Chasing the Monkey King Read online

  The ferry ride to Lopez Island was unusually rough—especially once the vessel rounded Shannon Point and entered Rosario Strait, one of the main commercial shipping routes between Vancouver, British Columbia, and the open Pacific. A hard rain continued to fall from a layer of low, dark overcast. The clouds couldn’t have been more than a few hundred feet above the cold, choppy, white-capped salt water. Some of the clouds trailed tendrils of mist that reached all the way down to the surface, as if tethering the sky to the earth.

  The cavernous vessel rocked this way and that as Severin squinted through the thick weather in an attempt to make out the San Juan Islands through the forward observation windows. Headwinds pushed the rainwater sideways across the glass, distorting the view. But before long, Severin was able to just make out the dark, shadowy hills of Decatur Island a few degrees to port of their heading, with Blakely Island a few degrees to starboard. Once they passed between those two islands, he’d be able to see Lopez.

  *****

  Though he’d managed to start his car in order to board the ferry at the Anacortes terminal, Severin couldn’t repeat the trick when it came time to disembark on Lopez Island. A deckhand tried to get him moving with a portable jump starter. But corrosion on Severin’s battery terminals made it difficult for the deckhand to get an efficient contact with his clamps, and he quickly gave up despite Severin’s insistence that he’d had no trouble jumping it earlier in the day. Another crewmember pushed his car off the ferry with a squat, yellow service vehicle they had onboard.

  They left him in a paved turnoff just off the dock. And there, with a heavy rain pattering on the roof of his car, he sat, watching the other ferry traffic disembark and disappear up and over the heavily forested hill separating the ferry terminal from the rest of the island. Before long, a handful of waiting cars boarded, the gates closed, and the ferry steamed away for Shaw, Orcas, and San Juan Islands, disappearing around the misty, rocky point to the west, leaving him alone.

  Seeing no alternative, he rang, for the second time that day, the number for Orin Thorvaldsson. As before, the phone was answered not by Thorvaldsson, but by one of his mellow-voiced and exceedingly polite employees. Severin explained his situation, and half an hour later, three men in two different green Land Rovers gave him a good look as they passed by, circled around, and pulled to the curb behind him. They stayed in their cars for a minute, appearing to focus on their smart-phones, leaving Severin to wonder whether he should initiate contact. Their delay got him wondering. Were they ordinary employees or security goons? If the latter, what was Thorvaldsson mixed up in that he felt he needed a security team on an idyllic, pastoral island like Lopez? Did he consider himself a target because of his wealth, or because of something else? And why the delay? Were they checking his license plate against some sort of quasi-legal private sector database? Making sure he was who he said he was?

  At last, they emerged from their cars with a strangely precise simultaneity, and Severin studied them in his rearview mirror as they approached. They were dressed in jeans and matching baggy raincoats that made it impossible to see whether they were wearing holsters. As Severin rolled down his window, a trickle of cold water poured in, wetting his thigh.

  “Mr. Severin?” asked a tall, broad-shouldered blond man with a high, tight haircut and a neck and chin like an old-school linebacker.

  “That’s me.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Paul. We spoke on the phone. I’ll give you a ride down to Hughes Bay while my colleagues get your car jump-started. When they do, they’ll follow us to the house.”

  “Okay.”

  Severin got out of his car and was headed for the passenger door of Paul’s Land Rover when Paul stepped in front of him. After apologizing and asking for permission in his kindly voice, and as one of his associates held a large umbrella over Severin’s head, Paul ran a metal detecting magnetometer wand up and down the length of Severin’s body.

  “I don’t even own a gun anymore,” Severin said.

  “Thanks for your patience. Again, I apologize, but it’s an unfortunate necessity for us.”

  “No worries. The world’s full of creeps.”

