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Why would a powerful Beijing mobster with connections to Chinese Intelligence want to target my detective agency?
CHAPTER 62
WE LEFT GAVIN and Daisy to deal with the mess Liu Bao had made of their lives and took the elevator down from the apartment.
Daisy had been searching for easy money after college, and Liu, seeing an opportunity in a beautiful, intelligent journalism major, had taken a long-term bet she would be useful. I’d encountered this sort of strategic planning before, in Moscow, but few people could countenance the thought process involved in formulating espionage operations on a ten- or twenty-year time scale. Like the old urban myth of the frog growing accustomed to being boiled in a pot, by the time Daisy realized there was something sinister about Liu Bao’s intentions, she was in too deep and had been sufficiently compromised for him to have leverage on her. Now Liu had started the same process with Gavin Hudson, finding something he desired—in this case Daisy—andusing her to compromise him. Thankfully, we’d exposed the plan at an early stage and Gavin was unlikely to suffer any long-term adverse effects on his career.
Daisy was a different matter. The State Department might decide to prosecute, or they could flip her and run her as an asset to get intel from inside Liu Bao’s organization. Either way, it was clear by the time we left that her relationship with Gavin was over.
“I still don’t understand why Liu would target us,” I said as the elevator took us down to the ground floor. “We’ve never crossed paths with him before, right?”
“Never,” Zhang Daiyu agreed.
“Who can be sure though?” Hua added. “He has interests everywhere. He’s brokered arms deals in Eastern Europe and Africa, financed mining activities in Asia and Australia, and has technology investments in North America. He has interests in energy production and mining in South America. A different branch of Private might have crossed his path and not even known it.”
Hua was right, but this felt too targeted to be retaliation for something that hadn’t even registered on our radar.
“I think we need to go back to the beginning,” I said. “I want to talk to David Zhou again. Do you think you can arrange it?”
Zhang Daiyu exhaled sharply.
“Maybe you don’t know how difficult it is to get into Qincheng,” she replied.
“Maybe I don’t,” I said. “But I do know how capable you are, so if I ask the impossible it’s because I know you can do it.”
Hua said something I did not understand and she smiled.
“He says your American football coach psychology is very effective. In the old days you would have got a peasant to try and steal pearls from under the emperor’s pillow.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“It’s not a compliment,” Hua responded flatly. “Crimes against the emperor were punishable by death. I was suggesting to Zhang Daiyu that you are dangerous.”
I didn’t like what he was implying but had to admire his honesty.
The doors opened. We stepped out into the lobby.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Zhang Daiyu said. “The emperor’s pearls had better be worth the risk.”
“I hope so,” I replied. “Now we have new information to trade and understand more of what’s going on, I hope we can convince Zhou to tell us the real reason he’s been sent to prison.”
CHAPTER 63
HUA RETURNED TO his surveillance team, and Zhang Daiyu and I spent a tense day at the workers’ hostel on Changcui Road. I was meant to be reviewing the files Hua had put together on Liu, but in truth passed the hours waiting for Zhang Daiyu’s phone to ring and trying to glean nuggets of information from her strained conversations.
Her uncle had said her request to get into Qincheng Prison once more was impossible to arrange, but Zhang Daiyu didn’t give up and enlisted the help of her aunt, his wife, to convince Ma Yuhang that a meeting with David Zhou was essential for his niece. It became a family effort. There were calls from Zhang Daiyu to uncle and aunt, then between husband and wife, until finally, shortly before lunch, Ma Yuhang conceded he would try to get us in again.
The passing hours turned afternoon into evening, and it was a little before 6 p.m. when he finally rang and Zhang Daiyu listened to a few terse sentences from him. She replied gratefully and hung up.
“Seven-thirty p.m. exactly,” she said to me. “That’s when we have to be at the gate.”
Time seemed to slow during the sixty minutes before we had to leave, but eventually we were in a taxi heading for Qincheng. We presented ourselves at the same heavy door we’d used on our first visit, but this time our experience was different.
At 7:30 p.m exactly Ma Yuhang opened the door to us in person and furtively ushered us inside. He said something to Zhang Daiyu, who translated to me, “Shift change. We need to be quick. Like before.”
I glanced into the operations room to see one prison officer behind the thick bullet-proof glass. He was facing in the other direction, studying an information poster pinned to a wall, and I got the impression he was deliberately looking the other way as Ma Yuhang led us inside. We bypassed the X-ray machine and metal detector, both of which were unmanned.
Her uncle spoke to Zhang Daiyu in hurried tones that bordered on hostile at times. We moved further into the prison, heading along the same corridor we’d walked before. Ma Yuhang used his key card to open the heavy security doors and within minutes we were outside the interview room where we’d first encountered David Zhou.
