China Strike

by Matt Rees

“Maybe he doesn’t want to help you.”

  “But you do.”

  “Do I?”

  “A lot of kids just like your boy could be hurt if we don’t stop this.” Verrazzano gestured to the walls of the room, the posters of starving children and dried up riverbeds. “Clearly you care about people’s lives.”

  She lowered the gun and came forward, crouching, filled with anger. “Maybe I think everyone in the West should get a wake-up call. Maybe they need a very, very loud noise for that. Maybe a lot of cars—”

  Jahn flashed out her hand and snatched the pistol from the woman. The woman shrieked. Jahn jumped toward the door and raised the gun.

  “What the hell are you doing, Gina?” Verrazzano said.

  Jahn snarled at him. For an instant, Verrazzano couldn’t tell if she aimed to shoot him or the German woman. The little boy sniveled.

  “Gina, you’re out of line.” He stood in front of her.

  Jahn’s teeth showed in the bright spot lamp, on edge. She growled as she relaxed her arms and lowered the gun.

  “Go watch the street.” Verrazzano took his pistol from her. “I’ll take care of this.”

  Jahn picked up her weapon from the desk. She turned to the German woman. “Special Agent Gina Jahn. Federal Bureau of Investigations.”

  “I know all about the FBI.”

  The defiance in the German woman’s voice seemed to needle Jahn. “I bet the FBI knows all about you too. What’s your name?”

  “Saskia Hütz.”

  “That your boy?”

  “His name is Markus.”

  “He’s a cool little customer. Where’s this guy Turbo?”

  “I’m almost right up your ass.” A Chinese man in a brown bomber jacket came through the door behind Jahn. He held a white motorbike helmet. The man who followed them from the station on his scooter. “Don’t worry. I said ‘almost.’ Turbo only likes black guys.”

  He was tall and skinny. His cheeks were dark with a slick black beard and punctuated with white eruptions of acne.

  “Be serious, Turbo,” Hütz said. “And do not speak that way in front of Markus.”

  “He doesn’t speak English, Saskia.”

  “I’m not referring to your words. He will understand your tone and your behavior.”

  Turbo’s laugh sounded like someone had stamped on a cat. He held his hand out for a high five. Markus nipped forward and laid it on him with a shy smile. “That’s my little man,” Turbo said in German. He turned to Verrazzano. “Are we ready to save the world? Let’s go, GI Joe.”

  “We are ready.” Verrazzano tried to pick out the Chinese man’s eyes in the shadows cast across his face by the ceiling light. Turbo was so shrill, Verrazzano wondered if the guy was high. Maybe the stress of whatever he was involved in had sent him over the edge.

  Turbo struck a pose, legs braced, fists pumping at imaginary enemies. “Before you can save the world, you’ve got to make sure you have Turbo in your pocket, Davy Crockett.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Get me the hell out of Dodge. Turbo knows what Turbo shouldn’t know.” He made his voice childish. “Bad guys want to kill Turbo and take his scalp. Turbo’s almost a dead ’un, General Patton.”

  Jahn moved forward. “Why do they want your scalp?”

  “It’s a hell of a head of hair, Kemosabe.”

  “Gina, we have to secure this location,” Verrazzano said. “Go out and keep watch. In a few minutes, we’re going to leave with—with Mister Turbo.”

  “The guy is disturbed,” Jahn said. “I should be in here with you. What’s with all these weird Americana references?”

  “Hot damn, Harriet Tubman,” Turbo said, “you’re an American hero. America is Turbo’s thing. I know more about America than Charlie Chan.” The man danced and made pistol-shooting fingers at Verrazzano. The little boy giggled.

  “Gina, I want to be sure there’s no one waiting for us out there.” Verrazzano went close to Jahn. “Come on. We’ve got to move. Go make certain the road is clear.”

  Jahn went through the front office to the street.

  Turbo slunk across the room to Saskia Hütz. “You saved me, baby. You brought the cavalry. General Custer’s going to take Turbo to safety.”

  Hütz grinned. “Better not call him General Custer. You know what happened to him.”

  “General Lee?”

  “Not much better.”

