Brute Force

Chapter 24

Quinn sat on a concrete bench under the mottled shade of a mulberry tree along Jiefieng Road. He’d chosen to wait in the shadows so he could see the portico to the Blue Sky Hotel and still remain out of sight of any curious People’s Armed Police cruisers. His head throbbed like he’d gone three rounds with Mike Tyson and his stomach still threatened to rebel at any moment from the recent anesthesia. The spinning uncertainty was even worse. It made him crazy to think of the block of time that was simply missing from his memory. Even as a youth, he’d possessed a severe aversion to being out of control, preferring a local anesthetic even to fix a compound fracture of his lower leg from a motorcycle wreck.

He leaned back against the cool concrete of the bench and worked on his breathing to calm his nerves — in for five, holding for five, then out for five. There’d been three hundred RMB in the pocket of the slacks Song had given him. It wasn’t enough to escape the country — about fifty US dollars — but he’d been able to buy some lychee-flavored bubble tea. Even that hurt his throat, but he didn’t know when he’d have the opportunity to eat again and hoped the sweet tapioca and milk would provide some energy and soothe his stomach.

A horn honked on the road and he looked up to see Song pull alongside the curb in a dusty tan VW Santana. She reached across the seat and flung open the passenger door as if she’d always expected him to be waiting in the trees.

Quinn climbed in and shut the door, trying not to look as sick as he felt. Midday traffic poured back and forth in a mad rush as if half the residents of Kashgar were streaming into the city while the other half fled. Song made liberal use of her horn and nosed her way into the melee in the particular way of someone unafraid of authority — or getting run down by a bus — before heading north.

“You told me to meet you at the Blue Sky Hotel,” Quinn said. “How did you know to pick me up here?”

Song tipped her head to look at him over the top of her black sunglasses. “This is where I would have waited. Anyway, I brought you a steamed bun.” She pushed a grease-stained sack across the seat. She wore the same jeans, T-shirt, and loose vest as before, but had let her hair down so it hung past her shoulders. Quinn thought it looked much better down, but he kept it to himself. Style tips weren’t something you shared with communist spies — even ones who seemed a little muddled as to their own identity.

“I’m assuming you have a lead on the Fengs’ whereabouts,” he said. He considered the steamed bun, but his gurgling stomach made him stick with his bubble tea.

“Habibullah seems to know more than he was telling us at first,” she said. “My assistant is talking to him now.”

“Are we going there?” Quinn asked, wondering what sort of conversation her assistant was having with the big Tajik. They crossed the muddy waters of the Tuman River. Ugly concrete buildings rose up like gray cancers among the pink-brown bastions of old Kashgar. It was easy to see why Gabrielle Deuben got so worked up about the city’s takeover.

“No,” Song said, watching a group of Uyghur youth eye her as she took a corner into one of the few remaining stone and brick neighborhoods down near the river. “We are going to Hajip’s brother’s house.”

“The one the Fengs murdered?”

“The same,” Song said.

Quinn gazed out the window, saying nothing. It made sense to go to the last place the Fengs had been seen. An experienced tracker and hunter, it ate at him that he hadn’t thought of it.

“What do you know of the Fengs, Mr. Quinn?” Song made a tight turn and they rumbled slowly down the narrow ally, tires popping against the cobblestones. Women in colorful scarves stopped sweeping and stood in their doorways. Children leaned out of second-story windows as they passed, boring holes in them with their eyes.

“There were three of them—” Quinn grimaced as Song hit one of the ancient city’s numerous potholes, deep enough that the battlefield acupuncture didn’t stop the pain in his shoulder. He continued once he’d caught his breath. “One apparently died in prison shortly after the US turned them over to Pakistan. Their father was Hui Chinese, mother was Uyghur, both deceased. US intelligence says they were trained at an al Qaeda camp in Yemen.”

