China Strike Page 11

  Verrazzano took a quick look at Du and touched his neck for a pulse. The man was dead. Verrazzano climbed onto the top rail of the office platform and jumped for an auto body on the roof crane. He caught hold of the metal strut along the bottom of the door. The car swung out over the factory floor, a forty-foot drop.

  “Go shut it off,” he called.

  Jahn stumbled down the steps toward the security guard. She shot a couple of rounds into the control panel on the wall.

  All the machinery across the factory halted. The crane track stopped. Verrazzano hauled himself up into the car body. Three cars ahead of him, a sky light was opened to ventilate the space. Maybe the Krokodil intended to leap up and go out that way. “Gina, head out to the parking lot in case the guy goes out there.”

  Jahn sprinted through the door.

  Verrazzano crawled onto the hood of the car body. The Krokodil was inside the skeleton of a car just ahead of him, out of sight around a turn in the robotic line. The bodywork swayed as Verrazzano propelled himself forward, leaping to the back of the next car.

  He clambered through the car to the hood. He repeated his jump to the next car along. He dropped through the space where the chassis would fill the bodywork when the car was completed. He clasped the seat anchors, but his right hand slid away.

  He held on with his left, suspended high over the quiet floor. The metal cut into his fingers. He reached up and strained to hold on with both hands. Then he swung forward.

  Dangling from the front of the car, he stared at the next auto body. The one where the Krokodil hid. He levered himself back and forth, building momentum. He flung his body forward and caught the rear of the next car. Two quick forward movements and he was beneath the car.

  He yanked his pistol from his holster and twisted to cover the inside of the car. It was empty. The Krokodil should’ve been in there. Where had he gone?

  He glanced around. Away to his right, a second walkway connected the office corridor with a lunch area above the factory floor. Verrazzano grimaced against the fatigue in his arms. He holstered his gun and levered himself over to the walkway. He jumped onto it, barely spanning the gap, lying flat in relief.

  A few inches from his face, a smear of blood on the metal seemed to have been spread hastily with a bristly brush. Verrazzano knew it was the hair on the strip of Du An’s scalp that the killer had taken. He had gone this way, still holding the bloody skin in his hand.

  Verrazzano lifted his H&K in front of him and went carefully into the office corridor. At his feet, a tubby man lay dead. He wore blue pants with a yellow stripe down the side. His torso was bare, his throat slit. The cop who had been guarding Du An. Verrazzano frowned, then he ran into the nearest office and scanned the parking lot.

  The police car was gone. The killer had taken the policeman’s shirt to disguise himself and driven away in his car. Someone lay on the ground in the shadows where the police car had been parked. It had to be Jahn. The chill in Verrazzano’s stomach was stronger than he’d have expected. She wasn’t moving.

  He rushed back to the walkway and leaned over the factory floor. The security guard was on his walkie-talkie, shaking his head and staring at the shot-up control panel. Verrazzano called to him in German. “Are you in touch with the gate guards?”

  The guard nodded.

  “Tell them to shut down all exits. They’re looking for a police car.”

  “A police car?”

  “They must not approach the man in the car. But they mustn’t let him leave the compound.”

  The guard mumbled into his walkie-talkie. Then he shrugged. “The policeman has gone. My colleague just let him out.”

  “Get your colleague to call the police and put an alert out. They have to stop that car.”

  He ran down the stairs and passed the guard, into the night. He was beside Jahn just as she made her first movement, rolling onto her back. He lifted her into a sitting position. She rubbed her head. “Knocked out by the same guy twice in twenty-four hours,” she muttered.

  “Ring my bell once, shame on you,” Verrazzano said. “Ring my bell twice, it’s the last damned time you get close enough.”

  “I feel like death.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re alive.”

  She turned her head to vomit. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Dead people can’t throw up, right?” He took her into the factory. In the office, Verrazzano flipped on the lights. The German police might arrest the Krokodil, but he thought it more probable that they’d find the stolen cop car abandoned over in the fields by the riverbank. Du An said there were two more computer engineers. Two more who’d be dead within days.

