The Enemy Inside (37 page)

The tender allowed Petrobets to explore for oil and gas in a region known as Area Seven. These were waters near the Spratly Islands, waters that China claimed as its own, even though they were almost seven hundred miles from the nearest point of undisputed Chinese territory.

What Beijing and much of the world called the South China Sea, the government in Manila called the West Philippine Sea. The Chinese military didn’t care what anybody called it. They were too busy building aircraft super-carriers, two of them, both nuclear powered, and capable of matching anything the United States had in their Nimitz Class carrier fleet.

American intelligence knew about it. How do you hide two aircraft carriers, each more than three hundred and seventy meters in length? But the current administration in Washington kept it under wraps.

Russia was eating everybody’s lunch in the Ukraine. Islamic radicals were running wild through the Middle East, promising to bring their jihad to Europe and the United States. This while they rattled the nerves of America’s oil-producing allies in Arabia and Kuwait.

The last thing the American president needed was news that China was about to erase his airpower edge in the Western Pacific.

Cheng knew about problems. At the moment he had one of his own. It was the third cable, the one from their embassy in London, that started to light a blaze in his belfry.

An obscure British holding company headquartered in Bermuda, Aeries International, had just purchased a sizable interest in Petrobets, Ltd., the oil and gas concern that was gearing up to poach in Chinese waters off the Spratlys.

Researchers at the London embassy were still trying to run down the names of all the investors in the Aeries firm. But on the list of known shareholders there was one name that jumped out and grabbed Cheng by the throat—Cormac Llewellyn Grimes.

He looked at it several times, checked the rest of the names, and then came back to it again. Joseph Ying had connections with an American politician, a prominent member of the US Senate. Her name was Maya Grimes. It was the only name that Cheng was ever able to extract from Ying regarding Ying’s contacts. It came as a result of a slip of the tongue during one of their conversations.

Ying guarded this information jealously. He once referred to her as the fastest horse in his stable. Grimes and her husband were wealthy in their own right, and powerful.

The second he got her name, Cheng had some of his people begin to collect information for a dossier.

Grimes’s husband was a noted capitalist, an investor who went by the initials C. L. Cheng was looking at the open dossier on the computer screen in front of him. This was too much to be mere coincidence.

Cheng went to one of the search engines on the computer and ran the word “Aeries,” the name of the holding company in Bermuda.

What came back on the screen was not what he was expecting. “Aeries Student Information System—Eagle Software. . . .” He was about to scroll down the page when the word hit him, like a bullet, right between the eyes.

It took him three more minutes to run it down. “Aeries” was one of two spellings for the same object in the English language. The other more preferred spelling was “Eyries.” But of course the Bermuda corporation couldn’t use that because there already existed another company using the name, Eyries International. The answer was found in the meaning of the word. An aerie is an eagle’s nest.

Cheng leaned back in his chair and thought about it. He couldn’t help but smile. Even though the man with the eagle-headed cane had crossed him, he had to admire his audacity. It was, in fact, brilliant. He might have lasted much longer had he stayed away from the feathered themes.

Ying was using the politicians he bought as well as some of their spouses to front for him on investments. He didn’t have to trust them because he owned them. They did his bidding because they had no choice. Cheng wondered how much of the wealth that showed up on these people’s financial statements was actually owned by Ying. Golden opportunities for special investments no doubt came his way, because of who they were. He probably had secret agreements signed by them tucked away in a safe somewhere, not that he would ever need them.

Ying, a.k.a the Eagle, clearly possessed elements of genius, but like anyone else wielding such power he also had his share of enemies. There was, in fact, one at the moment who was quite active. In anticipation of this possibility Cheng already had his agents with their ears to the ground. He made a note to pass the word.

Cheng’s intelligence bureau had worked for years using cutouts, front corporations and sham companies in a program designed to compromise members of the US Congress. You would run out of digits trying to compute the amounts of money they had spent. The approach was always the same. Shower the politicians with cash, campaign contributions if you had to, outright bribes if you could convince them to take it. The goal was to compromise them so that the Bureau might extort official acts and secret information—to own them.

