Lethal Circuit (Michael Chase 1) Read online

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “You fled the scene.”

  “It was your idea to leave.”

  “To save your ass.”

  “And why would you do that?” Michael asked. “You don’t even know me.”

  Kate took a seat on the drooping cot. “Call it a character flaw,” she said. “You were in trouble, I helped out. All I want in return is an explanation.”

  Michael averted his eyes, glancing around the closet-sized space. “Look, it’s not you personally. I just don’t want to pull anybody else into this.”

  “You don’t think it’s kind of late for that?”

  It was true. She was involved now. Almost as involved as he was. “What do you want to know?”

  “You accused Larry of murdering your father.”

  Michael felt a lump grow in his throat. “Are you sure we’re good here?”

  “For now.”

  “Then here goes.” He dropped his pack, taking a seat on the far end of the drooping mattress. “My dad worked for a big athletic shoe company. The kind with lots of Madison Avenue marketing and product manufactured wherever it was cheapest to do it.”

  “Nike? Adidas?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The point is, he traveled a lot. Growing up, my dad spent a lot of time out of town. He was always there when we needed him, but work kept him away a lot of the time.”

  “Somehow I don’t think two dead guys are about a lack of quality time with dear old dad.”

  Michael rolled his tongue inside his mouth and said, “About six months ago, he didn’t come home at all. The official explanation was an automobile accident west of here in Guanxi province. They say his car plummeted to the bottom of a river gorge. His body was never recovered.” Michael unzipped the top compartment of his backpack. “Larry was the last to see him alive.” Michael removed a letter-sized envelope. “Five days ago I got this in the mail.”

  Opening the envelope, Michael pulled out a paper airline ticket for travel between Seattle and Hong Kong. Across the back of it was a simple message scrawled in a violent hand.

  It read: “LARRY DID IT.”

  Kate examined the envelope. “It’s postmarked Kowloon Central. No return address. You took this to mean that Larry murdered your father?”

  “How would you take it?”

  “Probably like that.” Kate considered the implications. “What do you think now?”

  “Now I don’t know what to think.”

  “So the backpacking bit, the route you were going to take?”

  “In the event that Larry was a dead end,” Michael winced at his choice of words, “I knew my dad was last seen out here. I came to find what happened to him.”

  “So what are you waiting for?”

  Kate reached into her daypack and without another word tossed him Larry’s bloody cell phone. It was an Android smartphone, probably less than a year old, and if you looked past the blood, barely used. After a moment’s hesitation, Michael woke the device from sleep mode. Then he hit play.

  The first thing about the video clip Michael noticed was the room. It had stark concrete walls, almost like a cell. A battered metal door was visible in one corner. An incandescent bulb hung from the ceiling above a gray metal table. To the side of the table was a gray tubular metal chair. Michael’s father stood between the table and chair. He had several days’ growth of gray beard and his wispy hair was greasy, falling haphazardly over his forehead. From the video, he looked to be in his mid-sixties, though Michael knew him to be younger than that. His father’s eyes burnt like hot embers, despite his obvious fatigue. He wore a simple oxford shirt, the collar open. Michael paid special attention to his neck, because even in this medium shot, he recognized the pendant—three small stars offset in a silver ring—that his father wore.

  “What’s he saying?”

  Michael realized that the volume was still turned off on the phone. He turned it up.

  “One, two, four, six, one, three, eight —”

  “Start it from the beginning.”

  Michael replayed the message, this time with the volume on.

  “Eight, five, six —”

  “It’s like he’s reading off the weekly lotto draw.”

  His father finished uttering the digits, sixteen of them, all a number between zero and nine, and the screen went blank. That was it. Michael checked the phone, but there was little else. No outgoing calls, nothing in the address book, no cached web pages, no apps, no games, nothing except a record of a single incoming call.

  “Either Larry’s really unpopular —”

  “Or he purged the phone.”

  Michael shared a glance with Kate and did the most expedient thing in the book. He tapped the redial button. There were the telltale tones of digits being dialed, followed by the sound of a connection being made, followed by nothing at all. Dead air.

  “Who are you?” Michael asked.

  The connection was cut. Michael immediately dialed again, but this time the call wouldn’t go through. He tried for a third time, but it was the same story. Frustrated, he tossed the phone to the bed. Even at this late hour, horns and traffic were audible outside the old building. To say Hong Kong never slept was a cliché. Hong Kong didn’t even slow down to catch its breath.

  Michael watched as Kate picked up the phone. Maybe she thought she could find something else. Something he hadn’t seen. She hit the play icon again, watching his father’s video message one more time. Then, about halfway through, she paused it and hit another key. Then she just stared. As if she had seen something unexpected. Something impossible.

  “What is it?”

  Kate turned the screen toward Michael. There was an information window opened over the still video frame of his father’s gaunt face.

  “The message is dated April 25.”

  “That makes no sense. He didn’t go missing until October.”

  “April 25th of this year.”

  Michael took hold of the phone and looked himself. It was true, the time stamp read 1:36PM HKT, April 25th of the current year.

  “You know what that means?” Kate said.

  Michael just looked at her. He wasn’t a fool. He knew what it meant.