  He scanned the room. People spent half their lives in their workspace. They marked it with their thinking. He scanned the room for clues about whatever might have been in Du An’s head while he waited for his American rescuers to show up—or for his killer. He ran his finger along the calendar on the office wall. It showed a dreamy picture of a young Chinese actress. Which date was the one set for the next disaster? He stared at the month of July that was just starting, wondering if one of the little squares on the glossy paper would soon be spread with blood.

  His finger came away dusty from the calendar. He coughed. The room was coated in dirt. The corridor outside was clean and the factory floor was well-kept. The key to the door was in the keyhole. Perhaps the cleaners didn’t come in here because Du An locked it whenever he wasn’t around.

  He pushed a few files around on the desk. Papers in Chinese and German, brochures for Jansen Trapp cars, notebooks with lines of computer code scribbled across the pages, Post-its with Chinese characters drawn on them. He shook his head. He couldn’t figure out what to do next.

  He let his mind clear. This was where he had stood out from other soldiers back in basic training, and where he was different from other ICE agents too. His Special Ops mind would help him. Wyatt had trained him never to get blocked, never to experience the frustration that takes up the very brain space you need to get unblocked. Wyatt used to say something else too: “If you can’t figure out which way to go next, it’s because you’re already there.”

  Verrazzano turned around slowly, not looking for anything. Just seeing.

  He stopped at the whiteboard. He watched it, waiting for it to speak to him. And it did. It told him it wasn’t dirty. Everything else in the room was under a thick coat of dust, but the whiteboard had recently been wiped clean.

  Du An knew Verrazzano was coming. But he must also have suspected the Krokodil was looking for him. Maybe there had been something on the whiteboard that could have led the killer to the other computer engineers. So Du An had wiped it away.

  Verrazzano went close to the whiteboard. It had been wiped hastily with a regular fiber eraser. It hadn’t been cleaned with a wet cloth. There were traces of the writing still on the metal. He went over it section by section. Notes on coding. Departmental phone extensions. Diagrams and graphs sketched in black, blue, and green. Then he saw some letters, down in the bottom corner. They had been written in red above a phone number. They were barely legible.

  He took a sheet of paper from the desk and a pen. He wrote the number, guessing at a couple of the digits that hadn’t adhered to the whiteboard as well as the others. Then he wrote down the letters. They spelled a woman’s name. Saskia.

  He picked up the desk phone and rang the number. A woman answered. “Hallo, Hütz hier.”

  “Saskia Hütz?” Verrazzano asked.

  “Ja.” Her answer was hesitant, as though her very name could put her in danger.

  He spoke in German. “I’m Special Agent Dominic Verrazzano, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

  “Do you have Du An?” She was relieved now. “You got there in time.”

  She spoke to him in English, but he continued in German. Even the best non-native speaker of English may stammer or think too hard about what they have to say. The only disturbance to th
e woman’s natural rhythm that Verrazzano wanted to hear was the one that might signal she was lying or keeping something from him. “Du An is dead.” He waited. She didn’t react. He gambled. “Can you help me find the others?”

  He heard a sudden blast of Chinese rock music down the line. Urgently the woman said, “Turn that off. It is late. Markus is asleep.” Someone laughed manically near her and the music cut out.

  Then Saskia came back onto the phone. “At Cologne main station, there is a Lavazza coffee bar underneath the platforms. Be there at six AM.” She hung up.

  Verrazzano’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. An e-mail from Haddad in New York. He opened it. It contained a photo of a tanned kid in desert camo. The kid watched the camera with a simplicity that somehow was at odds with the evidence of his clothing, the fatigues that proved he was on his way to kill people or to be killed by them.

  The phone rang. Verrazzano picked up. “Who’s this kid, Roula?”

