China Strike

by Matt Rees

  “A Czech?”

  “Sounds like it. The name, I mean.”

  “I’ve been following the trail of Chinese engineers. They’ve been dying just as I get to them. Julie Jin was the last one. My trail is dead. Unless—”

  “Unless Mister Salac would take time out of his grieving to enlighten you? Obviously there’s something very basic you’re not telling me. Something that makes this even more urgent than you would have me believe.” He jerked his thick body across the back seat. He came close to Verrazzano’s face. His breath smelled like Pittsburgh in the heyday of US Steel. “So if you want to question Mister Salac, stop treating me like an idiot.”

  “The Darien crash was only the first stage in the criminal operation.”

  “Ahh.” Sliva let his bulk slip back across the bench seat. “What’s the next stage? More crashes?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “But if all the Darien cars crashed on Monday, then—” Sliva’s dark glower opened and urgency beamed out. “By Christ, there’s another carmaker involved.”

  “More than one. Almost every car sold in the last year.”

  Sliva opened the door of the patrol car. “I bought my BŠZ when Axl Rose was in the charts. So I guess we’ll be safe driving it. Let’s go and see Julie Jin’s husband.”

  It was a short drive to Jin’s home in the Žižkov neighborhood. A patrolman perched against the hood of his squad car outside the apartment building, sharing his cigarettes with a girl. Even from a distance and at night, it was obvious that she was too young to smoke and much too young for a cop to have his hand up her skirt. Sliva pulled up behind the cop car and shunted its rear fender hard enough to jolt the happy couple. The girl’s body jerked, and her cigarette lanced into the cop’s cheek. He spun around and advanced angrily on the old BŠZ. He bent to talk to the driver through the window of the car.

  Sliva opened the door forcefully, striking the cop on the head with the frame around the window. The younger cop’s cap flew off and he staggered. Sliva stepped out. “Go home,” he called to the girl. She skittered away, the lights in the heels of her sneakers flashing on the graffitied facade of the apartment building with each step. Verrazzano came around from the passenger side of the BŠZ.

  “Gentrification.” Sliva gestured at the faux ghetto daubings on the walls. “Real estate will be a thousand euros per square meter here soon enough. Very high class. Unlike this guy.”

  The younger cop was doubled over, one hand on his shaven head, the other on the hood of the BŠZ. He bled from a cut above his brow. Sliva gave him a wad of tissues from his pocket and a few whispered words that oozed contempt and headed for the apartment building’s entrance.

  A chain and a sign in Czech decorated the elevator door. Out of service. Sliva approached the stairs with reluctance. Julie Jin had lived on the fourth floor. By the time they got to the apartment door, Sliva was wheezing like a sevdalinka accordion at the end of an energetic folk song. Verrazzano walked lightly behind him, trying to fend off the sense that he was at a dead end. If Jin’s husband couldn’t give him a lead, he was stuck without any route toward stopping the crash.

  Sliva entered the apartment without knocking. Verrazzano went in behind him. The hall was decorated with Chinese calligraphy and posters of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. At the far end, a female police officer whispered to a sullen four-year-old whose features were Asian. A slim man in his fifties with delicate posture came out of the living room. His hair was swept to the side, falling over his brow. He pushed it back and stroked the beard that reached down to his collar bone. Then he spoke in Czech.

  “English, please.” Sliva jerked his finger at Verrazzano. “Your wife excited the interest of the Americans, Mister Salac.”

  Salac turned his sad eyes on Verrazzano. “What’s so interesting about my wife to you? Except that she’s dead.”

  Verrazzano glanced quickly along the corridor toward the child’s room.

  “Daniela doesn’t speak English,” Salac said. “Julie spoke to our daughter in Chinese. I speak to her in Czech. She won’t overhear anything. So please explain why there’s an American here.”

  Verrazzano had seen this aggression in the recently bereaved before. Some people fell apart when faced with death. Others reacted to investigators as a stupid inconvenience. “Your wife worked for a man named Feng Yi?”

  “My wife worked for BŠZ.” Salac’s beard stuck out from his chest, as he lifted his chin angrily.

