Shadow Harvest (A Sydney Rye Mystery, #7) Read online

  "Okay," I said. "Did you find any computer equipment? We didn't find anything at her apartment. She didn't look like she could afford a tablet, let alone the kind of stuff you found in the closet."

  "No, but I have not done a deep search."

  "My men can do that," Loki said, pulling his phone out.

  "They never found the shooter?"

  Loki shook his head. "No fingerprints, nothing. They were very careful."

  "I want to go check out the roof, see what I can see about alternative exits."

  "Okay," Loki said, "I will come with you."

  After he spoke to someone about searching the apartments we headed back up to the roof. The girl's body was gone, a bloodstain marked where she died. "What happened to her corpse?"

  "It was moved."

  "Got that part."

  "Arrangements have been made."

  "Too vague," I said, pushing hair back from my face as a wind blew it into my eyes.

  "I have made arrangements with the local police. It is best if her death is considered an accident. So that we may proceed with our investigation without interruption."

  "You can do that?"

  "Yes."

  I left it at that and continued along the roof. It was flat, like the rest of the roofs on the block. They were all connected from one end to the other, an aerial grid pattern defined by the streets below. The only new building, taller than the rest, was the one the shooter had fired from. "That building is offices?" I asked.

  "Right."

  "When was it built?"

  "In the last five years I would guess. It is hard to get permits to build in the Bund. It is historically significant. The city wants to maintain its authenticity. At least on this side of the river," he said with a small smile, expressing the irony considering the mass of skyscrapers on the other side of the Huangpu River.

  Walking to the back edge of the roof line, I saw that there were fire escapes on all the buildings. "Merl, Sing and the dogs could have gone down any one of these fire escapes. But why? What were they up to? Why not use the front door?"

  Loki didn't answer me.

  "What about the three assistants?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Sing and Merl are gone, disappeared into the wind. There were also three guys living in that other apartment. What happened to them? They seem to have left in somewhat of a hurry. I mean, sure they were slobs but who leaves their dinner plates just sitting on the coffee table?"

  "Single men."

  I shook my head. "You don't really believe that. Can you check and see if any bodies have turned up?" Loki nodded and pulled out his phone. "Thank you," I said. He nodded again.

  Blue touched his nose to my hip, reminding me he was there. I placed my hand on his head. "What do you think?" I asked. "What did Merl get caught up in?"

  Blue sat down next to me, leaning his weight against my leg. I closed my eyes feeling the sun on my face, a breeze played with my hair, and I tried to clear my mind. There was something here I was missing. Who would want to kill that girl? Did her death mean Merl was dead, too? I didn't think so because there was a part of me that didn't think Merl could die. He was too strong, too smart. The man was infallible. But how could he have been taken, or whatever happened to him?

  Unless her death was a coincidence, which seemed impossible. But what if it had nothing to do with Merl? What if Merl and Sing left for the tai chi center? Maybe this girl was mixed up in something else entirely. I wanted to go to the tai chi center. There was nothing I could do here. I didn't speak the language or understand the politics. I needed to be out looking for Merl and there was one more place to check.

  Loki came back to where I stood. "They are checking for the bodies."

  "I need to go to Yang Shuo. To a tai chi center there. That is where Merl was heading and I need to make sure he didn't make it."

  "Okay, I will escort you."

  "I was hoping you'd say that."

  "Allow me to make arrangements."

  "Can we leave tomorrow?" I asked.

  "It may take a day to arrange it. I will start immediately though."

  "Fine."

  Mitchel was waiting in the kitchen for us, his head popped out the window. "I got it down," he said.

  "Great," I said. Mitchel offered me his hand as I climbed back in the window. "Did it give you any info about what beacons it's put out of commission recently?"

  "Nothing like that but I want to get us back to the apartment so I can set up new beacons for us both. Right now we are off the radar."

  "Okay," I said, a part of me loving that news. It made me want to run off, do something crazy without any of my friends watching. I almost laughed out loud. What would I do?

