Razing Beijing: A Thriller

by Elston III, Sidney

  “Did they get a description?”

  “Nothing conclusive there—no match on hair and eye color, of course those can be altered. The bush pilot said the American paid cash to be flown to Duluth, Minnesota. Both he and the pilot—”

  “Passed through Customs. So there’s a passport and name on record.”

  “Neither of which indicate Paul Devinn, of course. Any guy who staged his own drowning would have prepared an alias. Question is, where did he go? The pilot and customs official don’t recall him saying. Meanwhile, we’ve put out an APB for a man fitting either description on suspicion of murder, conspiracy to commit espionage, felony fraud and violation of U.S. immigration law.”

  “I thought the borders had long undergone some sort of a clamp-down.”

  Hildebrandt chuckled. “Let’s not go there. This guy had a valid passport—we’re still trying to figure that out. Is it safe to say you’re still interested in the investigation?”

  “If this missing person might really be Devinn, and potentially guilty as you seem to think, then connecting the dots I’d have to say there’s a distinct possibility that he may have information relevant to national security. In that case, I’m very definitely interested.”

  “We’ll consider this a pseudo-joint effort?”

  McBurney thought it might be a stretch to wrap the particulars of a domestic espionage investigation under the JCTF executive order. “Joint effort—sounds good to me.”

  “Awesome. So what was it Stuart meant in the diner about China, and Emily Chang’s parents being blackmailed?”

  McBurney leaned back in his chair and gazed out at the forest that bordered Agency headquarters. There was no point in trying to deny what Hildebrandt had certainly read in the transcript of his and Stuart’s diner rendezvous. “As best we know, Stuart was right. Emily Chang’s trip to Tortola was all about protecting her parents. I think you should dismiss the money laundering allegation against her.”

  “Just like that? First you ask us to reel in Stuart, apparently because Chang provided you with evidence of sabotage at Thanatech that seemed to implicate him. Maybe now it’s time you share all the specifics with us.”

  “I cannot do that—sorry. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the specifics bear on your criminal investigation. For the time being, that information is sensitive.”

  “I could arrange to have Chang and Stuart subpoenaed.”

  McBurney sighed. “Would you mind holding off on that? Here’s the deal: the minute something breaks on the relevance of Chang’s parents to your investigation—her parents live overseas—then we’ll share it with the Bureau.”

  He could hear Hildebrandt tapping something on his desk. “When is that liable to be?”

  “Soon. I’m already under pressure to make it soon.” Along with every other goddamn thing on my plate.

  SPECIAL AGENT ED HILDEBRANDT hung up the phone just as Agent Nicholas Brophy arrived at his borrowed cubicle.

  “Morning,” Brophy said, surprised to see the Cleveland agent already sitting behind his own desk. “Mind if I sit down in my own chair?”

  “Oh. Got any decent coffee in this place?” Hildebrandt asked, rising to his feet.

  “Sure.” Brophy dropped one of the ubiquitous brown file folders onto his desk. “This is New York City, we got everything here.”

  Hildebrandt eyed the folder. “Anything new?”

  “Okay...we know that on the day Carl Smith presented his passport to Customs, at least three other Carl Smith transactions took place in Duluth. The field office out there is bird-dogging those. Meanwhile, I ordered up a cross-reference check on the passport to his social security number—both seem valid. That’s really strange, because the IRS has no record that he ever filed a tax return.”

  “Nice work.”

  “And I’ve started the ball rolling on the storage locker attorney.”

  Among Hildebrandt’s reasons for being in Lower Manhattan was its jurisdiction under the Second Circuit district attorney’s office, which was considering his subpoena request to investigate the lawyer handling Paul Devinn’s storage locker. He said, “I guess we can proceed with a credit card track.”

  “We’ve contacted the credit card issuers. We don’t know yet if our Carl Smith is among any who used a credit card that day.”

  “Well, he would had to have—”

  “Rented a car, or booked another flight—we’re also running that down. There are ways to skirt under the radar. He could’ve taken a cab to the ’burbs and booked a Rent-A-Wreck, or paid cash for a bus.”

  “Now, Nick. This being New York City and all, we should aim for nothing less than being able to flag this guy the instant he charges a cup of damn coffee.”

  68

  STUART REACHED TO WIPE the dust off the monitor with the palm of his hand. The inherent passivity of sitting over a keyboard was something he had never really taken to. Even during the day at work, it had gotten so that he only begrudgingly surrendered each tedious minute to his computer. The digital clock in the corner of the screen reminded him why, at nine-forty in the evening, he was sifting through the hundreds of messages. A dozen miles outside Logan, Utah, Ashley and her great uncle would be sitting down to dinner and discussing the day. Actually, he thought it more likely that Ashley would be discussing, his uncle would be listening.

  His eyes drifted from the monitor to the darkness beyond the window. He had considered hiring professional guards, but the idea of paying total strangers to hover over Ashley and his property seemed only marginally better than not knowing who might otherwise be out there. Bodyguards or not, what he’d found intolerable was the thought of his daughter at school, playing with her cousins outside his sister’s house, walking her dog or being anywhere out of his sight while stalked by a man cowardly enough to threaten a child as a means of getting to him. Rearranging his life to be with his daughter had had the perverse irony of putting her at risk. It was frustrating how circumstances again demanded that he place responsibility for her well being into somebody else’s hands. He looked down to find that his own were clenched into fists.

