Power and Empire

by Marc Cameron

  Working quickly, he tied a fixed loop in one end and a slip knot in the other. Crouching over the bunk, Chang slipped the larger loop around Feng’s neck so the knot was in the back of his head. Then, grabbing Feng’s foot, Chang bent it up and over Feng’s back, pulling the knee upward until he was able to loop the slip knot over Feng’s foot, arching his back as though he were hog-tied. Dead weight from Feng’s own paralyzed leg pulled the noose tight, putting pressure against the already bulging carotid arteries in the side of his neck.

  The noose did the trick of stopping blood to Feng’s brain, but it wasn’t quite tight enough to compress his airway. Gagging noises escaped his open mouth and his face rapidly took on the hue of an eggplant. His eyes fluttered. Chang relaxed a notch. Finally. It wouldn’t be long now.

  Chang spun on his heel and scooped up the rubber chock he’d left in the cell door to keep him from getting locked inside. He took one last look at the choking man. When he turned around, Officer Pankita Lincoln blocked his path.

  Her eyes looked right through him. “What the hell?”

  Chang feigned a smile. He was big enough that he could run right over this puny bitch if he wanted to.

  “Inmate troubles,” he said—and threw what he thought was a pretty damned good left hook.

  Unfortunately for him, Pankita Lincoln’s father had taught her how to box.

  Chang’s eyes and then his shoulder telegraphed his intention to throw the hook a mile away. She faded backward, just enough to let the hook slip by. Pepper spray in hand, she gave him a full blast directly in the face before driving her knee into his groin in a repeated, rapid-fire attack.

  Chang roared in pain. His eyes slammed shut and he staggered back, instinctively trying to put more distance between himself and the searing burn. Defensive-tactics instructors taught their students to use the fingers of the nondominant hand to hold open one eye—but DT class was nothing like real life. There was no getting ready, no time to prepare. This whole thing had gone to shit.

  Flailing blindly, Chang forced his eyes into a grimacing squint. His lungs rebelled, convulsing each time he tried to draw the smallest breath. Mucous membranes kicked into overtime, sending strings of snot draining from his nose. If he could just get hold of her, he could shut her up for good, maybe even make it look like she’d killed Feng—at least long enough for him to get away.

  Pankita Lincoln had other ideas.

  21

  Dominic Caruso thought Flaco’s interview seemed to be going well when they first sat down in an interview room at the Dallas FBI field office. Flaco’s nostrils flared and his upper lip twitched, rabbitlike, as if he were trying to keep on a pair of nonexistent glasses. He was obviously terrified—not a bad emotion for someone from whom Caruso wanted information. He spent more time staring at the one-way glass than he did making eye contact with the two investigators.

  Then Callahan made the mistake of asking who had kidnapped him. The skinny gangbanger just sat there staring at her, blinking stupidly, head shaking like it might explode at any moment. In the end, he muttered something about a lawyer and refused to say another word. Dom suspected his reticence to talk might have had something to do with the application of particular boot to the side of his neck. John Clark was in his late sixties, maybe a little old for this kind of hands-on work, but there was a brooding air of vengeance about the man that gave even Caruso the willies.

  Joe Rice and a blond Dallas PD detective named Shirley Winston took Flaco to jail, leaving Callahan to deal with Caruso. It was not lost on Caruso that both of the task force officers looked at him like a member of an invading army.

  Kelsey Callahan rubbed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “Want to see where I work?”

  “Sure,” Caruso said, wondering how much of the conversation the mic on his neck loop was picking up. Adara was open-minded, but she would not like this at all.

  “Good.” Callahan gave a contemplative nod. “’Cause I need to drop by the hangar before you buy me that drink.” She leaned back against the table, looking him up and down, obviously flirting.

  Caruso gave her his best smile. “I thought you were buying me the drink.”

