Claiborne Hotel, Manhattan
I awoke with a start. I’d fallen asleep with my clothes on, on the bed, exhaustion piercing past the feverish high I’d had running for hours. I hate sleeping in my clothes; it always feels like the sleep has seeped into the fabric. I heard the knock on the door again, insistent. I’d put out the Do Not Disturb sign. I reached for my gun and then remembered I didn’t have one. There was so much paperwork involved in transporting a gun; I’d get one from my bar, The Last Minute, later.
‘Sam. It’s me.’ Leonie.
I glanced at the clock. Ten in the morning. I got to my feet and opened the door.
‘I want you to order coffee and breakfast for us, to your room. I don’t want the maid to see my room right now.’
‘Why not?’
Leonie rolled her eyes. ‘Do what I tell you. Coffee, two pots, French roast. Breakfast, make it big, I don’t know when we’ll eat again. Come get me when the food is here.’ She turned and went back into her room.
I obeyed her, ordering us a spread and two pots of coffee. I showered like a man running late, pulled on jeans and a fresh shirt that I could wear untucked. I checked my personal phone, where Mila would call me. There was no message. Maybe she’d keep her distance. There was no message on the phone Anna had given me.
The food arrived: two omelets, bacon, bagels, hash browns, juice, coffee. A New York room service breakfast only costs a fraction of the national debt. I signed the check and then knocked on her door.
‘Bring it here, it’s going to be a working meal,’ she said.
She held the door for me while I carried in the big trays.
The walls were covered with white sheets of paper, big ones, as though torn from a presentation pad, and scarred with heavy marker. The laptop lay open and it looked like she was in a chat room. An ashtray, full, sat next to it.
‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said.
‘I’d quit. When Taylor was born. Now I’ve started again and I hate it.’
Leonie sat down and began to shovel the cheese and mushroom omelet into her mouth. ‘I hate cold food,’ she said. She ate with concentration for a long minute while I drank a cup of coffee, which I needed like oxygen. ‘Okay. First things first. Jin Ming did not exist before he arrived at Delft.’
‘False identity.’ I raised an eyebrow, reached for my own plate of food.
‘His student transcripts are almost perfect.’
‘You broke into the university’s server?’
She shrugged. ‘Universities are easy to hack; they have to maintain large networks with lots of unsophisticated users – even at a technical university. Think of a college as one giant coffee shop, everyone with a laptop. It’s not hard.’ She ate some more, so fast I thought she wasn’t tasting the food. ‘All his documentation points to him being from Hong Kong. Makes it easy then to explain his excellent English. But I dug deeper. There is a Jin Ming from Hong Kong who shares his birthday on the university records; he died at the age of five, drowned in Repulse Bay.’
‘Our target hijacked an identity.’
‘Yes. And filled in the back details. He supposedly attended Hong Kong International School there, falsified transcripts. The actual prep school has no record of him.’
‘Did you break into their computer database?’
‘Oh, no. I called, pretending to be from New York University.’
I sat down. ‘Why would Jin Ming pretend to be from China so he could go to grad school? I mean, people fake IDs so they can clean money, so they can cross borders. Who the hell steals an identity so that he can go to graduate school in Holland? And pretends to be Chinese? What if he got deported? He’d totally be screwed.’
Leonie smiled. ‘So if you see someone with a Chinese passport, you don’t entertain the notion that he’s not Chinese. He can’t be who you’re looking for.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said slowly.
‘Jin Ming means “golden name”. A legitimate name, yes, but I think there’s even a sense of purpose behind his selection. A golden name, one perfect for him to hide behind.’
I rubbed my forehead. ‘This is not an ordinary kid, is he?’ Dumb people are easy to hunt; smart people are a challenge.
‘I think he’s a fugitive.’ Leonie crossed her arms. ‘Someone who is hiding but badly wants to continue his education, and especially at a prestigious technical university. And not very many people would think to falsify Chinese documents because they’re afraid of being deported to China and then not getting out. It’s actually very smart. Right now when I see a Belgian or a Costa Rican passport I straight away start to think it’s been faked; they’re the most popular nationalities for people who want to disappear. I think he picked Hong Kong because he’d been there before, maybe he could pass as a native. But my guess is he’s American or Canadian or English or Australian.’
‘Surrendering to the CIA in New York? He must be American.’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t make assumptions. For all their faults, the CIA is still the most powerful intelligence agency in the world, and our mysterious Mr Jin may just want to deal with the biggest.’
‘For all their faults?’ I said. ‘You sound like a veteran.’
A blush spread across her cheeks, up to her auburn hair. ‘Don’t. I’m not. I don’t have anything to do with the CIA.’
‘So what now? You look for criminal computer science students of Chinese descent who have gone missing?’
‘Yes, actually, I do,’ she said. ‘But here’s the other thing, Sam. New York. If Jin Ming wants to surrender to the CIA, why isn’t he doing it in Amsterdam? There are agents there. They could easily pick him up. Why does he need to run?’
‘You ask like you know the answer.’
‘I do. Right now he’s wanted in Amsterdam.’ She pulled up a web page of the Amsterdam English language paper. ‘He left a hospital where he was a patient. A man was found dead there, beaten to death with a metal pole. The dead man has a criminal history as hired muscle.’
‘They tried to kill him once before.’
‘Yes. And the supposedly helpless hacker killed the thug.’ Leonie sounded almost proud of him. ‘The police seem to think Jin’s in danger, and running, and are trying to get him to surrender.’
‘But he could still surrender to the CIA there. In fact, he has even more reason to because he’s being hunted. But he’s not turning himself in to the closest CIA office. What’s here? What’s in New York?’ I said. I hadn’t thought of this. The kid had to have a compelling reason to take the risk to come to New York.
‘Two reasons,’ I said. ‘He knows a CIA contact here.’ August had dealt with him in Amsterdam; maybe while in their care he’d heard something that tied August to New York, and wanted to meet him specifically. I didn’t know the whole story of what had gone on between them when August grabbed Jin Ming from the coffee shop.
Leonie waited.
‘Or he’s from here, and he’s running home.’
‘Why run home?’ she asked. ‘He’s been very smart as to how he hid himself. Very. If he’s a fugitive from here, it implies he’s wanted here. Huge risk to return.’
‘Maybe he has family he wants to collect and protect. Maybe he needs to say goodbye to them if he’s going to vanish.’
‘I assume that if he was living in Holland under a false name he’s already vanished once before.’ Exhaustion crept into her voice. We couldn’t let the toxic mix of lack of sleep and emotional turmoil derail us. ‘If he was already hiding, then why does he come home? That seems to be a bigger risk than he needs to take.’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve heard of people in witness protection coming home. They just get tired of living a lie.’
‘My clients don’t do that. Once I hide them they stay hidden.’
I don’t know what possessed me. ‘Nice. I mean, you shelter people fleeing murder raps. Scum that Novem Soles needs protected. Nice.’
‘You don’t know a single thing about what I do or who I help.’
‘As if you’d tell.’ She knew more about me than I knew about her. Whose fault was that?
She raised an eyebrow at me, took a long drink of coffee to let the tension melt in the room. I felt mad at
