China Fire, page 5
part #1 of Monaco Grace Series
Cambry cut right through the niceties. “Sit down, Alex. What the hell is going on with Grace in Beijing?”
“She called for embassy backup. They sent one of their agents—her Agency contact, Ron Estrada—to meet her at midnight at Tiananmen. They’re still looking into it, but Estrada’s dead, his driver and car is missing.” Bright patted at his tie, which was an almost neon red, but a damned expensive neon red. The contacts were still bothering him a bit, but some drops in his eyes seemed to help.
“So she’s been in Beijing less than twenty-four hours and the op’s already gone tits up.”
Bright met Cambry’s gaze. “I sent her to find out what happened to one of your NOCs. Within twenty-four hours she apparently got hold of something. Something that bites. And here’s an even better question, Bill. Who the hell was the driver and why is he missing?”
Livingston interrupted. “Gao Xinhui is a Chinese national on staff with the embassy. He was primarily used as a driver by Station members. I’ve been told they vetted him and trusted him—their word, not mine. I hope to God they don’t go around trusting everybody. We’re a bunch of spies, for God sakes. I’m having them go over his background again.”
Cambry’s eyes seemed to glow. “You think he’s a mole inside the embassy?”
“One of many, probably,” Bright suggested.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Livingston said. “But it—”
“If Monaco thinks Gao Xinhui is a mole, she’ll assume the entire embassy is blown. She won’t go back there. She won’t contact there. She’s in the wind.”
Cambry did that profile thing of his, swinging sideways in his chair to contemplate, apparently, his Ego Wall, communing with the president’s photograph. Bright wondered if Cambry had hopes for DCI, Secretary of State or maybe even the presidency itself. Cambry wasn’t a hardcore intelligence wonk the way Bright and Livingston were.
“As we discussed before,” Cambry said slowly, “I worry that Grace is a loose cannon.”
“And as we discussed before, I have complete faith in her ability to accomplish her mission.”
“At what cost?”
“She’s not one of your case officers, Bill. She’s a fixer.”
Cambry shifted back to them. “I had a meeting with Corrison this morning.”
Bright wondered what was on Cambry’s mind. Greg Corrison was the Deputy Secretary of State. Bright’s gaze flickered over to Livingston, who remained impassive. “Oh?” he said.
“You’re aware we’re working on a free trade agreement with Malaysia.”
“Yes.”
“We have a nearly $16 billion trade deficit with Malaysia.”
Bright didn’t like where this was going. “Your point, Bill?”
“Just thinking out loud.”
Just laying the groundwork for a fuckover, he thought. You want to jump to State, Bill? He decided to deflect the subject back to China. “I never got the full report on Peter Lee, Bill.”
Livingston said, “I’ll send it to you.”
Cambry’s expression was sharp. “I sent it to you.”
“You sent me the summaries. I want the raw reports. And there was no mention whatsoever about Dr. Alan Richter.”
“Richter?” Cambry seemed legitimately puzzled.
“Estrada’s notes to China Station say that he got Grace into Lee’s apartment via an American college professor who lived in the same building and had contact with Lee.”
“Ah. Yes. What about him?”
“Is that all he is?”
“Richter?” Cambry shrugged. “Just collateral. Anyway, I have a meeting with the DCI shortly, so that will be all.”
Out in the hallway, Livingston murmured, “Do you have anyone else in Beijing?”
Bright shook his head.
“I’ll send you a memo. There are an awful lot of trees here, Alex. Talk to you later.”
Bright returned to his subterranean office, thinking: There are an awful lot of trees here?
You can’t see the forest because of all the trees.
Monaco, with Richter nearly dead weight on her shoulder, stumbled down the tunnel. Their pursuers weren’t making an effort at stealth. Their voices were loud, harsh, talking in a mix of colloquial Cantonese and Mandarin with some dialect thrown in. Monaco and Richter plunged deeper into the tunnels. For a moment, the voices faded.
