Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare (34 page)

“Beats me. I only do what I’m told.”

“By whom?”

“Someone better than him.” She rubbed her cheek.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the handy little closet under there?”

“It leads into the main monitoring panels for the audio and video surveillance in all the room—phones, lamps, phony sprinkler heads.”

“TVs in the bathroom,” I said.

She shrugged. “Most of the time, whole floors in a hotel are devoted to monitors and transcribers and so forth, but these owners didn’t want to sacrifice profits. They must have had a lot of clout, because Security ended up with everything crammed into a room at the end of that tunnel.”

“Thanks.”

“You need another place to stay. Don’t leave me a forwarding address; I don’t want to know. If I were you, I wouldn’t leave by the front door.”

“Where?”

“There’s a back exit.” She fiddled with a dial on one of the monitors and a picture appeared. “Nobody around. They’d be in plain sight if they were back there.”

“I thought the monitors weren’t working.”

She twirled the dial again and the picture disappeared. “They’re not.”

The back door of the hotel opened onto a narrow street that snaked past a school and a collection of buildings that were under major repair. I wanted to get to the SSD offices, not the headquarters but a nondescript compound behind a sagging brick wall where the technical offices were located. Security was not as
tight there as it was at the main building. I knew that because when I was still working at the Ministry I occasionally had gone to the compound on business. Assuming the compound was still there. Assuming the procedures hadn’t changed in five years. One thing, I knew, was working in my favor—bureaucratic time. Mountains might crumble, but regulations were for the ages. Five years was nothing for a bureaucracy. It wasn’t even worth opening a file.

As I emerged onto a main street, I heard a car slam on its brakes and watched in amazement as a blue Nissan with right-hand drive shot across six lanes up onto the sidewalk in front of me.

“Get in.” It was the thin man, and he was breathing heavily. “We thought you were at the river doing laundry.”

“I was, but I had to go back for some bleach. You don’t mind giving me a lift? Where’d you get this car?”

“We had a deal. You broke it. I’m going to bust your legs so you can’t do that again.”

“No, you’re not. You’re going to take me to SSD Compound Three. They just phoned about some photographs. Step on it.”

The guard at the front gate held up his hand and frowned.

“I told you we’d never get in. My plates are the wrong ones for this compound. Now I’ll have to argue with this moron.” The thin man started to open his door.

“Wait; don’t get out. Stay in the car. He’s not used to looking in a right-hand window at a driver. If you get out, you give the guard the advantage.”

“I do?”

“Make him come over here. Growl at him.” I gave it some thought. “Give him one of your stares.”

The guard frowned again and looked more closely at the license plate.

“Don’t worry,” I muttered between clenched teeth. “He’s getting nervous. He’ll come over to your side any minute and ask for ID. Tell him to get lost.”

“What? He’ll call in his commander, and they’ll take me away in chains.”

“They don’t have chains. All they have is those nose rings. Just say we need to see H4. See if that does any good.”

The thin man put his hand to his nose as the guard walked over.

“ID.” Every guard since time began sounded angry when he said that. It wasn’t anything personal.

I wasn’t too worried, but the thin man looked rattled. “I’m here with a headquarters visitor. He has official business with H4.”

The guard took a step back and saluted. “Next time, get a fucking blue pass for the windshield.”

I smiled as we drove in. “See, that wasn’t so difficult. Park over on the side. That’s where I used to put my car. Someone will come out of the building to complain, but if you lock the doors, there isn’t anything they can do. Move as if you’ve been here a hundred times before.”

“Say, you know your way around. I’m impressed.”

“Do whatever I tell you. Once we get into the photography section, you sit in the waiting room. They have collections of real good pictures, if you know what I mean.”

The offices of H4—“Silver Mountain Tractor Parts” as it was known to outsiders—were on the second floor. That was where SSD doctored photographs for use in operations. It was also where photographs were checked to make sure someone else hadn’t monkeyed with them. The people in H4 were very good at what they did. If they said they needed a new, state-of-the-art machine to keep up with the opposition, they got a new machine.

The door to the second floor from the stairway was locked. “This one is compliments of me,” the thin man said. He took out a leather pouch with several small tools in it, selected one, and opened the door. “We’re even.”

“Even,” I said. “There’s the waiting room. Go in there and look important. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

The third door down the hall was open. The desks hadn’t changed; nothing had changed, not even the rounded shoulders of the man sitting with his back to the door, peering through a microscope.

I knocked softly. “Can anyone come in?”

The man swiveled around in his chair. “Long time, Inspector.” He stood up. “Who let you through the front gate?”

“Nice way to greet an old friend. Have a minute?”

“Sure. That’s probably how long we’ll have before the guards come up and drag you away.”

“Not to worry. I’m here with someone from SSD headquarters.”

“That so? I suppose they’re in the toilet powdering their nose.”

“Actually, they’re in the waiting room.”

“You don’t mind if I look? The last time you and I did business, they lifted my file for investigation and my rations were suspended for two months because you weren’t properly escorted.” He walked down the hall. In a minute, he was back. “OK, your escort is swooning over the photographs. We can talk. What can I do for you?”

“A little background.”

“As in information? That I can’t do. Pictures we can discuss. Information is something else. You know that.”

“All right, pictures. If I wanted to modify pictures from a hotel security camera, what would I have to do?”

“Depends on the camera. If it’s an old one that takes photos every few seconds, it doesn’t much matter. The photos are crap and the time between the frames makes it nearly impossible to
get a believable continuity. We don’t touch them anymore. There are only a few hotels in the city that haven’t changed over to the new technology yet.”

