The Risk Agent (39 page)

“Then we go together,” he said.

“You are a waiguoren.”

“I noticed.”

“It would be asking for trouble. Be reasonable.”

“Don’t ask the impossible.”

“Help me over that first wall. If I am not approached, we will investigate together.”

It was a compromise he could live with—though reluctantly. Knox handed her the phone. Minutes later, he helped her over the wall and then watched as she climbed the conveyor that rose on a steep angle into the sky.

Reaching the freshly paved compound, Grace stayed in shadow, close to the wall. Her chosen route screened her from Knox but was preferable to crossing the yard out in the open.

As she worked around the interior perimeter, the building’s faded blue sign became not only legible but also recognizable: CHONGMING TANNING. Only the first word had been captured in the video.

She bided her time in a dark corner and watched. Five minutes stretched to ten. In the background she heard the rumble of passing ships, the slap of river water, the steady roar of frogs and night insects. Finally, she positioned herself to match the angle of the video, wondering about the late-night paving. She crossed the asphalt, trying to do so casually, not sneaking up on the place, but just out for a walk, in case she was spotted.

She felt Knox’s eyes on her back.

A pair of huge sliding doors formed the center of the structure. They were padlocked with a new lock. A second door for people was to the right. It, too, was padlocked, all the windows barricaded with a grid of welded rebar.

She returned to the center doors and found a few centimeters of play in the assembly. She improvised a pry bar out of a section of discarded pipe. With upward pressure, the door on the right pulled off its track, revealing a gap at the bottom. She rested and then pried a second time. When she leaned hard on the pipe, the door swung out a foot at the bottom. If she could block it there, she thought there might be enough room to crawl through. A two-person job. No doubt Knox was watching her, thinking the same thing.

She resented needing him. To ask for his help was to invite him to join her, and she did not want that.

The phone he’d given her vibrated in her pants pocket. She made no effort to retrieve it. She didn’t need his cynicism and sarcasm.

She spotted a pile of discarded cinder blocks. Ingenuity, she thought. Focus. Commitment. Her army training returned effortlessly.

Minutes later, she heaved once again on her pry bar and simultaneously shoved a cinder block into the gap with her foot.

She lay flat and crawled through the narrow space, elated that Knox would never have made it.

She was inside.

Perched on the exoskeleton of the conveyor’s steeply angled arm, Knox willed Grace to answer the damn phone. He’d lost a pair of headlights coming up River Road from the direction of Chongming. Of the many explanations he considered, the most likely was that the vehicle had pulled off the road and switched off its lights—a pair of teenagers seeking back-seat romance; a cop settling into a speed trap; or something much worse.

As if to confirm her independence, she wouldn’t answer her goddamned phone. Never mind that he’d been impressed by the ingenuity of her entering the building, he’d have gone after her if he’d thought he might squeeze under those doors as she had. But there was no way.

Instead, he concentrated on locating the vehicle belonging to the missing headlights. A minute passed. Two. Three. Nothing.

Maybe it had been lovers after all.

Using the phone’s screen as a flashlight, Grace followed the bluish glow deeper into the tannery. She passed steel carts fixed to tracks laid in the concrete floor. Giant metal vats lined the aisle on either side of her. A tangle of plumbing. The stench of bleach and chemicals over which hung the unmistakable fetid odor of decay.

Her eyes adjusted, allowing her to navigate by the phone’s glow more easily. She passed beneath an elaborate network of catwalks, tracks and winches. A pair of forklifts sat like tusked animals alongside a central doublewide trailer. An array of dozens of stacked fifty-five-gallon steel drums.

Only as the buzzing of bluebottle flies rose like a chorus and the decomposition choked her did she sense what had happened. Rounding the corner of the doublewide, she faced a line of steel-framed, butcher-block dressing tables beneath a set of fluorescent tube lights. The dressing tables had their own sets of knives and cutting tools. Drains and PVC tubing ran to grates set into the floor. She turned and retched. The table nearest her had been cleaned too hastily. Flies clustered around bits of bone and flesh. Blood coagulated along the edges and the drains.