Song nodded. “Our intelligence confirms only Ehmet attended the terrorist camp. Yaqub is the eldest, but he is more of a follower. Ehmet ran away when he was not yet thirteen to seek glory in Yemen. Yaqub would have been recruited as a suicide bomber had he attended such training. It is not uncommon to use more slow-witted youth in such a way. Ehmet’s complete disregard for human life apparently demonstrated great promise to his teachers. He began sawing the heads off people he considers infidels while the ISIS darlings we are watching on the news these days were still attending European boarding schools.

“The odd thing,” Song continued, “is that there does not seem to be any pivotal event that turned Ehmet into a killer. His parents died while he was in Guantanamo Bay, but he was already responsible for hundreds of deaths long before he was arrested by your military. Though he may be a believer, it is my belief that his jihad provides him a convenient vehicle to further his lust for blood and death.”

“Maybe,” Quinn said, thinking that he’d met a great many evil men and he’d given up trying to figure out what tragic event had made them that way. Some people were simply born broken.

“In any case,” Song said. “Ehmet Feng is a fighting machine. Our sources say he absorbed the weapon practice and hand-to-hand training in Yemen as a natural. I am a hundred seventy-two centimeters — you would say five eight. I believe Ehmet to be significantly shorter than I am. But many soldiers and police officers have paid a heavy price for underestimating him because of his size.”

“I try not to underestimate anyone,” Quinn said.

Song turned, deadpan. “Except men on horseback carrying spears.” Quinn thought it might be her attempt at humor, but couldn’t be sure.

Song brought the Volkswagen to a stop in front of a slumping brick building that looked like all the other brick buildings in old Kashgar. Quinn had expected to see a Chinese soldier or two standing guard, but the narrow street was eerily empty.

“I am at a loss,” he said, taking advantage of the moment. “You appear to know a great deal about me while I know nothing about you but your name and employer.”

Song kept both hands on the wheel and stared straight ahead. “It is enough to know that I am a very good at what I do — and I will do whatever it takes to stop Ehmet Feng.”

“As will I,” Quinn said.

“I am counting on that.” She glanced down at the sack containing the steamed bun. “You should eat. I don’t know how you are around blood, but there is a lot of it in there. It may ruin your appetite.”

Quinn felt his stomach groan again. “I’ll be fine,” he said, and left the steamed bun on the seat.

Light streamed in through several open windows, throwing spotlights on great pools of drying blood on the tile floor of the main room. The bodies of the victims were gone, but the authorities hadn’t done anything about the blood and other gore, leaving that for the family to take care of. Uyghur on Uyghur crime, hardly worth a lengthy investigation. Hajip was tied to a terrorist group, and his brother, thought by many to be an informant, was associated closely enough with terrorists that he could inform on them. It was a win in the eyes of the local police.

“Hajip’s brother had two children, eleven and seven years of age,” Song said, shaking her head at the individual pools of blood on the floor. “It looks as though Ehmet killed them first and made the father observe their deaths.”

“Ehmet Feng is a bad man.” Quinn held up his hand, stopping her from giving him any more description that might make him think more of his own daughter. “I don’t need to be convinced of that.”

“I have seen some horrible things,” Song whispered. “But the people who would do something like this…” Her eyes scanned the room, looking for answers to questions Quinn knew were unanswerable.

He stepped over a black pool of blood, drying in a shaft of light from window, to reach a small wooden desk at the corner of the area that served as a kitchen and dining room. A pile of sliced carrots, a diced onion, some raisins sat on a cutting board beside a wooden bowl of chopped and shriveled lamb. Hajip’s sister-in-law had been surprised in the middle of preparing polo—the Uyghur word for pilaf. Everything had been shoved to one side, spilling a clay bowl of uncooked rice. Someone had sat there during the murders. A potato, cut in half but still unpeeled, lay on the table beside the bowl of lamb.

“Odd,” Quinn said.

Song looked up. “What?”

“Probably nothing.” Quinn shook his head. “Do you like Uyghur food?”

“I do,” she said.

“Ever had polo made with potatoes?”

“Not often.” She turned up her nose. “Potatoes and rice. Too much starch.”