The Chinese thought their program was unique. In fact rogues from the US intelligence community, people who had left the government in some cases decades earlier and who went private setting up their own companies, were doing the same thing. Only they were doing it on a much larger scale and with much greater success.

In the last eight years, China had managed to net three members of Congress, people who were fully hooked. Two of them lost their next elections and the third died in office. Cheng and the bureau spent vast sums pursuing many more, mostly in the form of campaign contributions. All of this disappeared down a rat hole. When his agents, all hired occidental cutouts, went calling to ask for favors, they were told in effect to get lost. It was what the American lobbyists called “being paid for, but not staying bought.”

By contrast, Ying, the Eagle, had compromised and as a consequence owned nearly a third of the key positions in the House and almost as many in the Senate. Cheng knew the approximate numbers, but he had lost years of sleep trying to figure out who they were. In the end it became easier and cheaper to deal through Ying, though the Bureau couldn’t always get what it wanted, either in terms of information or the performance of official acts.

Cheng concluded that there must have been some vital element of the American political process that no matter how hard they tried, the Chinese simply could not comprehend. Perhaps it was cultural. One thing was certain: at least in the battle to seduce and corrupt their own leaders, Americans had clearly trumped their foreign adversaries.

FORTY-FIVE

B
y the time Harry and I get home I find a message left on my phone at the house from Herman down in Mexico. Something has happened. He doesn’t say what. He tells me they’re both fine. Then something about a charter flight and Tampico. Says he’ll call back from there.

I listen to it again, this time taking notes, but before I can finish, the phone rings.

It’s Harry. “I got a message from Herman.”

“So did I.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Well, they’re alive. At least they were when he called. Did you get a time and date?”

“Sorry,” he says. “I never set the feature on my phone.”

“Same here.” The fact is my telephone system at the house is so old it probably wasn’t available on the handset when I bought it. It’s a relic I brought with me from Capitol City on the move when I came south almost twenty years ago.

“They must have found them.” Harry means the people chasing Alex.

“Sounds like it.”

“Did you catch the part about the courier?”

“I was about to when you called.”

“Says it’s compromised. No more messages.”

Harry is thinking the same thing I am, but he doesn’t want to say it over the phone. This is probably how they found them.

“The place they went,” he says. “Do you know it?”

Harry means Tampico. “No. Never been near the town. I don’t have a clue as to where they might go. Herman has contacts in Mexico but I don’t have any names, numbers, nothing. They’re off the edge of the earth for all I know.” If anyone is listening I want to get this part crystal clear.

“The phones are back up and working at the office,” he says. “I just called. Told them we’re back in town. Why don’t we meet up there, say in an hour?”

I look at my watch. It’s ten thirty in the morning. We flew standby, a red-eye out of Amsterdam, chasing the sun across the Atlantic. It lapped us and won. “What day is it?”

“Friday,” says Harry. “Least that’s what the calendar in front of me says.”

Even with some pretty good winks on the plane, I’m dead. “Let me take a shower, get some coffee,” I tell him. “Gimme an hour and a half.”

When I get to the office Harry is already there. There’re a handful of messages waiting for me in the little carousel on the reception counter. There would have been more, I’m sure, except the phones were down.

Sally, the receptionist, hands me another one. “This guy’s called three times in the last two days. Says it’s important.”

I take the slip and look at it. “Clete Proffit.” The pillar of the bar who had me followed to Graves’s office in D.C. He wants me to call him back. I’m wondering what he wants.

I check the other messages. Nothing from Herman.

Sally is back talking on the headset, taking a call. I whisper over the counter, “Did Mr. Diggs call by any chance?”

She shakes her head.

“If he does, put him through immediately. Even if I’m on the phone.”

She nods. Gives me the big OK circle, finger to thumb.

