by James Church
“And that would be bad?” The ambivalence embedded in this whole operation was getting to me. He almost sounded like he wanted it to get through to the buyer. “I didn’t slip the gizmo Vincente gave me into the machine. Your friend Yuri didn’t either, though he had the chance.” I paused to give him time to say he didn’t know what I was talking about.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Figures. I gather you didn’t, maybe because you don’t have a gizmo. That means the thing will work when it gets to wherever it’s going, which I’m assuming is not what Vincente’s or Viktor’s, or whoever the hell he is, plans called for. So the next step, if I’m not assuming too much, is to intercept it, though you don’t sound very keen on doing that. I’m even less keen on it than you are, mostly because it isn’t my problem.” And then, I thought to myself, there was the matter of Rosalina. Dead because why? She got in the way? Tried to help me? Figured out she was being used? Tried to double-cross someone who was already double-crossing her? I didn’t know her very well, so it wasn’t as if I’d lost anyone important to me. It’s just that I didn’t like finding people dead when they obviously weren’t supposed to be in that condition. She was sitting in a big white office looking out at the garden. Why? She had turned off the alarms. How? She was important to Vincente; he was important to me. Her death had knocked something loose. The problem was, I didn’t know what.
“One thing at a time.” Yakob pushed the trapdoor back in place. “Forget about intercepting it. I told you, it’s already on its way. So now, step one is to find the manifest. Otherwise we look for a planning memo. They’re different, but they usually say the same thing. OK, so I knew Yuri, if that is what you’ve been fishing for.”
He smiled. I smiled back. Two rats trapped in a box.
He continued. “Yuri was supposed to have made a copy of one of them, whichever one he found. There’s always a planning memo attached to these things. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because the Swiss are usually involved.”
“The Swiss?”
“Yeah, who did you think was supplying the machine tools? The Algerian mafia? Listen, I’m not sure how much you know and how much you’re supposed to know. No one introduced us, and no one told me you’d be here. So from this point on, we don’t say a lot to each other.”
At least he knew something about operational security. Nice surprise. “Fine with me,” I said. “Here’s what I know: nothing. I was bored at home so thought I’d have some fun and catch a plane to Barcelona, but this isn’t what I had in mind. For one thing, I’m a man who likes noodles, not dumplings. For another thing, I’m through pretending I’m Japanese. You need anything more by way of introduction?”
Yakob led the way to the exit. “You don’t know anything, you like noodles, and you aren’t Japanese. Can we put that on your gravestone?”
“If it fits.”
8
The first place to look for documents was obviously the factory’s main offices, near the entrance where the taxi had left me off. After being slapped around, losing my eyesight, and winding through underground passages, my sense of direction was a little wobbly. Someone once told me I was like a carrier pigeon. Once I’ve been somewhere, I can find the route again even years later. The only way to hone that skill is to get lost and find your way out again, over and over again. For that, a GPS is a tool of the devil, and whenever they used to issue one to me at home, I always sent it back. I didn’t need it—until now. Now I was lost.
Yakob seemed to know the place by heart, though, and we trotted along the gravel path, past a series of outbuildings with bars on the windows, and up a short flight of stone stairs under a walkway lined with enormous oak trees. These had been left unscathed. Any one of them could have supplied wood for the ugly table in the dining room where I’d sat with the factory manager. When we got to a narrow steel door, off a short path nearly hidden behind a huge iron vase on a pedestal, Yakob stopped.
“You stay out here and keep watch,” he said. “This is the secure office area. From the looks of it, I don’t think there’s anyone left around here. I’ll only be a minute. If the bill of lading isn’t here, the routing instructions might be. If they’re not here, I’ll have to get fancy and get into the vault area for the planning memo. That won’t be fun. If I need your help for some reason, I’ll whistle.”
“Good plan,” I said. “Afterward, you can pat me on the head and feed me a treat. You want me to bark if I see someone?”
“Let’s just get this done, OK?” He did something with a keypad on the door and disappeared inside.
A few minutes later he came out again. “Nothing. The computers are wiped clean. The file cabinets are filled with old cheese sandwiches.”
“Don’t tell me, but you found the routing instructions.”
Yakob shrugged modestly. “Not quite. But I think I found the shipping company. It’s Chinese, and it’s based in a city called Barbin. The company is Bing something. Here’s the business card. Heard of it?”
I took the card and studied it. Maybe Yakob was nearsighted. The city was Harbin. “No, actually, I don’t know much about China,” I said, turning the card over.
I was doing what I always told my nephew not to do—bet. I was betting that if this operation was dangerously loose in some aspects, it was unusually tight in others. Luis knew some things about it, but seemed not to know others. Salvador was harder to figure out. He pretended not to know much, but he was involved up to his ears. For one thing, he showed up in a cleanup crew with a hypodermic needle. Yakob really did strike me as a late addition, and someone who had been working on the inside, like Yuri had, without much knowledge of the overall scheme. Yakob was fixated on bills of lading. Everyone has a specialty. That was his.
