THE FLENSE: China: (Part 3 of THE FLENSE serial)

by Saul Tanpepper

  "She showed up at the factory. My man was holding her."

  "Was?"

  "She got away and is headed back there. He's going after her."

  "Incompetent fool!" Aston sputtered. He waggled a finger in Norstrom's face.

  "I'm going to lend a hand."

  "Well, you damn well better catch her!"

  "There's a lot of road between Wenbai and Chifeng. We'll catch them."

  "Them? There's more than one reporter?"

  Norstrom thought back to the way the text message had been worded: THEY ESCAPED. ON ROAD TO CHIFENG. STAY THERE. WILL CALL WHEN CAUGHT. They, rather than she.

  "He didn't exactly specify, but I have reason to believe the American was with her when she showed up at the factory."

  Aston paled. "Why the hell would that woman go back there?"

  "Why indeed."

  Norstrom waited for an answer, but none ever came. Instead, Aston's mood seemed to shift, apparently lightened by a new thought. "When you catch them, I want you to dispose of the reporter. Permanently. No, make it look like an accident, a car crash on her way here. I don't care how, just do it."

  "And the American, the factory girl?"

  "I realize I was thinking about her as a liability, but I've since changed my mind. I want to understand what made her return to the factory. Call me when you have them. I'll send for my chopper to meet with you as soon as we're done here."

  There was something in the man's eyes that Norstrom didn't like, something that danced and played like a tiny black spark over a pool of gasoline.

  Aston gave him a cold smile. "I told you that this will all be over soon. Looks like I was right."

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  The concussion from the gunshot disoriented Angel for a moment. But it was the force of the recoil knocking her onto her heels that jolted her back to her senses. She cursed herself for forgetting her range practice and locking her elbows.

  A small puff of dust and a hole appeared inches to the right of the man's head. He flinched as a piece of the cement from the wall cut a thin line across his cheek.

  "Next one goes through your forehead," Angel warned, striding toward him. The suddenness of her advance took him by surprise, and before he could move, she was standing only a meter away. "I can't miss from here. Even if I wanted to."

  She could sense him trying to decide what to do.

  "Drop the knife."

  "When this is all said and done," he told her, as he slowly released the pressure of the blade from Jamie's throat, "you're going to wish you hadn't wasted that bullet."

  "I said drop the knife and let her go."

  Jamie's screams had died away, and her body went slack. She looked like she had fainted. But the man continued to hold her up, leaning back with her body draped over his own as a shield. He also continued to grip the blade.

  "Do as I say. Let her go. We're leaving."

  "It's too late for that, and you know it. She's going to die. It's obvious. There's nothing you can do to help her. You have no idea what you're dealing with here."

  Angel's eyes narrowed. "And you do?"

  "Look, I'm not—" he started, then seemed to struggle with his thoughts. "All I know is we were brought in to clean up a crash site, take care of any witnesses. Whatever the company people are doing here, I'm not at a high enough pay grade to know, but I can sure as hell guess that it's something bad."

  "Guess?" Angel spat, glowering at him. "Of course you know nothing. "You're just the . . . the . . . le nettoyeur, the cleaner person. How do you say? The man who takes out the trash and cleans the toilets."

  She could see him struggling to hold Jamie up. His arm was quivering from the effort. He had his fist pressed up against her sternum, just beneath her breasts. If he were to let go, Jamie would slip and impale herself on the knife he refused to let go.

  "That's right," he said. "I'm a janitor. Just a guy doing a job."

  "It changes nothing! You're still a murderer."

  "I've killed no one!"

  "Hundreds of people died!"

  "Not by me! They were already dead. We didn't—"

  "I'm not talking about that! I'm talking about the village! I watched you people burn it and the villagers. I was there!"

  "I wasn't!"

  "I don't care! You murdered them, and all for what? To hide this?" She waved her free hand around to include the factory. "You are going to tell me right now what is going on here. You will tell me what all those people had to die to keep hidden!"

