Boxing the Octopus, page 7
San Francisco was the birthplace of Uber, Lyft, and every other ride-sharing service for a reason. The number of taxis per capita was less than one-twentieth of any major city, so rates were astronomical, assuming you could find a cab in the first place. Vintage trollies were undeniably quaint but claustrophobic, the conductors refusing to move until each car was standing room only. And city buses offered all the charm and convenience of a rusted chastity belt on a honeymoon.
Flannel Man exited through the front door of the bus, and Cape slid through the accordion doors in the middle. Fresh air greeted him like an old friend as he stepped onto the grass. They were on the northeast corner of the park, near the intersection of Fulton and Stanyan.
The park wasn’t crowded this time of day, but it wasn’t empty either. People taking a break from work, families with small children strolling or playing on the lawn. Cape let Flannel Man get a healthy lead before following at a distance.
Cape admired the man’s willpower. There was no way Cape could’ve traveled this distance and not consumed every last donut in the bag.
They headed south. On the right was the Conservatory of Flowers, a crystal palace with surrounding gardens that could make Louis XIV jealous.
As they crossed John F. Kennedy Boulevard, a Segway tour made an otherwise placid landscape look surreal. The tourists looked anxious, as if the Segways might become sentient at any moment and veer into oncoming traffic or right off a cliff. Cape dodged one of the stragglers and shook his head in wonder. Not safe for the roads and illegal on the sidewalks, never had so much technology been developed for no discernible purpose.
Flannel Man ignored them and kept walking in no particular hurry. After a sloping patch of lawn, a castle came into view.
Cape knew the park well enough to recognize the Sharon Building from any angle. Built as an elaborate playhouse to accompany the playground, it was almost destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and two fires in the years since. Now it was an art school, but it still resembled the estate of a medieval lord, with heavy stone walls, iron gates, and an octagonal tower.
Flannel Man headed to a small hill overlooking the playground. Locals knew it as Hippie Hill, a notorious gathering place in the sixties when the city had a fleeting cultural relevance beyond its own borders. Cape lingered near the playground as he realized what he was about to witness.
After enduring the bus and nearly getting squashed by a Segway, it seemed terribly anticlimactic.
The man in flannel sat on the hill, opened the bag, and took out a donut. While he chewed, he reached back into the bag and removed a small packet that look like a bag of tea. Tearing along its long edge, he held the packet sideways in his left hand while fishing something from his breast pocket with his right. It looked like a fountain pen, but Cape knew it was an e-cigarette, a vape pen.
Cape watched as the man sprinkled the contents of the packet into a small compartment on the side of the pen, then snapped it closed. Placing the pen between his lips, he took a long drag and closed his eyes.
Watching someone get stoned is about as entertaining as watching a mime with your eyes closed.
Cape was still a long way from finding the missing driver of the armored car, but he had found yet another reason to question his career choice. Flannel Man idly watched the kids on the playground as he inhaled. A boy around ten was on the swings, laughing and yelling as his mother pushed him higher, higher, higher.
Flannel Man’s left leg kicked involuntarily, and he gave it a sharp glance, then shook his foot as if an ant had crawled inside his shoe. He leaned back, both hands behind him on the grass, and took a deep breath like a man breaking the surface of a pool. His leg stopped wiggling. He lay still for a full five minutes, eyes open but unseeing, until his eyelids started to flutter, blinking long and slow, a semaphore signal that he was shutting down. The vape pen fell from his grasp as he closed his eyes.
Cape waited another minute before strolling nonchalantly up the hill, passing within a foot of the sleeping stoner. The man lay unmoving. The sun was out, the hillside was warm, and Flannel Man was fully baked.
Cape plucked the empty packet from the grass and snatched the bag of donuts without breaking stride. A glance inside the bag revealed two more packets, five more donuts, and a small vial about the size of a bottle of eyedrops.
Cape was ten paces away when a sudden pang of guilt made him turn around. He gingerly removed the packets and vial, slipped them into his pants pocket. Then he returned the bag of donuts to its spot alongside the sleeping man. Cape couldn’t deny he was a thief but didn’t want anyone to say he was inconsiderate.
As he walked down the hill past the playground, Cape wondered what he had in his pocket, and why it was worth so much.
21
Some things are priceless because of all the lives they cost.
Sally moved through the crowd like a ghost, completing her second circuit of the pier without bumping into anyone or having to change her course, despite the number of people looking at their phones instead of their feet.
She marveled at the money flowing through people’s fingers, wondering what they would be doing next year with the things they bought today, or if they’d even remember buying them. Her own possessions, not counting the weapons, could fit inside the small trunk she kept at the foot of her bed.
She considered one or two items to be priceless. The rest she could leave behind in a heartbeat if she had to disappear, as she had before.
Cape had possessions, but Sally doubted he knew where half of them were. She almost smiled, always surprised to be working with a man with whom she had nothing in common. A man who didn’t consider this world so strange.
But he was also a man who had never lied to her, which was as foreign a concept as the pier beneath her feet.
