by Neil Russell
As a ground-pounder at Delta, I’d learned that even if the Washington brain trust does know something, it doesn’t do much trusting down the line. You’re lucky if they tell you anything. Ask Pat Tillman. “What you’re saying is to take a step back.”
“Correct; if we make what we know now our alpha position, we’ll burn a lot of shoe leather and end up with exactly nothing. So if we go back to the satellite, what’s missing?”
“The girl with the baby,” said Fat Cat.
“Yes, but the cops said Lucille was done first. And the killers used ATVs from the house to get out there. That means the girl had already escaped, and Chuck was out of commission. So why not chase the quarry rather than hang around torturing people to find out where she might have gone? No, what they wanted, Lucille had, and it was only when they couldn’t get it out of her that they returned and tried Chuck.”
“Which is why they were even more violent with him. Pure fury.”
“And you said the Pullman wasn’t trashed, so it was something Lucille knew.”
I thought about it for a long moment. The FedEx driver had a standing order. For Perth, Australia. And he’d seen an artist’s easel and heard a man’s voice. I took out my cell phone and held it so my associates could listen.
The Reverend Northcutt didn’t seem as happy to hear a sinner’s voice as a man of God should have been. “This will only take a minute, then you can go back to handing out Bibles. In that collection of cops you minister to, is there an artist?”
“An artist? I’m sure we have lots of people who can draw.”
“If you want to be coy, I can stop by and discuss it in person.”
“Milt O’Keefe.”
“And Milt was a friend of Chuck and Lucille’s. A good friend.” They were not questions.
“Yes.”
“And a cop?”
“Not a cop, but he worked for the LAPD. But only to put food on the table. Milt was classically trained. In Rome. He did a lot of really fine work on Lucille’s train car. Painted a mural in their dining room too.”
“And if I wanted to talk to Mr. O’Keefe?”
Northcutt’s pause was confirmation, but I waited until he said it. “He’s dead.”
“As of when?”
“Just before Chuck and Lucille. Couple of weeks, I think. He was target shooting in the desert and didn’t come home. Coroner ruled it a suicide.”
A couple of weeks. The same time Lucille had gone to see Maywood. When the dominos had begun to fall. I hung up.
“Looks like Milt was drawin’ girls,” said Fat Cat. “Probably so somebody could recognize them.”
“Why?” I asked. “When you could take a picture and shoot it around the world in a few seconds. Besides, when the FedEx guy saw them, there were babies there, so they were already back from their trips.”
Coggan nodded. “Milt was a police artist. He was drawing something being described to him. And he’d been doing it for some time, meaning whatever Lucille was doing, it wasn’t spur-of-the-moment.”
“Sounding more and more like Department 11 all the time,” I said.
“What’s Department 11?” asked Coggan.
After I ran it down, he seemed genuinely impressed. “I didn’t think the FBI had that kind of thinking in them. Sounds like they didn’t stretch for a person to run it, but it’s nice to know they’re finally in the game. That makes this guy Wes Crowe and his radio gear even more interesting.”
“Why?”
“In most places, an Internet connection and a Dell will get you all the connectivity you need. But in China, they’ve got something called the Golden Shield, less glowingly referred to as the Great Firewall. It’s their own blocking technology that State Security uses to track citizens who might pose a threat.”
“In other words, anybody with an idea not invented by the Central Committee.”
“The term is harmonization, as in all content must be harmonized with policy. You’d think that would be impossible in today’s world, but the big dotcom players pitch right in. Helping Beijing crush radical concepts like human rights is the price of admission to their market. We estimate there are hundreds in prison for doing nothing more subversive than checking the weather in Taipei. And some have gotten a ride in an execution van for not much more. Motherfuckers.”
“American companies? Are you shittin’ me?” asked Fat Cat.”
“They make a lot of noise when their complicity leaks out, but as soon as the heat’s off, they go right back to business as usual. That kind of control goes all the way through the system. Try to sneak a PDA into the country, and you’ll be lucky if all they do is confiscate it and beat you senseless.”
I knew some Falun Gong refugees, so I understood how paranoid Beijing was about free expression. I made a mental note to check with my executives to find out if Black Group was playing that game. If we were, there were going to be some changes.
Coggan finished his thought. “Radio is low tech, reliable, impossible to shut down and everywhere. So Crowe might be helping get a few kids to freedom, but he didn’t build the kind of capacity you describe as a hobby. To anyone wanting to bypass Beijing, what he’s got is worth its weight in gold.”
“Or jade,” I prodded.
“Okay, the tiger. It’s the work of the Hu-Meng, the mountain people of South China. The statuettes were used to identify their safe houses on the Tiger Road. There are eight basic shapes—sleeping, drinking, sitting, stretching, running, leaping, stalking and attacking. They’re all roughly the same size, but depending on the artist and the year carved, there are wide variances in detail.”
