The Breakthrough (20 page)

“For what?”

Waldemarr hesitated and a smile played at his lips. “He sells space in our sports catalogs.”

“Where would he have had face work done?”

“At his home. By one of our people.”

“Is there no limit to what you can provide?”

“If there is, I haven’t found it. Now, you’ll find Feng’s English entertaining, but realize that he understands everything you say.”

“Will he be armed?”

“Discreetly. But not in the airport. And he is a master of martial arts. But naturally he must abstain from anything that would bring attention to himself, so don’t count on him to bail you out unless he’s sure no authorities are watching.”

“Got it.”

“Now memorize that face and the name and let me have the picture.”

Boone angled it fully toward the light and locked in on the young-looking visage. “What’s his cover?”

“Tour guide. And though he’s self-taught, he’s good. Sometimes he has to give a tour of Tiananmen Square or the Forbidden City, even to people who would have him put to death if they knew who he was, and he pulls it off. Of course Feng Li is not his real name.”

The owner of the Night Visitor cleared his throat and slowly opened the curtain, which gave both men time to tuck away their documents. He laid the steaming food on the table and bowed slightly. Ragnar whispered his request that the man stand guard for the next thirty minutes. “No servers until you hear from me—no one.”

The owner pulled the curtains together as he backed out.

Boone wolfed down the delicacies, realizing that under any other circumstances he would have found them delicious. For now his mind was revving and food was merely fuel. He was also mindful of the clock, aware that he had to absorb everything Waldemarr had for him and get to O’Hare.

Both men finished eating inside of ten minutes. Waldemarr pushed the dishes aside and produced a small leatherette bag containing electrical socket modifiers Boone would need in China. “That’s also where you’ll find a cheat sheet of what to say to passport and customs agents. Memorize it.”

“You think of everything, don’t you?”

Waldemarr nodded. “There’s even a pronunciation guide for simple words and phrases jammed in there, but I can’t imagine you’ll have time to study it. Feng should be all you need. Don’t eat on the street, and make him take you to more Western-type places, just to be safe.”

“I hope I’m not there long, Doc.”

A female cleared her throat outside the curtain, and Dr. Waldemarr peeked out. Boone watched for an expression of annoyance, since he had clearly asked not to be interrupted. But Rags beckoned the newcomer in with a nod, and Boone instinctively stood.

Could it be?

Boone would have been more confused only if Haeley herself had appeared. But it was, of all people, Brigita Velna, the Chicago Police Department counselor and caseworker Boone had twice been assigned to. The no-nonsense matron had proved warm and encouraging in the end, but she had been the bureaucrat in charge of his evaluations after both the loss of his family and his being shot in the line of duty.

So what was this? Had she been assigned him again, now that his wife had been injured and their son kidnapped? And how would she feel about his skirting department protocol? Had Dr. Waldemarr set him up? If the doc wasn’t what he seemed, Boone could be in deep, deep trouble. But Waldemarr clearly acted as if he knew she was coming.

Boone slowly sat, imagining his trip being scuttled, the case stalling, his career in jeopardy. Should he say anything? Call Fritz Zappolo? He opened his hands as if to inquire. Waldemarr smiled. Brigita Velna put a thin leather folder in her lap as she squeezed in next to Ragnar. “He didn’t know I was coming?”

“Hadn’t gotten to that yet.”

Boone closed his eyes and shook his head, failing to make anything compute. “You invited Ms. Velna?”

“She’s a colleague, Boone.”

“I know who she is, Doc. We’re well acquainted.”

“No, we’re not,” Ms. Velna said quietly, and Boone thought her tone sounded sweet. “Doctor Waldemarr means that he and I are colleagues off the job, away from the office.”

“Colleagues, meaning . . . ?”

“Meaning colleagues. His wife has become one of my best friends.”

“Well, one of you is going to have to get real specific real soon. I’m lost.”

“Brigita,” Waldemarr began, “was attending an otherwise-innocuous social gathering when she happened to mention to my wife a bit of history with family members who have suffered at the hands of state officials. Not here, and not in China, but it has made her, ah, sympathetic to those who need, shall we say, extracurricular assistance. We have since collaborated on a number of extremely confidential tasks.”

Boone sat trying to recollect whether he had detected an iota of that in his previous contacts with her. And slowly it came to him. Yes, he had. She had said all the right things, followed all the rules, and yet finally showed empathy and understanding and even put herself on the line for him.

“You may recall, Officer Drake,” she said, “that I am an admirer of yours.”

“I hope so.”

She smiled. “Yes, I’m afraid that is critical to this mission.”

“You know my mission?”

