“By comparison,” she said.
Yang Cheng debated all this internally.
“The choice is yours, but the offer will be made elsewhere if you pass.”
“What else?” Yang Cheng asked, sensing it in her.
“The four of us will not appear on any watch lists or wanted lists. My citizenship and visa status, and that of Lu Hao, remain unblemished. Clean slate.”
“Face.”
“Yes.”
“A man cannot promise such things. These take time and expend much guanxi.”
“Precisely why I have come to you, honorable Yang. You have twenty-two hours to free the man hospitalized,” she said.
“Absurd! Two weeks or more! A single week if I’m lucky!”
“You will explore possibilities. When the man called David Dulwich-the American in hospital-arrives to the consulate, you shall have the name of the corrupt official. And all evidence. By this time tomorrow I will seek another to do business with.”
“This is not business, it is extortion.”
“Business makes for strange bedfellows,” she said.
“We will always have a place at Yang Construction for one as cunning as you, Ms. Chu. You have my number.”
Grace collapsed the umbrella-her signal to Knox-and moved into the throng.
Yang’s man joined him at his side and shot a look back at her. She recognized him as one of the two from the alley attack.
She pushed north through the crowd, trusting that Knox was watching her. She returned an ear bud.
“Do you have me?” she asked.
“Wave,” he said.
She lifted her arm.
“I have you. You’re clean.” He paused. “What was all that visa nonsense?”
“This is my family home. Lu Hao’s family home. We cannot return here if we are fugitives.”
“You attached it to Sarge. That wasn’t our agreement.”
“We did not have an agreement, John. We had an understanding.”
Ten minutes later, a black Range Rover pulled to the curb in front of the Peace Hotel. The car’s rear door swung open. A tall man and a petite woman climbed inside and the door closed.
The Range Rover pulled back into traffic.
MONDAY
42
10:00 A.M.
LUWAN DISTRICT
SHANGHAI
The rain had begun falling heavily again an hour earlier. Knox, Grace and Kozlowski stood on the mansion steps, under the cover of an awning.
Just beyond the consulate gates, still in Chinese territory, an ambulance waited, a single red light spinning above the windshield.
The gates opened and the security blocks lowered. The ambulance did not move.
“Come on…” Knox said, willing it to cross onto American soil.
Grace held Knox’s iPhone to her ear. “Katherine, please,” she said. “The ambulance is at the gate.” She rolled her eyes at Knox. They had been waiting for Yang Cheng to pick up.
She covered the phone with her palm and whispered, “He is not going to do this over the phone. He is too careful.”
“Then, what? Here?” Knox said. “Where?”
“I believe it is more a question of how,” Grace said. “Yang will not risk being seen or overheard taking a name of a Chinese official from an American, and then later turning this same man over to authorities. He obviously understands we could be playing him, that it all could be an elaborate trick of U.S. Intelligence.”
“And of course he’d be right,” Kozlowski allowed. “Given that U.S. Intelligence was smart enough to dream up such a ploy. To remove a top official by rumor and innuendo would be a coup.”
Grace cradled the phone to her cheek. “Katherine? Please inform Mr. Yang the offer is good for forty minutes. I will be waiting at the front gate at the U.S. Consulate on Wulumuqi. I will turn over the information to either you or Mr. Yang. No one else.” She ended the call.
The red light pulsed across their faces.
“Why?” Knox said, imploring her.
She answered. “If they send someone from the Ministry, for instance, there is no guarantee the deal for Mr. Dulwich will be honored.”
“But Yang will honor it?” Knox asked sarcastically.
“Of course.”
“Because?”
“Face,” she answered absolutely. “He will not go back on his word. This, I promise.”
Knox carried an umbrella for Grace as he escorted her to the front entrance security check and then stood at the gate to get a better look at the ambulance. The music of U2 escaped from a Humvee, manned by a lone Marine who guarded the gate. The wipers of the Humvee were out of sync with the music; the engine was not running.
It was one of the longer walks of Knox’s life. Careful to remain on the consulate side, he craned to peer through the ambulance windshield, its wipers thumping. The ambulance driver, believing Knox was looking at him, pointed to a cutout of Kobe Bryant hanging from a mirror and, pointing to it, offered his index finger to signify “Number 1.” Knox was looking past the spinning Kobe at the man on a side bench in the back. A paramedic, a woman, sat next to him while the knees of a dark blue uniform could be seen, sitting across. Police. Dulwich held his arm in a sling and was wearing gauze on his head like a yarmulke. He looked like shit. Knox nodded faintly at him and Dulwich squinted back, either not seeing him or choosing not to acknowledge him.
Behind and alongside the ambulance were two police cars, each with four officers inside. Knox considered an extraction, but eight-against-one, nine, counting the cop inside, were not the best odds. Still, if the ambulance backed up-if the brokered deal fell through, he didn’t rule it out.
He looked both ways down the unusually quiet street, searching for Yang’s black Bentley he’d seen at the Bund. A few cars and taxis moved in both directions, along with a few dozen bikes, but no Bentley.
He cursed the Chinese for erecting walls within walls of honor and shame, defenses to rival an Umbrian hill town. Rules within rules. Codes within codes. They seemed to shift according to need; despite his claims, he did not understand it.
Ten minutes passed more like forty and he was still standing in the same spot, rain drumming on the umbrella. He was still looking when a taxi pulled to the curb. A woman climbed out, shielding her hair. From a distance she could easily have been Katherine, if memory served. But his memory was crippled by fatigue and he couldn’t be sure. The woman went through to security.
Knox waited. The taxi idled.