  Further down the scale of importance, he had received notice that afternoon by registered mail of his scheduled appearance before the Cuyahoga County district court—a joke, now that a conspiracy appeared to be the cause of the deaths and not professional negligence. But was that really the case? Was it negligent to have presided over a process vulnerable to the whims of terrorists, or whoever was behind the sabotage of the aircraft? Perhaps he should have taken the advice of this CIA jerk after all, and made a proper appeal to the FBI to protect his daughter. It wasn’t too late to approach them; for that matter, he was going to need someone credible to vouch for his integrity in court. He would be of little use trying to raise his daughter from inside a prison cell.

  AS THE SOLAR TERMINATOR RETREATED over the western half of the country, a smattering of stars penetrated the cobalt twilight sky over Baltimore, Maryland. On this particular night, the full veil of Earth’s atmosphere combined with the urban profusion of lights to obscure the radiance of most celestial objects.

  Looking down from a low-earth orbit of two hundred forty miles, the effect on clarity was similar. A comparatively low altitude slightly complicated the kinetic solution for acquiring a focus on-target, which the satellite approached along its designated ground track at roughly five miles per-second. As with any representative experiment, there were secondary effects to consider—seasonal variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, for instance, and heliocentric parallax as a result of deviation from mean altitude—but the satellite designers believed they had whittled down the primary obstacles so as now to address even these. Among the many complicating factors to be compensated for by the on-board computers, there happened to be one offsetting simplification. The satellite’s ground track permitted a nearly vertical orientation over the selected target. This eliminated the need to correct for atmospheric refraction, a phenomenon similar to that chall
enging ancient archers who, centuries earlier, had learned to adjust their aim at fish below the water’s surface.

  Sol Bernstein liked to think of M&T Bank Stadium as his own, which for all practical purposes it was. For the average sporting event, the stadium was occupied by as many as sixty-nine thousand cheering fans. The owner of the Baltimore Ravens loved the game and the crowds as he had his entire life. He considered his acquisition of a National Football League team the quintessential achievement of a lifetime. But when the stadium shook with the collective roar of the fans, the concept of ownership was abstractly surreal. On nights like tonight, when the stadium was empty and his staff already gone for the day, Bernstein liked to gaze from the office into the vastness of the stadium. When time came for him to leave, he would walk to the door and do what he relished: extinguish the lights. There was something about being the last one out. Maybe it reminded him of running his billboard advertising company, the little business with which he had built himself a fortune.

  But the good times were becoming infrequent; there were headaches to owning a team that he hadn’t foreseen. That wasn’t actually true; in his zeal to become an owner he’d simply been too quick to dismiss these, as tonight’s review of the numbers bore out. Two full seasons of decline in both ticket sales and advertising revenue had taken their toll. The Ravens—his team—had limped to the end of the season. Far from a slot in the playoffs, Bernstein and his partners had lost some eight and one-half million this season alone. The economy seemed sure to remain punk. Things were bad enough that his staff were suggesting that he begin the fall season by discounting ticket prices fifteen percent—across the board—to stimulate demand and bring back the fans. Such tactics were unheard of in the boom times before the double whammy of terrorism and recession.

  Bernstein leaned wearily against the railing by the window, shaking his head. Next, he thought, they’ll suggest I divvy out ownership to the players. He turned from the window and walked to his desk. There he tossed the budget reviews into his briefcase, to be studied at home over a glass of Riesling with his wife.

  He walked across the carpet toward the door. Suddenly behind him there was a bright flash with a crack of thunder that he felt through the floor—the light imprinted on his retina an image of his shadow against the wall. Bernstein’s immediate reaction was that it was too bright and prolonged for lightning—had a thunderbolt struck and ignited the stadium lights?

  He tried to recall his insurance provisions as he hurried back to the window. To his relief, it looked as though the stadium lights were intact but...what in the name of...? His eyes began to adjust. The briefcase slipped out of his hand, bounced open and spilled its contents onto the floor.

  Bernstein staggered backward and fell against his desk. Hands shaking, he picked up the phone and stabbed out 9 - 1 - 1.

  69

  EMILY LOWERED THE TOP OF HER newspaper in order to scan the faces of CLI employees streaming toward the lobby exit on their way home for the evening. With her office buried deep within the company’s high-security complex, and other than the occasional glimpse, Emily found herself cut off from most of Stuart’s daily agenda.

  Why has Stu not invited me to dinner, or even just for coffee? She had sensed his attraction to her, and yet he had not taken the initiative. Having allowed herself to be hired into his company, was she somehow less attractive a woman to him, condemned by some Western cultural nuance she hadn’t considered? Perhaps she was the victim of an ironic twist of fate. As a corporate manager, Stu might restrain himself because of American laws threatening punishment for such behavior.

  The stream of people had reduced to a trickle; so too Emily’s faith in her present strategy. Perhaps I should choose a more direct approach, she thought. She had noticed the occasionally aggressive techniques of American women, but was that an approach that Stu found attractive? Perhaps I should simply drive to a pet store and buy another cat.