“Dr. Waldemarr has filled me in. While I delivered to him the documents he has already supplied you, I am not expert in manufacturing those. My role is slightly different. See me as a policy wonk.”

Boone glanced at his watch. Ms. Velna had never been hasty, but he did have a plane to catch. She apparently noticed his discomfort. “I’m Ragnar’s researcher. There are options I must ask you to consider and things you simply need to know so you’re fully equipped before you leave.”

“Seeing a version of the weapon I hope to use would be good.”

Brigita raised a brow at Waldemarr. “You haven’t even gotten that far yet?”

“It won’t take long. He’s a quick study.”

“Still,” she said, “I must get through this. You’ll make your plane, Officer Drake—er, Chief Drake. The fact is, it won’t leave without you.”

“How did you manage that?”

“You’ve heard the expression, ‘It’s not what you know . . . ?’”

He nodded. “Well, I’m just feeling totally cared for. Fire away.”

Ms. Velna showed more dispatch than he had ever experienced with her, pulling a sheaf of documents from her portfolio as Dr. Waldemarr moved the lamp yet again. She raised her glasses to her forehead, held the pages at arm’s length, near the light, and used them as notes.

Boone’s new phone vibrated. He peeked at a text from Jack.
Call me when you can.

“That was automatically answered, by the way,” Waldemarr said.

“No, it was a text from Chief Keller.”

“He would have gotten an immediate response that you will get back to him as soon as you can.”

“Which is true, but how—”

“Just something we had added to your phone to save you time. Seems to do your thinking for you. Now let’s let Brigita get through her material.”

“Okay,” she said, “first we have decided to be very circumspect with the NCIC.”

Boone nodded. Keeping Haeley’s and his own name out of the database of the National Crime Information Center seemed prudent. “That’s still my preference,” he said, “though I know it goes against conventional wisdom. Everybody thinks that the more people who know about this, the better chance we have of—”

“Well,” she said, “Max is listed as a missing person. And yet we’re certain he’s already in China. Tipping off his abductors on this end who you and your wife are would serve only to—”

“The one guy knows. Kenleigh, the one who uses all the fancy aliases, threatened to tell Pitts.”

“He won’t,” she said. “Crafty as Kenleigh is, he doesn’t need trouble from someone that powerful and connected. You understand why such news would be trouble for Kenleigh?”

“Because he should have told Pitts before the abduction, sure. And Pitts would have pulled the plug.”

“Of course he would have. Pitts’s whole livelihood is based on anonymity. He needs it to appear that these kids have just disappeared. No ransom demand, no evidence, no trail, no nothing.”

Boone nodded.

“Now,” Ms. Velna continued, “I assume you’re aware that Alien/Fugitive Enforcement is one of the divisions of the US National Central Bureau.”

“I couldn’t pass a test on it, tell you how many divisions there are, but—”

“Six.”

“—I’m aware of it, yes.”

“Any interest in involving them?”

Boone shook his head. “What would they do with the knowledge that I’m on the case?”

“You know what they’d do with that. They’d report it.”

“Then no,” Boone said. “Plus, how slowly would that bureaucracy roll?”

“Almost as slow as Interpol. And of course Interpol relies way too much on national governments rather than local police agencies.”

“Agreed,” Boone said. “No on them too. And I’m almost afraid to ask whether we can expect any official cooperation in China.”

“We can’t,” Brigita said. “Besides lack of professionalism—though they rarely show that side to the public—many Beijing police officers are corrupt. And the state publicly disavows any knowledge of human trafficking in country, so most US police agencies have to somehow act unilaterally over there.”

“Which is what I’ll be doing.”

“You need to know that at the US–China summit in the late nineties, President Clinton and the Chinese president gave a lot of lip service to halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction and then got into human rights. The US offered judicial and legal training that got as far as a symposium on international human rights covenants. In ’98 there was a memorandum of agreement that was to establish a law enforcement joint liaison group that would cooperate to combat narcotics, alien smuggling, and even organized crime.”

“How’s that gone?” Boone said, knowing the answer before Ms. Velna shook her head. “Then give me something I can use,” he said.

“All right, just a couple more things,” she said. “Lots of Americans like to adopt from China because the wait here is just too long. But the stories of Chinese orphans are largely just a ploy. Brokers buy those kids—mostly girls—cheap and sell them to Westerners. There’s too much profit for it to be altruistic, as the adopting parents are led to believe.”

“That’s Pitts’s business,” Boone said, “but it doesn’t concern Max. These big transactions going the other way, placing white males with wealthy Chinese—those are what line his pockets. The rest is just a cover, isn’t it?”

