Razing Beijing: A Thriller

by Elston III, Sidney

  Upon driving home he walked across the street to make a show of offering Joetta Hollinsworth, the middle-aged widow who liked to make passes at him—and who also was central to the neighborhood gossip mill—the more costly goods in his refrigerator which, he assured her, would only go to waste. Devinn politely declined her offer to enjoy some of it tonight over candlelight and suggested a rain check instead, blaming it on a mountain of packing to do.

  At 10:17 P.M., he sat down to commemorate his next-to-last dinner before officially departing life as he knew it with his favorite take-out sushi. Whatever his misgivings about pulling the plug, it was too late to turn back now.

  31

  Thursday, May 21

  EMILY SAT ON THE MIDDLE of her bed clutching her knees to her chest, staring at the cordless telephone. The clock on her nightstand read 1:48 A.M.; again she had woken to soft feminine laughter mingled with low tones of male companionship. She bided her time while enduring the noise and struggling to suppress her envy.

  It had been three hours since managing to raise only the generic voice-mail greeting on Stuart’s home telephone. It was irrational for her not to have left a message. More irrational yet was her concern for who besides Stuart might hear it.

  The nagging question was whether Thompson’s death meant her blackmailers had lost the means of stalking her behavior, thereby opening the opportunity for her to thwart and ignore them. Of course, his murder might have been inadvertent or completely unrelated to what Emily collectively thought of as the sabotage conspiracy. She had literally ransacked her studio apartment in an attempt to find the listening device undoubtedly there; upon finding none she realized that she did not know what one actually looked like. Lodging a complaint with the telephone company yielded an onsite inspection of her home telephone and the lines leading out to the utility pole. At least her studio wasn’t bugged, or so it now seemed. She had yet to identify a suitable next step.

  What frightened her most was difficult to say. She was afraid for her parents, with no word yet from their smugglers. Thompson’s murder meant she had reason to fear for the well being of others in her work unit. Certainly, she feared for herself.

  Emily groaned as the sound of her neighbor’s amour reached a rhythmic crescendo. She thought back to instances of certain signals from Stuart and wondered if these had been more the result of her own wishful thinking. Some she vividly recalled not thinking so at the time...she felt herself giving in to the temptation to indulge her imagination. Why do I torture myself? Her unrequited longing for Stuart felt like an adolescent schoolgirl’s crush, a source of private embarrassment.

  In any case, Stuart was one person who would not dismiss her story out-of-hand. So what am I waiting for? More people to die?

  Emily snatched up the phone. For the fifth time that evening, she pushed the redial button and held her breath.

  “Yeah,” she heard Stuart grumble on the other end.

  Emily closed her eyes.

  “Hello?” Stuart’s voice implored.

  “Stu, this Emily Chang. I’m sorry that I woke you up.”

  “S’okay.” There was a pause as she pictured him struggling to sit up and turn on the light. “What’s going on?”

  To her horror she started to cry. “Something’s gone terribly wrong.”

  Stuart remained silent.

  “I need to show you, they killed...they threatened me and forced me to stop my work. And Sean Thompson! Now I think they killed Sean.”

  “Slow down, Emily. Let’s start over, okay? Who exactly do you mean by ‘they’? No, wait. First tell me what happened to Thompson. He called me here at home the other night, apparently on his way to see me. He practically begged me to wait up for him and then never showed up.”

  “When was that?”

  “Night before last. I figured he was mixed up over some personal matter and decided to change his mind. You’re telling me he’s dead?”

  Emily willed herself to breathe, slow down, and think. So—Stu had been contacted by Sean...his very admission to it provided yet more precious assurance that Stu wasn’t involved. She clutched a swath of bed sheet and wiped the tears from her face. The calming effect of finally sharing her burden began to take hold. “It sounds like they found Sean the morning after you spoke with him. I don’t know the details but they appear certain that he’d been murdered. The FBI even questioned me about it in Paul Devinn’s office. They think it was robbery and that it looked drug-related.” She then described Thompson’s uncharacteristic behavior in the weeks leading up to his murder.

  “So that’s the personnel problem you were telling me about?”

  Emily sighed. “And something else horrible has happened.” She tried to explain the blackmail threat she received by relating it to her suspicion that Thompson’s subsequent murder had somehow not been a matter of coincidence.

  Stuart listened patiently despite her voice breaking on several occasions. When he finally did interject with a question, he sounded as if he might not believe her. “Have you told any of this to the police?”

  “I’m afraid to.”

  “You lost me. Why do you think the blackmailers might’ve killed Sean Thompson?”

  Emily was frustrated. She had taken something only partially clear in her own mind and managed to make it utterly incoherent for Stuart. “I’m not comfortable going into more detail over the phone.”

  “I see.”

  Emily hesitated. “I think we should meet. Then I can show you.”

  To her surprise, Stuart agreed immediately. “I’m flying back into town Saturday morning to settle a few things. Would you like to meet then, maybe for lunch?”

  Biting her lip, Emily considered Stuart’s invitation. “Why don’t I pick you up at the airport?”