  She sighed. “I know I owe you one. I mean . . . hell, I hear the words coming out of my mouth and I’m like, ‘That’s not me.’” She gave a nervous chuckle. “Did you know that I make every boyfriend let me run a diagnostic on his computer and phone? That kind of trust is a real turn-on, let me tell you. But I can’t help it if I know the stats. I can walk down the street anywhere in the U.S. and the odds are I’m passing some pervert with child porn on his computer every couple minutes.” She breathed out hard, puffing her cheeks as if trying to keep from crying. “This job, it can turn you into a real bitch, you know.”

  Caruso shook his head and said softly, “A carne di lupo, zanne di cane.”

  Callahan raised an eyebrow, waiting for him to explain.

  “Literally it means something about wolf meat and dog fangs, but figuratively it says you have to be rough to fight rough things. Kelsey, your investigations pit you against some of the sickest people on the planet. You’re entitled to be a little pissy once in a while.”

  “Fight rough with rough.” Callahan closed her eyes to think for a moment. “I like that . . . I like it a lot.”

  • • •

  The hangar near Love Field Airport was less than fifteen minutes away from the FBI field office via the West Northwest Highway, called Loop 12 by locals. Caruso followed in his rental car, parking beside Callahan. He groaned within himself as he noted the position of three exterior security cameras. If they went to a remote server, then he was screwed. Government agents didn’t like being under surveillance any more than regular citizens. The difference was, they could do something about it, so there weren’t likely to be any cameras inside the building.

  Callahan used a proximity card to get through the front door. Once inside, she deactivated an alarm with a simple key pad. She didn’t try to hide it, and Caruso memorized the five-digit code.

  She flipped on the lights and said, “Behold! The office of misfit toys.”

  “Nice,” Caruso said, surveying the bullpen arrangements of all the desks in the cavernous hangar. “You’re in charge here, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then where’s your office?”

  “No office,” she said. “I’d miss too much. I sit at that desk there, below the whiteboard.” She explained the makeup of the task force, the agencies involved, and ran down a list of their recent arrest and rescue statistics.

  “Those are impressive numbers,” Caruso said.

  Callahan scoffed. “You want numbers? In 2008 there were over 57,000 kids reported missing in Texas alone. In that same year, the Highway Patrol made 2,891,441 traffic stops. How many kids do you think they recovered?”

  “No idea.”

  “Zip,” she said. “Nada. Zero. So they developed a program called Interdiction for the Protection of Children, which lines out a set of behaviors law enforcement should look for in trafficked children and the traffickers themselves.”

  “So it’s working?”

  Callahan closed her eyes. “Fifty-four kids were rescued last year. Better than zero, but we still have a long way to go. Human trafficking is a thirty-five-billion-dollar-a-year gig. There are places in the world—hell, there are places right here in this state, where women and kids are sold and traded like horses. And we’re barely making a dent.”

  Caruso was thinking, You haven’t met John Clark, but he said, “And you still don’t think you’re doing enough?”

  “Honestly, I’m overcome with guilt for standing here talking to you now instead of trying to save another one.” She ran a hand through her hair, redoing the scrunchie that kept her ponytail in place. “Anyway, sorry about bringing you down. I’m sort of used to having to make my case all the time.”
r />   “No worries,” Caruso said. “It’s good to see someone so dedicated who’s not completely burned out.”

  “Who said I’m not burned out?” She took his hand and turned toward the back wall, behind her desk. “Come on. There’s something I need to show you.”

  Caruso pulled his hand away as gently as he could. “I’m in a relationship,” he said.

  Callahan gave him an honest laugh, continuing to walk toward her desk.

  “I figured,” she said. “Men who can quote Italian proverbs don’t stay unattached for long.” She sat at her desk, found a pair of reading glasses, and then bent to spin the dial on a gray metal safe under her side table. She hit the combination on the first try, and turned a handle before pulling open the heavy drawer with a loud thunk. “To be honest,” she said, looking up at him, “I’d intended to bring you here and engage in my own little version of a honey trap. You know, try and trick you into admitting what it is you’re really up to. But I guess I already know. When Flaco decided not to talk, I realized we had nothing to go on but the thin stuff Eddie Feng is giving us, and that’s likely just to save his own skin. He’s hiding more information, I know it, but in the meantime, I’m open to whatever help you guys at the Counterintelligence Division can give us.” She took a small yellow envelope from the safe and handed it to Caruso. He could see from the outline it was a USB drive.

