Razing Beijing: A Thriller

by Elston III, Sidney

  The message was heard inside the van located one block from the hotel. McBurney and Nomura exchanged looks. McBurney held a microphone to his lips. “That’s it—roll it up. Say again, roll it up.”

  “Mr. Pedersen?” The Japanese bartender addressed him with a heavy accent. If Deng was confused by the name he didn’t reveal it.

  “Yes?”

  “The bar is closing early this evening.”

  Stuart blinked.

  “You must leave”—the bartender raised his eyebrows—“immediately.”

  McBurney’s instructions on this had been very specific. For whatever reason, Chinese security was now converging on their location. It was imperative that he not be seen with Commissioner Deng.

  Deng smiled knowingly. He handed his water tumbler to the bartender. “In that case, I shall have a scotch on the rocks.”

  Stuart left Deng behind and walked briskly out of the lounge. From the foyer, he saw the Japanese bartender pouring his final customer a drink. Stuart hurriedly slipped on his shoes and other effects. His final glimpse of Deng was with hands folded on the table while gazing out at the Tokyo skyline.

  The plan called for walking down the corridor to the service elevator and riding it up to the rear of the lobby. There, he was to meet one of McBurney’s staff who would know the route for vacating the building unseen.

  Thinking only to leave quickly, in his nervousness Stuart reached out and pushed the main elevator button. He realized his mistake moments later when the doors slid open...

  Stuart’s stomach turned. The Chinese man glanced at him indifferently while brushing past. Stuart stepped onto the elevator and instinctively directed his gaze down at the controls—he felt the exhilaration that accompanied escape, certain the stranger hadn’t gotten a good look at him. But the man stopped rigidly in his tracks. From the corner of his eye Stuart realized the stranger was looking into the lounge. There was little doubt that from where the stranger stood he could see the commissioner, engaged in solitary reflection while nursing his drink. If this was the case, the ruse hadn’t worked—the man spun on his heels. The doors started to close.

  The man stepped back onto the elevator with Stuart. The doors slid shut.

  THERE SEEMED NOTHING UNUSUAL about a hotel guest waiting in the Tokyu lobby for the 1:00 A.M. limousine ride to Narita. Seated next to his luggage, Ian Sorensen was coming to grips with Kirazawa-san’s anxious report and McBurney’s command to quickly but quietly conclude the operation. He lowered a corner of the Financial Times to view the concierge desk and the bank of elevators beside it. Two of the Chinese security detail stood waiting for the other’s return from the Lipo Bar. They craned their necks to look up at the elevator indicator.

  The elevator door opened. Four stunned men stood motionless, two inside and two outside the elevator car, all wondering what to do when Stuart reached to press the elevator control. The man riding with him stepped off—Stuart disappeared behind the closing doors.

  Shit... Sorensen shielded his mouth with his hand in preparation to speak. Beside the concierge desk, the Chinese security men absorbed the news delivered by their agitated colleague.

  Sorensen spoke just above a whisper into the knot of his necktie. “This is the lobby—very bad. Three are panning out and they don’t look happy. Looks like Courier rode up from the bar with one of them, and that guy stepped off to launch into reporting what he must’ve seen down in the bar. Our man’s on his way up the elevator alone—strike that, he’s arrived. Fourteenth floor.”

  Sorensen glanced to his left in time to see another of the Chinese detail take up his position just inside the main lobby doors. The short, well-attired and powerful looking middle-aged man clasped his hands and eyed him with suspicion. That clinched it for Sorensen. “Plan B is blown,” he announced.

  CURSING HIS OWN STUPIDITY, Stuart watched the elevator indicator and checked his watch repeatedly, wondering what he should do if one of McBurney’s team wasn’t waiting once he got to his floor. Why had the Chinese security officer’s interest been him and not Deng? Surely they were looking for the commissioner; he had seen the man visibly register Deng’s presence in the bar. Why, then, had the sneer and accusing eyes been leveled at him? Beneath his shirt a bead of perspiration trickled from under his arm down to his waist. The elevator stopped.

  The doors slid open. There was nobody there.

