White Ghost (2 page)

T
he slug's impact wasn't anything like in the Hong Kong movies. It didn't throw Peter backward or knock him off his feet or send him twisting and flailing.

No, it wasn't like that at all. His body just . . . went . . . limp.

And it made no sense.

He'd known for certain nobody would get hurt.
It's an inside job. Nobody gets hurt on an inside job.
That's what Big Brother said when he chose him, when he let him use the name Ah Pang and handed him the gun.

A voice pierced through the gunfire and the screams and the running feet and the tumbling boxes.

“Ah Pang's shot—Ah Pang's shot—Ah Pang's shot.”

A hand gripped Peter's shoulder and wrenched his head from the floor. His eyes jerked into motion and spun past the desks and shelves, the distant walls, the fluorescent lights, the high raftered ceiling, finally coming to rest just inches away from the face of a kneeling Dog Boy.

Peter saw his minute reflection in his friend's eyes and his image magnified in Dog Boy's terror—until he turned away and
pushed himself to his feet. Peter then heard soles pounding concrete, accelerating into the distance, and voices yelling.

“Go—Go—Go.”

What did Big Brother say they should do if something went wrong?

Run to the truck.

That's what Dog Boy had done, but now only Peter's thoughts ran. The unconscious flow of thought into action had been severed, and even if he could will his legs to move, there was nowhere left to run, for the enveloping stillness told him the others had faded into the void from which they had emerged only minutes earlier.

Peter's eyes caught sight of frightened Chinese workers peering over boxes and peeking around desks, then each recoiling at the sight of the black revolver in his hand. Even the security guard, the pudgy old white man who'd shot him, stood twenty yards away, face flushed, wide-eyed, body trembling.

Peter's gaze settled on the butt of his gun an arm's length away, dwarfing his skinny wrist, pinning his fingers to the concrete floor. Only moments before it had been awesome and alive, but now it was just cold dead metal.

He felt the confusion at the heart of his life mushroom into an unexpected form. He didn't know the word for it, but he was certain that his sister would, for Lucy knew all the words.

Peter heard rustling as clerks reached for their cell phones and whispered from a dozen hiding places.

“Help . . . please . . . shooting . . . guns . . . robbers.”

Robbers.

Peter now saw himself through the terrified eyes watching him. He was a robber. He'd been Ah Pang among those he came with, but who was he now that they were gone? And what had he been before?

Lucy would know that, too.

Getting shot wasn't at all what he'd expected. And lying on the concrete floor as it warmed to the temperature of body and blood, he found that dying wasn't what he'd expected either. It was just a pounding heart . . . the sound of his breathing . . . and . . .

G
raham Gage's cell phone rang as he walked into his third-floor office in his converted redbrick warehouse. He lowered the window shade against the early spring sunlight ricocheting off San Francisco Bay and connected the call.

“I need your help with something.”

“Hello to you, too, Jack.”

“It's not a hello-to-you-Jack kind of morning. A client's son was killed during a computer chip robbery in San Jose yesterday.”

“His parents must be devas—”

“It's a lot worse than you think. The kid wasn't the victim, he was the bloody robber.”

International lawyer Jack Burch's reversion to the Australian idioms of his youth told Gage that his friend was floundering. Strategic ambiguities in law and finance had always fascinated and enthralled Burch, and his mastery of both had made him the Fortune 500's choice to navigate the turbulence of international business. But certain kinds of ambiguities and discontinuities in life frustrated him, sometimes paralyzed him. And Gage could
hear in his voice and in his tone and in his clipped speech that this was one of them.

Before Burch could continue, Gage said, “Hold on a second,” and covered the mic.

A wave of nausea first crept, then exploded through Gage's body, leaving his face burning and a metallic taste in his mouth. He eased himself down onto his chair and rested his head in his hands until he felt it all receding.

“Sorry.” Gage picked up a file from his desk and slapped it down loud enough for Burch to hear. “Somebody came into the office to drop something off. And your client is . . .”

“Thomas Sheridan. Manufactures cell-phone components in China for Nokia and Motorola. Manages the plants from Hong Kong. He's a British ex-pat, but his wife is Hong Kongese. He sent her and the kids over here ten years ago when he was finally convinced the Chinese takeover was ending life as he knew it.”

“Instead, life as he knew it ended here yesterday.”

