fic: Chinese Boxes 6/11

[01cheers]

14. Tessuti Varese

“You drove down in this one? Seriously?” She is not even trying to keep the mockery out of her voice. In fact, she is playing it up for all it’s worth. Bruce waiting for them outside Gianfranco’s villa in a Renault Scénic is probably the most bizarre sight she has seen in weeks. It is black, granted, but it looks like the most innocuous, boring, ordinary car imaginable, an opposite of Bruce himself. She is momentarily sorry that she had to take the train into Florence to maintain her cover story as Gianfranco’s fake fiancée just in case the Chinese are keeping an eye on him; travelling with Bruce in this car must have been a priceless comical treat.

Strangely, Bruce seems completely unruffled. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

She senses the mischief in his voice. “Anything I don’t know?”

He is all but grinning at her, but tries to maintain the mystery. “You’re welcome to take a look. See if you can spot it.”

She takes a casual stroll around the Scénic; it looks the way she thinks a Scénic should. She climbs into the driver’s seat and holds out her hand to Bruce for the keys; if it isn’t some external feat of camouflage or other hi-tech modification, it must be the engine - and while looking at it may give her clues, she won’t really figure it out unless she starts it.

“Careful,” he says, dropping the keys into her palm. So that’s it, then.

She almost jumps at the smooth, low, powerful rumble when she turns the key. The damn thing sounds like a Ferrari. Even more oddly, the engine sound comes from behind her.

She turns to Bruce, the engine still running in idle. “What have you got in it - and where is it?”

He finally laughs out loud. “Switch it off and get out, I’ll show you.”

A few seconds later, she stands and stares in amazement at the gleaming beauty of a V12 engine seemingly taking up the entire bottom of the storage space in the back of the car, camouflaged below a cover of carpeting. No wonder it sounds like a Ferrari; it is powered like one.

“It’s Theo’s toy car,” Bruce explains. “He has a BMW for everyday driving and a Range Rover for the family, but this one is his prank favourite. He suggested a race when I had recovered enough to drive the Sesto, and kept insisting no matter how much I kept mocking him. Of course I had no idea about the engine. I must admit I had an eye-popping moment when he got ahead of me in the first five seconds. I still won,” he smirks, “but it was a hell of a race.”

Finally, it all makes sense. Just like the predatory Sesto is all Bruce, this prank on wheels is all Theo, innocuous... until it pounces.

“This, from a man who hates bullshitting,” she says, half accusing, half admiring.

“He may hate bullshitting, but he has nothing against pranks. Especially when he is the one pulling them.”

“You know, I actually like the idea a lot,” she muses, turning to Bruce. “I wonder if a V12 will fit inside a Cinquecento without it crumbling to the ground...”

***

“Ma che cazzo è?” Gianfranco exclaims, his voice a mixture of incomprehension and awe. They are huddled in front of a coffee table with Bruce sitting in the middle, carefully tracing a finger along the touchpad of his laptop, manoeuvring the fly drone over Tessuti Varese territory; Gianfranco knows the site well enough to recognise where the camera feed comes from, but cannot fathom how the moving image is obtained. It is slightly grainy, but still of sufficiently good quality to make out the buildings and structures. Thankfully, with the villa bristling with Wainwright-installed gadgetry, they do not need to worry about safety or the secrecy of what they are doing, saying, or looking at, so long as they are inside.

“A little spying before we go in there. Think of it as a flying camera,” Bruce explains succinctly. “I wanted to see if the place had changed compared to the satellite image I saw, so long as we have time.” They still have almost an hour before their scheduled meeting, and are waiting for the girl - another Chinese, but positively angelic-looking, and, according to Gianfranco, beyond suspicion - to finish stitching in the Kevlar lining under the regular lining of their suits; she has already finished the vests, and apparently is none the wiser about the properties of the fabric she is handling, having been told that it is thermal insulation; they’ve warned her to run her machine slowly, but did not elaborate that the slow speed was needed to stop the fabric from hardening at the needle hits.

“I can tell you it’s changed,” Gianfranco states. “These two warehouses weren’t there before.” He points a finger to the screen as the image pans across the factory yard. “These four were always there, I think it’s two for yarn and two for rolls of finished fabric, but I have no idea what these new ones are.”

“Anything else?” Bruce prompts.

“Apart from the goons with guns, you mean?” Gianfranco seems to be picking up Bruce’s vaguely sarcastic manner. Well, it is better than trembling in fear. “Not that I can see. Can you swivel the camera around to look at the factory again?”

