by Mark Gilleo
Captain Talua pulled up to the front of the house in the cleanest police cruiser the Saipan Police Department had to offer. The sky was dark, the stars brilliant, and the strong wind from the south helped keep the bugs down and the crickets quiet. C.F. Chang looked up at the house and the low light that shined through the living room window of the small bungalow.
“Are you sure about this woman?” C.F Chang asked Captain Talua.
“She works in the general aviation terminal. She studies accounting most of the time. She may be able to tell you what happened to the girl you are looking for.”
“Why would she talk to us?”
“Offer her a thousand dollars and she’ll tell you. She’s a dreamer.”
“A dreamer?”
“Yes. There are two kinds on Saipan. Those who love it and don’t ever want to leave, and those who dream of something more. This girl is a dreamer.”
Ten minutes and fifteen hundred dollars later, C.F. Chang and Captain Talua walked out of the small one floor bungalow with the answer to their question. The Chinese girl had left with three American men on a charter flight heading for Washington D.C.
C.F. Chang cursed all the way back to the hotel. He had his fingers on speed dial and was punching buttons.
Chapter 47
“Thank you Mr. Winthrop,” Senator Day said into the microphone after his final witness shined his way through twenty minutes of question and answer from the committee members.
The CEO and president of Winthrop Enterprises found his seat at the end of the testimony table, a large stretch of wood covered with a deep burgundy tablecloth that hung to the floor with frills on the hem. He reached for a glass of water as Senator Day covered the microphone and spoke quietly to the senator in the next seat.
The man in the new gray suit pulled the large door open and walked toward the front of the committee room. With perfect posture and an unquestionable professional presence, he approached the Capitol Police officer at the end of the rows of spectators. He reached into his breast pocket and handed the note to the officer, whispering in his ear. He pointed toward Senator Day and nodded. The officer carried the paper across the room and reached upward to deliver the priority letter to Senator Day in his chair. A short conference ensued with half of the committee rising from their seats and gathering around the Chairman.
The brief meeting adjourned and Senator Day spoke. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have one additional speaker today before we put this to a vote. Please step forward and identify yourself to the committee.”
Al stepped past the officer and walked to the end of the testimony table. “My name is Al Korgaokar. I am a Foreign Affairs Officer for the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. Retired. As I have stated in the letter you hold, I want to testify as to the improvements I have seen overseas as a result of internationalization.”
Al Korgaokar’s presence snapped Peter to attention. Peter looked at the man he knew years ago and could see that Al’s face hinted at years of hard existence. Peter took another sip of water as he watched Al move toward the center of the chamber. Peter knew that Al had seen him, and he thought it didn’t matter. Washington was a small city when it came to politics, and Al Korgaokar testifying at a Senate Committee meeting merely caused Peter Winthrop to pause. It was an interesting coincidence. Nothing more.
Senator Day looked at Al. “Mr. Korgaokar. Testifying at a Senate Committee is a serious matter. Furthermore, protocol generally requires that we receive your written testimony in advance. Given your service to the country, we will allow you to testify, but this committee will also require a written statement as to your testimony.”
“Fair enough, Senator. I will be brief.”
The official Senate Bible carrier stepped from the side of the chamber and Al was sworn in—oath, lock, stock, and barrel.
Senator Day nodded at the conclusion of the formality and addressed Al directly. “Please sir, go ahead.”
“As I mentioned, I spent twenty years serving my country with the State Department, primarily in Asia. I was stationed with the embassies in Japan, the Philippines, China, and Thailand. I have seen the impact that American corporations have had on the native population. I have seen lives changed.”
Senator Day smiled. Nothing wrong with a cherry on top of Peter Winthrop’s brilliant testimony. A tried-and-true American with firsthand experience supporting the senator’s position.
The senator’s grin lasted until Al’s next sentence hit the audience, the press, and the history of the committee transcripts.
“And I have seen lives ruined.”
