Trigger City (16 page)

I
drew my gun, flew up Amy's front steps
and hammered on her door and jabbed at the doorbell. Looked up and down the block. The street was empty. And quiet. I hammered on the door again.

A few more seconds passed and the door opened.

Vince said, “Keep your pants on. I had to check, make sure it was you.”

“Jesus, Vince. I thought you'd be in the car.” I holstered my gun and stepped inside and Vince locked the door behind me.

“Amy invited me in after she saw the news on TV.” He offered up a sly man-to-man smile. “I think she likes you. She was really worried about you.”

“Where is she?”

“Upstairs, sleeping.” Vince stretched. “And speaking of sleeping, I'm beat. Can I go now?”

“You see anything?”

“Niente. No bad guys, no nuthin'. Just a regular night on a quiet street.”

“Okay, thanks. Get as much sleep as you can and be back at four.”

“Will do.”

“Also, pack a bag. I want you to stay on Amy's couch awhile.”

Vince nodded. “Listen, uh, if I'm gonna be here 24/7, working…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I'm not gonna be able to take any process-serving gigs for Argos.”

“Right. You're working for me full-time for the next while.”

“But, see the thing is, I don't have a daily rate. We never talked about that. What's the job pay?”

“Oh yeah, sorry. Four hundred bucks.”

“For how many days?”

“Per day. Four hundred per day.”

Vince broke into a wide smile. “Excellent. Cool, thanks.” He turned to leave.

“Vince.”

“Yeah?”

“Is Jill on days or nights right now?”

Vince thought for a second. “She had yesterday off, goes back on days this morning. Shift starts at eight.”

“Thanks.” He headed down the front steps. “Get some sleep,” I called after him. I needed some myself, badly, but that would have to wait until Amy was awake and could stand watch. In the meantime, breakfast would keep me going.

I fried a couple eggs and some bacon, read the morning paper while I ate. The police still didn't know the identity of the man who attacked me. Not at press time, anyway. The story told me nothing new but Terry had indeed quoted me, against his better judgment.

When reached by the
Chronicle
for comment, an angry Ray Dudgeon said, “I have some advice for the people responsible for today's attempt on my life. Next time, send someone who can fly.”

Perhaps not my finest moment. But Terry had helped sell the quote by describing me as
an angry Ray Dudgeon,
and it didn't read like false bravado. Rather, like a guy come slightly unhinged. Maybe a little more than slightly.

And despite the obvious attempt at humor, I didn't think Jill would love the quote a whole lot. Of course, I hadn't been thinking of how it would read to her when I said it.

“Good morning.”

I looked up from the paper. Amy stood in the kitchen doorway. She wore blue jeans and a red UIC sweatshirt. Her hair was in a ponytail, her hands jammed into the back pockets of her jeans. Bare feet, toenails painted red.

I closed the paper, tried to control my anger, failed. “I don't suppose you've had a chance to read the paper.”

“I saw it on television.” Amy looked at her delicate feet. “I'm sorry. I wanted to believe you but…I was scared, I didn't know what to think. When I saw the news, I knew for sure you weren't with them.”

“You sure? Because I can go back out there and get myself killed if you need more convincing.”
You're being childish, Dudgeon. She was trying to protect her daughter. Let it go.
I took my plate to the sink. “It's all right, forget it. Just tell me what you know and don't leave anything out this time.”

 

We sat in the front room and Amy told her story again. It was the same story, right up to the point when Steven Zhang went nuts.

She said, “You asked before if Steven was faking his illness. I still find it hard to believe…”

“But he was, wasn't he?”

“Yes. God…yes I think he was. I mean, he put on a good act but I didn't really…you know, like when you see an actor in a movie and you can't point to anything specific that he's doing wrong but you just don't believe him? I asked him—I said, ‘Why are you doing this?' and he responded with all sorts of delusional raving, but…” Amy shrugged. “And there was something in his eyes. Like he knew what he was doing was hurting me and he felt terrible about it.” She let out a long sigh. “If he really had been as disconnected from reality as he was acting, he wouldn't have looked at me like that.”

I'd already concluded that Steven Zhang's illness was phony. The fact that Amy thought so too was fine, but ultimately useless to me. I needed something concrete, something I could work with.

“You thought Steven had learned something bad on Hawk River's computers.”

“Yes.”

“And whatever he found, he had to save. On a CD-ROM, a flash drive, SD card, portable hard drive, whatever.”