  Before long, they were speeding south, through the forests and falling maple leaves, alongside golden pastures dotted with sheep, cows, and horses, past a small village on a quiet harbor, and at last down a lonely dead-end road to a set of impressive wood and iron gates. Paul entered a long key code, the gates swung open, and they made their way down a driveway that had to be a quarter-mile long, to a circle drive in front of a Pacific Northwest contemporary style mansion fronted with enormous rhododendrons and flanked by Japanese maples in vivid fall colors. Reds, oranges, yellows. The house was sided in cedar shakes. The window frames were a bright white. And the steep roof, which was a charcoal gray metal, angled upward, away from the driveway. The far side of the house must have been three stories high, with its windows facing picturesque, quiet little Hughes Bay.

  As they parked and got out, a tall, late middle-aged blond man, presumably Thorvaldsson, stood under a huge umbrella, just in front of a wisteria arbor that framed the front entryway.

  “Mr. Severin?”

  “Call me Lars.”

  “I’m Orin. Thanks for coming. Let’s get you somewhere dry.”

  Thorvaldsson walked him through the massive wooden front door, down a corridor lined with hanging, expensive looking Chilkat blankets. The blankets bore woven representations of ancient Salish, Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian spirits like the raven, bear, and orca. Severin’s jaw nearly dropped as they emerged into an enormous great room where a large fire roared in a river-rock fireplace. The room had heavy timbers crossing the high cantilevered ceiling, walls with elaborate cedar trim work, and pedestal-mounted shadow boxes holding tribal artwork. One side of the room was a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that Severin guessed were 18 feet high. They framed an incredible view spanning the entirety of Hughes Bay, in the middle of which a lone sailboat sat at anchor in the mist. There couldn’t have been more than three or four other houses on the bay’s rocky, forested shores. It looked like a postcard. Below the windows, a long, sloping yard lined with yellowing Yoshino cherry trees ran down to the water’s edge where a floating dock extended out into the bay. In the foreground, just below the windows from which Severin was examining the surroundings, was a vacant helicopter pad complete with airport-grade perimeter lights and a windsock.

  The house was immaculate, perfectly decorated, perfectly furnished. Everything in its proper place. Everything matched to the dominating dark browns and grays. To Severin, the overall effect was cold, despite the roaring fire. As he made his way through the room, his eyes were drawn to the one source of vivid color—a large wooden bowl of flawless, photo-quality fruit that sat in the middle of a dark barn-wood table. Grapes, bananas, pears, oranges, apples. He had to suppress a grin as it occurred to him that if he reached for an apple, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise if he set off some sort of burglar alarm.

  “Can I interest you in a glass of wine?” Thorvaldsson asked. “A bourbon maybe?”

  “Bourbon would be great.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “With one ice cube, if it isn’t a bother.”

  “No bother at all,” Thorvaldsson said as he took a seat in a brown leather wingback by the fire, nodding to a young Asian woman—apparently another employee—who’d materialized in the doorframe to an adjoining corridor. She wore a black button-down shirt and black pants that made her look like a catering employee. “I’ll have the same. A double?”

  “You speak my language,” Severin said as the silent woman disappeared back down the corridor. His gaze drifted from the towering stone fireplace and chimney, up to the timbered ceiling, then back over to the wall of windows. “This is quite a house.”

  “Thank you. It was designed by the architectural firm of Christiansen & Lund, Copenhagen.”

  “Denmark? I would have guessed it was a northwest
designer. It fits right in.”

  “I find that there are notable similarities between the architectural styles of the Pacific Northwest and Scandinavia. But then, given that so many Scandinavians settled here—at least in the Puget Sound area—I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense.” He gazed into the fire. “How was your journey? Paul said that you began east of the mountains. That’s quite a trek.”

  “I’m used to it. I drive a lot for my work. And speaking of work, if you don’t mind my asking, what does a person do to be able to afford custom Danish architecture on such a grand scale?” Severin asked, looking all about. “Are you one of those Microsoft millionaires I envy with such heartache?”

  “You haven’t heard of us? Thorvaldsson Trading?”

  “Should I have?”

