The Canton Connection (16 page)

Wu faced him squarely. “How can you be a big FBI special agent and still be such a wuss?”

“Hey, I’m just being practical.”

“And dead wrong. That big system in there is not all that complicated.” Wu nodded toward the long, four-story building. “And I can get us on a plane.”

“How about we force ourselves into a cockpit and highjack the plane?”

Wu regarded him with disgust. “That’s a federal crime.”

“Then what are you s
uggesting? Stow away in an airplane and find ourselves in Timbuktu?”

Wu was already striding toward the distribution complex. “You’ve got to trust me.”

Jake took a deep breath. He was reluctant to trust the guy. Even if he was a federal marshal.

Wu flashed his badge at the
security guard who stood between them and the tarmac. “Air Marshals,” he said.

“You’ve got the wrong airport,” the guard said. “This is cargo only.” He pointed at another set of buildings. “That’s your passenger airport.”

Jake stepped forward and pulled out his FBI badge.

“What is this, a federal case?” the
guard asked.

Jake nodded grimly. “Yes. And we need complete access to the facility.”

“You’ve got it,” the guard said, and allowed them onto the tarmac.

Jake had no idea why he should trust Wu. What about the deputy marshal made him think he could navigate his way through the miles of conveyor belts and innumerable bins and end up on an airplane heading to China?

An FBI special agent couldn’t figure it out that quickly, if at all. And certainly no deputy U.S. marshal could.

Unless, of course, that deputy U.S. marshal was also a computer engineer.

Jake looked out a large window at the sprawling UPS complex. Bright lights threw airplanes in stark relief. The terminals were connected to each other through a main building that contained miles of conveyor belts. Finding which conveyor connected to which flight would be impossible.

“I’m not going to take another conveyor belt,” Jake said.

Wu agreed. “Rather than slap a China sticker on our foreheads and have the electronic eyes shuttle us to the correct airplane, let’s just find out which airplane is leaving for China.”

“How do you propose we do that?” Jake asked.

“Follow me.”

The lack of internal security at the facility was unnerving. It was one of the last remaining pre-9/11 places in America. But, Jake had to remind himself, this was a business, not a public service.

He followed Wu into a darkly lit office where workers hunched over computer screens. There was
a lot to monitor in such a complex system, and the big problem seemed to be a pileup of packages headed for Boston. Maybe it was kids moving to college.

Wu leaned over the shoulder of an older man and stared at the rows and columns of symbols. “Which plane is going to China?”

“Hong Kong is Gate 31,” came the reply. “Shenzhen is Gate 32.”

The man never looked up.

Jake and Wu stole out of the command center.

“For that,” Jake said, “you needed a computer degree?”

“Hey. You just have to talk their language.”

“Speaking about talking their language,” Jake said. “Wh
ere the hell is Shenzhen?”

“Does it matter?” Wu said. “He said it’s in China.”

“C’mon. You’re Chinese,” Jake said. “Are you telling me you don’t know anything about China?”

“You’re Irish. Where’s Shannon?”

“You got me there. Speak Chinese?”

“
Wo hui
.”

At least Wu would be good for something.

Now to find their flight.

Jake looked for signs pointing to Gate 32 for the flight to Shenzhen. The gates weren’t labeled like a normal airline terminal.

At last he said, “Let’s just walk outside and find the plane.”

H
e stepped into the night. It was muggy, and the sweet smell of airplane fuel stung his eyes.

Wu followed him to the first line of planes. They looked intimidating from the ground.

“Watch out,” Wu said.

A tractor hauled past pulling a line of semi-circular metal containers. They seemed designed to fit neatly into the cabin where passengers would sit.

“There’s 32,” Jake said. A plane was being loaded at that very moment.

A giant K-loader lifted containers up to the plane and then rolled them into a large cargo door midway back in the fuselage.

“How are we going to get up there?” Wu asked.

Jake couldn’t believe he was walking among the cargo handlers without being stopped. He was going to make himself into cargo.

He watched the process for a minute. On the ground, handlers made sure parcels were strapped into place. Then they pulled a canvas curtain down over the entire open side of each container and attached it magnetically at the bottom.

Half the containers stood open and Jake could see inside them. Several were empty.

“We’ll ride in an empty container,” he said.

“But they’ll see us,” Wu said.

Jake had to agree. Loading the airplane looked like a precise process. Handlers weighed each container to help balance the aircraft. It didn’t look like he and Wu could just slip into a container without eventually being noticed.

Jake studied the cargo handlers. They were mostly college students, there for the busy night shift. What did they know about what was legal and what wasn’t?

“Follow me,” Jake said.

A young woman with straight red hair and a yellow hardhat was the last to inspect a container before it went up on the loader.

Jake pulled out his wallet and approached her displaying his FBI badge.

She had little time to glance away from her handheld computer where she marked the weight of the container in front of her.

“FBI undercover sting,” Jake told her. “We need to get on that aircraft immediately.”

That got her attention. “For real?”

Wu whipped out his marshal star. “Air Marshals,” he said.

That seemed to impress her more than the FBI badge did. “I can give you a ride on the lift,” she said.

“Understand me,” Jake said with a voice full of authority. “We need to ride this container straight to China.”

She nodded and returned to her calculations. “I’ll have to add in your weight.”

Jake was already pushing the canvas curtain open to look inside. There was plenty of room. “Then add our weight.”

