Torching the Crimson Flag Read online

  As she sat at her office desk, she turned her chair around and gazed through her floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the Yellow Sea. One of four large bodies of water in the world named for their colors, it was magically displaying its golden color – a gift from a recent Gobi Desert sand storm that lay fine grains on the surface of the waves. As she watched the sun setting into the ocean, she began thinking about her upcoming meeting. Most people don’t understand the skin trade. They wonder how a person could sleep at night, knowing that they traffic children around the world. But for the people at the top of the food chain, the children are just currency to the real jackpot: power and influence. She picked up her cigarette and drew a satisfying breath.

  “Mayor Landow just arrived for his appointment with you.”

  Seiko looked up and nodded to her assistant.

  The tall mayor of Honolulu strode into the room with a big smile and offered a short bow. “Miss Chiu! How wonderful. I love your home. It’s remarkable. And look at the view!” he exclaimed, running his hands through his thick blond hair and gazing out her window.

  “Thank you. I’m glad you could come, Mayor Landow. Please, have a seat.”

  The two exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes before Seiko leaned to her right, reached for her desk file drawer, extracted a manila envelope, and placed it on the table. “Mayor, we need a few favors from the city of Honolulu.”

  “What can I do for you, Miss Chiu?”

  “We have some unique containers and need things to go well at the ports.”

  “Of course. No problem. As you know, our harbor handles over eleven million tons of cargo annually.”

  “It’s not about the capabilities. It’s about the oversight. We need it to go away.”

  The mayor squirmed uncomfortably. “I’m not sure we’ll be able to help you with that. Our city’s harbor security is some of the highest in the world. Inspectors crawling over the place like ants. Security cameras … thousands of them. I just don’t see how what you want is possible.”

  Seiko sat for a minute and stared out of her window. “We’ve already brought one container through that was filled with product. The inspectors missed it.”

  “That’s a dangerous game, Miss Chiu. I’m sure we have evidence on our closed-circuit camera network. Everything is hardwired. Impenetrable via wifi.”

  “We bypassed them.”

  Landow pursed his lips. “Can I ask you how?”

  “Sure, but I won’t answer.”

  “Well, if you’ve figured out how to bypass everything, then what do you need me for?”

  “We’re not just talking about sneaking in one container.”

  “You’re not going to sneak in a whole container ship!”

  She laughed. “No. Nothing that daring. Just several containers a week.”

  “And you want there to be no record of them?”

  Seiko nodded, reaching for her pack of cigarettes.

  “I’m not even the Harbor Master. I’m just the Mayor.”

  “From what I understand, you’re good friends with him.”

  “I don’t know about ‘good,’ but we interact professionally.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I wouldn’t be comfortable talking about this with him, honestly. I mean, why don’t you speak with him directly? I can give you his number.”

  “Because I know you.” She tapped her cig on her ashtray to lighten its load. “We’ll give you an account from which you can transfer money to him. He has three daughters in college, and they’ll be having expensive weddings soon. He owes $47,890 in credit card debt, is juggling five car loans for his wife, himself and the girls, has an almost million-dollar house in Kaneohe that he’s trying to keep, although his life savings are almost gone. He’s financially stressed.”

  Landow glared at her. “You know what? Miss Chiu, I’m going to pretend this entire conversation didn’t happen. We’ll go our separate ways. Did you have anything else to talk about today?”

  Seiko lit her next smoke. “Speaking of surveillance, Tom. I have something I’d like you to see,” she answered, sliding the manila envelope on her desk in his direction.

  “What’s this?” Landow asked suspiciously. He leaned forward and picked the envelope off of the desk. When he opened it and pulled out the stack of full-page images, Chiu watched him carefully. All the color left his face. He dry-swallowed. His hands shook, ever so slightly. Eyes narrowed. He went through each page, and then he carefully put the photos back into the envelope. “Where did you get these?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It matters to me!”

  “You should have thought of that before throwing a sex party with children. Did you think that just because you were on a private yacht, you could get away with this?”

  “Who else has copies of these?”

  “Are you kidding? This isn’t the twentieth century, Tom. They’re encrypted and tucked away in the cloud on a secure server. For now. Easy for me to get at. Impossible for you.”

  Landow was silent, simmering with the kind of rage that comes from being deeply embarrassed, frightened, and furious.

  “Anyway. Your choices in sexual preference are not my concern, Tom. You love who you love, right? But, your constituents probably aren’t that sympathetic. They’d label you a predator of the worst kind. I think they’d feel very betrayed if they saw these surface in the press or on CNN. Of course, the F.B.I. would also be … not so understanding. And then also I hear child abusers fare poorly on the inside.”

  “Rot in hell, Seiko.”

  Miss Chiu pressed a button on her desk, and her assistant entered the office, as they’d planned before the meeting started. “Could you bring Mayor Landow a bottled water, please?”

  Chapter Nine

  Michiko Imada and Saara Tuurig opened the door to LaunchPad, expecting several from the team to be there, but Leonard Stone was alone and had just poured himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen.

