Chasing the Monkey King

by D. C. Alexander

“Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Upon their return to the hotel, Severin had Zhang inquire as to whether the thermostat in his room had been repaired, and was assured by the desk staff that it had. Resuming their positions in the dining room, Severin insisted they drink something other than Baijiu. “They have beer,” Zhang said.

  “Let’s stick with spirits.”

  “The only other spirit they have is cognac.”

  “Whatever. Fine.”

  As they each sipped their first glass, they simultaneously pulled faces and looked at each other with disgusted surprise.

  “This is not cognac,” Severin said.

  “No.”

  “Let me see that bottle.” Zhang handed it to him. “This is made in Georgia. The country, not the state. Former Soviet republic. The French would shit a collective brick if they knew the Georgians were calling this stuff cognac.”

  “Back to Baijiu?” Zhang asked.

  “Back to Baijiu. But let’s mix it with something.”

  “Coke?”

  “How about beer?”

  “We’ll have wicked hangovers.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  Zhang went and got them a bottle of Baijiu and a couple of large, cold Qingdao beers from one of the servers.

  “Now then, what do you make of these?” Severin asked as he handed Zhang the documents he’d stolen from the factory.

  “Invoices. Shipping documents. For dog food.”

  “I can see that. What about the Chinese characters in the header? I found hundreds of sacks of dog food in the factory with the same characters on the label. Does it give the name of the company? Zhucheng Pet Food Products Company, right?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Ningbo Animal Feed Company Limited.”

  “Ning what?”

  “Ningbo. It’s a city. That’s odd.”

  “Odd? Why?” Severin asked, holding his hands to his head as if he were having a migraine.

  “The name of the company. And the Ningbo business address here in the header. I mean, Ningbo is hundreds of miles from here. It’s well south of Shanghai, near the coast. Why would their documents and products be all the way up here?”

  “The labels they were putting on the sacks of dog food said Zhucheng. New labels that were going over old Ningbo labels that were in Chinese.”

  “Trying to make it look like the dogfood was made by Zhucheng instead of Ningbo?”

  “I guess.”

  They both sat quietly pondering the significance. Finally, Severin huffed, slapped his hands on the table, then poured them each large servings of Baijiu. “This stinks. We’re never going to get that $50,000.” Severin turned up his glass, dumping the Baijiu down his throat.

  “You don’t think they’ll still pay us?”

  “For telling them we found a big pile of dog food where YSP was supposed to have been?”

  “There has to be more to this.”

  “Sure there’s more to it. But we don’t have anywhere else to go for answers.”

  “What about down to Ningbo? There’s a business address on these invoices.”

  “We won’t find anything there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if it isn’t a legitimate company, they won’t have a legitimate facility there. We’ll find another empty warehouse of another long-vanished, fly-by-night outfit like YSP. If it is a legitimate company, then it seems they’ve recently relocated from Ningbo to here.”

  “Maybe they’ll still have an actual office in Ningbo.”

  “Even if they do, we have no reason to think they have anything to do with YSP and aren’t simply the next tenant of the building we just burgled. There’s always a chance, I suppose. We could check it as a last resort. But it’s probably another red herring.”

  “What about busting into that safe you found?”

  “And how do propose to do that, Butch Cassidy? With dynamite? It’s a tiny wall safe. Even if we could open it, what do you think we’re going to find in there? The YSP CEO’s secret personal diary saying here’s what I did with the bodies? Anyway, assuming YSP was a front, a fake company, then they would have cleaned everything out of there a long time ago.”

  “Maybe YSP was a real company.”

  “If they were, then they went out of business. Either way, their stuff would have been removed before the dog food company took over the building.”

  “If there’s nothing there worth hiding, why did five goons show up to drive us off?”

  “They’re probably just security toughs, paid to keep thieves out of all these little factories and storage yards.”

  “Their cars were black. They could have been official.”

