The China Dogs Read online

  He smiles at her cheek as he clicks off the message and gets in his Dodge. The girl’s got edge. Something unusual and sparky about her. Gutsy too. He knows his unusual looks often catch the eye of many pretty women, but things generally end badly. Once the physical novelty of bedding an albino has worn off and they’ve discovered his personality is even more complex than his appearance, they tend to run for the hills.

  Ghost puts her out of his mind and thinks again of the dog on the beach. Did it really need five bullets to stop it? It was certainly a muscular slab of canine. But five rounds?

  His cell phone buzzes. It’s a call from his office. He picks it up on a Bluetooth relay. “Walton.”

  “Lieutenant, it’s Annie Swanson, can you speak?”

  “Sure, Annie, fire away.”

  “Just thought you might like to know that the FBI is all over your dead dog case.”

  “The Feds are interested in a dog death?”

  “That’s right. Admin fielded a call to me from the office of the National Intelligence Agency, they wanted everything we had on the death.”

  “The NIA is not the FBI, Annie—it’s part of the CIA.”

  “Okay, my bad. But why would the CIA want to know about a dog attack?”

  “Good question. Is there a name and number to call?”

  “Yeah—a Gwendolyn Harries left her direct line. You want me to read the number or put you through?”

  “Put me through. Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “You’re welcome. I’m dialing now. Sorry for that mix-up thing with the FBI, I feel dumb now.”

  “Don’t. They’re both cut from the same cloth.”

  The line is filled with bleeps, then a distracted and old-­sounding female voice answers: “Gwen Harries.”

  “Gwen, this is Lieutenant Walton from the Miami police. You wanted to speak to me about the fatal dog attack.”

  “I did, thanks for calling back.” She searches her desk for the details she took down earlier. “Seventeen-year-old girl, right? Bitten to death on some beach?”

  “Schoolgirl named Kathy Morgan. Hey, can I start off by asking why the NIA is interested in this?”

  She sees no harm in telling him. “NIA isn’t. Director Jackson is. I think it’s a personal thing. He’s with the President as we speak. As you might have read, the Moltons got a new dog some months back, so I suspect that’s what’s sparked the interest.” She finds her notes. “Here we go. What was the breed of dog that carried out the attack? Your office didn’t seem to know.”

  “Vet wasn’t sure. She thought it was a cross. Maybe a Staff, pit bull or small mastiff.”

  “You got any photographs you can send?”

  “I can call the vet and get some to you. Do you also want the PM reports on the dog and victim when they’re in?”

  She thinks on it for a minute. “May as well. I’ve got your electronic mail details on my screen. I’m sending you mine right now, so you can zip it to me. Would be good sooner than later.”

  “You’ll have it sooner.”

  The line goes dead.

  Then the phone rings again.

  Ghost clicks the Bluetooth and assumes the officious NIA woman got cut off. “You’ll have to give me twenty minutes; I’m still in backed-up traffic.”

  There’s an awkward silence.

  Then Zoe speaks. “I’m keen to see you, Lieutenant, but twenty minutes is a bit soon.”

  “Shit. I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

  “Nope. Still the same person you left in the café and who left you a message earlier. So how are you fixed tonight?”

  “I’d love to meet up. Sorry I didn’t get around to returning your call. You still at your friend’s place?”

  “One sixty-one Huffington, just off the bottom of Coral Way.”

  “Is there anything you don’t eat?”

  “Humble pie and bullshit. Aside from that, no.”

  “Then be ready for eight.”

  “Where we going?”

  “That’s a surprise.”

  “I don’t do surprises. I end up wearing the wrong clothes in the wrong places. Where we going?”

  “Then dress smart. Smart is always good.” He pulls into the police station parking lot and hangs up. His mind is still on the call from the NIA and the crap about the President getting a new dog.

  19

  Coral Way, Miami

  Zoe is left staring at the dead phone—and at a real problem. She has nothing to wear but what she’s dressed in. Plus maybe whatever she can borrow.

