“Hal’s fine, Valerie. A bit odd getting that worked out in your bathroom, though.”
“Who was on the phone?”
“My partner. He has something he wants to go over. He wants me to meet him at a Starbucks in SoMa.”
“The ABC?” she asked, using the term for American-Born Chinese. “Fong. That one?”
“One and the same.”
“So you’re leaving?”
“Yes. I think I have to.” He wanted to take her into his arms, and after a moment, he did. She came to him willingly and placed her head against his chest, her hands resting on his hips. Ryker bent over and kissed the top of her head. “Are you all right?”
“I have to pee,” she said with a slight giggle.
“Oh. Well, have at it, then.”
Ryker stepped outside and got dressed. He heard her go to the bathroom and flush the toilet, then turned on the water to wash her hands and maybe brush her teeth. He moved to the door, intending to ask if she had a spare toothbrush—Ryker’s mouth tasted a lot like the inside of a garbage can. But over the running water, he heard her sobbing. Quietly, because she was trying to hide it from him. He hovered outside the door for a moment longer, then turned and walked out of the bedroom.
###
“You’re late,” Chee Wei complained. It was almost 8:00am, and the Starbucks was already crowded. Ryker didn’t doubt he’d had to fight to keep his table. Maybe he’d even pulled his gun.
Ryker shrugged and sat down opposite him on a wooden chair that was off-balance. He tried to get comfortable, but the chair kept rocking around under him. He’d taken the time to buy himself a small coffee, and it tasted like rocket fuel.
“So what do you have that’s so important you couldn’t tell me about it over the phone, but have no problems discussing in the middle of a crowded, noisy Starbucks?”
“I heard from my cousin last night…well, more like this morning. Remember how I told you he was with the Hong Kong PD? He did some digging for me and found out some really interesting shit about James Lin.” Chee Wei smiled and took a swig of his skinny double half-caf mocha latte and looked damned pleased with himself. Ryker patiently sipped his no-frills coffee and wondered when Chee Wei would show the goods.
“Dude, you’re gonna love this,” Chee Wei promised.
“Any chance we can get this done before lunchtime?”
Chee Wei reached to the bag on the floor beside him and opened it up. Ryker frowned.
“Chee Wei. Is that a purse?”
“It’s a knapsack,” Chee Wei said defensively as he pulled out a manila folder from inside the dun-colored bag. He put the folder on the tiny table between them their coffee cups and flipped it open. Inside were several pages of text. Chinese text.
“Wow, it’s all in Chinese, even. Impressive,” Ryker said as he swigged some more rocket fuel and looked around the coffee shop. To think he woke up in a mansion just off of China Beach this morning, lying on a bed that was probably bigger than his entire bedroom in his apartment, next to a woman whose beauty was…well, the most amazing thing he’d ever seen up close. Despite being driven nearly crazy by grief over her dead, abusive husband.
Women. You just can’t figure them out.
“It is impressive,” Chee Wei said, rifling through the papers. “It’s a file on Lin Yubo, aka James Lin, former governor of Shanghai, former deputy director of the Central Cultural Revolution Group, and the head of the Shanghai Black Dragon tong. This guy was a real mover and shaker during Mao’s time. He started out as a criminal, working the backside of the Kuomintang and the rest of the Chinese Nationalists until the Japs invaded. When they took Shanghai, Lin faded out and came back into the picture, this time with Mao and his guerilla fighters. He stuck with them during the whole war against Chiang Kai-shek, and it seemed Lin Yubo was a true-blue commie lover.”
Ryker snorted. “Lin? A member of the Communist party?”
“The Chinese Communist Party, no less,” Chee Wei said. “Those guys didn’t mess around, they all believed in the Party, heart and soul. Well, at least in the beginning. But Lin? No way, man. It was just another way to stay alive for him.”
“An opportunist to the core,” Ryker agreed. “Look, all this is really interesting. But what does it have to do with our case?”
Chee Wei flipped a page over and started reading. He finally pointed at a block of text and showed it to Ryker. “Look familiar?”