The tunnels grew colder and darker. Vibrations moved through the ground; Monaco could feel them in her feet. She wasn’t sure if it was from traffic far above them or perhaps one of the numerous construction projects tearing up the city.
Richter panted out, “Take…a…break?”
The voices had disappeared. For now. She gently let him down to lean against the wall. Their only illumination was from her flashlight.
Kneeling, she checked the bandage on his leg. It oozed blood, but had mostly clotted. That was a good thing, but Richter looked exhausted. His complexion resembled a fish belly. She laid her hand to his forehead. For a moment she felt a sense of déjà vu, a memory of her birth mother transposed onto a memory of her adopted mother. That most universal of maternal motions, hand on forehead, checking for a temperature. Richter felt clammy. She supposed that was marginally better than feverish, all things considered.
He said, “Are we lost?”
She smiled slightly. “We’re in Beijing, Richter.”
“You…mean…under Beijing.”
She shrugged. “We’re fine.”
“Don’t know where we are, do you?”
“Like I said, Beijing. If we come out a door in Nebraska, then yup, we were lost.”
“Like…your…attitude.”
“Good.”
But in truth, they were lost.
It was then that she heard the sound of footsteps.
“Let’s go, Richter.”
It was clearly harder for him to get up this time. It was a struggle and it took too long. By the time she got him moving, they could hear the voices and footsteps behind them. And worse, see the glow of their flashlights and electric torches. One of them shouted something, but in the echoing tunnel she couldn’t make it out.
It was followed by a gunshot.
“C’mon, Professor. Move!”
The tunnel sloped steeply downward. It forked left and right. It was a coin toss. Monaco thought she heard a rumbling sound from the left. She couldn’t identify it so she went right. Twenty yards in, the tunnel came to an abrupt ending. The tunnel had been sheered right through by what looked like a concrete wall. Monaco thought it was probably the foundation of a high-rise towering above them.
“Back, back, let’s go!”
They hurried to the fork. Glancing left, she saw the glow of flashlights—three of them—and in the glare, the figures of three men. More gunfire erupted. She returned fire, hoping to slow them down.
She led Richter into the left fork. As they raced forward, the rumbling sound magnified. The tunnel’s air grew humid, rank with the smell of mold.
More shouts from behind them. Turning, Monaco held up the Norinco handgun she’d taken off Gao Xinhui and fired twice. Richter, stumbling along half-conscious, jerked, suddenly alert.
“What’s that sound?”
The rumbling sound had grown louder and more distinct as they moved deeper into the tunnel. Monaco just shook her head. “Come on.”
In thirty more yards they found out.
The tunnel abruptly ended. In the glow of her flashlight Monaco saw a curtain of water dropping past the tunnel. She thought it was some sort of water runoff from the sewer systems. All the rain hitting the city had to go somewhere. Beijing was dotted with lakes—Kunming, Yuyan, Lianhua, to name a few—as well as the Jinhe River and irrigation canals. She didn’t know if this waterfall was intentional or part of a broken sewer or waterline.
It didn’t matter. They were trapped.
In Cantonese, a guttural voice behind them shouted, “Hands on your heads.”
Over the roar of the water Monaco heard the unexpected sound of Richter’s laughter. She stared at him. He shook his head. “Fuckin’ China. I hate this country.” He looked at her and smiled. “’The Fugitive’ or “Butch Cassidy’?”
“Richter—”
He gripped her arm with sudden strength and launched them both out into the waterfall.
Monaco didn’t think the fall lasted that long. The drop was maybe twenty feet. They hit the water hard. There was no light. She lost contact with Richter. Struggling upward for air, she was caught by a fast-flowing current that sent her tumbling like rocks in a landslide.
The flashlight was gone.
The gun was gone.
Richter was gone.
In total, inky blackness, Monaco struggled to get to air. Part of her instincts told her to struggle against the current. The other part, the one that had taken white water rafting trips with her parents, told her to hold her breath and go with the flow.
Protecting her head, she held her breath.