  “Welcome back, you two!” he said, smiling. “5:30 PM. You’re right on time.” He chuckled, “You were only gone for three days, but it felt a lot longer. How was the U2 concert?”

  “Great,” Michi answered with a nod. “It was amaaaazing. A dream come true for me – I’ve always wanted to see them live. It was even better than I’d hoped it would be.”

  “Yes, it was wonderful,” Saara said, adding, “They performed for two hours straight and sang every song I was hoping they’d sing.”

  “That’s great. I’m glad you had a good time.”

  “They even did some of their older music, like ‘Under a Blood Red Sky.’”

  Dr. Stone understood the allusion. “Grab something to drink, and let’s meet in the conference room.”

  When they’d all sat down, Leonard took ten minutes to debrief them on everything he knew about the case so far. “Clearly, we’re all on a break, but losing Iris could be catastrophic. I’ve asked Trey and his family to head back here. They have almost finished with their vacation in Banff anyway.”

  “What about Boyd?” asked Michi.

  “She’s still visiting her family in Hawaii. I don’t want to pull her all the way back here until we know exactly how things are going.”

  “The Parks?

  “They’re on Prince Edward Island. We could use them. But I don’t want to cut short another honeymoon.” He paused and looked down at his buzzing phone. The notification was for a text from Agent Kurt Middleton-Fox.

  “What about Fox and Ashley?” Saara asked.

  “They’re very close to here, but there’s been a problem.”

  When the hood had been taken off of her head, Dr. Harris was disappointed. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting in that moment, but he didn’t recognize her at all. She had a defiant look of sorts. Dark blonde hair, a gray soft-knit, formfitting tank top, with black yoga pants. He couldn’t make out her eye color. He’d at least hoped that her face would trigger a memory and maybe a clue as to why they’d been t
aken and brought to a fetid pig sty. The door at the far end of the warehouse slammed shut as the men who had delivered her, left.

  “Sit,” Chen ordered.

  She did as she was told, pulling out an empty chair from under the heavy wooden table. When she saw Nathan, her eyes narrowed. They were dark brown. “Is he the translator?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are my tools?”

  “You’ll have them tonight,” Bing answered. “We didn’t want to risk bringing them in the daylight.”

  Harris felt a shiver go down his spine.

  “You know that once I start using them, I’ll know where we’re located.”

  “Yes, we thought of that.”

  “Then why did you blindfold me?”

  “We have our orders.”

  So far, the third Chinese man in the room hadn’t spoken. Nathan wondered who he was. He just watched everything. Every look. Every move.

  Ashley didn’t even glance at Fox. She drove past him, exited the cemetery and paused to check for traffic. There was none, so she pulled out and parked on the shoulder across the street.

  Fox remained in position, and after about thirty seconds, he saw the white Nissan Altima. He grasped a smoke grenade from in his backpack. He’d activate it, slow the car down, then toss a flashbang into the mix before approaching the vehicle and getting them out at gunpoint. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but he knew it would work.

  Something felt wrong. The giant agent couldn’t figure out what it was. He was just about to pop smoke when he noticed there were only two people in the car. At the same time, there was a movement to his left. He heard the crack of a rifle and felt the searing pain of a 1600 yards-per-second slug rip through the surface of his left thigh. He could feel it ricochet off his femur and expand its path of carnage through pieces of tissue, detached by the synergistic effect of bullet fragmentation and the temporary cavitation of his leg muscles. The smell of burning flesh hit Fox’s nose as the hot lead seared his hamstring.

  Fox used his good leg to scramble behind the tree and quick-checked towards where the shot had come from. Another shot. This time the bullet found the brick wall directly behind the agent. He reached around the tree and blindly shot a few rounds towards where he figured the car would be. The last bullet hit the mark. Glass.

  He heard someone’s voice on the other side of the wall from him. “Fox!”

  “Ashley get out of here.”

  “No! Fox!!”

  “NOW!”

  Another rifle shot hit the tree trunk and imbedded in the elmwood.

  Sticky blood began to pour out of his wound, indicating the bullet had damaged an artery. He needed to get pressure on it. Then he saw the blood from out the back of his leg.

  He quick-checked again and saw where the rifleman was. The shooter was about a hundred feet away, also behind an elm tree. Fox tossed a can of smoke about ten feet into the shooter’s direction. In seconds the smoke screen effectively blocked the rifleman’s view. The big agent snuck a look on the other side of the tree that had just saved his life. The car was at a standstill. The driver was staring at him through a web of cracked windshield glass scattered around the neat circle of a bullet hole. The passenger had left the car. Fox couldn’t see where he’d gone. He reached around the tree, lined up his shot, and fired directly into the driver’s head.

  Fox heard Ashley roar off in the Audi. Then he heard the distinct sound of a Samurai 250 CC motorcycle racing towards the action. He fired another shot at the Altima, still not knowing where the passenger was. Then he fired through the smoke. It was getting harder to concentrate. He needed to get something on his wound and started tugging at his belt. He’d tighten it over the bullet’s entrance and exit holes.

