The Altman Code

  Fully dressed in the same suit, fresh shirt, and new tie, he selected items from his suitcase—his backpack, a pair of gray slacks, a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, a seersucker sport jacket, canvas running shoes, and a collapsible Panama hat. His black working clothes were already in the backpack. He packed everything else in, too, including his folding attaché case.

  Finally, he put on his dirty-blond wig and adjusted it in the mirror. He was Major Kenneth St. Germain again.

  After a final survey of the room, he left, carrying the suitcase and wearing the backpack. The carpeted corridor was still empty, but behind the doors, televisions had been turned on, and people were moving.

  Jon rode the elevator down to the floor above the lobby and took the stairs the rest of the way. From the doorway, he scanned the lobby east to west, north to south. He saw no police, no one who acted like police, and none of the killers from yesterday. There was no one he recognized from Shanghai. Still, none of his precautions guaranteed no one was waiting.

  He stood out of sight another ten minutes. At last, he crossed to the registration desk. If he left without checking out, the hotel might notify the police, especially since it was only a matter of time until the corpse upstairs was discovered. While he waited for the bill, he asked the bell captain to call a taxi with an English-speaking driver, to take him to the airport.

  The cab was barely out of sight of the hotel when Jon leaned forward from the backseat: “Change of plan. Take me to Eighty-eight Queensway in Central. The Conrad International Hotel.”

  Dazu, China

  A thousand years ago, religious artists carved and painted stone sculptures into the mountains, caves, and grottos that surrounded the rural village of Dazu. Now a metropolis of more than eight hundred thousand, Dazu had terraces of well-maintained rice paddies as well as high-rise buildings, small farmhouses nestled among trees, and mansions surrounded by formal landscapes. The soil and climate of the green, rolling land were favorable for city gardeners and suburban farmers, who grew as many as three crops a year, most still using the methods of their ancestors.

  The prison farm was less than five miles from the giant Sleeping Buddha, carved at Baodingshan. Secluded and isolated, the prison was a sprawl of frame buildings and walkways, locked behind a tall, chain-link fence that had raised platforms at each corner for the armed sentries. The dirt road that led to it was never traveled by tourists or city people. Inmates, who worked in fields and paddies operated by the distant Beijing government, were marched to and from work by armed guards. They had little contact with locals. Light as the confinement and security appeared, China did not coddle those it branded criminals.

  The old man was one of the few inmates excused from the fields and morning march. He was even allowed some privileges, such as the cell—almost a normal room—he shared in the barrack with only one other prisoner. His offense was so long ago that neither the guards nor the farm’s governor remembered what it was. This ignorance left them nothing specific to condemn him for, nothing easy to cause hate or fear, nothing longstanding to punish and feel righteous about. Because of this and his advanced age, they often treated him like a grandfather. He was given treats and a hot plate, books and newspapers, pens and writing paper. All illicit, but known to and ignored by the usually stern governor, a former PLA colonel.

  This made it more disconcerting to the prisoner when very early in the morning, even before breakfast, his Chinese cell mate vanished to be replaced by a younger, non-Chinese man. He had been brought in at dawn, and since then he had been lying on his sleeping pallet. His eyes were usually closed. Occasionally, he stared up at the unpainted barrack ceiling. He said nothing.

  Frowning, the old man went about his activities, refusing to let this abnormality interfere with his routine. He was tall and rangy, although on the thin side. He had a rugged face that was once handsome. Now it was heavily lined, the cheeks sunken, the eyes set in hollows. The eyes were intelligent, so he kept them downcast. It was safer that way.

  That morning, he went to his clerical assignment in the governor’s office as usual, and, when lunchtime arrived, he returned to his cell and opened a can of Western lentil soup, heated it on the hot plate, and sat alone at his plank table to eat.

  The new prisoner, who was perhaps fifty, had apparently not moved from his pallet. His eyes were closed. Still, there was nothing restful about him. He had a tough-looking, muscular body that never seemed completely at rest.

