The Risk Agent

25

4:20 P.M.

North of the confluence of Suzhou Creek and the Huangpu River, Knox’s taxi sped through the area northeast of the Garden Bridge that in the past 160 years had been home to American traders, Russian refugees, Japanese merchants (and then military occupiers) and the European Jews whom the Chinese required to live in squalor during the war. An uninspiring and neglected part of the city for decades, it had recently undergone gentrification, and was now home to hotels, coffee shops and office buildings.

He tapped the driver’s forearm. “Slowly, cousin,” he said, speaking Shanghainese. “Straight on.”

“Excuse me. The car-”

“Straight,” Knox repeated. “Turn around and pull to the curb.”

“But-”

“Kuai, kuai, kuai!” Fast.

The Volvo had slowed and taken two successive rights. Evasive action to check for tails. Knox was betting it would take two more, returning to its former route. The pause to look for tails was a good sign: they were getting close.

He’d had the taxi turn around so he could see through the Volvo’s windshield in order to confirm its passenger had not left the vehicle. The sleight-of-hand trick with the duffel weighed heavily upon him.

Knox checked his watch, forgetting it had stopped hours ago. The moment that money was delivered, Danner and Lu Hao would be killed. Close wasn’t going to cut it. The stopped watch suddenly seemed prescient.

The driver, his face animated, waited for him to say something. Knox could hardly think.

Too long! The Volvo hadn’t been trying to lose surveillance; the two consecutive rights had been the result of a missed turn or one-way streets. It was nearing its destination.

He texted Randy.

need location

A moment later a text returned:

soon

Knox directed the driver in the direction they’d last seen the Volvo. Recalling Grace’s mention of broken glass in the background of the video, he realized they were in the wrong neighborhood.

“Abandoned building or old lilong near here?” he asked the driver. “Broken windows?”

The driver’s face contorted. “Power station by river, many years,” he said. “Made new most recently.”

“New does not work,” Knox said. He pointed for the taxi to take another right, the Volvo nowhere to be seen.

His phone buzzed:

south of Kunming Rd, east of Dalian

Knox defined the area for the driver.

“We are close!” the driver said, accelerating and crossing Dalian Road two blocks later. “Is large area.”

“Yes,” Knox said, peering through the smeared windshield.

The driver offered a thumbs-up, then pointed out his side window.

It wasn’t the Volvo he’d spotted, but a brick fortress set back from the curb.

With hundreds of broken windows.

HUANGPU DISTRICT

Rabbit had lost the woman in Xintiandi, leaving Melschoi wanting to break something, starting with Rabbit’s head.

He called his source inside Feng Qi’s group.

“What can you tell me?”

The line went dead. The man couldn’t talk.

Minutes later the man called back.

“We are monitoring police radio. The foreigner has been spotted in People’s Square Metro station.”

“Tell me something I don’t know!”

“Our people are headed there.”

“You’re too late! He’s gone.”

The eBpon would suffer for this-if he ever found him again.

HONGKOU DISTRICT

Knox faced a pair of crumbling four-story brick blocks. The roof and windows were riddled with holes. Given the location provided by Randy, and the description, by Grace, it was a strong candidate.

Danner’s time clock was quickly expiring. Knox had to test the waters.

The compound was set back from the street across a patch of bare dirt and weeds and surrounded by high brick walls that met at an elaborate archway where a wrought-iron gate hung open. Inside the archway were aluminum lawn chairs occupied by a handful of overweight women, smoking and cackling in Shanghainese.

Electric wires had been strung through several of the second- and third-floor windows in the building on the left. The structure on the right appeared fully abandoned.

A nail-house by all appearances-a residence condemned to demolition where a few determined squatters had “nailed” themselves down, refusing to be relocated.

He had no great desire to confront a group of Shanghainese matrons; they were considerably more frightening to him than the Mongolians, but they would know everything going on in those buildings.

He crossed the street and approached them. Soaking wet now.

The woman closest to the street wore an armband symbolizing her affiliation with the government as a neighborhood observer. Only in China, he thought, could a squatter hold a community position.

On the dry concrete protected by the archway, he saw fresh wet tracks leading into the compound. The security guard, he thought. Or a courier who had met the Volvo and taken possession of the duffel.

He was tempted to follow the tracks and ignore these women. But he knew they could be paid sentries. No time to shorten Danner’s time clock.

“Heavy rain!” he said in English.

The youngest of the five women-mildly attractive-nodded faintly, though the one in charge shot her a penetrating look, apparently not wanting a language bridge between this waiguoren and their group.

“Rain,” Knox said, in intentionally poor Mandarin.

The head matron cocked her head. He tried again, improving only slightly.

She nodded, and then rattled off in Shanghainese that waiguoren spoke with rocks in their mouths. The other women chuckled-all but the youngest. Knox had an ally in her.

“You live here?” Knox asked, sticking with intentionally poor Mandarin. “These building?”

The lead woman stared at him through suspicious eyes. In Shanghainese she let him know it was none of his damn business, her language so foul that one of her friends looked to the brick walkway demurely.

In Shanghainese the younger woman said, “Be polite, you old witch. He is guest in our country. He and his kind bring commerce and prosperity.”

“They bring the avian flu and KFC. To hell with them all,” the older said, carrying on the national rhetoric that had pinned the avian flu’s origin on the United States.

“Indeed, we live here,” the younger woman said to Knox, in slow, halting Mandarin spoken so that he might understand.

“Any young men, men my age or younger, recently join you?” he asked her.

In rapid-fire Shanghainese the lead woman said, “Shut your mouth, pretty flower, or I will report you and your tribe as running a brothel and have you imprisoned for generations. Do not test me.”