“And for his wife. She's the reason I called. She's seen your name in the Hong Kong papers over the years and wants you to find out what happened.”

“What could she have read that would make her think I do street crime investigations?”

All of Gage's work in China that had been covered in the press had to do with corruption, fraud, intellectual property theft, copyright infringement, and currency manipulation, not robberies and homicides.

“I asked her the same thing. She'd read an article that said you were once a San Francisco police detective. That was good enough for her. And since they pay us a half a million a year in fees, I—”

Gage gasped as the nausea surged again.

“You okay? That didn't sound so good.”

“I was just picking something up off the floor.”

“Yeah . . . right.”

“You think I'd lie to you?”

“Of course you would, but you wouldn't lie to Faith and she inadvertently let on how bad it's gotten.”

“Where'd you find time to turn my wife into an informant?” Gage forced a laugh. “Aren't there mergers that need merging or acquisitions that need acquiring, or maybe joint ventures that need jointing?”

Gage's words sounded hollow, even to himself. An escape or an evasion. And the silence at the other end of the line told him Burch recognized it.

The high squeak of Burch's chair jabbed at Gage's eardrum. He imagined Burch rising to his feet in his financial district office tower, his already ruddy face reddening, the broad muscles across his shoulders tightening.

“It would be a lot simpler if you'd stop answering with questions, and start answering with answers.”

“Whatever it is will pass; everything does.”

“That's still not an answer.”

Gage pictured Burch's clenched jaw, and his fist tightened around his phone. Burch wasn't a courtroom lawyer, but he was a man who expected his questions answered and headed a firm of a hundred attorneys who always answered them.

“Have I ever told you that your stoicism is really annoying?”

“Not this week.”

Burch took in a long breath, then sighed. “I give up.”

“Thanks. What do these people want from me that the police and the FBI can't give them?”

“Sheridan wants the gangster behind the whole operation and doesn't believe law enforcement can reach him. And, get this, he claims to know who he is.”

“How could he know—”

“He didn't want to talk about it on the phone.”

“Sounds a little paranoid.”

“A little, maybe. Wary, for sure, in the way commercial predators are. And when he thinks he needs something, he gets it; and his wife has convinced him he needs you.”

Gage's thirty years, first as a detective who had spent time working in Chinatown, then as a private investigator working in Asia, thumbnailed Sheridan and his wife.

“It sounds to me like a combination of a mother with a cultural suspicion of governmental authority and the grief-driven delusion of a father who thinks he can buy anything.”

“I don't know about her, but you're dead-on right about him, and I'm sorry to put you in the middle of it, especially now.”

“Now.” The word shook Gage for a moment. He wasn't sure what
now
was, for that meant understanding both the past and the future—what had made him sick and what it would do to him.

Now only meant what illness always means: feeling trapped in the present.

“Bring Sheridan by tomorrow and I'll find a way to deal with him.”

“He won't get here for another forty-eight hours. It'll be his wife and daughter. Ten
A.M.
okay?”

“Make it two. I'll be locked into something until then.”

T
he coastal hills a few miles away were still shadowed as Gage lay on a sliding table at the Stanford Hospital radiology clinic waiting to be fed into a roaring metal doughnut whose internal workings would produce hundreds of cross-sectional views of his body.

But he had no reason to believe the scan would be any more revelatory than the tests preceding it in the last three weeks; at least that seemed to be the meaning of his doctor's shrug when he'd ordered it.

Gage thought of Faith sitting in the waiting room and knew she felt the physicians' diagnostic failures as her own. She'd called and e-mailed fellow anthropologists throughout Asia, Africa, and South America where he'd worked during the previous months, describing his symptoms and seeking instances of diseases that might have caused them. She begged her graduate students doing fieldwork overseas to report not just on their research, but on illnesses they observed.

And the possibilities poured in. From African sleeping sickness to West Nile virus to dengue fever to scrub and Queensland
tick typhus, even to plague. But his doctors had excluded each in turn.

A technician approached Gage from behind.

“Ever have an allergic reaction to iodine contrast material?”

“Just the warm, fuzzy feeling everybody gets. A surgeon needed to figure out how to dig some lead out of me without doing more damage.” He smiled up at her. “Don't worry, I was the good guy.”

She smiled back. “I suspected you were.”

