The Chase (18 page)

The inspector turned back to Kate, and he could see her reading the defeated expression on his face.

“Damn,” she said. “You’ve lost him.”

He shrugged. “But we have you.”

Kate sat on a gurney in a windowless exam room at Shanghai United Family Hospital in Hongqiao. She wore a hospital gown, and her right wrist was handcuffed to the bed rail. She’d been examined and X-rayed by a Chinese doctor with the bedside manner of a mortician. Her wounds had been cleaned and freshly bandaged. The whole time, she’d remained under the stony gaze of two expressionless uniformed police officers she’d christened Rigor and Mortis, who stood now on either side of the exam room door. She hadn’t seen the inspector since the ambulance had taken her away from the freeway median almost two hours ago.

She looked over at Rigor and Mortis. “Could one of you run out and get me a hamburger or something? I’m starving.” Neither officer said a word. “I’ll settle for anything. Fried rice. An eggroll. A bag of Doritos. Whatever you can get from the cafeteria.” The men remained expressionless. She lifted her right arm and rattled the handcuff chain. “I’m locked to the bed, and my ass is hanging out of this gown. I’m not going to escape if one of you goes to get me some food.” Neither man budged or gave any indication he’d even heard her. Maybe they didn’t speak English.

The door opened and Zhaoji came in. His hair was wet, and his overcoat was soaked. The drizzle had apparently turned into a downpour. There was some mud on his shoes and the cuffs of his pants.

“How are you feeling?” Zhaoji asked. His English was good, though his Chinese accent was heavy.

“Hungry. Tired. Pissed off.”

The inspector said something in Chinese to Rigor, who nodded and left the room. Zhaoji faced Kate. “The doctor says you’ve been slashed with a knife and that you’ve suffered numerous blows to your torso, resulting in substantial bruising, and you possibly have a concussion.”

Kate jangled her handcuff against the rail again. “Why am I being treated like a criminal?”

Zhaoji took his wet coat off and draped it over the back of a chair. He wore a white shirt, black tie, and an off-the-rack gray suit that was beginning to fray at the cuffs from years of use. “A woman was killed on Stanley Fu’s plane, and an international fugitive is loose in our city.”

“I had nothing to do with any of that.”

“You were on the same plane.”

“So were Fu, his crew, and his guests. Are they in handcuffs, too?”

“You have no passport or identification of any kind.”

“Because they were taken away from me. I told you who I am. I’m FBI Special Agent Kate O’Hare. Send my picture and my prints to the U.S. consulate. They’ll confirm it.”

He shrugged. “You stowed away on a private jet and entered this country illegally.”

“I was beaten and abducted.”

“You fled from the plane in a car with Nicolas Fox.”

“Against my will. I was locked in the trunk.”

“You were found in the possession of suitcases containing a counterfeit bronze rooster and sophisticated safecracking equipment.”

“It all belongs to Fox, and if you’re smart, you’ll stop wasting valuable time and uncuff me so I can help you catch him before he disappears.”

Zhaoji didn’t appear to be in a hurry. He took a leather notebook out of his back pocket, dragged a stool in front of the gurney, and sat down. The deeply creased notebook was curved from being constantly pressed against his butt. All the male cops that she knew had notebooks shaped like that. He pulled a pen from his breast pocket, held it poised over a page, and looked at her with his bloodshot eyes. “Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?”

“I chased Nicolas Fox for years. I finally caught him and put him behind bars, but he escaped from custody on his way to trial. I’ve been searching for him ever since. Three days ago I got a tip that he was going to steal the bronze rooster, so I went to D.C. to try to catch him in the act.”

“Without telling your superiors? Without any backup?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’ve obviously talked to the FBI and you know who I am. So why am I still handcuffed?”

“They say you are supposed to be in Los Angeles and that they don’t know why you’re here. They say you’ve gone rogue.”

