by Steven Gore
“These are enlarged lymph nodes. They should be a quarter of the size they appear here.”
Goode turned from the monitor and pressed his fingers into the depression between Gage’s clavicle and neck muscles.
“Take your fingertips and push down like I did and you’ll feel a lump. That’s one pushing up against the muscle.”
Gage found it as Goode stepped back to the monitor and pointed at the larger of the gray blobs.
“If they’d been bigger or in more accessible places closer to the skin, we’d have noticed them sooner and gone right to the CT scan.”
“What does it mean?”
“Not much in itself. But let me show you a few more images.”
Goode paged through the scans until arriving at one that displayed a slice of Gage’s lower lungs and spine. He pointed with his pen at three globs of tissue suspended in Gage’s chest cavity.
“You can see a few more enlarged lymph nodes in this area.” Goode gestured toward an elongated mass. “And this is your spleen. Also enlarged.”
Goode looked at Gage, his brows furrowed. “Is your appetite a little depressed lately?”
“Some.”
“A lot,” Faith said.
Goode selected another scan and enlarged it on the monitor.
“This shows your liver and your abdomen. These small bodies are a cluster of enlarged lymph nodes. You won’t really be able to make it out, but this area”—Goode circled Gage’s mesentery with his pen—“shows some density that is usually associated with inflammation. It may account for the nausea you’ve had.”
Faith reached around Gage’s shoulders and hugged him. “So it’s just an infection, just like we thought. And the lymph nodes are just reacting to it.”
Gage turned his gaze from the scan to Dr. Goode. “Is it the dog wagging its tail, or the tail wagging the dog?”
Goode shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“What?” Faith dropped her arm from Gage’s shoulders and bent down toward the monitor.
“What he means is that he doesn’t know which is the cause and which is the effect.”
Faith peered at the image and ran her index finger over the light gray lymph nodes and the darker area of inflammation as though she could trace the link between cause and effect.
“We’ll need to do a biopsy to find out,” Goode said.
Faith turned back. “Cancer? You think it’s cancer?”
“No, not necessarily.”
“But that’s what biopsies are for.”
“They can also exclude it and reveal other possibilities, other diseases, even other infections.”
“When can we do it?” Gage asked.
“Given your symptoms, I think the sooner the better. Let me make a call.”
Goode pulled the door closed behind him as he left the room.
Gage slipped down from the exam table, buttoned his shirt, and stepped over next to Faith still standing in front of the monitor.
“What do you think?” Faith asked.
Gage pointed at the inflammation, then at a lymph node. “I don’t think this tail is wagging that dog.”
Goode returned a few minutes later.
“I just spoke to one of our head and neck surgeons. He suggested the safest approach is to go after the ones below your collarbone. I told him you’d stop by his office after you left here.”
“No problem. If he’s going to have a knife at my neck, I think I’d like to size him up.”
After Goode left, Gage and Faith walked over to the Ear, Nose, and Throat Department, where Gage identified himself to the receptionist.
A half hour later, a nurse escorted them into Dr. Michael Norman’s office. He directed them to sit down, then leaned back against the edge of his desk, facing them.
“I know this may appear to be relatively minor surgery,” Norman said, “but there are some risks.”
Faith placed her hand on top of Gage’s.
“The main one is damage to the accessory nerve, causing numbness and a reduction in your range of motion.”
Norman turned his monitor toward them. He pointed to the target lymph nodes.
“The ones we’re going for are tucked in right here.” Norman placed the tip of a pen on the two overlapping gray spheres on the right side of the cross section of Gage’s neck.
“What about a needle biopsy?” Faith asked. “Like for breast cancer.”
“We’d have no guarantee we’d capture enough cells for genetic analysis, which is key to choosing the right treatment. We really have to go in.”
“Why nerve damage?” Gage asked.
“I’ll have to cut through a lot of tissue, move some muscle. It’s a critical spot in your body. Neck, shoulders, and arm all link up.”
“Aren’t there others you could go after?” Faith asked.
“They’d require major surgery and are either near Graham’s spine or dangerously close to some major organs, maybe even involved with them.”
“When do you want to do it?” Gage asked.
“In the next day or two. I’ll have my scheduling nurse call you this afternoon. The operating rooms are heavily booked, but we’ll squeeze you in. I don’t want this thing lingering.”
CHAPTER 15
Sylvia, Alex Z, and Annie Ma, were waiting in the conference room when Gage arrived after dropping Faith off at her office on the Berkeley campus. Alex Z slid a spreadsheet across to Gage as he sat down.
“Ah Tien had coded numbers for two inside lines at East Wind,” Alex Z said. “Alan Lim confirmed they belonged to Cheung and Lew. They have been the same all the years since Lim started handling their shipments. There wasn’t a cell-phone number for Ah Tien, but there was for Lew, and there were both coded and uncoded numbers for import and export companies and for other customs brokers and freight forwarders.”
Alex Z reached out toward Gage and pointed at an entry on the list.
“The most interesting one at least as far as microchips are concerned is a coded number for a company named ChinaCom in Shanghai.”