  Suddenly he jumped lightly to his feet and seemed to flow to the door. His face had a gray stubble that matched his iron-gray hair. He opened the door and scanned the barrack, which was empty because most of the inmates ate beside the fields. He closed the door, returned to his pallet, and lay down again as if he had never moved.

  The old man had watched with a kind of envy mixed with admiration and regret, as if he had once been as athletic as that and knew he could never be again.

  “Your son can’t believe you’re alive. He wants to see you.”

  The longtime prisoner dropped his spoon into his soup. The younger man’s voice had been soft and low, yet somehow carried clearly to his ears. The newcomer stared calmly up at the ceiling. His lips had not moved.

  “Wha . . . what?”

  “Keep eating,” the motionless man said. “He wants you to come home.”

  David Thayer remembered his training. He bent to his soup, lifted a spoonful, and spoke with his head down. “Who are you?”

  “An emissary.”

  He sipped. “How do I know that? I’ve been tricked before. They do it every time they want to add to my sentence. They’ll keep me here until I die. Then they can pretend nothing ever happened . . . I never existed.”

  “The last gift you gave him was a stuffed dog with floppy ears named Paddy.”

  Thayer felt tears well up in his eyes. But it had been so long now, and they had lied to him so many times. “The dog had a last name.”

  “Reilly,” the man on the pallet said

  Thayer laid down his dented soup spoon. Rubbed his sleeve across his face. Sat for a moment.

  The man on the floor remained silent.

  Thayer bent his head again, hiding his lips from anyone who might be watching. “How did you get in here? Do you have a name?”

  “Money works miracles. I’m Captain Dennis Chiavelli. Call me Dennis.”

  He forced himself to resume eating. “Would you like some soup?”

  “Soon. Tell me the situation. They’re still not aware of who you are?”

  “How could they be? I didn’t know Marian had remarried. I didn’t even know whether she and Sam were alive. Now I understand she’s dead. Terrible.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Sam’s visit to Beijing last year. I get the newspapers here. I . . .”

  “You read Mandarin?”

  “Washington wouldn’t have sent me if I weren’t fluent.” Thayer smiled thinly. “In nearly sixty years, I’ve become expert. In many of the dialects, too, especially Cantonese.”

  “Sorry, Dr. Thayer,” Captain Chiavelli said.

  “When I read about Sam’s visit, his name jumped out, because Serge Castilla had been my closest friend at State. I knew he’d been helping in the search for me, too. So I did some calculations. President Castilla was exactly the right age, and the paper said his father was Serge and his mother Marian. He had to be my son.”

  Chiavelli gave an almost invisible shake of his head. “No, he didn’t. It could’ve been a coincidence.”

  “What did I have to lose?”

  The Covert-One agent thought about that. “So why did you keep quiet until now? You’ve waited a full year.”

  “There was no chance I’d ever get out, so why embarrass him? And why risk Beijing’s finding out and vanishing me completely?”

  “Then you read about the human-rights treaty.”

  “No. It won’t be announced in the Chinese papers until it’s signed. The Uigher political prisoners told me.” Thay
er pushed the soup bowl away. “At that point, I allowed myself to hope. Maybe there was a chance I’d be overlooked among the crush of releases and accidentally let go.” He stood up and walked to his hot plate.

  Chiavelli watched with half-closed eyes. Despite Thayer’s advanced age—he had to be at least eighty-two, according to Klein—he walked energetically, steady and firm. His posture was erect but relaxed. There was a spring to his step, now, too, as if he had shed years in the fifteen minutes they had been talking. All of this was important.

  Routine had saved Thayer’s sanity. He picked up a chipped enamel kettle, carried it to the scarred sink, filled it, and put it on the hot plate. From a little cupboard, he brought out two chipped cups and a tin canister of black tea. His method of making tea was an unusual mixture of traditional English and traditional Chinese. He poured the boiling water into the earthenware pot, rinsed it, poured it away, then measured in four teaspoons of tea. He immediately poured more boiling water onto it and let it steep less than a minute. The result was a pale, golden-brown liquid. The pungent aroma filled the cell.

