The Risk Agent

37

6:00 P.M.

CHONGMING ISLAND

Through the haze, the air over Shanghai bulged as a pink smudge on the horizon. Nearing the confluence of the Yangtze River and the China Sea, the shipping traffic spread out; low-slung barges lumbered alongside towering container ships. Jets floated on final approach into Pudong International.

Grace drove the Toyota, now sporting a third set of license plates. She turned the car off the River Road onto a rutted mud drive, entering an area of dirt and weeds and abandoned warehouses. A gravel yard’s towering equipment was silhouetted by the last vestiges of the sunset.

“It’s a ghost town,” he said, climbing out. Grace joined him.

“National Day holiday.” Cinder-block walls separated the abandoned buildings. Grace kept close to one as she led them away from the gravel yard.

“I suggest you take up position there, on the sand pile,” said the former army officer, pointing to the gravel yard. “From there you will be able to see all the buildings. It is good cover.”

“Agreed,” Knox said. “But you’ll be the one standing guard, not me.”

“A Chinese woman wandering around these places will be treated much more gently than a waiguoren.” She stopped, too small to scale the wall.

“But I can climb the walls without someone’s help,” he said, smugly.

Knox helped her over the wall, then followed. They cut across a mucky, foul-smelling stretch of saw grass and mud and scaled a second wall into the gravel yard. The sun sank into the layer of smog. Night fell quickly, dusk lasting all of five minutes.

Together they crawled up the sand pile, winning an elevated view of the industrial buildings to their left.

“Third building over,” Knox said. “That’s not dirt.”

“Asphalt. I cannot read the sign from here.”

“If you could, it would be the same sign as in the Mongolian’s video.”

“Speculation.”

“If you climb that conveyor, you’ll have an even better view.”

“You have an extra phone or two.”

“So what?”

“Give one to me and call me from up there if you see anything.”

Knox smiled at her. “Nice try.”

“As a woman,” she said, “and a native of this island, I have much better chance of talking my way out, if caught.”

“As a man, I don’t talk my way out,” Knox said.

“My point, exactly. Should talking fail, neither will I. If I need help, I have you.”

“And how do you intend to get over the walls?”

“There is only the one wall,” she said, pointing. “You see? The second wall is crumbling. Not a problem.”

“Then we go together,” he said.

“You are a waiguoren.”

“I noticed.”

“It would be asking for trouble. Be reasonable.”

“Don’t ask the impossible.”

“Help me over that first wall. If I am not approached, we will investigate together.”

It was a compromise he could live with-though reluctantly. Knox handed her the phone. Minutes later, he helped her over the wall and then watched as she climbed the conveyor that rose on a steep angle into the sky.

Reaching the freshly paved compound, Grace stayed in shadow, close to the wall. Her chosen route screened her from Knox but was preferable to crossing the yard out in the open.

As she worked around the interior perimeter, the building’s faded blue sign became not only legible but also recognizable: CHONGMING TANNING. Only the first word had been captured in the video.

She bided her time in a dark corner and watched. Five minutes stretched to ten. In the background she heard the rumble of passing ships, the slap of river water, the steady roar of frogs and night insects. Finally, she positioned herself to match the angle of the video, wondering about the late-night paving. She crossed the asphalt, trying to do so casually, not sneaking up on the place, but just out for a walk, in case she was spotted.

She felt Knox’s eyes on her back.

A pair of huge sliding doors formed the center of the structure. They were padlocked with a new lock. A second door for people was to the right. It, too, was padlocked, all the windows barricaded with a grid of welded rebar.

She returned to the center doors and found a few centimeters of play in the assembly. She improvised a pry bar out of a section of discarded pipe. With upward pressure, the door on the right pulled off its track, revealing a gap at the bottom. She rested and then pried a second time. When she leaned hard on the pipe, the door swung out a foot at the bottom. If she could block it there, she thought there might be enough room to crawl through. A two-person job. No doubt Knox was watching her, thinking the same thing.

She resented needing him. To ask for his help was to invite him to join her, and she did not want that.