Her admonishment sobered the others, while telling Knox all he needed to know. He caught the eye of the young woman, who was blushing.

“What floor?” he asked in English, knowing the matrons could not understand him. “Show me with your fingers. I will not betray you.”

“What does he say? What does he say?” snapped the old bitch. “You will not speak! You will not answer him!”

But Knox had already turned away from them having seen the young woman’s left hand, resting on her knee, touch thumb to pinky-the Chinese hand signal for “three.”

He took two steps, stopped and turned, now back in the rain. Addressing the lead woman, speaking perfect Shanghainese, he said, “You are a bitter old cow with the brains of a potato. I had five hundred yuan I was prepared to offer you to help me with the magazine article I am writing. Now it remains in my pocket, and you remain in the chair, poorer for your rudeness.”

He tromped off through the standing puddles. Immediately, the women were on their leader with vicious crude remarks and admonishments. Knox knew the arguing would continue for a good fifteen minutes. With luck, time enough for him to get in and out without detection. Ironically, the only one of them he worried about was the youngest, fearing she might see through to his intentions.

At the end of the compound was a wall shared with a five-story apartment building. Wet to the core, Knox turned at the apartment building and went up and over the wall. He slurped through mud to the far edge of the brick tenement, finding an opening where a door should have been.

He entered a dark hallway, rainwater coursing down the interior wall. The warped floor was littered with trash and broken beams and pieces of brick, all covered in layers of filth. Faded printer’s proofs of posters were held to the wall by rusted thumbtacks. Improvised wiring snaked in tangles up the banister. Knox fingered the tangle. The cleanest of the wires was a phone line-new. The residents of such places weren’t the kind to install phone service. But a gang of kidnappers might pirate the service from a nearby pole in order to have Internet. Knox’s confidence built as he crept silently up the staircase, pausing every few feet to listen. The pounding of the rain covered all sound.

If the money had been delivered, then Danner’s time was up.

At the first-floor hallway, he checked two nearby rooms, their doors missing or open; both were unoccupied and cluttered with construction debris.

The second floor was darker, the result of cardboard blocking a hallway window. The wires separated here and ran like grape tendrils to various rooms. Two, one thick-electricity-the other thin-the phone line-were tied in a pair leading still higher.

Adrenaline charged through his system as he anticipated the action at the end of the wires. The moment he’d come for: Danner. He climbed, following the wires, moving more cautiously now. He was led to a door, third down on the left. A set of wet shoe prints had soaked into the wood floor-a recent arrival.

His eye fixed onto a shiny new brass key lock-an amateur move. Ever so gently, he turned the doorknob and applied the slightest amount of pressure to the door.

Locked.

4:30 P.M.

HONGKOU DISTRICT

Knox heard muted voices in a heated discussion from the other side of the locked door. He leaned his good ear against the wood: muted Shanghainese from at least two, possibly three. Mandarin spoken by at least one. He stared at the footprints saturating the worn wooden floorboards.

As he listened, his fingers involuntarily counted out the number of voices: four. Difficult odds, given that he was armed with only the Mongolian’s switchblade.

He considered using the window at the end of the hall and working from outside the building, increasing his element of surprise. But the building face was sheer, and the old witches at the gate might see him.

He dropped to his knees and peered through the space at the bottom of the door, covering his right eye. Four pairs of feet by table legs; two pairs-scuffed dress shoes so typical of Shanghainese men, standing; one, a pair of Nikes; the sitting man’s feet tapped nervously, his legs dancing-not bound to the chair, Knox noted. The fourth pair of shoes by the table was black and rubber-soled above a cuffed pair of pants. A fifth pair of shoes could be seen to the right, against an exterior wall. What held them closely together, Knox couldn’t see, but they were large, size thirteen or fourteen. Danny! That made five.

Knox sat back against the wall and exhaled. He fought the impulse to kick the door and let adrenaline rule. Think!

But he’d not come here to think. He’d come here for Danny.

He stood and kicked the door alongside the lock, shattering the jamb. The second kick flung the door open.

Three men standing-two to the left of a central table, one at the back. One man sitting, to the right. Danny was blindfolded and duct-taped to a chair to Knox’s right. He looked haggard, but alive.

Knox’s elation at seeing Danner nearly cost him. The man on the far side of the table pulled a knife.

The duffel was open, a stack of bound bills alongside it. One of the three men on the left had his hands in the duffel. Knox took him out first, while hip-checking the table and slamming its edge into the man with the knife. He flopped over.

Knox chopped at this man’s hand, dislodging the knife, while fighting through the next man-a wiry guy who took a punch poorly. But the man possessed sharp, exact movements, and was fast. He landed a blow in Knox’s side-his wound-and Knox’s knees went out from under him.

The one who’d had the knife stood up, now weaponless-it was two-to-one against Knox. Three-to-one, as the man in the chair leaped to his feet.

Knox returned to standing using his back to overturn the table onto the one coming out of the chair. The duffel fell. The cash spilled. He throat-punched the wiry man, causing the man to blanch and grab for his own throat. Knox defended a blow coming from the knife man, countered, and then blocked again.

This man was the most practiced fighter. Knox defended well and managed to make the man take a step back, establishing Knox as the dominant. His opponent kicked for Knox’s right knee and might have broken it had the table not moved, putting a table leg between them. The table leg broke, not Knox’s.

The remaining blows came fast. Knox drove the man back one final step and took him down with a left to the kidney and a right to the heart.

A man jumped onto his back. Knox caught the flash of the fallen knife. He blocked the attempted blow, elbowed the man off of him and turned to finish him.

The man lying on the floor, cowering-the man who’d been sitting in the chair watching the money being counted-was Lu Hao.