Intrusion (A Chris Bruen Novel Book 2)

by Reece Hirsch

  About ten minutes in, he was tempted to open the door to see if the driver was still there. Perhaps it was possible to run, but he finally decided that would be unwise. The driver would probably be watching the container until it was loaded on the ship.

  He saw only one way out of his situation, and it wasn’t a good one. But what other choice did he have? As he went through it again in his mind, he realized that it wouldn’t do to keep carrying Li Owyang’s laptop. He was going to need to remove the hard drive.

  Fortunately, Chris carried the tools of his trade with him. He removed a set of small screwdrivers from his computer bag and went to work unfastening the bottom panel of the laptop to get at the hard drive. He quickly had two of the four screws out.

  Outside, he heard the ignition of the crane turning over, then a metallic creaking sound that grew into a rumble. Moments later the container lurched upward into the sky, rocking sickeningly from side to side like a Tilt-A-Whirl. Chris was thrown and rolled on the floor until he steadied himself by lying spread-eagled. The laptop skidded across the floor of the container, and Chris scrambled after it. At least there weren’t any unsecured crates inside the container or he probably would have been crushed.

  He lunged and got his hands on the laptop. The container swung on a horizontal axis as it was hauled over the water to the ship. Chris tried to roll with the motion, holding the laptop aloft to protect it from being bashed against the wall. It was impossible to remove the tiny screws on the bottom of the laptop while the container was pitching and rocking.

  The container plunged precipitously, until it landed on the deck with a bone-rattling, metal-on-metal jolt. At first Chris was so stunned by the impact that he wasn’t sure if he’d retained his grip on the laptop. Now his window of opportunity was closing fast. If the captain was standing on the deck waiting to slap a padlock on the door, then he was trapped, and there was nothing to be done.

  Chris hurried to remove the two remaining screws, struggling to calm himself and keep his hands steady for the delicate work. The last tiny screw came loose, and he popped out the hard drive. He sealed the drive in a Ziploc plastic bag and put it inside the front of his shirt.

  Chris opened the door a few inches and looked out on the deck of the ship, an open, rust-red expanse dotted with the metal twistlock spikes used to secure the containers to the deck. There were no crew members in sight, although the outline of a figure could be discerned in the darkened windows of the bridge tower, which rose from the opposite end of the ship.

  He pushed opened the door of the container and stepped out onto the deck. There was no time for hesitation now.

  Chris shut the door of the container and walked quickly across the deck to the railing. He threw the laptop and bag over the side of the ship and watched as they disappeared into Xiamen harbor. Chris’s stomach clenched as he gazed down at the choppy, gray swells, but that didn’t stop him from climbing over the railing and jumping feetfirst.

  16

  Stepping off the deck of the Jupiter was like jumping off the roof of a four-story building, and the impact knocked the air out of Chris’s lungs when he hit the water. Beneath the surface of Xiamen harbor, he continued his flailing plunge. When his downward momentum slowed, he looked up, saltwater stinging his eyes, to see the sun reduced to a distant glimmer.

  His shoes felt like lead weights now, and he wished he had removed them before jumping. There was no time to attempt that now. As it was, he wasn’t sure he had enough breath to reach the air.

  Chris began swimming, kicking madly. The sun didn’t seem to be getting any closer. His cracked rib made every stroke painful.

  For a few endless moments, his mind was blank as he struggled upward against the water, which fought and pulled at him like a human opponent. Finally, he burst into the air, filling his lungs and inhaling a fair amount of petroleum-laced saltwater in the process. He coughed, sputtered, and retched as he tried to keep his head above the choppy waves.

  When he had recovered his bearings, Chris saw that he was about a hundred yards off the bow of the Jupiter. Any crew member who happened to be looking in his direction could have seen him, but he saw no one at the railings.

  He confirmed that the plastic baggie containing Owyang’s hard drive remained inside his shirt, then began paddling away from the Jupiter and back to the docks. His path led him alongside the endless, gray hulk of another container ship. With his clothes and shoes weighing him down and his injuries restricting his motions, Chris’s swimming strokes had grown wild and not very effective. He swallowed more saltwater and coughed it up.

  A life preserver splashed next to him, and he grabbed on to it. Then a rope ladder uncoiled beside him. Chris looked around frantically for other options and found none. This was no time to question what lay on the other end of the ladder. He gripped it and began slowly and painfully pulling himself out of the water and up the side of the ship.

  When Chris reached the railing, hands reached out to grab him. He was hauled aboard, dripping, and laid out on the deck like the day’s catch.

  A half-dozen crew members crowded around to stare at him, probably trying to tell if he was crazy, injured, or both. Then the oldest of them—a small, wiry man in a dirty tank top—began shouting at him in a language he did not understand. He seemed indignant at Chris’s apparent stupidity and the introduction of that stupidity to his ship. The man was clearly the captain.

  Chris sat up and motioned that he did not understand. In Mandarin, he asked, “Do any of you speak English or Mandarin?”

  A young crew member, who looked to be about eighteen, said, “I speak Mandarin.”