The phone he’d given her vibrated in her pants pocket. She made no effort to retrieve it. She didn’t need his cynicism and sarcasm.

She spotted a pile of discarded cinder blocks. Ingenuity, she thought. Focus. Commitment. Her army training returned effortlessly.

Minutes later, she heaved once again on her pry bar and simultaneously shoved a cinder block into the gap with her foot.

She lay flat and crawled through the narrow space, elated that Knox would never have made it.

She was inside.

Perched on the exoskeleton of the conveyor’s steeply angled arm, Knox willed Grace to answer the damn phone. He’d lost a pair of headlights coming up River Road from the direction of Chongming. Of the many explanations he considered, the most likely was that the vehicle had pulled off the road and switched off its lights-a pair of teenagers seeking back-seat romance; a cop settling into a speed trap; or something much worse.

As if to confirm her independence, she wouldn’t answer her goddamned phone. Never mind that he’d been impressed by the ingenuity of her entering the building, he’d have gone after her if he’d thought he might squeeze under those doors as she had. But there was no way.

Instead, he concentrated on locating the vehicle belonging to the missing headlights. A minute passed. Two. Three. Nothing.

Maybe it had been lovers after all.

Using the phone’s screen as a flashlight, Grace followed the bluish glow deeper into the tannery. She passed steel carts fixed to tracks laid in the concrete floor. Giant metal vats lined the aisle on either side of her. A tangle of plumbing. The stench of bleach and chemicals over which hung the unmistakable fetid odor of decay.

Her eyes adjusted, allowing her to navigate by the phone’s glow more easily. She passed beneath an elaborate network of catwalks, tracks and winches. A pair of forklifts sat like tusked animals alongside a central doublewide trailer. An array of dozens of stacked fifty-five-gallon steel drums.

Only as the buzzing of bluebottle flies rose like a chorus and the decomposition choked her did she sense what had happened. Rounding the corner of the doublewide, she faced a line of steel-framed, butcher-block dressing tables beneath a set of fluorescent tube lights. The dressing tables had their own sets of knives and cutting tools. Drains and PVC tubing ran to grates set into the floor. She turned and retched. The table nearest her had been cleaned too hastily. Flies clustered around bits of bone and flesh. Blood coagulated along the edges and the drains.

But it was the shredded pieces of bloodstained clothing that caught her eye. Frayed cotton and bits of denim. A human slaughter, not cattle for tanning.

Yao Xuolong’s death had appeared to be a hit-and-run, not a butchering.

Instinctively, she backed away from the crime scene. Her shoes caught and she tripped, reaching out for purchase. She grabbed at a hanging chain, but let go immediately, the chain sticky with what she was certain was blood.

She brought the phone’s screen close. Not red, or black, but a leather-colored brown goo. Whatever it was came from overhead as a steady drip to the floor, where it collected in a syrupy puddle by a drain.

She wiped her hand on a butcher’s apron hanging within reach. Her fingers began to warm. Then, sting. Then feel as if they were rotting off her.

She hurried through the maze of floor machinery, left, right, down a narrow aisle in search of a sink. She reached an emergency chemical wash station, placed her hands under the sunflower showerhead and bumped the lever with her knee. Nothing.

She hurried along the wall, half-blind, knocking tools and cans to the floor. She found a wall sink, turned the faucet and plunged both hands beneath the spit of water just as her phone rang.

The pain was too great to remove her hands. She would call him back as soon as she got the chemical off her skin.

She grabbed a worn bar of soap and worked up lather. Slowly-too slowly-the pain subsided. Her palms were raw and close to bleeding.

She connected her burns with Knox’s. From handling the surveyor’s shoes. She wanted to tell Knox what she’d found, but as she withdrew her hands from the water, they hurt so badly she doused them again.

Her phone buzzed for a third time. She braved the pain and reached for it, stuffing it into the crook of her shoulder and thrusting her free hand back into the water.

She awkwardly worked the phone, shoulder to ear. The device slipped and squirted out, landing with a clunk and the sound of shattered plastic. Its screen went black.