  "The car is waiting for us," Loki said.

  #

  Back at the Lenox's apartment Mitchel took Blue's collar and my cell phone and went to work in his office. Loki said he had matters to attend to for us to travel to the tai chi center and left.

  I wanted to take a run, to clear my head and get some thinking done but Mitchel begged me to wait until after he'd gotten my tracking device working. I agreed, reluctantly. There was nothing for me to do while Mitchel worked and so I exercised in my room.

  Push-ups, sit ups, side bends, squats, no matter how I made my muscles burn I couldn't clear my mind. Where was Merl? Who would want to capture him or kill him? Not that we didn't have enemies. But I didn't think these enemies were ours or I'd have been shot on that roof. This was something else. Something Merl stumbled into. But what would an aging sword maker, a tai chi instructor, and a tech-savvy young girl be involved in that would get them captured or killed?

  I wandered into Mitchell's office. He looked up at me and raised his brows. "What's up?"

  "You done yet?"

  "Almost, these things are really fried."

  "Really? I need to go for a run."

  Mitchel screwed up his face. "That sounded almost like you were whining."

  I laughed. "Sorry," I said, sitting in the chair opposite him.

  The phone on the desk rang and we looked at each other. "Should we answer it?"

  "I don't know. I mean it could be Loki."

  "Wouldn't he just call your cell?" Mitchel asked.

  The landline stopped ringing, solving our dilemma. Then Mitchel's cell began to vibrate. He answered. "Loki," he said, "sorry about that, we didn't know if we should answer the phone." He listened for a moment. "That's great news. Okay, I'll be here." He hung up the phone. "They found a laptop at Sing’s house. In the studio. They’re bringing it here."

  "Great. Maybe we will get some answers."

  "Let me get back to this," he said.

  I returned to my room and flopped onto the bed, annoyed with my lack of action, with having nothing to do.

  That night I drank three glasses of red wine, which helped me fall into a nice deep sleep that Mitchel woke me from at around 3 am with a knock on my door. Blue leapt off the bed, a warning growl escaping his broad chest. I sat up, the pipe I'd placed under my pillow in my fist before my eyes were fully open. "Sydney," Mitchel called. "Come here, quickly."

  I was wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts but moved to the door, my pipe up. Mitchel was waiting on the other side, his eyes bulged when he saw the weapon. "Oh, no, everything's fine like that. I mean, I was working on the computer. Just come here, you should see this." He looked down at my loose shirt and then quickly back to my face.

  I followed him to the office. Bai's laptop was sitting at the center of his desk, wires lead out of it to an external monitor, Mitchel's laptop and what looked to me like an external hard drive. The screen was black except for the question "Who are you?" in red Helvetica in the top right corner.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "Some kind of security, I think. Or it could be a person."

  "A friend," I said, sitting down in front of the computer. I typed in Joyful Justice.

  "Really?" Mitchel said.

  "If she is
a part of a hacker group they will have heard of us and know that we are not the authorities."

  "Where are you?" came an answer.

  "In Shanghai."

  "How did you get this computer?"

  "Your friend is dead."

  The whole screen went blank.

  "Shit," Mitchel said, leaning over my shoulder and then turning and looking at his own computer. "They wiped it. He was just keeping us talking to wipe it."

  "Call Dan," I said.

  Mitchel picked up his cell and Dan was on the line moments later. Mitchel explained what happened, then put Dan on speaker so I could hear him. "Interesting," Dan said. "What do you think, Sydney?"

  "I have no idea, Dan, this is your department."

  I could picture him, sitting on the edge of his bed, hair ruffled from sleep. Bare chest, long strong arms, elbows resting on his knees. "Mitchel any thoughts?"

  "Obviously she was a hacker."

  "Right. There are a lot of groups in China."

  "Yes," Mitchel agreed.

  "Let me ask around. I'll get back to you." Dan sounded thoughtful, his mind far away.

