A Time for War (7 page)

When she finished Jack asked, “Your father said you noticed something unusual?”

“It was out of character with everything else,” she said. “At first I thought he had come to try and extort money.”

“A protection racket,” Jack said.

“That's right. But when I told him I wouldn't get my father, that all I could do was sell him something—meaning groceries—he smiled. It was not an amused smile but something private, as though he knew something that I did not.”

Jack considered this. “You're sure he wasn't a cop checking to see if you were selling drugs?”

“The police looked at the surveillance video,” Johnny told him. “They said he wasn't one of their own.”

“Maybe he was a dealer,” Jack said. “He might've wanted
you
to sell for him.”

“He looked too wholesome for that kind of trade,” Maggie replied. “He didn't have the jewelry, he wasn't looking over his shoulder, he didn't have that dusty smell of a room with no windows.”

Maggie was referring to the labs where drugs were sorted, cooked, or packed. Jack knew exactly what she meant. Men and women naked so they couldn't steal drugs, powder from the talc used to cut cocaine or heroin clinging to their skin, dryness from dehumidifiers that kept moisture out of the packets of blow or smack or pot.

“He didn't look like he was from around here and he didn't
sound
like it, either,” Maggie said. “His English was very formal and it had no hint of mainland gutturals. This was a schooled, educated man.”

“A spy, recruiting?” Jack suggested. “That's how they do it. Guys come from the consulate, go out among transplants, look for people loyal to the homeland who might find a couple grand a week helpful. Maybe he hoped you would sell information.”

“He didn't try and talk to me, get to know me—”

“It was your father he wanted,” Jack reminded her. “They don't go after second generation, young people who have already assimilated.”

Father and daughter fell silent. They obviously hadn't considered that.

“Did you see any of the others? Did anyone see them?” Jack asked.

“No,” Maggie said. “I was ducked down and people in the street were looking at the speeding SUV. They couldn't describe the others.”

Jack wasn't sure that recruitment was the answer. A “missionary,” as consulate recruiters called themselves in the intelligence game, would not have tried to grab Maggie. He also wouldn't have had an SUV parked right in front of their store. He would have come downtown unobtrusively, made his rounds, talked to other merchants, come back some other time to talk to Johnny. Missionaries don't like to call attention to themselves.

Jack was out of ideas. “What do you think he wanted?” he asked Maggie. “You've obviously given this some thought.”

“Until you said that about the spies, my belief was that he wanted to buy the store,” Maggie said.

Jack looked at Johnny. “Is it for sale?”

“No.”

“Do you know if he ever talked to other shopkeepers?”

“The police canvassed the block,” Johnny said. “Apparently they came to see us.”

“How many merchants own their properties instead of renting?”

“I own and so does the takeout next door and the cell phone shop on the other side,” Johnny said. “I know the owners. The man didn't talk to them.”

Jack looked around. His eyes went from the worn, green-tile floor to the embossed, rustic copper panels of the vintage ceiling. “What do you have that someone would want?”

“Everything,” Johnny said.

“You lost me.”

“When Chinese seek something, they never want just that one thing,” he said. “It is like acupuncture. You put a needle in one spot, but it is really a larger wellness you are after.”

“Someone wouldn't just want to buy your business?”

“Why?” Johnny asked. “It is a lot of work for little reward. But if, for example, you wanted to tear down the block and build an office tower, what better way to start?”

“But why build an office tower here?” Jack asked. “There must be something else.”

The street was full of shops that were probably no better or worse an investment. A real estate deal didn't explain why Johnny had been targeted first, and the behavior of the intruder didn't fit with the typically smooth and stealthy tactics of developers and their lawyers. But no other explanation jumped out. If someone were just looking to launder money, the check-cashing business was better for that. Distributing drugs? There was the pharmacy, or the Asian movie rental store that catered to young people.

“Do you have a blueprint of the place? There was probably something attached to the contract when you bought it.”

“Those are filed with my attorney,” Johnny said. “What would that matter? And how would someone else see it?”

“Libraries, government offices—there's a lot of material available onsite and online,” Jack said. “As for why it would matter, we won't know until we have a look. You have the two-bedroom place upstairs and a small basement, as I recall?”

Johnny nodded.

“I'd like to look at both, if that's all right.”

“Of course,” Johnny said.

Maggie went to check out a customer while Johnny took Jack upstairs. They looked out the window. There was nothing in the line of sight that stood out, no obvious targets for potential terrorists like flight paths or a police station. It wasn't like the old days when someone needed a neighborhood place for a stakeout. That could be done from a car or even a laptop and a small sound amplifier from a park bench. They went downstairs. The cellar was unique for the street—there weren't a lot of basements in earthquake zones—but it was small and there was no back entrance. Johnny used the area for storage. Jack was a wine connoisseur and his impression was that it would make an adequate wine cellar but not much more.

Nothing jumped out at Jack. No motive even suggested itself. They went back to the grocery. Maggie was chatting with a young man who looked to be about thirty. He was well dressed and buying an orange juice.

“I'll check with the few friends I've got left in law enforcement,” Jack said, “see what they think. Are you going to be OK here?”

Johnny grinned. “We'll be fine.” He cocked his head toward the counter. “That's one of Maggie's martial arts school brothers. He stops by every afternoon. I'm sure that word will spread. They will make certain there are brothers and sisters coming in and out, walking by, available at the other end of the phone.”

“Nice,” Jack said. He used to have that kind of camaraderie at the GNT network. His staff, the other hosts, the news anchors and reporters. All he had now was his camera operator, Max. And she was freelance, only around when he needed her.

Johnny and Maggie thanked Jack and they agreed to be in touch as soon as anyone had any information to share. Even though Jack didn't boast the kind of clout or access he once did, Johnny seemed relieved to have connected with someone who knew what to look for and where to look for it.

