Covert One 4 - The Altman Code (12 page)

Dr. Kamil’s heart pounded with joy. The invoice the Frenchwoman wanted
either did not exist or was in the Basra office. He jammed the file back
inside the drawer, closed it, and strode back to his patient.

Twenty minutes later, there was a low cough followed by a sigh from
Faidhi. His eyelids fluttered. Dr. Kamil marched to the office door,
opened it, and smiled to the distraught secretary, pacing outside.

“You may come in now, Nadia. He’s reviving and should be fine.”

“Allah be praised!” “Of course,” Kamil said solemnly, “I’ll need to
examine him further, a complete checkup. Call my office and make an
appointment for him.” He smiled again. There would be a fat fee and much
gratitude. He would tell the Frenchwoman that if she wanted that
invoice, she would have to go to Basra, where, of course, he could not
go without arousing suspicion.

Everything had turned out well, just as he had expected.

Shanghai.

A beautiful woman sat alone in the darkened living room, in the midst of
heavy, museum-quality antique side pieces. She was curled up on a
brown-leather Eames chair. Small and slender, she wore her shiny black
hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. In one hand, she held a half-full
brandy snifter. An uncorked bottle of Remy Martin cognac stood on the
chrome-and-ebony table next to her. A large cat watched from a luxurious
couch nearly half as long as the mammoth living room.

The woman gave no sign she saw Smith, the cat, or anything else. She was
staring into space, a fragile presence dwarfed by her surroundings.

Smith scanned the room for a sign the woman was not alone. He saw and
heard nothing. The house was eerily silent. He stepped carefully into
the room, his Beretta still in both hands. The woman raised the snifter
and drank it dry in a single gulp. She reached for the open bottle,
poured it half full again, set the bottle down, and continued to stare
ahead, her movements automatic, like a robot.

Smith walked closer, making no sound, the Beretta still up and ready.

Suddenly she was looking straight at him, and he realized he knew her
from somewhere, had seen her before. At least her face, the high-necked
Chinese dress she wore, the imperious expression … Of course, it was
in the movies. Some Chinese movie. She was a film star. Yu Yongfu’s
trophy wife? Whoever she was, she was staring straight into his face,
seemingly oblivious to his pistol.

“You’re the American spy.” Her English was flawless, and it was a
statement, not a question.

“Really?” “My husband told me.”

“Is Yu Yongfu here?”

She looked away, staring again into the distance. “My husband is dead.”

“Dead? How did he die? When?”

The woman turned to face him again and then did something odd. She
looked at her watch. “Ten or perhaps fifteen minutes ago. How? He didn’t
tell me. Possibly a pistol like the one you’re holding. Do all men love
guns?”

Her matter-of-fact, emotionless voice, her morbid calm, chilled Smith.

Like a sharp wind blowing across a glacier.

“It was you,” she continued. “They feared you. Your presence. It would
cause questions they didn’t want asked.”

“Who are ”?”

She drained her cognac again. “Those who required my husband to kill
himself. For me and the children, they said. For the family.” She
laughed. It was abrupt, like an explosion. A macabre sound more like a
bark than a real laugh. There was no humor in it, only bitterness. “They
took his life to save themselves. Not from danger, mind you. From
possible danger.” Her smile at Smith was mocking. “And here you are,
aren’t you? Looking for my husband, just as they said you would. They
always know when there’s a threat to their interests.”

Smith seized on the acerbic mockery. “If you want to avenge him, help me
bring them down. I need a document he had. It’ll expose them for the
international criminals they are.”

She considered. There was speculation in her gaze. She searched his face
as if to find some trick. Then she shrugged, picked up the bottle of
Remy Martin, poured her snifter almost full, and gazed away.

“Upstairs,” she said woodenly. “In the safe in our bedroom.”

She did not look at him again. Instead, she sipped the brandy and
studied the empty air above her head as if it were full of answers she
could not quite read.

Smith stared. Was this an act? Perhaps to lull him into going upstairs
where he would be trapped?

