Cameron, Marc - Tom Clancy's Shadow of the Dragon

The place was too clean for a single man’s apartment. A function of Liu’s engineer brain, Chau supposed. All this felt very wrong. No one disappeared, not in China. Cameras and facial recognition were everywhere.

He remembered the entry camera. It was wireless, uploading its images to a cloud-based server. He located the router attached to the wall on Liu’s spotless kitchen counter. The PRC government required tech companies to provide backdoor access to every piece of software and hardware—even those shipped to other countries … especially those shipped to other countries. A quick call to a girlfriend with MSS Information Technology saw Chau logged in through the professor’s router with his own mobile phone, with access to the last month of video surveillance.

Liu had departed for the office at roughly seven a.m. every day and returned at six p.m. On the evenings he went out, he stayed out past midnight. Five times over the past two months he’d brought home women, all in their early twenties. They always left a few hours after they arrived, and Liu departed the next morning at seven, as if he’d not been up all night with a guest.

“Wait,” Lung said, leaning over Chau’s shoulder to watch the surveillance video on the mobile screen. “This one is Caucasian.”

The time stamp read 12:07 a.m., two and a half weeks earlier.

Chau chewed on his bottom lip, deep in thought. The woman looked to be in her twenties, staggering a little, probably intoxicated. She wore a heavy coat with a fur collar that matched her chopped blond hair.

“She is Russian,” Lung said, nodding with a certitude that dared Chau to argue.

Chau obliged him, working hard to keep from rolling his eyes. He could not keep from wagging his head. “And how do you know this?”

“Because someone gave her a black eye and she did not cover it with makeup,” Lung said, as if it were all so simple.

Chau shrugged. “That means nothing.”

“She thought to apply the rest of her makeup,” Lung pointed out. “Look. Lipstick, heavy eyeliner, even some red to her cheekbones, but she leaves the purple moon under her eye visible for the world to see?” Lung gave a smug nod. “The American women I know would cover their black eye in shame. This one wears her injury proudly, like a badge of honor.”

“How many American women do you know?”

“It does not matter,” Lung said. “This woman is Russian, you will see.”

The woman noticed the camera above the porch at about the same time Professor Liu unlocked his front door. Both looked directly up, as if she’d mentioned it. Chau took a screenshot with his phone and then let the video play.

The woman left two hours after she’d arrived, still staggering, but on her own. She walked toward the street and turned left before disappearing from view.

“All of the others were picked up by taxi,” Chau said to himself.

“This one walked,” Lung mused, scrolling through something on his phone. “There is a Russian pastry shop three blocks from here.” He nodded toward the front door. “The same direction the girl walked.”

Chau stayed focused on the video, his mind racing. Liu’s allegiance to China seemed firm enough. But someone high up had thought him worthy of watching. They were all so paranoid about defectors … and yet, Liu had gone somewhere. That was a fact.

The morning after the blond girl left—Chau still refused to call her a Russian, even in his head—Liu Wangshu departed his house at 7:08 a.m., carrying only his briefcase. This was the last time Liu appeared in the footage. If he’d planned to go away, it wasn’t for long.

The camera recorded no other visitors for two weeks—but the day before, a tall man with a felt fedora obscuring his face picked the lock and went inside without knocking. He’d known no one would be there. His face was obscured when he left as well.

Lung made a call to request a forensic examination of known IP addresses connected to Liu. Chau didn’t expect to find anything. Liu’s accounts were, of course, all flagged. That was standard MSS procedure with a babysitting job. Still, it had to be done.

The apartment failed to turn over anything but a few erotic magazines, some ladies’ underwear, and a stack of ungraded physics examinations that may as well have been written in another language as far as Chau was concerned.

Lung stood by the bedroom door, swinging a pair of lace panties round and round on his gloved index finger.

Chau dropped the folder of exams back on the desk. “You believe he went to work for the Russians?”

“You and I may not know what he was working on,” Lung pointed out, “but someone in the Zhongnanhai thought him valuable enough to assign us to watch him. That says something.”

Chau gave a thoughtful nod. His browless partner did make sense. Maybe the professor was selling his knowledge to the highest bidder. “North Korea is just across the border.”

“Could be Koreans,” Lung said. “Those witless turtle eggs could use a good scientist or two … And yet, Liu’s last female visitor would indicate—”

Chau cut him off. “I know. Russians.”

“It makes sense.”

“None of this makes sense,” Chau said.

Lung held up the panties and used the elastic to shoot them like a rubber band.

Chau swatted them away. “You have a brain illness.”

Lung nodded to the tiny scrap of silk on the floor. “Look inside.”

“I don’t wish to—”

“At the tag.”

Chau pinched the underwear with a thumb and forefinger, feeling dirty even with his latex gloves on. Panties freshly peeled off a willing female was one thing, picking up a pair in some other man’s bedroom made him bilious. He rolled the elastic over to expose the tag—which was written in Cyrillic.

Lung’s eyes widened, certainly thinking himself a paragon of wisdom.

“Now are you ready to go talk to the Russians?”

5

Chau’s first mistake at the pastry shop was to forget that he was dealing with Russians and not fellow Chinese.

“Hey, Igor,” he said in Chinese to the man behind the register, showing a screenshot of the blond girl from the professor’s door video. “Have you seen this girl before?”

The Russian was older, perhaps fifty, with a thick neck and a swollen nose that was mapped with tiny red veins from his nightly affair with vodka. Had Chau taken the time to notice, he would have seen a map of scars along the right side of the man’s head, almost but not quite covered by his shaggy salt-and-pepper hair, and the tip of a blue star tattoo peeking out from the collar of his button-up shirt.

“My name is not Igor,” the man said in perfect Mandarin. He wiped his hands on a rag. Remnants of flour and dried dough on a white apron said he’d been baking since early in the morning.

“Igor, Ivan, Boris,” Chau said and sneered. “I do not give a shit what you call yourself. What I want to know … what I require that you tell me, is if you know this girl.”

Chau’s second mistake was getting too close.

The baker acted as if he were reaching across the glass case full of sweets to get a better look at the phone, but grabbed a handful of Chau’s forelock instead. Chau was already leaning forward in an effort to intimidate, and the Russian had no trouble slamming his head into the counter, driving it straight through the glass case and into a platter of sugared teacakes.

The MSS man yowled in pain, freezing in place for fear of cutting his own throat on the shards of glass if he jerked away. The baker lifted him straight up, as if he, too, was aware of the dangerous teeth of glass so near Chau’s neck. Instead of letting go, he slammed Chau’s face against the wooden beam beside the till, roaring something in Russian that Chau couldn’t have understood even if he wasn’t getting his face bashed in.