China Fire, page 1
part #1 of Monaco Grace Series
CHINA FIRE
Copyright ©2013 by Mark Terry
OROX Books 2013
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
Cover art: Judy Bullard, Jaebee Creations
Layout: Natasha Fondren, the eBook Artisans
Also by Mark Terry
Derek Stillwater
The Devil’s Pitchfork
The Serpent’s Kiss
The Fallen
The Valley of Shadows
Dire Straits
The Sins of the Father
Gravedigger
Standalone Novels
Hot Money
Edge
Dirty Deeds
For Kids
Monster Seeker
Monster Seeker 2: Rise of the Dark Seekers
(Ian Michael Terry with Mark Terry)
The Battle For Atlantis
The Fortress of Diamonds
Collections
Deadly By The Dozen
Catfish Guru
Nonfiction
Freelance Writing For A Living
31-1/2 Essentials For Running Your Medical Practice
For my friend Natasha Fondren,
Who convinced me to continue
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
The terrorist ran and CIA Agent Monaco Grace went after him. He let go of the little girl and sprinted down Jalan Petaling, dodging around shoppers in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. He hit a table, flipping it and its multi-colored umbrella with a crash. A couple shoppers screamed. The vendor yelled at him, shaking his fist and cursing.
Monaco stopped by the little girl just long enough to say, “Don’t go away. Stay right here.” The little girl stared blankly at her. Dammit, thought Monaco. She only speaks Malay. She tried again in Cantonese, but still no response.
She turned to chase the terrorist, whose name was Christopher Augustine. Augustine glanced over his shoulder, eyes wide. He crashed into a table containing hundreds of watches. The watch seller yelled at him as Augustine untangled himself from the collapsed table, scrambled to his feet and ran.
Monaco was only a dozen feet behind him. She could take him out now if she wanted to, but the crowd was watching.
It was the little girl, dammit. Why did he have the little girl with him?
Abruptly Monaco melted into a booth selling DVDs. They were pirated copies of American films, probably dubbed with Malaysian actors speaking in Malay or Chinese. The proprietor, a round woman with cheeks like greasy donut holes, jabbered at her in Malay. Monaco answered in Cantonese, saying, “Did you see that idiot? I thought he was insane.”
She pulled up the hood of the sweatshirt she wore beneath her jacket, and strolled away into a market selling vegetables and fruit. Monaco’s birth mother had been Chinese, so Monaco could blend in almost anywhere in Asia with the right attitude and a little makeup. Keeping an eye peeled for Augustine, she thumped a melon, sniffed a pineapple, and picked up a lime, all while studying the crowd.
She had been hunting him for a week, ever since the agency picked up hints he had gone from Indonesia to Malaysia. Despite his rather bookish appearance—he looked like a computer nerd, slim, white shirts and dark slacks, wire-rimmed glasses—Christopher Augustine was a very successful bomb maker for the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah. He had been connected to several bombings throughout Southeast Asia, including one thwarted attempt on the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines.
The biggest complication was that Augustine’s ex-wife was a staffer for a prominent member of the Malaysian Parliament. The Malaysians weren’t exactly protecting Augustine, but they were dragging their heels and being uncooperative.
Alex Bright, Monaco’s boss in the CIA’s Special Operations Division, had slapped a TOP SECRET folder on her desk and said, “You’re going to KL and you’re teaching the fucking Malaysians a thing or two about screwing with us.”
A short, dark-skinned Malaysian in jeans and a T-shirt pointed at the fruit in front of her and said something in Malay. Monaco shook her head. In halting English the Malaysian said, “You want limes? They very good.”
“Sure,” she said. “Two.” He told her the price and she handed over Ringgit coins to pay for it. Slipping sunglasses on, she took off the hood and retrieved a blue baseball cap from her purse, tucking her dark hair under it. She pulled off the lightweight jacket and slung it over her arm, a paper bag containing the limes dangling from her hand.
By the time she had moved to the end of Chinatown, she still hadn’t picked up his trail again.
She doubled back, looking for the little girl. Not far from where Monaco had left her, she found the child sitting on a chair next to an ice cream vendor, sipping Coke from a can, tears streaming down her face.
Safe, it seemed.
Scanning the crowd, she watched for Augustine. Surely he would come back for his daughter?
Perhaps that was just Monaco being optimistic. The man was a Muslim terrorist who spent much of his life murdering innocent people with explosive devices. The last known bomb he had set off in Indonesia had killed eighteen people on a bus, eight of them children.
Monaco stayed in the area, keeping an eye on the eight-year-old girl who seemed to go from frightened and crying to animated and chatty and back again at the speed of light. Fifteen minutes later she spotted Augustine creeping along the line of vendors across the crowded street, trying to approach his daughter.
Monaco slipped from the shadows, mingled into the crowd and came up behind the terrorist.
All his attention was focused on his daughter fifty feet away.
Monaco approached to within five feet. Without hesitation she fired the silenced H&K USP Compact she held under her jacket. Four rounds struck Christopher Augustine in the spine. He pitched forward. A crowd quickly gathered.