Bruce does as requested; the building that comes into view is long and low, with its central two-storey portion jutting above the one-storey flanks. He strokes the touchpad again, signalling for the drone to move closer. “See anything yet?”

“No, looks the same as I last remember it. Whatever they’ve changed must be on the inside.” He walks over to a side cupboard and takes out a sheaf of old design drafts, pulling one on top of the rest, showing a long gallery-like room with twin rows of weaving machines along each side. “This is the way it was last redesigned in the late eighties, and once we’ve been there, we’ll see what’s different now.”

“OK, we’ll look at it later.” They agreed, at Bruce’s suggestion, to crudely map the inside of the building first before sending in drones to avoid wasting too many of them -each of them is capable of about half an hour of powered flight and would normally be rechargeable, but they realise that they have to treat these as disposable not knowing if they’ll be able to retrieve them afterwards. “Check with your seamstress if she’s done, we need to get out of here in half an hour.”

***

Castelletto, at the end of their six-mile drive, looks like a regular industrial area, a fence surrounding a cluster of warehouses bordered on three sides by agricultural fields and on the east by a road. As per Bruce’s nighttime recon five days ago, the new owners have installed enough security to discourage snooping - she has spotted a few ordinary cameras and plenty of passive infrared sensors on the outside perimeter just under the barbed wire coils on top of the high fence, not to mention the armed guards they saw on the camera feed - but hopefully, none of their surveillance is hi-tech enough to pick up on the sophisticated gadgets they are sneaking in; the afternoon’s unnoticed drone fly-by was encouraging already.

The iron gate is flanked by a guard post, and they are asked to leave their cars in the tiny parking area outside the gate and walk in through the guarded entrance, passing through a metal detector as they do so. Even without knowing for sure, Bruce prepared for the eventuality, and brought the stack of X-rays that has become his customary alibi in dealings with airport scanner staff. She has seen it all before, but it never stops making her cringe. With the guard now taking his time examining each sheet, she is treated to the before-and-after shots again in their gory glory. Three lumbar vertebrae, screws in his left wrist, a titanium plate on his left kneecap, titanium strips on half a dozen ribs that had cracked with the landing impact... she is only responsible for the first item in the morbid catalogue, but it is bad enough; and not being responsible for the rest does not make it much better, either. She swears to herself that if he mentions heli-skiing again, she’ll put up a proper fight. But for now, the little horror show has an important purpose as a distraction technique.

She watches Bruce very casually shrug off his suit jacket to let the guard pass the handheld scanner over his back, where it buzzes, predictably, over the titanium vertebrae... the guard conveniently oblivious to the hidden pocket in the back of the jacket lining where he has put Selina’s translation gadget. She could try to smuggle it in in her handbag claiming that it is an mp3 player, but the risk of being found out made them choose the safer alternative, and seeing the other guard peer and poke inside her handbag now makes her glad they did so. It’s enough that her bag holds what appears to be a makeup kit and is in reality a carefully camouflaged fingerprint dusting kit, with magnetic and fluorescent dusting powder masquerading as a monochromatic eyeshadow set and rather garish pink blusher, a UV light posing as a mascara tube, and seemingly innocent makeup brushes doubling as print powder applicators, complemented with a business card case holding plastic-backed tape strips and backing cards mixed in among actual business cards. But these are all so cleverly disguised as to arouse no suspicion, and the chunky onyx ring on her right hand is small enough to set off no alarms that might alert anyone to the carbide glass cutter wheel hidden behind the large stone. Still, she is glad that they have kept gadgets to a minimum; none of them carries a laptop, and all she and Bruce have by way of mobile communication is a pair of simple, clean cell phones with fake contact lists and call records pre-loaded the day before; it’s good enough that Theo is keeping an eye on their GPS positions, but there are no fancy tricks inside. With this bunch, they’d better be safe than sorry and better underplay their hand than trigger suspicion.

Having completed his X-ray routine and explained to the guard about the bad car accident that had apparently caused his injuries - she cannot understand his Chinese without the gadget, but knows his usual excuse - Bruce puts the final flourish on it by pulling up his left trouser leg to show the guard the knee brace. The guard looks, waves his hand, and lets Bruce off the hook; what he does not know is that Bruce intentionally did not tighten the brace enough to let him walk normally, and is showing the full extent of the limp: if the worst comes to the worst and they do have to fight their way out, it will be best to have his full fighting ability with the brace properly locked as an unexpected advantage. She hopes it does not come to that, but agrees with the principle.

