The Risk Agent (18 page)

“The man who paid you—” Knox said.

His victim shook his head frantically shouting, “No good! No good!”

“We have come for him.”

“Bu xing!” The man backpedaled, trying to get Knox’s hand off his throat. Then: “I do not know!” Repeatedly. His face had gone the color of an old bruise; his eyes occupied a third of his face and were growing.

“You tell me now,” Knox said, reaching between the man’s legs, “or you piss blood for a week.”

The color in his face deepened.

“He paid you, my friend,” Knox said. “Do not lie to me!”

“I take the money! It is true. Each week, I take the money. For this I give favorable quality standard reports. May Buddha forgive me. I know nothing more than payment did not come this week. Nothing more, I tell you!”

“Enough!” Grace called out.

Knox released him and shot her a look that warned her not to interfere.

“And this week?” Knox asked the man. “Did you still give favorable report?”

The man flinched and recoiled as Knox lifted his hand toward him.

“I did not think so,” Knox said. He scooped up the man’s ID and pocketed it. “If you ever take so much as another fen for such a favor, your family will pay for generations.” Knox knew a threat to a man’s lineage was the most serious of all.

“I told you!” cried the wife. “I warned you nothing good came of such greed.” She, with both a new refrigerator and a dishwasher in her kitchen. Not even expats had dishwashers.

“Your phones,” Knox said to the man.

He glared back, puzzled.

“Both of your phones,” he said to the couple.

They produced them. Knox collected the SIM cards and crushed what remained.

He grabbed Grace by the arm and they backed out, pulling the door closed behind them.

“Walk calmly,” Knox said.

Grace was unfazed. Knox’s right hand was shaking.

“We might have handled that differently,” she said, accusingly.

“That’s how it’s going to be,” Knox said. “Exactly like that until we’re convinced the person’s telling the truth.”

“And if they know each other? If he should call ahead to warn the others?”

“That’s partly why I took the phones,” he said.

“I think you took the phones to look at who he calls, who he knows.”

Knox said nothing. She was too smart by half.

“But if he should call ahead,” she said, repeating herself, provoking him.

“What do you want me to say?”

She didn’t answer. Together, they climbed onto the scooter and drove off, Grace holding Knox around the waist. She read directions from the GPS while Knox recalled everything Danner had recorded as if it had been left for him personally.

They moved between districts and neighborhoods, honing their interrogation skills with each stop. Grace was forced into the fray twice, responding with a technical precision and efficiency to her movement and force. Together, they manhandled and subdued three more recipients of Lu Hao’s bribes, bringing the total to four, when they found themselves facing a cluster of impressive high-rise apartments overlooking the Huangpu River.

Danner’s voice notes had the floor and apartment numbers as well as comments about the lobby security.

Knox passed Grace a ball cap for the sake of security cameras.

“These buildings,” she said. “No expats. All Party officials, Chinese businessmen. Important people. Everyone in Shanghai knows this address.”

“Construction inspectors?”

“We do not know for certain, neh? Not until we find Lu Hao’s accounts.”

She pushed this on him, reminding him he had failed to secure the accounts. She couldn’t analyze what she hadn’t yet seen.

“Every kind of successful person lives in this compound,” she said. “Inspectors? Perhaps. Also city planners and regional supervisors. Architects. Engineers. Decision-makers.”

“It’s early yet,” Knox said. “Every reason to believe they will be at home.”

“Two are in the same tower,” she reminded him.

“Yes. The fifth floor and the twelfth.”

“Once we have visited the one, it is highly unlikely—not likely at all,” she emphasized, “that a second interview will be possible in the same building.”

Interview, he was thinking.

With each stop, Knox sunk into a darker place. He’d begun to enjoy the punishment he delivered, to transfer his anger over Danner’s situation into his fists. To look forward to the next stop. He’d failed to fully consider the conflict this building presented until he heard her voice it.

“That is a problem,” he said. “We can’t pick one over the other. People in power—the way you describe these people—these could be the people we’re looking for.”

“Yes. We must coordinate our efforts. Time this perfectly.”

