The driver offered a thumbs-up, then pointed out his side window.
It wasn’t the Volvo he’d spotted, but a brick fortress set back from the curb.
With hundreds of broken windows.
HUANGPU DISTRICT
Rabbit had lost the woman in Xintiandi, leaving Melschoi wanting to break something, starting with Rabbit’s head.
He called his source inside Feng Qi’s group.
“What can you tell me?”
The line went dead. The man couldn’t talk.
Minutes later the man called back.
“We are monitoring police radio. The foreigner has been spotted in People’s Square Metro station.”
“Tell me something I don’t know!”
“Our people are headed there.”
“You’re too late! He’s gone.”
The eBpon would suffer for this-if he ever found him again.
HONGKOU DISTRICT
Knox faced a pair of crumbling four-story brick blocks. The roof and windows were riddled with holes. Given the location provided by Randy, and the description, by Grace, it was a strong candidate.
Danner’s time clock was quickly expiring. Knox had to test the waters.
The compound was set back from the street across a patch of bare dirt and weeds and surrounded by high brick walls that met at an elaborate archway where a wrought-iron gate hung open. Inside the archway were aluminum lawn chairs occupied by a handful of overweight women, smoking and cackling in Shanghainese.
Electric wires had been strung through several of the second- and third-floor windows in the building on the left. The structure on the right appeared fully abandoned.
A nail-house by all appearances-a residence condemned to demolition where a few determined squatters had “nailed” themselves down, refusing to be relocated.
He had no great desire to confront a group of Shanghainese matrons; they were considerably more frightening to him than the Mongolians, but they would know everything going on in those buildings.
He crossed the street and approached them. Soaking wet now.
The woman closest to the street wore an armband symbolizing her affiliation with the government as a neighborhood observer. Only in China, he thought, could a squatter hold a community position.
On the dry concrete protected by the archway, he saw fresh wet tracks leading into the compound. The security guard, he thought. Or a courier who had met the Volvo and taken possession of the duffel.
He was tempted to follow the tracks and ignore these women. But he knew they could be paid sentries. No time to shorten Danner’s time clock.
“Heavy rain!” he said in English.
The youngest of the five women-mildly attractive-nodded faintly, though the one in charge shot her a penetrating look, apparently not wanting a language bridge between this waiguoren and their group.
“Rain,” Knox said, in intentionally poor Mandarin.
The head matron cocked her head. He tried again, improving only slightly.
She nodded, and then rattled off in Shanghainese that waiguoren spoke with rocks in their mouths. The other women chuckled-all but the youngest. Knox had an ally in her.
“You live here?” Knox asked, sticking with intentionally poor Mandarin. “These building?”
The lead woman stared at him through suspicious eyes. In Shanghainese she let him know it was none of his damn business, her language so foul that one of her friends looked to the brick walkway demurely.
In Shanghainese the younger woman said, “Be polite, you old witch. He is guest in our country. He and his kind bring commerce and prosperity.”
“They bring the avian flu and KFC. To hell with them all,” the older said, carrying on the national rhetoric that had pinned the avian flu’s origin on the United States.
“Indeed, we live here,” the younger woman said to Knox, in slow, halting Mandarin spoken so that he might understand.
“Any young men, men my age or younger, recently join you?” he asked her.
In rapid-fire Shanghainese the lead woman said, “Shut your mouth, pretty flower, or I will report you and your tribe as running a brothel and have you imprisoned for generations. Do not test me.”
Her admonishment sobered the others, while telling Knox all he needed to know. He caught the eye of the young woman, who was blushing.
“What floor?” he asked in English, knowing the matrons could not understand him. “Show me with your fingers. I will not betray you.”
“What does he say? What does he say?” snapped the old bitch. “You will not speak! You will not answer him!”
But Knox had already turned away from them having seen the young woman’s left hand, resting on her knee, touch thumb to pinky-the Chinese hand signal for “three.”
He took two steps, stopped and turned, now back in the rain. Addressing the lead woman, speaking perfect Shanghainese, he said, “You are a bitter old cow with the brains of a potato. I had five hundred yuan I was prepared to offer you to help me with the magazine article I am writing. Now it remains in my pocket, and you remain in the chair, poorer for your rudeness.”
He tromped off through the standing puddles. Immediately, the women were on their leader with vicious crude remarks and admonishments. Knox knew the arguing would continue for a good fifteen minutes. With luck, time enough for him to get in and out without detection. Ironically, the only one of them he worried about was the youngest, fearing she might see through to his intentions.
At the end of the compound was a wall shared with a five-story apartment building. Wet to the core, Knox turned at the apartment building and went up and over the wall. He slurped through mud to the far edge of the brick tenement, finding an opening where a door should have been.
He entered a dark hallway, rainwater coursing down the interior wall. The warped floor was littered with trash and broken beams and pieces of brick, all covered in layers of filth. Faded printer’s proofs of posters were held to the wall by rusted thumbtacks. Improvised wiring snaked in tangles up the banister. Knox fingered the tangle. The cleanest of the wires was a phone line-new. The residents of such places weren’t the kind to install phone service. But a gang of kidnappers might pirate the service from a nearby pole in order to have Internet. Knox’s confidence built as he crept silently up the staircase, pausing every few feet to listen. The pounding of the rain covered all sound.
If the money had been delivered, then Danner’s time was up.
At the first-floor hallway, he checked two nearby rooms, their doors missing or open; both were unoccupied and cluttered with construction debris.
The second floor was darker, the result of cardboard blocking a hallway window. The wires separated here and ran like grape tendrils to various rooms. Two, one thick-electricity-the other thin-the phone line-were tied in a pair leading still higher.
Adrenaline charged through his system as he anticipated the action at the end of the wires. The moment he’d come for: Danner. He climbed, following the wires, moving more cautiously now. He was led to a door, third down on the left. A set of wet shoe prints had soaked into the wood floor-a recent arrival.
His eye fixed onto a shiny new brass key lock-an amateur move. Ever so gently, he turned the doorknob and applied the slightest amount of pressure to the door.
Locked.
4:30 P.M.
HONGKOU DISTRICT