  Callahan took a deep breath. “I’m not an idiot, Caruso. Headquarters drops you in here on top of me, and then one of my arrests shows up duct-taped and hooded with a muddy boot print on his face.” She nodded to the envelope. “I don’t know who you are exactly, but I think you should take a look at this. There’s obviously something on it that I’m not seeing.”

  Caruso opened the envelope and dumped the USB drive into his palm. “Not saying your theory about me holds any water, but we are on the same side, I promise you that. I wouldn’t mind having a look at this. It’s been checked for malware?”

  She nodded. “FBI techs assure me it’s virus-free. You’ll need to sign for it. And I do want it ba—”

  Callahan’s cell phone began to chime, cutting her off in midsentence. She looked at the caller ID, then shook her head. “It’s Joe Rice,” she said. “One of the detectives who booked Flaco into jail. I’ve gotta take this.”

  Callahan’s mouth fell open five seconds after she pressed the phone to her ear. “You have got to be shitting me,” she said with a gasp. “. . . Okay . . . I’ll be right there.”

  She ended the call and stood up.

  “What is it?” Caruso asked.

  “Apparently,” Callahan said, “somebody thinks Eddie Feng has information that is too important to let him live.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Not quite,” Callahan said. She reached behind her desk and grabbed a black 5.11 daypack, which presumably she used instead of a purse. “Listen, Feng is in the hospital now, surrounded by a protective detail of very jumpy FBI agents. I’m going to try and get some kind of information out of the detention officer who attacked him. Sounds like he got a snootful of pepper spray, so maybe he’s been tenderized a bit. You go on and do what you need to do with that thumb drive.” Tears welled in Callahan’s green eyes. She sniffed and wiped them away. “I know there are hundreds, even thousands, more kids out there. I’ve never even met her, hell, I barely even know what she looks like, but for whatever reason, it feels important that we find Magdalena Rojas. I’m good with using your sketchy counterintel methods if it helps us find Matarife and rescue this kid.” She stopped at the door, finger poised above the pad to arm the security system. “Tell me how you say that Italian proverb again.”

  “A carne di lupo, zanne di cane.”

  Callahan looked at him and nodded. “Hell yeah,” she said. “That.”

  • • •

  Forty-five minutes later, Caruso sat with the rest of The Campus’s operators in Clark’s room at the Omni Hotel in downtown Dallas. Caruso and Adara leaned forward on the loveseat, shoulder to shoulder. Jack slouched in an overstuffed chair, and Midas leaned back in the office chair he’d swiveled around from the desk. Both men leaned as far back as their respective seats allowed, staring at the ceiling. Chavez sat on the floor, his back to the couch. Clark perched on the end of his bed. The team was used to such meetings in cramped hotel rooms and were all too tired to care about the furniture—or lack of it.

  Caruso’s cell phone lay faceup on the coffee table with Gavin Biery on speaker. The Campus IT wizard sounded congested, like he had a cold—which was surely a function of the fact that it was nearly two in the morning in D.C.

  Biery coughed. “I found a guy named Donny Lao with an Australian passport who looks a hell of a lot like the photo you sent of Vincent Chen, who happens to have a passport issued by the ROC.”

  “I’m betting Donny Lao’s not really Australian,” Ryan said, stating the obvious.

  “Ya think?” Biery’s eye roll was almost audible over the phone. “Vincent Chen has school records in Taiwan and the U.S. Sounds sinister, I know, but he owns a greeting-card company that has him taking trips between his home base in L.A. and China several times a year. I’ve sent everything I’ve found to you.”

  “How did you come to find this Donny Lao?” Jack asked. His brain was exhausted, but not asleep . . . yet.

  Biery chuckled. “The United States required friendly nations to add biometric data to their passport photos over a decade ago. Once I had Vincent Chen’s photo, it was a matter of stepping behind the firewalls of those nations and running a comparison program. Australia is part of the Five Eyes, so much of their information is available through CIA and NSA data links.”

