The Risk Agent (37 page)

The driver remembered three men, two foreigners. From his description Grace identified Preston Song and Allan Marquardt, but was stumped by the third. Song had done most of the talking. Marquardt had had his head in his BlackBerry most of the time.

“You will take us there, now,” Grace said.

“We have an agreement, lady,” the driver said.

“Something is not right,” Grace told Knox, speaking in English.

“Because?” Knox said.

“Why is he reminding me of the agreement?”

Knox leaned forward and spoke Mandarin. “Your mother will not recognize her son if you fail to hold up your end of agreement.” He leaned back in the seat.

“But there is nothing to see!” the man replied, craning back to look at Grace. “I swear you will be disappointed. Farmland. Nothing more.”

“But you recall which farm roads,” she stated.

“Yes. Of course. I grew up here.”

“So did I,” she said. “So do not try to play with me.”

“Farm roads, cousin, I swear. Nothing more!”

“Show us,” Knox said.

Grace looked at Knox excitedly. “Farm roads. Land development.” He heard her pride, the sense of victory. Maybe the vodka.

Grace leaned her head back, sighed, and fell quickly to sleep, a smile faintly on her lips.

A few minutes out of town, they time-traveled back two or three hundred years. Half-acre rice farms, manicured to precise detail, formed an uninterrupted patchwork. Decaying dwellings lined the roads. Young children led beasts of burden by nose rings, or carried live chickens hanging by their feet.

“Where are we?” she asked the driver, opening her eyes.

“River road on way to Chong’an Cun,” the driver said.

“This is Chong’an Cun?”

“Precisely, cousin! You are indeed an islander!” He pulled the van to the side of the road. “This was our first stop.”

“How was it identified?” Knox asked. “How did they direct you here?”

“Village name,” the driver said.

“Only that?” Knox asked. “Nothing more specific?”

“Village was name enough,” the driver replied.

“Only this one village?” Grace inquired.

“No. Next we went to Wan Beicun.”

Knox took pictures with the iPhone. “Take us there, please,” Knox said.

The going was rough and slow on narrow mud roads meant for tuo la ji and water buffalo. They traveled through a half-dozen poor villages and arrived twenty minutes later at a crossroads. Again, the van stopped.

“This is it?” Grace asked.

“This was last stop before return to Chongming.”

“Your GPS,” Knox said. “Pass it to me, please.” Knox accepted it and
wrote down the current lat/long location. He asked the driver to point out their position on a map he carried.

Knox spoke English to Grace, softly so the driver could not hear. “There was a second car service. They took a second car.”

Grace faintly nodded. “Damn,” she said. It was the first time he’d heard her swear.

“That way no one driver had the full picture of the land parcel,” he said.

She nodded. “Yes. But not a single parcel. Too big for that. It must be a project involving the expansion of several small towns. Something like that. We will never know. They have defeated us,” she said.

While she considered their failure, Knox was wondering how long it would take, once they left the car, for the driver to contact Preston Song and sell him the information that two people were trying to retrace his steps. How long after that for Song to notify the police?

“We need more than this,” she said.

“Marquardt and Song weren’t taking a Sunday drive. Your instincts were right.”

“We have nothing but a pair of small villages.”

The forty-minute drive back to Chongming was interminable, both of them exhausted. Knox fought to stay awake while she slept off the vodka.

They were dropped off and walked two blocks to the Toyota. Knox was switching out the plates as his phone rang.

She listened, spoke softly and hung up, cradling the phone to her chest.

“So?” Knox asked.

“Lu Jian has found nothing involving a land deal, big or small. Nothing beyond the seventh city projects already announced and underway. None involve Chong’an Cun or Wan Beicun.”

“That’s depressing.”

“But in the process of his asking around, he turned up a news story worthy of our interest.”

“Because?”

“A hit-and-run fatality, last month. A surveyor by the name of Yao Xuolong. A civil servant. This man was struck and killed along the roadside near Yuan Liu Qidui. The driver was never found.”

“And it means…?”

“Yuan Liu Qidui is a small village also surrounded by nothing but farms.” She snatched the map from Knox and took a moment to find it. “Here. You see?”