Jack decided to walk for a while and started down Washington Street toward the Ferry Building. He loved the new marketplace of stores nestled within the brick-and-ceramic arches carefully restored to look like the 1898 originals. The preservation of history kept it from feeling like a mall, and the smells from the bakery, the cheese store, the coffee shop, reconnected him with the city as a whole. San Francisco was a permanent friend and companion to whom unconditional, unwavering love was given and returned. Every street held a memory, every corner the promise of something new. It made him smile when nothing else did. Like now.

Jack found a corner of the marketplace that gave him some privacy but still let him smell the coffee from the coffee shop. He made two phone calls. One was to FBI field director Carl Forsyth, whose very grudging trust Jack had gained after preventing the Golden Gate Bridge from becoming ground zero for a dirty bomb. He didn't mention the grocery in particular, just asked Forsyth if he had received any alerts regarding Chinatown or anyone who might have designs on businesses there, other than the usual thugs and punks. The answer was negative. Forsyth wasn't brusque with Jack; he just had nothing to give him.

The other call was to Detective Sam Jason of the SFPD. Jack had helped him back in 2009 when Jason, who was off duty, tried to apprehend a gang member for fare evasion at a near-deserted San Francisco Municipal Railway stop. The man told the officer he had a gun and tried to flee; Jason killed him with a single bullet to the spine. It turned out the man was unarmed. Jack found out that the dead man had been accused of rape six months earlier and might have participated in a holdup the year before that. His coverage encouraged a witness who had heard the victim say he had a weapon to come forward.

Jason looked up the report on Yu Market from the responding officers.

“They've got a photo of the Chinese guy from the grocery camera,” Jason said. “No match in any of our databases. They found the SUV abandoned on Marina Green Drive, rented with falsified documents. The lab's got it now.”

“Run-of-the-mill gangsters wouldn't bother with fake IDs,” Jack said.

“Not likely. And they were smart enough to leave it where there were no cameras. I'll let you know if forensics comes up with anything.”

Jack thanked him, hung up, and wandered out of the marketplace. Apparent outsiders, a singularly targeted location, and now forged papers used to rent an SUV. Plus a getaway site that was blind to the SFPD. There was something here; it was a wedge for something else. Whatever that was, it was well organized if initially overconfident. The men would be back.

*   *   *

Sammo Yang had never been to America. He spoke English adequately, having undertaken its mandatory study for seven years in primary and secondary school. But he knew nothing about America other than what he saw on the news or heard at the China National Space Administration, where he worked for his entire professional life. Now that he was here, the thirty-five-year-old Beijing native felt distaste pooling in the back of his throat.

His credentials as an attaché enabled him to pass quickly through Customs at the San Francisco International Airport. The diplomatic papers, on a China-based aircraft, would make it virtually impossible for American authorities to find out his true identity. He spotted a radiation detector tucked in a corner of the ceiling. He noted the security cameras, which would not help the Americans identify him. Though he had happily shaved the beard he had worn in Afghanistan, he had on a fisherman's black wool cap with a brim and sunglasses. He also wore a white windbreaker specially made with magnesium fibers for seam threads. The garment was highly reflective and created a lens flare that smeared the video image whenever he moved. The large plastic case he carried was not inspected, set off no alarms. He was met by a tall, efficient consulate employee who ushered Sammo to the van waiting curbside.

“Did you have a pleasant flight?” the youthful consulate worker asked.

Sammo didn't care that the question was banal. It was a joy to hear his language being spoken on the ground in this awful, arrogant land. Sammo's father had overseen a shoe factory for an American firm in Nanjing. When the firm got a better deal in India, they closed the shop literally overnight and Sammo's father was out of work. His parents had died within weeks of one another four years ago. They had both been in their fifties.

Sammo earned a degree in physics from Nanjing University with a doctorate in acoustics and engineering. He went to work for the CNSA in their top-security spy satellite program where he developed a method of intercepting secure wireless signals even in the vacuum of space. That brought him to the attention of the science office of the Central Military Commission. That brought him to Afghanistan, challenging himself in ways undreamed of, equipped with skills he had never expected to possess.

Now it brought him here.

Mistreating the citizens of the People's Republic of China was bad enough. It represented everything the Chinese people had fought against, going back over a century to the Boxer Rebellion: the exploitation of hardworking citizens by foreign powers. But the actions the Americans had taken in the past six months had been intolerable. They would be made to pay dearly for that.

Sammo looked through the dark-tinted window at the airplanes riding gray plumes skyward while others seemed to float to earth. He looked at the towers of some city in the distance, at identical-looking stores offering food and electronics, at the occasional gleaming flashes of the waters of the Bay. He had read on the government's Xinhua News Agency website that Chinese banks effectively owned America. That did not instill him with feelings of pride but with revulsion: he did not want to own this place, he wanted to see it crushed and dismantled, the way his father had lost face for being unable to keep his factory, the way his family had been broken.

“This is the freeway called the 101,” the consulate employee said helpfully. “We are headed north to San Francisco. That is the famous Bay on our right and just there,” he pointed, “one can see Candlestick Park. That is the location of the San Francisco American football games.”

Sammo's mouth twitched downward and he snorted quietly. He had no interest in American sports madness. No longer listening to the consulate employee, Sammo sat with the case on the floor in front of him, his mind alert; he had slept well on the airplane, still exhausted from his trip to Afghanistan but exhilarated by the results. He was eager to begin the second part of the mission. Through intermediaries in Beijing, Jing Jintao had sent him a cryptic message that he wished to see Sammo as soon as he arrived, that there might be another way he could help his country.

Sammo was anxious to hear what the revered statesman had to say. He was willing to help in any way possible.