  "We're leaving the city tomorrow," I said. "Headed to the tai chi center, see if Mo or Merl is there."

  "Okay, I'll get on this now. Give me a couple of hours."

  "Thanks."

  "Of course."

  Mitchel hung up and we looked at each other. "Tell me about the Chinese hacking community," I said.

  Mitchel laughed. "That's a big question."

  "Try to make it simple for me."

  He sighed and closed his eyes for a second thinking. "You've heard of the Great Firewall of China."

  "I know the government censors the internet."

  "Yes, and they can do this because there are only three places that it comes into the country. Everything comes through these checkpoints and is censored right there. The routers automatically check all traffic moving in and out of the country. It's like an online border control. Anything with banned keywords, domains, or IP address are sent back to the user as ‘file not found’ or a message that there is something wrong with the internet rather than specific content is ‘forbidden’ or ‘blocked’. Average users give up on those sites, deciding they are too slow and annoying to deal with."

  "I can understand that," I said, thinking about how quickly I gave up on any site that took more than a few seconds to load.

  "Right," Mitchel said. "So that works for any site that is seen as a threat as a whole but there is also a full-time bureaucracy searching the internet for things the Chinese government doesn't want their citizens to know about and blocking those articles and websites. It's so sophisticated that they can block specific articles on websites like the New York Times that they deem subversive or dangerous."

  "So people think they have access when they don't."

  "Sort of yeah, I mean, I could Google Tiananmen Square right now and we would not be able to find a single reference to the protests and killings that happened there."

  I nodded.

  "The next level is the '50 cent army'," Mitchel continued. "They post pro-government comments on blogs drowning out any dissenting voices."

  "So, what do people do to get around all that?" I asked.

  Mitchel frowned and shrugged one shoulder. "There are a lot of different things. People use code words, have you heard of the grass fed mud horse?"

  "No," I said with a smile.

  "It's all over the Chinese internet. There are comics, videos, you can even get stuffed animals. In English it doesn't sound like anything but if you change the tone in Chinese it means 'fuck your mother'."

  I laughed.

  "There is a famous Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, who took a self-portrait of himself jumping naked into the air, just a stuffed grass fed mud horse covering his crotch. With a shift in tone 'grass fed mud horse covers the middle’ can mean ‘fuck your mother, Communist Party Central Committee.’"

  "Wow," I said, smiling. "Inventive."

  "Yeah, so there is that kind of thing, using a new language that the censors don't know yet and then of course, there is software to get around the censors."

  "Like what?"

  "One group, Falun Gong, they're a spiritual movement I guess you could say. They were banned as a subversive group or some such crap at the end of the ‘90s and have been persecuted in this country ever since. Their leader lives in the US, and they’ve created a pretty brilliant piece of software that allows the user to fake out the censors. They disguise their browsing by rerouting their traffic using proxy servers. The programmers have to constantly switch the servers, which is a hard and painstaking process but works for now."

  "Impressive."

  "Yeah, those guys are pretty awesome. They've hacked into TV satellites and switched the programming."

  "Sounds like a 1980's movie."

  Mitchel laughed. "Yeah, but it's pretty twisted. I mean, Falun Gong is totally peaceful but because the religion became popular the government has been trying to destroy it. It's based in Buddhist principals, from what I understand." Mitchel put up his hands. "I'm really not an expert, I just know about it because of their hacking prowess. But man, being a Falun Gong practitioner is dangerous."

  "What do you mean?"

  "They get locked up, none of that due process stuff necessary. There are stories of torture, organ harvesting, it's sick."

  "Horrible," I said.

  "The thing is there is a big movement of people in China using the internet to try to gain freedoms, not just of speech but from actual bondage. So, the fact that Bai was somehow involved is a great clue, but doesn't get us much closer to a solution. She could also have been involved with an international organization like Anonymous."

  "What is Anonymous?" I asked

  "It's the biggest hacking group. They are kind of like Joyful Justice in that they work together to bring down evil doers."

