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Jack Campbell averted his gaze. Patrick O’Kelly shrugged.
David eyed the man from the State Department suspiciously. “What do you want me to do?”
“Go to China…”
“You can stop right there,” David said. “They’ll never let me in. I’ve applied for visas before and—”
O’Kelly cut in. “The Chinese have already issued you an official invitation to come and work with their investigators. You have a plane ticket and a multiple-entry visa—which, since you’ll only be making this single trip, you really don’t need, but what the hell. You’ll be leaving tomorrow.”
“Wait a minute—” snapped Madeleine.
“No,” O’Kelly said. “We can’t wait.”
“I don’t think you know who you’re talking to,” she said tartly.
O’Kelly sat back in his chair and said, “I know exactly who I’m talking to. I hope the U.S. attorney will remember that yours is an appointed position. Everyone in this room works for the government and has pledged that they will support the government. Now it’s time for Stark here to get out from behind his desk and do his country a favor.”
“And what if I say no?” David asked.
O’Kelly considered David with something akin to pity. “You won’t say no. Your sense of justice demands that you find whoever killed those men.”
Two days later—after crossing the international date line and losing a day—David Stark was above Beijing in an airplane packed with businessmen and-women, a group of Tennessee two-step dancers who would perform in the capital, and a museum tour group set on seeing the ancient capitals of Asia. The pilot had just made another of his periodic announcements. If the fog cleared, they would be able to stop circling and land. “If not,” the pilot said, “well, we only have so much fuel. If we don’t see an increase in visibility in the next twenty minutes, we’re going to have to turn around and go back to Tokyo. You’ll spend the night there, and we’ll get you out as soon as we can.” These words were met by tired groans. Another five hours back to Tokyo! That would make this a ten-hour trip to nowhere.
“It happens all the time,” the woman next to David said. These were the first words she’d spoken. She’d spent the last five hours hooked into her computer looking at spreadsheets. “You fly to Tokyo, wait around for an hour or so, get on a new plane, fly up here, and half the time you have to turn around.”
“Why can’t we fly to—I don’t know—Shanghai or someplace?”
“The Chinese won’t let foreign airlines fly domestically. If we went to Shanghai, we’d have to take CAAC or one of the other smaller airlines. Believe me, you don’t want to do that. The only other choice is to take the train. But United won’t do a thing for you, except set you down. You’re on your own to find a seat, and they’re hard to get. And even if you do get a seat, you’re going to spend about twenty-four hours riding with chickens and God knows what else. You’re welcome to it.”
“It shouldn’t be too hard to get out tomorrow. Can’t we just take this plane first thing in the morning?”
The woman laughed. “Hardly! You’d better be ready to fight your way off the plane if we go back to Tokyo. Seats will be on a first-come first-serve basis. We might not get out of there for days.”
“But I’ve got to get to Beijing.”
“So does everyone else.” The woman peered at him through the corner of her eyes. “Your first trip to China?”
David smiled. “It’s that obvious?”
“Well, let’s see. You’ve checked your passport about ten times. You’ve double-checked your immigration and customs forms about as many. You keep looking through your briefcase. I have to guess you’re double-checking things there too.”
“You’d make a good detective.”
“Actually, I’m the vice president of a refrigeration company. We have a factory outside Beijing. I make this trip once a month now—two weeks here, two weeks in L.A.—but when I first started I was like you. Did I have my money in a safe place? Did I dot my i’s and cross my t’s? I didn’t want to have any trouble with the authorities, if you know what I mean.”
“I guess I do.”
“Don’t worry. The Chinese are very modern. They aren’t the big bad Communists we were raised to think they were.”
“And you make this trip by yourself?”
“Of course.”
“Is it safe for a woman to travel alone?”
“About a million times safer than going to Italy,” she responded. “But I take the usual precautions. I have my own driver, whom I’ve used for three years now. I think I’ve bought his loyalty. I carry a lot of cash, but I don’t throw it around. When I’m nervous, which is hardly ever, I use the side entrance to the hotel. I read that tip in a guidebook my first trip out. But I’ll tell you, if a Chinese were foolish enough to assault a foreigner, within about five minutes the police would take him out and put a bullet in his head.”
The woman closed her file, snapped her laptop shut, and turned her full attention on David. By the time the pilot announced that he’d received clearance to land, Beth Madsen had told David what to see, where to go, what to eat. When the flight attendants came through, picking up headsets and encouraging people to stow their belongings, Beth slipped over David’s lap and went to the bathroom. As she edged past him, she regarded him with undisguised interest. He felt a throb begin in his groin. What was he thinking?