  "I'd like to know that, too."

  "Don't play games with me."

  Jamie's head lolled over his arm. She let out a moan.

  The man shifted her, redistributing her weight to his other hip. "Look, I'm not hiding anything," he panted.

  "What about that bone in there? I heard you mention it to the other man."

  "The doctors removed it from her leg. I was told to collect it, to bring it here and check it out."

  "For what? What did you find?"

  "I'm not qualified to say. All I know is that it didn't seem . . . natural."

  That last word pounded through Angel's mind, though in Jamie's voice rather than his. She had said the exact same thing when they were at the hospital.

  "It has to be what's wrong with her," he said, nodding at Jamie's slumped form.

  "What's wrong with her is the crash," Angel snapped. "It has nothing to do with a piece of bone! She's bleeding internally and needs surgery to fix it. And the longer we wait, the less likely she'll survive. Let us go, or you'll have her death on your hands, too!"

  "This isn't bleeding!" he cried back. "Look at her! Even I can see that. Whatever is happening to her, it's not natural either! You say you're a doctor, then you go take a look and tell me what you think."

  "I'm not—"

  Jamie's body went rigid, causing the man to lose his balance. Angel stepped forward, but he thrust the knife out at her, warning her to back off. Then he pressed it back against Jamie's neck again. A bloodcurdling scream rose up out of her throat, and she clutched at her stomach, bunching up the shirt and drawing it over her abdomen.

  Angel was horrified at the sight of her skin stretched taut over those odd protrusions. Gasping, she took an involuntary step back, nearly dropping the gun. "What the hell?" she whispered.

  "The answer is back in that lab."

  Jamie writhed in his arms, moaning and crying out. In a brief moment of lucidity, she opened her eyes and reached out for Angel, begging her to help her. But then she was gone again, lost once more in the terrible abyss of her pain.

  Angel took a step forward, and the man flinched. "For the last time," she said, "let her go. Let us go!"

  She knew he wasn't going to be able to hold her much longer. Sweat poured down his face, getting into his eyes, darkening his collar. And where his skin wasn't covered in blood, she could see it had gone pale. His whole body was shaking. But it was the look of desperation in his eyes that impelled Angel to act before he could. She stepped forward without warning and swung the gun up, then down before he could even react. The butt of the grip connected with the side of his head with a sickening thud.

  He crumpled to the floor, releasing Jamie.

  Angel caught her and pulled her away, cringing with disgust at the hardness of the swellings pressed against her own belly. It reminded her of an exercise her anatomy professor had made her go through her first year at Sorbonne. They'd been required to learn the names of all the bones in the body, as well as their identifiable processes, not just by sight, but by feel. To challenge his students, he had placed a dozen plastic bone models inside each of several pillowcases and required them to list all twelve bones and their parts correctly.

  That's what Jamie's belly felt like, a bag filled with bones.

  The man lay moaning on his side. She'd hit him on the temple, aiming for the nerve bundle called the parotid plexus. Theoretically, it was supposed to overwhelm him. Even so, it had surprised her how easily he
'd gone down.

  But he obviously wasn't going to stay down for long. He hadn't even lost consciousness.

  Quickly removing the laces from his shoes, she bound him just as he'd done to her. Just as she should have done the first time. Then, for good measure, she yanked off his socks and stuffed them into his mouth to keep him quiet.

  By the time she'd finished, he was fully awake again. There was no misinterpreting the hatred in his eyes.

  "Si les regards pouvaient tuer," she muttered at him. "If looks could kill." Then she spat in his face.

  Chapter Forty

  The private jet spearing its way toward the coastline of mainland Europe had encountered a patch of rough air, forcing Alvin Cheong to return to his seat and belt in on the advice of the pilot. He watched helplessly as the stack of printouts on the table slid to one side, then flutter to the floor as the plane tilted into a perilously steep bank. Moments like this reminded him of exactly why he disliked flying, even as he enjoyed the convenience of it. The sense of helplessness extended beyond his inability to attend to the papers. It had to do with his complete and utter dependence upon machines and their operators to keep him alive, sometimes in apparent defiance of natural laws.

