Ridley Pearson - The Risk Agent

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.”

A choke point.

“How many?”

“Five, all told.”

That left three in good health. “The reason I ask,” Grace said, “is that I would rather not be seen by the one that owes me. He is not pleasant.”

“All rough men.”

“Yes,” Grace said. “Mongolians are rough.”

The woman did not contradict her. “In pairs,” she said. “Roommates. The leader lives by himself.”

“Leader?”

“They travel like a pack of dogs.”

“Yes.” Grace assembled the data, wondering how far to push it. “Two rooms,” she proposed.