  Haddad’s voice was flat. She was reading from a file. “Shane David Getmanov. Born 1985, Lexington, Kentucky. Russian father, mother from Harlan, Kentucky. Infantry training. Ranger qualified. Four tours in Iraq. Decorated. Discharged for repeated drug abuse. Told psychs the illegal drugs killed his PTSD.”

  Getmanov sounded like Wyatt’s kind of guy. Highly trained. Damaged. Seeking a new purpose.

  “Last drug-related AWOL—the one that broke the camel’s back—Getmanov went to his uncle in Moscow and was arrested by Marine guards at the US embassy shooting up on the steps,” Haddad said. “No further record of his whereabouts.”

  Verrazzano heard the tension in her voice. “Except?”

  “The officer who recommended a discharge for Getmanov, his eight-year-old was on the way home from school when someone ran up to him and jammed a syringe into his arm. Injected the kid full of Krokodil. The only thing the kid remembered about the assailant was that—”

  “His skin looked like a red crocodile.”

  “That’s right.”

  Verrazzano went down the stairs to the factory floor with the cell phone in his hand. Jahn sat on a metal bench by a water cooler with a cup in her hand. Her nerves seemed to throb outside her skin.

  “Thanks, Roula,” he said. Jahn spilled her water in surprise at the sound of his voice. “See if you can find anything else on Getmanov.” He hung up his cell phone and crossed the plasticized flooring to Jahn.

  “How about some coffee to settle you?” he said. “Apparently there’s a good café in Cologne.”

  CHAPTER 13

  When Maj kissed the skin of his cheek, Shane Getmanov felt it burn, as if the diseased surface of his body had peeled off, dropped away from him, and left his true self exposed to her. She was the only one who ever saw it. Except for Wyatt.

  He reached his arms around her to hug her to him. Then he remembered how his torso looked, and he couldn’t do it to her. Couldn’t press her clean, pure body against the filth that spewed out of his every pore. She seemed to sense his self-disgust, because she plunged forward and was on top of him, her breasts against the scabs and sores that covered his chest and belly. He braced his hands against her shoulders to move her away. “No, Shane,” she whispered. “It’s who you are. It’s okay.”

  “It’s not. Not who I am. It’s filth.” Krokodil. The cheap concoction of morphine and red phosphorus chipped from the heads of matches. Attacking the skin, building abscesses around the point of injection, leaving patches of rotted flesh that resembled the scales of the predator that gave it that name. It destroyed the blood vessels, the bone and muscle. It wrecked the spirit. The drug had been around almost a century, first prescribed by doctors who hurriedly discarded it as a treatment as soon as they observed the side effects. But when the Russian government cracked down on heroin in 2003, it was resurrected, cooked for the streets and sold to the most hopeless of junkies. Like him.

  “Shane, it’s the drug. It’s not you. I can see you.” Her face in front of his. How could she bear to look?

  Under his lower rib, his liver buzzed with the thousand tiny impacts of the poison in its shattered lobes. Stress squeezed around his heart. In one moment, he experienced all over again the trauma of his military service in Iraq and the horror of the murders he committed now for Wyatt. The shuddering fear merged with the abhorrence that underlay his Krokodil highs, and—admit it—the love that he betrayed with his every waking thought. His love for Maj.

  Her long, straight blonde hair fell over him, covered his face. For an instant, its perfume overwhelmed the rotten stink of his flesh. He cursed the path that had brought him to her at the clinic in Stockholm after he fled Petersburg. If he had met her somehow without the intervention of the drug, he could only imagine the man he might now be. A man with a beautiful, intelligent Swedish girlfriend who cared for him, loved him. A man with a future. A man who possibly could learn how to love.

