Razing Beijing: A Thriller (33 page)

In Wells Creek, Ohio, the instant background check affirmed
the transaction. The register spat out the receipt. Devinn slid the cards back
into his wallet. The shop owner handed him his package of supplies.

At 9:20 that evening, Devinn parked his rental car behind
the building that contained his storage garage. He keyed open the padlock,
raised the metal door and stepped inside to turn on the light. Everything
appeared undisturbed.

Devinn placed his new ammo boxes and so forth inside the
large storage trunk he kept in the garage. He took a moment to inventory his
arms cache. Unlike the other items that were more or less available to the
public, much of this was standard FBI issue and acquired for him by his handler:
infra-red night vision equipment, concussion grenades, the Remington 7.62 mm
SWAT sniper’s rifle, Kevlar body armor, several sets of black BDU fatigues, and
his silenced semi-automatic Heckler & Koch handgun.

Devinn closed and padlocked the door to his locker and
pocketed the key. By the time the Toyota’s Bridgestones spun-up the gravel upon
exiting the U-Storage it was nearly eleven o’clock.

The drive to Emily Chang’s studio apartment took a little
over thirty minutes. Unlike adjacent units, all of the lights in Chang’s
apartment were out; her Toyota was nowhere in sight. Devinn had observed that Emily
was a woman prone to keeping her own company; he wondered with whom she might
be spending time at so late an hour. It was possible that she was working late
at the Thanatech plant. He decided to drive around the neighborhood for a while
and see if she came home.

Devinn repeated his drive-by sequence several times, but at
midnight her parking spot remained empty. It was clear that, tonight anyway,
his options for finding Emily were few.

Disappointed, Paul Devinn a.k.a. Carl Smith checked into a
hotel in Cambridge, Ohio, some forty-minutes from the West Virginia border. It
was also a place where he figured the odds of being recognized were low,
particularly with the newly dark-blond coloring of his hair.

The next morning he awoke at 8:10 and was hungry enough to
eat a horse. He showered and changed into a fresh pair of khakis and a blue
twill cotton shirt. Devinn stood before the mirror feeling refreshed, studying
the blond hair belonging to Carl Smith; he was particularly pleased with the
neatly trimmed beard that redefined his jaw line. It was difficult to know how
effective either would actually be at preventing the hunter from becoming the
hunted. The thick brow and deep-set brown eyes, olive complexion and lean,
muscular build might be recognizable to someone like Stuart. The odds of that
happening, while not zero, were probably low. Carl Smith’s smile was
unmistakably his own.

He enjoyed a breakfast of poached eggs, sliced Canadian
ham, a tall stack of blueberry pancakes, and wheat toast with marmalade jam. Devinn
checked out and paid cash for his room. By about 9:45, with disappointment
lingering that Emily Chang hadn’t materialized, he set off southbound on
Interstate 77. Soon he would be heading east, retracing precisely the route
both he and Sean Thompson had followed in his previous life.

“WHY WOULD SOMEBODY
want
to sabotage that test flight?” McBurney stood in the blazing sun with a greasy
payphone to his ear while Special Agent Edward Hildebrandt pondered the
question.

“Well, first thing comes to mind is so unlikely as to be
hardly worth saying. Thanatech’s not the only outfit racing to offer these
fuel-efficient engines, so industrial espionage is not beyond the pale, just
hard to believe—these are reputable firms. On the other hand, I’ve lived here
long enough to see how the fortunes of local folk rise and fall with the
winning of some big engine order. A single airline order can be worth
billions
—that’s
with a capital
B
. I’d add to the short list of conspiracy theories maybe
an oil company or two, maybe a disgruntled employee. I take it you found
something interesting at Mojave?”

“Maybe. Are Thanatech’s competitors domestic?”

“One is, one isn’t.”

McBurney let out a breath. “Your scenarios are pretty much
what I came up with. Motive aside, I think I may have found a way someone might
have pulled off some mischief.” McBurney relayed his discussion with the Mojave
technicians, and the role that something like the AMDAC computer device would
play in his theory. He finished by indicating that the technicians referred to
Thompson and Chang as the relevant engineering experts.