The number eight again. “The Tiger Road anything like the Silk Road?”
“Same concept, but it’s not linear. More like a web with its epicenter in the high country north of Hong Kong. The tentacles reach into the major tiger habitats, India, Indochina, Sumatra, Bali, Afghanistan—at its peak, a dozen and a half countries. Including, the biggest prize, Siberia. If you were one of the lucky few deemed loyal enough to be granted a jade tiger, you automatically became the wealthiest person in your region—and the most feared. God help anybody crazy enough to fuck with you.”
“How many is a ‘lucky few’ ?”
“The Tiger People—that’s what Hu-Meng means—could travel thirty miles a day with a hundred animals. Lodging was the exception, not the rule. They tried to steer clear of population centers. I’d guess no more than a few dozen statuettes—give or take.
“And the cargo, are we talking pelts or live tigers?”
“The only reason you’d have a pelt was if the animal died during capture or transit. It would be the value difference between a Vespa and a Ferrari. But there was also a downside to being tied to the Hu. If they suspected you were working with anyone else, they stripped your flesh, painted you with snake venom to keep the blood flowing, broke off the jade tiger’s head, and stuffed it in your mouth. Then they tied a rope around your neck and led you behind the caravan. When you couldn’t go any further, they tossed you to the tigers and took bets on how long you’d last.”
“Can I assume this tiger trade is in the past?”
“You can assume it, but it wouldn’t be true. It almost died during the dark days of Mao, but it reappeared about two decades ago. There aren’t as many tigers now, but the money per animal is staggering.”
I was afraid that was going to be the answer. “So if the Hu-Meng are in the capture and transport business, Markus Kingdom must be the market-maker. Sort of the DeBeers of endangered species.”
“You gotta help me here,” said Fat Cat. “Guy’s got planes, more ships than the navy, all kinds of shit and a billion fuckin’ dollars. What’s he doing hustlin’ tigers?”
“Because he was always a criminal. He just got rich legitimately too,” answered Coggan. “But I work for institutional bucks, so I might not be the one to ask.”
They both looked at me. “There isn’t any way to say this without sounding like a jerk, but when
you have a vast amount of money, your thinking is different. I have to fight every day to maintain a semblance of reality, and I still don’t do a very good job. Often, the only thing some people think about is how to one-up their peers. It’s not accidental that the business press covers mobsters, drug lords and dictators right along with oil barons and Internet tycoons. We’re all part of the same ego game.
“One gives billions to science, so a second gives more to save rain forests. Then there are the spenders. Biggest yacht, best sports team, most trophy properties. It’s an I’ll-see-your-foundation-and-raise-you-a-Jackson-Pollack-No. 5 kind of world. And ordinary folks slugging it out for a paycheck like to know what the newest billionaire causes and toys are too. Forbes would be out of business if the rich suddenly turned shy. Essentially, every one of them wants to be Jack Nicholson. But if they go to a Lakers game, nobody notices. So they buy their own cameras and point them at themselves.”
“I don’t think of you like that,” said Coggan.
“Then you would be wrong. I don’t have a publicist, but I smile just as broadly as the next guy when people find out something I wanted them to know but didn’t want to get caught pushing. Like I said, I fight against it, but I don’t always win.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Tigers allow Markus Kingdom to occupy a place in the world no one else does. That none of the others would even consider doing it makes it all the better. It marks him as dangerous and a renegade too.”
Fat Cat sat back. “I think I’ll stick to donuts and choke holds.”
I picked up the butt of the MAC clip and handed it to Coggan. “You’ll have to get the right angle, but does the character in the bottom mean anything to you? It will be the code name.”
Coggan positioned the base so he could see into it. “It’s in an archaic style. Xin Dynasty, maybe as far back as the Western Han. Only somebody very important would have this attached to him today.”
“My dynasty knowledge is rusty, what’s that in years?”
“Two thousand, give or take a couple of hundred.”
“And how long have the Hu been in the tiger business?”
“The first mention of them is in 220 b.c. During the Salt Wars. Hong Kong was founded on the vast salt beds of the Pearl Delta, and after the emperor’s army seized them for his own exploitation, the indigenous tribes were forced to find other employment. The Hu ran the caravans, so they had established trade routes, and since they were already dealing in the occasional tiger to supplement their income, it was a natural transition.”
Coggan handed the MAC-11 clip back to me. “This character denotes a color. A very specific one. Crimson. Known then as Blood of the Tiger.”
Fat Cat let out a whistle. “More tigers. What the fuck.”
It was time to tell them about Jerry Merican’s seventy-year locust remark.
Coggan thought for a moment, then seemed to be weighed down. “My God.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. As it turned out, I didn’t like the answer any better.
“It’s been exactly seventy years since the last great tiger hunt. It lasted two years and is said to have resulted in the capture of more than seven hundred animals. The Hu smelled WWII coming, and they were preparing for it.”