  “We drink this without milk or sugar.” He gave Chiavelli a cup.

  The undercover agent sat up and leaned back against the wall, cradling it.

  Thayer sat at the table with his. He sighed. “Now I’m beginning to believe getting out because of the treaty is just the pipe dream of a man at the end of his years. They’ve held me in secret far too long to admit that they’ve held me at all. It’d make their human-rights record look even more despicable.”

  Chiavelli drank. The tea was light-bodied and mild for his Italian-American palate, but it was hot, a welcome improvement to the underheated barrack. “Tell me what happened, Dr. Thayer. Why were you arrested in the first place?”

  Thayer set down his cup and stared into it as if he could see the past. When he looked up, he said, “I was working as a liaison with Chiang Kaishek’s organization. My job supposedly was to bring about some kind of detente between his Nationalists and Mao’s Communists, so I thought it’d help the process along if I personally went to Mao and reasoned with him.” He gave a smile that was half grimace. “How ludicrous. How naive. Of course, what I didn’t see was that my real mission was to keep Chiang in power. I was supposed to make deals, hold talks, and stall until Chiang could destroy Mao and the Communists. Going to Mao was the quixotic notion of an inexperienced intellectual who believed people could talk rationally together even when power, values, cultures, ideas, classes, haves, have-nots, and geopolitical spheres of influence were in conflict.”

  “So you really did it? You actually went to see Mao alone?” He sounded both amazed and horrified.

  Thayer gave a thin smile. “I tried. Never got to him. His army decided I was an agent of the West, or of Chiang, or both. Of course, they arrested me. I would’ve been shot by the soldiers, if Mao’s politicians hadn’t intervened because I had diplomatic status. Over the years, I often wished I had been shot on the spot.”

  “Why did they report you dead and then hold you like the Soviets held Wallenberg?”

  “Raoul Wallenberg? You mean the Soviets did have him?”

  “Denied they did, never released him, and for fifty years continued denying they ever had held him. He died early on, in custody.”

  Thayer seemed to sag. “I expect what happened to me was what happened to him. They couldn’t believe he was nothing more than he appeared. That’s the direct result of paranoia, the kind that happens when anyone who speaks out is ruthlessly suppressed. At the time I was captured, the Communist revolution was sweeping China. There was such chaos . . . endlessly changing commanders, new civilian orders, confounding proclamations, and bureaucrats who had no idea what was going on. I think I must’ve been simply lost in the machinery. By the time Zhongnanhai stabilized, it was too late to send me home without creating an international incident and losing face.” He turned the warm cup between his gnarled fingers. “And here they intend for me to stay. Until I die.”

  “No,” Chiavelli said firmly. “What happened to Wallenberg isn’t going to happen to you. You won’t die in captivity. When the treaty’s signed, China will release all political prisoners. The president will make a point of bringing you to the attention of Niu Jianxing and the rest of the Standing Committee. I’ve heard he’s called the Owl, because he’s a wise man.”

  David Thayer shook his head. “No, Captain Chiavelli. When that treaty is signed by the general secretary and my son, I will have been conveniently ‘lost’ again. If my son pushes too hard and makes an issue at this late date, no one will ever find me. Instead, a hundred old men will appear and claim to have witnessed my death a half century ago. There’ll be assorted proofs. Probably pictures of my grave that is now, alas, deep underwater behind some new dam.” He shrugged, resigned.

  Chiavelli studied him. The Covert-One agent was a former special forces captain who had operated in Somalia and the Sudan. Recently, he was called back into action in the valleys, caves, and mountains of eastern and northern Afghanistan. Now his new assignment was David Thayer. His first question was whether Thayer could be extracted.

  He had surveyed the immediate area and found it encouraging. It was sufficiently rural and remote, if not sparsely populated—nowhere in China, except for Xinjiang, Gansu, and the Mongolias, was sparsely populated. Outside Chongqing, the roads were bad, military installations scattered, and airfields primitive. Fortunately for his assignment, outside Dazu, they were largely nonexistent.