Still, it is unlikely that any of this will be needed this same afternoon. The meeting they are about to go into is purely an introduction, a gambit to open negotiations that should, with any luck, continue tomorrow and give them enough time to gather damaging evidence and figure out what the hell it is that Tessuti Varese is now making, or trading in, and who they are selling it to. Gianfranco and Bruce still think that the stuff is drugs, or possibly pharmaceuticals; she is less convinced, but then, she has had fewer encounters with substance smuggling than Bruce.

The scrutiny over, they are led past the warehouses and across the yard to the main building. The guard workers have apparently been told to stay out of the way; they are either inside the warehouses or hovering just outside the warehouse entrances, so the three of them and one of the three gate guards are the only people walking around. Inside the factory building, there is a corridor running the entire length of the production floor along the right side - looks like 150 feet or so. It looks like the production workshops are in a straight line along the corridor and have side doors that are supposed to open onto it, but those doors seem locked. The only entrance that opens - just for a few seconds at that - is a wide double-door gateway opening into the shorter, 30-foot corridor branching off immediately to the left along the short wall; there is a corresponding gateway in the outside wall across the corridor, and the two sets of gates open to admit a motorised cart carrying yarn spools; they have to wait just inside the building entrance for it to pass. Once the gate is closed again, the guard leads them to the end of the short corridor, where a right turn leads onto a single long flight of stairs to the upper floor along the back wall. She hopes to get another glimpse of the production room on the way back; maybe she can play stupid and pretend to be curious.

The upper floor offices, built above the production floor to avoid the noise, are also arranged in a row along a corridor, this one running on the left-hand side the entire length of the upper floor -looks to be a hundred feet rather than the ground-floor one-fifty. There are seven windows along the wall on the left-hand side and six doors along the wall on the right, the first room apparently about twice the size of the rest, if the position of the door is any indication, about 25 feet long.

They are ushered into that first room, which reveals itself to be a meeting room with a long table at the far wall, next to the two windows, and a sideboard and cabinet along the wall to their right; save for these and the chairs around the table, the room is bare. Having seen the late Varese’s taste at his villa, Selina wonders if the Chinese have stripped the room of other, fancier furniture, perhaps a pair of leather armchairs and some ornate coffee table, to take elsewhere, thus reducing it to this minimalist arrangement. But her attention is soon occupied by studying their hosts who have risen from the table and, after advancing exactly one step each, are waiting for them to approach with the greetings.

There can be no doubt as to which of these is Wu, the boss; the stony-faced man not just behaves like he owns the place, but seems to look down on anyone less disagreeable than himself. Stocky and square-jawed, harsh seems the best and shortest way to describe him, and his voice when he speaks has the same quality. A minute ago, when they were walking up the stairs, Bruce slipped the translation gadget that he had taken out of his jacket lining into her hand; having now switched it on, she does her best to feign incomprehension at his curt greeting until Bruce translates it officially for her and Gianfranco.

“Mr Wu would like to welcome you to the company,” Bruce says, impassively, with just the tiniest hint of sarcasm. Wu’s implication is clear; he is welcoming them, Gianfranco included, to his company. “And he would like to thank you for suggesting a meeting. In view of the sad circumstances of Mr Varese’s demise, it is important that we discuss a way forward that would be beneficial for all of us.” Some of us more than others, Selina thinks, but if they can play this game their way, it will be Wu himself coming up the loser.

The introductions are performed in turn; Gianfranco, trying to play up Mafia overtones, calls Bruce his consigliere, advisor, rather than consulente, consultant, hoping that Wu will recognise the term in the original Italian before Bruce translates it; and he braves Bruce’s sideways look when he puts an arm around Selina’s waist introducing her as Chiara, his fiancée. Hopefully, if his late father ever mentioned his son’s affairs to Wu, he wouldn’t have gone beyond mentioning the girl’s name, in which case they are safe. Wu, in his turn, introduces one of the other two men, the shorter and shifty-faced Zhang, as his deputy and finance director, and the other one, the bulky Xiao, as the health and safety manager, which is as ridiculous a euphemism for enforcer as Selina has ever heard.

They trade inane remarks for the better part of half an hour; both parties state their intention to move the matter forward to a satisfactory conclusion, Gianfranco, plucking up some courage, suggests that all aspects of the proposed sale have to be considered, the apparent code for wanting to raise the buyout price, and Zhang, to whom Wu seems to leave the talking most of the time, responds that they are happy to do so but have to bear the company’s difficult situation in mind, the apparent code for no way. By then it is almost half past four, and having completed this initial circling round, they agree to meet in this same room the following morning for a full-day meeting.