He heard Hildebrandt whistle annoyingly into the
mouthpiece. “You think they might’ve reprogrammed something through the
computer?”

“Or they inserted a virus, but who the hell knows. Maybe
some sort of an explosive device was hidden aboard and programmed to detonate. I’ll
send you a copy of my notes. Now, I also went back over your report and those
Aviation
Weekly
articles say that Thanatech was in the process of identifying
changes to fix the problem that blew the engine apart, so that’s going to be
key. You said you were sending a couple of suits in Richmond out to talk—”

“To Stuart. The agent described a scene about as productive
as the one we had with Emily Chang. Stuart did admit to taking the calls. He
apparently thought Thompson was interested in talking about a job.”

McBurney sensed that the case for foreign espionage was
slipping away. “How did the guy respond to learning that the victim phoned him
minutes before having his head blown off?”

McBurney heard papers shuffling in the background. “He
claims Thompson phoned him to express interest in a job at this company called
Coherent Light where Stuart’s a part-owner, that he was familiar with
Thompson’s performance and agreed to personally endorse the guy at the
recruitment office. Let’s see... Responding to the assertion that it was odd
for Thompson to have called him around the coroner’s estimated time of death,
Stuart admitted surprise and that he too found it odd. He explained that by the
time he’d been notified of the homicide, it was already being reported by
police as drug-related and so he hadn’t bothered to notify the authorities.”

“Yeah. Stuart was actually at home when taking the Thompson
call?”

“That alibi looks pretty tight. He was hosting a dinner
party with family. Richmond Bureau followed up on the names he gave for
corroboration. His story seems to check out.”

“Are you buying it?”

“I don’t know. Richmond recommended they field a small
surveillance team to keep an eye on Stuart. I accepted the offer.”

McBurney realized there was much investigative spadework to
be done. “This is all very interesting and I hope that in some small way I’ve
helped. Unless you come up with a different angle, maybe on the money
laundering, I don’t see a role for the Agency. But there is one thing you might
try. I’d ask Thanatech to compile a list of everyone who was present for that
flight test—the employees I spoke to in Mojave indicated it was quite the
dog-and-pony show. I’d cross-check those names against a list of employees who
have since terminated employment. Sounds like this guy Stuart might be on both
lists. I don’t know what it says about Chang, but if your saboteur was an
employee, odds are he won’t hang around to collect his pension.”

Hildebrandt suggested they expand that to include employees
of all the other companies involved in the test flight. “Thanatech is touchy
about the crash. I’ll have to couch the request in terms of investigating the
Thompson murder.”

“Good luck. If anything breaks on the money laundering
angle, give me a call.”

HAVING ALREADY PAID
a
visit, Hildebrandt found the Human Resources suite easily enough. This time Thanatech
was undergoing a lay-off; the FBI agent could say with authority that the mood
in a morgue was jovial by comparison. Seated behind the secretary’s desk was
the distinguished-looking older woman whom he had met during his last visit to
the plant. She set down her novel when Hildebrandt approached. Reading a book
during office hours and in the midst of a lay-off struck the agent as odd.

“Hello, again,” the secretary said.

Hildebrandt explained that he was still investigating the
Thompson murder.

The woman wriggled her nose. She looked at him with a
placid expression and said nothing.

Hildebrandt glanced at the name on the desktop. “Ms.
Schwegaman, I—”

“That’s Marlene
Schwegman
.”

“Sorry. I spoke to your public relations representative. Didn’t
she call—”

“To say you were coming? I’m afraid not. In any case, Mr.
Devinn is out on extended leave.”

“I remembered that he wouldn’t be in. I was hoping you
might be able to help me.” He asked if someone might compile a list of
employees who had attended the Mojave flight test—he noticed her flinch at the
mention of the catastrophe—and of those who had subsequently left the company. “If
you could also direct me to someone who might know how to contact the other
companies with employees who’d attended the flight test, that would be helpful
as well.”