“Yes.” Amy's eyes grew wide. “Yes, that's right! A week after Steven started acting crazy, Joan called me. She asked about his sudden illness and I told her I didn't understand it, either. Then she said that Steven was supposed to give her something; he had some important computer files and she needed them very badly. She was extremely agitated about it. Most of all, she sounded frightened and I remembered when Steven was fired from Hawk River, he said that it was for my own good not to know any details, that he was trying to protect me. In my mind, the two things fit together.”

“Good thinking,” I said.

“Joan asked me to ask Steven about it. She wasn't able to get through to him and she thought maybe I could. I asked him a number of times, whenever he seemed lucid, but he immediately started ranting about how everybody was in on some giant brainwashing conspiracy against him. Like my asking triggered him to amplify the craziness.”

“Do you know if Joan ever got what she was looking for?”

“I know she didn't. She called a few times to see if I'd found out from Steven. The last call was the day before…” Amy kneaded her hands in her lap.

So I'd spent a night tearing through Joan's apartment for nothing. She never even had the damn thing to hide.

Which means it could still be right here…

“I need to search Steven's office upstairs.”

“You won't find anything.” Amy reached forward and touched my arm to stop me from standing. “I'm sorry, I should have told you all this before—”

“Don't worry about that now,” I said. “Just tell me, why won't I find anything?”

“Well, this goes back a long time,” said Amy. “All the way back to China.” Her voice echoed reluctance. This was not an easy topic, but then none of our conversations were easy.

“That's okay,” I said, “go ahead.”

She took a deep breath, let it out. “All right. You need some background. In 1989, Steven and I were both student organizers in the June Fourth Movement.”

“Tiananmen Square?”

“Yes, Tiananmen was what the world saw on television and that was the largest of them, by design. But there were protests all across the country…it was massive. And it was carefully coordinated, timed to coincide with Gorbachev's visit, when there would be news media from all over the world. Planned for many months on university campuses, in dorm rooms and study halls and cafeterias. The universities in Beijing were the main planning centers.

“Steven was a leader in the prodemocracy student movement. He had written influential dissident essays that were secretly distributed among the campuses. Those essays inspired many students to join. To me they were like the writings of Thomas Paine, forbidden in China but widely read in secret. I was eighteen years old, an undergraduate studying languages. The prodemocracy movement soon became my passion. And I became an organizer on campus.” As Amy told her story, she stopped looking at me and seemed to retreat into herself. Like she was alone in the room, telling herself the story.

She was silent for a minute. Then she said, “We believed that the Americans would stand up. The UN. The whole Western world would stand up for us when they heard our cries, and the Party would be forced to enact some democratic reforms. We weren't expecting utopia, just a few reforms. A little less corruption. A small step toward democracy. We really believed it was within reach. Of course we were wrong. No one stood up for us. And the government crushed us.”

Television images of Tiananmen Square flashed through my mind.
A sea of people standing together under the glare of Mao Zedong. Student leaders making speeches through bullhorns. Thousands of people, the young and the old, sitting cross-legged on the ground, staging a mass hunger strike. The statue of the
Goddess of Democracy,
hastily carved in Styrofoam, facing Mao's portrait, staring him down. Tanks and trucks full of soldiers with rifles, surrounding the square, waiting for the order to move in.

And as they made their approach, the solitary young man who stood defiant before the tanks, daring them to run him over.

And then chaos. Truncheons cracking heads and rifles firing into the crowd and clouds of tear gas choking protesters. Limp and bloody bodies being carried away, buses burning in the streets, the
Goddess of Democracy
felled by a tank and quickly reduced to Styrofoam rubble by the People's Liberation Army.

People's Liberation Army.
What a name.

“I was rounded up with the rest of the organizers and sent to prison,” said Amy. “I was given a ten-year sentence. It was very bad in prison. We were not treated well. After a year, I was given medical parole.”

“What was wrong?”

Amy looked at me again and smiled without any humor. “A medical parole is just an excuse to send a political prisoner into exile. You see, because I was well known to the movement I became one of the
June Fourth martyrs,
as we were called. And martyrs inspire. So the government offered us medical parole, on condition that we leave the country—for medical treatment, is what they say in public—and never return. It's a common practice—a convenient way to get rid of troublemakers without creating more martyrs. I was put on a plane to America and told that if I ever returned, I would disappear into a prison labor camp and never be seen again.”

“Did Steven come with you?”

She shook her head. “Steven was offered medical parole,” she said, “but he refused it.”

“Why?”