Senator Day’s posture snapped straight and his eyebrows shot upward. There were a few muffled gasps and one noticeable giggle from the committee audience. Peter Winthrop fought the urge to run from the room.
Wallace looked at Nguyen. “Now this is getting interesting.”
“Sir?” Senator Day asked.
“You heard me correctly, Senator. Lives ruined. But today I am here to end the lies.”
The doors opened in the back of the room and Jake walked in with Wei Ling on his arm. Senator Day took one look at the girl he had spent the night with in a threesome and stood from his seat. Then he came unglued. With high shrills and screams that bordered on unintelligible, the senator commanded the officer on duty to stop the intruders.
Al grabbed the microphone off the testimony table and spoke over the senator in a booming voice that echoed through the PA system. “Ladies and gentlemen, the woman you see entering the room works in a sweatshop in Saipan. And she is pregnant with Senator Day’s child.”
The audience collectively inhaled, gasping, falling silent for a spilt second before the decorum of the room officially shifted to the hysteria of an animal outbreak at the zoo.
“Holy shit,” Wallace said to Nguyen, whose mouth opened wide enough to catch a tennis ball served at full speed.
Senator Day banged his gavel and screamed orders like Judge Judy with PMS. “Officer. I want these men arrested. This committee meeting is in recess. I want this man’s testimony erased from public record.” Then Senator Day pointed his finger directly at Peter Winthrop. “You son of a bitch. You and your goddamn son.”
Peter looked over at his son and Wei Ling. He shook his head, opened his mouth, and for the first time in his adult life, was speechless. Jake looked over at his father, the first contact with him since going to the FBI. His father stared back with blood-pumping hatred.
The room turned into a sea of questions, waves of accusations crashing down every direction. The rookie reporters began yelling, cell phones in their ears, calling in the biggest story of their lives.
“What the hell just happened?” Nguyen asked.
“I don’t know, but I think we found Peter Winthrop’s son.”
Senator Day climbed down the stairs from his noble perch and pushed his way through the rising crowd. Peter exited the back of the chamber from the far door. Al rounded up Jake and Wei Ling and pulled them out of the storm. Reporters and senators poured from the chamber behind them, a mass of commotion in their wake.
“Let’s go,” Wallace said to Nguyen. “Time to get the answers to our questions.”
Chapter 48
The long main hall of the Russell Senate Building felt like a tunnel, tightening with every step. The walls breathed. Senator Day couldn’t. His life was slipping through his hands. He picked up the already breakneck pace as if jogging away from the committee chamber was going to put distance between himself and his freefall from grace.
Senator Day needed air. He turned right towards the main entrance and descended down the marble stairs to the foyer, past the security booth on the left. The four guards on duty stopped their search-and-question routine and stared at the senator with disdain and disbelief. Good gossip traveled fast.
Senator Day pushed on the wooden doors, hoping to leave the madness behind him. He needed time to regroup, time to think. He needed air. With a single stride forward
, the senator stepped from controlled unpleasantness into mass chaos.
The senator froze on the top stair of the Russell Senate Building and looked down into a hornet’s nest. Hundreds of protestors, signs waving and bullhorns screaming, assaulted the senator’s senses as he stumbled to the side of the granite staircase. The AWARE group’s numbers had tripled overnight, their presence buoyed by over two hundred reinforcements from the city’s finest homeless establishments. Standing at the bottom of the staircase, waving a large sign with one hand and yelling into a bullhorn with the other, was Kazu Ito’s father. A look of fury on his face, he cheered the crowd on, screaming in the memory of his dead son and looking for an apology.
The noon sun combined forces with the multitude of lights from the news crews who were there en masse in response to an anonymous tip. A sea of microphones were shoved into the senator’s personal space, and he stepped back, one hand covering his eyes, the other hand helplessly trying to protect his body from intrusion. Behind him, the audience from the Senate subcommittee squeezed through the doors onto the packed staircase.
