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  "He was disillusioned with the rebellion; he thought it would inevitably fail, that many of his people would be killed. He hoped that by revealing it to the world, he could kill the CIA's enthusiasm for it. And save his people."

  "What happened to this rebel?"

  "He was killed in an accident."

  "Did he have a name?"

  Sam sat silently, staring at the man. She had to give him something. She went for one of the few other Shibdese names that she knew. "Dromo, he told me to call him Dromo, but the way he did it, I didn't think it was his real name anyway."

  "And that was enough for you?"

  "He said it was to protect his family back in Shibde, I had no reason not to believe him."

  "What reason did you have to believe any of what he said; could you verify it with another source? Isn't that what you western journalists are supposed to do?"

  "How?" Sam shrugged, "I was hardly about to enter Shibde and try to find someone else to talk to, was I?"

  "I don't know, Sam Blackett, that's what I'm trying to find out."

  Sam remained silent.

  "And how did this Dromo happen to die, what kind of accident?"

  "A fall, he wanted to escape to the west, so we headed into Nepal and he slipped off the edge of a cliff."

  "How convenient." The man paused. "Why don't I believe you, Sam Blackett?"

  Sam shrugged. "Because you have a doubting nature?"

  The man sighed, watching her closely for a long while. "All right, I think that's enough for now."

  Sam felt a presence materialize at her elbow.

  "He will take you back to your room, we'll try again later."

  "Hey," said Sam, standing, "you can't hold me like this, this isn't even about Roger's murder, I want to talk to the embassy."

  "Yes, we can, this is China. Maybe when you come back you'll have some better answers for me, Sam Blackett."

  Sam didn't move, a hand took her elbow. "The story I wrote was intended to stop any CIA action in Shibde by embarrassing them. Why would I reveal a covert action if I was part of the CIA?" The hand tugged at her. "You must be able to see that?"

  "Later." He waved her away.

  Sam gave in to the insistent tugging at her elbow for just long enough to start towards the door.

  "Oh," said the officer.

  Sam turned back.

  "What was the reason you told me you were meeting Ravert?"

  "I didn't, there wasn't one; I just met him in the bar." Then she shook the man off her elbow and walked out of the room ahead of him.

  The view was getting pretty old by the time they came back to get her. Nothing she had seen in several hours of staring at the ornate ceiling had reassured her about her immediate future. The likelihood of the next ceiling being the grey concrete of a prison cell seemed high. The thought did nothing for her appetite, and although they came and offered her food and drink a couple of times, she didn't take anything. So when the policeman finally stood by the open door and waved her through it, she had only been on her feet for a minute when she realized that she was now starving hungry.

  "Welcome back, Sam Blackett," said the unknown policeman, as she entered the same huge, blue room. Sam was watchful as she sat back in the same chair, on the same side of the desk. "So," he started, the cigarette packet tapped three times. "Tell me the story of last night, but this time with everything that you can remember. From the moment you met him in the bar."

  Sam hesitated; she had expected the interrogation on Shibde to continue. So it was with some relief that she told him the story, very careful not to miss anything out. They must have CCTV in the hotel, and this man had had plenty of time to check the recordings. He made no notes, and didn't speak for several seconds after she had finished. The whole thing must have been recorded by some hidden mikes.

  "Were you going to have sex with him?" he said, finally.

  'What? No!"

  "Really?"

  "Yes, really, I was helping him up to his room, he was very drunk."

  There was a long pause, just the sound of the cigarette packet tapping away in the silence. "So your story checks out with everything we already know, which is a lot. I think you are telling the truth, Sam Blackett. Nevertheless, your involvement in this matter is a potential embarrassment to both your country and mine. It's bad enough having an American murdered in one of Shanghai's top hotels, but a married American in the company of a beautiful young woman, who also happens to be a famous journalist..."