Within seconds she popped to the surface. She had just enough time to snatch some air before the current slammed her against a concrete wall. Whatever tunnel she was in had made a hard right. The water had grown foul, the odor suffocating. Rain runoff must be mixed with sewage runoff, she thought.
She scrabbled at the concrete, heart racing, trying to gain purchase, but to no avail. She thought she heard a cry or a shout. “Richter!” she shouted, but it went unheard as the current dragged her under and down.
Her feet slid along a slimy, moss-covered bottom. Levering her legs, she pushed up. Again, her head bobbed out of the water and she sucked in air. She had just a moment to blink water from her eyes. She thought she saw light—maybe only a patch of gray in the black—in the direction they were heading. Something grabbed her and spun her around.
Monaco let out a gasp as she broke upward again. Richter shouted, “Are…you…”
That was the last thing she heard as they were swept forward and down. Suddenly she found herself falling. Again, she flailed into a deep pool of water. Struggling to the surface, she saw lights.
It was still night and it was raining, but Beijing’s skyline was all around her, lit up like a billion jewels. Richter popped to the surface about ten feet away.
He sputtered, “As a medical professional of sorts, I can’t even begin to tell you how nasty and dangerous this water is.”
“But we’re alive.”
“Small consolation.”
They swam to shore.
Monaco Grace’s mother had been a junkie and prostitute in Washington, D.C. Monaco didn’t have very many memories of her mother. The memories she did have ranged from a few warm, mother-daughter moments fixing dinner in the one-bedroom apartment they lived in, to uglier, scarier memories of her mother nearly comatose from the heroin she was addicted to and her long disappearances—feelings of abandonment, loneliness and fear.
When Monaco was seven years old her mother died of an overdose in a Washington, D.C. alleyway. It was three days before the police found and identified her mother and another ten days before they realized she had a daughter who was missing. She had lived on breakfast cereal and potato chips until the police and social workers arrived.
Monaco spent the next three years bouncing from one bad foster home situation to the next. She was a problem child, to be sure, but her mixed heritage caused a fair number of problems in the homes she was left in. She ran away from most of them, preferring life on the streets, picking pockets and stealing. She was always picked up and returned to the foster system.
Three days before her tenth birthday she was adopted by Gerald Grace and his wife, Lydia. Gerald was a Colonel in the army, stationed at the Pentagon. It would be many years before Monaco would realize her adopted father worked in Military Intelligence. Lydia Grace’s maiden name had been Lydia Xhang, born in China, moved to Taiwan as a teenager, and immigrated to the United States just before she went to college. Lydia Xhang was a professor of Asian languages at the American University.
Although Monaco had rebelled and run away repeatedly, the Graces acted very much as if they expected that. It had taken a few years, but she had grown to love them. She had stopped running away. She had, for the most part, felt safe.
It was much later that she discovered that her mother also sometimes consulted with the Central Intelligence Agency as a linguist and expert on China and Asia.
Part of her childhood had been spent traveling throughout Asia—China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, as well as numerous other part of the world. Before joining the CIA she had taken several years to live, work and travel in Asia.
She had made many friends.
It was time, she thought, to call on one of them.
It was clear to Monaco that Richter’s wound was serious enough to require medical attention. They dragged themselves up the bank of what Monaco was pretty certain was the Grand Canal. The world’s largest manmade canal, the Beijing-Hanzhou Grand Canal had begun its life in 486 B.C. It now ran in various forms, connecting up various rivers and watersheds, all the way south to Hangzou and the East China Sea. If this was really the Grand Canal, they were probably in Tongzhou, essentially a suburb of Beijing, although Beijing didn’t really have suburbs—it had urban sprawl.
The place they had emptied out appeared largely industrial, the wharves on the far side dominated by factories. The side of the canal they had found themselves on was a green space that moved uphill to a cement wall. Beyond were rows and rows of high-rise apartment buildings. Tongzhou was something of a sleeper community, where Beijing professionals lived.
She looked at Richter, who lay on the grass, an arm over his face. “Richter, are you up to moving.”
“Sure,” he said, not budging. “Where are we going?”
“We’re going to steal a car.”