  “As of five days ago, your father was alive.”

  5

  THE FIRST THING Michael’s father taught him was courage. Michael remembered it well. He was just five years old. They had moved to a new town and Michael was scared. He had just gotten used to his old kindergarten and now he had to go to a new one. To make matters worse, today was Halloween. All the kids were to report to school in costume. Michael’s mom and dad knew about Halloween and they made sure that Michael had a costume to wear that morning. But Michael didn’t want to go. All of a sudden his green dinosaur costume seemed really lame. All the other kids were probably princesses or pirates. They would laugh at a dinosaur.

  So Michael’s dad made him a deal. He said Michael didn’t have to go if he didn’t want to. The school would always be there. He could stay home all week if he wanted. But Michael’s dad also reminded him that dinosaurs were an important part of Halloween. Maybe the most important part. Dinosaurs stopped the princesses and pirates from tearing each other to pieces. If Michael didn’t go to school, he might have a fine day playing Play-Doh and watching cartoons, but who would protect the pirates? Michael saw the logic. Somebody had to keep the peace. He attended his first morning at the new kindergarten in full dinosaur regalia. Happily, not a princess or pirate was lost all day.

  AS OF FIVE days ago his father was alive. Kate’s words hit Michael like a hot poker. It wasn’t that Michael hadn’t hoped it, hadn’t dreamed it even, but to have another human being utter those words just made them that much more real. Even if they turned out to be a lie. And it was for this reason that upon hearing Kate say the words, Michael made it his business to get as far away from her as possible. Even if everything changed, he wanted to keep the illusion alive. Besides, she’d already seen the video.
He didn’t owe her anything more than that.

  But getting out of the tiny room without alerting Kate turned out to be more of a task than he’d imagined. She seemed to sleep with one eye open and his first visit to the washroom amounted to her practically showing him the way. Only after a mumbled explanation regarding the flaming curry and three subsequent trips to the can was Michael able to shake the interest of his ever vigilant roommate. On his fourth trip to the washroom, less than half an hour before dawn, Michael retrieved his backpack from the storage locker in the hallway and continued out of Happy Tom’s and into the twilight.

  Michael suspected that he had little time before Kate realized he wasn’t coming back, but his bigger concern was that the police were still looking for him. After all, the debacle at Chungking had taken place less than four hours earlier. They might be winding down their search, but he doubted they’d have completed it. For this reason Michael was pleased to note that the Westrail Station he needed to reach was less than a twenty minute walk away. The mass transit map he’d picked up at Chek Lap Kok clearly indicated he could take the MTR, Hong Kong’s highly efficient subway, to the station, but he knew he’d already be taking a risk riding light rail out of the city. There was no reason to compound the problem by walking into a subway station where the police could well be checking identification.

  As it was, the brisk walk in the pre-dawn light gave Michael the perspective he had been craving. Neon signs faded gently against a gradually lightening sky and before he knew it, Michael had located the Westrail station. He purposely chose not the main concourse which was located in a shopping mall, but a smaller elevated outdoor platform about a five minute walk past. There, after a wait that couldn’t have lasted more than a minute on the already busy platform, the white train whooshed to a stop and he stepped aboard, taking his stainless steel seat.

  Soon, the dense urban jungle of Kowloon proper was behind him, replaced by the lush landscape of Hong Kong’s New Territories. The New Territories were so named because they were the last piece of colonial Hong Kong to be leased to the British. They were also the last stop before China proper and the answers that country held hidden. Michael mulled on the thought as the tin-roofed shanties on green hills flew past. He wanted to believe that his father was alive. He wanted to believe it so badly that it hurt. It was, after all, this secret hope that had driven him to fly across an ocean. But he had also buried his father. He had thrown the last handful of dirt as the empty casket was creakily lowered into the rain soaked ground. To have to reevaluate those fundamental assumptions, to have to truly consider that his father might still be living was a difficult proposal. Not because Michael didn’t want his dad to be alive. But because he didn’t want to go through the pain of losing him all over again.

  Michael also realized, however, that what he wanted was largely irrelevant. He knew that if there was even a chance that his father was out there, he needed his help. And it went without saying that Michael would go to the ends of the Earth to help him, which is why upon hearing his father recite the sixteen digit number, Michael knew exactly what he needed to do.

  Number one was to immediately commit the number to memory. It was something he’d been able to do ever since he’d learned to count. He didn’t know if he had an eidetic memory or not, he’d never been tested, but running the number over in his mind he had recognized what it was. It wasn’t a lottery number, or a telephone number, or even a code. It was much simpler than that. It was a simple GPS waypoint—coordinates that designated a precise latitude and longitude and one look at Kate had told him that she knew exactly what it was as well, however well she might have tried to hide it.

  It wasn’t an accident that his father would send him a message like this. Some of Michael’s fondest childhood memories were of times spent hiking with his father in the back country of the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Range. They’d hike in the mountains for days, sometimes even venturing up to the Coast Range in Canada, always excited about what the new day would hold and always carrying a GPS receiver en route. They’d never needed to rely on it per se, but it was nice to know that absent a map, there would always be a way back.