“Yeah. It says ‘spicy beef platter’, right?”
“It says Bu zhan, bu he. No war, no peace. It was a slogan used during the Shanghai purges in the 1960s, during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.” Chee Wei flipped over another page and held it up for Ryker to see. It was a photo of James Lin—Lin Yubo, back then, in a time when James Lin didn’t exist—standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mao Zedong, the crazed deflowerer of twelve-year-olds himself. Mao had a gentle, almost beatific smile. Lin looked just as crusty as he did today, only more than four decades younger.
“So it’s revenge,” Ryker said. He took the printout and examined it more closely. A woman stood next to Lin, half cropped out of the picture. Ryker turned the page and pointed to her.
“Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife,” Chee Wei said. “She took over the post of the Central Cultural Revolution Group from Lin. This is when Lin had some bad times, when he was sent back to Shanghai to oversee the purges. It was actually a demotion, but my cousin thinks he used the time to rebuild part of his tong. Ten years before Mao kicks the bucket, and he was already planning for when China opened its doors to the west. You have to hand it to him, Lin is a really strategic thinker. And he used his crime money to buy his way into businesses and make even more cash.”
“You sound like you admire him,” Ryker said.
“I admire his check book, that’s for sure.”
“What else you got?”
Chee Wei spread out the pages as far as the tiny table would allow. Ryker picked through them, but 99% of the text was in Chinese. He would need Chee Wei to spoon-feed him everything, which would be incredibly time-consuming. He was about to ask Chee Wei to type up the Cliff’s Notes version when he came across some more pictures. Lin as a younger man. Lin in the trenches with the rest of the commies. Lin as a respected member of the Chinese Communist Party. Lin extolling a group of people—
“Well, lookie here.” He pointed out one of the figures standing beside Lin in his ‘return to Shanghai’ phase. “You were right. It’s that guy the manservant.”
“Han Baojia,” Chee Wei said. “Lin’s deputy. See, I told you those guys had a history.”
“Shoot son, you might actually be worth a detective’s badge after all.” Ryker went through the pictures again, and found yet another person of interest. He’d almost looked over the image but something tickled his eye and he looked back. It took a moment for the face to register with him, and he turned the paper back to Chee Wei again. “Who’s this guy?”
Chee Wei read the caption. “Ren Yun. Until recently, the guy running the Ministry of Transport in China. He was one of Lin’s associates back in the day, and his primary sponsor back into the Communist Party after Mao died and the Gang of Four fell. What about him?”
“He was at Lin’s last—” Ryker said before he stopped himself. “I saw him with Lin,” he amended, and quite lamely, at that.
Chee Wei looked at him, puzzled. “What’s going on?” he asked.
Huh. Maybe he will make a good detective after all.
“I was invited to Lin’s house last night. For a, uh, social function. This guy, Ren, he was there. Looks about the same, only a billion years older.”
“You went to a party at Lin’s house?” Chee Wei was appropriately scandalized. “Hal, you realize that’s a bona fide conflict of interest, and probably ethically questionable, right?”
“Neither of those things ever separated Cueball from his badge.”
“Everyone knows he’s fat and stupid, and every village needs its idiot, so Wallac
e is ours. But you? You’ve got baggage, and superiors who fucking hate you, man. Going up there was probably not that smart.”
“Yeah, well.” Ryker lifted his coffee cup to his lips.
“You get laid?”
Ryker almost spit his coffee all over Chee Wei. “What?”
“I said, did you get laid? Was Valerie Lin there? Did your hormones assault her?”
Ryker sputtered for a moment, then made a face and shook his head. “Kid, you’re some piece of work.” He dropped his eyes back to the papers, hoping that Chee Wei wasn’t that good of a detective yet.
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. I guess it’s just not your time of the year yet. Don’t worry though, I hear rutting season is right around the corner. In, like, New Zealand.” Chee Wei caught the look of the woman seated at the next table. “Eh, sorry.”
“Do we know what this guy’s here for?” Ryker asked.