  32

  A TROUGH OF SOGGY low-pressure settling in over the Great Lakes delayed Stuart’s arrival by over an hour. Emily watched with conflicted feelings as the flight from Richmond finally descended out of the mist onto the runway.

  While there was a risk that he would associate her with the destruction of his career and professional reputation, there simply was no one else to whom she could turn. The potential for more deaths, perhaps Stuart’s and her own, worried her desperately as she watched the Boeing 737 taxi to the gate.

  “Where to?” Stuart asked minutes later.

  “Have you had any breakfast?”

  They walked a short distance to a surprisingly busy delicatessen located in Cleveland Hopkin’s main terminal. Stuart held Emily’s chair as she sat down. A waitress appeared and took their order, Emily a sesame bagel and orange juice, Stuart a cup of black coffee.

  Stuart sat forward in his chair. “So, how are you doing?”

  “We all miss you at work. Things are floundering a bit.”

  “I presume that means the investigation’s winding down?”

  “The day after you left, Mr. Hackett instructed everyone to stop what they were doing and document what they had done. The committee is putting together a final report, and I guess they will recommend three or four re-designs as a result of the effort. There’s word of another flight test. Now we’re bracing for when the production line ramps up. With fewer people, of course, it’ll be back to more overtime.”

  Stuart nodded thoughtfully. He seemed comfortable allowing her to broach the subject of Thompson’s murder when she was ready to.

  “Stu, I want you to know that I think it’s cowardly the way Thanatech is blaming you for dragging out the investigation. I’m not alone in that opinion. Someday everyone will know it was a horrible misunderstanding.”

  “Misunderstanding or not, the fact is I am responsible. I did the best I knew how and the cards fell where they did.” He shrugged. “My boss saw things differently. The politics surrounding this damn lawsuit didn’t help matters. As it turned out, I’d already been planning to leave for some time.”

  Emily felt a stab of disappointment. “Really?”

  The waitress sho
wed up with their orders and then hurried off to tend to an elderly couple.

  “Seven months ago my wife, my ex-wife, died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.”

  “I had heard. I am very sorry.”

  “Nowadays I don’t...the reason I brought her up is because I originally accepted Cole’s invitation to work at Thanatech in order to get over her and our break-up. So, the time had come for me to be back in Virginia to raise my daughter. Actually, even before Angela died, I’d been toying with the idea of taking a position where I’d been working when the whole divorce mess started.”

  “How old is your daughter?”

  Stuart’s face lit up. “Old enough to take real advantage of me. Ashley is ten.”

  “Ashley,” she repeated the name. Emily brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. For the first time that morning, she smiled.

  “Why don’t we talk about your family?”

  Stuart’s innocent inquiry hit Emily like a splash of cold water.

  “That bad?” he asked, seeing her smile melt away.

  She watched the people walking hurriedly past in the wide corridor of the concourse. “Would you mind if we went somewhere else to discuss it?”

  After Stuart paid for their breakfast, neither said much as they walked through the terminal to short-term parking and her old Toyota. Emily asked Stuart to drive, and they exited the airport’s circular maze of access roads and headed east on Interstate 480, skirting the city. Saturday morning traffic was moderate and in twenty minutes Emily directed them to a wooded park on the crest of a hill overlooking the haze-covered valley and the Cuyahoga River, remarking that she liked the tranquility of the park and often came there to jog or to sit in the shade with a book. They sat in the car silently for several minutes and watched the sun struggle to burn through the fog.

  Emily asked: “Remember when it seemed the engine control might reveal what triggered the crash?”

  “Remember? It was miraculous! That it later failed shouldn’t be looked—”

  “I caused it to fail.” Emily turned toward him, her tears flowing freely down her cheeks. With great control her chest heaved once and she choked back a sob.

  “What do you mean, caused it to fail? And what’s that got to do with your family?”

  She searched his eyes. “I intentionally derailed the investigation so that it wouldn’t succeed. Believe me, I didn’t have any choice.”

  Stuart looked at her distrustfully for what seemed an endless moment. He clenched his jaw. “You’d better tell me exactly what happened.”

  “You have no idea how sorry I am.” Emily shielded her eyes with her hand while her shoulders wracked with sobs. “When I heard you’d been dismissed...I struggled to think of some way that would not involve you any more than you already were.” She reached beneath the passenger seat and produced a manila folder, splattering a tear on the middle of the cover.

  Stuart skimmed over the single page of paper she handed him; the constructed words and letters cut from newspaper and pasted in place suggested an anonymous note of some sort. The author’s intent could not have been more clear, and yet Stuart was certain only of his relief that he hadn’t unloaded on her without first reading the note. “Should we be physically handling this?”

  Emily presented him with several large photographs. “The people who sent these would have been careful not to leave fingerprints.”

  One word escaped Stuart’s lips: “Sabotage.”

  The photographs all showed different angles and variations of the same theme. In each, the tormented eyes of the man being threatened struggled to convey a sense of dignity. Stuart sensed that the victim somehow knew the photographs were destined for the hands of his daughter. “But the letter isn’t addressed to you,” he observed, flipping back to re-examine the note.