It was no surprise to her that Bolton had thrown her under the bus, but at least now they knew that she and Nick had pulled off the switch. Nick’s cover was safe. He was a fugitive before and still was. But their covert operation was still at risk. Bolton probably had his intestines tied in knots worrying about whether she’d be able to walk away from this without being exposed as Fox’s accomplice. It all rode on how this interview with Zhaoji turned out.

“They’re pencil-pushing bureaucrats,” Kate said. “I’m sure it’s the same here.”

He shrugged again.

She knew it was his way of being noncommittal and keeping her talking. She was glad to play along.

“I knew the tip wasn’t strong enough to get them to approve a trip to D.C.,” Kate said, “so I went on my own. My bosses call it going rogue, I call it showing some initiative. It’s the only way you’re going to catch a man like Nicolas Fox.”

Rigor came back with a bowl of white rice and a set of chopsticks, which he offered to Kate. She nodded her thanks and took it, though she would have preferred a cheeseburger.

“If you believed the rooster was at risk,” Zhaoji said, “why didn’t you alert anyone at the Smithsonian, or in Stanley Fu’s company, or in the Chinese government?”

“Because if I did that,” Kate said, “they would have reacted by increasing their security or changing their plans in some way, which would have scared Fox off and blown my opportunity to get
him. By the time I got to D.C, the rooster had already been delivered to the cargo hold of Fu’s jet and nothing unusual happened during the trip. So I assumed that Fox hadn’t stolen the rooster yet, which meant that he had to make his move while the plane was on the tarmac at Dulles, or while it was in midair, or once it landed in Shanghai. It was obviously going to be in the air.”

Zhaoji looked confused. “Why?”

“Because airports are high-security locations these days. He’d need manpower and weapons to pull off the theft at one of the airports, and that just isn’t his style. But midair he wouldn’t have to worry about security, and he’d have hours alone with the safe to crack the combination. Plus it was a ballsy play, pure Nick Fox. All I had to figure out was how he was going to do it.”

“You make it sound easy. Seems to me it would be the hardest part.”

“Not if you’ve been chasing Fox as long as I have,” Kate said, finishing her rice. “I looked into Fu’s activities while he was in D.C. and discovered that he’d purchased the Charger and intended to take it on his plane. If I was a thief, I’d hide in the Charger and sneak onto the plane. So the night before Fu was supposed to leave D.C., I went out to the car dealer in Bethesda, slipped inside the building, and caught Nick Fox turning the backseat of the Charger into a secret compartment.”

Zhaoji had been taking notes as she spoke, but now he stopped and met her eye. “You’re an FBI agent and an ex–Navy commando. You could probably kill all three of us right now with those chopsticks. Do you really expect me to believe that Fox disarmed you, beat you up, and locked you in the trunk of the car?”

Kate set her chopsticks down in the empty bowl, and Mortis quickly snatched the bowl from her. Okay, she thought, now I know
two things. The inspector is a lot smarter and more informed than he lets on, and the stone-faced guards clearly understand English.

“I got the drop on Fox,” she said. “But what I didn’t know was that he had an accomplice, a highly trained BlackRhino operative with a switchblade. She came out of nowhere and took me by surprise. We had a fight. She won. Next thing I knew, I woke up in the trunk of the car in the cargo hold of Fu’s airplane.”

“Why didn’t she kill you?”

“Fox must have stopped her.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he isn’t a killer.”

“But Alexis Poulet was,” Zhaoji said. “Before she joined BlackRhino, she was a spy and assassin for DCRI, the French intelligence service.”

“That’s irrelevant. Fox doesn’t kill people. His con, his rules, that’s how he rolls.”

Zhaoji took his cell phone out of his inside jacket pocket, tapped a few keys, then turned the screen toward Kate so she could see the picture of the dead BlackRhino operative stuffed into the jetboat storage compartment. “Then who did this?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “I was locked in the trunk. I was given a couple bottles of water, but beyond that I have no idea what went down. I heard some arguing, raised voices, but I don’t know what was said. I had no idea the woman was killed. Like I said, it’s not Fox’s style. Maybe someone else is involved.”