  “Tell your captain that I would like to speak with him in private—with you to translate.”

  The captain listened to the request and after a moment nodded. Then he barked a few sharp commands that sent the crew back to their tasks.

  The captain and the boy led him to the captain’s quarters in the tower, which was little more than a map-strewn cubicle.

  As soon as the door was shut, the captain said something short and sharp.

  “He says, ‘Speak,’ ” the boy said.

  “Yes, I got that,” Chris said.

  Chris told the captain that he was an American, who needed to get out of China by any means necessary.

  The captain spoke and the boy translated. “Are the police after you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Something that the government didn’t like,” Chris said, making a calculated gamble.

  “He says the government doesn’t like a lot of things.”

  Chris couldn’t be certain, but he thought that the twist to the captain’s lips might have been his version of a smile.

  “That is very true.”

  The captain studied him, then said something, a fairly long sentence for him.

  The boy continued, channeling the old man and unconsciously mimicking his laconic tone. “I don’t want to know who you are or what you’ve done, but I’m going to let you stay on board if you want to go to Thailand.”

  “Thailand is fine. Tell him, ‘Thank you.’ ”

  The boy passed that along, and the captain shrugged in acknowledgment.

  “And you’re going to have to keep out of sight. There’s a cot in one of the storage compartments, and you can stay there. Anapan—that’s me—will bring you your meals.”

  “I appreciate the hospitality.”

  “He says you haven’t tried the food yet.” The captain turned to a newspaper that was spread across his small desk, signaling that their audience was concluded.

  Anapan led him down an iron staircase into the bowels of the ship and the most depressing, dirty, claustrophobic space that he had ever inhabited. As unappealing as it was, Chris was so exhausted that he knew he would sleep as soundly here as he would on four-hundred-thread-cou
nt Egyptian cotton sheets at the Ritz-Carlton. But before he could pass out on his bunk, he needed to contact Zoey, who was probably worrying about him.

  He had Anapan show him to a computer with Internet in a closet-size room that was available to the crew. Anapan referred to it as the “porn booth.” As soon as he accessed the secure site, he received an instant response from Zoey.

  ZOEY: Are you okay? What happened?

  CHRIS: I got a bad vibe from my driver and jumped ship. I didn’t trust him.

  ZOEY: I guess your instincts were correct.

  CHRIS: Why do you say that?

  ZOEY: Because Song and Shao are in custody.

  Chris found it hard to process the information. He had just left them that morning, and they had risked so much to help him escape.

  ZOEY: Are you there? Are you okay?

  CHRIS: Where are they being held? And what are the charges?

  ZOEY: We don’t have details yet. We may never know.

  CHRIS: Were they injured?

  ZOEY: Someone on the street saw them being taken away outside Shao’s apartment by PLA soldiers. Their heads were bloody but otherwise they were okay. We think the driver must have given you up.

  CHRIS: I owe them my life. We need to do something to get them out.

  ZOEY: Where are you? Are you safe?

  CHRIS: I’m on a container ship bound for Thailand. I think I’m safe.

  Chris proceeded to provide the details of his destination in the Bangkok Port aboard the Thailand Star.

  ZOEY: We’ll have someone there to meet you when you arrive. It doesn’t seem so important now, but I know that Saperstein will kill me if I don’t ask—do you still have the laptop?

  CHRIS: No, but I’ve got the hard drive. If the evidence is there, we still have it.

  ZOEY: Then things may get interesting when you return.

  CHRIS: Don’t the Chinese have a curse, something about living in interesting times?

  ZOEY: Yeah, well, they say a lot of things. They should just shut up.

  Chris signed off, and almost as soon as he was back on his cot he plunged into a sleep so deep that he might have been drugged. As his eyelids grew heavy, he felt the forward motion of the ship cutting through the waves. The sense of momentum translated into his dreams, in which he was a bullet speeding to its destination.

  17

  Chris stood on the bow of the Thailand Star at sunset as it approached Bangkok Port, a cool wind in his face as the container ship sliced through the green waters of the Gulf of Thailand. The voyage from Xiamen to Bangkok had taken eight days. Chris had spent most of his time walking the ship’s long decks and communicating with Zoey through the secure site. He had gotten some rest, and his bones had begun to knit, but he still had no new information about the fates of Song and Shao.

  Chris had also had plenty of time to consider the driver’s betrayal during the long voyage. At first he didn’t understand why the driver had taken him to Xiamen at all. If he was working with the PLA, he could have pulled a gun on him at any time. Chris had reached the conclusion that the driver wasn’t a PLA operative, just a sympathizer who had decided on the fly that he would rather betray the dissidents than complete his mission. The driver was too cautious to risk a direct confrontation, so he had been waiting until Chris was safely locked into the container vessel before turning him in.

  The ship eased into the bar channel where the port was located on the left bank of the Chao Phraya River. In the distance, Chris could see the office towers of Bangkok, many of which favored a stair-step design that made it look like they’d had chunks carved out of them.