I head to my office. When I pass Harry’s open door I see him sitting behind his desk swung around in his chair with his back to me. At first I think he’s laughing. Then I realize Harry is crying. Sobbing like a baby.

“What’s wrong?”

He turns and looks at me, his face all red. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s nothing.” He grabs some Kleenex from a box on the credenza behind his desk.

I close the door so that no one else can see. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head, wipes his eyes, puts his hand out, like maybe I should go away. “It’s nothing,” he says.

“It must be something,” I tell him. I’ve never seen Harry cry before. This is a first.

“I guess . . . I don’t know. I guess it’s just everything,” he says. “All of a sudden it’s just catching up with me. The other night. The old man.”

He’s talking about Korff. His body by the bridge. Harry is suffering a delayed reaction. Post trauma. “Listen, why don’t you go home and get some sleep? We’re both tired. That’s where I’m going in just a few minutes. As soon as I check my desk and take care of a few messages.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” says Harry.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Wasn’t able to sleep at all on the plane.”

I sit down in one of the chairs across the desk from him. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“What’s to tell? You were there. You know,” he says.

“Sometimes things affect people in different ways. Tell me.”

“Jeez,” says Harry. “You’re gonna make me say it?” He lifts his shoulders. When he drops them he starts crying again. “We got him drunk!” says Harry. “I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t kept pouring, maybe he’d still be alive. Maybe he wouldn’t be dead. Don’t you get it?”

“No! No, you have to stop thinking like that. He didn’t die of alcohol poisoning. He died because somebody murdered him. Giving him beer had nothing to do with it. We tried to put him in a taxi. We offered to take him home. Don’t you remember? He said no. He wouldn’t hear of it.”

“I know,” says Harry. “But I still can’t help thinking . . .”

“He told us he’d take a cab. We both saw him. He walked to the counter and hit the bell. What were we supposed to think?”

Harry nods.

“Besides, the man had a tolerance for beer. I’m not saying he wasn’t drunk. But if you or I had consumed anything near what he had, we wouldn’t have had to worry about a taxi. They would have taken us away in an ambulance.”

Harry looks at me red-faced and laughs. He wipes his nose.

“You can’t blame yourself for what happened. Sometimes it’s just fate. If JFK had been ten minutes earlier in Dealey Plaza he probably would have served out his term and, who knows, done another four years. If Lennon had come home an hour later at the Dakota, maybe he’d still be making music. And if Korff had gotten into a taxi at the front door, outside that hotel, my guess is they would have never even seen him,” I tell him.

“You think so?”

“The fact they killed him on the far side of the bridge tells me they were probably waiting for him there.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Nobody in their right mind is going to want to track Korff across that bridge under all those lights. He was a big man. And if he turned to fight maybe they get trapped out there.”

Harry nods.

“So try not to think about it. We did everything we could.”

“Yeah, but if we’d known . . .”

“But we didn’t. We took him at his word. Sometimes that’s all you can do.”

“Still,” he says. “We should have thought about it. I mean after the girl and Graves.”

“We did think about it. That’s why we told him to take the cab. It wasn’t just because he was drunk.”

“Yeah. I suppose.”

“He knew that Serna didn’t die in an accident. We told him as much. He was well aware of the dangers. He had to be. He knew more about what was going on than we did.”

Harry nods. “You’re right.”

“Listen. Tell you what, when we’re done here, why don’t you follow me to the house. We’ll sit and talk,” I tell him. “We need to relax and unwind. A lot of stress.”

“Yeah, I’m OK. Go do what you have to do.”

“I will. But not until you give me that rusted piece of crap in your center drawer,” I tell him.

“What were you doing in my drawer?”

“If you must know, I was looking for drugs.”

“And you saw the gun?”

“You bet I did. How could I miss something like that?”

“What do you think, I’m gonna . . .”

“Not at all,” I tell him. “I’m just worried that if you go and pull the trigger with the corroded bullets you’ve got, it’s gonna blow up and take your hand off. I don’t want you running around the office trying to hit the keyboard with a stump. That’s all.”