  “If they were official, it wouldn’t have gone down like that. Plus, since it’s obvious we’re foreigners, they’d have known to check the hotel. And even if there is more to it, even if they’re being dispatched by some evil overlord who wants to keep people away so that they can’t discover that it isn’t really a sorghum factory, it still doesn’t get us anywhere, does it? It doesn’t change the fact that there was nothing there.”

  “We’re at a dead end then.”

  “So it would seem.”

  *****

  They drank and drank, Zhang getting silly, Severin getting gloomy.

  “Let’s stop,” Zhang half slurred. “Or I’ll end up puking all over myself in bed.”

  “You know something, Wallace?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have shit.”

  “For brains? I beg to differ, sir.”

  “No, seriously. Look at it. I’m rocketing toward middle age. Our contemporaries have homes, families, stable lives. I’m up to my ass in debt, living paycheck to paycheck. I have a piece of junk old car that barely runs. I live in a rat-hole apartment that overlooks Interstate 5. I have no retirement account. No wife. No girlfriend. No friends, really.”

  “Would you feel better if I gave you an uppercut to the jaw?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t be such a mope. It’s a choice, you know.”

  “A choice?”

  “You choose to wallow in self-pity. You choose to be unhappy.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You tell me.”

  Severin stared at him for a moment, his eyes glassy. “I’m going to bed,” he said, finally.

  “That’s a great idea. Oh, wait.” Zhang pulled a small brown bottle from his pants pocket. Its colorful label bore the face of an old Chinese man surrounded by Chinese writing. “Here, take this before you go to bed.”

  “What is it?”

  “Chinese medicine. I got it at a shop down the street. It will help keep you from feeling hung over.”

  As they strode to the elevator, Severin noticed a Chinese man sitting on a small black vinyl sofa opposite the adjacent stairwell. He seemed to be watching them. Was it because of the novelty of seeing a Caucasian in Yinzhen? Or were his interests more sinister? If he were a professional, Severin rationalized, he wouldn’t be staring straight at them. In fact, he probably wouldn’t be sitting there in plain view at all. Still, it worried him.

  “Wallace,” Severin said once the elevator doors closed. “Slide your desk in front of the door of your hotel room tonight, alright?”

  “You’re being paranoid again. Nobody followed us from D.C. to Shanghai, and nobody followed us from Shanghai to here.”

  “There’s no harm. Just do it.”

  “You just told me there was nothing official about our goon encounter at the factory.”

  “It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with that. And anyway, official or not, somebody isn’t happy about our being here.”

  “I think you need an enema.”

  *****

  That night, Severin woke with a jolt to the sensation that he hadn’t been breathing. His room was hotter than ever. He was in the grips of yet another episode. But this one
was the worst yet. Checking his pulse, he found that it was up near 160 beats per minute and that the rhythm was irregular—his heart skipping numerous beats. This is really it. My heart is giving out. I’m dying.

  With alcohol spins giving him the feeling that he was sinking into the mattress, he jumped from bed. But as soon as he was vertical, he was overcome with nausea. Running to the bathroom, he knelt on the floor in front of the toilet, grabbed hold of the urine stained rim, and vomited. For a long time he knelt there dizzy, the odors of bile and dried pee mingling in his nostrils, his heart pounding, his abdomen convulsing as he repeatedly retched or dry heaved. Finally, he curled up in the fetal position on the relatively cool tile floor next to the toilet. I’m dying.