“If you leave the country, you have turned your back on the struggle. You have taken the easy way out. Exile is not honorable for someone considered a martyr.”

“That's pretty harsh.”

“In China, life is harsh. You couldn't understand.” She was right; I couldn't even imagine. “For three years Steven refused medical parole. Finally he gave in. He came to Chicago and we were married.”

My cell phone rang. The call display said it was coming from the FBI. I held my finger up in a “one minute” gesture and answered as Amy went into the kitchen.

Special Agent Holborn said, “I've got to admit, you're harder to kill than I ever would've guessed.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Got anything for me?”

“Two things. First, the plate number you gave me.”

“The DHS guys.”

“Are you sure they were Illinois plates?”

“Absolutely.
Land of Lincoln
and everything.”

“Then either they're counterfeit or you wrote the number down wrong.”

“I gave you the right number,” I said.

“Then it's counterfeit. No such plates exist. Not in Illinois.”

“That's interesting.”

“I thought you'd think so.”

“You guys ever use counterfeit plates? Like when you're undercover and you want to dress your car as a civilian?”

“Ray, we're the government. We can get genuine civilian plates whenever we want. Genuine civilian cars, too, if we need them.”

“Yeah, I'm just looking for a reason why a couple of DHS agents would ride around with counterfeit plates on their car.”

“If you think of one, I'd love to hear it.”

“You said two things. What's the second?”

“I spoke to the China desk. Your Blake Sten never brought them anything about Jia Lun meeting with any Steven Zhang. They've never heard of Steven Zhang. Or Blake Sten, for that matter.”

“Thought you weren't going to tell me what the China desk said.”

“I figure you earned it yesterday.”

“Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” said Holborn. “Stay alive, and call me when you learn something.”

A
my and Steven Zhang built a new life together
in the United States, became citizens, had a daughter, saved their money, and brought Amy's mother to Chicago. They embraced their adopted country with the intense gratitude felt by immigrants from oppression.

But they could not forget the way things were back home and those who continued the struggle, and they felt some measure of guilt for the blessings of their new life. So they decided to exercise their new freedom to help.

Steven used his computer skills to set up special Web sites. One site gave tips on building a backyard koi pond and keeping your fish healthy. Another was a guide to Chicago's Chinatown for the casual tourist. A couple of years ago, he added a site devoted to Italian recipes and cooking techniques. Completely innocent Web sites, but behind them he built
blind pages
. You could surf around the sites all day, click every available link, and you'd never stumble upon the blind pages. On those blind pages, he posted news articles about China that appeared in the Western media but were censored back home. He posted the articles as large image files, making them invisible to word-Search applications.

Amy wrote the copy for the main sites. And she used her job as an English tutor at UIC to recruit Chinese students. The students sent e-mails back home, to kids on university campuses in Hong Kong and Beijing, and those kids forwarded the messages to kids on campuses in other cities throughout China. The e-mails looked trivial enough—a lot of prattle about the life of a college kid.
Oh, and by the way, I found this really cool site about Chicago's Chinatown, or koi ponds, or Italian cooking
. And certain words within the prattle told the reader what extensions to type, in order to get to the blind pages.

It was a clever system and they were able to funnel a lot of news past the censors. Their big mistake was not doing enough to disguise ownership of the sites. Steven opted for private registration of the domain names, but that's easy enough to get around if you really want to find out who owns a site and are willing to spend a few bucks. If you did, you'd find that the sites were registered to Zhang IT Consulting. And the ownership of Zhang IT Consulting was a matter of public record.

As Amy told me all this, I realized how I'd underestimated her when we first met. Living in a city like Chicago, you meet cabdrivers who were doctors in their home country, waiters who were engineers, and so on. My own mechanic, Sasha Klukoff, was a professor in Russia back when it was the Soviet Union. You meet these people, but it never occurs to you that some of these cabdrivers and waiters and mechanics were also political dissidents in their native countries. Even political prisoners. Now I saw Amy Zhang through new eyes. She was a fighter, and a survivor.

And then she told me how it all came crashing down.

“The night that Steven died, after the police had gone, I was packing a suitcase. Theresa was at my mother's and I was going to join her there. I couldn't stay here. The place…it was a mess.” I'd seen the police photos and I knew what she was saying. “I had to get out of here. I was packing a bag and a man came to the door. He was a huge man, with a terrible burn scar on his face.”

“Blake Sten,” I said.

Amy nodded. “He didn't say his name but Steven had described
him to me. He showed me a photograph of Steven in a coffee shop with Jia Lun.”