  “Still, must have taken hours.” Jack yawned. Now he was falling asleep.

  “Not really,” Biery went on. “I wrote some code that worked on it while I did other things. I had two hits within the first half-hour. Looks like your man Chen has bona fide passports issued from Canada and Australia—under the names of Todd Lee and Donny Lao, respectively. He was never discovered because, up to now, no one was looking for Vincent Chen—just another face among millions.”

  “That’s good work,” Clark said.

  “Thank you,” Biery said. “Also, Mr. Lao happens to be booked tomorrow on the three-thirty p.m. Delta flight from DFW to Buenos Aires . . . well, technically this afternoon at three-thirty.”

  Chavez gave a low groan. “You couldn’t have led with that? I might actually be able to close my eyes for a couple hours.”

  “Don’t want to hear it,” Gavin said. “I’m passing you off to Lisanne. She’s got some information for you about flight—”

  “Hold on,” Clark said. “What about the thumb drive? I need you to take a look at it A-SAP.”

  Biery heaved a sigh. “So who’s willing to risk a potential infection of their laptop to send it to me?”

  “I’ll do it.” Caruso raised his hand, despite the fact that it was a voice call. “The agent I got it from assured me this thing’s been checked by FBI computer techs.”

  “Have I taught you guys nothing?” Biery snapped. “Do not even get that drive close to anyone’s machine until I get there.”

  Chavez’s head snapped up. “Wait, what? You’re coming here?”

  “Gerry approved it. This USB is obviously important to you, but I’m not letting it near one of my machines until I run some of my own diagnostics. FBI techs . . . Please! Anyway, we’re at the hangar now—already on the plane—just waiting for the pilots to get here. Here’s Lisanne. I’m going to get some sleep since Jack’s not here to hog the couch.”

  Lisanne Robertson was the new Adara Sherman—director of transportation for The Campus. Gerry Hendley had recruited the energetic former Marine after she pulled him over for speeding on the Jeff Davis Highway. Her Lebanese mother had raised her to be fluent in Arabic—she had two tours in Iraq under her belt by the time she
was twenty-seven. After separating from the military, she’d spent four years with the City of Alexandria Police Department. Both jobs gave her the chops she needed to transform from uniformed flight attendant to effectively become a one-person Phoenix Raven unit, pulling security on the Hendley Associates Gulfstream when it was parked at less secure airfields—which seemed to happen all the time.

  “Hey, guys,” Lisanne said in her usual chipper voice. Dom could imagine her blue-black hair bouncing as she spoke. “We’re estimating wheels-up out of Reagan in an hour with an ETA into Dallas Love Field of four thirty-five a.m., Central Time.”

  A collective groan ran around the room.

  Clark shot a glance at Dom. “You’re staying in Texas with me,” he said. “The rest of you will get to Buenos Aires well ahead of Chen and set up a reception. Follow him and see what he’s up to. There’s still a hell of a lot to find out about him and his operation on this end.”

  22

  Ba Meiling braced, her small chin tucked, narrow shoulders pinned, along with six other servants in the slate-tiled entry of Foreign Minister Li’s home. Dressed in black slacks and crisp white shirts, they stood with hands folded and eyes locked to the front. Minister Li did not like to be gawked at. The butler, Mr. Fan, stood beside Meiling under the harsh light of the crystal chandelier. Beads of perspiration coursed down the side of the man’s ashen face. A recent addition to the household, Mr. Fan had been brought on shortly after Minister Li had seen an episode of Downton Abbey. It was a whispered joke among the staff that the minister was a Chinese man who owned a German car and lived in an Italian villa with an English butler—or at least a Chinese butler he dressed up like an English one. Mr. Fan should have been in bed but was too frightened of the foreign minister to admit that he was gravely ill.

  The Li home was located northeast of Beijing, outside the 5 Ring Road. It was just far enough to escape the worst of the enormous cloud of yellow haze that choked those unfortunate enough to live in the city. The thirty-kilometer distance between home and office gave Li’s driver plenty of time to alert the staff, providing them a chance to convene for his arrival.