“No problem,” said Jack.
“You bet, no problem. This whole process shouldn’t take more than twenty-four hours. Let’s go.”
“Wait,” I said. “Go where?”
“Don’t worry, the quarters are comfortable. And the food’s not bad, and it’s on us. Now, either you all accompany me voluntarily, or I’ll ask the Nineteenth Precinct to detain you in their quarters. I’ll have to call Justice to get that to happen, and the whole process is kind of a pain, so I’ll be even more aggravated than I am now. How aggravated do you want me? If this all works out, you’ll be home in your own beds tomorrow night. If it doesn’t, you’ll want to practice being guests of Uncle Sam, anyway.”
Which is how I came to be spending the night—without my cell phone—in a government-contracted four-star hotel on the Upper East Side. I ate grilled salmon in a small but, as promised, comfortable room with a giant TV, a lovely view over the East River, a disconnected phone, and a State Department security officer outside my door. Jack and Bill, I understood, were billeted together down the hall. Because they were both large guys, I hoped their room was bigger.
26
Morning’s usually a busy time for me. I wake up early, go running, or rollerblading, or to the dojo. Get my blood moving before the action starts. Not today, though. The sunrise over the East River was gorgeous, the hotel bathrobe was comfy, the shower was fabulous, and breakfast was quite tasty, featuring a selection of premium teas. Lunch wasn’t bad either. I was climbing the walls by the time the security officer knocked on the door at midafternoon to tell me the car was here.
Yesterday’s final negotiation—besides one phone call to my mother, to tell her I was working overnight—was that we’d all, including the Yang family, be at the airport to see Mike Liu arrive.
“They’re putting him on a plane that gets in at five,” Jerrold said. “Direct flight. You don’t trust me to call and tell you he’s here?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
So we all piled into a black government limo, Jerrold up front with the driver, Bill and me in the normal backseat, Jack in the one facing us. Which meant we all had to stare at each other on the hour-long drive.
When we finally got to Newark after sixty particularly long minutes, the car dropped us and went off to park in some special diplomat place. Jerrold flashed credentials and we were led through blank hallways and up an elevator, then shown to a room with a one-way window overlooking the vast space where people wait to meet international travelers.
Jerrold checked his watch. “Plane should be just landing.” The door opened, admitting Mr. Jin and Dr. Yang. The professor glared around the room, with just slightly more discernible anger and contempt for Jack than for the rest of us. Jin and Jerrold bowed to each other. No one spoke. We all stood at the window, watching the crowd below. A normal crowd, no press, no Mike Liu welcoming committee. That was part of the deal, too. And Jin had won on the no-asylum demand, but Mike Liu, being married to an American citizen, could start his naturalization process this same afternoon.
An unbroken stream of people pulled suitcases or pushed piled carts through the doors, looked around, got their bearings in America, and went on. Some spotted people waiting for them in the crowd; some had to look deeper, because their people were farther back. If your people happened to be Anna and Mrs. Yang, you’d have seen them in a second, Anna leaning over the waist-high barrier, her mother standing beside her. Anna was in constant motion, rising on her toes, tilting left and right, as though at a ball game tied in the final minutes when everyone’s on their feet and you can’t see. Finally, she saw.
The glass in our window was ballistic, an inch thick, but I’d swear I heard Anna shout Mike’s name. A man just through the doors stopped. He was thinner and paler but otherwise looked exactly like the photos I’d seen of Mike Liu. Appearing dazed, he searched the crowd. Anna jumped, waved, shouted all at once. He spotted her, pushed his way over, and enveloped her in a huge, crushing hug. The little group disappeared out the terminal doors.
“Okay,” Jerrold said. “That was touching. Now you owe us. And this information had better be good. Or—”
“We know,” I snapped. “The terrorist watch list, the Justice Department, our families, we know.”
Jack turned from the window. “Don’t worry. It’s good.”
He waited for Dr. Yang, but the professor’s mouth was drawn into a hard, flat line. He shook his head slowly: He wasn’t going to speak.
So Jack nodded, rubbed the back of his neck, and gave Jerrold and Jin the name they’d been waiting for.
He said, “Doug Haig.”
27
The debriefing was, well, not so brief. The four of us—the Three Musketeers and Dr. Yang—sat alone in separate rooms waiting for Jerrold, or Jin, or Jerrold and Jin, to stride in and hurl questions at us. We each told the story as we had it. I gave my version, messing up the details that were mine to mess up, forgetting the answers that were mine to forget. Our versions were unavoidably different, just as we’d planned. Nothing’s more suspicious than four people whose stories match exactly, especially if three of them are supposed to have gotten the facts secondhand. Bill and Jack were pros, so I wasn’t too worried about them screwing up. It was Dr. Yang, the academic with a certain professional stake in the truth, and little experience at interrogations, who concerned me. On the other hand, he had the most to lose; he was capable of improvising—witness the three paintings, when the plan had been for him to bring one—and as Jack pointed out, he had the scariest scowl.
To Jerrold, on his first visit to my windowless room, I gave the details of the investigation we were claiming we’d done. We’d looked into the situation, so the story went, after Dr. Yang told us about Doug Haig arranging for him to slip out of China. We didn’t know about Chau then, I said, but his story must be substantially the same. I told Jerrold what was there to be found, most of it on the Web, which is where PI’s do our background investigations these days, didn’t he know that? All the evidence, of course, was circumstantiaclass="underline" records of Haig’s China trips, meetings he’d had with young artists who’d been caught up in the Tiananmen violence or denounced afterward. Some of the information I directed Jerrold to was real. Haig had made a lot of trips, talked to a lot of people. The patterns that pointed to political activity, though—phone records, surveillance reports from not-quite-identified, now defunct Chinese agencies, newspaper photos documenting Haig’s presence in this town or that—had been planted by Linus, to shore up reality.
It wasn’t the nature of the evidence against Haig that brought the steam out of Jerrold’s ears, however. It was Haig. “He’s an American citizen!”
“You were thinking a Chinese person pulled this off?”
“I can’t turn him over to the Chinese government! And you’re not giving me anywhere near enough to arrest him here.”
“Mr. Jerrold, we didn’t promise we’d make your case for you. We just said we’d give you the smuggler’s name. You’ll have to do your own police work. Maybe you can get Haig to confess.”
“Oh, sure! On what basis?”
Actually, I had no idea, so I held my tongue, and he stomped out. The really lucky break in all of this was that neither Jerrold nor Jin knew Haig particularly well. If they had, they’d never have bought for a minute the fantasy that Doug Haig would lift a finger, especially in the face of danger, to rescue anyone.
Finally, disgusted with my inability to deliver damning details, Jerrold told me I was free to go. I called Bill and Jack from the airport monorail, left messages on both their phones, and settled in for the ride home.