The Risk Agent

34

12:35 P.M.

CHONGMING ISLAND

Off a narrow hard-packed dirt road, marked by a crumbling pair of stacked stone columns, a rutted lane led into a compound of five timber-built houses, the exteriors scabbing paint. Smoke rose from chimneys and hung in the air, tasting of cooking oil. Knox and Grace approached on foot.

A withered woman greeted them. She wore a loose-fitting white cloak under which could be seen the wide legs of simple three-quarter-length pants of coarse cloth and ancient black cloth shoes that might once have been embroidered with colorful birds and peonies.

“The grandmother,” Grace said. “She is getting her daughter. The white she wears is for mourning.”

A woman in her forties wore her grief as fatigue in what had once been spirited eyes. Knox and Grace were shown into a dim room and offered low stools around an open fire pit where a carbon-encrusted teapot boiled and steamed.

Knox kept up with introductions despite the woman’s difficult accent: the grandfather was a clay potter, this woman’s husband, his apprentice; the couple’s son, Yao Xuolong, had attended the local school and had gone on to be a surveyor.

Grace explained that she and her foreigner friend had heard that the son had been involved with a project of enormous significance bringing great honor to the family and that his importance in the project could not be easily measured. That they were interested in documenting the son’s achievements.

The mother showed them a photograph of her son and then proudly carried on for fifteen minutes while Knox and Grace sipped green tea. Grace did not interrupt, displaying an unusual patience, a quality Knox did not share with her.

“Now this charade,” the mother said angrily, her eyes brimming with tears.

“Please explain,” Grace said.

“They know nothing of my son! I explain to police many times, and yet they sweep me out the door like dust.”

“What do they not know of your son?”

“His clothes, lady! He dies in his finest clothes, those saved only for evening. For town. For courtship. Business. He is found by the side of road in finest clothes, but with the equipment for work. Not his own equipment either! How is this possible? I tell you, it is not. I do not know why these lies are told about my son, but a lie is a lie!” The tears arrived. She wiped them away.

“How recent is this photo?” Knox asked her.

“Not so very,” the woman said.

“Did he wear his hair like this?”

“Shorter,” the woman answered. “You know the young people nowadays.”

Knox tried imagining this same man with shorter hair, working to match him with the man in the video seen entering the factory. It wasn’t an impossible match.

“How tall was your son?” Knox asked.

“One hundred sixty centimeters,” she said. “A little more.”

Knox did the conversion in his head. Five-foot-four or five, a decent match with the victim. He sat up taller, his blood pumping.

“Tell us about this problem with the equipment,” Knox said softly. “You said it was not his own. What do you mean?”

“Indeed! Not his!” The woman motioned to her husband, who’d been standing in shadow. He immediately headed upstairs.

She then explained that her father had given the son the latest surveyor’s equipment upon his acceptance into civil service. The equipment was expensive, representing years of savings on the grandfather’s part. The dead man had taken great care of the equipment. But he’d been found on the side of the road in possession of state-owned equipment, a contradiction that hadn’t been explained.

The husband came downstairs holding a common plastic tote in one hand and a large plastic case in his other. The tote contained the clothes the son had died in. The shoes-dress shoes, Knox noted-had adhered to the tote’s plastic. Knox pulled the shoes free and studied the clothing, passing each piece to Grace.

The mother, sobbing, spoke of her son’s watch and shoes, how he would never-ever!-have worn either in his fieldwork.

Knox had a tar-like substance on his hands from handling the shoes. The father offered him a soiled rag and he cleaned up. He opened the large case, revealing a clean neon-orange tripod and a high-tech sextant.

Knox studied the equipment.

“It’s a sextant,” Knox told Grace. “With GPS,” he emphasized. “Sophisticated stuff. Must have cost a fortune.”

Knox asked the mother and father if he might inspect the sextant more closely. He was granted permission.

Knox switched it on. A small green screen lit up, revealing menus with Chinese characters. He moved through the menu as the others watched.

“It records and saves the ten most recent locations,” he said, speaking English.

“Something wrong?” the mother asked.

“It’s all good,” Knox said in English. Then, Mandarin. “This information helps us greatly.” He ran his finger along the second lat/long, wondering if Grace recognized how close it was to the number Knox had taken from the driver’s navigation device. Only a few seconds off.

Grace wrote down all ten coordinates.

“Do you have your son’s cell phone?” Knox asked.

The father returned upstairs and came down minutes later wearing a look of bewilderment. He and his wife exchanged some heated questioning.

“It is lost,” the mother told them.

“I’ll bet,” said Knox.

Knox wanted to leave them money, but Grace stopped him from offering. It was agreed they would buy several pieces of the grandfather’s pottery, which they did. Each piece was carefully wrapped in newspaper, a time-consuming process that left Knox anxious.

