The Enemy Inside

by Steve Martini

  “Listen, why don’t we roll them into the bathroom, use the handicapped stall,” I tell him. “Open ’em up and check them out.”

  “Unless I miss my bet we’re not gonna find anything unless you can come up with a sharp knife. I’m thinking they slit the lining and slipped it between the inner lining and the outer case. I’ve seen it done,” says Harry. “Super-glue the cut . . .” Harry suddenly looks down at his shoes and smiles. “I don’t want to keep looking at him. If I do, I’m gonna look guilty and he’ll come over here with the dog. In which case we won’t need a knife,” he says.

  “What is it, explosives?”

  “No. If they wanted to do that they would have left the bags alone and slipped a couple of devices under our beds,” says Harry. “I think you’re right. I don’t think they want to kill us. At least not yet. At the moment I think they have something else in mind.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The suitcases in the room. The comb on the bed. Everything tossed and put back so carelessly inside the bags. No one is that stupid. What they wanted was to send us a message,” says Harry. “Let us know they’d been in the rooms.”

  “Why?”

  “My guess is so we’d panic and run.”

  “And here we are,” I tell him.

  “Yes, but we’ve had time to think. That and some really fine luck,” says Harry.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Harry’s eyes keep tracking the cop with the dog as the canine and his master move toward the platforms. “My bag. I’m gonna hate to lose it,” he says. “I’ve had it at least ten years. It’s been everywhere with me. Thing like that grows on you.”

  “You make it sound like a family pet.”

  “Well, it just did me a favor no dog at the airport is ever going to do.”

  “What?”

  “It told me what I had in my bag. About a month after I bought this case it got hung up on one of the convey jobs at one of the airports. Brand-new case and suddenly it has a small rip in the outer canvas down near the left wheel. You can imagine how angry I was.”

  “Yeah, I can imagine.”

  “Well, between the little rip and the bouncing ride over the cobblestones, if that dog over there picks up the powder trail I’m leaving, he’s probably gonna OD,” says Harry. “I’m surprised he hasn’t already found it. If he does, you’ll want to get out of my way, ’cause I’m gonna have to outrun him dragging the suitcase all the way to the river.”

  “What? You mean cocaine?”

  “No. Hell,” says Harry, “over here that’s a party favor. Get caught and you gotta say ten Hail Marys and write ‘pardon my sinuses’ eight times on the blackboard. No. Don’t look now but I think that snow coming out behind from my wheels is China White.”

  Harry is talking heroin. “Why kill us,” he says, “when they can dump us in some European dungeon for a few decades? In the meantime, everybody who’s chatted with us is turning up dead.”

  “So what do you want to do? We could just leave the bags here and walk away.”

  “We do that, two abandoned bags, they’ll find them before we can get halfway to the platform.” Harry is looking at the cop with the dog again.

  “We could take them back to the river and dump them,” I tell him.

  “Not a bad idea,” says Harry. “I wish you’d come up with it about five minutes ago. You might want to take a gander at the door.”

  When I turn to casually look I see another uniformed cop with a dog on a leash standing there. Two more come through one of the side doors. Beyond the glass doors I see at least three police cars outside with flashing lights.

  “One might think there were a lot of druggies that come through here in the middle of the night,” says Harry.

  “No. It’s overflow from the crime scene. They’re thinking whoever did it might be trying to take a train out of town.”

  “Well, aren’t we lucky,” says Harry. “We’re gonna get busted, but for the wrong reason.”

  We watch as the cops all gather by one of the doors. They hold a conference. For the moment, at least, the way to the platform is clear.

  “Won’t do us any good.” Harry reads my mind. “They’re sure to search the trains before they leave.”

  Six more uniformed cops come through the doors as we’re talking.

  “Did you notice on the trains they have no porters? Everybody does their own thing with their bags.”

  “What about it?” he says.

  “Follow me.” We grab the bags and roll toward the platform halfway across the station. The train leaving for Zurich departs in ten minutes, assuming the authorities don’t delay it.

  Along the way there are trains parked at almost every platform. Some of them are dark, the doors locked, waiting for the morning commute.

  When we get to Platform 36, there are two trains, both of them hot: the one to Zurich and the one directly across from it headed to Bern. The doors on both are open.

  “Follow me.”

  “Where you going?” says Harry. “That’s the wrong train.”

  “I know.”

  A couple of seconds later I step onto the train for Bern and pull my rolling bag on behind me. Harry follows me but with confusion written across his face.

  There is already a pile of bags inside the barred-off area for luggage at the bottom of the stairs. We lug the two rollers and toss them on top. Then we climb the stairs to the passenger area on the upper level. I walk down the aisle, Harry following behind me. There’re only four people in the car, lots of open seats. But Harry and I don’t take any of them. By the time we reach the front of the car one of the conductors is climbing the steps coming up the other way toward us. When I see him I smile. “I wonder if you could help us?”

  “If I can, monsieur.”

  “Is this the train to Zurich?”

  “No, no, the train to Zurich is over there.” He points toward the other side of the platform.