  He waved back her interruption. "While I believe you when you say that you weren't going to sleep with him," the sneer was audible, "I have my doubts that the New York Post will take this view. We don't want this kind of publicity. I'm sure his wife won't, and I'm confident that you don't either — so, given your rather shaky story for being here, I think that it would be better for everyone if you left China and went home, don't you? Then we can all pretend that you were never here when this happened, and everyone will be a lot happier."

  Sam said nothing.

  "We will prepare a witness statement for you to sign..."

  "Will I get to see it first?"

  "Don't worry; it will be an accurate transcription of what you have told us, you will have plenty of time to read it and check."

  Sam nodded, once, slowly.

  "Once you have done that, we will take you to your hotel to pick up your bags, and then to the airport. Where would you like to go?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Miss Blackett, I have adequate reason to believe that you have been working here as a journalist, in contravention of your visa. Now you can either take the People's Republic's generous offer to fly you back to anywhere in the US, or you can make me try to prove my case."

  "But what about Roger, and the guy that did it, what if you catch him, don't you need me to recognize him, or something?"

  "You told me that you barely got a look at him, and now we have much better witnesses and CCTV from the ground floor where he exited the stairs into the lobby. We won't need you when we catch him, Sam Blackett. He will meet with the People's Republic's justice, believe me. Now, where would you like to go?"

  Sam thought about the letter in her jeans pocket. "Detroit," she said. "And can I please get a sandwich before I go?"

  Chapter 2

  Sam Blackett jerked awake as the wheels of the Delta Airlines Boeing 777 touched and skidded onto the tarmac of Detroit Metro Airport. For a long, terrifying moment she was back in the corridor of the hotel with the sickening cry and the thud of Roger's body to the floor. She had a white-knuckled grip of the arm rests, and couldn't let go.

  "It's all right, dear, we're down safely," said the elderly gentleman next to her.

  Sam nodded, took a deep breath, but said nothing. The plane wobbled slightly, then steadied and started to slow properly as the brakes came on hard. She felt the seatbelt press lightly against her belly. It took her several long moments to get orientated and to start to relax. She was back in America, she was safe. Escorted through security, immigration and all the way to the gate, the Chinese police had even watched her get on the plane. But they had let her go, and here she was, in Detroit.

  She snapped the lid of her laptop closed. It had shut itself down while she was asleep. She had more or less finished anyway. She'd wanted to record the experience while she could remember it - god knows, it was unlikely to ever be repeated. After the brush with what must have been the Ministry of State Security, or MSS, she had a feeling that she wasn't ever going to be let back into China.

  She stared out of the window into the rain as they taxied to the terminal, and wondered what to do about her travel story. Could she write something with what she'd already seen? Or should she tell them what had happened? Maybe she didn't want the world knowing that she'd been going up to the hotel room of a married man that she had just met in a bar. Who the hell was going to believe that she had just been helping him to his room?

  She sighed, whatever... the problem cou
ld wait. She would go and see poor Roger's wife, give her the letter and see where that went. She glanced at her watch, just after 6pm — thanks to the dateline, this 14th August must be the longest day she'd ever experienced. She had time to get it done this evening, and then she could figure out what to do next.

  Sam endured the ordeal of the arrival, waiting patiently for the doors to open, the first class passengers to leave, and then the slow shuffle off the plane. The queues weren't too bad at immigration, and in less than an hour she was out in the arrivals hall with her backpack. She got three hundred dollars out of the ATM, and then dug her old pre-pay Smartphone out of her bag and put a shiny fresh hundred bucks on it.

  She found Starbucks, bought a latte and sat at a table with no one around. She pulled the letter that Roger Ravert had given her out of her pocket, and checked the address on Google maps. On street view it looked like a regular house; big, smart, well-cared for — but nothing out of the ordinary.

  Next she Googled Roger Ravert, and discovered that he had been the CEO of a company called DeChip, who appeared to specialize in creating custom control processors for manufacturing. So not an arms dealer after all. She felt a little sigh of air escape with her disappointment.