  He was on his way to the Saint-Exupéry airport in Lyon. In all his global travels, he'd never been through there, so when he was told where they would be landing, the name had brought an unexpected memory to the surface, followed by a deep sense of loss. So strong was the feeling, in fact, that on the way to Newark Liberty from Manhattan, he asked his driver to pull into a small rundown plaza with a used bookshop called THE READING EDGE. It was there, in the donation bin, that he found the book he was looking for, a dog-eared copy of Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, its pages yellowed with age and the back cover affixed with old tape from which the adhesive had long since dried out. He had his driver pay the owner a dollar for it, and slipped it into a plastic bag for the journey.

  But now that bag, with the book still inside, was as much out of his reach as was the avalanche of papers he'd been sorting through when the turbulence hit, copies of documents and photographs gleaned from the Manhattan apartments of both David Eitan and Angelique de l'Enfantine. As for Washington, DC, Cheong was still waiting to hear from his man there.

  On his lap was the copy of the Eitan-de l'Enfantine divorce filing dated eighteen months earlier. He'd snatched it from the pile to read while the plane rode out the rough weather, and now he flipped distractedly through it hoping to keep his mind off the fact that so many things could go wrong at any moment, while so many things had to go right — and keep on going right — for the plane to stay suspended in the air.

  He came to the claims of irreconcilable differences and tried to focus on what that meant. The two had been separated for some eighteen months by then. Any judge would have been convinced by the passage of that amount of time to accept that their differences must have been, as asserted, irreconcilable.

  He was having trouble buying it.

  He had no concrete evidence to the contrary, nothing more than a vague feeling, a suspicion. Perhaps it was in the wording, the hesitant way that the attorney depicted the relationship between the couple. There were no descriptions of acrimony. And in reading the scant post-separation correspondence his crew had found between the two, there was no sense of any bitterness. Instead, the notes were filled more with regret and loneliness.

  His eyes strayed again to the plastic bag on the seat opposite him. He considered risking unbuckling himself and fetching it. How long had it been since he'd first read the story of the lonely little prince? Twenty years? Twenty-five? Not since he'd been brought to the United States as a teenager. It seemed to him that Angelique de l'Enfantine was like that lost little boy, searching the cosmos for a friend.

  Hadn't he crashed his airplane?

  He placed his fingers on the buckle, determined to assert his will, but the plane shook again, violently enough this time to make the plastic molding in the cabin creak and the tables rattle. He heard the stifled exclamations of a couple team members outside his private cabin. And in his personal bar, the liquor bottles clinked together. He decided to stay put.

  He turned to the last page of the court filing. Neither party had signed it. Rather, in the right-hand margin, someone had scribbled:

  hold until can confirm david's ip exposure as regards license agrmt

  ~s.a.

  He frowned. Somewhere in the stack of papers he had come across a one-year option to license Eitan's invention of a synthetic gene reprogramming technology. He hadn't read it, had instead been prompted to search for the patent application which Eitan had filed when his first company, MECH INVIVO, was established over six years ago. Reading that document, Cheong quickly realized that the technology was one of those pie-in-the-sky type things, a discovery that Eitan had made early on in his graduate work. The idea he proposed seemed utterly impractical. There were already tools available that could accomplish much of what he suggested, though admittedly on a much more limited scale. Modified viruses, for example, had become commonplace in genetic engineering. Eitan's proposal had depended upon synthetic technologies rather than biochemical or organic ones, and most of them didn't exist and likely would not exist for decades: computer processors at a molecular scale; streamlined algorithms one trillion times as robust yet one trillion times as compact as those currently in use; on-the-fly reprogramming of networked processors remotely based on unicellular genetic codes. The man's vision was so ahead of its time that it was unfeasible.

  And yet it had piqued someone's interest. Why?

  And whose?

