“Looked to me like he wasn’t very successful,” the cop observed, “but I’ll still need to make a written report.”
Lang gave a brief if fictional account of what had happened, stopping several times as the policeman filled in a number of blanks and added a written narrative. His manner suggested filling out reports of robberies, both attempted and otherwise, was nothing new. The report, Lang suspected, would be duly filed away and intentionally forgotten lest it be counted in the city’s carefully edited crime statistics, numbers that uniformly demonstrated Atlanta was a safe city with an ever-decreasing crime rate, which was cold comfort to crime’s victims.
“Your association dues at work,” Hopkins observed proudly. “If this officer hadn’t come along…”
It was as though he was personally taking credit for Lang’s perceived rescue.
The policeman put his clipboard with the report on it back in his car and walked around the one deserted at the curb, painting it with his flashlight. “Rented.”
For the first time, Lang noted the Hertz sticker just above the tag. “The name of the renter should be on the papers. Try the glove box.”
The cop opened the passenger door, reached inside and produced what Lang recognized as a parabolic listening device and a set of earphones. “What’s this?”
Specifically, Lang thought, it is a DetectEar, available for just under five hundred bucks plus shipping and handling from any spyware order-by-mail warehouse. With a collapsible twenty-inch dish and only three triple-A batteries, it can pick up voices three hundred yards away. A glance told Lang it had obviously been modified in some manner to pick up the vibrations of conversations inside, the modification that had caused the humming sound on the phone.
That there was a market for such things was not a favorable comment on contemporary American society.
He said nothing.
“Looks like some kind of spy-movie stuff” came from a group of curious residents who had gathered.
“Someone was snooping!” Hopkins’s tone indicated national security might rest in the privacy of Ansley residences.
Shrugging, the policeman put it in the cruiser and pulled a sheet of paper from the glove box, holding it up to the light. “Car was rented a week ago by a James Wang of Doraville.”
Doraville was an Atlanta suburb popular with Vietnam immigrants, Koreans and Chinese, so popular that the local city council had required all business signs to be in English in addition to their proprietors’ native alphabets so fire and police could find them in an emergency.
“That should make it easy to check out,” Hopkins volunteered. “How stupid can you get?”
If Lang was going to bet, he’d put his money on the fact Mr. James Wang of Doraville was in for a very unpleasant surprise. Either his identification or rental car or both had been stolen. Again, he said nothing.
Twenty minutes later, Lang garaged the Porsche and walked into the kitchen, where Gurt was bent over, opening an oven that emitted a delicious aroma of freshly baked bread. Manfred was seated at the kitchen table, moving a pair of toy trucks around with appropriate sound effects. Grumps, ever the optimist, was attentively watching Gurt in hopes of a stray scrap or dropped morsel. He gave Lang the briefest of glances before returning his attention to the stove.
“Whatever happened to the tail-wagging welcome?” Lang asked rhetorically before giving Gurt’s rear an affectionate pat, much to Manfred’s amusement.
“Vati schlug Mommy’s ass,” he chortled.
“It appears our son is learning more in school than we might wish,” Lang observed, lifting the little boy by the arms and swinging him in a circle.
Gurt straightened up, a pan in her hands, and gave Lang an appraising look. “You have been to the boxing ring instead of the office?”
Following her gaze, Lang noticed for the first time that one of the seams of his jacket was ripped and his knee gaped from a hole in his trousers.
“I met someone on the way home,” he said pointedly, setting Manfred down. “We can talk about it later.”
Gurt set the pan on the table. No doubt about it, it was home-baked bread. She gently slapped Lang’s hand as he reached to break off a piece. “And you can let it cool. Your friend Miles called. He said he’d call back at ten o’clock our time.”
Lang reached to his belt and removed the weapon he had taken from the listener, laying it on the kitchen counter. He was not surprised to see that it was another knock-off Tokarev.
Gurt’s eyebrows arched. “Perhaps the person you met was Chinese?”
“Too dark to tell, but that’d be my guess. Oh yeah, I got this, too.”
He dropped the wallet beside the pistol. By this time Manfred’s attention had returned to the trucks.
Gurt picked it up, flipping it open. “James Wang? He was the person you met?”
Lang took it from her hand and started pulling out credit cards. “I doubt it, but I intend to find out. What’s for dinner, er, Abendessen, ” he said, remembering to speak German in front of Manfred. Except when the subject matter was one he preferred his son not understand.
“Schweinefleisch mit Apfel. ”
Pork with apples.
With Manfred now in prekindergarten, Gurt spent her new leisure time preparing native German dishes contributing to both Lang’s delight and his potentially expanding waistline. He put in extra time at the driving club’s gym to remove the extra five pounds. Observing her domesticity in the kitchen amused him: the world’s only gourmet cook who had repeatedly won the Agency’s marksmanship trophy.
She rapped his knuckles with a spoon as he attempted to lift the lid of one of several pots on the stovetop. “It will be ready by the time you have a drink and watch the news,” she said in German, “unless you continue to get in the way.”
Evicted from the kitchen, Lang wandered into the library/den and opened the doors of a walnut buffet de corps to reveal a sound system and TV screen. Punching the remote, he moved to the bar and poured a liberal dose of scotch into a glass as the newscaster interviewed an official with the water department. In the third year of a drought, the city had imposed strict limits on watering lawns, washing cars or filling swimming pools. The decline in water usage had, predictably, resulted in lower water bills. The water department’s solution to declining revenue was to raise rates.
Government’s principal function: extorting money from the governed.
Lang was tempted to add more scotch.
Or turn off the news.
22:01
Manfred long asleep, Lang and Gurt were propped up in bed themselves, engrossed in separate books.
When the phone rang, Lang looked at the clock on the bedside table before picking it up. “Hi Miles. I was beginning to worry.”
There was the usual split-second delay of multiple relays. “Sorry. You have any idea what time it is where I am?”
Lang flicked his eyes to the bedroom windows, making certain the sound shields were in place. “Of course not. I have no idea where you are. What did you find out?”
“You sure this line is secure?”
“Reasonably certain. Why?”
“You’ve been keeping some pretty questionable company. The guy you wanted ID’ed goes by a number of names, Wang Jianfei being most likely his real one.”
“I’m not planning on Googling him.”
“Wouldn’t do you a lot of good. I doubt he’s on Facebook, either.”
“OK, Miles, what did you find out other than a possible name?”
“Nasty character. Works for the Guoanbu.”
“The Chinese state-security people? Last time I looked, their spooks were busy ferreting out dissenters and other troublemakers in their own country to send to the Chinese equivalent of the gulags. Why would they go extraterritorial?”
“We’d like to know that, too. In fact, it’s part of a puzzle we’re working on right now.”
“Care to tell me about it?”
“Not on a line I’m not one hundred percent sure is secure. Tell you what, though: I’ll be in Atlanta day after tomorrow and I’ll buy lunch.”