He sat up slowly. “Stage three of My China Adventure. Grand Theft Auto. Sounds good. Haven’t done that yet today.”
“Still got the flash drive?”
He held it up, thought about it a moment, and handed it to her. “It’s yours. All yours.”
She pocketed it. “Let’s go steal some wheels.”
It wasn’t hard finding a car in this part of the city and since it was 4:45 in the morning, traffic was relatively light. Beijing had a population of fourteen million, so rush hour lasted all day, but this early it was sparse. Monaco noted that Richter was almost out on his feet. She chose one of the first cars they found, a rusty blue Fiat. She’d managed to keep her knife. No guns, no flashlight, no Blackberry, a wad of soggy money she’d jammed into a pocket, and a knife. The door was locked, but she jimmied it with the blade, broke apart the steering column and within seconds the engine was running. Richter collapsed into the passenger seat and said, “You medical sales people sure have a wide array of skills.”
“Yes, we’re well trained.”
But he didn’t hear her. He’d passed out.
Dashanzi was an old factory district in Beijing that had been converted to lofts and art galleries and studios. The 798 Art Space had been a Russian-built military factory, now decommissioned, and it hosted hundreds of galleries. Monaco’s friend lived and worked nearby. Monaco parked the Fiat in an alley, wiped down every surface, and got Richter moving. He seemed more alert now, but it was obvious his leg had stiffened while he slept. She had to support his weight more and more.
He looked around them in the early morning gloom and said, “Dashanzi?”
“Yes.”
“Let me guess, we’re going to a gallery opening.”
“An old friend.”
He was quiet as they limped and shuffled along the dark streets. He said, “Is this old friend going to like two American outlaws knocking on his door?”
“Her. I think it’ll be fine.”
“Um. Okay. Whatever.”
Monaco stopped at a very old building, two stories tall, long and black, really ugly, brick and concrete. Glancing back and forth on the street, Monaco steeled herself before pounding on the door. She waited, and pounded some more.
A moment later the steel door swung open and a middle-aged Chinese woman stood in the doorway. Despite it being almost six in the morning, she appeared wide awake. She was short, maybe five-feet-tall, her black hair streaked with gray and worn straight to her shoulders. Her blue jeans were baggy, her feet were bare, and she wore a men’s denim shirt that was spattered with paint.
Her gaze met Monaco’s and her expression didn’t change. “Come in, Monaco. It’s been a long time.”
Gu Lin helped Monaco get Richter undressed and into the shower. He was barely conscious. Sighing, Monaco stripped out of her own clothes and got in with him, rinsing and washing him. The stench of the sewer system floated around them both. He clung to the showerhead and said nothing. Under other circumstances it might have been erotic, but at the moment it was just tiring.
Drying him off, she led him to a bed, where he collapsed and promptly fell asleep. Gu Lin provided Monaco with alcohol, gauze, clean cloth and a topical antibiotic. The wound started to bleed again and Monaco didn’t think a bandage was going to solve the problem.
Finally, dressed in a too-tight pair of Gu Lin’s jeans and a white T-shirt, Monaco said, “I need to go out for a bit and get some things.”
Gu Lin, who had been making green tea, handed her a cup of the steaming beverage. “Perhaps I can go for you.”
“I don’t think so,” Monaco said with a shake of her head. “But thank you.”
Gu Lin’s smile was faint. “How is your mother?”
“Fine.”
“You have taken after your father.”
“I’m adopted. You know that.”
Gu Lin’s eyes twinkled. “Yes. I know that. Do you need money?”
“Mine is soaked. I can replace it. But yes, thank you.”
Gu Lin disappeared into her loft. Monaco studied Gu Lin’s work-in-progress. Her art had changed, she thought. She was still working on huge canvases, twenty feet by fifteen feet. But before, Gu Lin had worked in hyperrealism, street scenes so detailed that they looked like you could walk right into them. Now the edges had blurred, they were more metaphorical, impressionistic, the colors lighter, but seeping into each other. She sipped her tea, wondering about the change.
