“Daisy?” he asked. “You’re talking about Daisy?”
I nodded.
“Shit!” he said. “You better come in.”
Chapter 61
Shoulders sagging and with an air of bewilderment and defeat, Gavin Hudson led us down the corridor to his apartment.
It was decorated like an upmarket hotel, with eye-catching pieces of furniture, engaging abstract art, and beautiful coffee-table books displayed around the place: stylish but lacking the feel of a proper home.
He shut the living-room door behind us.
“Have a seat.”
He gestured to two sofas facing each other either side of a glass door, which opened onto a large balcony. I could see the seemingly endless city beyond.
“I’m assuming you have proof of this allegation,” he said.
I signaled Hua, who pulled his tablet computer from a shoulder bag and handed it to Hudson. The embassy staffer scrolled through the photos of Daisy and Liu Bao.
He shook his head in dismay. “She introduced me to him. Claimed she’d met him during an interview for a magazine. Said he would be a good contact for intel on trade and finance. How did this get by State?”
I shrugged.
“I hardly know the guy. We’ve had a beer a couple times. That’s it,” Hudson continued.
“Sounds as though they were just getting started on you,” I replied.
He looked relieved. If it had gone any farther, something like this could have ruined his career. Or made a traitor of him.
“Daisy?” he said, rising. He put his head through a doorway. “Daisy honey, could you come in here?” He was grimacing, but his voice gave away nothing much, just the slightest edge to it.
I wasn’t expecting her to be in the apartment and exchanged a look with Zhang Daiyu, who seemed calm about the unexpected encounter. It would be a good opportunity for us to put Wells in a tight spot.
Hudson returned to his seat opposite us and a moment later Daisy Wells came into the room, dressed in an oversized T-shirt and little else, having obviously just woken up.
“Honey?” she asked Hudson, still coming round. “Who are these people?”
“Private detectives,” he replied. “They say you work for Liu Bao.”
She tried to conceal the shock she felt at the accusation but wasn’t entirely successful.
“What? Bullshit!”
He showed her the photos on Hua’s tablet and she crumbled almost immediately.
“He recruited me out of college. Said he needed a cultural advisor.”
She sat next to Hudson and put her hand on his knee, but he moved away.
“I know I should have told you, honey.” She started to cry. “I never meant for this to happen. He told me to befriend you in Washington. That you’d be coming to China soon.”
“So he has good sources,” Zhang Daiyu observed. “To know about US State Department postings in advance.”
“I didn’t realize that... I didn’t know what he wanted. I still don’t. As I got to know you, Gavin, I fell in love, but by then I was trapped. Liu threatened to expose me to you... to the embassy... unless I kept doing what he told me to do. I begged him to stop but he refused to let me go. He said I was to introduce him to you and help you understand that your future lay in furthering China’s interests.”
“Honey trap,” I remarked. “One of the oldest tricks in the book. He got to Daisy with money and used her to get to you.”
“Have you been sleeping with him?” Gavin asked her.
The silence that followed told him everything.
“How could you do this?” he asked, his face flushing red.
For a moment his anger surged and I thought I might have to intervene, but as I tensed his rage subsided and was replaced by sorrow.
“I’m so glad you caught this,” he said to me. “Thank you.”
“You’ll report it?” I asked.
“Report it?” Daisy echoed, concern in her voice.
Gavin nodded.
“Mr. Hudson has an obligation to report any compromised contact to his superiors,” I explained. “They’ll bring in specialists to assess the situation.”
“I didn’t mean... I’m sorry. I...” She was sobbing now.
Gavin’s eyes were full of sadness. It was clear that life as he’d known it was over. He would almost certainly be transferred back to Washington for a time. If she was lucky enough to escape charges, Daisy would not be going with him. The State Department would put an end to their relationship.
“If I can ever repay the favor...” he said.
“We would like any non-sensitive intelligence she might be able to offer that relates to Liu Bao’s operations,” I replied.
“But I don’t know anything,” Daisy protested. “He always kept me in the dark. I should never have taken his money.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” I agreed.
“What about Private?” Zhang Daiyu asked. “Did he ever say anything about an investigation agency called Private?”
Daisy wiped her eyes and thought for a moment.
“Yes,” she said. “I heard him talking on the phone once. He said Private would be targeted. An example would be made of them.”
I looked at Zhang Daiyu and could see she was equally troubled by this revelation.
“He said that?” I confirmed. “An example would be made of them?”
Daisy nodded.
Why would a powerful Beijing mobster with connections to Chinese Intelligence want to target my detective agency?
Chapter 62
We left Gavin and Daisy to deal with the mess Liu Bao had made of their lives and took the elevator down from the apartment.
Daisy had been searching for easy money after college, and Liu, seeing an opportunity in a beautiful, intelligent journalism major, had taken a long-term bet she would be useful. I’d encountered this sort of strategic planning before, in Moscow, but few people could countenance the thought process involved in formulating espionage operations on a ten- or twenty-year time scale. Like the old urban myth of the frog growing accustomed to being boiled in a pot, by the time Daisy realized there was something sinister about Liu Bao’s intentions, she was in too deep and had been sufficiently compromised for him to have leverage on her. Now Liu had started the same process with Gavin Hudson, finding something he desired — in this case Daisy — and using her to compromise him. Thankfully, we’d exposed the plan at an early stage and Gavin was unlikely to suffer any long-term adverse effects on his career.
Daisy was a different matter. The State Department might decide to prosecute, or they could flip her and run her as an asset to get intel from inside Liu Bao’s organization. Either way, it was clear by the time we left that her relationship with Gavin was over.
“I still don’t understand why Liu would target us,” I said as the elevator took us down to the ground floor. “We’ve never crossed paths with him before, right?”
“Never,” Zhang Daiyu agreed.
“Who can be sure though?” Hua added. “He has interests everywhere. He’s brokered arms deals in Eastern Europe and Africa, financed mining activities in Asia and Australia, and has technology investments in North America. He has interests in energy production and mining in South America. A different branch of Private might have crossed his path and not even known it.”
Hua was right, but this felt too targeted to be retaliation for something that hadn’t even registered on our radar.
“I think we need to go back to the beginning,” I said. “I want to talk to David Zhou again. Do you think you can arrange it?”
Zhang Daiyu exhaled sharply.
“Maybe you don’t know how difficult it is to get into Qincheng,” she replied.
“Maybe I don’t,” I said. “But I do know how capable you are, so if I ask the impossible it’s because I know you can do it.”