Monaco kept moving. She tossed the bag of limes in a trash receptacle. Just one more thing to take care of—the daughter.
Langley, Virginia
Alex Bright leaned back in the uncomfortable chair in front of William Cambry’s desk and waited. Cambry was the Director of Operations and theoretically Bright’s boss.
Cambry closed the file and said, “You seem to think she’s more reliable than she appears to be. Why?”
It wasn’t what Bright had been expecting. He blinked, his eyes itchy, something to do with the new contact lenses he started wearing two days earlier. His hand strayed to his pink silk tie for a moment, before dropping it back to his armrest. The ties amused him, always expensive, always garish. “Grace is an excellent operative. Whatever would make you think she was unreliable?”
Cambry’s eyes widened. Bright thought it was an act. So much of Cambry’s behavior was theater it was hard to tell when anything he did or said was real. “She cleans Augustine in a crowded tourist area, then goes and picks up the man’s daughter, puts her in her car, and drives her to the little girl’s mother’s apartment, picks the lock on the door and leaves her there. That was irresponsible.”
Dryly, Bright said, “In most parts of society that would have been considered very responsible. Are you saying that Grace shouldn’t have left an eight-year-old girl unattended in an apartment?”
“Dammit, Alex. She blew her cover. The Malaysians know we assassinated someone on their soil without even letting them know we were there. They know we’re responsible.”
“That was the point, Bill. We asked for their help, but they weren’t being helpful. They were, probably inadvertently, harboring a terrorist. We took care of business and got rid of JI’s top bomb maker in their backyard. We didn’t want it to look like an accident or natural causes. It had to be a killing. The KL press might call it a mugging, but the JI, the JRP and the Malaysian government know damned well it was an assassination and they know damned well why.”
“You know that’s not what I’m saying.” Cambry turned sideways in his chair, fingers steepled in front of him, apparently looking at the photograph of himself with the President of the United States that hung ostentatiously on the wall next to an American flag. “Now the Malaysians have a description of her, they’re probably tracking how she got in and out of KL.”
“If they have a description of her, it’s given by an eight-year-old. They’ll only know she was a woman. They can only guess that she was the cleaner. They might think she was a helpful stranger who got the address out of the little girl. And we are denying everything. Not that they believe it.”
Cambry stopped giving Bright his profile and spun back to him, finger jabbing at the report on his desk. “Did you read this psych profile?”
Ah, thought Bright. Now we’re getting to it. He nodded. “Of course.”
“No, I mean the after-action psyche profile.”
Bright nodded.
“She has no compunction about killing that man, but she insists she could not, in all conscience, leave that little girl abandoned by her father.”
Bright waited to see if Cambry had more to say on the subject. Apparently not, as silence filled the office.
“Well?” Cambry said. “What do you have to say about that?”
“Part of her job description involves the possibility she will have to kill people, Bill. If she had a lot of problems with it, she wouldn’t be a very good op, would sh
“She jeopardized herself and her mission by going back for the little girl.”
“Yes.”
“What do you have to say about that?”
Bright knew exactly why Grace had done that—because Grace had been abandoned by her father before she was born and abandoned by her mother when she was seven, if you call a drug overdose in a back alley abandonment. And if Cambry had bothered to dig a little deeper into Grace’s personal history, he would have known that.
Bright said, “Grace is one of my best ops and you can just accept that she has some quirks, as do all of my best ops, and stop beating around the bush and tell me what’s on your mind.”
Cambry made a sound deep in the back of his throat that might have been a growl. He leaned over and plucked a file off his maple credenza. It was labeled TOP SECRET. He held it in his hand for a moment.
“I understand that Monaco Grace speaks fluent Chinese.”
“Yes, Cantonese and Mandarin. She is also fluent in Japanese and Korean, as well as a number of other languages. She’s my first choice for ops in Asia.”
Cambry dropped the file in front of Bright. “Just got this in. One of our NOCs disappeared. His name is Peter Lee. I want you to get Grace to Beijing in the next forty-eight hours and try to find out what the hell happened to him.”
Beijing, China
Monaco Grace peered out the window of the KLM jet from Hong Kong as they approached Beijing. It was clouded over, so all she saw was gray mist. She assumed it was rain, although in Beijing it could be smog or smoke.
Within moments the jet landed with a thump and taxied to the terminal. Another glance out the window and she saw it was raining. Everything looked gray, which when asked, was how she would typically describe Beijing, an oddly depressing combination of ancient Chinese culture and Communist lack of imagination. In recent years Beijing had been undergoing a massive building spree, creating something like the equivalent of four Manhattans a year. Much of the ancient Chinese architecture was disappearing. Unfortunately, a lot of the Communist lack of imagination remained.
Sure, Monaco admitted, much of the newer architecture was cutting edge, but all that meant was Beijing was starting to look like Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and hell, New York and London. The new energy of the people and the economy was invigorating, but the China she knew and loved was changing in a hurry.