The questions came in a flood of babble, a dozen at a time, and the senator tried to push forward past the first wave of cameras and lights. He reached the first landing of the stairs, his path blocked, bodies everywhere. “Shit,” was the first comment caught on tape.
The crowd filled the street, reaching thirty yards in either direction. The AWARE group, led by Kazu Ito’s father and joined in delirious celebration by several hundred of Al’s closest friends, was extending their cause to support their suppressed Asian sisters toiling away in sweatshops around the world.
Stuck like a herd of cattle in a slaughter chute, Senator Day knew silence wasn’t the answer. It didn’t matter what he said, but he knew he had to say something. He had lied on far less appropriate occasions than this. He shoved his way to the granite walls that encased the massive stairs of the Russell Building, pushed his way up two steps and floundered for his footing. He waved his hands to hush the media and the growing rebellion below.
Peter came out the door as Senator Day tried to quiet the crowd. Al stepped from the building next, Wei Ling sandwiched safely between himself and Jake, who brought up the rear. Detectives Wallace and Nguyen were in pursuit, flashing their badges at anything that moved as they forced their way to the exit. Through the door, Wallace pointed down the stairs at Jake and Wei Ling. Nguyen moved in.
The crowd quieted slowly, Senator Day’s hands waving up and down, begging for silence. His lips moved first, his mouth opened in slow motion, and then he doubled over as blood sprayed from two new holes in his chest.
The echo of three rapid-fire gunshots was the start to a full scale riot. The media scattered, cameras rolling in every direction. Trees, the sun, stairs, and legs caught in shaky frames on film. Senator Day’s body tumbled down half a flight of stairs before coming to rest on his right side, shoulder and head below his feet. The AWARE group and their homeless friends lost their urge to protest, bodies running in every direction. Among the madness, running with a pronounced limp, was a six-four Asian in a business suit.
Nguyen caught Jake from behind and pulled him to the side as Wallace pushed through. “Get inside,” Wallace said, pulling Jake and Wei Ling by the arms as the Capitol Police poured from the Russell Building.
Al looked at Jake, who had Wei Ling in his grasp, and nodded. “You got her?”
“Yeah, Al. I got her.”
Al jumped over two crouching reporters and joined the Capitol Police at the senator’s side. Blood stained the white marble, a trail moving down the staircase like a broken Slinky.
The screams for 911 mixed with the overall hysteria in the air. Twenty seconds after the gunshots, the 911 emergency switchboard lit up like the Vegas Strip. ***
Chow Ying got on the Metro at Union Station and rode until New Carrollton, Maryland. He got off the train and took the pedestrian bridge over the subway tracks. He waited ten minutes and boarded the northbound Amtrak Metroliner. He found a seat in the back row next to the toilets and bought a ticket from the conductor as the train picked up speed leaving the station. He peeked inside his jacket pocket to check on his passport and his money. New York City was next on his list. After that, it was anyone’s guess. Maybe San Francisco. Chow Ying pulled the phone from his pocket and checked for messages. Six in the last half hour. Chow Ying knew he was dead already. He had known it for weeks. When the gentle Mr. Wu had asked for his passport in New York, Chow Ying knew his time was short. He knew too much. C.F. Chang would never let him live. And if he wasn’t going to live, then he was going to his grave knowing that he had taken away the one thing that C.F. Chang wanted. C.F. Chang had made the kill easy. Instructions, timeline, transportation, identity cover. All the authorities had to do now was find the car.
Chapter 49
Jake squinted as he came out of FBI headquarters. He rubbed his temples and the bridge of his nose before putting his hand up to shade his eyes from the sun. He looked at the trees that lined the street, and turned away from the sun’s western position to admire a light blue sky. He inhaled deeply and took in a dose of smog and thick humidity. After forty hours of interrogation in dimly lit rooms without windows, nature’s canvass was a pleasant shock to his system.