“Really? You don’t know much about China?” Yakob was looking at a small map he’d taken from his pocket. “I heard you and Luis were friends. He’s Chinese, isn’t he?” The map disappeared back into the pocket. Wherever he was going, he didn’t need me to know.
Yakob knew Luis? This was a bad sign. It meant he was in deeper than I figured. I decided to push my luck. “I thought you said you didn’t know about me. How do you know who my friends are?”
“What I said was, no one introduced us. And I didn’t know you’d be here. That doesn’t mean I don’t know about you. You got suspicions about me? Tough. My list against you is getting longer every minute.”
At least he could remember what he said. That could be good or bad. It depended on who was remembering, and what. In his case, I didn’t think it was a plus.
“Actually Luis is only part Chinese,” I said. “We met in Macau. Macau isn’t really China. It is, but it isn’t. If you’ve never been there, you might like it.”
“No thanks.”
“You sure this is the shipping company? All you have is this business card, and it looks old. Old and greasy.”
“You’d look greasy too if you had been under a cheese sandwich for a while. Give me that card.”
I held onto it. “OK, what if this card is right? What can you do about it?” I put a little barb on the end of the question. Not much, but enough.
“What can I do about it? Plenty, but first I have to climb out of here and get somewhere I can send messages.”
He didn’t say “we” have to get out of here. Years ago I learned to be really sensitive about pronouns in these situations. It was clear he was planning to leave alone; the question was, in what shape was he planning to leave me?
“Salvador has a taxi,” I said. “It must be outside somewhere. We’ll split up and look for it.”
Yakob didn’t seem to think that was a good idea. He frowned.
“Out of curiosity,” I said, “why do you think these offices weren’t guarded? Where is everybody? They just let you waltz in and look around? Does that make sense?”
“Simple. The two we got in the office were just a couple of thugs. They probably hadn’t gotten the word yet that the g
ame is over. The rest of the guard force, or at least the smart ones, have figured out they don’t have anything left to guard. The guys in suits left earlier, once they smelled trouble. If the dumpling machine is on its way, and they wiped the computer files, the guards don’t care anymore. Anyone left is scrambling to get out. They are only loyal to their own necks. The machinists know they’ll be well taken care of. They’re paid not to talk, and if they’re deported, they don’t care. They’re too valuable for anyone to sacrifice. Too bad we won’t get a chance to squeeze information out of them. Madrid won’t want the embarrassment.”
Madrid? Yakob was working for the Spanish? Somehow I doubted it. “What about the Swiss?”
“They’ll tut-tut and arrest someone, but it won’t amount to much.”
“In the garden, Vincente said the Chinese run this place.”
“Then he must know something I don’t. I’ve heard rumors, but that’s not my problem, and it’s not your problem either. Now I have a question. You still have the gizmo Viktor gave you?”
“It’s in my pocket.”
“Give it over. You don’t need it anymore.”
“What if I run across the machine?”
“You won’t. As far as I can tell, you’re done.” That didn’t ring so well in my ears. “If Viktor needs you for anything else, he’ll let you know. Your next move from here is down along that wall about five hundred meters. There’s a big, heavy gate. It swings in. Once you’re outside, you’re on your own. There should have been a pickup car to meet us”—he looked at his watch—“two hours ago. It won’t be your friend the taxi man.”
“Should have been, as in, it isn’t there anymore?”
“They wouldn’t hang around forever, especially if there was no signal from us. Unless Viktor has been able to get hold of someone to reschedule, they are long gone. Best of luck, cowboy.”
“Funny way to run an exfiltration,” I said, “but then, everything about this operation has been funny.”
“Your people do things better, I suppose.”
“You know my people? They usually don’t rely on ‘best of luck’ as the fallback. Listen, there’s no sense getting bogged down in what went wrong and who screwed up worse. If there is nothing else, we might as well split up like you said. I’ll give you a minute to move out, then I’ll head down the wall as you said.”
I wasn’t going to argue with him. I also wasn’t about to go looking for a gate five hundred meters down the wall if that was what he wanted me to do. The opposite direction might not be any better, but I doubted if it could be any worse. After listening to him the last few minutes, I had decided that Yakob was not someone I trusted with my life. If there was more than one way out of this place, I’d find it once I was clear of him.
“A pleasure working with you,” I said. “If I see you again I don’t know who you are, do I have that right?”
“Right.” He paused. “The gizmo. Hand it over.”
“Apparently, I don’t have it after all.” I made a show of going through my pockets. “They must have taken it off me when I was drugged up.”
Yakob took a step toward me, then must have thought better of it, because without another word he turned and walked quickly back toward the main path. As soon as he disappeared behind the iron vase, I started through the bushes, keeping to the wall of the main house, going the exact opposite direction from what he’d suggested. The bushes along the wall were old, with thick branches that refused to give way. “Trees have a sense of decency,” my grandfather would often tell me. “Bushes? Not a bit. They are selfish, devious little things.”