  He stepped into the hallway and found it eerily quiet, as it should be at 1:02 in the morning. The original plan called for riding the service elevator to the rear of the lobby. He could think of no reason not to take it there now.

  Pressing the service elevator call button, Stuart’s thoughts returned to his meeting with Deng. He had not expected the man’s stoicism after unfolding the slip of paper and discovering who had murdered his family. Maybe it just needed time to sink in.

  The approaching service elevator ground to a halt and the door slid open. Stuart’s jaw dropped and he stood motionless. The Chinese man stepping out of the elevator into the hallway smiled affably, like a long-time friend. McBurney had shown Stuart a lot of photographs; this looked like the burly guy walking with or behind Deng in virtually all of them, the one they called Cheung.

  The man’s smile vanished when he struggled to speak. “Would you please take a moment to talk, Mr. Stuart?”

  Stuart was taken aback by the use of his name. “Wrong guy. The name’s Pedersen.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Pedersen. Would you please take a moment to talk?”

  With that, Stuart shook his head and turned to walk away. What now? The door to the stairwell was ten feet away; he headed for it at a brisk clip. When he swung the door open, he was surprised to find the man right on his heels. They entered the fire tower stairwell with Cheung muttering something unintelligible. Then the Chinese security officer made the mistake of grabbing him.

  Stuart glanced down at the man’s hand. “Let go of my arm.”

  Cheung’s eyes went wide at Stuart’s abrupt defiance and, after a moment’s hesitation, eased his grip. Too late.

  Stuart drove his fist as hard as he could into Cheung’s face.

  Chinese are not accustomed to the Anglican attack of a clenched fist—Cheung wavered, disoriented, sagged to one knee and latched onto Stuart, who tried unsuccessfully to shake his arm free. He slugged him again, and the man fell to the ground like a sack.

  Without warning a deafening shrill of fire klaxons filled the air. Price O’Connell burst through the door from the corridor looking anxious and out of breath. He saw the man slumped unconscious on the concrete floor, shot an accusing glance at Stuart and crouched to check the man’s carotid artery.

  “He grabbed me,” Stuart tried to explain over the klaxon.

  O’Connell looked frantically around the landing. He swung open a narrow red door. Attached to the wall inside was a spool of canvas fire hose and a first aid box.

  Motion in the tiny square window of the door to the corridor caught Stuart’s eye as guests began wandering out of their rooms, dazed and barely awake. At any moment they would realize the elevators didn’t work.

  “We are truly screwed!” O’Connell informed Stuart. “Better give me a hand.”

  Stuart and O’Connell dragged the Chinese agent by the shoulders to the fire hose closet. Stuart felt something hard beneath the man’s armpit and realized with dread it was the butt of a pistol. They propped him with his back against the wall in the space beside the spool. O’Connell maneuvered the man’s legs inside and Stuart slammed the fire closet door shut.

  O’Connell motioned with a sharp jab toward the stairs. “We run!”

  Emergency halogen lights cast hard shadows as Stuart bound down the stairs behind O’Connell, two and three steps at a time, and around each of the landings. The smoke smelled of burning plastic; at one point Stuart stumbled full into O’Connell’s back. Guests flooding the stairwell with their belongings encumbered their descent. The smoke became particularly thick by the time they reached the thi
rd floor landing.

  O’Connell held his hand to his earphone in order to hear and squinted to look in through the door. He turned and shouted over the klaxons to Stuart, “Follow me!”

  DESPITE THE JAPANESE PENCHANT for disaster planning inconceivable to most cultures, the hotel’s capacious lobby erupted in pandemonium. Hundreds of nonplussed guests carrying luggage swarmed from stairwells out onto the marble esplanade, many refusing to leave until their friends or associates appeared. The night manager raced about issuing orders as calmly as possible, directing his guests to the sidewalks outside the building, an effort all the more difficult thanks to the din of alarms and sirens of ladder trucks and ambulances encircling the building.

  Two guests complaining of sprained or broken ankles were escorted to a remote corner of the lobby to await medical care. The sea of commotion parted to allow two orange-clad emergency medical crew with a gurney to pass through the lobby. Strapped beneath the blanket was a woman overcome by smoke inhalation, her hair ashen with soot, an oxygen masked strapped to her face.