  Suddenly four things happened at once. He spotted the passenger through the fog, and his Glock 19 was lined up on Fox. The motorbike’s engine had stopped. Then he heard the rapid firing of an Israeli TAR-21 assault rifle. And saw the passenger’s head explode.

  “Fox!”

  It took him a second to realize who it was. “Michi?”

  “I think we’re all clear.”

  “There’s a shooter at my eleven o’clock.”

  “I got him. How many hostiles were there?”

  “Three.”

  “We’re clear.”

  The smoke had started to dissipate, and Fox could see the shooter lying face down over a gravestone. The Altima was a bloody mess, and the driver was too. Whoever had been the passenger was in the driveway of the cemetery, clearly very dead.

  The blond agent stood up and then fell down. “My leg’s not working very well, Michi,” he confessed, laying on his back.

  Michiko Imada jogged over and knelt down. “The wound could look better,” she stated in her indirect Japanese kind of way. What Fox wasn’t seeing was the bone fragments. She whipped out her cell phone, snapped a picture of it and sent it to Ashley, but as she did, she could already hear the sound of an Audi A5 returning to the scene. Whipping out a knife, she cut Fox’s shirt and ripped it into large bands to compress the wound. Ashley slammed on the brakes and came to a screeching stop, barely avoiding the body of the dead hostile lying in the driveway.

  “Fox!!!” she screamed, sprinting towards him.

  The big agent grimaced and tried to sit up.

  “We need to get him to a hospital right away!”

  Michi nodded.

  “No!” interjected Fox. “Take me to LaunchPad and do it yourself, Ash.”

  Sudden intense emotion welled up on her face, and she wailed, “I can’t! Fox, I can’t!”

  The big agent struggled to sit up, “I’m getting in your car, and you’re going to work on my leg.”

  Ashley was sobbing as the memories of another gunshot fiancé on an operating table flooded through her mind. She knew that a gunshot to the leg wasn’t like in the movies. People don’t just keep running around when they get a 900-mile-an-hour slug splintering their bones. The consequences could be devastating.

  “Fox, please.”

  He was already trying to stand. “Help me!”

  The two women saw that his mind was made up and helped him stand on his one good leg. He hobbled towards the car with their assistance and then braced himself against its body to turn towards his bride-to-be. Forcing his face to look as calm as it could, he spoke softly, “Ashley, you are an award-winning surgeon and my best friend. I don’t want anyone else to do this. Saara is back at LaunchPad and is a talented doctor, too. Now put me in the trunk and take me to your clinic.”

  “I’m not putting you in the trunk!”

  “I’m not going to bleed all over your leather seats.”

  Michi rolled her eyes. “Fox, get in the passenger’s seat now before I shoot your other leg.”

  The giant agent grimaced as pain shot up his spinal cord, almost causing him to buckle. “You win. No trunk.”

  Ashley was still fighting to keep it together. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “Are you going to be able to drive?” Michi asked gently, after Fox was in the car, and his door had been closed.

  “Yes.”

  Imada took Ashley’s arm. “You’ll be fine. I can see that knowing you’re caring for him brings him much peace. Hurry to LaunchPad. I’ll let Saara know you’re coming so she can prep the clinic. Leo will meet you with the wheelchair. I’ll stay here and process this scene. We need photos, fingerprints, phones, and weapons. As soon as I’m done, I’ll meet you at LP.”

  “Okay, Michi. Thank you.”

  Both women suddenly heard the wailing of distant sirens.

  “Go!” Agent Imada said, urgently, noticing that Ashley had stopped sobbing.

  Good! She thought. Her medical side will kick in now, hopefully.

  Chapter Ten

  The Embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington D. C. is not a small building tucked away in a neighborhood. The two giant white structures not so subtly reflect the oppressively utilitarian values of communist-er
a architecture. Lots of concrete and virtually no aesthetic beauty. In the 1980s, the FBI and the NSA spent millions of dollars to secretly tunnel their way under the Russians to spy on them. They got found out when the legendary American traitor, Robert Hanssen, leaked the information to the KGB. The damage he did earned him fifteen consecutive life sentences in the belly of a federal supermax prison near Florence, Colorado.

  David had been on the phone the entire time the trio had been on the road. First, he’d reached out to a contact in the Russian Embassy who owed him a favor. It went nowhere as the lady never picked up her phone and didn’t respond to text messages. Next, he’d called a friend of his who used to be in service to the foreign government, but again, no response. Then updates from the situation with Fox and Ashley started to trickle in. Bruce was making his case for returning to LaunchPad immediately, but Tank “felt” they should stay on task. David tended to side with Lakota native, trusting that his Spidey sense had merit.

  “I don’t think we’ll be able to do much, Bruce,” Leonard’s old friend said. “In a few minutes, he’ll be on Ashley’s operating table, and all we’ll be doing is wringing our hands.”

  “This better be a fruitful trip, that’s all I can say,” Bruce growled. “Did you get a hold of anyone, yet?”

  Just as he spoke, David’s phone rang.

  “Sokolov,” Hirsch muttered, touching the green answer icon. “Hirsch.”

  “David, you have to stop calling everyone.”