  “Let’s call that her day job. She was employed by Chinese intelligence. She was a plant.”

  Salac spoke to Sliva in Czech. The cop shrugged.

  “Mister Salac asks me,” Sliva said, “if he can refuse to talk to you. You see, he’s old enough to have grown up under Communism. Despite these pictures of great capitalists on the walls, he’ll do what I tell him because I’m the guy who could make him disappear in the night. Even if things aren’t like that anymore.”

  “They’re more like that than you’d care to admit,” Salac said.

  “The system is no longer like that.” Sliva wagged his index finger at Salac and smiled. “But maybe I am.”

  “The photos of Jobs and Gates weren’t put on the walls by Mister Salac,” Verrazzano said. “They’d have been Julie’s idols. She was the programmer. Mister Salac is a student of China in general and of calligraphy in particular.” He stepped toward a wall-mounted frame that contained a sheet of paper three feet tall. The Chinese characters stacked in columns were a little more fluid than the rest. Where the others were unadorned almost to the point that they seemed to have been printed, rather than painted, this one showed signs of the movement of the brush around the edges of each stroke. “This is Caoshu, right?”

  Salac inclined his head in assent. He wasn’t about to be charmed by a little knowledge of Chinese art.

  “I appreciate calligraphy because the whole point is that, when you write, the motion is as much a part of it as the information you’re setting down on the page,” Verrazzano said. “It fits what I’ve observed about the world around me.”

  “How so?”

  “The message isn’t only in what people tell you. It’s about the time and the space in which they exist. It’s about where and when you hear it, and about how you listen.”

  “So whatever I tell you, you won’t believe me? That’s what you’re saying.”

  “I’ll listen to what you say, but I’ll watch how you say it and I’ll pay attention to the reaction it triggers in me.”

  Salac turned to the Czech cop. “Is that how you work too?”

  Sliva gestured at the Caoshu work in the frame. “It makes me hungry. It looks like the stuff they use to decorate my local takeout place.”

  “I came to calligraphy and to my wife through my love of China,” Salac said to Verrazzano. “I still love China. So if my wife worked for Chinese intelligence—which I think is a crazy idea—I would still be rooting for them over some American government bastard any time.”

  Sliva turned his smile on Verrazzano. “This guy is covering you with shit. Luckily I am the final square of toilet paper.” He slapped Salac hard across the cheek.

  The slight man tumbled against the door frame. He slid down to the floor. His daughter wailed and jumped from her bed. The policewoman held her. Verrazzano knelt beside Salac. The man was out cold. Blood seeped through his beard.

  Verrazzano lifted him. He pushed past Sliva into the bathroom. He ran the cold tap and sat Salac on the toilet seat. He checked his airway and splashed water on his face. The man came around. He jerked his leg involuntarily, kicking over the wastebasket, and slipped off the toilet seat. Verrazzano caught him. The wastebasket rolled noisily against a plastic bag filled with purchases from a pharmacy. The bag shifted and its contents spilled out—tampons, roll-on deodorant in pink with a flowery label, a tub of night cream, a tall aerosol of shaving foam, a Gillette Mach III razor, and a pack of replacement blades.

  Salac focused blearily on the feminine pr
oducts on the tiles and seemed only then to realize that his wife was gone. He wept and mumbled her name.

  “You’ll be fine,” Sliva said. “I see you’re planning on shaving that stupid beard. You’ll get another little Chinese girl soon enough.” He nudged the Gillette with his toe.

  “I loved only Julie, you bastard. I don’t want another ‘little Chinese girl.’”

  The detective lit a cigarette and dropped the match in the sink.

  Verrazzano sat on the side of the tub and picked up the pharmacy items. He put the razor in the bag last. Salac had at least two years of beard on his face, yet he sent his wife out to buy the razor along with her creams and tampons. Maybe Julie Jin wanted her husband to get rid of his long beard. She decided to force the issue, perhaps. He set the bag down and righted the wastebasket.

  Footsteps came into the hallway, heavy, shuffling, unsteady. The cop who had been set to guard the apartment came into the bathroom doorway. He took away the soaked tissues from the cut on his brow. Blood streamed down the side of his face. “You cut me bad when you opened the door, sir. I need to wash up.”