  The ship passed beneath gigantic yellow gantry cranes that stood like sentinels guarding the entrance to the busy port. One of the docked ships had a city bus sitting incongruously atop each of its containers. The port was a crawling anthill of activity, with trucks arriving and departing, and dock workers steadying bales of copper wire as they were lowered from the cranes. Chris examined the scene closely, watching for any sign that the PLA was there to greet him.

  He saw nothing that appeared out of the ordinary until he spotted a familiar face. Dez Teal, the executive VP of Zapper, was standing on the dock next to a black limousine. Chris never thought that the sight of Paul Saperstein’s corporate minion could elicit such happiness.

  Teal gave a little wave and a thumbs-up sign.

  The ship docked with a tectonic thump. As Chris waited for the gangplank to be lowered, he realized that the captain was standing beside him with his translator, Anapan. The captain had traded his customary greasy tank top for a garish short-sleeve silk shirt. Apparently, this was his shore-leave attire.

  “The captain has a question for you,” Anapan said.

  “Of course,” Chris said.

  The captain uttered a staccato sentence.

  “He wants to know if we—I’m not sure how to translate this—fucked them up.” Chris recognized Anapan’s translation problem. The Thai language probably had as many terms for sexual intercourse as the Eskimos have for snow.

  “Fucked up who?”

  “The Chinese.”

  “Yes,” Chris said. “I think we may have fucked them up good. Tell him, ‘Thank you.’ ”

  For the first time the captain’s weathered face cracked into a broad smile, and he said something to Anapan.

  “He says there’s no need to thank him for that. The pleasure is his.”

  Chris shook hands with the captain and Anapan and headed down the gangplank to Dez Teal, who was pacing impatiently.

  Dez rushed over to greet him as soon as he stepped onto the dock, pumping his hand. “Chris! It’s good to have you back. We really thought we’d lost you.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Dez,” Chris said, the words sounding strange to him.

  “Let’s get you out of here,” Dez said. “But first, you do have the materials with you, right?”

  Chris reached into the plastic shopping bag he was carrying and produced the plastic baggie containing the hard drive.

  “Excellent. Paul is very anxious to hear your story firsthand. We also want to get that hard drive to our forensic team.”

  “I could use a bed and a bath,” Chris said.

  “You can get both on the Gulfstream. Believe me, you won’t be roughing it from here on in.”

  They climbed into the limo and drove alongside the Chao Phraya. On the opposite bank of the river were the spires of the Buddhist temple Wat Arun, adorned with multicolored shards of porcelain.

  “Have you examined the contents of the hard drive?”

  “No, I would have messed up the forensics if I’d tried to do that outside the lab.” Chris didn’t want to talk about China, because it would lead to the story of the three men that he had killed. Chris gazed out the window at the temple across the river, its dome glowing in the sunset.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t it?” Dez said. “It’s called Wat Arun, the Temple of the Dawn, but this is actually the best time to see it.”

  Chris glanced at him as if to ask, Who made you a tour guide?

  Dez added, “I’ve been waiting for you to arrive for four days. Had a chance to do some sightseeing.”

  On the way to the airport, they crept through the congestion that surrounded Khao San Road, a pedestrian thoroughfare a block from the Chao Phraya that was a mecca for backpackers. The neighborhood was teeming with hostels, cheap restaurants, and vendors hawking tourist trinkets and skewers of street food.

  “Any more news about Song and Shao?”

  “We have a source who says they’re in a detention facility outside Beijing. That’s all we know so far.”

  “Is the State Department working on this?”

  “No, State doesn’t feel that they can reach out directly to the PRC, because they don’t want to acknowledge what you and Zapper were up to over there.”

&
nbsp; “Does that really matter at this point? The mission is over, and we’re going home.”

  “It matters to the State Department because the Chinese will think the mission was government sanctioned. And it certainly matters to Zapper. The press would have a field day if they knew about this little exploit. People know us as the search engine that they rely on every day. We’re not supposed to be engaging in covert ops abroad.”

  “You know, the press might think you were heroes for striking back against the Chinese.”

  “Perhaps that might be true if you hadn’t killed those three men in Shenzhen.” Dez grimaced as soon as he said it. “Sorry, that was insensitive of me.”

  “It’s okay,” Chris said. “It’s the truth.”

  “I want you to remember that everything you did in China is subject to attorney-client privilege. You cannot make any public statements. No attempts to draw media attention to Song and Shao.”

  Chris chose not to respond. If there were a way for him to help Song and Shao, then he’d do it, regardless of attorney-client privilege.

  Exhausted, Chris sank into the leather upholstery of the limo and stared at the tumultuous street life. Impossibly young backpackers in boy-girl pairings spun away from Khao San Road onto side streets like stray isotopes, still hoisting beers and vaguely dancing to a distant, pulsing dubstep beat. Chris tried to remember what it was like to be so young and unscarred.

  Dez may have continued speaking; Chris wasn’t sure. About a half hour later, the limo pulled onto the tarmac of a private airport in front of a massive Gulfstream jet. Dez and Chris boarded the plane and were greeted by the uniformed pilot, who nodded and said, “Whenever you’re ready, sir.”