Marlene was frowning. She puckered her lips, her eyes
searching Hildebrandt’s.

“I know this is going to take some time,” Hildebrandt threw
in, noting her hesitation. “Perhaps simply a list of names with dates of departed
employees would be easier to start with.”

The secretary pushed herself back from her desk and slid
open a drawer. In an instant she miraculously presented Hildebrandt with a
single sheet of paper—twenty-three names numbered in a column labeled simply
across the top,
Post-test Attendee Departures
.

“Do you mind telling me how you already happened to have
this?”

“Well,” Marlene Schwegman’s face broke into a smile, “maybe
you’re not the first person to ask for it.”

DEVINN DROVE THROUGH
the
towns and hamlets west of Richmond, Virginia—places with peculiar names like
Goochland, Tobaccoville, Chula, Skin Quarter, Jennings Ordinary. Besides
wondering idly what in their past had spawned towns with such names, he spent
his hours behind the wheel deeply withdrawn inside his own thoughts.

Try as he might to ignore it, there had been every
indication that Stuart and Chang were up to
something
. He had personally
witnessed their intelligence and resourcefulness. Rather than find comfort of
refuge in his new identity, the fact of the matter was he was teetering between
determination and the fringes of panic. His dilemma was that only by first
obtaining the proof could he then convince his handler of the risk they faced.

He was fording unfamiliar waters; risking his cover in
pursuit of scrutinizing Stuart was not, strictly speaking, adhering to his
handler’s instructions. While it was dangerous to toe the line with the
organization that kept him challenged and very well compensated, stepping over
it would signal that he could no longer be trusted—with predictable results. And
while his
neutralization
was underway they would freeze all of his
assets, an instrument of control that he had found no practical means of countering.
His benefactors had knowledge of at least the Hong Kong bank where Devinn
instructed them to wire his payments; his maze of worldwide accounts were no
match for a determined trace. They also might suspect, albeit wrongly, that
Devinn could finger their principal for helping him conduct espionage. They
would certainly never allow anything like his arrest by the authorities;
indeed, the elegance of their arrangement was that his benefactors claimed to
be ever vigilant in preventing it. In the final analysis, it would always be
they
who had
him
over the proverbial barrel. Their implementation of a
decision to do away with him would be certain and swift.

THE WOODED KNOLL
provided
an expansive view of the modest yet secluded estate. Beyond the main wing of
the antebellum fieldstone house, several acres of velvet lawn with forsythia,
lilac, roses, and dogwood were tiered down to the waters of Nomini Bay. A
modern dock extending out into the water was concealed by the boathouse, where
high above its cedar-shingled roof were visible the large white mast and
spreaders of a sailboat moored to its berth. Stowed inside a large wire cage
beside the tennis court was a vast collection of colorful plastic children’s
toys.

From his position just below the crest of the knoll, Paul
Devinn looked between branches of mature ash and pine trees to see most of the
five acres of grounds. Headlights occasionally passed on the winding two-lane
road some hundred yards to his left and from the other road further behind him.
Past the intersection of these two roads that bordered the thickly wooded
property was the entrance to a bridle path where Devinn had parked his rental
car.

He enjoyed a relatively unobstructed right-quartering view
of the front of Stuart’s residence. He could also see much of the crushed
gravel drive which paralleled the edge of the woods before looping beneath the
Gothic-column portico and around to a four-bay garage. Nearly an hour had
passed since the driver of the cream-colored Lexus, an attractive woman with
auburn hair in her early-to-middle thirties, had stopped beneath the portico
and entered the house with a young girl. He had no idea of the woman’s identity—unfortunately,
she wasn’t Emily Chang—but noted her ability to enter the security code into
the keypad beside the front door. The little girl he recognized from the
obligatory photographs on the desk in her father’s office.

The girl shortly re-appeared behind the house laughing and
running around the yard with a dog. This concerned Devinn but Stuart’s daughter
and her pet eventually re-entered the house without incident. Soon the sun sank
farther below the hills to the west. Interior lights around the first floor of
the house began to appear.