Dana Stabenow - Blindfold Game

In Moscow they took an even older Tupolev to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Their forged passports, visas, and work permits went unchallenged. They found menial jobs as sweepers and loaders on the docks and a one-room apartment with light but no heat.

They settled in to wait, sinking with barely a trace into the general population, which unlike the citizenry of many Russian cities was fully occupied building ships for the Russian Pacific fleet, assembling Mig fighters for export, manning a steel mill to furnish material for the construction of both, and lading freight on and off the many ships coming into the port.

Within days, the others began to trickle into town in ones and twos.

Smith and Jones wielded shovels and picks and the occasional broom, and waited.

HUGH LEFT BALTIMORE ONEevening at 8:30 p.m. and arrived in Hong Kong the next day at 1:05 p.m. He didn’t sleep well on jets, spending most of his time holding them in the air by the armrests, and he was feeling distinctly travel worn when he came through customs.

He was also weighed down by the possibility that he was going to be fired for any number of reasons, among them disobeying a direct order and misuse of public funds, but he shoved that into the back of his mind and pushed through the crowd to the curb. A taxi pulled up and Arlene’s voice said, “Get in.”

He did and they pulled away with a lurch and a corresponding roar from a muffler that sounded as if it were hanging by a thread.

“How was your flight?”

“Give me a Super Cub anytime,” he said. “What have you got?”

“No hello after I’ve spent two and a half months in the wilderness for you?”

“Hong Kong isn’t exactly the wilderness, Arlene. Come on, give.”

Arlene’s smile was small and satisfied. “I found him.”

“You told me that six weeks ago. What else?”

She pretended to pout. “I don’t get to brag?”

“Later. Talk.”

“I had a couple of local contacts, and one of them knows someone in Chinese customs. Turns out they’ve been interested in Fang and Noort-man for some time. They’ve compiled quite the little dossier.”

“You didn’t manage to score a look at it?”

She smiled again.

“God, I’m so smart,” Hugh said.

“For what?”

“For hiring you.”

She laughed. “Naturally I agree.”

“What was in the dossier?”

“Our boy’s been busy.” She recounted half a dozen of Noortman and Fang’s jobs, including the most recent one. “They took a tramp freighter”-she closed her eyes for a moment-“the Orion’s Belt, carrying a load of Chilean lumber from Valparaiso to Mumbai. Near as our friends can figure, Noortman, uh, rerouted the cargo to Sumatra and sold it on the black market. The Indonesians are desperate for construction materials after the tsunami, and they don’t ask a lot of questions when a load of two-by-fours shows up at the dock.”

“What did they do with the ship?”

“Sold it to shipbreakers in Alang.” At his look she elaborated. “A beach on the west coast of India.” She shrugged. “An efficient means of disposing of the evidence. I was writing a story on Mumbai a couple of years ago and I took a trip out there. Hell of an operation. The beach is six miles long and on any given day there can be as many as two hundred ships being scrapped at once. The ship would have been gone in as little as six months. Maybe a year. Like I said, efficient.”

Sara would have hated the very idea of an operation like Alang’s, Hugh thought. “Can our friends in Hong Kong prove any of this?”

Arlene snorted. “It was a French-owned, Liberian-flagged freighter carrying a Chilean cargo bound for India, with Indian officers and a Filipino crew, taken by pirates of multiple Asian nations in international waters. No one country even has jurisdiction over the crime scene, never mind any evidence that would stand up in court.”

“Yeah,” Hugh said. “So?”

“So, I’ve been watching Mr. Noortman.”

“Have you? Any company?”

“Are our friends watching him, too, do you mean? They say not. I’d say yes, just not twenty-four seven. Noortman has done nothing to offend the local laws, which would be the smart thing to do if he wanted to stay here. Thou shalt not shit in thine own nest.”

Hugh couldn’t argue with that. “Where are we going?”

“To a restaurant with a conveniently placed front window. I’ve already reserved a table with a view of our boy’s office building.”

“Marry me,” Hugh said.

She grinned. “You’re too old for me.”

“Noortman actually has a storefront?”

“Oh yeah, Hong Kong Fast Freight, Ltd., is very much on the up-and-up, licensed, bonded, registered, incorporated, files quarterly tax returns, contributes to enough local charities in small enough amounts to stay low on the local social radar screen. All perfectly aboveboard and squeaky clean.” As an afterthought she said, “Of course, this is Hong Kong. Squeaky clean in Hong Kong isn’t squeaky clean in, say, Seattle. Or for that matter Beirut.”

“I thought everything tightened up after the Chinese took over.”

Arlene gave him a look. “It’s still Hong Kong.”

Hugh, who wasn’t about to admit that he’d learned most of what he knew about Hong Kong from the www.discoverhongkong.com Web site while he was sitting in the Baltimore airport waiting for his flight to board and the rest from James Clavell during the flight, gave a noncommittal grunt.

“You’ve been here before, right? So I don’t have to give you the tour?”

Half a dozen times to change planes, and once to meet in the British Airways lounge with a snotty little shit of a case officer who had started their conversation with a recitation of his family tree, which appeared to reach all the way back to the Mayflower, and reached forward to several members of Congress, a cabinet-level post in the current administration, and a Supreme Court justice. It had ended with the snotty little shit of a case officer white-faced and trembling, mumbling out his report of the nascent Islamic terrorist cell in Egypt he had stumbled across in his posting to the American embassy in Cairo. The report had been unexpectedly useful, but Hugh, who saved the rough side of his tongue especially for arrogant little pricks just starting out in the agency, didn’t make the mistake of saying so. Said prick was now warming the most junior of junior charge d’affaires seats in the American embassy in Zaire (or the Democratic Republic of the Congo or whatever the hell they were calling themselves nowadays), which gave Hugh the warm fuzzies all over whenever he thought of it, which wasn’t often.

“I’ve been here before,” Hugh said without elaboration. He was a desk man, not a field agent. He shook off his fatigue and watched the approaching skyline with interest. From a distance Hong Kong looked like a multitowered castle built on a tall green promontory, surrounded by the world’s largest moat. The water was crowded with craft of every kind and size, from homemade junks to boxy ferries to sleek cruise ships.

As they entered the city proper, Hugh saw a lot of concrete, a lot of neon, and a shitload of people, many in cars. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper stop and go, and none of the drivers would have made it a hundred feet on an American street without being pulled over for felony tailgating. Everyone, pedestrian and driver alike, ignored the stoplights, and Hugh saw a black Mercedes roll through an intersection against a red and literally hit a woman in the crosswalk. The car was moving slowly enough that all it did was hoist her up on the hood. She slid down and yelled at the driver. The driver stuck his head out the window and yelled an uncomplimentary reply, and for a minute Hugh felt like he was in New York.