  Sliva stepped away from the sink and beckoned for the patrolman to enter the cramped bathroom. “Join the party.”

  Salac sobbed on the toilet. His daughter was silent in the corridor. Verrazzano folded his legs sideways to allow the cop to get to the sink.

  The cop rolled up his sleeves to wash. His forearms were massive. The one closest to Verrazzano, his left, was tattooed with a girl’s name.

  “Who’s Veronica?” Verrazzano asked.

  The cop put his head under the faucet and sloshed water over his scalp. “That’s my daughter, sir.” He winced as he cleaned the wound. He took a white towel from the rack. He dried his head. Blood smeared the towel. The cop looked embarrassed.

  Sliva took the towel and tossed it into the bathtub. The cop turned. On his other arm, the name Petr was tattooed.

  “Your son?” Verrazzano said.

  “One kid on each arm, sir.” The cop smiled. “My wife’s name is tattooed on my chest. Only when you put them all together do you get the whole of me. On their own, they don’t mean anything. See? Because I’m only complete when—”

  “We get it. Very clever,” Sliva said. “What did you tattoo on your dick? A dotted line for the latest one to sign her name across it? Oh, but you like them too young to know how to write, don’t you?”

  “That wasn’t what you thought it was, sir. The girl had asked for my help.” The cop rubbed his shaven head nervously. “I’ll get back to my post now.”

  Verrazzano listened to the cop’s tread on the stairs. Sliva helped Salac into the living room. Verrazzano picked up the bag of toiletries. He glanced into the sink. It was pink with blood from the cop’s head wound.

  Something formed in that bathroom, a thought he couldn’t absolutely grasp, as though he had just entered and detected the scent of a previous user. He ran over the prompts, the events and sights, everything that might have given him this sense that he was close to a point of understanding. He played it all out again—Salac’s unconsciousness, bringing him around, the wastebasket, the pharmacy bag, Sliva’s callousness, the young cop’s arrival, his wounded scalp, his tattoos, the three names that made him whole, the towel, and the blood. What did it mean?

  “On their own, they don’t mean anything,” Verrazzano whispered. That’s what the cop had said. About his tattoos. As he rubbed his shaven head.

  It was there. All of it in those few moments.

  Verrazzano grabbed the pharmacy bag. He pulled out the razor, the replacement blades, and the shave foam. He ran to the door of the living room. Sliva was bent over Salac on the couch. The detective looked up.

  “Take me back to the graveyard,” Verrazzano said. “Right now.”

  He went down the stairs four at a time. He waited on the sidewalk for Sliva to join him. He drummed on the roof of the BŠZ. It was all there. Now he saw it all.

  The tattooed cop sat in his squad car and averted his eyes. Sliva shambled into the night. “What the hell, ICE man?”

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  The detective took the old BŠZ onto Vinohradska. “Are you going to tell me why you’re taking a razor and shaving foam to the graveyard?”

  A trolley car jangled across the junction. Sliva veered ahead of it and yelled at the driver. “Just get me there in one piece,” Verrazzano said. “Don’t crash. You’ll see what it’s about soon enough.”

  When Sliva pulled up at the graveyard, Verrazzano jumped out of the car. The cops at the perimeter made to stop him, but Sliva called for them to let him through. Verrazzano vaulted the wall and weaved through the tombs. He glanced quickly at the plastic sheet that covered Tom Frisch’s body. Then he went to the one shrouding Julie Jin. He pulled it away.

  A photo technician made a protest in Czech and reached for Verrazzano’s shoulder. Sliva bellowed at him, and the tech drew back.

  Verrazzano stared at Jin’s face, bloodless but for the brow where the Krokodil had begun to scalp her. Like all the other Chinese engineers.

  He covered the strip of short hair from her brow to the crown of her head in shaving foam from the can Jin had bought at the pharmacy. He ripped the razor out of its packaging.

  Sliva came to his side. “This had better be good, ICE man.”

  Verrazzano braced Jin’s head in his left hand and with his right stroked the razor back from her brow. He wiped the foam and hair off the razor onto his jeans. Then he made another stroke.