She swabbed the inside of his right elbow with alcohol, inserted the IV into his vein, and then swung a metal arm above him. A clear plastic plunger hung from the end and attached to it was a flexible clear tube. She snapped the dangling end of the tube onto a plastic nipple extending from the needle, then raised both his arms, extended them, and brought them to rest behind his head.

“We'll be making three passes, about thirty seconds each,” she said. “You'll need to hold your breath during each one.”

Gage heard her step into the observation booth and close the door.

A male voice emerged godlike out of the silence. “I am now beginning the IV.”

Gage watched the plunger drive down, shooting the iodine into his arm. His body warmed and an edgy chemical taste mixed with the barium he had consumed three-quarters of an hour before the procedure began.

The voice spoke again. “Hold . . . your . . . breath.”

The scanner whirled as the table eased forward, sliding him into the doughnut as far as his chin, then back out to his hips.

“Breathe.”

At the start of the third pass, a wave of nausea shuddered through him. His faced flushed and his fists clenched.

“Hold . . . your . . . breath.” 30 . . . 29 . . . 28 . . . 27 . . . 26 . . . He gritted his teeth and stiffened his body. 25 . . . 24 . . . 23 . . . 22 . . . 21 . . . He could feel a damp warmth under his back as sweat soaked through his blue medical gown pressed against the white sheet covering the table. 20 . . . 19 . . . 18 . . . 17 . . . 16 . . . The wave passed. He stopped counting.

“Breathe.”

“D
ID YOU GET A CHANCE
to talk to the radiologist?” Faith asked as Gage drove them from the hospital toward the tree-lined streets of downtown Palo Alto.

“All I got out of him was a weak smile, but at least he didn't shrug.”

“You almost lost your balance when you got out of bed this morning.” Faith glanced at the Brooks Brothers store as they passed Stanford Shopping Center. “And I looked at your belt last night and saw where you used to buckle it.”

It was Gage's turn to shrug.

“I'm sure we'll have the answer in a few days.”

Faith sighed and looked down at her hands folded in her lap.

“How many times have we told ourselves that?”

Gage looked over. The cloudless May sky allowed the sun's rays to fill the car, highlighting the few strands of gray among the auburn hair that framed Faith's tense face and strained eyes and flowed down to her shoulders.

He laid his hand over hers.

“For all we know, a couple of weeks with the right antibiotics or some foul-tasting, take-on-a-full-stomach syrup and it'll be gone. Maybe today was the last test I'll need.”

Gage pulled the car to the curb near the University Cafe, and a few minutes later they had worked their way between the sidewalk tables and past the brass and cast-iron coffee roaster to the counter.

“Jack telephoned yesterday,” Gage said, after they'd ordered coffee and bagels and sat down.

“How'd that go? The uncertainty of this thing scares the hell out of him.”

They both knew Burch had yet to recover his balance after he was shot as part of a securities fraud cover-up and after the breast cancer that nearly took his wife's life. For Burch, it had been less that these were confrontations with mortality and more that for the first time he felt his world and his life slip from his grip, torn away first by the rude mechanics of a biological process and then by a man with a gun.

“Why'd he decide to face the abyss and call you himself?”

Gage withheld his answer until after an approaching waiter passed by.

“A wealthy client's teenaged son hooked up with a gang and was killed during a robbery.”

Faith looked down, shaking her head, then back up.

“How could a privileged childhood end up like that?”

“I don't know. But I suspect the kid wanted more out of the crime than just money.”

Gage thought of the Navajos he grew up with on the Arizona and Mexican border near Nogales, the older people talking about going to war having been a young man's rite of passage, and he remembered a friend's older brother who'd enlisted in the Marines in 1968 while not even knowing where Vietnam was. For him, the pretenses of the ceremonial dances, the reenactments of others' heroism, hadn't been enough. He believed he needed to fight to feel alive, to feel real in his world. And he'd died trying.

But Gage doubted Sheridan's son's death was about that, about feeling alive and real. Like the other immigrant and cross-cultural children of his generation who populated the Asian gangs, the kid probably had more of life than he could handle.

“What do you think he wanted out of it?”

Gage gazed over at the traffic passing on the street and the tree-shadowed sidewalk. “I don't know, but someone else will have to find that out.” Then back at Faith. “I'm only meeting with the family to make sure they don't destroy themselves in a misguided attempt to discover on their own what that was and who was behind it.”