  “Jude!” She shouts through to the bathroom where her friend is sitting behind a locked door. “You got anything super smart in your closet that I can borrow?”

  “Look for yourself, though on my wages don’t expect Chanel.”

  Zoe wanders through to the front bedroom and pulls open the mirrored doors of an anorexic closet.

  The racks are squashed tight with a lifetime of clothes—skimpy dresses, a rainbow of tops, a great bird-print number that looks miles too big, a vividly floral tunic dress that might do at a push, a rose-print prom number that looks terrific, a pleated-front dress that is way beyond hideous, and a black sequin maxi dress so clingy and tight it must have been designed by a gynecologist.

  She pulls out the maxi and the tunic and holds them up side by side. “Okay, looks like one of you is going out tonight—who is it going to be, clingy and black or flowery and nostalgic?”

  “Clingy and black,” says Jude from over her shoulder. “You don’t want too many pastel colors going on around albino boy. I guess that’s who you were talking to on the phone.”

  “It was. And you’re right.” She hangs the floral one up again. “You know anything about cops? Ever been out with one?”

  “Never. But I bet he’s rough and rude. He’ll want to get into your pants before you even get shown the dessert menu.”

  Zoe smiles and swishes the maxi around on the hanger. “Here’s hopin’.”

  20

  New York

  There’s no alternative but to run.

  Run until his lungs are on fire and he can’t breathe.

  Then run some more.

  Danny Speed has got jammed up. It’s down to a weasel named Jason Bennett who works the Internet café Bean and Bite. He knows it is.

  The young programmer pumps his arms and gets his weight on his toes, just like his gym teacher told him back in the fifth grade, but the two undercover cops are still hot on his heels as he heads along an alley off Monroe Street.

  He opens a gap as he sprints under the thundering carriageways of Manhattan Bridge. Glancing up, he sees hurtling gray trains and fender-to-fender cars trundling back and forth. A scavenging dog breaks from the shadows and barks so loudly he almost falls. Heart hammering, he dodges left into a yard that stretches around the back of the old glass works.

  Danny’s cursing himself. Jason had begged him to make a dozen copies of electronic swipe cards for a friend setting up his own company off East Broadway. He should have smelled a set-up right from the start. The guy was a slime ball at school and is a slime ball now—probably a coke head as well.

  There are several Dumpsters up ahead, and for a second Danny thinks about hiding in one of them, but suspects that only works in movies.

  One of the two iPhones, two BlackBerries, and two cheap burner cell phones in his denim jacket rings.

  He has no idea which.

  Now the ring tone kicks in. “Just Don’t Give a Fuck.” The full-blooded kick-ass Eminem track he assigned to his bossy sister.

  “Shit!”

  Zoe’s not going to take a voice-mail recording for an answer. She’s going to keep calling until she finally gets him to talk.

  He vaults the farthest bin and uses it to spring onto a high metal fence an
d clamber down the other side into an adjoining yard.

  Danny hits the ground like a sack of wet sand and tweaks an ankle.

  Barking breaks out.

  Another mutt. Jeez, they’re everywhere these days.

  This is a brown guard dog, woken from its curled-up-with-bone happiness into full growling-snarling pissed-off mode.

  “Fuck!”

  Back through the fence he sees cops climbing the Dumpsters. They’re out of shape, red-faced, but closing in. The dog’s on the move too. Fired up and thundering across the gravel.

  He spots the open back door of a fast food restaurant, steam billowing through the hanging strips of a tatty, multicolored plastic blind.

  Danny beats the Alsatian by less than a yard and slams the door shut, trapping half the colorful streamers.

  A kitchen porter, elbow deep in a sink of filthy pan water, shouts at him. Hard abuse in a rough Slavic tongue. The whole place is tight and busy with red-faced, sweating men hunched over blisteringly hot stoves and fryers.

  He bolts down one side of the galley and bumps a chef.