  Unheeded by all were the Chinese security officers, who were forced to back away from blocking the exits. Their eyes scanned the crowd as people poured out into the crisp night air.

  Upstairs on the fourteenth floor, the corridor had filled with an inert gray smoke and throbbed with the force of the klaxon. It appeared otherwise deserted; three of Cheung’s men were attempting to make certain. They unlocked the door of the room reserved in the name of a man they had been told was an enemy of the state. One stood watch in the hall while his colleagues charged inside with handguns leveled.

  Why the television was blaring was unclear to the men. There was dampness in the air and they turned their attention to the closed door of the bathroom. Sergeant Bao readied his aim before giving his subordinate a nod. The younger man whipped open the door and sprung to the side. Steam billowed out into the room.

  Sergeant Bao cautiously entered the bathroom. The shower was running and through the mist-covered doors he saw the figure of the man standing inside—his foe stood resting his arms against the wall beneath the showerhead, immersing himself, strangely oblivious to the alarms and the smoke and commotion. Bao never pondered a reason for this beyond that ingrained in his training, that an unstable adversary was the most volatile danger of all. With one hand he leveled his weapon, with the other he reached out to pull open the shower door—

  —the naked mannequin fell rigidly out of the shower and crashed to the floor.

  THE AMBULANCE DRIVER saw the sparse morning traffic and increased his speed to one hundred sixty kilometers per hour, not that any urgency was really demanded. The chartered business jet would still be waiting for departure clearance.

  Stuart sat upright on the gurney and removed the wig, while McBurney eyed him scornfully from a bench beside racks of emergency medical paraphernalia. Sorensen, Mekler and Ross mostly stared at the floor. That Stuart felt like a fool was compounded by the fact that he undoubtedly looked it. The woman’s dress was entirely open in the back; he quickly stripped it off his front and arms in about the time it had taken to slip the thing on. Tired of watching him struggle with the back of his brassiere, Carolyn Ross reached to unclasp it. His two prosthetic oranges fell to his lap and onto the floor of the ambulance.

  “Go Syracuse,” Stuart deadpanned. Nobody smiled.

  The driver flipped off the sirens. Ross handed him a towel.

  Stuart looked at it.

  “Lips,” she pointed.

  “Christ.”

  McBurney finally asked: “How did he take it?”

  Stuart thought for a moment. “Quietly. I’m not sure he believed me. Either that, or he no longer cares.”

  “I’m not so sure that it matters.”

  The comment numbed any reaction from the rest of the group.

  Stuart smeared the unsightly cosmetic from his lips with the towel. “Okay, I’m the one who fucked up.”

  The others in the ambulance cast him a glance. McBurney studied him indifferently. “You don’t say?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what really happened tonight,” Stuart said.

  “Why don’t you tell me what really happened tonight,” McBurney countered.

  “One of them called me by name. He knew who I was.”

  “Your cover was blown. It happens. Hence our emergency preparation.”

  “Right—no big deal. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but you obviously expected more trouble than I was led to believe. The guy O’Connell and I bagged was wearing a pistol under his arm.”

  Stuart and McBurney exchanged probing stares.

  “This ruse with the fire wasn’t about whisking me away without their knowing. You knew that my life was going to be in danger. I’d probably have been okay with that, except for the fact you deliberately kept it from me.”

  McBurney eyed him with newfound contempt. “You people don’t believe much of anything we say, but the truth is you’re wrong. It really was about making sure they didn’t have the opportunity of connecting you in a rendezvous with Deng Zhen. For the sake of our objective, for Deng’s sake, and for yours, in about that order of priority.”

  “Did you know they’d be packing weapons?”

  McBurney’s expression softened. “We were never sure Beijing hadn’t intercepted Deng’s Internet message to you. This was all a calculated risk. I have no idea how your cover was blown, but I’d guess off-hand it had to do with Deng’s message. You have to view it from their perspective. Their very existence depends upon their ability to control information. There was no way Beijing would willingly allow you or anyone else to leave that hotel without first knowing what a high-level guy like the commissioner might have told you. Especially if they already suspect he’s a traitor.”