So they are, I thought, but I don’t need warnings of that from the grave. A few minutes later, out of breath, my legs heavy and my heart pounding, I stopped and slid to the ground behind a big juniper bush. Shouting, two guards ran past on the path, then two more. Yakob was wrong. Not everyone had left. I heard gunfire. Then it was quiet.
Chapter Two
It couldn’t have picked a worse time to rain. The canopy of the oak trees kept most of the water off me, but most isn’t none, and a little water can soak your shoes as much as a flood. I curled up under one of the azaleas, but that wasn’t much good. The rain stopped and the sky cleared fifteen minutes later. It was long enough for the ground to have become soggy, and the bushes more devious. They grabbed for me at every step. Wherever the bushes retreated, the mud sucked at my shoes. At last I decided that if I didn’t get back to a solid path, I’d collapse and be found weeks later, grinning at the sky, my bones providing extra phosphorous for these man-eating bushes.
The main path, I discovered, was only a few steps away, on the other side of a monstrous hedge of ancient Japanese yews paralleling the azaleas. I could see it through a tiny break in the hedge, which was too high to climb over, and so impenetrable that there was no way through. I finally crawled under it on my stomach, cursing the Japanese, cursing Luis, vowing never to eat dumplings again as long as I lived. When I emerged, the front of my shirt was mud-soaked, and the back of my jacket was in shreds, but I was away from the bushes and on a pathway that might get me to safety. It might also get me killed if I ran into those guards, but there was no time to weigh the odds. After about fifty meters, the path diverged. As usual, I went right, and there, in front of me, was a small iron gate. On the other side, leaning against a tree and smoking a cigarette as if there wasn’t much else to do in the world, was Salvador.
“You’d better have a key to this thing,” I said through the gate, “because I’m done climbing over, under, or around things.”
Salvador looked over at me, ground out his cigarette on the tree—careful to put the butt in his shirt pocket—and opened the gate. “It’s not locked,” he said. “This is the one gate they never locked, don’t ask me why.”
“At this point,” I said, “who cares why? Do you have something to drink? My nerves are shot.”
“The taxi is over there. I was waiting for another fare, but I might as well take you. You look awful, by the way. Can you take off that jacket? I don’t want to get mud on the upholstery. I think I have a bottle of brandy under the seat, if I didn’t drink it all the last time Vincente nearly got us all killed.”
“You’ve run this operation before?”
“No, not exactly, but something close. Similar outcome. It’s getting discouraging.”
“It was worse than that for Rosalina.”
Salvador shut the gate behind me. “She wasn’t one to make mistakes. Someone must have sold her out.”
“I vote for Yakob.”
“He say something to you?”
“Not exactly, but he uses the first-person pronoun too much.”
“Well, he won’t be using it anymore. Don’t ask why.”
“I’m not interested why. How come he doesn’t seem to know you?”
“He didn’t need to know me. But I knew him.”
We got in the cab and drove slowly down a dirt path to the main road.
“You want to turn on the meter?”
“It’s a flat fee,” he said. “Let’s throw your jacket away here. Go on, just throw it out the window. It’s best if they find it. We’ll get you another one. Do you like brown tweed?”
“Possibly,” I said. “But only if it’s three buttons.”
2
I was exhausted, and after a few sips of the brandy that Salvador handed me, I might have slept. Salvador had other ideas. He wanted to talk, and he wanted me to listen.
“What do you think?” he said over his shoulder. He was driving faster than seemed to me safe on the winding road.
“I think you can slow down a little.”
“Relax,” he said. “I can drive this section with my eyes closed.” He closed his eyes and smiled. “See what I mean?”
I took another swallow of brandy. “You know we missed the dumpling machine, and no one knows its routing. Yakob thought it would go by truck.”
“Yakob knew exactly how it was being transported.”
I should have guessed that much about Yakob. So why was he so intent on going through the act with me?
“I think Rosalina found out,” Salvador said, “and that’s why they killed her.”
“She stepped in to save me.”
“She what?”
When I’d explained what happened, he pounded on the steering wheel a few times.
“She knew that was forbidden. She wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with you once you got off the plane. She shouldn’t even have been seated next to you. That was a bad idea. Someone saw you. Even if they only spotted you getting off the same plane it would have been fatal. It took us months, almost a year, to get her on the inside. They left her like that in the chair because they wanted Vincente to see. I think they were going to take a photo. They hoped it would drive him crazy.”
“Will it?”
“Probably. I don’t think anyone should work with him anymore. He’s going to take too many chances. He was already taking too many.” The car sped up as we crossed the double line to pass a truck. The truck honked, and Salvador answered.
Once we passed, I looked back. It wasn’t a big truck, but it was big enough for three crates. The license plate was covered in mud.
“If he was so close to Rosalina, why did he let her get so far inside?” The brandy was a couple of drops away from putting me into a deep sleep. “He must have known it would be risky.”
“Brown tweed,” Salvador said. “And a tie, maybe dark blue.”