Once they have taken their leave from Wu and Xiao and are being escorted outside by Zhang, Selina grabs her chance when she sees the workshop gateway fractionally open. She jumps up to it and starts twittering about how fascinating it is and how she always wanted to see a weaving machine. Zhang tolerates it for just as long as is required for him not to look suspicious, which is a couple of seconds, before telling her in a decisive voice that the weaving machines are too noisy and closing the gates. No matter; she has seen most of what she needed to see.

***

As soon as they are out of direct line of sight from the Tessuti Varese gate, Bruce, who is ahead of them in the Scénic, pulls up at the side of the road. They stop and get out of Gianfranco’s Alfa Romeo, wondering what it is that could not wait until they get to the villa. After all, they already agreed that they would not discuss business in the car in case the guards planted a bug to eavesdrop on them.

“I want my girlfriend back,” he states simply in response to their quizzical expressions. Gianfranco’s shoulders slump a bit, and Selina smiles.

“So what do you think?” he asks her when they have driven off again.

“About..?” she ventures, not sure what is safe to discuss. After all, he was the one worried about bugs.

“We’re OK here, Theo has installed a bug sweeper in the radio, I’ve already run it.”

“Ah. Well, it’s like you said, all low tech but enough to be a hassle. There have to be a dozen guards, the three at the gate, one each I think for the warehouses, give or take, and I saw two in the weaving room and I figure there must be two more at the other end of the building. No one upstairs, unless you count Xiao. From what I saw, compared to the design Gianfranco showed us, they’ve split the production floor into smaller rooms. The first room has only four weaving machines in it when the design draft showed a dozen in total, and two of those were definitely idle, if not three. And this room now has a wall thirty feet in with a door and a sort of horizontal slit that the fabric is fed into. That’s as much as I saw before Zhang closed the door.” she concludes.

“You’ve seen enough for now, we’ll get a video feed from the drone fly-by in an hour,” he reassures her. “According to Gianfranco, there are also two workers who are not guards but actual technicians who know something about weaving, unlike the rest. So maybe one or both you saw in the weaving room was one of those. But I agree, a dozen guards, probably in two shifts, they don’t look like they care about labour regulations and eight-hour days. Gianfranco told me when you were getting ready back at the villa that the explanation they gave him for the redesign,” Bruce continues, “was that they’ve changed the product range to make waterproof fabrics for extreme wear conditions, more expensive but also taking longer to produce and needing chemical treatment. At least that’s the official reason behind what must be in the next room, we’ll see how true it is. There’s something else I saw,” he goes on with a scowl. “When we were walking back now and you were talking to Gianfranco, I saw a batch of flattened boxes taken to one of the new warehouses, so now we know for sure they’re used for the yarn, and know what that warehouse is for.”

“And the one next to it?”

“Now we get to the major evidence part. I didn’t notice it with the drone, but the other one is connected to the box warehouse by a covered passage, and has a partially concealed smokestack next to it. Looks to me like an incineration facility.”

Which makes absolutely zero sense.

“What kind of idiot would ship yarn in cardboard boxes, and then incinerate them instead of recycling?”

“The kind of idiot that built a chemical plant in a seismic region, next to an airfield that’s supposedly abandoned,” he reminds her grimly. “The kind of idiot that may have more use for the packaging than the yarn and most likely has something hidden inside that packaging, and doesn’t want to leave traces.”

There’s no arguing with that. They trade identical scowls and drive the remaining two miles to the villa in an uneasy silence.

_____________________________________

Notes to Ch 14

I am afraid I have no idea if a Renault Scénic can be fitted with a V12 engine as I describe, but I like the premise. It actually comes from a funny song I once heard, where what seems to be a tiny Cinquecento-like rundown car chasing criminals with unfailing success is suspected of being driven by Batman.

The components of a fingerprint dusting kit are pretty much as I list them.

15. In Pandora’s shoes

An hour later, they’ve seen it. They had to wait, or rather have the pair of drones waiting and hovering outside the weaving-machine room door for a few minutes until a guard came out to go outside for a smoke, but after that it was almost too easy. A quick look around the first room confirmed that only one out of four machines was running, with a second one on standby, and that the fabric was immediately fed through the low gap into the next room. There was just enough clearance to fly the drones through the gap, and Bruce had them perform some tricky manoeuvres to get them clear on the other end, but it worked.