  Roger had been murdered in clinical fashion, by a professional, for no reason that had been readily apparent. In China. There was some sort of story here, and if he'd really been an arms dealer then it could have been another front page lead. Maybe it still was — the only way she was going to find out was by taking the letter to his wife, and talking to her.

  Sam finished the coffee, headed for the car rental desks and was soon on her way in a budget compact. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing, bright shafts of sunlight steamed through the clouds. It was hot and humid, just like Shanghai. It looked like she had about another hour of daylight, so she cranked up the air conditioning and headed west for Ann Arbor on the Detroit Industrial Expressway.

  Roger Ravert's home was in a neat wooded neighborhood close to the University of Michigan and the river. The light was fading by the time she got there. She left the car on the road and walked up the driveway. There were no lights on in the house, which looked cold and uninviting, and in the gathering dark she snagged her coat on a rose bush by the steps to the porch.

  She swore, the jacket was new. She'd bought it after she'd finally escaped the Himalayas for the warmer climate of southern India. She felt a sudden wave of exhaustion wash over her. She had been on the go for more hours than she had the mental capacity to calculate.

  She knocked on the door anyway, waited for about fifteen seconds, knocked again, and then slowly walked back down the driveway. It would have to wait till the morning. She glanced over her shoulder as she reached the car. The house remained dark and silent. It looked different.

  She stared at the house for a long moment. Big, smart, well-cared for; maybe it was just different to the impression that she had got from the Street View image, but that had been in daylight, and taken in the fall. It would look different.

  Nothing moved, nothing changed, and she couldn't pinpoint what was bothering her. A little shudder shook her. It was dark, quiet and Roger had been murdered. Maybe she should talk to the cops before she came back in the morning... except that if she did that, then she wouldn't be the one to hear anything interesting that Madeline had to say.

  She clunked the locks open and got in. She started the car up and drove back to the highway. Only when she was on a busy street did she stop and Google for a hotel on her phone. She found a Holiday Inn, punched the address into the satnav and headed north-east.

  Paul Jobert was earlier than usual. The traffic getting from his home, across the river in DC, to his office in the George Bush Center for Intelligence, in Langley, Virginia had been light. He wasn't particularly happy about it, he didn't have much enthusiasm for the day's tasks and he had been enjoying the audio book of the final Harry Potter novel in the car. He put his jacket on his chair, pulled his laptop from his bag and started it up. He was about to head down the hall for coffee when there was a knock on the door.

  "Uh-huh," said Jobert.

  Mart Wallace poked his head round the door. "Remember that girl who did the Times story on the Shibde operation?"

  Jobert frowned; the Shibde operation had been his idea, and his work. And it had gone belly up with the presumed loss of the two men he had put into play for the job, along with some very, very expensive equipment. The whole thing hadn't done him any favors within the agency, and he was still working on salvaging something from the wreckage.

  "How could I forget her?" he said, finally.

  "She just turned up on the Border Protection computers — landed at Detroit Metro last night."

  Jobert was silent for a long moment. "Anything show up on the surveillance, do we know why she's come home?"

  "Nope, it all happened very suddenly, she was working on a story for the Boston Globe in Shanghai and next thing she's on a plane to Detroit."

  "Family problem...?"

  Wallace smiled, and Jobert realized he had been led towards a big reveal.

  "Nope," said Wallace. "Take a look at this..."

  Paul Jobert only looked at the piece of paper that Wallace placed in front of him for a couple of seconds. "Goddamn," he muttered, looking up, "anyone else know about this?"

  "Nope, I came straight to you."

  "Good, shut this down, I don't want anyone else's fingers on it — you and me will work this, no one else. Find out as much as you can about what happened through all the normal external sources, but don't ask the guys at the Beijing station any questions." He stood and reached for his jacket. He had a bag packed with everything he would need in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. Old habits die hard. "I'm going out to Dulles; I'll take the first commercial flight I can get. Let's keep the paper trail on this one to a minimum. And I need you to find her by the time I get to Detroit. I need to get to her before the cops. Here..." Jobert jotted a number down on his card. "Use this cell; no one's going to pin that back on me."