Wu followed him in, and that’s the last they saw of the redhead, or of the airport, or of America.

Jake and Simon Wu were beneficiaries of the U.S.-China trade imbalance. They were able to spread out in comfort inside the air cargo container on the near-empty flight back to China.

They could stand up to stretch and lie down to sleep. There were no seatbelts, but they wouldn’t be thrown far if there was a crash.

The only discomfort was a rocky ride. The plane hit turbulence over the Great Lakes, and Jake scraped the top of his head against the container. He sat down on the cold metal floor.

His thoughts returned to the innocent face of Stacy Stefansson. She looked so pretty eating a ribeye steak at the Outback. She had openly encouraged him to join her for breakfast in Charlottesville. She had been so carefree riding up to her home in the Appalachians. She had fallen asleep in bliss on the rowboat ride at Mountain Lake Resort.

How could she be working for the hackers?

He was left breathless with the scope of her deceit.

He tried to review all that she had said and done. How had he missed the clues? Was he blinded by her personality and beauty?

Even now, his reputation put through the wringer and hung out to dry, he felt a hole in his heart. No woman had ever had such a spontaneous and devastating effect on him.

He tried to see the defection through her eyes. She knew she would be leaving her parents and her hometown for good. What was she expecting in China? A hero’s welcome?

Any fortune, adulation or respect she might gain from the Chinese or the computing world could not replace what she
would have left behind.

Did she expect to find some better version of
him
there?

He rubbed his arms as the cargo cabin grew chillier. He was disposable in her overall scheme.

She had been so calm. She must have been preparing for this for a long time. And she had just played with him and toyed with his heart.

The image of her smiling over the ribeye steak changed in his mind. The blonde hair gave him a chill. The red lips seemed painted on. Her admiring eyes were made of pure ice.

He was glad he was flying to China. It might be a big country, but he would find her and he would bring her to justice. The world would be a better place without her.

He could imagine the look on her face when he met up with her and exposed her to the world. Would she be so calm then?

He reflected back on the past week. There was only one time when he had seen through her veneer. He had heard her voice crack on the 9-1-1 recording as she reported the murder on the bike path. She sounded afraid, cautious, uncertain.

Ever since then, however, she was a profile in self-confidence.

What had changed her in such a short period of time?

“Simon.” He rose to his feet and kicked the deputy marshal.

Wu was nearly asleep. “Yup?”

“You know Stacy better than I do.” Jake didn’t mind admitting it now. “What would make her want to defect?”

“Beats me,” Wu muttered. “It’s not like defecting from North Korea. She has a lot to lose.”

Jake agreed. But, “You knew her before she took this drastic step. Did you have any inkling that she was contemplating or even capable of leaving it all behind?”

Wu lay motionless for some time. Jake thought he might have even fallen asleep. Then, “I never saw it coming.”

“What does she even know about China?”
Jake said. He thought about how little
he
knew of the inscrutable people, their land and their ways.

“I suppose she dealt with Chinese programmers,” Wu said.

Jake didn’t think that was much of a connection. “Do you think she did this on a whim?”

“People weren’t getting murdered on a whim,” Wu said bitterly.

Jake could only agree. Stacy was part of some well thought-out scheme.

Wu’s boss Oscar Walsh had assigned Wu to keep an eye on Stacy and report her every move. Then Walsh had left his fingerprints on the weapons to incriminate Wu for murder.

Looking back, there was nothing accidental about the week. In all likelihood, Walsh was eliminating all those who knew about the hacking into the A root server, and he had probably made off with the sweet young woman who alone knew the password.

For all Jake knew, Stacy and Walsh were lovers, or on the same plane as hostage and captor.

The airplane dipped in a trough of air, and Jake grabbed for the curtain to keep his balance.

There was just one piece missing to the carefully orchestrated string of events. If hackers had initiated the attack, how had they targeted Chu’s company? And how had they found a willing partner in Walsh?

“Who came first, Walsh or the hackers?” he asked aloud.

“Huh?”

Jake explained. “Either Walsh came up with this plan and recruited hackers or hackers found him.”

“That’s an intriguing question,” Wu said. “But I’m half-asleep.”

That left Jake to work it out himself.

He lay back on the floor and tried to imagine what might make Walsh go bad. As head of the Witness Protection Program, Walsh knew a lot of people and a lot of stuff people had done. He had the key to pasts many people were trying to forget.

Did Walsh have something on Stacy Stefansson? Was there some dark secret he could threaten to expose? But Jake had been to Bluefield. That was her hometown. She couldn’t have been relocated there from a previous life.

Then Jake remembered Han Chu, slumped against the bushes along the bike path. It reminded him of why he’d been called in on the case in the first place.

Chu had a tattoo on his chest of a dragon’s head in a triangle. He was a man with a past.

Chu had been in a Triad gang that relied on extortion to achieve tremendous wealth.

It was hard to imagine the man with the flabby body as part of anything so violent and sinister. But that was most likely years in the past, and Chu had built up a successful business with lucrative government contracts.

Walsh would have been able to find out and exploit Chu’s past.

The blue image of the dragon remained fixed in Jake’s mind as the airplane made an adjustment in altitude and rose higher as it headed for the North Pole.

Jake would make that Triad symbol the starting point of his search in China. Once he found the Triad, he suspected he would find Stacy, too.