“Was Fox the one who dressed your wounds?”

“I assume so. When I woke up, I was already bandaged.”

“It’s one thing not to kill you, it’s another to treat your injuries while he’s in the middle of a heist.”

She shrugged. Two could play that game.

He cocked his head and looked at her as if seeing her in a new light. “He cares about you.”

“Fox only cares about himself and his image. He wanted me alive and well to do what I’m doing right now, telling his side of the story.”

“Perhaps.”

The inspector’s face betrayed nothing. She couldn’t tell if he believed her or not, if she’d be sent home or to prison. Zhaoji stood up, slipped the notebook back into his pocket, and walked out, leaving her handcuffed and alone with Rigor and Mortis once again.

The rain had stopped. The wet streets of Shanghai had a glossy sheen that reflected the lavishly illuminated buildings on both sides of the Huangpu River, the dividing line between the city’s past and future.

On the western side of the Huangpu was the Bund, which in the mid-nineteenth century had been the Wall Street of the Far East. The surviving buildings were a trapped-in-amber artifact of the city’s rich colonial past as a trading post. This nineteenth-century city had been carved up by the British, French, and Americans into districts that looked like their faraway mother countries.

On the east bank was Pudong, a booming Tomorrowland of skyscrapers rising from the swamps. The most iconic high-rise was the Oriental Pearl Tower, perfectly symbolizing Shanghai’s aggressive new attitude on the global economic stage. There were 90 billionaires and 140,000 multimillionaires in Shanghai, and the majority of them lived, worked, and partied in Pudong.
This was where Nick Fox liked to ply his trade when he came to town.

He stayed at the Park Hyatt Shanghai. The luxury hotel occupied the seventy-ninth to ninety-third floors of the 101-story Shanghai World Financial Center. It was a landmark building with a massive, rectangular hole at the top that made the sleek, shimmering tower look like an enormous bottle opener. The similarity was so striking that bottle openers shaped like the SWFC were sold as souvenirs on the tower’s hundredth-floor observation deck and at tourist shops throughout the city.

Nick showed up carrying an Hermès suitcase and wearing some of the clothes he’d bought at Shanghai Tang. He wore a perfectly tailored black blazer, a light blue-and-white-striped chambray shirt, stretch denim slacks, and a pair of casual Ecco leather boat shoes. He registered as Sonny Crockett and took the elevator to his ninety-third-floor suite.

The suite’s dim lighting, muted colors, and minimalist décor made the breathtaking view of the Huangpu River and the Bund through the floor-to-ceiling windows appear even more dramatic. But what really heightened the drama for Nick was the reflection of the man standing behind him holding a gun.

Inspector Zhaoji Li entered Kate’s room carrying a neatly folded set of blue surgical scrubs, which he placed beside her on the gurney.

“If you were chasing Nicolas Fox in Shanghai,” he asked, “where would you start looking for him?”

Zhaoji asked this in his politely enigmatic way, but Kate knew there was nothing trivial about the conversation. Just as she instinctively knew he already had the answer.

“I’d go to the five top hotels in the city,” she replied.

“Why?”

“He believes in hiding in plain sight, and he likes his comfort.”

“Would the Park Hyatt Shanghai qualify?”

Her heart skipped a beat. She knew that was where Nick was staying, and apparently so did Zhaoji.

“Is it a five-star hotel?”

He nodded. “It’s also one of the tallest hotels on earth.”

“Then yes, definitely, it would be at the top of my list.”

Her answer seemed to satisfy him, which only deepened her concern. He sent Rigor and Mortis out of the room with a nod of his head and unlocked the handcuffs on her wrist.

“Your shoes are in the closet, but you might prefer this clean set of scrubs I brought for you to the clothes you were wearing when you were brought in.” He pocketed his handcuffs. “I hope they are your size.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Does this mean that I am free to go?”

“Yes, though you won’t get far without identification or money and wearing only scrubs. We could drop you off at the U.S. consulate if you like.”