Razing Beijing: A Thriller

by Elston III, Sidney

  “That’s sort of surprising. How much more?”

  Emily reminded herself to breathe. “Three to four times the amount attributed to the oil pooling damage scenario.”

  Stuart studied her with a frown. “That’s not even close. Seems like the pilot would had to have slammed the throttles all the way forward.”

  “And even that would not be enough. There is still the possibility that the actuation system somehow slued the propeller blades in the wrong direction. A fine blade pitch would reduce the—”

  “An actuator failure on top of everything else that went wrong?”

  Emily felt tears slowly welling up in her eyes.

  Stuart looked away. “Just the same, it would really be good—”

  “To have the video,” she said with a nod, completing his thought, “and we could see for certain.”

  Stuart’s eyes continued to roam, until finally he held her gaze. “I need to make sure I understand. Either the pilot for some reason chose to ignore the fly-by procedure and pushed the throttles all the way forward, or the actuators failed, or some combination of both. Do you think the pilot would have done that?” Stuart knew the answer as well as she did.

  “The aircraft data recorder clearly shows that he set throttles at seventy percent, just like Sandy requested.”

  “Then, assuming propeller blade pitch was nominal, and the pilot set the proper throttle, how could that much extra fuel be delivered to the engine?”

  Emily shook her head in denial, even as tears flowed freely down her cheeks, the awesome responsibility falling squarely on the shoulders of her and her staff. “All of the electronic circuitry double-checked out. I don’t see how our control could have so horribly malfunctioned. But it’s the only explanation.”

  14

  PAUL DEVINN CAREFULLY returned the telephone to its cradle on his desk. He stared at it with an anger powerful enough to kill. He reminded himself how anger had never played a role in any of his killings in the past. The bullets he had delivered to the heads of the Iranian spy and the president’s promiscuous envoy, and the disinformation he had skillfully introduced to the Rivergate apartment, had not been the consummate act of an animal urge, but something performed in the execution of a meticulous plan.

  Channeling his instincts was one of his great personal strengths, necessarily so. Devinn dismissed from his mind the frantic telephone call which was the source of his angst. He walked calmly from his office, returned his secretary’s smile, and headed for lunch.

  Arriving back at the Thanatechnology plant afterward, Devinn noticed the small scrap of paper wedged beneath the corner of the handicapped parking block. He swore under his breath.

  Later that afternoon, he found himself sitting alone in a secluded booth at the Perambulate Inn. He was bitter for several reasons, not least being the need to reschedule dinner that evening with an attractive woman whom he’d recently met. The longer he waited the angrier he became. He ordered another iced tea from the waiter, this time with a small salad.

  His accomplice finally entered the restaurant, sat down and slid to the middle of the opposite bench. Sean Thompson looked nervous as he brushed his strawberry blond hair back from his eyeglasses.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Why are we even here?” Devinn waved down the waiter. Thompson ordered a Coke and a cheeseburger. The waiter disappeared through a set of swinging doors and Devinn resumed eating his salad.

  Thompson began to pick at his fingernails. “We may have a problem.”

  “That’s very good, Sean. We may have a problem. I thought we agreed the remedy was to lay low.”

  “I don’t want to wind up in prison.” Thompson’s eyes darted around the dining room.

  Devinn was taken aback. They might indeed have a problem, he realized, though probably not the one his accomplice had just alluded to. He dabbed Caesar dressing from his chin. “Nobody’s going to prison. What makes you so sure we’re actually responsible for the crash? From what I gather, everyone seems to suspect some sort of mechanical malfunction.”

  “It’s simple,” Thompson leaned forward to explain. “The engine explosion was caused by an overspeed exactly as I intended, except, well, obviously it didn’t trigger before the plane left the ground like it was supposed to.” He downcast his eyes. “No one would have been hurt. You’d still have gotten your rotten publicity.”

  “Then...what exactly seems to be the problem?”

