“Do I know one face from another? I tell the waiguoren the same thing! I am told to pick up and deliver a meal. I pick it up. I deliver it. A face is a face, nothing more.”
“You lie poorly,” Knox said in perfect Mandarin. “You knew this man, Lu Hao. You are no simple delivery man.”
“How did the northerners find you?” Grace challenged.
“No idea! They appeared after delivery to The Berthold Group. Arrive on all sides out of nowhere.”
Grace shot Knox a look: the northerners had been watching the MW Building?
“I gave you the address,” the man said. “I was to report there. This is all I know.” He cowered.
“Who are your partners?” Knox asked. “You mean to lie to us again?”
“Lu Hao, Lu Hao, Lu Hao,” the man chanted, dismayed. He sounded as if he was calling for his help.
“Your partners?” Grace hollered.
The man trembled with fear and passed out.
Knox took the man by the chin and shook him. “Who knows? He could be out awhile.”
“If we leave here, we will never see him again,” she said.
“If we stay,” Knox said, “who knows what trouble the neighbors will bring us? He was pretty loud.”
“I should have gagged him.” All business.
Remind me to stay on your good side, he thought. “We have to leave now,” he said.
“There is more he can tell us. I can feel it.”
“These others-Mongolians?-are out in front of us,” he said. “I hate playing catch up.”
She let go of the man’s arm. It bounced lifelessly against the bed.
“The way you handled yourself,” she said. “You are part Chinese, you know?” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
6:45 P.M.
CHANGNING DISTRICT
SHANGHAI
Knox took precautions to identify motorized surveillance-executing four consecutive right turns; slowing down, speeding up; reversing directions. Grace kept a lookout as well.
“Do you have him?” she asked, leaning her chin onto Knox’s shoulder, their helmets bumping. “Black shirt? Shaved head.”
“Yes. I haven’t seen anyone with him.” Knox shouted above the roar.
“No.”
“Doesn’t that seem a little odd?” Vehicular surveillance nearly always came in pairs or trios.
“Uncommon,” she said. “Yes. Maybe their numbers are small.”
“About to get smaller. Can you drive one of these?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Hang on!” He felt her hold to him tightly. He abruptly directed the scooter down the next lane. He turned right at the first sublane, and leaned over, allowing Grace to grab the scooter’s left hand-grip. Knox then slipped off the seat and his shoes met the concrete. He ran with the momentum to keep from falling.
The scooter wobbled but Grace gained control. She continued down the sublane. Knox hid in a doorway, peering out. Breathing hard. Adrenaline running hot.
An older Chinese couple passed, arms hooked, strolling down the lilong’s main lane.
Grace and the scooter disappeared to his right.
The idling bubble of a small-cc motorcycle engine grew louder. Closer. Knox ducked back into the doorway. He reached for a bamboo broom as the scooter driver goosed the throttle to make the turn.
The man was big, with sharp, high cheekbones. Another Mongolian?
Knox lunged and drove the broom handle through the front wheel. He slapped his hand over the rider’s and gunned the throttle. The bike lifted over its front wheel. The helmetless driver sailed over the handlebars and smashed down onto the concrete, the bike slamming on top of him.
Knox sprang, kicking the bike out of the way. He removed a Russian Makarov 9×18mm from the man’s lower back. Knox took the man’s mobile phone, noting it was the same make and model-the same color!-as the man’s he’d attacked in Lu Hao’s apartment stairwell.
He pulled the man free, drove his knee into his groin and watched the man recoil. He found a Resident Identity Card and some yuan in the front pocket of the man’s jeans. He kept it.
“Where is the hostage?” Knox spoke slowly in Mandarin. “Where is Lu Hao?”
The vacancy in the man’s eyes told Knox he either didn’t understand Mandarin, or was ignorant of the information.
He struck him hard in the face.
“Lu Hao!”
The man spoke, and this time there was no question: not Russian, but Mongolian.
“Who the fuck are you?” Knox said in English.
“Fuck you,” the man returned in English.
The thwap of the man’s skull smacking concrete was slightly sickening. He was out cold.
Knox checked the man’s hands for calluses-right-handed. He broke the man’s right elbow across his knee.
He was interrupted by an old woman’s shouts of distress. Knox looked up, his temper boiling. Looked right into a surveillance camera high on the building’s corner.
The scooter reappeared, Grace’s timing, impeccable.
Two Mongolians, he thought, wondering, what the hell. Private muscle? For whom? Berthold’s construction competitors? Foreign agents? Chinese cops?
The bike sped off, Knox wrapping his arms around Grace’s tiny waist.
7:25 P.M.
XINJINGZHEN NEIGHBORHOOD
SHANGHAI
Grace steered the scooter in a U-turn across the wide, empty road and returned, having driven past the address supplied by the Sherpa delivery man. The scooter’s light found the light industrial compound’s entrance. Blocked by a padlocked steel cable, the interior roadbed was packed dirt, litter-strewn and weed-infested. It led to a group of six flat-roofed concrete-block buildings that looked decades old but had been built just five years earlier.
The cable was there to stop cars and trucks. Grace slipped the scooter past a stanchion and into the compound. Building 3’s north side looked out on a field of weeds and heaps of rusted junk. She killed the engine, and together she and Knox listened, looked and learned.
Knox double-checked the designation: 3-B. He stacked some cinder blocks and climbed up to have a look through a gray glass window.
The interior space was dark, but looked empty. As Grace parked the scooter, Knox found a length of rusty wire and hooked it through the door’s gap and tripped open the lock’s tang. They were inside.
A typical warehouse space with floor-to-ceiling metal posts. In the near corner were three plastic lawn chairs and some overturned cardboard boxes along with empty pizza boxes, beer and soda cans.
Grace stepped forward, but Knox blocked her advance. He took photos using the iPhone’s flash.
Wads of discarded duct tape lay on the concrete floor by a wooden chair. Knox pointed to the chair and held up a single finger, eager for quiet until they’d cleared the space.
He hand-motioned Grace to the left. He circled around the right. They checked nooks and corners.
“Clear,” she said softly.
“Here, too,” Knox said.
They returned to the area by the door, where a balled-up rag lay among the duct tape.
“One chair,” Knox said, making his point again.
“So they divided up,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, gut-punched. They both understood the other possibility.
“We work the evidence,” he said. “You take the food and those lawn chairs. I’ll stay here, on this.”
“Sure,” she said, sensing his anxiety over having possibly lost Danner.
As she worked behind him, Knox tried to make sense of the scene, to see people in the space instead of a space void of people. He put Lu Hao in the chair, bound by duct tape-confirmed by sticky adhesive on the front legs at ankle height and on both arm rests. He noted the stains and the sour smell, suggesting the hostage had urinated, soiling himself. Then he spotted a shallow plastic tub leaning against the wall-a makeshift bedpan. He put the hostage-takers in the lawn chairs, smoking and eating and killing time. Squatting, he moved like a frog around the chair, then stopped.