“Ugly as it is, you’re right. And Pitts is small-time in the adoptions that come this way. He’s got lots of competition, and the whole one-child law and the anti-female sentiment impact every Chinese family.”

“Forgive me, Ms. Velna, but right now I don’t care about any family but my own.”

“I understand, sir, but you need to know what you’re walking into. Asian families have taken advantage of new technology, and as soon as they determine their unborn child is a girl, you know what happens. A hundred and sixty million abortions of female babies in Asia alone. Despite a Chinese proverb that says women hold up half the sky, thirty-five thousand girls are aborted in China every day. And five hundred women commit suicide.”

Boone was stunned to silence. On the one hand, all he cared about was Max. On the other, he was on his way to an abortion mill that staggered the imagination.

“I want my son,” he said, his voice thick. “And I want Pitts.”

Ms. Velna put away her documents. “You know we have no extradition treaty with China. If you find Mr. Pitts, you’ll have to deal with him yourself.”

“Or administer justice on him there.”

Dr. Waldemarr used a finger to part the curtains a sliver and seemed satisfied that the owner was still standing guard. He reached to the floor and dug deep in his case, pulling out a handgun that looked like a small Beretta. “Is that blue,” Boone said, “or is it just this light?”

“It
is
blue.”

Boone liked the weight and feel of it. “Loaded?”

Waldemarr nodded. “Fifteen-round magazine. It’s called a QSZ-92, and it’s manufactured in state arms factories over there. Feng Li has them in two styles. One takes 5.8mm ammo with a bottleneck case and pointed bullets. This one takes 9mm shells, more like a Luger. Locked breech, short recoil.”

“Nice.”

“It gets better. It’s got an accessory rail there under the barrel for a laser sight or a flashlight.”

“Hope he’s got the laser sight.”

“He does. And you can see the fixed sight even in this light because of the luminous insert.”

Ms. Velna cleared her throat. “I understand that the official line on you, Chief Drake, is that you’re separating yourself from this case to spend time at your wife’s bedside.”

Boone nodded miserably as he traded out his license and credit cards in his wallet and tucked everything else into the appropriate pockets. “Truth is, I’m not trying to deceive anyone except the bad guys. They used phony documents, so I’m fighting fire with fire. I don’t care who knows within the CPD, because there’s not a copper worth his star in this city who wouldn’t do exactly what I’m doing. And I hope it goes without saying that if there’s anybody I’m doing this for as much as me, it’s Haeley.”

“Not to mention your son,” she said.

“I try not to even think about what’s going through his little mind. Somebody’s gonna pay for that.”

The three decided to leave separately, the way they had come. Boone left first, feeling as if he were staggering to his car. Part of him was abjectly exhausted from stress and dread fear. Another part of him seemed limp with gratitude for the support system that had formed around him. His friends, his colleagues, everyone.

He tucked his real license and other docs between the spare tire and the floor of the trunk and lodged his Beretta deep in the wheel well. On the way to O’Hare he called Jack, his new phone coming to life as they talked, vibrating every few seconds. Boone noticed new messages coming in from Pastor Francisco Sosa and Margaret.

Jack quickly brought Boone up to date on what he’d found. “The most likely passengers matching the descriptions we got from Mannock were a woman using the name Virginia Tuttman and a little boy with a black buzz cut traveling under the name Mark Tuttman. I’ve attached photos from the passport database. That’s definitely Max, isn’t it?”

“Hold on,” Boone said, fingers shaking as he accessed the photos. The woman looked in her midforties with short dark hair and glasses. And there was no question the little boy with the black buzz cut and panic in his eyes, despite a shy smile, was Max. Boone sucked in a breath. Oh, for powers that would allow him to rocket to Max in an instant!

“That’s him,” Boone told Jack.

“Counter personnel confirm he was sleepy to the point of nodding off during the boarding process and that the woman said he was her nephew and they were going to visit relatives vacationing in China. Their documents listed addresses in Palos Hills, Illinois, but the occupants of those residences have no knowledge of anyone by those names.”

“How’m I supposed to find either one of them in Beijing? You realize how huge that place is?”

“Just hope they’re still there, Boones. I mean, that’s a monstrous city, but the rest of the country is just a bigger haystack. They’ve got lots of cities many times bigger than New York.”

“You get into Pitts’s place?”

“We did. A mansion. Lots of imported marble. Apparently lives alone. No house staff, but there was a separate desk and phone and bunch of file cabinets in another room, like maybe somebody comes in and works for him. Humanitarian awards and pictures everywhere. If you didn’t know—which apparently few do—you’d think he was God’s gift to childless couples and needy children. Files are full of records of adoptions, but so far nothing incriminating. If you didn’t know, you’d figure he was on the up-and-up.”