White Ghost (7 page)

N
inety minutes later, Gage entered the second-floor conference room next to Sylvia's office where she was laying out Ah Tien's possessions.

Sylvia's hand tracked the rows of items as she described what she found. “Credit cards, address book, business cards in English and Chinese, a letter in Chinese, an invoice from a luggage outlet at Kennedy Airport, house keys, a New York hotel bill, and few pieces of paper with English and Chinese handwriting.”

Gage felt Sylvia inspecting him as he scanned the articles, but she made no comment about the condition of his shirt at the end of their meeting with Lester or why he'd changed into a fresh one.

Sylvia pointed at a business card. “If this is legit, he worked for the LA branch of a company called Great Asia Import and Export. They also have offices in Taipei and Bangkok.” She turned it over. “Interesting thing. He only used his Chinese name, Fong Hai-tien, even on the English side of the card. No Henry or Harry Fong.”

“Which means he probably didn't have any non-Asian customers.”

“But it sure looks like he has lots of Asian ones.” Sylvia reached for the address book. “Lester found this hidden in Ah Tien's sock.”

“That's pretty old-school. Maybe he figured the government would break into his contact list on his phone and didn't want to take the risk.”

“There are a couple of hundred names in here. Most written in Chinese, but some in English and some transliterated from Chinese into English.”

Gage flipped through it. He spotted a name and a Hong Kong address and telephone.

“Some of the numbers are coded. The country code for Hong Kong is 852, not 498.”

Gage paged Alex Z, who walked in a minute later.

“See if you can get the country codes to make sense.” Gage handed him the address book. “Maybe the rest will follow.”

Gage returned to examining Ah Tien's possessions as Alex Z left. Staring at the remnants of the man's life, things of meaning once warmed by the man's body heat and now forever cold, like the man himself, sent a chill through Gage.

“No cell phone?”

“Lester denied even seeing one, even after I told him I'd buy it if it just happened to turn up.” Sylvia gestured toward the papers she'd laid out. “What do you want me to do with these?”

“Scan them and have Alex Z put them on the network, and then run everything over to SFPD.”

“How will I explain where I got it?”

“Say you were doing surveillance in the area on an insider trading case and spotted the stuff. They won't believe you, but there's nothing they can do. If they lean on you, tell them we're working for Burch's firm and what we're doing is privileged. I'll clue Jack in to be ready if they call him.”

“If I was still in homicide and all this turned up now, I'd
be wondering whether Lester stole it and then got scared and dumped it. That means they'll be wanting to talk to Lester again.”

“That's the reason I didn't make him any promises. Call Nancy Kramer if he gets busted. She'll figure out a way to make the case go away or at least kick it down the road until our part in this is done.”

Sylvia turned toward Gage. “You sure you don't want to tell SFPD about the possible Ah Tien–Ah Ming connection?”

Gage shook his head. “They'll race headlong at Ah Ming and he'll bury anything or anyone who could incriminate him. And SFPD is a sieve. We first found out that Ah Ming is Cheung because a babbling cop told the private investigator Sheridan hired. When the time comes, we'll go see Joe Casey. This is better in the FBI's hands.”

The conference room phone beeped. Sylvia answered and put Alex Z on speaker.

“Hey, boss, I got it. It's a plus and minus six system. Plus six on the first number and minus six on the next, then back to plus, and so on. The guy made it too easy. He picked the Chinese lucky number for prosperity. I conferenced Annie Ma in to translate and made a call to Taipei. Bingo. It was the office voice mail of the guy whose name was in the entry.”

Gage stood up to leave as Sylvia disconnected. “It looks like six didn't turn out to be such a lucky number after all.” He looked down at what remained of Ah Tien's life and shook his head. “What a waste.”

D
r. Mitchell Goode, head of the Infectious Diseases Department at Stanford University Hospital, pointed at a CT scan displayed on a monitor in the corner of the examining room. The grayscale image showed twenty cross sections of the lower neck and upper shoulders of Gage's body.

Gage sat with his shirt unbuttoned on the end of the exam table. Faith stood next to him, sharing his view of the screen.

Goode pointed at misshapen globs of tissue nestled among the bony structures of Gage's neck.