As they reached the Toyota, Knox already had the iPhone out. He input the first of the sextant’s coordinates-the most recently recorded waypoint. A blue pin dropped onto the phone’s map. A second. A third. The line pointed back toward Wan Beicun.

“He’s a shrimp-the right height for the guy in the video,” Knox said.

“Yes.”

“The guy in the video was also wearing decent clothes.”

“Yes,” Grace said.

“So maybe it’s him and they dumped him away from the factory.”

“It is possible,” she said, climbing behind the wheel.

Knox worked the finger of his right hand. “Shit!” he said.

“What is it?” Grace asked, looking over.

“My fingers are on fire.” He spit onto them. “Crap! Pull over!”

She gasped at the sight of the raw flesh.

“Chemical burn,” he said, having seen similar things during his time in Kuwait.

She pulled the car to a stop and Knox jumped out, washing his hands in a puddle. He returned five minutes later.

“Better?”

“Barely,” he said. “Caustic stuff.”

“The shoes!” she said.

“Yes. Our boy was someplace nasty before he died.”

“Like a factory,” she said. “We plot all the coordinates.”

“Whoever did this-providing we’re right-wanted his death to look like an accident. A hit and run while he was surveying. Otherwise, he just disappears.”

“So his disappearance would raise unwanted questions,” she said. “Questions we must now answer.”

For the next several hours, they passed through tiny farming villages as they tracked the surveying equipment’s GPS coordinates across a large area. Two of the ten lat/longs closely matched locations they’d visited with Marquardt’s driver: Chong’an Cun and Wan Beicun. They stopped there.

Grace studied the map, upon which Knox had drawn connecting lines.

“Are you still thinking it’s a group of small towns?” he asked.

He’d sketched three sides of a perfect rectangle.

“It is so large. So much land.”

“Measured in square miles, not acres,” Knox said. He watched her studying it. “Any ideas?”

Grace looked up and outside at the flat expanse of rice paddies stretching to the horizon. “It is a New City,” she said. “A resettlement city.”

The Chinese government occasionally created a new technology center or manufacturing district in a remote area and relocated millions of people to live and work there.

“Doesn’t that fly in the face of Chongming being the seventh city?” he asked.

“Not actually. It supports it. It is to be a resettlement city,” she said, her voice more confident. “Similar to one I once saw outside Chengdu.”

It was a new term Knox had not heard, and he said so.

“China is no longer able to feed her people. We import even basic food like rice. The problem is farming efficiency. We have over seven hundred million farmers, yet the average farm is less than half a hectare. Our government has calculated we need a minimum of one-point-five hectare per farmer to be self-sufficient. It means we must find new work for one out of every three farmers. We are in the middle of the largest migration of humanity in the history of world,” she said, sounding somewhat proud.

“Resettlement,” he said.

“Yes. Resettlement cities are built on empty tracts of land, just like this.” She indicated the open fields. “High-rise housing. Typically, four to five million people.”

“Million,” Knox said, trying to wrap his mind around it.

“Such a construction project would be worth-”

“Billions of yuan,” he said. “Fourteen billion, seven hundred million, to be exact. The number. The prize.”

They sat in the idling car, neither of them speaking. For both it was an epiphany, the weaving together of frayed ends. For both, their fatigue suddenly weighed even heavier.

“I owe you an apology,” Knox said. “Marquardt’s trip meant something.”

“Accepted.”

“Lu’s red envelope,” Knox said.

“Passed along by a Beijing official. The first two hundred thousand was likely for the coordinates, so Marquardt could visit the proposed property. The process would be closed bids. By seeing the property beforehand-”

“He’d know the approximate cost of developing it, refining his bid.”

“The second two hundred thousand was perhaps to buy the bid amount acceptable to the Resettlement Committee. The fourteen billion, seven hundred million. This would allow Marquardt to undercut all other bidders.”

“Yao Xuolong understood what he was looking at,” Knox said. “It’s a small island. He figures it out just as we have. Maybe he offers to sell the coordinates to Yang Cheng or another Berthold Group competitor, or maybe he wants money to keep his mouth shut. Whatever his move, it gets him killed.”

“But he knew who to contact,” she said. “He knew who to call. How would he know the Mongolian?”

“Maybe he didn’t,” Knox said.

“The government official,” she proposed.

“It’s possible. And if he figured out who it was, so can we.”

The only flaw in the trapezoidal shape formed by the coordinates was at the southeast corner, where an irregular box connected the parcel to the shores of the Yangtze River. Both of them spotted it.

“I am familiar with that area of the island,” she said. “A long time ago, it served as a ferry dock. Now it is warehouses and light industrial.”

“So they annex a piece of ground onto this New City, ground that’s already zoned for light industrial. It offers a manufacturing area and river access. Makes sense to me.”

She took Knox by the hand. “Your fingers burning. Light industrial.”

“Chemicals,” he said.

“Chemicals,” she echoed.