The Case Officer (25 page)

“But what am I to look for,
mon
vieux?”
asked François when MacMurphy spelled out the problem to him.

“Damned if I know…I don’t know
what in blazes we’re looking for, to tell you the truth. Any indication that
your new
amour
or her mother might have somehow disturbed the
equipment…see if there are signs that the couch was moved…anything at all that
might explain the disruption. Something other than the lamp plugged into the
outlet behind the sofa? Anything at all out of the ordinary.
Ça va?”

“Your accountants aren’t going to
like this,” François replied, smiling.

What is that roué up to now?
MacMurphy raised his eyebrows
and shook his finger at François. “Okay if it takes a dinner, but you don’t
need to rent a bloody Benz for the evening.
Ça va
?”

It was beastly hot out. Paris was
sweltering under a seriously oppressive August heat wave. True, the day before
had been even worse, but today was no Arctic breeze.

François phoned Collette. “I
don’t know what your plans for this evening are,
ma chere,
but in this
heat, I think a picnic is in order. It’s no weather to be indoors without air
conditioning. There should be a pleasant breeze in the evening. What if I will
pick up a nice picnic basket at Fauchon’s for us? Perhaps some caviar, smoked
pheasant, pâté with truffles, and a baguette. Oh yes, and a nice bottle of
Bordeaux. Perhaps a Chateau Beychevelle. Yes that will do just fine. Chateau
Beychevelle. This is no night to cook. I’ll be at your place around seven, yes?
And I’ll bring a bottle of cool champagne as well for an aperitif.” He was not
going to take a no, or even a maybe, for an answer.

Collette was delighted and didn’t
try to hide the pleasure in her voice. The man had said, “I miss seeing you.”
That and his thoughtfulness at suggesting she not cook on such a hot day were
enough to curve her lips into a deliciously wide smile. Her mother, seated
nearby, didn’t know what was being said at the other end of the phone
connection but had a pretty good idea as to who it was that was putting such a
smile on her daughter’s face.

François arrived on the dot of
seven with an overflowing picnic basket and a cool bottle of Veuve Clicquot.  

While the trio enjoyed the
champagne, François looked discreetly around the apartment for any clues as to
what had gone wrong the day before. But everything seemed perfectly in place.
He made a comment that this weather was “certainly not the time to do anything
that requires a major expenditure of energy…like moving furniture,” but got
nothing but agreement from the two women, with no further comment or
explication. He was almost ready to give up and declare his mission a failure.

After getting her mother settled,
Collette practically fled out the door with François. She wished both to be
alone with him and to escape the heat of the apartment. The hallway and
stairwell were worse, windowless and enclosed as they were, and when the pair
emerged onto the street, Collette breathed a sigh of relief while François did
some major mopping of his face with his handkerchief.

“This heat is horrible,” he said.

“And yesterday was even worse.
And then we experienced a blackout.”

“Blackout?”

“Yes. A main fuse in the building
blew. These old buildings aren’t really wired for air-conditioners, but several
of the apartments have window units installed. We need to get one as well. I
suppose they were running full-blast in this heat, and something got
overloaded. The whole building was without electricity for most of the day. Not
even a fan—nothing. It was awful…”

François’s thoughts immediately
focused on the mic that had been hooked up to the back of the outlet in the
wall.
Voilla! That was what had happened to silence the mic.
He could
hardly wait to report back to MacMurphy…but of course, he had to go through
with the picnic, first. And when he thought of all the goodies he had packed in
the basket, and witnessed the delight in Collette’s eyes, he decided it was not
at all a bad thing to spend a few hours in the park enjoying a picnic dinner
with Collette LeBrun.

Chapter Sixty-Three

M
acMurphy and Santos were relieved
to get to the bottom of the mystery, though nervous that there would be a
recurrence of the blackout and the interruption in their electronic
eavesdropping.

They paid visits to the LP three
times a day for the next five days, nervously fussing over the equipment,
checking the tapes, and listening to the conversations and other sounds
emanating from Huang’s office, but nothing of significance was recorded. Huang
spent most of the time alone in his office, not communicating with anyone
except for one-sided telephone conversations. The heat wave finally broke, and
thankfully there were no further blackouts to interrupt transmission.

One morning Santos was sitting at
the table, listening through the earphones, when he said, “Listen to this
Mac—sounds like they’re moving furniture around in there.”

MacMurphy put on the earphones
and half-sat against the edge of the table. The audio quality was excellent,
but he still pressed the earphones tighter against his ears to hear better. He
listened carefully. His Mandarin was okay, but not quite fluent enough to catch
every word that was spoken, and some of the conversation was in Cantonese. Several
people were in the room. He strained to comprehend the conversation.

“I hope you’re recording this,”
he said to Santos.

Culler quickly inserted a fresh
cassette tape into the recorder and hit the Record button. He nodded to Mac. “I
am now…”

Chapter Sixty-Four

A
t that moment, Huang Tsung-yao
was directing two heavy-set Chinese men who were trying to horse a large
cabinet safe, secured to a dolly, into position against the wall in his office.
“Right over there. Yes, there. Back against the wall.”

The two laborers were sweating
profusely as they tried to jockey the heavy five-foot-tall safe back against
the wall. He motioned to his deputy, who was sitting sprawled in a chair in
front of Huang’s desk, leg over one arm, watching the workers. “Eyeah, give
them a hand, Lim. Be useful. Help them…”

Lim cast a disdainful look at
Huang but joined in to help anyway. They maneuvered the dolly until the safe
was as close to the wall as they could get it. Then they tried to tilt the
dolly down gently, but it got away from them, and the top of the safe banged
heavily against the wall, digging out a chunk of plaster.