“I think so too,” Quinn said, picking up the potato half and looking at the sliced end. The other half had turned black and shriveled like a prune, but the cut end of this one had been facedown on the table and remained moist, if a little discolored. He held it up to Song. “Got a piece of paper?”

She took a notebook from her vest pocket and stepped gingerly over the blood, looking a little unsteady.

“A potato stamp.” She nodded, squinting as if she was only now able to see what he was holding and understood what he was talking about. Quinn wondered just how necessary the glasses were for her to see anything. She passed him the notebook.

“Exactly.” Quinn breathed softly against the cut portion of the potato to give it a little more moisture, before pressing it firmly against a blank page of Song’s notebook.

“What is the American slang?” she mused, watching him work before she answered her own question. “Old school.”

Quinn left the potato pressed in place a few seconds. “Old school, indeed.”

A potato stamp was a well-known trick used by professional forgers before the advent of inkjet printers. The cut end of a potato could be used to lift the ink of a stamp from a genuine passport or other document and transfer it to a phony one.

Quinn lifted the potato off the page to find the vague outline of a Chinese immigration exit stamp. It told them the Fengs were leaving China. But it didn’t give them any clue as to where they were going.

Song made a quick call on her mobile phone, relaying the new information in rapid-fire snippets. She looked at Quinn as she spoke, knowing he understood Mandarin, and apparently not caring.

“Yes,” she said, “Tell the stupid Habibullah that we know they are leaving the country—” Her face darkened and she spun, facing away from Quinn, speaking through clenched teeth. “He said what?”

She rocked forward on her toes, almost imperceptibly as she listened to the call. Her voice suddenly dropped and Quinn could only make out a few of her words. “You’re sure that’s what he said?” She turned back toward Quinn, still talking on the phone. “Very well, then do what you must,” she said. “Tell him you will cut off his balls if he does not help us.” The interrogator was evidently in the room with Habibullah so Song stayed on the line to get her answer. A moment later, she rolled her eyes in disbelief. “Is that so? He will not?” She brightened, suddenly struck with an idea. “Inform Mr. Habibullah that I will be generous and give him fifteen seconds to tell me what I want to know or I will personally drive out and shoot his buzkashi horse…. Yes, tell him now. I will hold.”

Quinn whistled under his breath. “I wish you could have gotten to know Jacques. You would have scared him to death.”

“I once had the adventure of purchasing a new car in America,” Song said, holding the phone away from her face. “The finance manager was a very stern woman, frightening really. When I need to be so, I merely imagine her.”

Quinn raised an eyebrow. “So it’s an act?”

“Yes and no.” Song shrugged. “The mystery of where the charade ends and the action begins… That is what makes women frightening. Don’t you think?”

Song put the mobile phone back to her ear, rescuing Quinn from a philosophy talk worthy of Thibodaux.

“Very good,” Song said, thanking the caller for the information before she ended the call. “Apparently,” she said, giving Quinn a sly shrug, “Habibullah values his buzkashi horse over his balls. According to him, the Fengs are en route to Dubrovnik.”

“Croatia.” Quinn tapped the cut potato against the table, considering the options before them. “Do you plan to notify the local officials?”

Song was already weaving her way through blood puddles on her way to the car. She turned to glance back over her shoulder. “I don’t even plan to notify my own officials.”

“Smart.”

The breakup of Yugoslavia and the Balkan wars had been devastating to the population, but organized crime and the smuggling of everything from heroin to humans had flourished in the vacuum left in the rule of law. Generational gangs of criminals had developed such deep and pervasive roots that even the relatively stable new government found it easier to live with them in a sort of uneasy truce. It was not the sort of place where you wanted to tip your hand.

“My kid brother has a friend who married a Croatian girl,” Quinn said. “They’ve been living over there for a couple years. He can help us out with transportation if you can get us the travel documents and a way there.”

“I will arrange private transport. With any luck, that will keep us out of the official databases,” Song said. “Fortunately, I have a few trusted resources within the party. Our passports will not exactly be genuine, but we won’t need to utilize a potato.”