Ridley Pearson - The Risk Agent

“This is very good thinking, captain. There’s yet a chance that you can undo these mistakes that were no doubt made by your subordinates.”

“You are gracious.”

“Perhaps,” said Shen Deshi, smiling grimly, “some discipline is in order to set the proper tone.”

Hey, there.” Skype video challenged Knox, not for the technological issues but because his brother looked so normal. Boyishly handsome. A kind face. One would never suspect the problems that lurked behind the man’s warm eyes.

“You haven’t called me in a long time,” Tommy said. The child-like singsong to his voice gave him away.

How long had it been? Knox wondered. Tommy was prone to exaggeration.

“I’m heading to China for a week or two.”

“I thought you were in Cambodia?” Tommy didn’t miss much-the doctors got that part wrong, time and time again.

“En route to Hong Kong. Then on to Shanghai.”

“More pearls? I think our inventory is okay, Johnny.”

“There’s always something good in Shanghai.” Like a paycheck that might begin to endow Tommy’s future medical costs. Their partnership gave them a reason to work together. It was something Tommy not only could handle but was good at. It kept Knox traveling. It was never going to make them rich. “It could be good for us.”

“I thought you were coming home?” Pouty.

Knox rarely went home. He made a million excuses to himself, all of them convincing, but the truth nibbled at the edges, stinging.

“I am, buddy. Just need to get this out of the way first.”

“Business first,” Tommy said, sounding like a mynah bird.

“You got it.”

“I’ll tell Eve.”

Evelyn Ritter, their bookkeeper. Tommy had a crush the size of Texas.

“Good idea.”

“What’s wrong?” Tommy asked.

That was the thing about Tommy: what he lacked in academic intelligence he compensated with intuition. Maybe he’d learned to read Knox’s expressions, though Knox was well practiced and tried not to send conflicting signals. Maybe he’d heard something in his voice. Or maybe it was far more subtle: Knox’s timing; his choice of short sentences. Maybe his kid brother just got him like no one else.

“It’s a side job, Tommy. Moonlighting.” He wasn’t going to lie. Talking down to Tommy resulted in regression, a lesson long since learned. “Something for Dave Dulwich.”

“Mr. Dulwich?” Excitement. “The soldier you rescued?”

Dulwich had been a soldier once, but not when Knox had pulled him from that truck.

Knox said, “You know Mr. Dulwich.”

“Can I speak to him?”

“I think you already did,” Knox said, not meaning to.

Silence. He’d stung him with that. Tommy lived to please his older brother. Any sense he’d inflicted something on Knox would burrow down deep inside him and come out later as something far more vile.

“I wouldn’t have gotten this offer,” Knox said, “if it hadn’t been for you.”

“You think?”

“I know. Are you kidding? You’re taking care of me. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around?”

Tommy’s laughter coughed static across an otherwise surprisingly clear connection. Knox, at forty thousand feet in a private jet; Tommy on a smart phone in Detroit.

He leaned to get a good look out the window at the chunks of land and water so far below. From somewhere within came the urge to refuse Dulwich’s offer. Or was it too late?

Knox laughed along with his brother as a cloud pulled the blinds and the space inside the plane grew mildly claustrophobic.

2:00 P.M.

PUDONG DISTRICT

SHANGHAI

Knox arrived at Shanghai International’s sprawling new terminal wearing a khaki-colored ScotteVest windbreaker with most of its fifteen concealed pockets occupied by his passport, cash, documents and electronic devices. He wore a pair of white earbuds, the wires from which disappeared into the jacket’s collar and connected to an unseen white iPhone provided by Dulwich. The iPhone was apparently one of Rutherford Risk’s newest toys. During calls, it switched cellular carriers every ten seconds, limiting any electronic eavesdropping to a few spoken words here and there.

Customs let out into an L-shaped gauntlet of web-strap retainers beyond which stood hundreds of Chinese holding signs or waving frantically. Loud and chaotic, just how Knox liked it.

He blended into the crowd heading for the Maglev train-a frictionless marvel, the envy of the engineering world. The thirty-kilometer train trip took only seven minutes, bypassing what would have been forty minutes of congested highway traffic. He determined he likely wasn’t being followed, though video surveillance was another matter. China employed seven million closed-circuit surveillance cameras and the world’s fastest computers for face recognition. Shanghai operated half a million of those cameras.

Knox boarded the Number 2 line and switched trains at People’s Square, arriving at a busy corner on Huaihai Middle Road. The sidewalk was jammed, a light rain falling. The colorful umbrellas moved like a dragon dance beneath an awning of plane trees, a throwback to the French Concession’s storied past when, in the mid-nineteenth century, an outlying part of the burgeoning city had been given to the French to keep the foul-smelling foreigners in their place.

A weary Knox reached the four-star Jin Jiang Hotel with wet hair and damp jeans. He paid a discounted price in cash, part of a long-standing deal with the manager. This was not the first time he’d created a double-blind to hide his place of residence; twice before, in the thick of difficult negotiations with black market traders, he’d feared for his safety and had created a false residence at the Jin Jiang which, like all hotels, registered their guests-foreign and domestic-with local police.

He entered his fifth-floor room-as a general precaution, he never stayed above the fifth floor of a hotel-and placed his bag on the desk, then tore back the bedding, ran the shower and dampened a bath towel to mimic a person’s use of the room. He tore the housekeeper’s V from the toilet paper roll, removed a bar of soap from its wrapping and passed it under the faucet. Poured some shampoo and conditioner from the complimentary bottles and flushed it down the toilet.

The mirror revealed a face now permanently tanned and ruddy from the elements, juxtaposed against unnerving royal-blue irises. It was his eyes that caught the attention of women and men alike, the eyes-more so than the asymmetrical eyebrows, or the scar by his left ear, or the cleft in his chin-that gave him an air of confident stillness some mistook for hardline arrogance. This stillness had the unnerving effect of concealing the machinations of his thought process. And while there was nothing in his affect that projected menace per se, neither was one ever in doubt about his capabilities. Instead, the doubt surrounding Knox had to do with what brutal efficiencies might, if pressed, emerge from beyond his mask of calm.

Back in the bedroom, he moved the television’s remote to the bedside, and drew the blackout curtains. One last ruffling of the pillow and he admired his work as he awaited the knock on his door. He tipped the bellman for returning his passport and slipped it into one of the jacket’s internal pockets.

He donned a tan Tigers baseball cap, checked the hallway through the door’s peephole and left. If possible, he’d return to disturb the room for a second or third time, depending on his perception of risk.

Soon he was back on the street in the thick of pedestrians. It took him fifteen minutes to reach the alley entrance behind 808 Changle Road. He shook off the rain and entered the Quintet guesthouse and climbed a narrow staircase to the first landing. He pushed open the door with a light knock.