Rewatching the captured video now, they are still trying to figure out the nature of the process in the room. It takes up the entire central part of the building between the weaving-machine room and a similar-sized room at the other end that, as they have now seen, holds finished rolls of fabric before they are transferred to the warehouse. This middle space is almost ninety feet long and the same twenty five feet wide as the weaving room before it, but this one has a sort of internal five-foot corridor, or rather a passage left free, along the right-hand side, with a sealed entrance halfway along the length of the room opening into the outside corridor, and a parallel two-foot elevated walkway, about seven feet off the ground, running along the left-hand side under the wide windows, mostly concealed by tall storage tanks, compressor equipment surrounded by coils of tubing, and huge ventilated air ducts in front of it. The central stretch of the long room is taken up by a linear sequence of four flat rectangular vats - or rather, two sequential sets of a vat and what Bruce says is some kind of dryer, if the ventilated ducts leading to and from these are any indication. At the far end of the room, the fabric, which seems to travel continuously through the vats and dryers up to that point, comes out again and goes through a low wide gap identical to the one at the weaving room end before it is rolled up in the last room. Scrutinising this assembly offers few clues apart from two things: this is a costly and complex operation and, according to Bruce, it is not entirely incompatible with the idea of a waterproofing treatment but it looks as if they are repeating the process twice, which makes no outward sense.

“I suppose it’s time we switched insects on them,” Bruce mutters, ignoring Gianfranco’s uncomprehending look, and calls up a different application on the laptop.

But Gianfranco, as it turns, out, is not always easy to dismiss. “What is it you’re doing now?”

“It’s all a bit technical.” Bruce manages to suppress the exasperated sigh... just. After all, Gianfranco is being helpful thus far. “We have a different kind of remote-controlled miniature drone. The fly drones you saw the camera feeds from are for video surveillance, but we also have surface-moving drones that can take samples of materials. We’ve seen what there is to see inside the production facility, but without knowing what sort of substances are involved, there’s no way of knowing what’s going on. So now I’ll get in a dozen or so of the other kind to get us miniature samples of the yarn, the cardboard box lining, and the finished fabric, and I’ll guide them outside the Tessuti Varese gates to a couple of hundred yards away where I can pick them up without the guards nabbing me. They look like ordinary cockroaches... well, just a bit bigger than ordinary but shouldn’t look too suspicious from a few feet away. They also have a primitive camera to navigate, but mostly what these are, are a pair of pincers and micro vacuum pump for sampling and a storage chamber inside. So long as I have a couple of them going into each of the two yarn and fabric warehouses and three or four going after the boxes one after another, it won’t look like enough of an infestation for the guards to start calling pest control.”

Gianfranco seemingly gives up on the pretence of looking unimpressed and just mutters Porco Giuda instead of an answer.

“Are you gonna take them to our friend at Pisa airport?” Selina asks.

“Exactly,” Bruce confirms. “He can then fly them to his HQ in the craft, and give us the analysis results before tomorrow morning. I’ll give him a copy of the video feed too, I’d bet he can make better sense of it than we could. And if Blue-Eyed Wonder here gives you any trouble while I’m away taking care of this,” he adds in English in a completely deadpan tone, “all you need to do is say the word later.”

Gianfranco’s knowledge of English idioms is not good enough to figure out why Selina is suddenly snickering. And obviously, the Italian part of this latest exchange has gone completely over his head as well, but rather than start asking pointed questions about what HQ and what sort of craft Bruce is referring to, he goes for a sort of general guess.

“Who are you, really?” He eyes Bruce incredulously. “James Bond?”

Despite the tense situation, this makes Bruce laugh and makes Selina bite the insides of her cheeks trying not to. “You’ve got to be kidding me, I’m Ame-“ Bruce cuts himself off at the slip but recovers almost instantly. “I mean Swiss.” But Gianfranco has picked up on the accidental confession.

“Ah, then you must be Superman,” he ventures.

Hopefully, Gianfranco will attribute the two of them collapsing against each other shaking with silent giggles to his attempt at a joke.

***

Lucius wakes them up with a phone call to Gianfranco’s landline at about 3 am, which in itself is a sign that he has discovered something major. They put on dressing gowns and stumble, bleary-eyed, out of the bedroom to switch on the speakerphone in Giacomo’s old study; Bruce raps on Gianfranco’s bedroom door as they pass it, and he joins them a minute later.