“It’s a computer and electronics manufacturer in China,” Annie said, “for the domestic market.”
“Sure makes Ah Tien look like a key guy in the chip operation,” Sylvia said. “Steal them here, use local freight forwarders, and smuggle them to ChinaCom.”
Alex Z displayed a map of northern China on a monitor hanging on a far wall.
Gage’s gaze fell first on Shanghai and held fast. A memory came to him of a visit he made to a Chinese herbalist twenty-five years earlier, looking for a flu remedy before Western medicine had entered the Chinese market. A bespectacled man had collected leaves, twigs, and powders and wrapped them in newspaper. Gage took them to the hotel kitchen where a cook boiled them. Gage first had winced at the acrid odor, then gulped it down, hoping it wouldn’t roar back up. As he stared at the map now, he wondered what those herbs, or others like them, might do for whatever his biopsy would find.
“Graham?”
Sylvia’s voice brought him back to the present.
Gage blinked, then looked up. “Sorry. I was just trying to figure this out.” He pointed at the monitor. “The most direct route to ChinaCom would be to smuggle the chips in through the Pudong container port across the river from Shanghai.”
He thought back over the material Sylvia collected from Lester.
“Didn’t Ah Tien have an invoice from a luggage store at Kennedy Airport?”
“For a briefcase.”
“Maybe he carried back some paperwork inside. It could be in his house. But we’ll need his family’s cooperation in order to get it.”
“What if they’re involved in this thing, too?” Alex Z said.
“I don’t think they are.” Sylvia slid a page across the conference table toward Gage. “This is Annie’s translation of a letter Ah Tien’s brother wrote to him last—”
“An actual letter?” Gage asked. “Not an e-mail or text?”
“Ah Tien really appears to
be a low-tech guy. Old-school in this just as he was with his address book.”
“It makes me think even if we find his phone, there won’t be much stored on it.”
“The kid’s name is Winston. There must be about a fourteen-year age gap between them. He’s an accounting major at UCLA. It’s mostly adolescent complaints about their parents and about Ah Tien, too, for always taking their side.”
“The handwriting is a little juvenile,” Annie said. “Winston probably learned how to write Chinese characters in an afternoon school over here. Ah Tien’s writing is proficient enough that he might’ve learned in China.”
Gage read over the letter. “It looks like they grew up in different worlds. Winston is making fun of Ah Tien for letting their parents choose his wife.” He smiled. “There’s a line in here about them building a bridge to the thirteenth century and Ah Tien falling through it.” He looked at Sylvia. “I don’t see this kind of kid being involved in his brother’s crimes. See if he’s willing to talk to us.”
Sylvia and Alex Z remained in the conference room after Gage and Annie left.
“Did he look all right to you?” Sylvia asked.
“A little tired, I guess. Maybe a little distracted. But when he’s really into something, he sometimes shuts out the world for a minute or two until he gets what he’s looking for fixed in his mind.”
“I think it’s more than that. He looks gray. And I know he’s lost weight. In the few months I’ve been here I haven’t gotten to know him well enough to ask him about it.”
“It isn’t a matter of knowing him well enough. He’s not the kind of guy you ask personal things. And he’s not going to tell you anything about himself unless it affects your work. If it doesn’t, you’ll never know about it.” Alex Z shuddered. “Once he called me from Ukraine to check on something and didn’t even mention that he’d been stabbed in the back an hour earlier.”
CHAPTER 16
Gage’s receptionist beeped him at the end of the day, telling him that Jack Burch and Lucy Sheridan were on the phone. He pressed the blinking button and caught Lucy saying, “My father had to leave for Hong Kong this morning.”
“I thought your mother would join us,” Gage said.
“She decided it would be simpler if she didn’t, but I don’t understand what she meant. She asked me to pass on how grateful she is that you agreed to help us.”
“How does it look?” Burch asked.
“It appears that Ah Ming was involved in something pretty significant recently, but I don’t know if it had anything to do with what happened to Peter.”
“You mean he’s a criminal,” Burch said, “but maybe not the right criminal.”
“And I’m not in the business of playing Lone Ranger. Unless we can connect him to the robbery, there’s no reason to stay with this.”
“What did Ah Ming do?” Lucy asked.
“I’d rather not say. My thinking is based too much on assumption and speculation. I’d like to follow up on a couple of leads. Depending on what we find, we may want to hand it over to the FBI and let them finish it up.”
“When will we know?’ Lucy asked.
“Let’s talk in a few days.”
“A few days?”
Gage sensed the beginnings of frustration in Lucy’s voice.
“That’s the best we can do. Hang in there.”
Gage’s cell phone rang moments after he hung up from the conference call. It was Burch.
“So what did he do?”
“I told you it is mostly speculation.”
“So speculate. I won’t pass it on to the Sheridans until you say it’s okay.”
Gage outlined what he learned about Ah Tien.
“That’s a lot more than speculation.”
“My guess is that if Peter hadn’t died during the robbery, Ah Ming would have killed him later. The kid was probably chosen for the robbery by mistake, kind of like a clerical error. And that clerical error was his death sentence.”