  Hot liquid slops from a pan and sizzles on a six-burner. There’s another outburst of foreign cursing. Someone throws a pan lid that clatters on a wall by his shoulder.

  Danny pushes through swing doors into the air-conditioned restaurant before any staff can follow. Startled diners look up from greasy plates, chicken bones held between their fingers, as he clatters past and out the front door.

  Eminem’s still rapping in his pocket as he beats an exit across the restaurant car park into the maze of back streets. Breathless, he pulls the phone out and presses Answer. “Sis, I’m kinda busy right now. Call you back!”

  The cops are lost and he’s heading home.

  Out of their sight. Out of their clutches.

  But only for now.

  21

  Beijing

  The world’s most famous Boeing 747 roars down the runway at Capital International and rises into the yellow, smoggy sky.

  Only when Air Force One levels out and the pilot’s voice says “Seat belts can be unbuckled” does Don Jackson get a chance to talk openly to President Molton and Vice President Cornwell.

  They gather in the “office,” a working area fashioned from the same woods and leathers as the White House’s Situation Room.

  Molton cuts to the chase. “You said Zhang threatened us?”

  “Cleverly and indirectly, but yes, sir, that’s what it amounted to.” The whole scene is indelibly etched in Jackson’s memory. “It was just before we left—we were in his hotel suite and he was charming enough to start with. Then he said he wanted to show me some video footage. The lights went down, and up came this reel of guys in the desert. They looked like cons. Anyway, they were running. Next thing you know, you can see why they were on their toes. These dogs, maybe a dozen of them, appear from nowhere and rip them to shreds. It was barbaric.”

  The VP is skeptical. “You sure this was fact not fiction?”

  “It looked real. Footage was virtually unedited and appeared to be military quality—not TV or movie standard. Certainly there was no use of green screen or special effects.”

  The President is eager to hear more. “Go on.”

  “When the clip finishes, Zhang tells me what I’d been looking at was weaponized animals, a new form of genetic terrorism that China believes is about to be unleashed—no pun intended—on the U.S.”

  Cornwell can’t believe what he’s hearing. “The fucking Chinese are going to turn dogs on us?” He laughs mockingly. “I thought the fuckers had eaten them all.”

  Molton scowls at him.

  “Not the Chinese,” Jackson stresses. “Zhang clearly said a ‘third party’—a terror group—had already introduced genetically modified dogs into the U.S. But hey, China could come to our rescue and prevent people being killed—if China wanted.”

  “I see a less than subtle connection,” says Molton. “This is linked to Xian’s crazy demands re debt repayment. He’s basically saying if we don’t give in and pay a slice of taxation to China, they’ll encourage some terrorists to set these weaponized canines on us.” He looks directly at Jackson. “It all sounds ridiculous, but it is what it is. Did he give you any idea how many of these dogs there are and where and when all this is supposed to happen?”

  The NIA director shakes his head. “He said it already was happening. Apparently there was some dog-related death in Miami yesterday. Zhang pointed it out to me—said we should look into it.”

  “Pha!” Cornwell dismisses it with a wave of his hand. “Little bastard will have seen it on CNN. Don’t attach too much credibility to this horseshit.”

  Molton isn’t so flip. “Anything in it?”

  “Too soon to say.” Jackson looks as uncomfortable as he feels. “I could only get a brief outline over the phone. Big dog went mad on a teenage girl over at a beach in Key Biscayne, then a Ranger shot it. Sad but not unheard of. Could be the heat, could be a disease, could be a lot of things.”

  “Find out which.” Molton stares out into the clouds. “I hope to Christ this is as crazy as it sounds.”

  22

  Coral Way, Miami

  The sun-shaped clock on Jude’s kitchen wall strikes 8:00 P.M. almost at the same moment the downstairs’ doorbell rings.

  Zoe is listening to the weather guy on the radio telling her tonight is going to stay way too hot to go out in the black maxi dress she’s just put on. Now that her date has turned up, she has no time to change into something cooler.

