Ridley Pearson
The Red Room
… as always, for
Storey, Paige and Marcelle
MAP
1
Two men await a delivery van. Nameless men. Professionals. Proficient at blending in. The man with the camera — call him Alpha. The man who stands in the camera’s frame is Beta.
A white FedEx minivan appears in the camera’s field of view. It serves as the starting gun. Alpha eases the Nikon onto his chest. Turning away from the Sisli Merkez Mosque, he is jostled by Istanbul tourists posing for the perfect picture. It’s nearing the end of the day. Slanting sunshine slices through the smog, playing across the mosque’s stone dome and adjacent minaret. Hell of a photo.
Beta, looking so much like Alpha they might be mistaken for twins — each in a navy blue knit cap, black leather jacket, blue jeans — sees the camera lower and moves toward the curb. He cradles a canvas messenger bag beneath his right arm.
The van double-parks in front of a pharmacy, its emergency flashers pulsing.
Alpha walks incrementally faster, entering the pharmacy only seconds behind the FedEx deliveryman. His job is to provide cover. Beta opens the van’s panel door and slips inside. After five days of surveillance, they know the delivery kid, always in a hurry, never locks the van in this part of town.
The pharmacy smells chemical. Alpha reaches the FedEx kid and, as if trying to slip past, allows himself to be tripped. He brings down most of the contents of a shelf as he falls. Turns and pulls the deliveryman along with him.
There is shouting as employees hurry to help. Boxes of medicine are spread across the floor, causing the employees to tiptoe as they approach. The delivery package has slid out of reach of both men.
The lens hangs broken from the camera’s body.
“Idiot! You clumsy bastard!” Alpha speaks English with an Eastern European accent. More training. The deliveryman is young, red-faced and unsure. He spouts apologies in Turkish.
Beta searches the contents of the first of six plastic bins arranged on the van’s open shelves, his fingers flipping through the packages like a collector in a vinyl-record store. He knows exactly what he’s looking for: he has its clone in his messenger bag.
Bin two. Bin three. An internal timer runs. The op calls for an abort at thirty. He’s at twenty-seven when his fingers stop at the air bill listing:
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE HOSPITAL
ABIDE-I HÜRRIYET CADDESI
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
Seven packages. More slowly now. The third shows the sender as a Swiss address. He makes the swap, his for theirs.
Forty-three seconds and counting…
No reaction. No adrenaline or concern or anxiety. The lapsed time is merely a statistic to be noted. It’s filed and processed. He stuffs the switched package into the messenger bag and comes out of the van with his back to the sidewalk. He walks the curb like a balance beam. No one has shouted at him. No one has approached. He slips out his phone and sends the text. The signal.
Alpha’s phone dings at his hip.
“My fault, my fault!” Alpha says. He helps the cautious deliveryman to his feet, making sure to keep the man faced away from the windows. In tourist Turkish, he manages something close to “Üzgünüm.” Sorry.
He inspects his broken camera, trying to force the lens back into place. He and the deliveryman exchange agonized looks. Alpha extends his hand, a peace offering. The deliveryman is delighted by his change of heart. They shake.
Alpha says in English, “All for some toothpaste.” A shared moment of tense humor.
Leaving the pharmacy, Alpha reads the text. It’s a smiley emoticon. Success.
He makes a phone call. Hears a click. No voice. He keys in a five-number string followed by three pound signs. Hears a second tone.
“It’s done,” he says, speaking Hebrew.
2
A veil of fog obscures the steep steel-and-glass-clad marvels that rise out of Hong Kong harbor. From the twenty-second-floor offices of Rutherford Risk in the Chamberlain Tower, John Knox thinks the trolleys and cars look like toys. On the glass, pinpricks of mist collect and join, growing into drops and skidding down the glass in a race, obscuring the view. It’s not raining, but will be within the hour.
Knox steals a look at his own reflection, while behind his image another appears: an imposing figure of a man, older by a few years, unable to disguise a brutal intensity that impressed Knox when the two first met in Kuwait, another Knox ago. David Dulwich still walks with a limp, although his gait has vastly improved since the car accident in Shanghai two-plus years ago. The men embrace.
“This way,” Dulwich says.
Knox notes the lack of small talk, wonders if the brief phone call that detoured him to Hong Kong was as much of the personal stuff as he and Sarge were going to bother with.
The starkly contemporary offices of Rutherford Risk reflect the tastes of company president Brian Primer, whose warm side only surfaces when a client is present. Knox knows Primer as a calculating son of a bitch who concerns himself with margins and profitability, often at the expense of his assets — like Knox. He treats his clients almost reverently and stops short of tolerating loss of life on either side of the ledger.
Down the corridor, the maple office doors, marked only by a number, rise to ten feet and are a full meter across, ensuring that any visitor, no matter how large, feels physically insignificant.
Primer, a proponent of Frank Wisner’s “mighty Wurlitzer,” required his architect and interior decorator to work with a team of psychologists. Wisner, the first director of the CIA, created front organizations and planted media stooges in order to “play any propaganda tune needed.” Primer can work a meeting.
To Knox’s surprise, he’s led not to Primer’s office but to the secure elevator. It drops thirty stories so fast he feels like he’s floating. He’s ridden it only once before.
Hong Kong high-rises are anchored deeply into the mountains. Lessons learned from mudslides a century earlier have prompted the creation of structures able to withstand both the ground giving way and the pummeling of typhoon winds and rain. Twenty meters below grade, storm shelters and storage rooms are carved into the hillside. It’s here, outside a door marked PRIVATE, that Dulwich removes anything containing metal — coins, wristwatch, Bluetooth device, smartphone, belt. He places the items in a cubby, turns the lock and asks Knox to do the same. Knox does so and pockets the plastic key.
Dulwich swipes his ID card and admits Knox to a small vestibule, where they must wait for the door to close before a second can be opened. A body scanner hums. A green light indicates that they are clear.
“The Red Room,” Knox says. “So cloak and dagger.”
Still, Dulwich is silent. The barrier is seven inches of steel and insulating concrete weighing three hundred pounds, yet it moves fluidly, clicks shut and locks electronically. The Red Room is a twenty-square-foot bunker with pale green walls and a strip of exposed overhead lights. The furniture is clear, ensuring that nothing can be hidden inside it. Knox has heard of it, but took it to be company myth.
“I’ve never had the pleasure,” he says.
Dulwich checks his watch. “We don’t have long.” He produces an A4 manila envelope. Knox can’t believe he didn’t see it, marvels at how quickly one can lose one’s edge. He’s been back to import/export for a matter of months; the operation in Amsterdam is still fresh in his memory but apparently not in his skill set.