Stephen Coonts - Combat

“Well, damn it to hell,” she said. “Excuse me. Scratch one criterion. What’s the significance of its being sawn?”

“Just that it may make it easier for you to see whether some of it’s been cut lengthwise with a very fine kerf and glued back.”

“What’s a kerf?”

“The slot made by a saw. Balsa can be slitted with a very thin saw-blade. It occurs to me that it might be the lighter timbers you should be checking for hollowed interiors. Bags of white powder aren’t that heavy, Dana.”

I think she cussed again before she sneezed. She said, “Thanks,” as if it were squeezed out of her.

“But I don’t think you’ll find anything,” I said.

She demanded, “Why not?” the way a kid says it when told she can’t ride behind the nice stranger on his Superninja bike.

“I just feel like whatever’s being delivered, if anything, hasn’t been. The monkey wrench your people threw into their schedule didn’t delay those pallets— gesundheit —but they’re behaving as if you did delay something. They’re waiting, apparently with patience.”

She said she’d get back to me and snapped off. To kill time, I played back our conversation on StudyBabe. Dana had a spectral analyzer with her? I had thought they were big lab gadgets. Right, and computers were room-sized — once upon a time.

While I was still muttering “Duhh” and thinking about possible uses of Dana’s gadgetry, Quent came down out of a stairwell in a hurry. He motioned for me to drive, pocketing his phone. “You love to drive like there’s no tomorrow, and I don’t. Please don’t bend the Volvo,” he begged. “Just get us across the bridge to Jackson and Taylor.”

While I drove, he filled me in on his fresh lead. He’d struck out again upstairs, but had just taken a call on his cell phone from Ali Ghaffar. His buddy Hong, said the Paki, had returned. Ghaffar had asked about Park. Oh, said Hong, that was easy; back at the gin mill, Park Soon had said he was considering a move to a nice room in San Francisco for the rest of his time ashore. Corner of Jackson and Taylor.

“Smack-dab middle of Chinatown. Didn’t say which corner, I suppose,” I said, overtaking a taxi on the right.

“No such luck. But there can’t be more than a half dozen places with upscale rooms on or near that corner. We can canvass them all in twenty minutes.”

I tossed a look at Quent. “You speak directly to Hong?”

“Watch the road, for Christ’s sweet sake,” he gritted. “I asked, but Ali said he was gone again. Very handy.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said, swerving to miss a pothole on the way to the Bay Bridge on-ramp.

Quent closed his eyes. “Just tell me when we get there.”

To calm him down I played my conversation with Dana. It pacified him somewhat, and I turned down the Volvo’s wick nearing Chinatown, which was a traffic nightmare long before the twenty-first century.

I chose a pricey parking lot near Broadway, and we jostled our way through the sidewalk chaos together. By agreement, Quent peeled off to take the two west corners of the intersection. Because some of the nicer little Chinatown hotels aren’t obvious, I had to ask a restaurant cashier. When she hesitated, I said I had a job offer for an Asian gent and knew only that he’d taken a nice room thereabouts. I said I hadn’t understood him very well.

Evidently, Asiatics have their own privately printed local phone books, but she didn’t hand it over and I couldn’t have read what I saw anyhow. She gave me five addresses, and three of them were on Quent’s side. I tipped her, hoping I’d remember to jot it down, and found the first address almost next door.

If there’s a small Chinatown hotel on a street floor, it’s one I never saw. I climbed three narrow flights before I saw what proved to be a tiny lobby through a bead curtain. A young Asiatic greeted me, very courteously, his speech and dress yuppily American. He heard my brief tale sympathetically. Sorry, he said, but no young person of either gender had registered in several days. Would I mind describing the employment I had to offer?

I said it was a marine engineer’s job, and I swear he said, “Aw shit, and me a journalism major,” before he wished me good day, no longer interested in my problems.

I crossed the street and began to search for the second address when my phone clucked. “Bingo,” Quent said with no preliminaries. “But no joy. Meet me at the car in ten. Until then you don’t know me.” No way I could mistake the implication.

He didn’t sound happy, and when I saw him on the street he had turned away, heading down Jackson. It’s a one-way street, and he walked counter to the traffic flow, something you do when you suspect someone may be trying to tail you in a car.

So I did the same on Taylor, which is also one-way, doubling back after a long block to approach Quent’s car on Jones — again counter to one-way traffic. If anyone followed me on foot, he was too good for me to make him.

I had paid the lot’s fee and was waiting in the Volvo when Quent appeared. “Oakland it is,” he said, racking his seat back to disappear below the windowsill. As I sought an on-ramp he said, “A man calling himself Park Soon rented a room for a week, not two hours ago; one flight up, quiet, expensive. Told the concierge he might be staying with a friend for a night or so but please to hold his messages and take names.”

“He’s not hard up for cash,” I said.

“He’s also about my height and age,” said Quent, who was five-eight, pushing forty.

I’d had Park’s description. “The hell he is,” I said.

“The man who rented that room with a cash advance is,” Quent said. “Unless the lady was pulling my leg. And why would she if she wanted me to think it was Park? Park Soon is five-three. What’s wrong with this picture, Harve?”

“I might know if I got a look inside that room.”

“That was my thought, but it’s a risky tactic in a subculture that’s understandably wary, so I didn’t even try. The Feds can do it if they want to. They know how to lean on people to, ah, I think the phrase is, ‘compel acquiescence.’”

“Our own little Ministry of Fear,” I observed.

“Everybody’s got ’em, Harve. I even have one,” he said with a half smile, and pointed a finger at my breast. “And if I had to choose between Uncle’s and the ones run by people who call him the Great Satan, I choose Uncle.

“Meanwhile, we don’t know who’s pushing our buttons, waiting for us to show up, and watching us flail around all over hell. But I’d bet someone is, and I’d just as soon they didn’t pin a tail on us.”

I nodded, pointing the Volvo onto the Bay Bridge. “You don’t think Park could somehow be in on this,” I suggested.

“Not in any way he’d like. I don’t think Park is where anyone will find him anytime soon,” Quent replied grimly. “Whoever tried to create a fresh trail for him would probably be pretty confident he’s not leaving his own trail of crumbs. I really don’t like that idea, Harve. Well, maybe I’m wrong. I hope so.”

“When are we gonna drop that one on Dana?”

He levered himself and his seat erect; opened his phone. “Right away. She’s probably still in the field. I will bet you a day’s expenses Mr. Ghaffar knows who took that room for Park; the description fits Hong, of course.”

I nodded. “Should we go back and have a talk with him now?”

“Not yet, I want to be very calm for that, and at the moment I am peeved. I am provoked.”

“You are royally pissed,” I supplied. He nodded. “Me too,” I added, as he punched Dana’s number.

It was nearing rush hour by that time, but with a few extra twists and turns, I managed to satisfy myself that we weren’t tailed while Quent spoke with our pet Feeb. She said she’d meet us in twenty at the boathouse on Lake Merritt, in residential Oakland.