“These are enlarged lymph nodes. They should be a quarter of the size they appear here.”

Goode turned from the monitor and pressed his fingers into the depression between Gage's clavicle and neck muscles.

“Take your fingertips and push down like I did and you'll feel a lump. That's one pushing up against the muscle.”

Gage found it as Goode stepped back to the monitor and pointed at the larger of the gray blobs.

“If they'd been bigger or in more accessible places closer to the skin, we'd have noticed them sooner and gone right to the CT scan.”

“What does it mean?”

“Not much in itself. But let me show you a few more images.”

Goode paged through the scans until arriving at one that displayed a slice of Gage's lower lungs and spine. He pointed with his pen at three globs of tissue suspended in Gage's chest cavity.

“You can see a few more enlarged lymph nodes in this area.” Goode gestured toward an elongated mass. “And this is your spleen. Also enlarged.”

Goode looked at Gage, his brows furrowed. “Is your appetite a little depressed lately?”

“Some.”

“A lot,” Faith said.

Goode selected another scan and enlarged it on the monitor.

“This shows your liver and your abdomen. These small bodies are a cluster of enlarged lymph nodes. You won't really be able to make it out, but this area”—Goode circled Gage's mesentery with his pen—“shows some density that is usually associated with inflammation. It may account for the nausea you've had.”

Faith reached around Gage's shoulders and hugged him. “So it's just an infection, just like we thought. And the lymph nodes are just reacting to it.”

Gage turned his gaze from the scan to Dr. Goode. “Is it the dog wagging its tail, or the tail wagging the dog?”

Goode shrugged. “I don't know.”

“What?” Faith dropped her arm from Gage's shoulders and bent down toward the monitor.

“What he means is that he doesn't know which is the cause and which is the effect.”

Faith peered at the image and ran her index finger over the light gray lymph nodes and the darker area of inflammation as though she could trace the link between cause and effect.

“We'll need to do a biopsy to find out,” Goode said.

Faith turned back. “Cancer? You think it's cancer?”

“No, not necessarily.”

“But that's what biopsies are for.”

“They can also exclude it and reveal other possibilities, other diseases, even other infections.”

“When can we do it?” Gage asked.

“Given your symptoms, I think the sooner the better. Let me make a call.”

Goode pulled the door closed behind him as he left the room.

Gage slipped down from the exam table, buttoned his shirt, and stepped over next to Faith still standing in front of the monitor.

“What do you think?” Faith asked.

Gage pointed at the inflammation, then at a lymph node. “I don't think this tail is wagging that dog.”

Goode returned a few minutes later.

“I just spoke to one of our head and neck surgeons. He suggested the safest approach is to go after the ones below your collarbone. I told him you'd stop by his office after you left here.”

“No problem. If he's going to have a knife at my neck, I think I'd like to size him up.”

After Goode left, Gage and Faith walked over to the Ear, Nose, and Throat Department, where Gage identified himself to the receptionist.

A half hour later, a nurse escorted them into Dr. Michael Norman's office. He directed them to sit down, then leaned back against the edge of his desk, facing them.

“I know this may appear to be relatively minor surgery,” Norman said, “but there are some risks.”

Faith placed her hand on top of Gage's.

“The main one is damage to the accessory nerve, causing numbness and a reduction in your range of motion.”

Norman turned his monitor toward them. He pointed to the target lymph nodes.

“The ones we're going for are tucked in right here.” Norman placed the tip of a pen on the two overlapping gray spheres on the right side of the cross section of Gage's neck.

“What about a needle biopsy?” Faith asked. “Like for breast cancer.”

“We'd have no guarantee we'd capture enough cells for genetic analysis, which is key to choosing the right treatment. We really have to go in.”

“Why nerve damage?” Gage asked.

“I'll have to cut through a lot of tissue, move some muscle. It's a critical spot in your body. Neck, shoulders, and arm all link up.”

“Aren't there others you could go after?” Faith asked.

“They'd require major surgery and are either near Graham's spine or dangerously close to some major organs, maybe even involved with them.”

“When do you want to do it?” Gage asked.

