Ridley Pearson - The Risk Agent

Knox double-checked the designation: 3-B. He stacked some cinder blocks and climbed up to have a look through a gray glass window.

The interior space was dark, but looked empty. As Grace parked the scooter, Knox found a length of rusty wire and hooked it through the door’s gap and tripped open the lock’s tang. They were inside.

A typical warehouse space with floor-to-ceiling metal posts. In the near corner were three plastic lawn chairs and some overturned cardboard boxes along with empty pizza boxes, beer and soda cans.

Grace stepped forward, but Knox blocked her advance. He took photos using the iPhone’s flash.

Wads of discarded duct tape lay on the concrete floor by a wooden chair. Knox pointed to the chair and held up a single finger, eager for quiet until they’d cleared the space.

He hand-motioned Grace to the left. He circled around the right. They checked nooks and corners.

“Clear,” she said softly.

“Here, too,” Knox said.

They returned to the area by the door, where a balled-up rag lay among the duct tape.

“One chair,” Knox said, making his point again.

“So they divided up,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, gut-punched. They both understood the other possibility.

“We work the evidence,” he said. “You take the food and those lawn chairs. I’ll stay here, on this.”

“Sure,” she said, sensing his anxiety over having possibly lost Danner.

As she worked behind him, Knox tried to make sense of the scene, to see people in the space instead of a space void of people. He put Lu Hao in the chair, bound by duct tape-confirmed by sticky adhesive on the front legs at ankle height and on both arm rests. He noted the stains and the sour smell, suggesting the hostage had urinated, soiling himself. Then he spotted a shallow plastic tub leaning against the wall-a makeshift bedpan. He put the hostage-takers in the lawn chairs, smoking and eating and killing time. Squatting, he moved like a frog around the chair, then stopped.

What he saw caused him to reassess. Not Lu Hao in the chair but Danner. Alongside the leg of the chair were three straight-line, black smudges: Danner’s message-three hostage-takers. Knox felt a spasm of release in his chest.

“It wasn’t Lu,” he said. “It was Danner. In the chair. Three men covering him.”

“Three. Yes. That is what I have got,” she confirmed. “One a smoker. Another, left-handed and a vegetarian. The third, nervous and fidgety.”

“Seriously?”

She glared at him. “That chair,” she said pointing. “Cigarette ash and butts. Center chair: beer can on left side, not the right-left-handed. The pizza there is no meat, only vegetables-vegetarian. Last chair, napkin shredded, folded, pieces rolled up and tied in small knots. Nervous disposition.”

“I’ll take your word,” he muttered.

He didn’t need DNA results. He felt confident it had been Danner in the chair. He studied it more carefully, using a pencil light, paying special attention to where the man’s hands had been taped. It took a different angle to see the grooves pressed into the wood of the arm.

“The number ‘forty-four’ mean anything to you?” Knox asked. He tried to get a photograph of it, but failed.

Grace looked over, but didn’t speak.

“How about forty-one?”

Grace stepped closer, gravely. “Forty-four?” she inquired.

Knox pointed out the impressions in the armrest’s wood.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Grace?”

“Four sounds like-si-death.”

“Danner or Lu?” he wondered aloud. “Danner could be wounded. Lu Hao could have had a seizure.”

“Only the one chair,” she said.

He pointed out the scuffmarks. “It was Danner in this chair. Count on it.” He dug into the balled-up duct tape, peeling it apart. He found a patch with whisker hairs and torn skin in the rough shape of lips. The whiskers were faintly red under the pencil light. “Danner,” Knox whispered. “For certain.”

“Where’s Lu Hao?” she gasped. “Dying and dead?”

“No jumping to conclusions,” he cautioned. “We’ve got no blood. No sign of trouble. Chances are these guys are pros and kept the hostages separated. SOP. If they lose one to the cops or escape, they still have the other. Nothing to worry about. Not yet.”

“You sound like you are trying to convince yourself, not me,” she said.

Do I? he wondered. Guilty as charged. “A left-handed vegetarian?”

“He left a partially eaten pizza slice behind. Ate off the left side of the slice. You are trying to change the subject. Why would a simple delivery man know this address, yet it is not the address for Lu Hao? That does not make sense.”

Not to Knox either. He was surprised how quickly she jumped to the same place he did.

“We can’t get ahead of ourselves,” he said. “We have Danner alive. Moved not too long before we got here, judging by the smell of the place.” Sweat and smoke hung in the air. Someone had been here in the past several hours. “We have the Sherpa’s driver, but he operated as an independent.”

“The Mongolians?”

“Hostage-takers survey the payee of the ransom demand. We have the Mongolians watching Lu Hao’s apartment. That could fit. Or, like us, they could be wanting Lu Hao’s records.”

“But I’ve seen well-dressed Chinese watching the MW Building from Xiangyang Park,” she said. These were the men she used her disguise to be rid of.

“Yes. Maybe working with the Mongolians, maybe separate. If we forget the Sherpa’s guy, that gives us the two groups to deal with.”

“The well-dressed ones could be PSB, perhaps,” she said. “Or independents. Or the kidnappers themselves.”

“And if the kidnappers, then we have to explain the Mongolians. Listen, this was a lead we had to follow, but the gold ring is still Lu’s records.”

“Gold ring?”

“The prize,” he said, clarifying. “We know from the Sherpa’s man that it was the Mongolians who attacked him. They hit him after he made the ransom drop at Berthold, so they were watching either Berthold or the driver himself. They aren’t the kidnappers. They got this address ahead of us. But by the time they got here, the place was empty.”

“Because?”

“No sign of a struggle.”

She nodded. “So the Sherpa’s driver must have been expected to call in a code or message once he was safely away from the Berthold ransom drop. He never got time to do so because the Mongolians attacked him.”

“And the kidnappers packed up and moved at least Danny. Yes. It makes sense. But if true, it also means the intellectual made an amateurish mistake in giving the Sherpa’s man the hostage location. Why would he do that?”

“Maybe not a Triad,” she said. “Someone less experienced at kidnapping.”

“Like a competitor of Berthold,” Knox said.

“We come back around to needing Lu Hao’s accounts of the incentives.”

He bristled at the use of the euphemism. “One step forward…” he muttered. “But who are they, these Mongolians?”

“Perhaps we should inform the PSB about this place,” Grace said. “The PSB is efficient. They can lift fingerprints. DNA. This evidence could help a great deal.”

“If the PSB finds Danner ahead of us,” Knox reminded, “he’s worse off than in the hands of the kidnappers. Lu, too, more than likely.”

She looked ready to argue. Instead, she exhaled and settled herself. “Three days,” she said.

7:45 A.M.

HUANGPU DISTRICT

SHANGHAI

“You asked I show you everything,” Feng Qi said, sitting uncomfortably in a dynastic armchair seven centuries old. Across from him, occupying an ornately carved chair and looking like a feudal lord, was Yang Cheng. The expansive desktop was a museum piece: exotic mahogany inlaid with ivory, ebony and mother-of-pearl.