  Ten minutes elapsed without conversation. The ambulance pulled off the highway for Narita New Tokyo International and headed toward the general aviation terminal. The waiting Gulfstream came into view on the tarmac, its starboard engine idling. Waiting by the retractable steps leading up to the fuselage was a well-dressed and exceptionally tall Japanese man whom McBurney seemed to recognize.

  “What do you suppose will happen to Deng?” Stuart asked as they gathered their belongings.

  McBurney looked sad, and very tired, as he considered the question. “They’ll fly him home. If he’s lucky his death will be quick and painless, but I doubt it.”

  Stuart was stunned. “So we’ve gotten him killed?”

  McBurney stood in a low crouch and waited, eyes down and searching, as the others exited the back of the ambulance. “Odds are Deng was already dead. In retrospect, I’m a little surprised he showed up in Tokyo to begin with.”

  Stuart rose from the gurney in order to follow McBurney out.

  “Oh,” said McBurney, turning toward him. “You should just have a seat.”

  “What? But we’re heading out.”

  “Yeah, that was before you pulled your little stunt. Now we’ve got a little extra debriefing to do.”

  Stuart looked through the window. Carolyn Ross offered her hand to the tall Japanese man while Sorensen and Mekler climbed the stairs and disappeared into the business jet. “Look, McBurney. I’ve got other responsibilities. Sticking around Tokyo wasn’t part of the deal.”

  “Neither was dropping the wire.”

  “You can’t keep an American citizen against his will.”

  McBurney smiled. “Watch me.” He slid his hand inside his coat and removed the familiar blue jacket of an American passport. He waggled it in Stuart’s face before slipping it back into his pocket. “I’ll keep you as long as I like, Mr. Pedersen. Excuse me a minute.” McBurney left Stuart behind in the ambulance and jogged slowly to greet his Japanese friend.

  91

  THE CHARTERED JET carrying its abbreviated CIA entourage was two hundred miles east of Tokyo Bay when, just past 4 A.M. in Beijing, a stiff breeze chilled the uninvited visitor waiting outside Rong Peng’s Zhongnanhai residence. He
avy curtains drawn over the windows muffled unrecognizable voices.

  Deputy Minister of State Security Chen Ruihan discarded his apology for the man whose sleep he had expected to interrupt. Rather than Rong’s mishu it was the vice-chairman himself, fully dressed and alert, who answered the door. Rong gave his guest a cursory glance. He dismissed the PLA 8341 Division escort who had accompanied Chen Ruihan from Nanhai Street.

  Entering the foyer, Chen observed several white-gloved Filipino porters hurriedly wheel breakfast trays into the room of loudly conversant guests. Rong led the deputy minister to his personal library, where the leader refrained from offering a chair—this interruption, however important, would be brief.

  Chen observed his mentor’s face turn deepening red as he explained the disturbing turn of events at the APEC summit in Tokyo.

  “How did the security detail learn the American’s identity?” Rong asked.

  Chen’s eyes came to rest on a set of gold-crested volumes of Homer’s The Iliad & The Odyssey. “We were in the process of determining backgrounds of all potential negotiating experts,” he said. “Something apparently caught the eye of a low-level informant. Major Cheung dug deeper and discovered incomplete information in this American’s credentials.”

  Rong’s eyelids drifted to half-mast.

  “It became a simple matter of lifting fingerprints from room service utensils. These provided a match with our files. I assure you, Comrade Rong, an effort commenced immediately to relocate the commissioner to another hotel.”

  “And this emergency evacuation of the hotel...?”

  “Possibly a CIA intervention. With the egregious assault on Major Cheung, for which there has been no—”

  “Can there be any doubt this man actually conversed with Commissioner Deng?”

  Chen exhaled. “We may have no choice but to assume that he did.”

  Rong closed his eyes, appearing eerily calm—Chen had witnessed Rong display such composure prior to lashing out at his confidants. “Has our great national asset offered his own explanation?”

  “Not yet. His security detail is uncomfortable approaching the commissioner with such an inquiry.”