  “Ah, stupid Americans,” I tell him.

  “No, not at all.” He smiles.

  He steps to one side and Harry and I quickly brush past him, down the stairs and across the platform.

  Six minutes later we watch through the windows from our seats as one of the German shepherds goes apeshit trying to eat our bags over on the other train. The cop trying to hold him on the leash looks like he’s about to go waterskiing behind the beast.

  “Catnip for dogs,” says Harry.

  I’m praying the animal doesn’t bite through the ballistic fabric on the outer bag. If he does, the blizzard of white powder will have them shutting down the entire station.

  Our train suddenly lurches, cars bump together. It starts to move, slowly at first. It rolls along the platform picking up speed, moving past the pillars that support the transparent arches of the roof high overhead. As the train accelerates the pillars begin to look like pickets on a fence until they suddenly disappear.

  We roll out of the station and through the rail yard. Harry wipes the sweat from his forehead. “Next stop, Zurich, and the plane ride home. Do me a favor,” says Harry. “The next time I say let’s not go, let’s not go.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  After decades of isolation, broader economic opportunity finally came knocking at China’s door. It was 1972, détente, what the Americans called “Nixon’s opening of China.” People in the United States were euphoric. The first real signs of warming in the Cold War.

  Cheng realized even then, as a lowly officer in Chinese intelligence, that Americans as a group were naive. Chinese leaders politely nodded, smiled, and showed the man they called “Tricky Dick” the Great Wall.

  There were times during American trade missions to China during the last two decades when things were so bad, so obvious, that Cheng and his subordinates hoped they weren’t caught blushing. As when entire air wings of the US Air Force found themselves grounded for lack of parts that were back-ordered from Chinese factories. Even then US leaders failed to take not
ice, or if they did, they took no action.

  The quaint theory that all America had to do was demonstrate its pluralistic democratic republic with its freedoms and liberty, coupled with America’s massive engine of industry, and the world would follow was to Cheng the great American lie.

  Americans had been told so often by their leaders that it was this, the tale of freedom and success that brought down the Iron Curtain and toppled the Soviet Empire, the mystique of Ronald Reagan. That if they waited long enough, it would do the same to China.

  What ended the Soviet Union was precisely the trail that America was on now, a financially bloated central government and a faltering domestic economy that could no longer support it.

  The Americans had clung to the railing longer than the Soviets for one simple reason. Unlike the now-worthless Soviet ruble, the Americans could print more dollars and the world would still accept them. The US dollar was, after all, the world’s reserve currency. But its days were numbered. To Cheng, America was living on Chinese money and borrowed time.

  The man known to his subordinates as the Creeping Dragon could only hope that he was not. This morning Cheng’s fears concerning Joe Ying were compounded. A series of four cables—two from a cultural attaché at the Chinese embassy in the Philippines, one from London, and one from the Chinese embassy in Washington—painted a picture with an ominous image.

  Ying had been seen coming out of the Presidential Palace in Manila not just once, but on three separate occasions during the last four months. If this wasn’t enough, Chinese agents had photos of him dining with a gentleman named Raymond Ochoa. Mr. Ochoa was an undersecretary of energy in the Philippine government.

  Ochoa’s name appeared prominently in the second cable from the Chinese embassy in Manila. Two weeks earlier he had awarded a competitive tender to an Indonesian firm known as Petrobets, Ltd.

  The tender allowed Petrobets to explore for oil and gas in a region known as Area Seven. These were waters near the Spratly Islands, waters that China claimed as its own, even though they were almost seven hundred miles from the nearest point of undisputed Chinese territory.

  What Beijing and much of the world called the South China Sea, the government in Manila called the West Philippine Sea. The Chinese military didn’t care what anybody called it. They were too busy building aircraft super-carriers, two of them, both nuclear powered, and capable of matching anything the United States had in their Nimitz Class carrier fleet.

  American intelligence knew about it. How do you hide two aircraft carriers, each more than three hundred and seventy meters in length? But the current administration in Washington kept it under wraps.

  Russia was eating everybody’s lunch in the Ukraine. Islamic radicals were running wild through the Middle East, promising to bring their jihad to Europe and the United States. This while they rattled the nerves of America’s oil-producing allies in Arabia and Kuwait.

  The last thing the American president needed was news that China was about to erase his airpower edge in the Western Pacific.

  Cheng knew about problems. At the moment he had one of his own. It was the third cable, the one from their embassy in London, that started to light a blaze in his belfry.

  An obscure British holding company headquartered in Bermuda, Aeries International, had just purchased a sizable interest in Petrobets, Ltd., the oil and gas concern that was gearing up to poach in Chinese waters off the Spratlys.

  Researchers at the London embassy were still trying to run down the names of all the investors in the Aeries firm. But on the list of known shareholders there was one name that jumped out and grabbed Cheng by the throat—Cormac Llewellyn Grimes.

  He looked at it several times, checked the rest of the names, and then came back to it again. Joseph Ying had connections with an American politician, a prominent member of the US Senate. Her name was Maya Grimes. It was the only name that Cheng was ever able to extract from Ying regarding Ying’s contacts. It came as a result of a slip of the tongue during one of their conversations.