  "Evil doers," I said. "Yeah."

  Mitchel looked up at me. "Yeah," he said, "What would you call them?"

  "I don't know. Evil-doers just sounds like something out of a fable. Not real life."

  "If only evil was contained in fables."

  "You're right." I walked over to the shelves behind the desk. They were lined with art books, David LaChapelle, Robert Mapplethorpe, Chagall. Big, expensive, beautifully bound. "Tell me more about Anonymous."

  "Their most recent accomplishment is bringing down a pedophilia ring in the UK."

  "Wow," I said, turning back to him. Mitchel was disconnecting the wiped computer.

  "Yeah, pretty awesome. I think Dan was a member, but it's called Anonymous for a reason."

  "So you're not a member?"

  Mitchel looked over his shoulder at me and smiled. "Like I said, it's called Anonymous for a reason."

  "Okay," I laughed. "So you think she might have been a member."

  He shrugged. "No way of knowing. I mean, I'd guess she had the skills considering the level of equipment she had at Sing's place."

  "We never found her cell phone, did we?"

  "No."

  I went and sat in one of the chairs facing the desk. Mitchel's face glowed in the blue light from his computer screens. "That's strange, right?"

  "Unless she wasn't using one. They are ridiculously easy to track." I looked at his mobile phone sitting on the desk. "I take precautions," he said. "Why do you think you get a new phone every couple of weeks? Dan is on top of that shit."

  "Wouldn't this girl be?"

  "Maybe she dumped her last phone and hadn't had time to pick up a new one."

  "Because she hurried over to check us out."

  "What do you mean?" Mitchel asked, looking up at me.

  "You said there was no surveillance equipment in the house."

  "That's right. With her equipment in there it would have been insta-fried."

  "Insta-fried. How big a range?"

  "The whole building, probably into the surrounding buildings by twenty feet give or take
, depending on what the walls are made of."

  "Okay, so maybe she had cameras set up on the block."

  "Sure, that's possible."

  I stood up. "Let's check it out."

  Mitchel nodded. "Okay."

  A Live Lead

  I liked a partner who didn't think it was crazy to head out at three in the morning to check on a hunch. Mitchel was working out just fine.

  The streets were pretty empty. We weren't in the party district. And though I knew that the city had a night life to rival any in the world, in this residential neighborhood it was just us and the rats out for a stroll. There was too much light pollution for any stars. The sky seemed low, like a ceiling, right above the buildings.

  When we turned onto Sing's block I saw a skinny kid up on a ladder fiddling with something on a building five doors down from Sing's. I broke into a sprint. Blue stayed right at my hip but Mitchel couldn't keep up. I heard him stumble after me for a few steps before I was burning down the block. The kid on the ladder heard me coming and after a quick glance in my direction, hustled down, leaping the last few rungs onto the sidewalk. He glanced over his shoulder for just a second before taking off at a full sprint, throwing up the hood on his black sweatshirt as he went around the corner.

  "Blue, go," I commanded. He broke past me, his speed so much greater than mine. As we came around the corner I saw the kid grab onto the ladder of a fire escape and pull himself up. Shit that kid could climb. Blue leapt after him but missed the boy's ankles by mere inches. The kid didn't even glance down, he kept going up the ladder, his speed incredible.

  I took a deep breath as I approached the ladder and leapt, just catching the bottom rung with my right hand. I swung out and caught it with my left before using my arms and the swinging motion I had going to catch the next rung. The boy was climbing onto the roof by the time I had my feet on the ladder.

  Scrambling up after him I reached the roof, poking my head up slowly. I scanned the flat space but didn't see him. Light from the low clouds reflected back the city's glow and swathed the roof in a dull luminescence. The parapets between each building tossed short black shadows.

  Was he hiding in the dark? Or did he already scamper down another fire escape? My breath was even, heartbeat steady, vision saturated with color, the adrenaline of the chase making me calm and ready for a fight. But it didn't look like I was going to get one.