  “Actually, it is. I changed my name to Emily Chang when I became an American citizen. They are mocking me.”

  He looked at her. “So you know who they are?”

  In slow and painstaking detail, Emily relayed her discovery of the blackmail threat in her studio, her cat butchered in the bathtub, and that she had had no choice but to lie to him about what actually happened to the ECU. “I had expected my first direct encounter with such horror years ago, when my government threatened to exile me for refusing to pursue the career chosen for me. For some reason they decided to spare my family. Only the political leaders of my homeland could be responsible for such atrocity.”

  Stuart found it hard to accept that modern governments went around threatening people with guns and without the due process of law. Wasn’t China a member of the World Trade Organization, the United Nations? “We must have been on the verge of discovering something that made somebody nervous. You think they tampered with the ECU and intentionally caused the plane to crash?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Do you have any idea why?”

  She shook her head. “All I know is that soon after the threat was delivered to me, Sean Thompson’s erratic behavior intensified. He was increasingly late to work, feeling sick and leaving early, complaining that he wasn’t given clear objectives, that sort of thing.” Emily described the lie she had told her staff, her fabrication that the NTSB was preparing a campaign of polygraph tests.

  “All of this was after that trip you took?”

  Emily looked at him blankly.

  “You said you’d had a family emergency—”

  “I’d rather not talk about that.” She averted her eyes to the floor of the car.

  “Why did you make up the NTSB story?”

  Emily’s cheeks flushed red. “Because somebody in my unit was involved in this! At least I could deprive them of—how do you say? Feeling ‘home free and off-the-hook.’ It was the only thing I could think of that they could not cite to retaliate against my family. And I was furious at what they did to my cat!”

  Stuart nodded. “Why would Thompson want to talk to me?” he wondered aloud. “If he was preparing to spill his guts, why to me instead of the police?”

  “Thompson knew he could trust you.”

  Stuart looked at her. She blinked her eyes and avoided his gaze.

  “So, you destroyed the ECU, and the evidence along with it. I mean, you had no choice.”

  “No!” Emily shifted in the passenger seat to face him with her back against the door. “I could not bring myself to destroy it, not after what they did. I came up with a way just to make them think so. I snuck into the lab late at night and substituted a defective board for the memory module.”

  “You’ve still got the memory module?”

  “I hid it in a very safe place. But I don’t see what we can do without endangering my parents. What do you think?”

  “I don’t see any alternative but to get this information to the proper authorities.”

  Emily’s eyes flared with defiance, like an animal cornered. “Don’t you see? Anybody could be involved in this! How can I know that my parents won’t be harmed as soon as I approach the police? I had come to think these people would not dare harm my father, but now I don’t know.”

  Stuart re-examined the face in the photographs. Emily was right; they could not risk calling these people’s bluff. If only half of what she had shared with him turned out to be true, the saboteurs had already demonstrated the capacity to kill.

  Emily wiped the tears from her face. “I am afraid it may already be too late.”

  “What?”

  Emily spoke very softly: “I received word from some of my friends in China. They say my parents have disappeared. Nobody seems to know where they are.”

  A young couple had parked their car on the far side of the green and were throwing a Frisbee to one another.

  “Okay,” Stuart said. “If not the police, then we’ll just have to think something up on our own.”

  AT ABOUT THE TIME that Stuart and Chang were leaving Ault Park, Canadair flight 1405 punched through the cloud layer and retracted its landing gear on its way to Mi
nneapolis.

  Paul Devinn sat back in the comfort of his first class seat and stared at the cumulous ocean boiling beyond his window. His chance sighting of Stuart with Emily Chang at the airport raised several disturbing questions. Had Devinn followed his instinct, he would not have boarded his flight. He then could have assessed the nature of their rendezvous, perhaps struck up a conversation. He even might have decided to tail them.

  Where to, her place? He’d have known long ago if Stuart was screwing Emily Chang. What other business would a young woman possibly have with an executive two levels above her, a man who had essentially been fired? If Chang’s objective were a job, she’d have simply called Stuart or flown to Virginia. For his part, Stuart might have returned to Cleveland for any number of reasons. It was possible the two had simply happened upon each other while passing through the airport.

  Another possibility asserted itself by way of the subtle tightness in his chest: despite the anonymous threat, Chang was spilling her story to Stuart. Whatever it was that Thompson might have shared with Stuart before being silenced had just become all the more relevant.

  Devinn breathed a heavy sigh. What sparked his paranoia would warrant, in only a matter of hours, little more than passing curiosity. He fully reclined his seatback. No, he decided, he had done the right thing by avoiding Stuart. Better to consider this with the clarity of distance and time. He would certainly have plenty of each.

  33

  Monday, May 25

  “THEIR AMBASSADOR recently delivered this to the White House.” The Director of Central Intelligence held up the folded copy of a letter between his thumb and forefinger. “Care to guess what it says?”

  McBurney folded his arms. That it had taken six weeks for Zhongnanhai to issue an official denouncement itself provided more insight than whatever blather the letter contained. “I can guess what it says.”