But it was the shredded pieces of bloodstained clothing that caught her eye. Frayed cotton and bits of denim. A human slaughter, not cattle for tanning.

Yao Xuolong’s death had appeared to be a hit-and-run, not a butchering.

Instinctively, she backed away from the crime scene. Her shoes caught and she tripped, reaching out for purchase. She grabbed at a hanging chain, but let go immediately, the chain sticky with what she was certain was blood.

She brought the phone’s screen close. Not red, or black, but a leather-colored brown goo. Whatever it was came from overhead as a steady drip to the floor, where it collected in a syrupy puddle by a drain.

She wiped her hand on a butcher’s apron hanging within reach. Her fingers began to warm. Then, sting. Then feel as if they were rotting off her.

She hurried through the maze of floor machinery, left, right, down a narrow aisle in search of a sink. She reached an emergency chemical wash station, placed her hands under the sunflower showerhead and bumped the lever with her knee. Nothing.

She hurried along the wall, half-blind, knocking tools and cans to the
floor. She found a wall sink, turned the faucet and plunged both hands beneath the spit of water just as her phone rang.

The pain was too great to remove her hands. She would call him back as soon as she got the chemical off her skin.

She grabbed a worn bar of soap and worked up lather. Slowly—too slowly—the pain subsided. Her palms were raw and close to bleeding.

She connected her burns with Knox’s. From handling the surveyor’s shoes. She wanted to tell Knox what she’d found, but as she withdrew her hands from the water, they hurt so badly she doused them again.

Her phone buzzed for a third time. She braved the pain and reached for it, stuffing it into the crook of her shoulder and thrusting her free hand back into the water.

She awkwardly worked the phone, shoulder to ear. The device slipped and squirted out, landing with a clunk and the sound of shattered plastic. Its screen went black.

38

6:40 P.M.

CHONGMING ISLAND

An imposing figure took long strides toward the tannery and made no attempt to conceal himself. A cop. He was large-headed but not wide-shouldered enough to be the Mongolian. Not tall enough for Kozlowski.

Knox called Grace for a second and third time. The phone jumped to Chinese voice mail—the building’s superstructure defeating the reception, he thought.

He kept track of the cop as he backed down the conveyor arm, fearful he was silhouetted against the sky.

The cop turned once he made it through the yard’s front gate, carrying something at his side. A gun? A tire iron?

Chinese police were not permitted to carry handguns, although People’s Armed Police officers were. Could this possibly be Kozlowski’s guy?

Knox paused as the man angled toward him, then continued down the rock conveyor as the intruder turned toward the tannery’s doors.

A moment later, a pair of loud metallic pops pierced the air.

Knox vaulted one wall, then the next. He pulled himself up and held his head over the wall of the compound.

The man had pried the lock off the doors.

He was headed inside.

With the loud sounds at the doors, Grace shut off the water and ran for cover. Only as the pulleys whined did she realize it had been the doors coming open. She cowered within the equipment as footfalls—Knox?—moved deeper into the building.

Not Knox. The man trained a small flashlight on the floor. She caught punctuated glimpses of his dark silhouette walking past the vats. Not as tall as Knox, but thick-necked with a head like a caveman.

The Mongolian? she wondered. Police? Security?

She slowed her breathing in an attempt to squelch her adrenaline rush. She used the shifting light to plot her own course out of the building.

Staying low, she inched her way down the aisle, dodging the boxes and tools she’d spilled. Halfway to her freedom, her curiosity got the better of her.

She turned and followed him. Like her, he seemed to be taking inventory of the place—hardly the actions of a man returning to a crime scene or a security man who knew his beat. She knew better than to stay, but was drawn to him. He reached the dressing tables and, like her, studied them long and hard.

A cop, judging by his confidence and his methodical nature.

His flashlight swept the tables and the cutting tools, the drain in the floor. It found the chain and followed the dripping goo to the puddle, then up to the drums.

He removed his leather coat and hung it carefully over a valve, stepping incredibly close to where she hid. She could see a well-worn leather shoulder holster beneath his left arm.

If he was a cop, then maybe he was an officer of the People’s Armed Police. Kozlowski’s Iron Hand?