  “Turbo knows how to recognize a real man.” He came to his feet, jogging in place before Verrazzano. “Because I’m totally gay, JFK.”

  Verrazzano lifted his hands, a calming gesture. “I need information now. Start by telling me your name.”

  Turbo made a kung-fu kick in the air. “Wang Fu. Spelled F-U. But the real me is Turbo. Because I’m turbocharged. I force air into my combustion chamber and it makes me run at twice my natural level, Evel Knievel.”

  “Got it. You’re one of the Happy Five?”

  Turbo raised his eyebrows at the name the Chinese engineers had given themselves. “Oh-ho, somebody talked.”

  “Du An told me about the Happy Five. I was with him in Rüsselsheim right before he died.”

  Turbo faltered, the manic expression on his face momentarily disintegrating. Then he was back, eyes wide and fired up. “The Happy Five is no more. Three are dead. Now it’s just the Scared Enough to Poo Two.”

  “I can protect you, Turbo. Who’s the last member of the Happy Five?”

  “It’s just me and Ju.”

  “Me and you?”

  “Ju. It’s her name, Billy Graham. How did Du An get whacked and waxed?”

  “A man leaned out of a crane, cut his throat, and scalped him.”

  Turbo touched his fingertips to the top of his head. “Feng Yi told us not to worry.”

  “Who’s Feng Yi?”

  “He said, ‘It’s all in your heads. But if you screw it up, it’ll be on your heads anyway.’”

  The German woman caught at Turbo’s wrist. “I’ve done what I can for you, Turbo. I hid you here. But this man is your best hope now. Be as serious as you can.”

  “Turbo’s in big doo-doo.”

  “I tried to help Du An, but I was too late. Don’t you dare mess this up.”

  Turbo stepped back and shrugged himself free of her. He rolled his neck and muttered resentfully in Chinese. Then he took a pace toward Verrazzano. “Saskia’s right. She tried to help Du An. He was a good guy. Just like Gao and Su over in the US of A. Du An warned Frau Hütz, and she got me into hiding before they came for me.”

  “Who’re they?”

  “The real monsters with the fangs so long, King Kong.” He was shuffling quickly on his feet again. “All I ever wanted to do was break into American corporate computer networks or hack the Pentagon. I was good at that—sitting in the military intelligence tower in Beijing, drilling through all these systems that were supposed to be secure, laughing my skinny ass off about how easy it was to get around the security systems. Then the Big Pig put me on the team. The Happy Five. He trained us, brainwashed us. Did other stuff to us that you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “He made me into a piece of computer code. That’s all I am now. My soul is so weary, Timothy Leary.”

  Verrazzano had interrogated drugged-up street mopes. But this interview was all over the place, throwing up too many questions he needed to answer. “Do you have a chip implanted in your head?”

  “This isn’t a sci-fi shtick, Philip K. Dick. This is really real reality.”

  “Then who is he? Who’s the Big Pig?”

  Turbo shook his head. “You make me safe, and if nothing goes wrong, Neil Armstrong, Turbo tells you the whole story.”

  “We don’t have much time.”

  “You’ve got more time than Turbo does if you don’t look after him right.”

  The German woman put her hand on Turbo’s shoulder and spoke to Verrazzano. “I have a friend who lives in the forest south of Bonn. She will let us
hide out there, if you can get us out of Cologne. It’s about an hour’s drive.”

  Verrazzano stroked at his chin. “I’ll send Agent Jahn to get our vehicle, and we’ll leave as soon as she’s back.”

  “You’re so awesome and handsome, Charlie Manson.” Turbo raised his hand for a high five.

  Verrazzano didn’t respond to the gesture. “I need you to talk now, Turbo.”

  “He just agreed to tell you everything,” Hütz said.

  “I want to be sure I’m protecting a guy who’s worth keeping safe.”

  “You’re making Turbo angry.” The man blinked frantically. “You want to be told, Lee Harvey Oswald? Okay, the Party put our team together.”

  “The Chinese Communist Party?”

  “Yeah, which is also known as ‘the government.’ We wrote a program that would make a car go out of control on certain dates. The boss man sent us to work at different car companies in Europe and America.”

  “Who’s the boss man?”