The white Dodge Caravan was parked at the corner, beyond the steel barrier that lifted vertically from its position flush with the pavement of the street. Al was leaning against the grill of the van, the seat of his jeans cleaning off a thin layer of dead bugs plastered to the flat front of the vehicle.
“Thanks for coming,” Jake said, walking slowly, taking in the sights.
“I guess I was your one allotted phone call,” Al said smiling.
“Yeah. When did you get out?”
“They questioned me for a few hours and let me go pretty quickly. The privilege of professional courtesy. That and the fact I still have a few friends around town. I tried to get you out sooner, Jake. I pulled every string I had and promised a few things I would have never been able to deliver.”
“Thanks for trying.”
“You okay?”
“I will be,” Jake said confidently.
“Didn’t know it was going to turn out the way it did.”
“No shit. Neither did I.”
“Senator Day getting shot wasn’t in the plan.”
“How is he? They mentioned inside that he was hanging in there.”
“Well at least they didn’t keep you completely in the dark.”
“There were a couple of good guys in there. A lot of assholes, but a few nice people.”
“Looks like Senator Day is going to make it. Chalk it up to the good doctors in D.C. having a lot of practice with gunshot wounds. He caught two shots in the chest. A third shot missed and hit a reporter in the leg. The senator is still in Intensive Care, but he’s going to survive. Politically, he may not.”
“I don’t think either of us is sad about that.”
Both men looked down the street toward the Mall.
“So what did they grill you on?” Al asked.
“Everything. Things about the Asian guy, my father, about Senator Day, about Wei Ling. They grilled me on Marilyn’s death.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told the truth.”
“The whole truth and nothing but the truth?”
“Most of it. Given that the senator had just been shot, they were most interested in what I knew about him. They wanted to know about the girl. What my father knew. They wanted to know why I turned my father over to the FBI for illegal exports, and how he thwarted their raid. They actually started accusing me of trying to blackmail the senator. Then they dropped that threat and moved on.”
“There is a reason for that.”
“They didn’t give me one.”
“The guy who shot the senator left a note in his car implicating the head of Chang Industries, a guy by the name of C.F. Chang. The note implicated him in the attempted murder of
Senator Day with the intention of influencing the Overseas Labor Special Committee. The note also implicated him for the murder of an American doctor in Saipan. This C.F. Chang is a big fish, Jake.”
“And the guy who fired the gun?”
“They haven’t found him yet. They have him on tape getting on the Metro at Union Station. Whoever he is, he’s got big balls. The guy admitted to being hired by a well-connected Chinese family to assassinate a U.S. senator. He won’t get far. But he obviously didn’t want to go down alone.”
“I don’t get it, Al.”
“What’s that?”
“If this guy came to the U.S. to kill the senator, then why did they keep Wei Ling captive? What’s the point? Seems like a contradiction.”
“I’m sure the FBI is asking that same question. Or if they aren’t, they will be shortly.”
“Where is Wei Ling?”
“She’s fine. Kate is with her. Amnesty International is giving her the velvet glove treatment. She is staying at the Mayflower. We can stop by and see her anytime. Amnesty International is planning to make you their official Hero-of-the-Month.”
“What about our sleight of hand in the charter terminal in Saipan?”
“Technically, we didn’t break the law,” Al said.
“We bent the hell out of it.”
“Is that what you told them?”
“I told the truth. I told them I went to Saipan to see the girl and couldn’t get into the sweatshop facilities. I told them that when I arrived at the general aviation terminal the girl was there. I asked her if she wanted to come to Washington and she made the decision to come to D.C. voluntarily. I told them I consulted with a State Department representative who happened to be at the airport at the time and that he told me I wasn’t breaking any laws by bringing the girl back to D.C.”
“That’s pretty close to the truth.”
“That is the truth. How could I have known any better? I’m just a student who wants to be an English teacher.”