  “Not necessarily. At least not in your line of work. But we’re in the business section of The Seattle Times a lot. We’re an import-export house. No particular focus. Wherever we see an exploitable margin in an unfulfilled market, we jump on the product. We contract with manufacturers, then set up our own exporters, importers, and distributors. Pacific Rim, mostly. A little bit of business with Latin America. Sometimes Europe. My siblings are co-directors. The whole thing was handed down to us by our late father. And really, his own father, who emigrated from Oslo in 1923 with little more than the clothes on his back, got him started.”

  “A family business.”

  Thorvaldsson nodded. “For better or for worse.”

  “And you run your business from here?”

  “No. I usually only use this place on weekends. I have an office in Seattle, in the Columbia Center. My main residence is in Broadmoor.” He slapped his hands on the leather arms of his chair as if readying to make an announcement. “I’ll cut to the chase. I don’t know how much Pete Carlsen’s nephew, uh … .”

  “Greg.”

  “Yes. I don’t know how much Greg told you. But in short, our family has had to endure this nightmare—the disappearance of our Kristin—without enough information to reach any sort of closure. Oh—here is our bourbon,” he said as the woman reappeared with a heavy silver tray bearing a crystal decanter, ice bucket, and two crystal tumblers. Without a word, she set it on the coffee table, placed a single ice cube in each glass, and poured. “This is a 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle,” Thorvaldsson said. “Supposed to be all the rage in bourbon circles at the moment. Harder than hell to get hold of. And I’ll let you judge whether it’s worth the $1,700 I paid a bourbon scalper for the one bottle.”

  Only the insecure insist on telling you the price of what they’re serving, Severin thought as he took a good sip and sat back on the large couch opposite Thorvaldsson. “It’s good.” But I wouldn’t have paid more than $40 for it. “Thank you.”

  “So, as I was saying, we’re looking for information. My niece, my sister’s daughter, Kristin Powell, was working for the U.S. Department of Commerce as a type of international trade dispute investigator. She was based at the agency headquarters in Washington, D.C. But her assignment took her and her partner to a remote, rural area of China, where they were conducting a sort of on-site audit and investigation of a Chinese company called Yinzhen Sorghum Processing Company Limited, or YSP for short—a processor and exporter of sweet sorghum syrup.”

  “Of what?”

  “That’s what I said. Sweet sorghum syrup. Apparently it’s something they pour over biscuits in the South. I’ve heard it described as being like a cross between molasses and honey. Something half way between each. Anyway, by all accounts, Kristin and her partner wound up their investigation of YSP and were on their way back to Shanghai to catch a flight back to the United States. They never made it. Specifically, if I can even call it that, they disappeared somewhere between their worksite and Shanghai. The U.S. State Department conducted a pathetically brief investigation, took two months to produce an inconclusive report, and called it good. That’s where we stand. But that isn’t good enough. Not by a damned mile. We deserve better.”

  “Look, Mr. Thor—”

  “Orin, please.”

  “Orin. There are a few things that need to be right out in the open before we have any further discussion on this. The first thing is my background. I don’t know how much you—”

  “I know enough. It doesn’t concern me. In fact, I think you’re a perfect fit for what we’re looking for.”

  Severin stared at the man for a moment, wondering what the hell that meant, then shrugged his shoulders. “Fair enough. The second thing is that, because this involves an overseas incident involving an employee of the U.S. government, this is the sacred province of the State Department, and I doubt very much—”

  “You mean the same State Department that apparently can’t process a simple passport application in less than 90 days anymore? You mean the same State Department that produced this travesty of an investigative report?” he said, drawing a document from a leather folder on the coffee table and handing it to Severin.

  The man liked to cut you off mid-sentence, Severin observed. He was probably the type who measured minutes by dollars.

  “And,” Severin continued, ignoring the interruption while thumbing through the very thin report, “I doubt very much that I’d be able to gather any more information than the State Department investigators did. I’m sure they did all they could.”