  The door to the executive suite swung open. Emily stole a glance—there was Stu, handsomely dressed in a dark blue suit, his right hand gripping a briefcase. He paused to talk to a well-dressed petite woman whom Emily didn’t recognize.

  Minutes later she heard his steps resound sharply on the marble floor. Emily deliberately uncrossed her legs and, with a self-conscious tug on the hem of her skirt, crossed them the other way. She dipped the top of the paper down to reveal her face, ever so slightly, her eyes scanning the articles...

  “Emily?”

  She looked up from the Richmond Times-Dispatch with her eyebrows arched in casual surprise. Stuart’s smile warmed her. “Hello, Stu. How nice to see you.”

  “I just had half the office checking to see if you’d left for the day,” Stuart surprised her by saying. He glanced at her satchel and purse on the adjacent chair. “If you’re waiting for someone, maybe I’ll just—”

  “No,” she assured him, perhaps a little too cheerfully as she folded her newspaper. “I think my friend and I must have missed each other.”

  Stuart cocked an eyebrow. “I know it’s spur of the moment, but have you got a little free time this evening?”

  EMILY FOLLOWED in her own car to a quiet restaurant not far from Stuart’s home. Sitting down at the bar that overlooked the Potomac, Stuart ordered them each a beer. Besides the careful attention he paid her when she had entered at his side, and the way he held her gaze when listening to her speak, Emily sensed that something was troubling him. Occasionally Stuart would appear about to say something, only to avoid her gaze. They discussed for awhile how she was adjusting to her job, her ideas for addressing the challenges they faced, the new people and surroundings—Stu mentioned he’d already overheard people’s positive comments. Their talk inevitably shifted to the subjects of her father in prison, Thanatech, and Stuart’s daughter. Neither she nor Stu had discovered anything new since his unfriendly rendezvous with the CIA officer.

  Stuart surprised her again by asking, “How is it that after we’ve gone through such hell together, I still enjoy being around you?”

  They looked into each other’s eyes—Emily’s pulse quickened. The bartender stepped away and left them alone. She wanted him to reach for her hand.

  Stuart reached his hand inside his coat and withdrew several folded slips of paper. “What do you make of this? They were sent to both my home and office e-mail accounts.”

  Emily accepted his three slips of paper. The top of the first page was an e-mail header, with the distinction of consisting exclusively of Mandarin characters. Her eyes skipped to the body of the message, written in English:

  The cub is born, grows wobbly on its feet,

  only to stumble, then walk, and ultimately leave;

  does the lioness recognize the sire,

  returned, to dominate the pride?

  Emily flipped to the second page.

  “The image was contained in an attached file,” Stuart explained.

  Emily frowned. There were no accompanying characters explaining the solid black symbol. “Isn’t that the Nike ‘swoosh’ ?”

  “Is it?” Stuart smiled, taunting her. “You could pick up almost any newspaper yesterday and find an article with a photo of something resembling that.”

  “I think everyone in the world knows what that is. But the message...well, that’s truly bizarre. Some sort of incest, no?” That brought a stab of embarrassment.

  Stuart looked at her strangely. “Apparently, a prankster carved that shape into this FieldTurf stuff—”

  “Oh, the Baltimore stadium! I was reading how the owner is threatening to take Nike to court over that. What do you think is going on?”

  “Take a look at the next page. That one showed up the day after the first e-mail.”

  The third page displayed the Chinese header and another verse written in English:

  It is impossible for nonbeing to be changed into being;

  It is also impossible for being to become nonbeing.

  Emily scanned the lines several times. They w
ere vaguely familiar.

  “Do either of these riddles mean anything to you?”

  “Well...this second might be Taoist. Actually, it reads a little like Neo-Taoism.”

  “What’s that-ism?”

  “That ism was sort of a metaphysical philosophy combining nature and religion, nonexistence was not nothingness, the pure being is absolute and transcends all forms, or something like that. Its following declined in third or fourth century China. We studied it as part of a university class.” Emily looked up from the page and smiled playfully. “You think because I’m Chinese I can unlock the mystery?”

  “Frankly, yes, although I could’ve asked any one of a dozen people at work to interpret it. I asked you because you’re smart. And because I presume you can read who it’s from if I agree to buy you dinner.”

  “You mean, if I allow you to buy me dinner?”

  “Yes, of course that’s what I meant.”

  Emily smiled and turned her attention to the lines of document header. “This is strange. Some of these lines look as though they are from servers that Beijing University uses.” She smiled triumphantly and handed him back the pages.

  Stuart looked dumbfounded. “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure. I attended Qinghua, but I also took several classes there.”

  “But I want to know who it’s from. Isn’t there a name?”

  Emily realized Stuart did not appreciate how restricted media like the Internet were in her native country. “Nobody sets their name to them because they operate in the black market for Internet access. You see, the university sets up these accounts—actually, students usually set them up while the university looks the other way.” A thought struck Emily and she covered her mouth with her hand. She shook her head. “We seem to have a history of anonymous notes, don’t we?”