  Ying guarded this information jealously. He once referred to her as the fastest horse in his stable. Grimes and her husband were wealthy in their own right, and powerful.

  The second he got her name, Cheng had some of his people begin to collect information for a dossier.

  Grimes’s husband was a noted capitalist, an investor who went by the initials C. L. Cheng was looking at the open dossier on the computer screen in front of him. This was too much to be mere coincidence.

  Cheng went to one of the search engines on the computer and ran the word “Aeries,” the name of the holding company in Bermuda.

  What came back on the screen was not what he was expecting. “Aeries Student Information System—Eagle Software. . . .” He was about to scroll down the page when the word hit him, like a bullet, right between the eyes.

  It took him three more minutes to run it down. “Aeries” was one of two spellings for the same object in the English language. The other more preferred spelling was “Eyries.” But of course the Bermuda corporation couldn’t use that because there already existed another company using the name, Eyries International. The answer was found in the meaning of the word. An aerie is an eagle’s nest.

  Cheng leaned back in his chair and thought about it. He couldn’t help but smile. Even though the man with the eagle-headed cane had crossed him, he had to admire his audacity. It was, in fact, brilliant. He might have lasted much longer had he stayed away from the feathered themes.

  Ying was using the politicians he bought as well as some of their spouses to front for him on investments. He didn’t have to trust them because he owned them. They did his bidding because they had no choice. Cheng wondered how much of the wealth that showed up on these people’s financial statements was actually owned by Ying. Golden opportunities for special investments no doubt came his way, because of who they were. He probably had secret agreements signed by them tucked away in a safe somewhere, not that he would ever need them.

  Ying, a.k.a the Eagle, clearly possessed elements of genius, but like anyone else wielding such power he also had his share of enemies. There was, in fact, one at the moment who was quite active. In anticipation of this possibility Cheng already had his agents with their ears to the ground. He made a note to pass the word.

  Cheng’s intelligence bureau had worked for years using cutouts, front corporations and sham companies in a program designed to compromise members of the US Congress. You would run out of digits trying to compute the amounts of money they had spent. The approach was always the same. Shower the politicians with cash, campaign contributions if you had to, outright bribes if you could convince them to take it. The goal was to compromise them so that the Bureau might extort official acts and secret information—to own them.

  The Chinese thought their program was unique. In fact rogues from the US intelligence community, people who had left the government in some cases decades earlier and who went private setting up their own companies, were doing the same thing. Only they were doing it on a much larger scale and with much greater success.

  In the last eight years, China had managed to net three members of Congress, people who were fully hooked. Two of them lost their next elections and the third died in office. Cheng and the bureau spent vast sums pursuing many more, mostly in the form of campaign contributions. All of this disappeared down a rat hole. When his agents, all hired occidental cutouts, went calling to ask for favors, they were told in effect to get lost. It was what the American lobbyists called “being paid for, but not staying bought.”

  By contrast, Ying, the Eagle, had compromised and as a consequence owned nearly a third of the key positions in the House and almost as many in the Senate. Cheng knew the approximate numbers, but he had lost years of sleep trying to figure out who they were. In the end it became easier and cheaper to deal through Ying, though the Bureau couldn’t always get what it wanted, either in terms of information or the performance of official acts.


  Cheng concluded that there must have been some vital element of the American political process that no matter how hard they tried, the Chinese simply could not comprehend. Perhaps it was cultural. One thing was certain: at least in the battle to seduce and corrupt their own leaders, Americans had clearly trumped their foreign adversaries.

  FORTY-FIVE

  By the time Harry and I get home I find a message left on my phone at the house from Herman down in Mexico. Something has happened. He doesn’t say what. He tells me they’re both fine. Then something about a charter flight and Tampico. Says he’ll call back from there.

  I listen to it again, this time taking notes, but before I can finish, the phone rings.

  It’s Harry. “I got a message from Herman.”

  “So did I.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “Well, they’re alive. At least they were when he called. Did you get a time and date?”

  “Sorry,” he says. “I never set the feature on my phone.”

  “Same here.” The fact is my telephone system at the house is so old it probably wasn’t available on the handset when I bought it. It’s a relic I brought with me from Capitol City on the move when I came south almost twenty years ago.

  “They must have found them.” Harry means the people chasing Alex.

  “Sounds like it.”

  “Did you catch the part about the courier?”

  “I was about to when you called.”

  “Says it’s compromised. No more messages.”

  Harry is thinking the same thing I am, but he doesn’t want to say it over the phone. This is probably how they found them.

  “The place they went,” he says. “Do you know it?”

  Harry means Tampico. “No. Never been near the town. I don’t have a clue as to where they might go. Herman has contacts in Mexico but I don’t have any names, numbers, nothing. They’re off the edge of the earth for all I know.” If anyone is listening I want to get this part crystal clear.

  “The phones are back up and working at the office,” he says. “I just called. Told them we’re back in town. Why don’t we meet up there, say in an hour?”