  He lay there frightened, monitoring his heartbeat, listening to his breathing, fighting to stay awake, to stay aware. At last, more than an hour later, his heart seemed to return to normal. And with his mortal terror now paired with a depressing certainty that he’d never get the $50,000 from Thorvaldsson, utter exhaustion claimed him and he fell asleep in his underwear beside the toilet.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The next morning, a thoroughly dehydrated Severin woke to a terrible headache, sour stomach, sticky eyes, and tacky tongue—his room still 85 degrees. He rose from the floor at the base of the toilet and staggered back into his bedroom looking for a bottle of water. Both his bottles were empty. At least he was alive. A line from Hamlet forced its unwelcome way into his aching head. “What should such fellows as I do crawling between Earth and heaven?” He turned on his phone and went back to the bathroom to splash water on his face, brush his teeth, and put on clothes. By the time he came back to his bed and picked the phone up off the nightstand, he could see that he had a text message from Zhang from the previous night. Zhang’s mysterious computer genius/hacker buddy had gotten back to them about the photo Keen had texted to Andrew Bergman. Apparently, the photo had exceptionally large dimensions indicating that Keen had taken it using an extremely powerful digital camera that he must have later connected to his smart phone so that he could upload and send the photo. Zhang’s friend had used a simple photo-editing software package to shrink the image down to a size that enabled viewing on a normal-size computer, tablet, or smart-phone screen so that it wasn’t simply a black-and-white blob encompassing one small part of what was, in fact, an extremely large and extremely high-resolution image. The hacker’s conclusion, after doing a bit of follow-up research and finding some artists renditions of the expected hull shape and conning tower position, was that the photo was of a brand new type of Chinese ballistic missile submarine.

  Holy shit.

  The first of its class, the new sub was called Type 096 by the Chinese, or Tang Class by NATO. It was thought to be awaiting initial sea trials at the large navy base just north of the port of Qingdao. To the great consternation of other Pacific Rim nations, including the United States, the Type 096 was believed to carry 12 more missile tubes than the generation of missile sub preceding it.

  Severin sprang from his bed and began pulling the desk away from his hotel room door as implications spun through his head. Was Keen a spy? Was Kristin? Was their employment with the Commerce Department just cover? A way for them to get into China? Perhaps they were planning to go to Bali to be debriefed by their Western Pacific regional intelligence handler before heading home to D.C. But if that were the case, Keen wouldn’t have had his Bali flight itinerary sent to his easily-hacked personal email account, would he? It made no apparent sense. Regardless, whatever their intent, the only thing Severin was reasonably sure of was that Powell and Keen never made it to Bali. Maybe they were in a Chinese prison. Maybe the MSS has already killed them.

  It was still possible that they’d been killed by YSP company goons, by Wesley, or in a random robbery. Regardless, he and Zhang were quite possibly in grave danger, as it seemed they might have unwittingly stumbled into a blown U.S. spying operation. Had Keen’s seemingly comical need to urinate on the coast road from the Qingdao Brewery to Laoshan Mountain that Holloman told them about actually been a trick—a ruse to get himself a chance to climb over a knoll where he could photograph this new submarine at its base for the CIA, DIA, or whoever the hell? Maybe the shooting death of Tyreesha Harris at the Anacostia Metro station was part of a cover up. Maybe Severin’s sense that he and Wallace were under surveillance—in D.C. and in China—was all because of this. Were they being watched now? Did the Chinese think he and Wallace were spies too? If so, why hadn’t they been arrested?

  As he threw his door open, he was surprised to see Zhang’s open as well. The frame of Zhang’s door was all scratched and dented up, as though someone had been using it for leverage, trying to pop the door open with a makeshift pry bar. Inside the room, he caught a glimpse of a bloody, badly beaten body just as med techs were draping a blanket over it as it lay on a gurney flanked by police.

  No!

  Afraid to acknowledge that he was with Zhang until he had a better idea of what was going on, Severin took one step backward into his room, closed the door, and leaned against the wall, his mind overwhelmed by horror. Before he could take a breath, his cell phone rang. The call was coming from Zhang’s phone. This was it. His time had come. It would be the leader of the Chinese counterintelligence team that had been tracking them, calling to tell him it would be easier for him if he surrendered without a fuss. Imploring him not to resist, as Zhang presumably had, and end up beaten until his head was an unrecognizable, shapeless, bloody pulp. Despite his fear, despite his rising nausea, he somehow managed to answer the call.