  But it hadn’t happened that way. She worked at the rehab clinic, tended him, and fell for him because she found a crack in the absolute concrete silence behind which he hid all his pain. She even left her job and followed him when Wyatt called him away. She stuck with him when she found the hidden syringes and vials. Now as she kissed his neck and delicately tickled his waist, it dawned on him that she was so pure as to be almost unnatural. No, that was the word for him. His body, his mind, his life defined it. She was absolutely natural. So why did she want to be with him? She detested all other contraventions of nature’s true order, even the international conglomerates whose control over the world economy she protested in the streets whenever prime ministers and presidents got together at summits and trade talks.

  “Didn’t nothing—” He coughed and stammered. “Didn’t nothing bad ever happen to you?”

  She smiled down at him. “Of course it did.”

  “Then why—why are you like this? I mean, how come you’re—? I don’t know the word for it.”

  She laughed. “You mean, why am I happy?”

  He couldn’t help it. He laughed too. “I guess, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I figure I’d be happy if nothing bad had ever happened.”

  “Instead you take that drug because of the bad things that happened to you.”

  “It’s eating me alive. Same as the bad memories.”

  She ran her finger along his jaw. “The only difference between you and me is that I don’t hate myself. So stop hating yourself. Give yourself some love.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  She kissed his lips lightly. “Then let me give it to you, and perhaps you’ll start loving yourself without realizing it.”

  “The difference between you and me is that I’m going to die.”

  “If you keep taking Krokodil, yes, you will be dead within a matter of months.”

  “So? Don’t that seem like a pretty basic difference?”

  “Until the day that you die, you are alive. That’s basic. That’s the way I live. You should try it, silly man.”

  Sobs shook through him stronger than anything he had ever felt. Until the day that you die, you are alive. She gathered him to her.

  “I’m dead,” he moaned. “I’m already dead.”

  “You’re not. Look at me—”

  “No, I don’t want to. I want to be dead. I deserve it.”

  As if it were happening right now, he saw himself scalping the Chinese, counting them off, knowing how many more there must be. All of it was to keep himself alive. All of it made him feel more dead than ever.

  “The world needs a man like you to change it for the better.” She touched her palm to his raddled cheek. “The world is ruled by men who dominate entire continents with their corporations. They control our thoughts with their online networks. But you are beyond their control, because you know how to defy everything. Even death. You only need to be cured of your addiction, and you will be the most powerful man on earth.”

  “I just got to do this last job for Wyatt.”

  “Then after that, you will use you
r power for good?”

  “You and me, together, we’re going to change the world. The globalization thing, right? We’ll take it on.”

  He wanted to believe it. But Wyatt never let anyone go. If the colonel kept him alive, it would be as a tool for dispensing death. Until he himself was dead.

  His cell phone buzzed on the mattress. Maj picked it up and read the text. Getmanov tried to measure her reaction. He knew what was coming. Wyatt had given him enough of a hint. It was a deal only a killer or a junkie could accept. Once you poison yourself the first time, you know that you would extinguish a universe if it meant you might continue murdering yourself with the drugs. And Getmanov was both a killer and a junkie.

  She turned to him, puzzled, and showed him the phone. “What does this mean? Shane, what does he want from me?”

  “He wants you to make someone think you’re going to screw him, so that he’ll do what Wyatt wants.”

  “Screw?” She spoke the word with wonder and curiosity.

  His laughter was sinister, and she recoiled in fear. She’d better get used to being scared. She ought to have let him die. If she wanted him alive, she’d have to trip the light frightful with him from time to time.

  She reread the text message. “He says I have to go to Vienna.”

  “My army psych told me about Vienna. That’s where Simon Freud is from.”

  “Sigmund Freud.”

  “The psych told me that Freud wrote something like this: Wars happen because being civilized is too much stress for human beings. Every couple of years we have to go totally wing nut and fight a war. It scares us into being kind of peaceful again, until a couple of years later the same thing happens—we just can’t take it, and so we fight another war.”

  “But you can’t ignore the fact that wars are fought for corporate interests. That isn’t because of a great cultural psychosis. It’s because some fat, white man in New York wants to boost his profits, so he calls another fat, white man in Washington, and they arrange to fight a war.”