A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [102]
Chapter 22
STEVE POWELL CAUGHT UP with Linda Greer in the hall outside the embassy conference room.
“Did you win today?” she asked amiably.
His hair slick from an after-tennis shower, Powell nodded with an air that said no contest. “The dust was murder out there. Took some top spin off my serve.” He propped his briefcase on one knee and opened it. The yellow cable was on top of a stack of files.
“Here,” Powell said, handing it to Linda. “It arrived this morning from San Francisco.”
Linda read the cable twice and went cold.
“Whatever it means,” Powell said. “I don’t think I ought to mention it at the staff meeting.”
It means Tom Stratton was right, Linda thought.
Powell said, “Some guy with two Ming vases makes it past customs and immigration using David Wang’s passport. Strange. Didn’t the late, great deputy minister tell us that the passport was destroyed?” Powell snapped the briefcase shut. “The question now is, Who was this guy? And how the hell did he get the passport?”
The passport. No, Linda told herself, it can’t be true.
“Maybe the deputy minister swiped it, then turned around and sold it,” Powell theorized, “like he was selling everything else. There’s quite a few Chinese who’d give anything for a U.S. passport. Your old buddy Bin could have found himself a rich customer.”
Powell watched Linda’s expression carefully. She was ashen.
“I guess you’ll have to cable customs,” she said finally. “They’ll want some kind of report.”
“I’ve got to let them know the guy was illegal, and screw the damn vases.”
Linda lowered her voice. “Steve, can you wait on it? Two or three days, tops. I need a little time, a head start.”
“For what?”
Powell could never know, nor could anyone else at the embassy. It would remain her secret because it had been her mistake. Angrily she flashed back to that night at the foreigners’ morgue. She had not recognized the welder who had bent over David Wang’s coffin, nor had she protested when the odd Mr. Hu had declined to open it for the requisite inspection. I am required to see it first, she had said. You were late, he had replied.
Now she knew why Mr. Hu had sealed the coffin so swiftly: it must have been empty. David Wang had been alive. Then.
“Steve, I can’t say much. Maybe when the boss gets back from Singapore. All I can tell you is that this”—Linda waved the cable—“is very serious. Extremely serious. Can I count on you?”
Powell smiled. “‘Course you can. Took customs three days to get us a wire from Frisco … might just take another three days for them to get an answer. Fair is fair.”
Linda squeezed Powell’s arm and whispered a thank-you.
The staff meeting was soporific and Powell droned through the agenda—new guidelines for visa requests, an upcoming visit by an undersecretary of state, still more travel restrictions for American tourists leaving Peking. …
Linda drifted in a rough sea. Stratton was right: she had lost the deputy minister. Not merely lost him, but let him slip away like an eel. He was cunning, but was he the murderer that Stratton claimed? It added up, all right. The mystery coffin at the foreigners’ morgue, the “official” drowning at the Ming reservoir, the hasty Party cremation—and now San Francisco.
The sonofabitch had done it, bought his way out of China with the blood of his own brother.
Now Wang Bin was free. Stratton knew. And he would find out where to look. And when Stratton caught up with Wang Bin it would all explode. There was no avoiding it. My secret, Linda thought, my failure. “One case is all it takes, right?” Stratton had said at that long-ago dinner. Yes, one case was all it took for glory—or for demotion down to some backwater, shuffling papers for the rest of her life. All those years fighting those stupid patronizing male smiles just to get somewhere—and now this. There’d be nothing left to save.
“…and finally,” Powell was saying, “I got a call yesterday from one of our friends in the fourth estate. He wanted another update on our deaths-by-duck,