  Thompson described the pressure that investigators were under while simultaneously running out of leads. Stuart wielded enough influence to keep active his own pet theories surrounding the crash—including those which the committee had already reviewed and dismissed from the list of possibilities. One such team that Stuart had assembled would be headed by Thompson’s boss. Emily Chang yesterday afternoon collected him and several of his colleagues to begin laying out plans for rebuilding the engine’s electronic control unit recovered from the crash. “The goal is to rebuild it—piece by piece, if necessary,” Thompson explained, turning pale. “They’re actually trying to restore full operation.” All of the electronic component investigations had so far been an intense search for quality deficiencies. Stuart’s latest initiative represented an altogether different and, from Thompson’s point of view, much more dangerous approach.

  The two men waited for the waiter to leave after delivering Thompson’s order.

  “Stuart’s gotten agreement from the airframer to look into a similar approach on the whole friggin’ flight management system.”

  “Huh. What is it they expect to find?”

  “You know exactly what they’ll find!”

  “I said, What do they expect to find?”

  “Evidence of an anomaly, I guess.”

  “Whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.”

  “You know goddamn well what it means!”

  Devinn as usual became quickly impatient with Thompson’s technical ramblings. “Sounds like they’re trying to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. To me, all this stuff looks like it was recovered from inside a volcano. Why should this concern us? You assured me the virus would disappear.”

  “It’s called a Trojan Horse. After corrupting the master code it was supposed to evaporate—actually, the friggin’ box was supposed to be toasted. It was also supposed to trigger during the pilot’s take-off ground-roll inputs, and since it didn’t, then how do we know—”

  “Why didn’t it?” Devinn asked with a curious frown.

  Thompson’s face flushed beneath the green shade of the table lamp. “What the fuck difference does that make!”

  Devinn stared while suppressing an urge that would quickly get out of hand.

  Thompson let out a deep breath, and the misery returned to his face. “I didn’t exactly have the opportunity to test it. The point is I have zero confidence that it ‘evaporated,’ which means there’s a chance Chang’s task team is going to find it.”

  Devinn contemplated that point as diners on the other side of the room glanced to see what all the commotion was about. “I thought without electrical power, these programs simply disappeared.”

  “The ECU has a back-up battery, like any computer. Looks like it survived the impact. Remember we’re talking about a relatively low-speed impact, so if the memory modules are also intact...” Thompson’s expression passed from agitation through realization to dread. “So what do we do?”

  Whether out of a cooler assessment of the situation or simple ignorance, Devinn thought the bigger issue was the ease with which Thompson had whipped himself into frenzy. He fished into the pocket of his shirt and took out a mint, removed the wrapper and popped it into his mouth. He offered one to Thompson. “This computer box is in the secured area, with the rest of the crash junk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we don’t do anything. Stay put, young man, and try to relax. Odds are in a few weeks time this all will have blown over. If you want something to worry about, then worry about how t
o spend some of that newfound wealth.”

  Thompson looked at him, rapidly blinking his eyes.

  Devinn folded his hands calmly on the table. “Realize this scenario you fear is borne of knowledge that you alone possess. Stuart and these engineers don’t suspect foul play; you only think they do, which means we’re probably not as vulnerable as you think. And wouldn’t this virus or Trojan Horse you wrote be hard to detect even if it is still lurking inside?”

  Thompson fixed his eyes somewhere over Devinn’s shoulder.

  Devinn leaned forward. “Listen up. It’s foolish for us to meet like this, Sean. From now on we’re supposed to be strangers. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.” Devinn smiled broadly. “Just take it easy for a while.”

  Thompson bid his goodbye with a sheepish grin. Waiting for the cashier to ring-up his change, Devinn watched the engineer walk with an air of uncertainty out of the restaurant. A minute later Thompson’s battered Hyundai pulled into the traffic.

