The Chase (17 page)

“Suit yourself, Inspector, but I assure you it’s a waste of time.”

The lights came on in the cargo hold, and Kate heard the ramp drop open. There were footsteps on the ramp. Maybe a half dozen men. They were engaged in a serious conversation. They walked
past the Charger toward the ULDs. Kate didn’t speak or understand Chinese, but she heard two words that chilled her blood.
Nicolas Fox
.

Fu led the inspector, four armed officers, and the antiquities expert to the ULD that held his safe. The expert, Lui Wei, looked frail and ancient enough to have seen the rooster the last time it was in China, one hundred and fifty years ago at the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.

Fu opened the ULD, revealing the safe inside. He looked over his shoulder at Zhaoji. “It appears untouched to me.”

The inspector nodded. “That’s encouraging, sir. Please proceed.”

Fu used his body to shield the dial from view so nobody could see the combination as he unlocked the safe. He spun the dial, opened the safe, and stepped back, presenting the rooster with a sweep of his hand.

“Here it is,” Fu said. “Emperor Qianlong’s bronze rooster.”

The antiquities expert crouched in front of the rooster and slipped on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that made his eyes appear so enormous, he looked like E.T. in a wrinkled suit.

Zhaoji stepped away to give Lui some light and more room to work. He scanned the cargo hold, glancing at the two cars and the boat. He looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor. Everything was immaculate. Except for one tiny dark spot on the floor. He knelt to examine it and found another drop a couple feet away. One drop led to another. And another. A trail. The inspector was so intent on following the drops that he missed an even more significant detail. The straps and chains that should have been securing the rare Dodge Charger Daytona to the floor of the cargo
hold were unfastened, and the battery was back in place, under the hood.

“We’re going with Plan B,” Nick whispered to Kate when he heard his name mentioned by the Chinese official.

“Oh crap,” Kate whispered back.

Nick slashed the backseat open and crept out of his hiding place and into the driver’s seat of the Charger, while all eyes were on the rooster. The keys were in the ignition. Nick released the parking brake and pumped the gas pedal to prime the engine.

Kate thought Plan B should have been called Plan D, for Desperation. Or Plan S, for Suicide. She braced herself in the trunk as best she could. Her fate was in Nick’s hands now. Fortunately, if there was one thing she knew about Nick Fox, it was that he was very, very good at avoiding capture.

Zhaoji climbed onto the jetboat, following the tiny drops of blood to an aft storage compartment that was topped with a cushion and doubled as a seating area. He bent down, removed the cushions, and lifted the lid. Several plastic trash bags were crammed inside. He pulled the bags out and discovered a woman’s stiff, dead body. She was blond, and her neck was twisted at an unnatural angle. He could see the Smithsonian patch on her jacket breast pocket.

“The rooster is authentic,” Lui Wei declared, rising to his feet in front of the safe.

“That’s a relief,” Zhaoji said, his back to the men below. “Tell me, Mr. Fu, was the Smithsonian guard a woman?”

Nick heard someone on the boat say
Smithsonian
and
nurén
, the Chinese word for “woman,” and knew the assassin’s body had
been found. He sat up, turned the ignition key, depressed the clutch, jammed the car into reverse, and flattened the gas pedal.

The Charger’s loud, guttural roar startled everyone in the cargo hold. They were even more surprised when they saw the car speed backward down the ramp and smack onto the wet tarmac, setting off sparks and scattering the ground crew.

Fu ran after the car, waving his hands, yelling for the driver to stop. Zhaoji scrambled off the boat, issuing orders to secure the hold. And Kate held her breath and braced herself.

Nick executed a perfect half-spin as he hit the tarmac, turning the car around so it faced away from the plane and directly toward the chain-link fence that separated the airfield from the road. The Charger shot forward, a blur of red streaking over the asphalt, its 426 Hemi engine powering it through the fence and onto a side street that led into a warren of warehouses. He sped south, straight into oncoming traffic, dodging head-on collisions with the taxis, trucks, and buses. All those hours playing Asteroids at the video arcade when he was a kid had definitely paid off. He wanted to throw as many obstacles into the path of his pursuers as he could.