“Bad news for the tigers.”
“Bad news for everybody. From that point on, extinction in China was irreversible. Then, when Mao consolidated power, he tried to finish the job. The great Commie murderer had read his history and knew the Hu weren’t picky about what they’d transport on those trading routes. Without tigers to support them, they wouldn’t be around to move weapons either.”
“Jesus.”
“It gets worse. Care to guess which animal corresponds to this year in the Chinese and Japanese zodiacs?” He let it sink in. “If you possess a tiger before the year ends, your soul becomes immortal. But it has to be a live one.”
I sat back. That’s why the Asians were in Vegas. They were waiting for the auction. But why Vegas? It could only mean they were going as a group. With someone they trusted. Someone who also knew how to move live animals. Markus Kingdom.
Coggan looked at us. “Babies and tigers. The two trains on the same track. The dead taxi driver is important too—for what didn’t happen. This Department 11 should have either logged it and moved on or taken over the investigation. Instead, they’re just hanging around. They don’t seem to know about Donnie in the corral or Cheater in the ravine either. And they’re not running around town violating people’s civil rights, which is definitely not like them. Rail, you’re not going to like hearing this, but you need to talk to that Huston chick again.”
“My stomach’s turning, but I’m way ahead of you. Which brings us to the Resurrection Bay II and Parkinson-Lowe Imports. It could be something as simple as Lucille’s taking Kingdom out of the loop with a ship of her own. But that would require a network inside China, and if she had that, she could have dumped him years ago.”
Coggan looked at me. “It might be a dead end, but we also have to find the girl with the baby. She’s the last person who saw Chuck and Lucille alive.”
I also wanted to talk to this Fabian Cañada. But no matter how you sliced it, sooner or later, we were going to have to go to Tonga. Fat Cat and Coggan could handle themselves, and Eddie could shoot and drive anything. Jody had to fly the plane, so he was operationally out. I had a plan forming, but it would require at least one more.
I looked at Coggan. “Think Wal-Mart would be up for a long flight?”
“You couldn’t pick a better man.”
“He’s a Mississippi boy, so I figure he can handle a gun.”
“Just don’t get between him and a buffet table.”
* * * *
32
Flying Foxes and Clean Sheets
FOUR WEEKS AGO
SOMEWHERE IN THE INDIAN OCEAN
Cheyenne heard the gunfire over the storm. Rain and waves had been pounding the Richer Seas for three nights, and she had just dozed off after another long session trying to calm the screaming infant. The next shots hit the ship so hard, the concussion rocked her cabin. Outside, she heard crashing glass and people screaming. She bundled up the baby, cracked her door and looked out. The corridor was empty, so she ran, being tossed from wall to wall as the deep swells pitched the ship in all directions.
On deck, chaos reigned. Waves crashed over the railings, and through the flashes of lightning, she could see a warship no more than fifty yards away firing its deck gun. This new fusillade tore away chunks of wood as big as Cheyenne’s fist. She squinted against the rain, trying to read the boat’s name. HMAS Flying Fox. Where had she seen HMAS before? And then it came to her. On a modeling trip to Sydney. So why were Australians shooting at them?
Looking around, she had her answer. The Richer Seas was firing too. Near the bow, a man fed ammunition into a .50-caliber machine gun while his partner raked the superstructure of the cruiser, tracer rounds visible through the rain. On the cargo ship’s bridge, other men fired rifles into the dark.
Suddenly, night became day as an intense floodlight bathed the Richer Seas. Immediately above where Cheyenne stood, a Chinese retaliated with a shoulder-fired RPG that took out the spot and splashed the attacking vessel with flames.
Then all hell broke loose.
Wave after wave of bullets hit the boat and ricocheted across the deck. The terrified cries of the innocents rose above the din as people tried to find cover. But there was nowhere to hide. Many died where they sat. One woman ran toward the bridge screaming and waving her arms. A volley cut her in half. Cheyenne screamed and pulled the baby close, feeling the child’s little hands clench into fists. Then their engines stopped.
Cheyenne and the baby went into the water shortly before dawn. The attack had mortally wounded the refugee boat, and it had been left to drift. But the shooting had also torn loose a long rubber bumper, which was sliding around the deck. Cheyenne managed to pin it against the rail with her shou
lder and lash herself to it, clutching the infant against her. A few minutes later, the Richer Seas slipped quietly beneath the waves, and she and the child were adrift in the blackness. If there were other survivors, she didn’t see them.
She had a cut on her forehead that was bleeding into her eyes, and the baby was crying again, but at least that meant she was alive. By the time the sun was up, the storm had ended, and Cheyenne was alone on the water. She drifted, kept afloat by the bumper, but unable to maneuver. Around midday, she heard engines and saw another military vessel cruising nearby. She tried to call out, but her words were lost to the sea.