  The camp guards were well armed, but they lacked sharp discipline. Their resistance to a swift, heavily armed, and well-planned raid would likely be minimal. With some help from inside, which he planned to provide, and a certain amount of good luck . . . experienced raiders could be in and out within ten minutes, back in the air within twenty, and more than halfway to the border and safety before significant military force could be assembled.

  The big question now was Thayer’s stamina. So far, Chiavelli liked what he saw. Despite his age, he seemed in decent condition.

  “How’s your general health, Dr. Thayer?”

  “As good as could be expected. The usual aches, pains, discomforts, and annoyances. I’m not going to leap tall buildings or climb Mount Everest, but they keep us in shape here. After all, there are fields to be plowed.”

  “Calisthenics, jogging, walking, working out?”

  “Morning and evening calisthenics and jogging, when the weather’s good. Minimal calisthenics in the barracks, when it isn’t. The governor likes to keep everyone busy when we’re not working. I do clerical work, of course. He doesn’t want us to sit around and plot or get into arguments. Inactivity leads to thinking and restlessness—a dangerous combination in a prisoner.” Thayer hesitated. He sat up straighter. His faded eyes narrowed as he turned to stare at Chiavelli. “You’re thinking about getting me out of here somehow?”

  “There are considerations. Constraints. Not just your health, but what my boss thinks and what the president can and can’t do. You understand?”

  “Yes. That was my life. Politics. Interests. Diplomacy. Those forces are always at work, aren’t they? The same ‘considerations’ that made State keep me ignorant about what we were really doing back in ’forty-eight. That and my naïveté got me into this mess.”

  “The Chinese won’t keep you here much longer, if I have my way. And I think I will.”

  David Thayer nodded and stood. “I have to go to work. They’ll leave you alone for now. Tomorrow, you’ll go to the fields.”

  “So my friendly guards tell me.”

  “What’s your next move?”

  “I make my report.”

  Hong Kong

  In a pricey boutique in the Conrad International Hotel, Jon bought a white Stetson hat, using the credit card for one of his covers—Mr. Ross Sidor from Tucson, Arizona. He put on the hat, checked into the hotel, and overtipped the bellman so he would remember Mr. Ross Sidor. As soon as Jon was alone in his room, he went to work: He cha
nged into the gray slacks and neon-bright Hawaiian shirt from his backpack. Over the shirt and slacks, he put on the suit he had worn yesterday to Donk & LaPierre. It was tight but manageable. Finally, he added the blond wig again and shoved his Beretta into his belt at the small of his back.

  Ready to go, he packed the blue seersucker sport jacket, canvas running shoes, folded Panama hat, and backpack into his black attaché case. He picked it up and left the room.

  He saw no one suspicious in the lobby. Outside on Queensway, he walked deeper into Central, carried along by the mob of pedestrians that seemed to live their entire lives on the streets of the city. He had gone a block when he spotted three of the armed men who had searched for him around the public phone in Kowloon yesterday. As soon as they saw him, they spread out through the traffic and pedestrians. They made no attempt to close in; he made no effort to lose them.

  He also did not try to disguise his destination. If they recognized him as Major Kenneth St. Germain, they might be surprised and, he hoped, confused to see him return to the high-rise that housed Donk & LaPierre.

  When he spotted the building, he shoved through the crowds to the entrance. As he went inside, his three tails took up posts across the street, one talking urgently into a cell phone. Jon smiled to himself.

  Altman Asia occupied the top ten floors of the building. The head of Altman Asia was Ferdinand Aguinaldo, the former president of the Philippines. His office was even higher—the penthouse. Jon took the elevator up.

  The waiting area was decorated with green bamboo, tall carved tables, and high-backed chairs and sofas.

  The Filipina receptionist smiled politely. “May I help you?”

  “Dr. Kenneth St. Germain. I’d like to see Mr. Aguinaldo.”

  “His excellency is not in Hong Kong at this time, sir. May I inquire why you want to see him?”