The pier was the cultural antithesis of everything she learned growing up—not that she considered her childhood a template for normalcy. Most stores had someone cajoling tourists with take a look, just step inside and enjoy the air conditioning, try a free sample or have your photo taken, step in front of this mirror and see how it looks on you!
As she glided over the wooden planks and pretended to browse the stores, Sally caught snatches of French, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese, both Mandarin and Cantonese. She understood them all, some more fluently than others, but none of the conversations were anything but mundane.
A few shops warranted more attention, less because of their clientele than for their absence of customers. The proprietors seemed disinterested in the endless flow of foot traffic just outside their doors.
Sally found the security personnel most interesting of all. All private, not a beat cop in sight, and most of them in better shape and younger than typical security guards. A few moved as if they’d had training, a subtle set to the shoulders and hips that Sally recognized. She watched one guard make his rounds and decided his training wasn’t very good, his level of awareness marginal, but in a physical encounter he probably knew how to fight.
Taking a last look down the length of the pier, she walked across the Embarcadero and headed south. Before she headed home, Sally wanted to view something truly priceless.
Despite the hills in San Francisco, Sally preferred to travel by foot whenever possible, only took mass transit reluctantly and never drove, so it took her half an hour to reach The Asian Art Museum.
The museum had moved from Golden Gate Park to the former main library near City Hall, a structure dating back to 1917. A hundred years was old by San Francisco standards, but now treasures spanning six thousand years resided inside its walls.
The museum was only moderately crowded. Couples on culture dates, parents with kids, and one middle school field trip.
The Japanese art was on the second floor. Sally took the stairs.
The exhibit was popular. Sally moved around the perimeter of the crowd until she found an opening and angled toward the center of the chamber. On the far side of a long glass case, a tour guide was describing the various artifacts to the schoolchildren, her voice clear and melodic.
“In twelfth-century Japan it was a great honor to be samurai,” said the guide. “But did you know that one of the greatest samurais of all time was a woman?”
Murmurs among the children—skeptical muttering from the boys and a chorus of cheers from the girls.
“It’s true,” said the guide. “Her name was Tomoe Gozen, and during the Genpei War, she was a retainer for the great warlord Yoshinaka.”
“I have a retainer,” said one of the schoolgirls.
“So do I!” said a boy next to her. “My teeth are all crooked.”
“Does it bother you when you sleep?” asked another girl.
“No, not that kind of retainer,” said the guide good-naturedly. “A retainer was a warrior on horseback. Now pay attention, children, because I think you’ll find this fascinating. Before we look inside the case…no, no peeking…look at me, so I can read to you from The Tale of the Heike.”
Sally had seen countless horrors in her life and a few things of real beauty, but the object in the display case took her breath away.
The children quieted and the guide began. ‘“Tomoe was especially beautiful, with long hair and charming features. She was also a remarkably strong archer, and as a swordswoman she was a warrior worth a thousand, ready to confront a demon or a god, mounted or on foot. She handled unbroken horses with superb skill; she rode unscathed down perilous descents. Whenever a battle was imminent, Yoshinaka sent her out as his first captain, equipped with strong armor, an oversized sword, and a mighty bow; and she performed more deeds of valor than any of his other warriors.’”
Inside the case, resting on a simple wooden stand, was a sword.
“Now children, come forward and look at Tomoe’s weapon of choice.”
Sally learned how to judge a blade by the time she was seven and mastered kenjutsu before she was twelve. This was a naginata, a long sword that resembled a spear, the hilt almost as long as the blade. It was the third type of bladed weapon Sally had mastered, after the katana of traditional sword-fighting and the tanto knife for close-quarters defense.
Her instructors in Hong Kong borrowed techniques from every martial art across the centuries for her curriculum. Styles of combat from China, Southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan. She even studied Krav Maga, a hybrid form designed by Israel military to master deadly force in a matter of weeks, not years. Every fighting technique from each culture offered certain advantages, but her Chinese teacher once grudgingly admitted that the Japanese were unmatched in swordsmanship.
Since she was half-Japanese herself, Sally felt a small hint of pride, suitably self-aware to admit that the line between ego and identity thinned over time. This weapon spoke to Sally like an echo from a past life.
The naginata was a cavalry weapon, its long reach a threat to any oncoming horse and devastating if used from the saddle. Sally recalled the unbridled joy of riding a horse the first time. Reflecting on a childhood focused predominantly on the killing arts, she was always surprised by any memory of girlish delight.
The metal had been folded hundreds of times, ripples of black and silver flowing along the edge of the blade. A current in an endless stream.
A sword like this should not be in a glass case.
Sally knew that what the museum guide failed to mention was Tomoe Gozen was the sole survivor of an epic battle. When her clan finally met defeat on the battlefield, the warlord ordered Tomoe to protect her honor as a woman and flee before the enemy could overwhelm their position. She reluctantly complied, but the opposing army’s greatest rider tried to intercept her.
Without breaking stride, wielding the naginata from her saddle, Tomoe decapitated him with a single stroke of the blade.