  "Is it encrypted?" asked Wallace.

  "Yes, but it's a commercial system, it shouldn't raise any flags."

  "Got it, boss," said Wallace, taking the card, and heading out of the door.

  Sam Blackett eyed the hotel's breakfast buffet with enthusiasm. She was starving, and this spread was going to pay the price. She picked up a plate, and started piling on bacon. It wasn't exactly dining at the Shanghai Peninsula, but there was plenty of it. She was adding hash browns to the bacon and eggs when the television above the bar caught her attention. It took her a moment or two to realize why.

  The pictures were grainy and looked like they were from a CCTV camera. She moved closer, still holding her breakfast. And then drew a sharp intake of breath. It was her; the pictures were of her leaving the bar at the Peninsula with Roger. A moment later some text flashed up on the bottom of the screen. She read the words: Chinese Embassy requests arrest and extradition of American citizen over Shanghai murder of Detroit-area resident.

  Sam backed away from the television. She looked around the room, but the only diners were an elderly couple, and three middle-aged men in suits eating alone; none of them were paying any attention. She walked to a booth and sat down. She didn't understand. Why the hell had they let her go if they now thought that she had done it? She glanced back up at the television and got a second shock; China victim's wife slaughtered in brutal attack. She gasped, and for a few moments, couldn't get a breath back in.

  The television images showed Roger Ravert's house in weak morning daylight, with three police cars and an ambulance all parked outside. She stared at the plate of food, her stomach churning, no longer the slightest bit hungry. Someone had killed Roger Ravert in China, and then someone had killed his wife in Michigan. Coincidence? She didn't think so. She didn't much believe in it at the best of times. So if the Chinese believed that she had killed Roger, and had already communicated that to the US authorities, th
en it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize that the local cops would put her in the frame for the death of his wife.

  It looked like someone was trying to set her up, and that same someone had probably just killed Roger and his wife.

  She glanced around the room. No one was watching her, but a couple of the businessmen were now idly watching the television. It wouldn't be long before someone worked it out, or the police tracked the rental through her driver's license. She had put a card deposit down at the hotel last night. And she had been to the house, if anyone had seen her... She remembered the rose bush and the damage to her coat.

  Whoever was trying to set her up was doing a great job. She looked as guilty as all hell from the point of view of a Michigan cop.

  Sam's stomach churned another loop. She felt for Roger Ravert's letter, still in her back pocket. Maybe it would help; maybe there was something in it that might indicate to the police a motive for the two murders. It was the one thing that no one else could possibly know about. She could steam it open with the coffee-maker in her room. She left her breakfast where it was and headed back. She took the stairs three at a time, and trotted down the corridor, already pulling her key from her pocket. Sam slid it into the lock and pushed the door open.

  She knew immediately that something was wrong. She had left her laptop bag on a chair. She always left it on a chair. And now it sat on the floor by the little desk. A cold chill spread up her spine. She could see all this from the open door, but not much more. One other thing she could see through the open door of the bathroom was the mirror, and her peripheral vision picked up a tiny movement of the shower curtain. She slammed the door shut and bolted.

  Sam ran back the way she had come, avoiding the lift again and tumbling down the stairs. Someone had warned whoever was searching her room, and that someone was probably not far away. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs. She could hear unhurried footsteps behind her. To her left was the short corridor to the lobby and reception, beyond that was the restaurant and bar where she had left her uneaten breakfast. There was a man sitting in one of the chairs by the unlit lobby fire, and as she watched, he dropped his newspaper and their eyes met. She saw the recognition. And if he wasn't actually Chinese, he certainly looked it. She turned to her right and ran.