“What guy?”
“This guy. The guy I saw last night.”
“Why didn’t you ask him last night when you saw him?”
“Because we weren’t exactly formally introduced?”
“Oh. Well, I don’t know. I guess I can try and find that out, though. But there’s something else I got to tell you. This is the crème de la crème, man. You interested?” Chee Wei wiggled his sparse eyebrows.
“Not at all.”
“Lin had two sons. Danny was the youngest. His eldest? Killed in Shanghai last month. Care to guess how he died?”
Ryker didn’t need to guess. He stared at Chee Wei for a long moment, too stunned to even speak. Then finally: “You mean to tell me this has happened to Lin before?”
Chee Wei nodded. “Totally weird shit, right?”
“A month ago, you say.”
Chee Wei went through the printouts and showed him another page. A younger, taller, more vital version of James Lin stared at him from the small picture on the paper. While he couldn’t reasonably ascertain these things from just a two-inch by two-inch picture printed out from an inkjet printer, he got the impression that Lin’s eldest son had been nothing like Lin Dan. This one had been serious. This one had been intelligent. This one had been studious. And more than likely, this one had been legitimately dangerous.
“Do we know the full circumstances behind this one’s murder? And what’s his name, anyway?”
“Lin Jong. John Lin here in the U.S. No, we don’t know the full circumstances, it’s still an active investigation in Shanghai, and the police have the information closed off. My cousin mentioned that it might not be real smart for him to start a fishing expedition that way, because he thinks the Ministry for Public Security is involved. The Chinese version of the FBI, only not so nice and not restricted by things like, you know, basic human rights.”
“So he can’t really help us any further. I got it.” Ryker tapped the tabletop for a moment, looking down at the photos before him. “Whatever’s been following Lin around is finally catching up to him. Both his sons, gone. That’s got to be a tough thing to deal with.” And the cunning bastard never even thought to tell us!
“So what do we do now?”
Ryker leaned back in his chair and looked out the windows that overlooked Polk Street. He tapped the tabletop again, an aimless patter. “Let’s go back to the stationhouse and review all this stuff. Then maybe take a ride up north and see what we can find out.”
CHAPTER 22
The video wasn’t as clear as it could have been, despite having been captured by state-of-the-art digital recording equipment employing sophisticated night vision imaging systems. But there it was, Baluyevsky taking in the view of San Francisco, totally unaware of the figure that slowly separated itself from the hedges to his right. While Baluyevsky’s body glowed in the darkness thanks to the night vision system’s ability to read infrared imagery and therefore “see” the big Russian’s body heat, the figure stalking him was muted, not as distinct. She (and Manning knew that killer was a female, and had always known it since Lin had described what had happened to his sons) crept toward Baluyevsky like a tiger, slowly stalking across the wide swath of lawn that separated the two of them. Even shrouded by the darkness of night, Manning thought Baluyevsky should have sensed something, that his mortality clock was slowly winding down. And at the last moment, he did. The assassin had closed to within fifteen feet of him when he turned suddenly, already reaching for the weapon at his side.
His assailant leaped toward him and launched a barrage of strikes that Baluyevsky only started to block. Then, his left arm went limp, as did his right, though he kept his grip on the butt of his pistol. He lashed out with one trunk-like leg then, executing a surprisingly swift crescent kick that would have floored his attacker had it made contact. But she had anticipated such a response and ducked down. Baluyevsky’s leg sailed over her, and then she launched herself at him, stabbing upward with both hands.
Baluyevsky tottered for just a moment, then collapsed on his back. Bright blood squirted into the air. The night vision gear read it as white, so it showed up clearly on the video screen.
And then the killer relaxed. She bent over the body and verified the kill. Satisfied, she rose to her feet and slowly walked back the way she had come. There was no urgency to her gait. It was almost as if she was taking a leisurely stroll.