When combined with the two locations they had just visited, three quarters of a perfect rectangle were formed—that, or a right-angled triangle. It was impossible to miss the symmetry.

“It’s massive,” Knox said.

“He provided me the man’s family’s home.”

Knox said, “I’m game.”

“It may be nothing. A twenty-minute drive, a waste of time.”

“We need to get out of here,” Knox reminded. “I trust that driver about as far as I can throw him.”

“You switched the Toyota’s registration.”

“Yeah,” Knox said. “But believe me, they’re not that stupid.”

33

12:30 P.M.

HUAXIN ZHEN

In a small office cubicle, one of a hundred identical cubicles in a warehouse-like facility in a northwestern district of Shanghai, a woman was alerted to a priority status license plate match.

She called up the source video, recorded less than six hours earlier: the plate belonged to a stolen Toyota crossing over the bridge/tunnel to Chongming Island. In one video, the face of a waiguoren was spotted looking out a rear-seat side window. Her chest pounding, she called her manager, who assigned her additional eyes to help inspect plate capture video in an ever-widening grid.

Within twenty minutes, the information was texted to the phones of all law enforcement officers, including that of Inspector Shen, who had traveled to Chongming Island because of the Mongolian’s remark. With
the text, Shen now had reason to visit the local precinct and solicit manpower and information.

If, during the arrest or incarceration or questioning of the waiguoren, the man was killed accidentally, it would be viewed as official business. Perhaps even attributed to the local police, instead of him.

34

12:35 P.M.

CHONGMING ISLAND

Off a narrow hard-packed dirt road, marked by a crumbling pair of stacked stone columns, a rutted lane led into a compound of five timber-built houses, the exteriors scabbing paint. Smoke rose from chimneys and hung in the air, tasting of cooking oil. Knox and Grace approached on foot.

A withered woman greeted them. She wore a loose-fitting white cloak under which could be seen the wide legs of simple three-quarter-length pants of coarse cloth and ancient black cloth shoes that might once have been embroidered with colorful birds and peonies.

“The grandmother,” Grace said. “She is getting her daughter. The white she wears is for mourning.”

A woman in her forties wore her grief as fatigue in what had once been spirited eyes. Knox and Grace were shown into a dim room and offered low stools around an open fire pit where a carbon-encrusted teapot boiled and steamed.

Knox kept up with introductions despite the woman’s difficult accent: the grandfather was a clay potter, this woman’s husband, his apprentice; the couple’s son, Yao Xuolong, had attended the local school and had gone on to be a surveyor.

Grace explained that she and her foreigner friend had heard that the son had been involved with a project of enormous significance bringing great honor to the family and that his importance in the project could not be easily measured. That they were interested in documenting the son’s achievements.

The mother showed them a photograph of her son and then proudly carried on for fifteen minutes while Knox and Grace sipped green tea. Grace did not interrupt, displaying an unusual patience, a quality Knox did not share with her.

“Now this charade,” the mother said angrily, her eyes brimming with tears.

“Please explain,” Grace said.

“They know nothing of my son! I explain to police many times, and yet they sweep me out the door like dust.”

“What do they not know of your son?”

“His clothes, lady! He dies in his finest clothes, those saved only for evening. For town. For courtship. Business. He is found by the side of road in finest clothes, but with the equipment for work. Not his own equipment either! How is this possible? I tell you, it is not. I do not know why these lies are told about my son, but a lie is a lie!” The tears arrived. She wiped them away.

“How recent is this photo?” Knox asked her.

“Not so very,” the woman said.

“Did he wear his hair like this?”

“Shorter,” the woman answered. “You know the young people nowadays.”

Knox tried imagining this same man with shorter hair, working to match him with the man in the video seen entering the factory. It wasn’t an impossible match.

“How tall was your son?” Knox asked.

“One hundred sixty centimeters,” she said. “A little more.”

Knox did the conversion in his head. Five-foot-four or five, a decent match with the victim. He sat up taller, his blood pumping.

“Tell us about this problem with the equipment,” Knox said softly. “You said it was not his own. What do you mean?”