Customs wasn’t too difficult. As usual, her documentation and cover were excellent. She was Ellen Wu, a representative of U.S. Health Connections, Inc., a medical information firm based in Baltimore that was interested in doing business in China.
She found a red Citroen—most of the taxis in Beijing were painted red—offering 1.6 RMG per kilometer, which was about average, and asked in English to be taken to The Peninsula Beijing. The taxi driver apparently spoke no English, so she shifted over to Cantonese.
He nodded his little gnome head, pulled out and crept along as if he were trying to save several liters of gasoline a day just by driving slow. Monaco sighed and sat back to watch the city approach through the rain-streaked windows. It had been several years since she had been to Beijing. She liked Hong Kong quite a bit, loved the Chinese countryside and Shanghai, and had a real love affair with Tokyo and Seoul. Beijing, however, left her a little cold. She thought it was a Communist holdover.
Either that or the pollution was so bad you had to practically chew the air.
Glancing over her shoulder, she noted a black Volkswagen Santana pacing them. It could be a cheaper taxi. But it was almost a joke that the low-level government workers drove the black VW Santanas. She wondered if she was being followed already. By the time they arrived at the hotel the VW was gone.
The Peninsula Beijing had a distinctly Asian feel on the outside, although it was a major business hotel. On the inside it was nearly indistinguishable from any other high-end hotel on the planet: comfort, the appearance of wealth, discretion, courtesy and plenty of amenities and conveniences. She paid her driver and let the bellhop handle her single suitcase while she carried her laptop and briefcase herself.
After checking into her room, Monaco left to search for an umbrella. She found one in one of the many boutiques located in the hotel, and walked out into the rain.
She wanted to see if she was alone.
There was no one obvious and there really shouldn’t have been. Her cover was impeccable and the Chinese government really couldn’t afford to follow every international businessperson entering the country.
Still, it had been known to happen, so she took precautions.
She walked several blocks in a random fashion. Although there were still pedestrians out on the streets, it was raining hard enough to keep most people inside. Finally sure she wasn’t being followed, she found her way to a restaurant on Qianmen Dong Avenue called Jin Hu Cha Can Ting.
When they offered to put her by a window, she gestured to a table along the wall that would allow her a view of the door and the front window. She automatically took in the potential exits.
“American?” asked the waiter, a tall, stoop-shouldered kid with spiky black hair.
“Yes,” she answered in English.
He gave her a menu printed in Chinese and asked her if she needed help with it. She shook her head, paused, and said, “What is the special of the day?”
The waiter nodded. “I recommend the Beijing Duck, which we call Beijing kao ya.” His English was quite good, though heavily accented.
“Not Peking kao ya?”
He smiled and completed the password exchange. “Not in years. Or perhaps you would prefer gong bao ji ding. But it’s very spicy.”
Monaco, having made initial contact, scanned the menu. “Yes, I think I’ll go with the gong bao ji ding.”
He left to get her food, which was a chicken dish with roasted peanuts and red peppers. While she waited, she watched the crowd, which was sparse, given that it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. She sipped at a cup of green tea, gathering her thoughts.
When her food arrived, it came with a tiny slip of rice paper on which had been neatly printed:
Forbidden City
Gate of Divine Might
4:00
She crumpled the little piece of paper and dropped it into her tea, watching it dissolve.
Monaco stood beneath her umbrella outside The Forbidden City, what had once been the Emperor’s Palace. It was an astonishing complex with 9,999 rooms—or so went the legend—architectural jewels in the middle of Beijing. The rain had decreased to an unpleasant drizzle, but it had not kept the tourists from visiting The Forbidden City. There were hundreds of people wandering around, mostly leaving because the facility closed at 4:30.
She studied Jingshan Park, the Pavilion of Everlasting Spring towering above her, what had once been the highest point in Beijing. Apparently the hill it stood on had been built from the earth removed to dig the moat around the city. She felt slightly exposed, but what she hoped an observer would see was a tourist looking at landmarks. And she did like the Pavilion of Everlasting Spring. It was beautiful.
A red Mercedes taxi pulled up and the back door opened. Right at 4:00. She slipped into the seat, folding her umbrella in after her. The Mercedes pulled out into traffic.
The man in the rear seat was younger than she expected. He smiled. “Ron Estrada,” he said. “You’re—”
“Ellen Wu,” she interrupted.
Estrada finger-combed his dark hair back off his forehead. Clean-shaven, Monaco guessed he was maybe in his forties but looked younger. He gestured to the driver. “He’s one of us. Don’t worry.”
“I always worry.”
“Right. Sure. Anyway, here’s the deal. Peter Lee was a NOC, a non-official cover—”
“I know the acronym.”
“Of course you do. Look, we’re jumpy about this. Lee’s cover was as a representative of AmerAsian Energy Consultants. It allowed him to be in and out of just about anywhere he wanted to go in the country and regularly visit China’s three oil companies.”
“So he’s known there?”
“As his NOC. At the oil companies and all throughout the government agencies that deal with oil. Oil is a big deal here. There are 1.3 billion people in this country and a lot of them are starting to buy cars.”