  The timing of that option, along with the scribbled notation coinciding with Eitan's and de l'Enfantine's separation, were other peculiarities. It almost seemed as if someone was worried about her interference. He had no doubt that Angelique would have known about any interest in her husband's inventions at the time. But if they had gone through with the divorce, then she'd almost certainly have been left out of the loop. Was someone trying to cut her out of the discussion? The profits?

  The latter didn't really make that much sense. After all, she was far richer than he, and it was to his financial benefit to remain married to her. She'd opened up her checkbook to him, had funded his second startup company, had continued to pay his expenses, even after their separation. Even after the divorce papers had been drafted (but never officially filed). The second apartment in Manhattan, for example, the one with Eitan's name on the lease, was still being paid for out of her family accounts in France.

  He became aware of the pilot's voice over the intercom, informing him that the rough patch of air was now behind them, and that everyone was welcome to remove their seatbelts and walk about for the remaining minutes they had before landing.

  Alvin Cheong released his restraint and stood. He stared balefully at the avalanche of papers for a moment, then he strode over to the bar and poured a couple fingers of fifty-year-old Macallan scotch whiskey into a glass that had been sterilized and sealed inside plastic. It was a treat he reserved for rare occasions, since at twelve grand for a bottle the price tag was a bit steep, even for him. He also regretted that whatever remained once he debarked the plane would need to be poured down the drain. But the malt was one of few good ones he knew to be safe, as it had been bottled in the mid-eighties, before the world began its descent into the mess it was in now.

  Taking the glass, he returned to the table, and began to resort the papers.

  Chapter Forty One

  "No," Jamie protested, her voice little more than a whisper. "I'm not going."

  Angel kneeled over the girl and rested her hand tentatively on one of the bulges in her abdomen. "You're very sick. Does that hurt when I push here?"

  She shook her head.

  "Then what hurts?"

  "Everything . . . . Nothing. I don't know." Jamie tried to swallow, winced. "My stomach hurts. And my back, when I move. And . . . down there."

  Angel slid her han
d from one side of the girl's belly to the other while applying slight pressure on the protuberances. Jamie didn't flinch. She didn't even seem to notice. Angel pressed harder, but there was still no reaction.

  It was terribly frustrating, trying to understand what was happening to the girl without the basic tools she had had when she was doing her medical studies. Completing her examination simply by touch and sight, Angel felt confident enough only to consider her earlier diagnosis of internal bleeding as a less probable cause of the abdominal distension, though she still couldn't rule it out entirely, at least as a secondary diagnosis. The paleness of the girl's skin, her rapid heartbeat and shallow respirations, the sunken eyes and chapped lips, all suggested she might be suffering from hypovolemia as a result of internal bleeding. But those symptoms could also be a result of the pain she was experiencing. Determining the source of that pain was what really mattered.

  Palpitating those odd, hard deformations had revived the old bag-of-bones memory. But, in the end, she decided that the girl had to be suffering from intestinal hernias, several of them at once. It seemed a reasonable diagnosis, since the trauma she'd suffered from the crash a week earlier could have easily torn several small perforations in her abdominal wall. The strain of pushing the laundry cart at the hospital must have widened the tears, allowing her intestines to bulge through.

  It was still just a guess, she knew. In her years of medical school and as a resident at Stanford, she couldn't recall ever having witnessed such an extreme case as this, but the hardness and irregularity of the protrusions, as well as the fact that they could be pushed in slightly — reduced was the medical term — and the intermittent pain she suffered while moving, all seemed consistent with that conclusion.

  The good news was, if that diagnosis were correct, then the girl was in somewhat less danger than Angel had first imagined. The bad news was, without corrective surgery, the herniated intestines could strangulate, atrophy, and turn gangrenous, requiring immediate emergency surgery. As it was, the girl was likely to lose at least a portion of her small intestine. And if she were really unlucky, the herniated organ would rupture, spilling bacteria into her abdominal cavity and leading to septic shock. If that were to happen, she would die a very quick, very painful death.