  “I already told you. It’s Feng Yi, Muhammed Ali. We were undercover more than a year after he sent us out. In that time, all the cars produced by those companies were infected with the virus.”

  Verrazzano’s guts chilled. “How many cars would that be? Every car produced by five companies?”

  “More than that. Every car company owns a bunch of other companies. Say you put something in the computer at Wolfwagen, it gets written directly into the software on all the company’s subsidiaries. In the Czech Republic, Spain, and the rest of Germany.”

  “How do I stop it?”

  “You don’t leave me alone, Al Capone. Make me safe. That’s how you stop it.”

  “You know the code? How to deactivate it?”

  “I know how to activate it.”

  “Tell me. Maybe we could reverse the code and—”

  “Actually it’s me and the other Happy Five guys. We all know. All of us together.”

  “But three of them are dead. Does that mean the code can’t be activated?”

  Turbo faltered again. “I—I don’t understand it. It’s only going to work with all of us.”

  “So why are they killing you? Is the killer trying to stop the cars going out of control?”

  Turbo sank into the chair by the door. “The big swine in the Party wanted to use the threat of chaos and death on the roads at the trade negotiations.”

  The trade talks were happening now in Vienna. Verrazzano imagined a scenario—someone else had uncovered the Chinese plan, and the killings of the engineers were intended to stop the cars crashing. Something about that didn’t sound right. “The first crash with all the Dariens was meant to be a warning. By Gao Rong in Detroit. Was it a warning to the parties at the trade talks? If so, it could actually make the Chinese threat more real, more powerful.”

  Turbo howled a few words in Chinese, angrily, cursing. Verrazzano couldn’t pick out anything except the name of Feng Yi. “The Big Pig had to get someone outside the Party who he could use to activate the code. He hooked up with some nasty American wacko.”

  That had to be Wyatt. “What was the American’s name?”

  “Whichever way I turn, I’m screwed like hot booty, Bill Cosby.” He lowered his head and rocked back and forth.

  The German woman got in Verrazzano’s face. “You’re thinking someone else decided to snuff out these computer guys so the Chinese wouldn’t be able to use them to activate the code?” she said.

  “It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “So you’re also thinking you should just let them rub out Turbo and the other programmer? In fact, maybe you should give them a hand right now.”

  Verrazzano glanced at the woman’s kid.

  “Oh, of course, you won’t do it in front of the little boy.” Hütz’s voice was loaded with contempt. “But you’ll murder Turbo as soon as my son is out of the room. You disgust me, you government people. I won’t let you do it. If you don’t protect Turbo, I will go to every investigative journalist in Germany with this story. I have been recording this meeting.”

  Turbo seemed to catch the hardness in Verrazzano’s face. It brought him out of his reverie. He jumped up from the chair. “He’ll kill you too, Saskia.”

  “I’m not going to kill you.” Verrazzano watched the boy reach for his mother’s hand. That hadn’t stopped him before. In the stairwell of the building in Beirut. He had assassinated Maryam Ghattas in front of her own child. On the orders of Colonel Wyatt. A Lebanese human-rights campaigner who, Wyatt told him, was working for Syrian intelligence and had helped kill American agents. A woman who was about to implicate him in the killing of the country’s prime minister. “I’m not going to . . .” His whisper trailed off.

  “I’m not scared,” Hütz said.

  “Everybody’s scared.”

  The woman lowered her voice. “Tell your colleague to get the car.”

  “We have to stop at a pharmacy on the way.” Turbo rubbed at his stringy hair.

  “A pharmacy? What do you need?” Verrazzano asked. The guy was drugged up, after all. Maybe he was on prescription medication.

  “You’ll see.” Turbo gave a crafty smile and mimed the twirling of a big mustache. “I’ve got a hell of a surprise for you, Nancy Drew. But you have to let me buy a couple of things at the pharmacy when we’re on the way out of town. I need them to show you what I’ve got.”

  “Fine.”

  From out on the street, Jahn shouted words Verrazzano couldn’t pick out. He rushed through the front office. As he reached to pull back the board door, bullets ripped through it. It swung open. Verrazzano stepped onto the sidewalk.

  To his right, a man in a black pea coat and jeans ran in a crouch in the lee of the buildings. He ducked into an alley.