  Now, a sixteen digit number was telling Michael that there was a way back to his father. According to the Suunto GPS capable watch he wore on his wrist, the coordinates were just over the mainland Chinese border, about fifteen miles east of the city of Shenzhen. That revelation had been enough for Michael to leave Kate behind and forge ahead.

  Michael steeled his nerve as the train crawled toward the Chinese border at Lo Wu station. When the train’s doors finally opened, he slung his backpack over his shoulder and continued onto the platform and down a crowded set of stairs into the bowels of passport control. Despite his well-masked anxiety, neither he nor his passport attracted undo scrutiny, and after a slow but methodical pass through two congested immigration checkpoints, one to leave Hong Kong, and another to enter China proper, he found himself on a bridge, crossing a barbed wire enclosed drainage ditch toward the early morning lights of the city of Shenzhen, Hong Kong’s nearest neighbor and arch rival.

  Michael wasn’t halfway across the pedestrian bridge before the automatic doors on the other side of it opened, revealing a shopping arcade filled with everything China had to offer. Electric dusters competed for space with scooters and robots and gift-boxed chopsticks. As he strode through the arcade, the sheer mass of product threatening to overwhelm his senses, Michael kept his eyes on a second set of deeply tinted automatic doors at the far end of the corridor. Those doors were his goal. The reason he was there. Five paces out, the deeply tinted panes slid smoothly open revealing the largest outdoor square that Michael had ever seen. It was then that it hit him. The border he had just crossed was much more than a simple line on a map. It was a line in the sand. A division between East and West, and as Michael contemplated that fact, he realized that here, alone in this vast square, far from home, the search for his father was about to truly begin. And so, Michael crossed not only his fingers, but the threshold of everything he had ever known, and entered the East.

  6

  LI TUNG DIDN’T like to travel. If you were to ask him why, he would probably say that he was old now and preferred the comforts of home, but the truth was, he had never much liked it. It was a fact he had, out of necessity, gone many places in his youth, but now, in his golden years, his once thick black hair a mottled snow gray, Li preferred to stay close to the quiet home he had created for himself atop Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak. He still had to go down the hill occasionally, if only to let his underlings know that he was still very much in charge, but he rarely ventured farther afield than Kowloon, and never beyond the borders of Hong Kong’s Special Administrative Region. Life was, after all, short and Li intended to employ what few years he had left, the way he liked, at home, in his garden, having the world come to him.

  Today, however, was different. Li was preparing for, of all things, a trip. The very thought of it made him anxious, so anxious in fact that if there had been any other way, he would not have entertained the idea of going. But sometimes life’s circumstances dictated even to powerful men like Li and in this case they dictated that he must leave the comfort of his home. As such, his items of a personal nature already packed by his loyal staff, Li made his way down the marble hallway of his elegant home toward his waiting limousine.

  The car was a stretch S-Class Mercedes, the second of three he kept in his fleet, and much more suitable for a long journey than the damaged vehicle from the evening before. Many months of planning and negotiation had led up to this day, but as Li walked, his attention turned not to the details of what he was about to do, but to the reason he was about to do it — his only son. It was for his boy, now a grown man in his own right, that Li was setting off on this journey today, and it was for his boy that Li would do much more should the situation demand. He hoped that it would not come to that, but if it did, he would be ready. For the present though, Li was pleased to se
e that his car was warm and waiting. He only hoped that the rest of his journey would go as planned.

  7

  SHENZHEN SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE, CHINA

  THE BUS LOOKED normal enough. It was the ride that felt like something out of a sick video game. The madness was apparent even before Michael had stepped aboard. The bus didn’t stop on the busy street, it simply slowed, disgorging its passengers as others ran breathlessly on. But getting on, Michael came to realize, wasn’t the problem. The problem was staying there once he was aboard, because the driver, as near as he could tell, was insane. He drove with one pedal, the accelerator, seemingly believing that the mere presence of his giant battered vehicle was enough to scare anything and everything else out of his way. And in this case everything ran the gamut from three wheel tractor trucks to water buffalo pulling motorless truck cabs to bicycles hauling loads twenty times their size.

  The weirdness wasn’t limited to the traffic. Shenzhen’s downtown core safely behind them, it wasn’t long before Michael saw what appeared to be the Eiffel Tower poking its head out of a field. Moments later they passed under a near life-size replica of the Golden Gate Bridge, before motoring past a pyramid, and then a whole swath of unfinished skyscrapers, soaring skyward, still covered in their flimsy bamboo scaffolding.

  Michael didn’t know if he was passing theme parks or office parks, but whatever the explanation he knew that he had only been to one other place remotely like it in his life, and it wasn’t in China. It was in Nevada, Las Vegas to be precise, and as far as Michael could tell, China’s glittering economic miracle of Shenzhen was like Las Vegas on speed. For a town that had been little more than a fishing village not many years before, it was hard not to marvel at how far the city had come. Where it was going, of course, was anybody’s guess, but Michael had more pressing concerns. The bus was scheduled to pass his father’s waypoint near the end of its route, and eyeing his GPS, Michael knew he was close. He raised his hand and, after some frantic waving, the bus driver cruised to a rolling stop alongside the highway.