  Behind the wheel of his Maserati GranTurismo, heading home to his townhouse in the chic western hills overlooking the city, Devinn reached for his cellular telephone. Perhaps he could resurrect those dinner plans, after all.

  15

  “YOU HAVE SIMPLY got to be tired of that old smokestack technology you’re working on,” Ralph Perry said between sips of his wine.

  Stuart’s business partner had left word with his secretary that he wanted to meet with him, and was willing to layover his flight from the west coast in order to make it happen. Stuart was exhausted and had no interest in meeting for dinner, but with the crash investigation into its fifth week, he did owe Perry an explanation.

  “Not a matter of how tired I am,” Stuart replied. “It’s got to be seen through.”

  “Well.” Perry washed down a mouthful of South American prawn with another sip of Riesling. “Even in this downturn, CLI’s business mix is proving a winner. Take a look around the dining room—folks just aren’t shelling out three-hundred bucks for dinner these days. Hell, I can’t remember the last time a four-star restaurant gave me a table on such short notice. Yet our Medical Group sales are up, Military a notch, Telecom down but stable. The crunch is actually drawing outsource business to our new satellite services unit. Good business mix—good strategy.” Perry looked Stuart in the eye. “We did okay, you know that?”

  Stuart certainly had to agree, although his partner now more or less ran the business himself that the two of them built. As younger men eager for risk, an old Strategic Defense Initiative contractor that hit upon hard times had caught their attention. Perry had convinced his friend of the opportunity to transfer the company’s laser technology from military to medical markets. So they pooled their savings and borrowed creatively in order to purchase and take control of the company. Each brought different skills to the mix, Perry’s in marketing savvy and a knack for cutting lucrative financing; Stuart’s in operations and his eye for hiring the right people. Seven hard, lean years later they succeeded in turning Coherent Light Incorporated into a small and prosperous group of businesses, exploiting synergies of medical and military laser technologies, fiber optic telecommunications and, since Stuart’s departure, Perry’s expansion into satellite telecommunications services.

  None of it had come without a heavy personal toll. Stuart’s original twenty-two percent stake in the company had been shaved in half by his divorce settlement. Related problems had contributed to Stuart’s three year hiatus. For five months now Perry had steadily turned up the heat for Stuart’s return, to which he agreed—contingent upon completion of Thanatech’s flight test, which seemed at the time a suitable stepping off point.

  “If it’s so good, why do you need me back?” Stuart asked.

  “Believe me when I say that this project lusts for you.”

  What Stuart could not believe was that his partner had ignored his revulsion to wading into yet another big government contract. “Remember the story about the tar baby, you know, the guy drove his fist into the face of the tar baby, and it just sort of stuck?”

  “Ah, bullshit.” Perry rejected Stuart’s skepticism with a wave. “We’ve positioned ourselves to ride an economic revolution—this is going to be the biggest paradigm shift since the creation of the railroad. That may sound like a cliché but I am not exaggerating. CLI isn’t at the cutting edge. We are the cutting edge.”

  “How do you expect me to give a damn when I don’t know what it is?”

  “Can’t.” Perry shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Department of Defense?”

  “Let’s just say they’ve provided a few of the security guidelines. It’s Department of Energy but a commercial research venture all the way. I can tell you that it draws on the same bonanza of green technology funding as this energy-efficient engine of yours. Only, well...probably a whole lot more funding.” Perry grinned.

  Stuart let out a deep breath. “I should know soon how much longer I’ll be.”

  Later, after the dinner table had been cleared, Perry cradled a snifter of Remy Martin XO. He looked at Stuart with the sort of gratuitous smile reflecting both a suspicion and a desire. “You like Cleveland?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I’m not happy about your delay. But I have to attribute your reasoning to one of those quirky traits that got us where we are. I trust you’re trying to finish up as soon as you can.”

  “Nothing would make me happier than to be back in Virginia.”