“Easy, easy, do not wreck the
place,” said Huang, who moved over to lend a hand himself. They finally set the
safe down about a six inches from the wall. The workers removed the straps that
held the safe to the dolly, tilted the safe back once again, and slid the dolly
out from under.

“Eyeah. That is as close as we
can get it with the dolly,” said one of the laborers. “Now it’s going to take
all of us to swing the thing into position flush against the wall.”

With two men on each side, they
inched the heavy safe back toward the wall, one side at a time. When they had
finished and the safe was finally in position, as close to the wall as they
could get it, they were all breathing heavily, and Lim’s clean, white shirt was
soaked through. The larger of the two laborers leaned heavily on Huang’s desk,
catching his breath, while the other busied himself fixing the straps on the
dolly. “We will be back with the pouch in a few minutes,” said the large one.
“It is one big bag. Heavy. That safe there was real bitch, eh? Too big, too
heavy…”

The laborers left to get the diplomatic
pouch, and Lim excused himself to change his shirt. He was compulsive about
cleanliness. One of his many foibles.

The group returned about fifteen
minutes later. The Chinese workers had the large, bright orange canvas pouch
bag secured to the dolly. They unstrapped it and left it, unopened, in the
middle of the room. Huang attacked the wire seals at the top of the bag with a
pair of wire cutters. It contained three heavy cardboard boxes stacked one on
top of the other. Huang peeled the bag down away from the boxes, and Lim
carried them one at a time and set them down in front of the safe. “What is in
the boxes?” he asked with understandable curiosity.

“Open them and see for yourself,
Lim. Close the door first. I am sure the contents will interest you.” Huang
watched with amusement as Lim dug in his pocket and extracted a vicious-looking
pearl-handled knife. He snapped the thin stiletto blade out of the handle and
carefully slit open the packing tape covering one of the boxes. He opened the
lid, removed a layer of packing paper, and gasped.

The box contained tightly packed
stacks of 500 Euro notes. Lim reached in and pulled out two stacks. “Eyeah,” he
muttered, “how much is in here?”

“Fifty million. More than either
of us will ever see again in our lifetime.”

“What are we going to do with
it?”

“Let us first get the money into
the safe, and then I will brief you thoroughly.”

Chapter Sixty-Five

“S
onofabitch!” MacMurphy jerked the
earphones off of his head and rubbed his ears. “Bastards almost broke my
eardrums.”

“What happened?” asked Santos.

“They just smashed a safe into
the wall right above our microphone.” He shook his head and dug his fingers
into his ears. “Damn, that hurts.”

“Safe? What safe?”

MacMurphy had not said a word
since putting the earphones on, so Santos was unaware of what Mac was listening
to so intently.

“Do me a favor, will you? Get me
another cup of coffee and something to take notes on. I’ll give you a full
briefing just as soon as there’s a break in the action, but for now let me
listen to this. Something really strange is going on in that office.” Mac held
one of the earphones to his ear while he spoke.

“They’re moving in a heavy safe
and trying to put it up against the wall right where our microphone is
located.  Damn!” He jerked the earphones out away from his head and rubbed his
ear again. Loud, scraping noises emanating from the earphones could be heard
clearly. “Wait a minute...they’re talking again...hang on.”

As they talked, Mac listened. And
as Mac listened, Santos watched him. His expression changed from interested to
concerned, then from concerned to angry, then from angry to…Culler couldn’t
pinpoint just what it was he was seeing reflected in Mac’s face. He was taking
notes furiously on a yellow pad, and whatever it was, it worried him.
What
was Mac hearing?

Almost an hour later, Mac hit the
stop button on the tape recorder and pulled the earphones from his head.
Several pages of the yellow pad in front of him were filled with rough notes.

MacMurphy leaned back in his
chair and turned toward Santos. “Huang and Lim just left the office. They
locked the door behind them after Huang told Lim to activate the alarm.
Probably some sort of a motion alarm system like we have in our stations.
Anyway...where should I start?”

“How about the beginning,” said Santos,
motioning to the pages of notes in front of MacMurphy.

Mac put his notes in his lap,
leaned back, and put his legs up on the table. “Get comfortable. This may take
a while.” But Mac, though he had assumed a relaxed position, did not look
comfortable at all.

Santos leaned back attentively in
the other kitchen chair.

“First of all, if there were any
doubts before about whether we got the right office or not, they are dispelled
now. It’s Huang’s office all right. No doubt about it. And he just took
delivery of a heavy safe, which is now sitting right smack up against the wall
where our audio mic is located. It’s directly in front of our pinhole. At least
that’s the way it sounds. The quality of the audio changed, got kind of
muffled, when the safe went all the way back up against the wall. And then,
right after they brought in the safe, they opened a diplomatic pouch from
Beijing. The contents of the pouch—get this, Culler—50 million Euros—has been
placed in that safe.”

“What do they need all that, you
know, cash for?”

“Good question. I think it
relates to why I was asked to come here in the first place. Let me just say
that Huang has spent the past ten years working on covert action affairs back
in Beijing. His last job before coming here was as Chief of covert action for
the Ministry of State Security.” Mac paused to organize his thoughts.

“A couple of months ago in Hong
Kong I picked up some disjointed information. It all seems to come together
now, though. Essentially, the information I got was that Huang, a covert action
expert, was coming to be the MSS station chief in Paris. So the question was
why send a CA expert to a place like Paris unless the MSS was considering
running some pretty serious covert action operations there.

“We all know the Chinese do very
little in the way of CA. But there were two other tidbits to add to the puzzle.
One was that there was a large shipment of cash about to be to be shipped here
by the MSS, and the second involved some sort of Iranian connection to that
shipment.”