“I’ve finished the tests,” Lucius tells them grimly. “It actually looks like a very similar process to what I was describing to you talking about the Kevlar treatment, except that the purpose here is not to alter the properties of the fabric but to transport a substance soaked into it.”

The three of them exchange tense looks. “Drugs?” Bruce offers.

“Worse,” Lucius replies, sounding crestfallen. “I’ll spare you the chemical designations but I’ll explain the principle. I’ve identified the composition of the yarn; it isn’t polyester but a highly absorbent polymer. In the spools they get, the yarn polymer has been treated by a base compound that doesn’t react with the polymer chain but bonds to the molecular strands on the surface in a stable way that allows to transport it over a long distance. Now the box lining, which in a normal cardboard box consists just of corrugated pulp sheets, is in this case filled with a loose powder that is a constituent of several highly toxic substances. It is not detectable between the layers of cardboard and doesn’t leak so long as the boxes don’t get wet or torn, which you say they don’t because they are shipped inside containers, and it can then be easily retrieved by destroying the box and collecting the powder. So long as the powder is in crystalline state, it cannot yet act as a toxin, but once it’s been dissolved in a non-polar solvent, it reacts with the base compound bonded to the polymer yarn to create a powerful nerve agent. The yarn isn’t affected by non-polar solvents, so the fabric structure remains intact, but due to its high absorbency the yarn expands like a sponge and can carry an amount of final toxin that is almost five times its weight. I know you couldn’t get a sample of the solvent itself, but I’m thinking it must be carbon disulfide. It is non-polar and wouldn’t look suspicious as a textile plant’s feedstock as it is widely used in rayon production. It’s also extremely flammable and with a very low auto-ignition temperature, with a boiling point of only 46°, which explains all those coolant pipes and compressors you saw in the treatment room. Once the reaction is complete, they then need to remove the solvent, which is what the first dryer unit with the ventilation ducts must be for. Due to the low boiling point, they only need to heat the fabric to about fifty degrees to make it evaporate. My guess is that the solvent vapours are then distilled and recycled, or else they’d be needing too much of it and there’s no easy way to dispose of it. To make sure that the toxin-saturated fabric doesn’t disperse its contents, they then coat the fabric in PVC, which must be the second reaction vat, and heat-seal it, which must be the second dryer. They probably have a way of making sure they keep the edges of the fabric sealed off in the treatment vats, grabbed between guide rails most likely, so they look like untreated fabric. And then to cover their tracks, they put about a quarter of an inch of untreated fabric on top of each roll of the PVC-coated stuff, that’s what the other machine on standby must be for, so from the outside the rolls look entirely untreated. The fabric in the rolls has fewer layers, but is heavier due to the chemical it carries, so the weight balances out and doesn’t look suspicious. Then when it arrives wherever it’s bound for,” Lucius concludes, “both the PVC and the polymer yarn are dissolved in a polar solvent that, in turn, does not affect the toxin, and the toxin is collected either by evaporating and distilling it or by centrifugal extraction.”

“So what you’re saying,” Bruce replies, visibly shaken, “is basically that we’re looking at a chemical weapons factory converting DIY nerve toxin kits into finished weapons-grade shit in portable form that looks 100% civilian.”

“Basically,” Lucius agrees.

“Cazzo.” This, of course, is Gianfranco sitting next to her, scared to a deathly pallor.

“You said it,” is Bruce’s verdict. “OK, I’d better get Theo on the case to see what he can do about Interpol notices. Thank you, Lucius.” Bruce sounds as gloomy as Lucius by now. “Will I see you back here later?”

“Of course,” Lucius assures him. “Just give me a couple of hours.”

The call Bruce makes next is to Lugano, where Theo sounds surprisingly awake. Or not surprisingly, she figures as she hears the man running through his pastimes of the moment.

“We’ve been looking at the ship movements as we agreed, Brandon,” Theo starts right after quick greetings to Selina and Gianfranco, “and I’ve checked the containers you tagged last week when you tracked them to Tessuti Varese. These same containers went back to Livorno yesterday and are now being loaded back onto the COSCO Ningbo bound for its next port of call, with a cargo announced as tent fabric. And its next port of call is Jeddah in Saudi Arabia before it goes back to China.” Right; waterproof, PVC-coated tent fabric going to a desert country. “I’ve checked the routes of the four other Greek-flag ships, they’re the same. Livorno, Jeddah, a couple of other places, then Guangzhou. And every time, every two weeks, it looks like they’re bringing in small ten-container shipments of yarn and taking out ten-container shipments of fabric. I’m now trying to get into the Jeddah port records to see where these go next, it’s a fucking hassle without speaking Arabic. My suspicion is that it doesn’t stop there.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t,” Bruce tells him. “I’ll tell you what we found, between that and what you’re saying it looks like we’re dealing with a budding alliance between the Triad and international terrorists.”