“You’re suggesting we split up?” he said. She’d been complaining about his techniques.

“Is there a choice?”

He imagined her gloating. “There’s always a choice,” he said.

“Then I will take the fifth floor,” she said. “If they throw me out the window, it is shorter to fall.”

“You’re going to joke about this?”

“I am learning,” she said.

Knox laughed aloud.

“You understand—” he began.

Grace put her fingers to his lips, stopping him. “Much more than you can possibly convince yourself of.”

She removed her hand just as fast as she’d used it to silence him. There was no hidden meaning to be read into her touching him. There was nothing suggestive implied by it. Yet Knox felt his lips tingle well after her fingers were gone, reminded for the first time since the cocktail party of her femininity, and the power women wielded over him, intentionally or otherwise.

He said, “We have two choices for gaining entry—subterfuge or power.”

“You leave this to me,” she said. “We will go to the twelfth-floor apartment together. From there, I will leave you and take care of the fifth.”

They made it past two doormen in the lobby by Grace holding on to Knox’s arm and acting incredibly sexy. She turned it on so quickly it surprised him, which was her intention. She ran her hands all over him, while giggling and purring. She pulled his hand onto her backside and he held it there. The boys—for that’s all they were: boys in gray suits—couldn’t keep their eyes off her and weren’t about to interrupt such a woman with a waiguoren involved.

They rode the elevator to the twelfth floor with Grace continuing to act her part, well aware the security boys would be attempting to follow them using security video.

Grace gambled correctly that a maid—the ayi—would answer the door. Taking a cue from Danner’s voice note, she mentioned a teenage boy to the Chinese woman at the door, saying she had important information that could keep the family from embarrassment. The door came open.

Knox swept inside. Grace pulled the door shut, leaving Knox cupping the unsuspecting maid’s mouth as he dragged her to the telephone and pulled the phone off-hook, engaging the line and ensuring an outgoing call could not be made. The maid went limp, having passed out from fright. He left her on the floor and hurried down the hall. Grace stayed behind to tie her up.

The first bedroom belonged to a sleeping teenager who didn’t move—wouldn’t move. “Only child, male,” he recalled Danner saying. Next door was an empty guest room, and finally the master suite.

He moved for the bed, but was jumped from behind—a stupid mistake! he realized. He’d made too much noise with the ayi. A male with a knife, and he knew how to use it. Knox turned, but too slowly. The knife punched for him. Knox blocked the second lunge. He was a fat Chinese man in checkered pajamas, sweating from nerves in the glow of a green nightlight.

Knox wrestled the knife free and kicked it across the floor. The man kidney-punched him. Knox slumped, surprised by how much it hurt.

He recovered to block another attempt and then, with an opening, he kneed the man in the groin, and a fist to below the ribcage. The man sank to the floor. The wife came screaming out of bed carrying a sheet. She tripped on the sheet, exposing her nudity, tripped again and fell.

Knox, now in full control of the man, punished him with a flurry of fists.

“You have taken money on the Xuan Tower project,” Knox said in steady Mandarin. “Do you deny it?” He clenched the man by the throat.

“You are wrong!” the man wheezed.

Knox leaned his weight into the man’s throat.

The wife tried to hide herself with the sheet, failing miserably. She skidded back on her bottom toward the wall, sobbing.

“I seek information about the one delivering your money,” Knox said.

“Fuck you.”

Knox dragged him toward the French doors. “All men fall at the same speed,” Knox said, “as you are about to find out.”

“Husband!” the wife called out.

He heard Grace before he saw her. She was craning over the cowering woman.

“You keep your tongue in your hole, or I will tear it out,” Grace said. She moved across the room and opened the French doors for Knox.

Knox’s victim saw he was outnumbered, saw the doors swing open.

“Shi de!” he cried. Yes! “It is true. All true!”

Knox squatted and questioned him. Grace crossed the room to gag and tie up the wife. She then took off down the hall.

The man confessed to accepting the bribes in exchange for “harmony on the construction site,” but claimed to know nothing of Lu Hao’s disappearance or whereabouts.