In the end, it did not matter. He needed the document in the safe. Too
much was at stake. He half backed out of the baronial room, rotating his
Beretta to cover both it and the dark entry hall. But the house remained
as silent as a tomb.

He slipped upstairs to the second-floor landing, where the shadows were
denser, since there were no windows to let in the moonlight. Nothing
moved up here either. There was no odor of gun smoke and no corpses. The
only sound came from down below–the clink of the bottle of cognac
against the snifter in the echoing living room, where the grieving woman
poured her next brandy.

The master bedroom was at the far end of the hall. The size of two
normal bedrooms, it was completely Chinese. There was a six-post,
curtained canopy bed from the late Ming Dynasty, two Ming couch beds,
Qing wardrobes and lady’s dressing table, and chairs and low tables from
various other dynasties. Everything was heavily carved and decorated in
the most elaborate Chinese style. Silks and brocades curtained the bed
and hung from the walls. Screens decorated every corner.

The wall safe was behind a hanging depicting some ancient battle from
what looked like the Yuan Dynasty of Kublai Khan. Smith took out his
picklocks, laid them on the cabinet closest to the safe, and inspected
the combination lock.

He took hold of the dial knob–and the safe door moved. Full of
misgivings, he pulled on the knob. Just as the door swung toward him, a
powerful car engine roared to life outside the house.

Smith sprinted to the window, which overlooked the garage and driveway,
in time to see the taillights of the Jaguar disappear down the long
driveway toward the street. Damn.

He tore out of the bedroom and down the stairs two at a time to the
living room. The snifter and bottle were on the table beside the Eames
chair, and the woman was gone. Had it all been a setup? A trap? The
woman’s purpose to distract him with her bitter tale of forced suicide?

He listened, but there were no sounds of any vehicles coming up the
driveway.

He rushed back upstairs to a bedroom at the front of the house to get a
different view. It was a boy’s room. From the window, he looked past the
garden and trees toward the distant wall. He heard nothing now out on
the street. Saw nothing moving anywhere in the gardens below.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she really was distraught and half drunk,
running away because of her horror to some private sanctuary. Or to join
her husband in death.

He could not take the chance. He raced back upstairs, emptied the safe,
and dumped the contents on one of the couch beds. There were jewels,
letters, documents. There was no money and no manifest. He shook his
head angrily, his disappointment raw. He searched through the letters
and documents twice more, swearing to himself. The invoice manifest was
definitely missing.

There was one item that was interesting–a typed note on the letterhead
of a Belgian company: Donk & Lapierre, S. A., Antwerp and Hong Kong.

Written in French, it was addressed to Yu Yongfu at Flying Dragon
Enterprises. It assured Yu the shipment would arrive in Shanghai on
August 24 in plenty of time for The Dowager Empress to sail, and it
expressed great optimism for “our joint venture.” It was signed by Jan
Donk and listed a phone number in Hong Kong under the sender’s name.

Relieved he might have found something solid at last, Smith jammed the
letter into his backpack and hurried out of the bedroom. He was at the
head of the stairs when he saw shadows flit across the moonlit windows
on either side of the front door. His pulse accelerated as he forced
himself to stay motionless, listening. Out in the night, quick footsteps
ran close to the house.

With a jolt of adrenaline, he sprinted back to the master bedroom and
peered out the rear windows at the formal English garden. No one was in
sight, but there were no trees and no other way down except to jump.

He dashed to the windows on the other side of the room, which faced away
from the driveway and garage. The manicured lawn was the color of
tarnished copper in the moonlight. There were trees, but none close
enough to reach. There was, however, a drainpipe that ran from the
gutters at the edge of the roof above him down to the grass.

As he studied the drainpipe, two figures ran around the front corner of
the mansion close to the house. They tested each window for entry.

If no trap had been intended when he arrived, it was a trap now. They
would soon find the front door unlocked, if they had not already. He had
seconds to get out of the house before they were inside, up the stairs,
and on him.