When Bruce has finished the summary of their recent discovery, Theo’s first reaction, perhaps predictably, is to tell them all to get the fuck out of there.

“What, and have the Chinese do a runner?” Bruce counters immediately. “The second they sniff something’s wrong they’ll disappear, maybe even destroy the site to avoid capture and make poison elsewhere. The only way to catch them is to pretend we know nothing.”

“Can you stop looking for reasons to make yourselves into human targets?” Theo lashes back at him, obviously cross. “There’ll be a way to track them. With what you’re saying it looks like a fine collection of charges already, terrorism, organised crime, weapons smuggling, likely money laundering. I can kick every ass I still know in Lyon to get them to issue a red notice for Wu’s arrest in 24 hours. Better still, an orange notice, the terrorism threat warning, in 36. It’ll take longer to convince them to issue it for what looks like a small far-fetched case, but it’s a much bigger charge and once it’s issued, the Carabinieri will be sure to send in the ROS, their Special Ops unit, right away.”

“By which time Wu will be anywhere in the world, and the factory may be either in pieces or making oilskin tablecloths.” Bruce isn’t budging an inch. “We’ll sit tight and pretend to negotiate while you’re working on the notice. As soon as we know they’re sending someone in, we’re out.”

“Do you think you’re Superman?” Theo scolds him next, oddly echoing Gianfranco’s inept guessing a few hours earlier. “Do you think that the Kevlar makes you invincible and they won’t find a way to kill you?” Selina mentally shakes hands with him; he is saying the things she would have wanted to say; the only difference is that she has given up in favour of the if you can’t beat them, join them route.

“Let’s make a deal,” Bruce says, trying to be conciliatory. “As soon as we gather enough info to make sure they can be found and charged and the operation can be stopped here and in China, we get out. So it’ll be the sooner of the two, the orange notice and Special Ops or killer evidence. Trust me, I have no wish to deal with these fuckers any longer than necessary and even less of a wish to have Selina and Gianfranco in there, except that he is needed as a pretext for the meeting and she refuses to stay away, but I want to get them. Who knows how many people they may be killing with that shit they’re making here, and who knows how many more they’ll kill if they aren’t stopped.”

When Bruce starts spouting global-scale morality he becomes notoriously difficult to argue with, as Theo is now discovering.

“Right,” he says, resigned. “I’ll let you know as soon as something happens on this end. I’ll also keep looking at the Jeddah port info, and see if there are any payments to Huaya or its Indonesian fronts originating in the Middle East. Maybe we can get them faster by following the money.”

“Thanks. You should be getting some sleep,” Bruce tells him. “We won’t be going anywhere in the next five hours anyway, and you probably won’t be able to do anything about the notice until then, either.” Official Interpol channels are round-the-clock, but to Theo’s occasional frustration, his present-day channels are mostly unofficial and as such, depend on the schedule of the particular person he is dealing with.

“As if I needed the reminder,” Theo replies sourly. “I’ll poke around for another hour or so, if I find anything of value I’ll send it on. You should get some rest too, I’m not the one walking into a chemical weapons factory come morning.”

By the time they are awake at eight, Theo has sent Bruce a brief encrypted message that, once opened, shows the results of his research for what must have been the rest of the night, and proves that even if unofficial, at least his contacts at the Interpol Financial Crime Unit are a force to be reckoned with. By cross-checking the sequential sources of money inflows into the Chinese ultimate parent company and its Indonesian subsidiaries with the destinations of money outflows from suspected terrorist finance fronts, he has seen intersection points between the two streams; it looks like the shipments are routed through and paid for by a chain of fronts whose final beneficiaries include the Syrian government, the Yemeni terrorist insurgents like Al-Aqsa and Abdallah Hazim, and a couple of other, equally unsavoury groups.