Knox told him if he reported their visit, even to security within the building, it would result in news of the bribes going public.

By arrangement, Knox did not go to the fifth floor, just as Grace would not return to the twelfth. Instead, he left by a stairway door and returned to the scooter, awaiting her. She met him less than five minutes later, her face flushed and shining with perspiration.

“Anything?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said.

“One left.”

“Getting late.”

“Or early,” he said. “Yes. But worth a try. Is it okay with you?”

She looked surprised he would ask. “Yes. Okay.”

The final stop came with an ominous note from Danner: “Recent addition to route. Extremely narrow alley. Ground floor, second or third door. Choke point.”

No mention of an individual. No exact apartment. Of greater concern, and explaining Danner’s lack of specificity, was his categorizing it as a choke point—a funnel with limited access, making anyone who entered vulnerable.

“This one is not good,” Knox said at a stoplight as they followed the GPS track. “Not enough information. Danner didn’t like it.”

“Latest addition to Lu Hao’s stops,” she said, reminding him of Danner’s voice memo. “If we had an exact date this could help me with the Berthold financials.”

“If I ever get you Lu’s books.”

“We will get them.”

The Muslim neighborhood was small but heavily populated. Dress changed, as did the smells of the street food.

Once again, Knox studied the entrance to the narrow alley off Ping Wang Jie Road. Once again, from a distance. Danner’s description was accurate: a choke point.

“Let me walk it,” she said. “Alone.”

“No.”

“I will not stop, will not ask questions. Just a walk-through.” She handed him the GPS indicating the lane, which appeared on the virtual map as a shortcut between two parallel streets. “A waiguoren cannot do this, Knox.”

At that moment Knox spotted an expressionless man coming out of the alley and looking toward them. Civi guard took off, he recalled Danner saying. A lane guard, a Party employee assigned to a neighborhood as a security detail. Not police, but someone gaining experience ahead of the application process; typically, a person eager to prove himself. Knox knew Grace was right.

“Go,” he said. “I’ll meet you around the other side. But if I don’t see you in five, I’m coming in after you.”

“Please. I will be fine.”

She slid off the scooter, handed him her helmet and disappeared through the traffic.

Grace noticed the lane guard turning to follow her. She kept up a brisk but unhurried pace. She would not give him anything to feed on. Behind her, she heard the scooter head off.

The lane was nearly narrow enough to touch walls with her arms extended. Stucco walls raised three stories overhead, interrupted by rusted wrought-iron balconies. It felt cloistered; the air smelled stale. She passed a series of doorways on her right and then caught herself staring at a green motorcycle. It was the combination of the unusual deep green color and the basket on the back fender. She’d seen it in the lane outside the Sherpa’s apartment. The Mongolians had been watching him. That, in turn, meant they’d seen her and Knox enter the residence.

The guard followed down the lane behind her.

A choke point, she recalled.

She walked past the motorcycle, committing its tag to memory. Stole a glance toward the small window by the door to her right: curtained shut. Passing the next apartment, its door hung open. She absorbed the layout: a single room of perhaps nine square meters. In this case, limited furnishings—a pair of bamboo mats on the floor and some stacked aluminum bowls. A slightly larger window in the back wall.

The footfalls of the guard suggested he’d closed the distance with her, now only a few meters behind. She continued walking, neither fast nor slow, knowing that had it been Knox in this lane the guard would have confronted him.

Two doors down, she saw another open door. Despite what she’d told Knox, she stopped and called inside, in part as an act for the security man. A Muslim woman met her. Grace lowered her voice, taking a chance.

“Hello,” she said in Mandarin. “You are familiar with the northerner two doors down?”

The woman nodded. “A Mongolian. And not the only one!”

Grace nearly cried out with the confirmation.

“One of his friends owes me money,” Grace said.

The woman’s eyes hardened. “I would forgive the debt, cousin.”

“Do you see his friends often?”

Another slight nod. “Yes,” the resident said, in an even softer voice than Grace was using. Her voice brought chills up Grace’s arms.

“Do they live with him, these other men?”

“Down the lane,” the woman answered. “Two to a room.”