Manning watched the video twice. The attacker practiced an easy economy of force, despite being arguably outmatched by Baluyevsky in almost every way. The only chance she had—other than shooting him in the head from a safe distance—was to get close to him and work fast. And that was how it went down. Manning didn’t kid himself, he knew Baluyevsky was as deadly as any man could be, but in this instance stealth coupled with speed and precision had won out.
Is she better than I am in close quarters? he wondered. How much punishment can she take? Will one punch make her fold up? If I break her collarbone, will she still come after me?
If it had been me out there last night instead of Baluyevsky, would I be dead now?
Manning didn’t know the answers to these questions, but he had the nagging suspicion he soon would.
Nyby and another security man stood in the small room with him. Manning turned to them.
“Thanks for showing me this. Where did you take Baluyevsky’s body?”
Nyby looked at the other man, a broad-shouldered Chinese. “To the wine cellar,” he said simply.
“Take me to him. And get me some latex gloves.”
###
Surrounded by dozens of bottles of rare vintage wines, Manning donned the latex gloves Nyby had given him and knelt on the cold concrete floor to examine Baluyevsky’s body.
The corpse was stretched out on the cement floor and its clothing cut away. Manning went through the garments one by one, gingerly going through the pockets of his trousers—Baluyevsky had urinated when he died, and his pants were still damp. He extracted a thin wallet which held only two plastic cards, one American Express Gold charge card and one Wells Fargo ATM card. Neither card bore Baluyevsky’s name, but that of an alias. He carried no cash. Manning removed the pistol and found another one in an ankle holster, as well as a Spyderco Tenacious knife in a special pocket sewn to his dress shirt. The shirt was more red now than white. Baluyevsky carried a cell phone, but it was password-protected. Manning set that aside.
Finished with the clothes, Manning set about examining Baluyevsky’s body. He was a mix of fat and muscle, with the physique of a powerlifter. His chest and arms were particularly hirsute, but his legs were almost completely devoid of hair. Old wounds marked the corpse; dimpled scars left by bullets, longer, more livid scars where blades and shrapnel had had their way with Baluyevsky’s flesh. Manning ignored the older injuries and concentrated on the new ones.
There was some bruising around his shoulders, and on each of his biceps. Lividity had drained the blood from the bruises before they could darken substantially, but enough blood lingered beneath the surface tissue to give Manning some clues as to what had happened.
He asked for a ruler, then held it beneath the blotched skin to capture their dimensions. He had Nyby take photos of the measurements with the Nikon while he stayed out of the camera’s range. When he was finished, Manning examined the bruises more closely. It looked like Baluyevsky’s assailant had targeted both of his radial nerves, not just once, but twice—possibly necessary since Baluyevsky was quite large and had a goodly amount of tissue protecting the underlying structures, and his attacker was on the small side. Manning appreciated the attacker’s dexterity. While he had been taught to do the same thing when possible, he found that clipping the radial nerve track was a mixed proposition with an equally mixed success rate. But Baluyevsky’s attacker had done so with great precision, and then did it again just to ensure the big Russian’s arms had been neutralized.
A lot of skill behind this attack.
Manning moved on.
The blade that had likely ended Baluyevsky’s life had been long but thin, perhaps more scalpel than knife. Manning rocked Baluyevsky’s head from side to side, working against the stiffening muscles in his neck. He felt around the back of the dead Russian’s neck, and detected no real damage to the cervical vertebrae there. Death was caused by soft tissue damage, likely to the brain stem itself where it left the protective sheath of bone. Cut off from the brain, Baluyevsky’s body would have no choice but to die. Manning found the method of death interesting. While the Lin boys had been killed in a gruesome fashion, Baluyevsky hadn’t; if anything, his death was almost as gentle a send-off as possible, excepting a sniper’s bullet to the head. His suffering had been minimal, which likely meant the killer bore no particular malice toward the big Russian.
But still, his death was meant to send a clear message to Lin Yubo.
There is no security.
Manning rolled the corpse over but found nothing remarkable other than some curious scarring on Baluyevsky’s right buttock. He rolled the corpse onto its back and rose to his feet, stripping off the gloves as he did so.
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