  Perry leaned back, swirling his snifter—Stuart knew his friend would not be so easily mollified. Not because Perry disregarded the importance of Stuart’s commitment; Perry had been and always would be able to serve only his own commitment. He wasn’t surprised or taken in by Perry when he asked, “How’s Ashley been? Who’s been watching her since Angela died?”

  It had been months since his ex-wife Angela’s death of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, something obviously beyond his control, and still he struggled to suppress an irrational sense of guilt. He had lost his appetite to discuss it with anyone, even Ralph. “I’m very lucky. My sister and brother-in-law have been helping out. They’ve a daughter of their own, younger.”

  “I’ll bet she misses her dad.”

  “I see more of her now than when her mother was alive.”

  “Weekends?”

  “For a while I was even making it back in time Fridays to pick her up at school.”

  “You should try to hurry back. I mean, any kid prefers a full-time dad.”

  * * *

  ON THE OPPOSITE side of town, Emily Chang received an e-mail message—sent first by a family friend in Hunan Province, then to a cousin in San Jose, who forwarded it to her. The message reported that her parents were missing, and that no one believed the authorities who claimed to be looking for them. Everyone thought that Party officials were too embarrassed to admit to having smuggled them off, or so the message indicated, in order to administer her mother the medical care which provincial hospitals could not provide. Emily’s cousin footnoted the message by politely urging her not to worry, that her parents would turn up sooner rather than later, healthy and in good cheer.

  After reading the message for the third time, Emily held her face in her hands and sobbed.

  16

  LOW, IRREGULAR BREATHING of lungs heavy with fluid cut the silent void of the underground vault. Attached to the faintly visible ceiling were two objects. Dangling through a hole cratered into the stone was a thin straight wire and at the end of it, a tiny microphone. The powerful flood of light illuminating half of the room emanated from a directional halogen lamp fixed to the top of a pole. Suspended prominently in the glare of the light, a sling of mesh wire contained the bottle of an intravenous drip, from which a clear plastic tube snaked through the air to where it was taped inside the elbow of the prisoner.

  The prisoner faced directly into the light where he lay on his back at a forty-five degree angle, naked, strapped securely
with wide leather bands to the inclined surface of a large stone pedestal. The damp air reeked of urine, mildew, the acrid smell of the man’s breath—the odor of infection, malnutrition, fatigue. The sleep-deprived prisoner likely sensed none of these stimuli—save that of the light. Stretching open each eyelid were three silvery surgical staples. Inflamed tissue sagged between the staples at one end where they attached to an eyelid, at the other they tugged at the swollen red skin beyond eyebrow and cheek through ovalized holes and globules of pus.

  “Now then, Comrade Zhao. What fools planned your escape north and away from the border?”

  The heavily drugged prisoner’s jaw dropped open and revealed his blotched tongue. His pupils quivered as they stared into space from beneath a dull, milky glaze. “Where is she...must see Meilin’...she is sick. I—” A spasm froze the prisoner’s back in an arch.

  This incoherence prompted a lively exchange of harsh whispers and expletives. A People’s Liberation Army nurse wearing green fatigues and a surgical mask approached Zhao and squeezed an irrigating stream of saline solution into his eyes. Next she reached up and twisted the petcock to interrupt the intravenous drip of amyl nitrate, removed the bottle, and replaced it with a bottle of Lactated Ringer’s solution. Finally she re-activated the drip and scurried back to the shadows.

  Thirty minutes passed before the heart rate monitor displayed a stabilized increase in rhythm, signaling the prisoner’s gradual emergence from the drug-induced state. Zhao Bocheng’s raspy breathing labored with the terror of consciousness.

  “Who was it that directed you north, away from the border? Why should you be loyal to them? If not for their foolish prescriptions you might have evaded our net. Who is it that helped you? How were you contacted? Tell us, Zhao. Or should we simply ask your wife?”

  The prisoner responded sluggishly. “What have you done with her?”