“In the next day or two. I'll have my scheduling nurse call you this afternoon. The operating rooms are heavily booked, but we'll squeeze you in. I don't want this thing lingering.”

S
ylvia, Alex Z, and Annie Ma, were waiting in the conference room when Gage arrived after dropping Faith off at her office on the Berkeley campus. Alex Z slid a spreadsheet across to Gage as he sat down.

“Ah Tien had coded numbers for two inside lines at East Wind,” Alex Z said. “Alan Lim confirmed they belonged to Cheung and Lew. They have been the same all the years since Lim started handling their shipments. There wasn't a cell-phone number for Ah Tien, but there was for Lew, and there were both coded and uncoded numbers for import and export companies and for other customs brokers and freight forwarders.”

Alex Z reached out toward Gage and pointed at an entry on the list.

“The most interesting one at least as far as microchips are concerned is a coded number for a company named ChinaCom in Shanghai.”

“It's a computer and electronics manufacturer in China,” Annie said, “for the domestic market.”

“Sure makes Ah Tien look like a key guy in the chip operation,” Sylvia said. “Steal them here, use local freight forwarders, and smuggle them to ChinaCom.”

Alex Z displayed a map of northern China on a monitor hanging on a far wall.

Gage's gaze fell first on Shanghai and held fast. A memory came to him of a visit he made to a Chinese herbalist twenty-five years earlier, looking for a flu remedy before Western medicine had entered the Chinese market. A bespectacled man had collected leaves, twigs, and powders and wrapped them in newspaper. Gage took them to the hotel kitchen where a cook boiled them. Gage first had winced at the acrid odor, then gulped it down, hoping it wouldn't roar back up. As he stared at the map now, he wondered what those herbs, or others like them, might do for whatever his biopsy would find.

“Graham?”

Sylvia's voice brought him back to the present.

Gage blinked, then looked up. “Sorry. I was just trying to figure this out.” He pointed at the monitor. “The most direct route to ChinaCom would be to smuggle the chips in through the Pudong container port across the river from Shanghai.”

He thought back over the material Sylvia collected from Lester.

“Didn't Ah Tien have an invoice from a luggage store at Kennedy Airport?”

“For a briefcase.”

“Maybe he carried back some paperwork inside. It could be in his house. But we'll need his family's cooperation in order to get it.”

“What if they're involved in this thing, too?” Alex Z said.

“I don't think they are.” Sylvia slid a page across the conference table toward Gage. “This is Annie's translation of a letter Ah Tien's brother wrote to him last—”

“An actual letter?” Gage asked. “Not an e-mail or text?”

“Ah Tien really appears to be a low-tech guy. Old-school in this just as he was with his address book.”

“It makes me think even if we find his phone, there won't be much stored on it.”

“The kid's name is Winston. There must be about a fourteen-year age gap between them. He's an accounting major at UCLA. It's mostly adolescent complaints about their parents and about Ah Tien, too, for always taking their side.”

“The handwriting is a little juvenile,” Annie said. “Winston probably learned how to write Chinese characters in an afternoon school over here. Ah Tien's writing is proficient enough that he might've learned in China.”

Gage read over the letter. “It looks like they grew up in different worlds. Winston is making fun of Ah Tien for letting their parents choose his wife.” He smiled. “There's a line in here about them building a bridge to the thirteenth century and Ah Tien falling through it.” He looked at Sylvia. “I don't see this kind of kid being involved in his brother's crimes. See if he's willing to talk to us.”

Sylvia and Alex Z remained in the conference room after Gage and Annie left.

“Did he look all right to you?” Sylvia asked.

“A little tired, I guess. Maybe a little distracted. But when he's really into something, he sometimes shuts out the world for a minute or two until he gets what he's looking for fixed in his mind.”

“I think it's more than that. He looks gray. And I know he's lost weight. In the few months I've been here I haven't gotten to know him well enough to ask him about it.”

“It isn't a matter of knowing him well enough. He's not the kind of guy you ask personal things. And he's not going to tell you anything about himself unless it affects your work. If it doesn't, you'll never know about it.” Alex Z shuddered. “Once he called me from Ukraine to check on something and didn't even mention that he'd been stabbed in the back an hour earlier.”