“Still here?” ?The scowl on his face shows that he does not have his Regulator on. “It’s after midnight.”
She notes, not for the first time, how the men in the department have often resisted the Regulator unless absolutely necessary, claiming that it dulled their instincts and hunches. But they had also asked her whether she had hers on whenever she dared to disagree with them. They would laugh when they asked.
“I think I’m onto something,” she says calmly.
“You working with the goddamned feds now?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You haven’t seen the news?”
“I’ve been here all evening.”
He takes out his tablet, opens a bookmark, and hands it to her. It’s an article in the international section of the Globe, which she rarely reads. “Scandal Unseats Chinese Transport Minister” says the headline.
She scans the article quickly. A video has surfaced on the Chinese microblogs showing an important official in the Transport Ministry having sex with a prostitute. Moreover, it seems that he had been paying her out of public funds. He’s already been removed from his post due to the public outcry.
Accompanying the article is a grainy photo, a still capture from the video. Before the Regulator kicks in, Ruth feels her heart skip a beat. The image shows a man on top of a woman. Her head is turned to the side, directly facing the camera.
“That’s your girl, isn’t it?”
Ruth nods. She recognizes the bed and the nightstand with the clock and wicker basket from the crime scene photos.
“The Chinese are hopping mad. They think we had the man under surveillance when he was in Boston and released this video deliberately to mess with them. They’re protesting through the back channels, threatening retaliation. The feds want us to look into it and see what we can find out about how the video was made. They don’t know that she’s already dead, but I recognized her as soon as I saw her. If you ask me, it’s probably something the Chinese cooked up themselves to try to get rid of the guy in an internal purge. Maybe they even paid the girl to do it, and then they killed her. That, or our own spies decided to get rid of her after using her as bait, in which case I expect this investigation to be shut down pretty quickly. Either way, I’m not looking forward to this mess. And I advise you to back off as well.”
Ruth feels a moment of resentment before the Regulator whisks it away. If Mona’s death was part of a political plot, then Scott is right, she really is way out of her depth. The police had been wrong to conclude that it was a gang killing. But she’s wrong too. Mona was an unfortunate pawn in some political game, and the trend she thought she had noticed was illusory, just a set of coincidences.
The rational thing to do is to let the police take over. She’ll have to tell Sarah Ding that there’s nothing she can do for her now.
“We’ll have to sweep the apartment again for recording devices. And you better let me know the name of your informant. We’ll need to question him thoroughly to see which gangs are involved. This could be a national security matter.”
“You know I can’t do that. I have no evidence he has anything to do with this.”
“Ruth, we’re picking this up now. If you want to find the girl’s killer, help me.”
“Feel free to round up all the usual suspects in Chinatown. It’s what you want to do, anyway.”
He stares at her, his face weary and angry, a look she’s very familiar with. Then his face relaxes. He has decided to engage his Regulator, and he no longer wants to argue or talk about what couldn’t be said between them.
Her Regulator kicks in automatically.
“Thank you for letting me use your office,” she says placidly. “You have a good night.”
? ? ?
The scandal had gone off exactly as the Watcher planned. He’s pleased but not yet ready to celebrate. That was only the first step, a demonstration of his power. Next, he has to actually make sure it pays.
He goes through the recordings and pictures he’s extracted from the dead girl and picks out a few more promising targets based on his research. Two are prominent Chinese businessmen connected with top Party bosses; one is the brother of an Indian diplomatic attaché; two more are sons of the House of Saud, studying in Boston. It’s remarkable how similar the dynamics between the powerful and the people they ruled over are around the world. He also finds a prominent CEO and a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, but these he sets aside. It’s not that he’s particularly patriotic, but he instinctively senses that if one of his victims decides to turn him in instead of paying up, he’ll be in much less trouble if the victim isn’t an American. Besides, American public figures also have a harder time moving money around anonymously, as evidenced by his experience with those two senators in DC, which almost unraveled his whole scheme. Finally, it never hurts to have a judge or someone famous that can be leaned on in case the Watcher is caught.
Patience, and an eye for details.
He sends off his e-mails. Each references the article about the Chinese Transport Minister (“See, this could be you!”) and then includes two files. One is the full video of the minister and the girl (to show that he was the originator), and the second is a carefully curated video of the recipient coupling with her. Each e-mail contains a demand for payment and directions to make deposits to a numbered Swiss bank account or to transfer anonymous electronic cryptocurrency.
He browses the escort sites again. He’s narrowed down the girls he suspects to just a few. Now, he just has to look at them more closely to pick out the right one. He grows excited at the prospect.
He glances up at the people walking past him in the streets. All these foolish men and women moving around as if dreaming. They do not understand that the world is full of secrets, accessible only to those patient enough, observant enough to locate them and dig them out of their warm, bloody hiding places, like retrieving pearls from the soft flesh inside oysters. And then, armed with those secrets, you could make men half a world away tremble and dance.
He closes his laptop and gets up to leave. He thinks about packing up the mess in his motel room, setting out the surgical kit, the baseball cap, the gun, and a few other surprises he’s learned to take with him when he’s hunting.
Time to dig for more treasure.
? ? ?
Ruth wakes up. The old nightmares have been joined by new ones. She stays curled up in bed fighting waves of despair. She wants to lie here forever.
Days of work, and she has nothing to show for it.
She’ll have to call Sarah Ding later, after she turns on the Regulator. She can tell her that Mona was probably not killed by a gang, but somehow had been caught up in events bigger than she could handle. How would that make Sarah feel better?
The image from yesterday’s news will not leave her mind, no matter how hard she tries to push it away.
Ruth struggles up and pulls up the article. She can’t explain it, but the image just looks wrong. Not having the Regulator on makes it hard to think.
She finds the crime scene photo of Mona’s bedroom and compares it with the image from the article. She looks back and forth.
Isn’t the basket of condoms on the wrong side of the bed?
The shot is taken from the left side of the bed. So the closet doors, with the mirrors on them, should be on the far side of the shot, behind the couple. But there’s only a blank wall behind them in the shot. Ruth’s heart is beating so fast that she feels faint.
The alarm beeps. Ruth glances up at the red numbers and turns the Regulator on.
The clock.
She looks back at the image. The alarm clock in the shot is tiny and fuzzy, but she can just make the numbers out. They’re backward.
Ruth walks steadily over to her laptop and begins to search online for the video. She finds it without much trouble and presses play.