Ridley Pearson - The Risk Agent

“Any footage on the camera?”

He passed her his iPhone. “Excuse the quality. I videotaped the little monitor on the side of the thing.” He upended his beer and drank loudly.

“Asphalt crew?” she said. “I do not understand.”

“Neither did I. But keep watching.”

Her eyes flared. “Who are they?”

“Too small to see. We need a much bigger monitor and a better copy. But the guy on the left is big enough to be our Mongolian. And the other guy is fat enough and well dressed enough to be rich.”

“You brought the tape.” She made it a statement.

“It’s a disk. But no. I left it in the camera.”

She glanced at him, frustrated. “But why?”

“We know where to find it. And if it goes missing, we’ve played our hand. You need to keep watching.”

She returned her eyes to the phone’s video.

“An asphalt crew at night,” he said, “in what looks like a light industrial area.” He rolled up his sleeve, revealing Chinese characters written in pen on his forearm. “This character is seen on a sign on the building in the background.”

“Chong,” she said. “This means ‘honor, esteem.’ Chongming Island…”

“Yeah. That occurred to me. Keep watching. It’s coming up any second.”

“Why film asphalt being laid?” she asked.

“Why hold on to a camera if this guy is dead? And if he’s missing a hand, he’s likely dead,” he said. “If the Mongolian’s working for the police, for this inspector, then I can see it. Cops retain evidence in order to convict or to-”

“Extort.”

“Yes,” he said. “Or as insurance. Agreed.”

“And if that fat guy with the Mongolian is a Beijing party member…”

She gasped loudly.

“You’ve got good eyes,” Knox said. “I didn’t see him until the second time I watched.”

She rewound the video and paused when a man’s head appeared on the far left of the frame-a man hanging on to the wall and peering over into the compound. The frame then moved to encompass the spy and the lens zoomed to capture his face in close-up.

“I recognized him from the pictures in the digital frame,” Knox said.

A pixilated Lu Hao stared into the camera lens looking like a deer caught in headlights.

She’d gone a pasty color. “Oh, Lu Hao.”

“Whoever laid that asphalt did not want it being seen.”

“In China,” she said, angry with him, “we work all hours. This is nothing.”

“They’re hiding something,” he said. “Count on it.”

“And Lu Hao saw it.”

“And the fat dude,” Knox said. “He saw the fat dude. And whoever that other guy was.”

“This is why he called me.” She went suddenly very quiet.

“You can’t beat yourself up over it.”

She had tears in her eyes when she looked up at him.

Knox felt fatigue drag him down over the next several minutes of her brooding silence. For his part, Knox was celebrating that the video he’d shot was clear enough to make out some detail. He thought that on a bigger and better screen he might be able to make out faces.

He touched her arm. “Seriously. There’s nothing you can do about it now except fix it. We’re going to fix it.”

She filled him in on her meeting with Yang Cheng and Marquardt.

“One of them will come through,” he said. “If not, we’ll drop a duffel of newsprint and improvise.”

“They will kill them.”

“They won’t get the chance. You’ll see.”

“There is only the two of us. Marquardt should not have made that call. By now the Chinese know we have Lu’s records. We are marked.”

“We knew there’d be speed bumps. You do what you have to do.”

She eyed him curiously.

“An American proverb,” he said.

“What now, John?”

He wanted another beer. Maybe five.

“I need to call Randy,” he said.

“For the encryption code? I thought he gave it to you.” She sounded defeated.

“He did. Yes. Not the encryption code. The new proof of life,” he said. “Primer will demand a final proof of life before making the drop. That’s our chance.”

7:00 A.M.

SHANGHAI

The Friday start of National Celebration Day coincided with the Mid-Autumn Festival, resulting in a migration involving over three hundred million Chinese. Nearly a hundred million round-trip train tickets would be purchased, accounting for one hundred eighty million passengers in less than three days. Two hundred million others would travel to their family homes by bus, car, bike, motorcycle, boat or by foot. Flights would be added to every route, and every plane was overbooked. Ferries would be jammed, their passenger count well exceeding the posted limits. Chinese citizens were duty bound to return to their ancestral homes. Expats seized the week-long celebrations as opportunities for vacation travel in and out of the country. China would effectively shut down. First was the celebration in honor of the founding of the People’s Republic; then, the autumnal equinox-a holiday dating back three thousand years. The human exodus would empty the streets and sidewalks of Shanghai, and the city’s population of twenty million would be drained to less than half that.

Among those not going anywhere were Knox and Grace.

With Knox having contacted Primer, they slept in shifts awaiting a return call, waiting for bids for the Lu Hao accounts from Marquardt or Yang Cheng.

At seven, they showered, ate baozi from a street vendor and drank Starbucks coffee. The sun shone brilliantly though Knox had read the forecast-the receding edge of typhoon Duan, a storm that had devastated the Philippines three days earlier, was on track to sweep onto the mainland by afternoon and stall, dumping rain amid hurricane-force winds.

For construction projects like the Xuan Tower, the timing of the storm couldn’t have been worse. With no manpower due to the holiday exodus, there was no labor force to secure the hundreds of sites, to batten down equipment or secure scaffolding. The government put out a call over the radio and television for all workers to return to the city. It would go largely ignored.

Grace’s iPhone rang. She and Knox stared at it briefly before she answered.

“Hello? Wait please…I will put it on speakerphone.”

“…you out of your mind?” Primer’s voice was tight. “Extorting a client? Pitting him against his competition?”

Knox heard the man’s venting, but thought only of Dulwich holding out an identical phone and showing him the tracking location of the Mongolian.

Without introduction or apology, Knox said, “You got my text about demanding a final proof of life?”

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

“Any progress with push-back?” Knox asked calmly.

A long pause on Primer’s end. “I don’t deal with rogues.”

“If we’d gone rogue, we wouldn’t have recommended you require a final proof of life and we wouldn’t have answered your call. Ask Marquardt about Chongming Island. He’s been withholding on us. We’re fucked here. We could use someone with some spine. We need the deets of the drop.”

A long pause. Then, “Time is clearly their bugaboo. They’re in a hurry. We negotiated it down to a hundred K. It’s to be Grace only. She arrives fifteen-thirty with the money and no one following. People’s Square Metro station. It’s a Dirty Harry. A run and drop. The proof of life will be a storefront video with real-time tags. Hostages to be released within twenty-four to forty-eight hours following a successful drop. It works for us.”

Knox scribbled out the details. The storefront proof-of-life intrigued him.

“What the hell were you two thinking?” Primer asked.