“Did you know that Jia Lun worked for the MSS?”

“Before I saw the photo? I knew that he was an important journalist and his reporting always supported Party policy, so he was connected to the Party. That's what I knew. Sten explained that Jia Lun was a professional contact of his. Then he showed me printouts of our Web sites, including the blind pages. He had the paperwork proving that Steven owned the sites. The last thing he showed me was another photo.” Amy closed her eyes, opened them slowly. “It was taken on the tarmac of an airport in Shanghai. You could read the signs on the building in the background. In the foreground there were six PLA soldiers. They had a man in handcuffs. Yan Benli. He had been one of the June Fourth martyrs, sent to New York on medical parole. He gave lectures here, trying to persuade the American government to take a harder line on human rights in China. He disappeared a year ago. He was supposed to give a lecture at the New School. He never showed up. His body was never found and he's still listed by the New York police as a missing person. In the photograph, he stood between Jia Lun and Blake Sten.”

“Sten was in China?”

“Yes. And he told me that the same thing would happen to me if I raised questions about Steven's death, or his illness. And I would never see Theresa again.”

It all made sense. The photo of Steven Zhang and Jia Lun wasn't proof that they'd had a meeting; it was proof that Blake Sten could
engineer
such a meeting. Sten hadn't shown me any other evidence and he hadn't brought it to the FBI, so the content of their conversation could've been completely innocent. All he had to do was send Jia Lun into the coffee shop and snap some photos. Jia Lun could have approached Steve Zhang and struck up a conversation about the weather and Blake Sten would've gotten the photo he needed.

Sten might've used the same coercion on Steven:
I have influence with the Chinese government. Look at this photo of you and Jia Lun—I made that happen. Now this other photo—Jia and me, delivering one of
your fellow dissidents to the PLA. I could do the same thing to you and Amy. Look here, I even have the records of your Web sites. You'll both disappear into labor camps, and you'll never see Theresa again. There's no way out for you. But you can save your wife and daughter…

Maybe. But why would Blake Sten have that level of influence with the Chinese government? I had no answer for that one.

Amy said, “Sten went to the door and two other men came in. They searched the house for hours, took everything apart. They spent a lot of time in Steven's office. They even took the hard drive from his computer.”

If three guys from Hawk River hadn't found it, I wouldn't. Amy was right—it wasn't there.
Damn.

“When the police came back, I described Steven's recent behavior but did not mention my suspicions, or Blake Sten. And as I told you, I was being watched after that. A week later, someone else came to the door—not Blake Sten—and asked me to tell him what I knew about Steven killing Joan. He made no pretense. He said that he worked for Sten and he wanted to hear it the way I told it to the police. There was another visit a week after that. Sten again. It was the same thing, he wanted me to tell it over again. I think really he just wanted to scare me again. Remind me of what would happen if I didn't go along. A week after that, they stopped following me. Until you arrived.” Amy was silent for a minute. Then she said, “And that's everything. Now I've told you all that I know. Can you do anything with it?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “If I had the computer files…I think I could get you and Theresa into Witness Protection. But you'd have to tell everything you know to an FBI man I know. And you'd have to testify, if it comes to that.”

“If I testify, would they be able to keep us safe?”

“They'd try. They're pretty good at it, but there's no way to know for certain.”

“Because I don't think Blake Sten will let me live. Once he finds whatever Steven had…or once enough time has passed not to raise suspicions…I think I'll have some kind of accident. Or I'll just disappear and Sten will earn some credits with his contacts in China.”

She was probably right.

My grandfather's voice echoed in my head, dispensing advice both simple and profound:
Never make promises you can't keep, son.

I said, “We're not gonna let that happen, Amy. I promise.”

I was fading fast, desperate for sleep. Clear thought now required conscious effort. If I didn't close my eyes soon, I'd be totally useless. I went out to my car, did a quick circuit of the surrounding blocks, saw nothing, and parked in front of the town house again. I'd brought a couple of portable door jammers from home and I showed Amy how they worked. Then set one up on the back door, the other on the front. I made sure all the blinds were fully closed and gave her instructions to stay away from the windows.

It was 9:20. I swallowed a couple of Percs, set the alarm in my cell phone for 3:30 and placed it on the coffee table. Placed my gun next to it. Pulled the coffee table close to the couch and stretched out.

By the time Amy put a blanket over me, I was asleep.