“Indeed! Not his!” The woman motioned to her husband, who’d been standing in shadow. He immediately headed upstairs.

She then explained that her father had given the son the latest surveyor’s equipment upon his acceptance into civil service. The equipment was expensive, representing years of savings on the grandfather’s part. The dead man had taken great care of the equipment. But he’d been found on the side of the road in possession of state-owned equipment, a contradiction that hadn’t been explained.

The husband came downstairs holding a common plastic tote in one hand and a large plastic case in his other. The tote contained the clothes the son had died in. The shoes—dress shoes, Knox noted—had adhered to the tote’s plastic. Knox pulled the shoes free and studied the clothing, passing each piece to Grace.

The mother, sobbing, spoke of her son’s watch and shoes, how he would never—ever!—have worn either in his fieldwork.

Knox had a tar-like substance on his hands from handling the shoes. The father offered him a soiled rag and he cleaned up. He opened the large case, revealing a clean neon-orange tripod and a high-tech sextant.

Knox studied the equipment.

“It’s a sextant,” Knox told Grace. “With GPS,” he emphasized. “Sophisticated stuff. Must have cost a fortune.”

Knox asked the mother and father if he might inspect the sextant more closely. He was granted permission.

Knox switched it on. A small green screen lit up, revealing menus with Chinese characters. He moved through the menu as the others watched.

“It records and saves the ten most recent locations,” he said, speaking English.

“Something wrong?” the mother asked.

“It’s all good,” Knox said in English. Then, Mandarin. “This information helps us greatly.” He ran his finger along the second lat/long, wondering if Grace recognized how close it was to the number Knox had taken from the driver’s navigation device. Only a few seconds off.

Grace wrote down all ten coordinates.

“Do you have your son’s cell phone?” Knox asked.

The father returned upstairs and came down minutes later wearing a look of bewilderment. He and his wife exchanged some heated questioning.

“It is lost,” the mother told them.

“I’ll bet,” said Knox.

Knox wanted to leave them money, but Grace stopped him from offering. It was agreed they would buy several pieces of the grandfather’s pottery, which they did. Each piece was carefully wrapped in newspaper, a time-consuming process that left Knox anxious.

As they reached the Toyota, Knox already had the iPhone out. He input the first of the sextant’s coordinates—the most recently recorded waypoint. A blue pin dropped onto the phone’s map. A second. A third. The line pointed back toward Wan Beicun.

“He’s a shrimp—the right height for the guy in the video,” Knox said.

“Yes.”

“The guy in the video was also wearing decent clothes.”

“Yes,” Grace said.

“So maybe it’s him and they dumped him away from the factory.”

“It is possible,” she said, climbing behind the wheel.

Knox worked the finger of his right hand. “Shit!” he said.

“What is it?” Grace asked, looking over.

“My fingers are on fire.” He spit onto them. “Crap! Pull over!”

She gasped at the sight of the raw flesh.

“Chemical burn,” he said, having seen similar things during his time in Kuwait.

She pulled the car to a stop and Knox jumped out, washing his hands in a puddle. He returned five minutes later.

“Better?”

“Barely,” he said. “Caustic stuff.”

“The shoes!” she said.

“Yes. Our boy was someplace nasty before he died.”

“Like a factory,” she said. “We plot all the coordinates.”

“Whoever did this—providing we’re right—wanted his death to look like an accident. A hit and run while he was surveying. Otherwise, he just disappears.”

“So his disappearance would raise unwanted questions,” she said. “Questions we must now answer.”

For the next several hours, they passed through tiny farming villages as they tracked the surveying equipment’s GPS coordinates across a large area. Two of the ten lat/longs closely matched locations they’d visited with Marquardt’s driver: Chong’an Cun and Wan Beicun. They stopped there.

Grace studied the map, upon which Knox had drawn connecting lines.

“Are you still thinking it’s a group of small towns?” he asked.

He’d sketched three sides of a perfect rectangle.

“It is so large. So much land.”

“Measured in square miles, not acres,” Knox said. He watched her studying it. “Any ideas?”