He glanced into his rearview mirror and saw cars swerving wildly in his wake, but didn’t see any police on his tail. He had the element of surprise, a big head start, and a car capable of hitting two hundred miles per hour. Still, he knew eventually they’d spot him from the air. And to make matters worse, he had no idea where he was going. He’d flown into Hongqiao International Airport before. He’d seen the Hongqiao streets from the sky and from the backseat of a taxi, but that wasn’t the same as knowing his way around. What he remembered most about the area from those trips were the wide elevated freeways and roads that all seemed to converge in one spot.

He made a sharp, tire-squealing left in front of the Air China Shanghai Hotel and zoomed east on Yingbin Road, a wide boulevard lined with stores on the south side and the Shanghai Xintianlu Conference Center park along the north.

Nick saw a police chopper closing in ahead of him. He was out in the open on a wide boulevard in a bright red car with a huge spoiler on the trunk. They wouldn’t be able to miss him.

The car that Inspector Zhaoji Li was driving was the last in a line of four police vehicles, sirens wailing, that were speeding south on Konggang First Road after a man he presumed was Nicolas Fox. None of the officers could see the Charger anymore, but Zhaoji wasn’t worried. There was no other car like it in Shanghai. It might as well be on fire. In the meantime, they were following the wake of cars Fox had scattered when he charged through oncoming traffic. Zhaoji was surprised that Fox hadn’t caused a single wreck and wondered whether that was by luck or by design.

Zhaoji was turning left onto Yingbin Third Road when a report came in from one of the police helicopters converging on the area.

“The assailant is a mile ahead of you, traveling eastbound on Yingbin Third Road toward the Outer Ring Expressway.”

The inspector smiled to himself. Whether Fox got on the elevated freeway or continued on the road toward the Shanghai Zoo, he’d be easy to corner now. Zhaoji would soon have the glory of catching an international felon. A promotion was definitely in his future. Perhaps he could afford a new overcoat. Maybe move into a larger apartment, too. The chopper pilot’s voice cut into his brief reverie.

“We’ve lost him,” the pilot said.

Zhaoji grabbed the mike with one hand while he steered with
the other. “What do you mean you’ve lost him? How is that possible?”

“The car went under the freeway on Yingbin and didn’t come out the other side. Maybe he crashed underneath the overpass.”

No, he didn’t crash. Zhaoji knew what Fox was doing. The cunning thief was using the elevated freeway to hide from the choppers. Fox was undoubtedly heading south underneath the Outer Ring Expressway, taking it to where it met the Yan’an Elevated Road, the Huyu Expressway, and the Hu Qing Ping Highway in a massive four-level knot of overpasses, interchanges, and sweeping on- and off-ramps above a wooded median. By hiding under all of that concrete and brush, Fox might escape detection from the air, but not the ground. All Fox had managed to do was box himself in.

“All ground units, the assailant is below the Hu Qing Ping Highway exchange,” Zhaoji said. “Seal it off. Air units, maintain surveillance of the freeways and surrounding roads for the red car in case he makes a break for it.”

The Charger blazed through the weedy, trash-strewn no-man’s-land beneath the Outer Ring Expressway. Nick tried to avoid hitting the pillars that supported the freeway while also trying to keep control of the car as it bounced over the uneven ground.

Nick made an abrupt left, flew over a small embankment, and landed hard in the thick brush of the median that was hidden in the shadows underneath three looping overpasses.

He got out of the car, ran to the back, and popped the trunk. Kate was curled up inside around the two suitcases. She was dazed and bleeding from a fresh cut on her head.

“Are you all right?” Nick asked, holding his hand out to her.

“Peachy.” She swatted his hand away. “How did you ever get a driver’s license?”