  Reluctantly, she trots through to the intercom by the front door and presses the button that opens the front lobby door.

  While he’s on his way up she sneaks a final check in the full-length hall mirror. The dress is so tight that wearing any underwear was impossible, unless she wanted to look like a patched up bicycle tire.

  There’s a polite knock on the apartment door.

  She pulls it open and is amazed to see a small Hispanic man in his late forties in tattered jeans and a blue shirt that is soaked under the armpits.

  “Cab for Zoe Speed.”

  “I didn’t order a cab.” She can’t take her eyes off the driver’s sweat patches.

  “Meester Ghost sent me.”

  “Who?”

  “Lieutenant Walton. Said to say sorry he couldn’t come in person but he’s running late.”

  She leaves the sweating cabbie on the doorstep while she collects her things and works out what kind of guy sends a car on a first date. Seems the night’s going to be full of surprises.

  Zoe swings a borrowed black purse over her shoulder. “Okay, I’m ready, let’s roll.”

  He leads her downstairs to a yellow car and plays jazz on the radio as he heads back into the city.

  She catches the driver’s eyes in the rearview. “Where exactly are we going?”

  He smiles back at her. “Meester Ghost said you would ask.”

  “Hey, what’s with this Ghost shit?”

  He looks up at her in his mirror. “That’s what everyone calls him.”

  “It’s not very nice.”

  “He don’t mind. He really nice.” He smiles widely so she can see his sign of approval for her date. “He said I should tell you you’re going to one of the best restaurants he knows.” His eyes twinkle. “I think you are in for a night you will remember.”

  “Is that right?” She can’t keep the irritation out of her voice.

  Two more jazz numbers play out before the cab pulls over in front of a tall sandy building that seems a cross between offices and apartments.

  The driver turns in his seat. “Apartment 4011—that’s the penthouse floor. The concierge will show you up.”

  “Apartment?” She bends in her seat and cranes her neck to get a view of where she’s supposed to be going. “Shouldn’t
you just take me to the restaurant where we’re having dinner?”

  “Meester Ghost said to bring you here.” He shrugs. “I just do what he say.”

  She gives up. “Okay. What do I owe you?”

  He shakes his head. “The fare’s already paid.”

  “Thanks.” She gets out and flaps the door shut. A cool breeze billows across the sidewalk, and Miami’s lights twinkle in the city blackness. It ain’t New York, but she can feel the place has its own special energy and buzz.

  The lobby is filled with black and white marble and some big old terra-cotta pots sprouting palms. A courteous concierge in his sixties shows her to the elevator and swipes his security card over an electronic reader so she can get to the penthouse suites.

  Apartment 4011 is just a few doors down on the fortieth floor.

  She knocks on the rich oak door and waits.

  Ghost opens it. He’s dressed in an immaculately cut black dinner suit, complete with bow tie. Zoe notes it’s not the clip-on cheating type but the really difficult shit you have to fold and twist all by yourself.

  And he’s minus shades. He’s there in all his albino glory.

  “Hi, come on in.”

  She stands there a second, in shock. “You look like James Fucking Bond.”

  He laughs. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Please do.”

  She’s still rooted as she studies his eyes. They’re amazing. Hypnotic. Fascinating. She wishes she had a camera to catch the meek milky irises and the threateningly deep pink pupils.

  “You want dinner in the corridor?” The big lieutenant smiles as he holds the door wide. “Or you want to come inside?”

  “Sorry.” She floats past him. “Inside is good.” She takes a quick look at the decor. “Fuck, inside is very good.” She grabs her iPhone from her purse and clicks at a white wall filled with multicolored original art. “You mind?”

  He shrugs at her bent back as she snaps. “No, why on earth should I? Unless you’re an art thief, planning a heist.”

  Zoe stops. “Stolen a few hearts in my time, but nothing else.” She slips the camera back into her purse.