The man ran a faucet and got a stream of water going from a hose she hadn’t seen. He washed down the soiled dressing table.

She choked back her surprise: he was destroying the very evidence that Kozlowski had told Knox both men wanted. Why not preserve evidence that might work against the Mongolian?

The answer seemed obvious: because there was no Mongolian.

His mobile phone pealed Metallica. He returned to his coat and answered the call, speaking curtly.

Knox hung from the compound wall, peering inside. He didn’t want to jeopardize Grace if she’d managed to hide or escape. He didn’t want to leave her if she’d been discovered and abducted.

He schooled himself to have patience, to let the situation develop. He had just climbed to the top of the wall as a pair of headlights swept the asphalt. He lay down flat.

A Range Rover swung onto the fresh asphalt, aimed at the open doors. The driver climbed out.

Steve Kozlowski.

Knox nearly called out, but stopped himself as he realized Kozlowski was meeting up with some Chinese cop—a bad-ass cop, according to Kozlowski himself—and on a Saturday night on a holiday weekend at a remote location.

Kozlowski, bent?

The consulate man left the Range Rover running and the headlights filling the doors. He entered the tannery with a commanding authority, a take-no-prisoners stride.

Knox rolled and dropped off the wall. He ducked low and ran for the Range Rover.

Headlights lit the tannery’s interior walls as Grace moved to the far aisle and climbed a ladder to an overhead catwalk. She lay down on
her belly and watched the man hosing down the dressing table. He worked quickly now in an almost maniacal effort.

A second man appeared in silhouette at the doors. He walked like he owned the place. Turning, she caught him in profile and nearly gasped. He fit Knox’s description of the consulate security chief, Kozlowski.

Interesting bedfellows.

Kozlowski broke his stride to grab a length of pipe as he continued deeper into the facility led by the spray of water.

Maybe not bedfellows.

He arrived to within several meters of the Chinese man. The water ran red into the drain.

“Don’t do that,” Kozlowski said in English. “Step away, now!”

Shen continued his work. “Go away, Mr. Kozlowski. It is no concern of yours.”

“You are destroying physical evidence of a possible homicide of a U.S. citizen. Step away and desist.”

Shen Deshi said coolly, “I advise you to go away now. You are trespassing. You have no authority to be here.”

“I will not have you destroying evidence. You will stop…or I will make you stop.” Kozlowski raised the pipe.

“If you remain here in this place you do not belong, I will bring the charge of industrial espionage. A government spy. Do you really want such trouble?”

“Destroying the blood evidence will not make the case go away. I assume you intercepted the forensic evidence intended for me?”

“I know nothing of what you speak.” Shen Deshi turned around, the hose splashing water onto the concrete floor. “Do not be naïve, Mr. Kozlowski. You have a hand found in the river. No body. You are prohibited from investigating in this country—an act you are currently engaged in. You are inside a facility of a private company, which constitutes industrial espionage. How much trouble do you want for yourself?”

Kozlowski said, “Chemicals and soil samples from the hand link directly to this facility. The hand is Caucasian. The DNA will come back
for the missing videographer, an American. I am within my rights to protect evidence.”

The scientific link caused Grace’s heart to flutter. A murder had taken place here. Possibly more than one. Lu Hao would never be safe. His plan to kidnap himself seemed suddenly much more understandable.

“When do you expect the results of a DNA test? Six weeks? Eight weeks? Do you want to spend eight weeks in a Chinese prison? Be my guest. Even if you prove such a connection, this cameraman was far from his assignment. This, too, smells of U.S. spying. You will be tied to him, and him to you. Is this what you want for U.S. Consulate? This is violation of agreements made between our sovereign nations. Very bad for everyone.”

“Step away.”

Shen trained the hose back onto the dressing table. “You must leave now,” he said. “Last chance. I do not wish such trouble on you. Of all blessings, charity is the highest.”

“A U.S. citizen has been murdered—most likely by a Chinese. We both know this,” Kozlowski said. He lowered the pipe, raised his phone and took a photo. “Destroying evidence is also a crime.”

With the flash of the camera phone, Shen Deshi dropped the hose and marched toward Kozlowski, withdrawing his handgun.