Paintings of Tomoe invariably show her galloping away, severed head in one hand and long sword in the other. Arguably too gruesome for a class tour of the museum, but when Sally read The Tale of the Heike as a student, it was the first time she had encountered an historical figure with whom she could identify. So Sally knew everything about Tomoe Gozen.
She knew that Tomoe disappeared after that battle, and after the war resurfaced as a nun at a Buddhist shrine. Some historians claimed that during this period, Tomoe opened a school for girls.
Sally tried to leave her past in Hong Kong when she turned away from the Triads, but her connection to history was a tougher cord to cut. A sword like this needed to breathe.
The school tour was wrapping up. Sally stepped around the case to view the sword from the opposite side. The guide gestured for the children to line up behind her, then turned toward Sally and began walking.
Sally froze.
The woman was Chinese and very beautiful, long black hair and lustrous eyes. But it was the way she moved that got Sally’s attention. Like judging a blade, one of the first things Sally learned was how to evaluate a human weapon.
The tour guide didn’t make eye contact with Sally, her attention seemingly on the children. She moved like a dancer, but Sally doubted that she had studied ballet. Torso perfectly balanced, hips flowing from side to side like water in a glass. Her feet landed soundlessly on the marble floor.
It took years to move like that, muscle memory formed by thousands of hours of training. Sally felt like she was looking into a mirror.
The woman walking toward her was a trained killer.
22
“You might be looking at a killer.”
Cape leaned over the microscope and adjusted the focus, but the substance under the lens looked about as dangerous as oregano. “I thought it looked like marijuana.”
“Synthetic marijuana.” Dumont Frazer shook his head like a disapproving headmaster. He wore a meticulous white lab coat over a polo shirt and jeans, his black hair tousled and graying at the edges. Glasses on the bridge of his nose reflected the overhead halogens like a signal mirror. “Calling it marijuana, pot, weed…all misnomers. It’s entirely different, chemically.”
“Looks like rosemary,” said Cape. “Or thyme, I always get those two mixed up.”
“Well, it is called spice on the street,” said Dumont. “Or K2.”
“That, I’ve heard of,” said Cape. “Just never knew what was in it.”
“Neither does anyone else,” said Dumont, gesturing at a row of test tubes on an adjacent counter. The first tube was filled with a reddish liquid, the second was bright orange, and the third was black as oil. Behind them was a gas chromatograph, a squat machine that housed three needles zigzagging across graph paper like a seismograph measuring earthquakes. “These are the three samples you brought me, mixed with the same chemical reagents. Notice the three different results.”
“You’re saying there’s not a lot of quality control.”
“Practically none,” replied Dumont, “but I’m more an engineer than a chemist.”
“Sure you are.” Cape glanced around the lab. A nondescript warehouse on the seedier side of Market Street, it was practically invisible to casual observers, painted to look like the garage for the building next door. But inside it looked like NASA was having an estate sale to raise money for a children’s science museum. Tables were littered with partially assembled electronics, experiments in progress.
An entire corner of the warehouse was filled with remote-controlled vehicles and flying machines of indeterminate purpose, ranging in size from quadcopters over four feet in diameter to minibots as small as a dragonfly.
The last time Cape visited Dumont Frazer’s laboratory, the affable scientist was experimenting with sonic grenades and acoustic lasers that weaponized sound waves. One of those grenades had saved Cape’s life. He was confident that basic chemistry wasn’t beyond Dumont Frazer’s realm of expertise.
“I always think of you as a mad scientist.”
“I never get mad,” said Dumont. “But why come to me with this?”
“SFPD doesn’t handle drug testing at their lab anymore,” said Cape. “Not since several kilos of cocaine went missing, courtesy of one of the lab techs. Just one of many mishaps that hit the press, so now they outsource all drug testing to private labs in San Mateo.”
“And you don’t know who owns or controls the private labs.”
“But I know you,” said Cape.
Dumont smiled. “I did hear they had a cat problem at Hunters Point.”
The SFPD had been storing old case files in a warehouse at the Naval shipyards in Hunters Point, but the building was in disrepair and a pack of feral cats moved in and started peeing all over the evidence. Another black eye on a department whose public face was more bruised than a bare-knuckled boxer.
Cape gestured at the test tubes. “So what are we dealing with?”
“Synthetic cannabinoids are not cannabis leaves,” said Dumont. “It’s not a single plant, it’s just a bunch of chemicals sprayed onto garden variety herbs. That’s why it’s called spice.”
“What kind of chemicals?”
“I did some more reading,” said Dumont. “While I was running my tests.”
“Of course you did.”
“At last count there were over seven hundred different chemicals being used to make synthetic marijuana.”
“Seven hundred?” Cape looked at the scientist in disbelief.
“The high people get from marijuana comes from a chemical called THC,” said Dumont, “but synthetic pot doesn’t contain THC, it’s a concoction of chemicals designed to recreate the same effects in the brain. Only the formula varies from one manufacturer to the next. Some of the mixtures are even technically legal because the DEA can’t keep up with all the variations.”