  Jahn was on the far sidewalk. She held her pistol, trained toward the alley, looking for a shot at the man in the pea coat. She gave it up and sprinted across the empty street. “That’s the guy,” she shouted. “In the alley. It’s him.”

  The Krokodil. They jogged to the alley where the man had run. It was short and ended in a ten-foot wall. Verrazzano braced himself across the narrow space, back against one side and feet climbing the other. He wiggled his shoulders to raise himself up. Beyond the wall, a slope of untended grass and a light sprinkling of trash rose to the train track at the top of the embankment. He kneeled on the top of the bricks and leaned out, scanning along the bank.

  He jumped back down to Jahn. “I don’t see him.”

  From the street back down the alley, they heard a woman scream. “No, don’t do it. No, Turbo.”

  Jahn took off. Verrazzano hurried after her. In the doorway of Hütz’s office, the German woman stood with her son, holding him tightly to her side. She lifted her eyes to Verrazzano, and he understood that she thought he would kill her now to erase the story she might tell the investigative journalists. There was also another dimension to her fear that he recognized immediately. Like the Ghattas woman in Beirut, not afraid for herself, but terrified that he would kill her in front of her child.

  “It’s okay, Saskia,” Verrazzano said. “We’re going to get you out of here. Everybody’s okay.”

  The boy pressed his face into his mother’s belly. She kissed the crown of his head. “Turbo’s gone. He got scared. He ran out of the door. You didn’t see him?”

  “Which way did he go?”

  “I couldn’t tell. I saw him go out. Then—”

  Verrazzano looked along the street. Turbo might have gone past the end of the alley while he was climbing the wall with Jahn beneath him. But Turbo could just as easily have fled the other way, under the railway bridge. And the Krokodil could have him already.

  “Gina, you go that way toward the main street. I’ll take this direction. Find Turbo.”

  Jahn ran fast down the block.

  Verrazzano came close to Saskia Hütz. He gave her the pistol from his hand. “Stay in your office. Turn off the lights and stay inside. If anyone comes in and doesn’t identify t
hemselves, shoot them without asking questions.”

  “You don’t have a weapon,” she said. “You’re going after a killer without a weapon?”

  “I’m going after Turbo. The only way he can hurt me is with famous American names and bad rhymes.”

  He sprinted under the railway bridge, trying the doors of all the workshops and storerooms in the arches under the track. They were locked. Around a sharp corner, the street ran into a dead end at the tall gates of a haulage company. He tried to climb the gates, but he couldn’t get over. The yellow iron struts were too tall and slippery with the damp air. Turbo hadn’t gone that way.

  A red-and-silver commuter train sped by on the rails above him. The overhead electrical line spat sparks from the trolley pole that connected it to the train. Amid the crackle and hiss from the catenary, Verrazzano heard another noise. Gunfire. The sound was distant enough that he knew it wasn’t from the vicinity of Hütz’s office. The woman and her kid were safe for now.

  He sprinted toward the main street through the Ehrenfeld district. A siren started a long way down Venloer Strasse. Someone else had heard the gunshots and called them in. He didn’t want to explain himself to a German cop. But he wanted to fail even less, so he put aside those distractions.

  At the corner, he dodged through the traffic and crossed into another side road. Turbo would’ve gone for a quiet street—amateurs who ran always did. A professional assassin would’ve disappeared down the busy main drag, matching his pace to the other pedestrians, making himself invisible. Verrazzano passed a laundromat where a few glum immigrant women stared at their spinning clothes. The lights inside the FedEx office next door fluoresced on the purple and orange of the company logo. In the middle of the street, Jahn wheeled about, holding her pistol at her side, staring up at the windows of the five-story buildings around her. She ejected the magazine from the pistol and slipped in another.

  “You lost him?” Verrazzano came up beside her.

  “I’m sorry, Dom.” She pointed into a small indoor parking lot that ran along the side of the street. A thin man clad in black lay flat on the ground between a parked Mercedes and a hydrant in the corner.

  Verrazzano knelt beside Turbo. The man had two bullets in his chest and one through his brow. Blood pooled beneath his head, dripping from the bare skull where he had been scalped.