 

The phone woke me at 2:05. Delwood Crawley said he would be at Riccardo's at 5:30. I said that I would be there and we hung up on each other. I'd been hoping for a full six hours of sleep, hadn't quite gotten five. It would have to do. I rose from the couch suffering from a bad case of bed head, managed to calm it down with a soak under the bathroom faucet. Brushed my teeth. Slapped on some deodorant. Felt almost like a new man.

I found Amy reading the newspaper in the kitchen. She wanted to visit Theresa. She hadn't gone yesterday and this was the longest they'd been apart since Steven's death. We had time to get to Grandma's for a quick visit and be back before Vince arrived. There was still no one watching Amy's house and I couldn't think of a reason to say no.

So we went. And there was no surveillance set up at Grandma's place in Chinatown, either.

As we entered Grandma's apartment, Theresa flew into the living room and into Amy's arms. There followed hugs and kisses and Amy
smoothed Theresa's hair down the way a mother does. Theresa led Amy by the hand and we all went into the kitchen, where a chubby Chinese girl in her early twenties sat at Grandma's kitchen table. Schoolbooks were spread across the table. Amy introduced the girl as Samantha and told me that she was Theresa's tutor, until the time was right for Theresa to return to school.

Samantha had long hair, dyed very black. Black eyeliner generously applied, and black fingernails. Black cargo pants and pink Chuck Taylors. A matching pink Hello Kitty T-shirt. About a thousand string bracelets, some with pukka shells, others with little skull beads. I might've guessed Goth, but the pink shoes and the Hello Kitty T-shirt said something else. I think she may have been what kids of her age call Emo. Whatever that means.

Although her English was better than most American kids, it was not her native tongue and I wondered if she might've been one of Amy's UIC students who, until recently, had helped smuggle news to university students in China.

Samantha told us that Grandma was out grocery shopping, and Amy put the kettle on the stove. I left them in the kitchen and sat out in the living room, by the front window.

There was still no one watching the place.

I thought it through: Sten gave me a story to feed my client.
I sincerely hope that, once you pass all this to Mr. Richmond, he can move on, too,
he said. And just in case that was too subtle for me, he'd followed up with the assault on Ernie Banks. A clear message:
Put this case to bed. Now.
I hadn't allowed Tim Dellitt to buy me off the case, so an unambiguous threat would be the natural next step for a guy like Sten. But then Terry called Hawk River with questions about Steven Zhang and Joan Richmond. Sten couldn't know if Terry had been put into motion before my visit, so Terry's call didn't tell him if his threat had achieved its goal.

Sten needed to know if I was still on the case. I'm usually a pretty hard guy to tail (despite my screwup the previous day) so it would require a team. Waste of manpower. Easier to simply put Malibu Man
on Amy. If I were pursuing the investigation, I'd turn up in Amy's life. If I didn't turn up, then either I'd dropped the case or I was such a lousy detective that I wouldn't get anywhere anyway.

But once I'd spent the night in Amy's house, Sten knew. She'd let me stay overnight—Sten would assume she'd told me everything. So there was no need to keep a man on Amy. Whatever damage Amy could do by talking to me had been done. I was the threat now. They could take care of Amy later. And killing her before me would be a serious tactical error.

It was too soon after the attempt on my life for Sten to move on me. I was too hot. If I'd convinced the police that there would be another attempt, there might even be a CPD team shadowing me for a few days, ready to swoop in and grab anyone tailing me. Better to wait. Regroup. Restrategize, in the light of recent events.

And if I was correct about the identity of my attacker, Blake Sten was as surprised by the attempt on my life as I was. Maybe, like me, he was right now wondering what the hell just happened.

 

Amy broke the silence of the drive back to her house with, “I still haven't told her. How Steven died. But I will have to, before she returns to school.”

“Or before she gets on the Internet,” I said.

“Oh my God. I hadn't even thought of that.”

“Amy, you've got to tell her.”

She ran her fingers through her hair. “She's so young and she's already been through so much. I don't know how. I don't know what words to use…”

“It doesn't matter how, just tell her.” It came out a little harder than intended. “For Christ's sake, the longer you wait, the worse it's gonna be. If she finds out somewhere else, it'll be a double betrayal—her father kills himself, and then her mother lies to her about it.”

Amy looked out the side window as we crossed over the Chicago River. She said, “But how do you explain suicide to a child?”

My mother's cold body naked on top of the sheets, an empty pill bottle beside her, a half-empty bottle of Sambuca on the nightstand. My grandfather's inadequate words: “Human beings are odd creatures…. She wasn't thinking straight—people never are when they do that.”