“They likely lack the technology to make the shit themselves,” Bruce explains to her; they have decided to keep this latest nugget from Gianfranco as it does not affect his safety or current status and will only scare him more. “So the Chinese mafia is making millions selling it to them. Syria is under partial trade embargo for weapons and dual-use goods and chemicals, Yemen is nominally clean, and Saudi Arabia is China’s long-standing trading partner, but if they tried to ship to any of these countries directly, even to the Saudis, their fear would be the CIA eventually getting wind of this and camping out in Guangzhou to sniff at every container until they were satisfied that these were legitimate goods, and they couldn’t risk that sort of scrutiny. Besides, it’s quite likely that this stuff could become unstable on a long voyage. This way they are routing it through a European country that arouses no suspicion and cutting the travel time for the finished toxin from a month to four days.”

No wonder they killed poor Giacomo as soon as he got curious, she thinks. With this kind of secret to guard, they’ll do the same to anyone short of a tank battalion, and pity those who take it upon themselves to play Pandora to this particular box.

_______________________________________

Notes to Ch 15

As Lucius says, there is a lot of resemblance between the Kevlar treatment I have him explain Ch 13 and the process I describe here, and this actually deserves a comment to explain the sequence of how it came about. Implausible as it may sound, I constructed the process I describe here first, trying to observe the general principles of chemistry and physics and figuring how a toxin can be transported completely hidden inside fabric fibers, and was about to write a note apologising for the chemistry here being utter bullshit (as you see, I still totally fudged it on the actual substances). And then when looking for extra-strength Kevlar for Ch 13, I found the research paper on the silica treatment and was shocked to see that the process, or at least the principle that I describe, is absolutely real, down to the details, except that the agent involved is innocuous silica instead of a toxin and the impregnation is an end in itself, not a means of making it portable. But I figured that the unintentional parallel was actually more of a blessing than a curse, not to mention an unexpected plausibility boost, hence I kept the process here as is.

Interpol red and orange notices, respectively, are basically as I label them, a de facto International arrest warrant and a warning of terrorist activity that represents an imminent threat and danger to persons or property. I don't really know how long it would take to get each of these issued, though it would definitely depend on the info and the source; but considering that they issued nearly 8,000 red notices and only 31 orange notices in 2011, I'd say that an orange one is harder to get. Lyon is the Interpol HQ.

The Carabinieri ROS (Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale ) is, indeed, the elite Special Operational Group that deals with specific high threats.

The properties of carbon disulfide are pretty much as I describe.

***

16. Discovering keys

Later that day, once they have repeated the guard post metal detector routine and the negotiations are open in earnest, they do their best to set aside the terrifying knowledge they are now privy to, and play as tough as their precarious position permits - and above all, they do their best to stall. Bruce takes his time doing precise and detailed translations for Gianfranco, insisting that the Chinese wait until he is finished and before doing the same in the opposite direction with Gianfranco’s meandering remarks. Selina plays stupid as best she can, asks for clarifications on every point so Gianfranco and Bruce have to stop and then interrupt and correct each other explaining to her what is being said... when she either knows it perfectly already or does not really need to know, and pops out of the room every now and then for pretend phone calls, the incoming quota of which Bruce surreptitiously triggers, only to come back a few minutes later to ask for an account of what went on in her absence. Between themselves, Bruce and Gianfranco bicker over valuation techniques and residual book value, apparently trying to use financial analysis to bargain up the price, while Zhang and Wu flatly and curtly point them to the company’s official losses for the past year and a half, as a thinly veiled euphemism for don’t hope for another cent above our offered price when no profits can be proven. They talk about survival of contingent liabilities and throw in the need for Wu to also buy out Varese’s minority stake in the empty-box trader Qingdao Jinglian, which he is, perhaps not surprisingly, much less interested in buying, before going on to discuss tax implications and possible ownership transfer mechanisms and money transfer routes ostensibly to help them avoid paying the transaction tax, and Bruce again does his best to be cautious and nitpicky and unhelpful at every turn. Forget accountant; he’d make a good nasty lawyer.

She sits on the other side of Gianfranco from Bruce, which would be pretty much unacceptable in most situations, and she is sure Bruce would share the sentiment, but on the upside on this occasion, it makes it much easier for her to pull Gianfranco’s notepad a couple of inches closer and scribble two words on it, pranzo fuori, when the others are engrossed in the discussion. Gianfranco sees them and gives a fractional nod; he is the one nominally calling the shots among the three of them, the operative word being nominally, but still; and so it falls to him to announce, at a quarter to one, that they need an hour’s break to have a quick lunch outside. They agree to resume at two, and the three of them are escorted outside to the Scénic; they gave up the pretence of two cars for the time being. But instead of finding a lunch spot in Prato as Gianfranco implied, they head straight to his family villa.

(Ch 16 continued in part 7)