“What about hotels overseas?”

“We don’t have access.”

“Nowhere?”

He scratched his head. “Mostly nowhere.”

“How about Macau?”

“MSS doesn’t like us fooling with their stuff.”

“But you do.”

“I don’t pay attention to what’s on the film or where it’s from. The job description comes in on the orders, I push a few buttons on the machine, zip, zap, a new reality is born.”

“If I was in a new five-star hotel in Macau and I wanted to evade the hallway security cameras, could I do it?”

“Sure. All you’d have to do is call the control room and tell them to turn off such and such a station.”

“But that would leave a gap, a blank spot. Everyone would know.”

“An empty inside corridor is an empty inside corridor. It looks the same all the time. No problem with changes in shadows. Once in a while a maid walks by. If you don’t really care, you just put in a stock scene. No one can tell with the new digital stuff. They say they can, but they can’t. If you are going up against someone who is more careful, double-checks the schedule of the help and that sort of thing, then you have to be more careful, too. That takes some coordination with the locals. But it can be done.”

“Zip. Zap. Coordination?”

“You know, a local service. Friends in the right places.”

“Gangsters?”

“You’re asking for information, O. No information about gangsters asking for film to be altered from Macau. I can’t share that sort of thing with someone like you, no matter how many times you ask. Nothing about suitcases, either. Now, get out of
here, and take your friend with you. You’d better wipe his chin; I think he’s drooling all over his shirt.”

A small word of appreciation was on my lips when a huge explosion rattled the building and knocked us both off our feet.

“What the fuck?” My friend picked himself from the floor. “It will take weeks to recalibrate everything after that. This is delicate equipment.” An alarm began to sound in the hall. “That’s it; you’d better get out of here before they start shooting first and then forget what the questions were.”

By the time the thin man and I got downstairs to the car, there was full-blown panic in the compound. The guard who had admitted us was lying on the ground, his face bleeding from flying glass. Another guard had his pistol out and was pointing it at pedestrians who were running past, shouting and crying.

No one looked twice when the thin man’s car made a tight turn and flew out the front gate.

“Some photographs!” The thin man shook his head in admiration. “I’m going to get myself transferred.”

“Did you hear the explosion, or were you too busy turning pages?”

“I heard it.” He pointed at a cloud of smoke billowing over the city. “Must have been an awful jolt over there.”

“Isn’t that where my hotel is?”

There wasn’t much left. One side of the building had been sheared away, and the roof was in danger of caving in at any moment. I spotted Kang in a crowd of people pushing against a police cordon that had been thrown up in front of the parking lot. No one had any training for this sort of thing, and all the cops looked nervous. The officer in charge was running up and down the line bellowing at his men to keep everyone back.

“I’ll get out here,” I said to the thin man.

“Oh, no. I’m not letting you out of my sight again.”

“I’ll be right there.” I pointed to the crowd. “There’s no way I’m going back up to my room, and I can’t go anywhere else until I have another place to stay, can I?”

“I’ll park. If when I get back you’re gone, I’m putting you on a shoot-on-sight list.”

“Since when is there such a thing?”

“Since right now. If you think I don’t have the authority to do it, try me.”

“You spit, I’ll raise my hand.”

I jumped out of the car and hurried over to Kang. “This is your doing. That’s why you told me to get another room.”

Kang seemed unperturbed. “No. We were going to cause some damage, scare the fish in that ugly rug, but not blow the whole damned place up. Half the staff was killed. Someone else did this. I wouldn’t put it past Kim to have set the bomb so he could blame us.”

“Kim might do something like that. I’ll tell you for sure who would—Zhao.”

Kang had given me directions to Zhao’s apartment house. “We want him as much as you do,” Kang said, “but you’ve got a funny look in your eyes. I’ll give you a ten-minute head start. If he’s in the open—which I doubt—do whatever you want. If he’s in his hole, don’t try anything heroic. Or stupid. And don’t forget, we’re right behind you.”

The explosion had pulled all of the official security off almost every building in town, including Zhao’s. The viper was asleep, curled up on a sunny chair in the lobby. That’s good, I thought. Bombs don’t impress snakes.

The woman at the front desk started to say something, but I pointed to the viper and put a finger to my lips. “Shhhh. He spits poison if he wakes up all at once,” I whispered. “I’m supposed to tell Mr. Zhao what that big noise was all about.”

She pointed upstairs.

The apartment wasn’t on the top floor; it was the top floor. There was no hallway. The elevator doors opened silently and directly into a library filled with books from floor to ceiling.

I meant to say, “Get up, you bastard,” but when I saw the library all that came out was, “You read?”

Zhao was in a chair—red leather. “Sometimes, when there’s nothing else.” He didn’t seem surprised to see me. “I don’t like books, though. You know why?”

It didn’t seem to me that this was the exchange I should have with Zhao just before shooting him between the eyes.

“I’ll tell you why.” Zhao turned off the small reading lamp beside him. That plunged the room into darkness. “A book is what? Lots of words, but only one word at a time. You read a word; then you read the next word.”

“You’ve got that part down pretty well.” I pulled the pistol out of my belt and eased myself back a few steps.

“Same with people talking—one word at a time. Only there you can watch their faces.” He looked at me closely. I don’t know how I knew he was looking at me, but it felt obvious. “You can see what their hands are doing, or their eyes. Eyes are a giveaway. Whenever one of my guys has screwed up bad and is trying to convince me not to drop him off a boat, there are a lot of words of regret, but it’s his eyes that tell me if he really means it. It’s so much better than any written confession. I always tell people, ‘Listen to their lips, but watch their eyes.’ ”