“I never said that I did.” He offered her his hand again. “Come on, we have to make a run for it on foot.”

“You are, I’m not.” She handed him her cell phone, fake ID, credit cards, and passport. “Close the trunk and go.”

“I know you’re tired and hurting, but it’s too soon to give up. The game isn’t nearly over, and I’ve got plenty of moves left. There are twenty-four million people in Shanghai. Getting lost among them is going to be easy.”

“For you it will be, but not for me. I’m bruised and bleeding.”

“We can work around that.”

“I’d rather use it to my advantage,” she said.

Nick cocked an eyebrow and regarded her in a new light. “You have a scheme in mind?”

“Plan C.”

“We don’t have a Plan C.”

“We do now. You said we should trust each other to do what each of us does best. Well, now it’s time for you to be a fugitive and for me to be an FBI agent.”

Nick could hear sirens closing in and helicopters streaking overhead. They didn’t have much time left.

“Have you got an explanation for the dead body in the cargo hold and how you ended up in China in the trunk of a stolen car driven by the fugitive you’re supposed to be chasing?”

“I do,” she said.

“I’d love to hear it.”

“I’ll share it with you over drinks in L.A.”

Nick grabbed her, and kissed her, and closed the trunk on her.

Nick walked up the embankment to Hu Qing Ping Gong Road, which ran along the west side of the freeway interchange. There were no rickshaws, no pagodas, nothing that screamed he was in Shanghai. The signs on the hotels, freight companies, and restaurants were in Chinese and English, but otherwise this could have passed for any airport neighborhood in any city in the United States.

On the other side of the street was a Motel 168, one of a large chain of Chinese budget accommodations. It was a drab five-story building with M
OTEL
168.
COM
spelled out on the roof in huge letters that could be seen by anyone on the freeway interchange, and certainly by the two police helicopters now circling above it.

As Nick crossed the busy street, drivers barely made an effort to avoid him. He walked calmly, pretending to check his phone for email, so that he’d look like a fearless expat who had done this a thousand times, not a man running from the police.

Once he reached the other side, he walked past the taxis parked in front of the Motel 168 and strolled into the lobby just as several police cars streaked by the building, sirens wailing. He went directly to the front desk, where he exchanged some U.S. dollars for Chinese yuan, then went back outside and hailed a taxi that took him to the airport Metro station.

Six police officers, led by Inspector Zhaoji Li, crept up on the Charger, their guns drawn. They could hear pounding and a muffled voice coming from the trunk. As Zhaoji got closer, he could tell that it was a woman’s voice, and that she was calling for help in English.

Zhaoji sent four officers into the brush to look for the driver. He holstered his gun and slapped the trunk with the palm of his hand to get the attention of whoever was inside.

“This is the police,” he said in English. “Be still. We’re going to open the trunk.”

“Make it fast,” she said.

Zhaoji noted that she didn’t sound scared. She sounded angry.

He told the remaining officers to cover him. The officers drew their weapons and stood off to one side as Zhaoji opened the trunk.

Kate blinked at the sudden light and wiped blood from her lower lip with the back of her hand. She was wedged in beside the two metal cases. Clearly, she had recently been beaten and bandaged. There was blood in her hair, and her shirt and jeans were blood-caked.

In spite of her bloody appearance, Zhaoji thought she didn’t look like a victim. She was focused and angry.

“I’m Special Agent Kate O’Hare with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she said. “Tell me you’ve got him.”

“Who?”

“Nicolas Fox. Who else?”

She tried to get up, but Zhaoji held up his hand in a halting gesture.

“Stay where you are,” he said to her, and then in Chinese he ordered one of the officers to call an ambulance and to alert the other units that Fox might be on foot. That’s when Zhaoji realized that none of his officers knew what Fox looked like beyond the fact that he was a white male in his early thirties. By the time central command sent photos of Fox to every officer in every patrol car, the thief would be long gone, if he wasn’t already.