He waited until the figures vanished toward the rear. He opened the
window, climbed out, sat on the sill with his legs dangling, and leaned
to the drainpipe, which was sheet metal and looked well attached to the
house. Holding it, he swung himself out. It groaned but held. Using the
toes of his shoes, he literally walked down the side of the mansion. As
soon as he touched grass, he bolted out across the moonlit lawn toward
the stand of trees that had sheltered him when he first arrived.

Angry shouts in Chinese carried across the night from the windows of the
master bedroom. They had found the open safe and spotted his escape.

As soon as he reached the trees, he began weaving, dodging the dark
vegetation. Shouts followed across the distance, and then it was a
single hushed version of a deep, harsh voice giving whispery orders like
a drill sergeant instilling steadiness in his men. Smith had heard the
voice before– from the leader of the attackers on Liuchiu Island. The
big Chinese with the red-and-white hair that the treasurer of Flying
Dragon had called Feng Dun.

Suddenly an ominous silence filled the night. Smith guessed they had
been ordered to spread out, to methodically force him toward the wall
where it bordered the street and the gate. Feng Dun would have more of
his people waiting there. It was the same pincer movement he had used in
the attack on Liuchiu Island. Military minds tended to favor the same
tactics–like Stonewall Jackson’s outflanking night marches.

Smith turned and trotted softly toward the back wall. As he slipped
through the shadows, he pulled his walkie-talkie from his pocket. “Andy?

Come in, Andy.”

“Shit, Colonel. Are you okay?”

“You saw them?”

“Sure did. Three cars. I got out of there fastest.”

“Where are you now?”

“Out front, like you said. I stashed the car and walked back. The three
cars are right here on the street, too close for comfort.”

“Did they leave men there, too?”

“You bet.”

“How many?”

“Too many, as far as I’m concerned. Three drivers. And another five just
came out through the gate to join them.”

“Let’s skip their greeting party. Go back to the car fast and drive
around to meet me at the back corner of the wall on the side street. Got
that?”

“Side street, rear corner.”

“Get going.”

Smith ended the transmission and resumed his race toward the rear. He
was just beginning to think he had outwitted his pursuers when he heard
a noise that meant danger. He spun and dropped flat, Beretta in hand.

There it was again–the hard sound of metal striking wood. There was a
low, muttered oath.

From the ground, he strained to see anything that stirred. The little
forest had turned quiet, and the only movement seemed to be caused by
the wind rustling through branches and leaves.

There was a thicket of bushes to his right, near the wall. He inched
toward it, all his senses on high alert. He slid in between two bushes
that hid him from above, and he forced his breath to slow, grow shallow.

He waited.

The only reason he saw the big shape pass was that the wind blew an
opening in the leaf cover high above. Moonlight shone through and
illuminated a half-crouched man and his raised AK-74 passing by.

Disgusted with himself, Smith knew he had guessed wrong. Feng Dun had
reasoned Smith would expect another pincer movement, so he had sent most
of his people to the street, while doubling back the opposite way alone,
in hopes of taking Smith by surprise. But he would not be alone ahead;
he would have men in position, waiting.

Smith slithered out from under the thicket, the spiny branches
scratching his head and hands. He hardly felt the discomfort. As soon as
he was out, he trotted left to where the wall bordered the side street.

There was no tree close enough to be useful, but fallen branches and
other debris had collected in a pile high enough to help. Fortunately,
Yu Yongfu preferred appearance over substance–taking care of one’s
wooded grounds where they were out of sight was not something that
interested him. Or if anything his wife had said were true, had
interested him.

Smith ran, jumped up onto the pile, and leaped. He grabbed the wall,
pulled himself to the top, and straddled it as he surveyed the street.

On the other side near the far corner, Andy An’s Jetta was parked.

He turned on his walkie-talkie. “Andy?” he said in hushed tones. “We’ve
got company all over the compound. I can’t get to the corner. Drive
away, circle, and come back to the center of the block. Slow down, and
I’ll meet you. Then we’ll burn rubber.”

He waited. There was no answer. Was Andy’s radio out?