  “Good morning sunshine.” It sounded like Zhang. “Hello?”

  “Wall … .”

  “What? Were you still asleep, you alcoholic bum? Did you see my text message?”

  “Wallace.”

  “Good guess. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Oh, sorry. I couldn’t sleep with the street noise, so I had them move me to a room overlooking the courtyard after you sacked out last night. Room 204.”

  “Stay where you are.”

  “Why? What’s going—”

  Severin hung up. As he was slipping out of his own room, taking care to make his move when the attention of the police, medical personnel, and gawkers in the hallway was directed away from him, he noticed the same pry bar marks on his own door frame. He was certain they hadn’t been there last night. Someone had tried to get in, but couldn’t with the desk wedged up against the other side of the door.

  Half a minute later, he was in Zhang’s room, explaining what he’d seen.

  “You think that was supposed to be me, but they gave my old room to somebody else who checked in last night? Somebody who was mistaken for me in the dark?” Zhang asked.

  “I think someone came for both of us last night.”

  “The goons from the factory?”

  “Or poorly trained MMS agents. Have you considered the implications of the submarine photo from Keen’s phone?”

  “You don’t think Keen just thought it was something cool to take a picture of when he saw it moored in the harbor as he was taking his beer piss?”

  “An unusually high-res photo?”

  “But why would anyone send him? Can’t satellites photograph all that stuff these days?”

  “From overhead, sure. But from the side? At high-res? I don’t know.”

  Zhang looked astonished. “If Keen was a spy, would he really have just sent the picture in an unencrypted text message?”

  “Maybe the circumstances dictated the method. Maybe he knew he was being pursued, knew they were closing in, and only had once chance. Maybe in his haste he sent it to the wrong contact number. How should I know?”

  “Do they really still send people in on the ground to take pictures?”

  “Do you really want to stick around to find out? Do you know what they do to suspected spies in this country?”

  “I guess, uh, no and no.”

  �
�Let’s go.”

  “Give me a minute to pack.”

  “Leave it. Just grab your passport and the keys to the cab.”

  “Wouldn’t our passports be compromised?”

  “We can always sell them for the cash we may need to get smuggled out of the country. And there’s still a chance my espionage theory is off target. At any rate, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s go.”

  They slipped out of Zhang’s room, down the dim and empty hallway, and into a fire escape stairwell.

  “Do you know how to hotwire a car?” Severin asked as they flew down the stairs.

  “Why would I know how to hotwire a car?”

  “I don’t know. Because you’re an Asian guy who went to Federal Way High School?”

  “Nice. Aren’t you law enforcement types supposed to know how to do all that sort of stuff?”

  “Hotwiring was an elective course at the academy. I took a second semester of racial profiling instead.”

  They popped out a back door of the hotel and out into the still pouring rain. “I’m sure they’ve figured out the cab is ours. It may even have a tracking device on it. But since you can’t hotwire a car, it’s our only option for now. Hopefully we can slip away unnoticed. We’ll ditch it as soon as we can. Maybe once we get to a bigger city—Zhucheng, or even Qingdao—we can lose ourselves in the crowd. You drive. You’re less conspicuous.”

  “What about the cabbie?”

  “Never mind about the cabbie. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Sneaking along the outer wall of the hotel, they made their way toward the back end of the grounds until they could peek around a corner to observe the parking area. There didn’t appear to be anyone around—though it was hard to tell because heavy rain was pouring down so hard that it largely obscured their view of whomever might be inside nearby cars. Crouching between two rows of cars, they ran for the cab, flung open the doors, and jumped in. Driving as fast as they could go without attracting attention to themselves, they were soon out of the parking lot and headed down the street away from the center of town. Severin, mindful of how he stood out in a rural corner of China that rarely saw westerners, crouched as low he could while still being able to peek out the rear window—which he constantly did, watching for followers.