  “You’re sure? Take a look at that thing. Does it strike you as at all thin? Does it strike you as mere window dressing? Does it strike you, perhaps, as the product of people who didn’t want the real answers?”

  Severin had to admit, the report was unusually thin. In his own experience, reports of even the most minor of investigations typically had at least twice as many references to witness interviews. Family, friends, co-workers, eye-witnesses, suspects. This report referenced barely a handful—most of them residents of China. The conclusion section offered nothing but conjecture. It seemed reasonably likely, according to the State Department, that Kristin Powell and her male co-worker were abducted after attempting to obtain transport from the main airport of the Chinese port city of Qingdao, Shandong Province, to the Qingdao Shangri-la Hotel, downtown. Then, the report theorized, they were robbed, killed, and disposed of. The last interviewed person to see them alive—an American attorney who represented YSP in the investigation, and who had been traveling with them—said he and YSP’s van driver left Kristin and her colleague curbside at the Qingdao airport with a slim chance of catching the last flight to Shanghai that evening. According to the attorney, if they missed the flight, they intended to grab a taxi to the hotel. The next day, in a suburb of Qingdao, someone used the pair’s U.S. government travel credit cards to purchase gasoline, and later the same day attempted, unsuccessfully, to use the cards to purchase various items of consumer electronics and furniture. Chinese customs had no record of Kristin Powell or her colleague ever leaving the country, and there was no record of them boarding a flight to Shanghai.

  “We refuse to accept the State Department’s half-baked conclusion,” Thorvaldsson said, a hint of desperation in his voice. “They have no proof.”

  Meaning they didn’t find a body, Severin thought.

  Aside from the brevity and seeming insufficiency of the report, there were several things that immediately jumped out at Severin as unusual or warranting further inquiry. First, the report was heavily redacted—sometimes with entire sentences blacked out. Second, the table of contents made reference to a classified annex that was left off of the public version of the report provided to Thorvaldsson. Yet the case revolved, ostensibly, around some sort of widely-known and entirely public international trade dispute. Why would the government feel compelled to redact or otherwise exclude so much information? In Severin’s experience, this usually only happened with documents concerning matters of national security—or espionage.

  Additionally, one of the last people to see Kristin alive was her husband, Wesley. Like Kristin, Wesley was an investigator with the U.S. Department of Comme
rce and was scheduled to be in China the week after Kristin was there, at a job site in a different province. However, the report noted that he arrived early, met up with Kristin at her hotel in Yinzhen just after her work concluded, and then rode with the team part of the way to the airport before asking to be let out of the team’s van, alone, on the side of a rural road. From there, he allegedly found his way to his own job site hundreds of kilometers away. The report didn’t even address why he got out of the van.

  “I see your point,” Severin said. “This doesn’t seem very thorough.”

  “They didn’t even send American investigators to this Qingdao place,” he said, pronouncing it Kingdow.

  “In Chinese, the letter q is pronounced like ch,” Severin said. “Ching-dow, not King-dow. Regardless, it’s a serious possibility that what’s in this report is really all that could be found, barring a miracle or detectives with ESP. In any case, I’m not at all confident that I could learn any more than this. The case presents a number of daunting obstacles to say the least.”

  “You don’t speak Chinese. You don’t have jurisdiction. You can’t compel anybody to talk to you. I know all of this. It’s already factored into the equation. Regardless, you might be able to find a lot of what you need on this side of the Pacific.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Actually, YSP’s exclusive U.S. importer, Sun Ocean Trade, is located in Seattle. Might be a good place to start. Plus, most of the people you’ll probably want to interview live in Washington, D.C., which I understand you’re already quite familiar with.”

  “I lived there for three years when I worked for Customs. Still.”

  “Still what? Do you mean why you? You have investigative experience. You have experience working overseas. Presumably, you have some familiarity with Pacific Rim international trade processes and practices, which at least in theory could prove relevant here.”

  “But no experience with respect to trade in Chinese sweet sorghum.”