wang Fu.”

  A Chinese name. The next engineer. “Where does he work?”

  “The Wolfwagen subsidiary just across the border in Holland.”

  “What’s his connection to you?”

  “I am opposed to high carbon-dioxide emissions by cars. The car companies try to convince people that they are environmentalists, that they are green, that they will not destroy the environment. I develop sources inside the car companies so that I can find out what they are really doing.”

  “Turbo is one of your sources.”

  “He was. Now he is scared. He came to me to hide.”

  “We believe Turbo can help us stop a very serious event that may be about to happen. An event that could kill a lot of people. We also believe Turbo can help us figure out who’s responsible for something that already killed a lot of people.”

  He expected more questions. Instead, the woman said, “Yes, he can.”

  Verrazzano waited. “Where is he?”