“And you’re thinking it might be better if Lucy and her parents never find out how trivial and inevitable Peter’s death was.”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“Faith and I have spent most of our marriage ten time zones apart. I think we’re both tired of living that way. I can see myself lying in a hammock, reading a book in some jungle camp while Faith does her fieldwork. And the only way to do that will be to turn the firm over to my employees.”
“Did you get some medical news you’re not telling me about?”
“No news at all. And even if there were, it wouldn’t affect what I’m thinking.”
“And that means that you’re going to let this Sheridan thing go?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Taking down Ah Ming wouldn’t be a bad way to end. And I think I can come up with a way to do it.”
“If you’re healthy enough.”
“The symptoms have backed off a little. It might get better on its own.”
“Does that mean they’re close to figuring out what it is?”
“Almost. One more test and I think this’ll be over with.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
“Tell me or I’m going to call Faith.”
“A little surgery.”
“What kind of little surgery?”
“A biopsy. A minor one.”
“There’s no such thing as a minor one. Where are you having it done?”
“Stanford Hospital. I’ll just be there overnight. In and out. No big deal.”
“Of course it is. I’m going to make some calls.”
“Jack, don’t—”
But Burch had disconnected.
CHAPTER 17
Lew Fung-hao stood near one of the last remaining phone booths in San Francisco’s Chinatown reading a nightclub playbill pasted to the side of a fish market. He cocked his head when the telephone rang as though puzzled by why it was ringing with no one standing by to answer it. He shrugged toward the fruit and vegetable vendors a few yards away, then reached for the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Me and my friends are in the other city.”
It was Le.
Lew lowered his voice. “Did you destroy Ah Ming’s cell phone?”
“Yes. What now?”
Lew smiled at the vendors.
“Go to Tai Ping Travel and ask for Tat Mo. He’s expecting you.”
Lew hung up, then shuffled away like an old man with nowhere to go and nothing to do. He wound through the Chinatown alleys, then back out to a commercial street of restaurants and offices. He walked until he found a cellular outlet and bought a pay-as-you-go phone. He then stepped into the recessed doorway of a residential hotel and sent a text message to Ah Ming:
All is well.
AH MING READ THE WORDS, then leaned back in his chair and looked at the calendar. All he needed to do was replace Ah Tien, he told himself, and everything would continue as planned, and as it always had. But he knew he was deceiving himself for he was on the needle end of two capital murders: Ah Pang and Ah Tien.
Tension pushed him to his feet. He held out his hands and stared at them. At moments like these he saw them for what they were and recalled the day thirty years earlier when they transformed from flesh and bone into weapons, when they’d beaten a gambler to death in Taiwan who hadn’t paid a debt to United Bamboo.
At the time the act had seemed like a kind of metamorphosis. He later came to understand it was more a moment of revelation about himself to himself. For he’d come to recognize it hadn’t been guilt he’d been feeling as he looked down at the man’s body, but rather an almost incomprehensible combination of power and shame. He’d had the gambler under control with the first blow. There’d been no reason for a second, even less for the fatal third one.
Ah Ming turned his hands over and inspected the lines on his palms, troubled not by the deaths of that man or of Ah Tien or of the
dozen others over the years, but by Ah Pang’s. He was certain he could dominate men, the killings were proof of that, but the coincidental was uncanny and unnerving, and too much like a fortune-teller’s prediction that mirrored a reoccurring nightmare.
CHAPTER 18
I’m just pulling away from Winston Fong’s house,” Sylvia said in a call to Gage. “I snagged him when he walked to the corner store. He’s nervous and wants to meet in a public place outside of San Francisco. I suggested Jack London Square.”
At 7:45 P.M., Sylvia and Gage were sitting at a wrought-iron table watching the tourists, the seagulls, and the moneyed high-tech young intermingle on the Oakland waterfront.
At 8:00 she tilted her head toward Winston emerging alone from the underground garage. Gage rose and once again offered his condolences to a grieving sibling.
“We’re looking into a number of things,” Gage said, after they sat down, “and one of them is the death of your brother.”
“The detective came by this morning to look around Haitien’s room,” Winston said, “but he didn’t spend much time and didn’t take anything.” He smirked. “I guess when he didn’t find drugs or guns or a gang sweatshirt and matching cap he lost his enthusiasm.”
Gage let the sarcasm pass. He knew part of the reason SFPD was stumbling around in the investigation was because he had yet to share what he knew with them. And he couldn’t. Spike Pacheco, the last of his generation in the homicide unit, had retired and Ramon Navarro, the best of the new generation, had been cross designated as a federal agent and sent to Michoacán to help the Mexican police and DEA in investigating cartel murders.
Delay would do no harm anyway. Gage never accepted what was called the forty-eight-hour rule when he was in homicide, and even if there was such a rule, he knew that discovering the truth about Peter Sheridan’s death would be the exception.
“Did the detective ask you anything?”
“Not this time. The night my brother was killed he asked if Hai-tien had any enemies or gang affiliations. But it was less like he was investigating a crime and more like he was drawing a line on a flowchart or filling in a blank, and ignoring the possibility that the answer might be none of the above.”