  “Mother of Christ, how am I going to explain this to the coroner?” Sliva’s sweat glimmered in the spotlights of the crime scene techs.

  Verrazzano worked at Jin’s hair. All the engineers had been scalped. The killer needed something from them. From their scalps. The Krokodil had lied when he said it was just his psycho passion. The scalps were the reason for the killings.

  The dead woman’s hair was fine and soft, but it gummed up the razor. He flicked off the disposable head and fitted a second blade from the replacement pack. A few more strokes and he saw the first letters. On her scalp. Her head had been shaved and something had been tattooed into her skin so that it’d be hidden when the hair grew back. He tried to figure out what it was. A neat section of scalp on the very top of her head in the center, three lines of letters and numbers, square brackets and arrows, colons and semicolons. He rubbed away the shave foam.

  “Is that computer code?” Sliva said.

  It was the kind of operating code that filled Julie Jin’s head. But this was on her head. Verrazzano took a photo with his phone and sent the image to Haddad.

  On their own, they don’t mean anything. The scalps were a set; he was sure of it. Whoever was killing the engineers needed all five of them to have the complete code. The code that, when it was input to a car’s computer, would make the disaster happen. Send every new car in Europe and North America hurtling toward a collision. But now they didn’t have all the scalps.

  Verrazzano sat on a flat tomb and stared at Jin’s head, at the lines of blue code. Had he stopped it all? Had he beaten Wyatt?

  A warm wind picked up, coming through the streets of old tenements from the River Vltava. The sheet covering Tom Frisch rustled. It was as though the dead man moved. Or spoke. Verrazzano heard him. He had to agree with Frisch. This wasn’t over.

  His phone buzzed in his palm. He picked up. “Roula,” he said. “The photo I sent you. What does the code mean?”

  “Is that someone’s head?”

  “It’s a tattoo on the scalp of Julie Jin. The code, Roula?”

  She hesitated. He imagined her making sense of the borders of the image, seeing it as the skin of a dead woman. Then she said, “It’s a bytecode, a set of instructions for a software interpreter. See, it’s numeric and—”

  “To put it in layman’s terms?”

  “It tells a computer what to do. It’s written this way, rather than in human-readable source code because bytecodes can be used on differe
nt hardware and different platforms.”

  “Does that mean you have to run it to figure out what it does?”

  “I have to reverse translate it to make it human-readable. But I can see from a quick look that it’s connected to the auto-crash software. Look at the middle of the second line. That’s the date of execution, and it’s July fourth.”

  “That’s tomorrow.” A chill passed through Verrazzano. If he had stopped this attack, he was just in time. If he hadn’t, then he had no time left. “Without this code, can they activate the bug?”

  “Only if they have a copy of this code.”

  “Assuming that there was different code on each of the engineers’ scalps, the bad guys have four-fifths of the code they need. They don’t have the final scalp, the final code. So they’re stuck?”

  “They’re stuck.”

  “And the cars aren’t going to crash.”

  “I guess not. Who was taking the scalps, though? The Chinese would surely have had the code themselves, somewhere central.”

  “The engineer who died here in Prague had bought shave foam and a razor. She was going to shave her head to reveal the code. I think she’d have read it in a mirror and activated it on July fourth.”

  “Why not just do it from China?”

  “They’d have needed to hack into every major car company’s system at the same time. Instead they put engineers inside who could each input a little bit of the whole code.”

  “I see it. Each of them together would beat the security of the car companies, and then their individual sets of bytecode would mesh over the different hardware systems of the car manufacturers. So maybe the killer is just trying to stop them? It could be another intelligence organization.”

  Verrazzano closed his eyes. He knew the deaths weren’t caused by any white knight. The Krokodil was working for Wyatt. “Think of the short sale on auto stocks that Bill and Noelle uncovered in Luxembourg. Someone’s in this for the money. It’s not an intelligence operation.”

  “But now they’re stuck.”

  Verrazzano wasn’t counting on that. He rubbed at his jaw. “Did Jahn get anything else out of Vienna?”