15th Affair (Women's Murder Club 15)

hink they did that on their own?”

Joe said, “I think so. Chinese intelligence was apparently stunned by the crash. They did a slick pivot and tried to blame it on the CIA. And we blamed ourselves—for not getting the intel in time to prevent the crash. The head of our internal affairs unit had to find out if I was involved. Who could blame him? After all, I was running the Muller-Chan operation.

“I was locked up and interrogated, seriously—that’s why I couldn’t call you, Linds. I was in an underground location, I don’t even know where.”

He sighed deeply, then said, “I don’t know if I have everything exactly right—but that’s pretty much what I know or have reasonable theories about.

“The Chinese made a lot of mistakes. They’re amateurs at the intelligence game. Maybe Ali Muller made mistakes as well.”

I asked Joe, “Do you think she killed Chan?”

CHAPTER 88

JOE GRIPPED THE wheel and gunned the car along the asphalt straightaway for long minutes before saying, “I’ve asked myself if Alison was the shooter a couple hundred times. Friendship aside, just bearing down on the facts, I think she’s been playing both sides—working for us, and working for the Chinese, and doing a pretty seamless job of it.”

I heard what Joe had said, but his answer was so off the hook, I had to ask him to say it again.

“Are you telling me that Muller is a double agent? That she is actually spying on us for the Chinese?”

“I’m speculating, Lindsay, but it makes sense. If she’s working for MSS, then she’s behind the murders in the hotel. Chan was betraying the Chinese by leaking classified information to her. He was an enemy and had to be eliminated. It’s almost as if they switched loyalties with each other, Chan wanting to get off the train that Muller had just gotten on.”

“You’re saying she would have shot Chan because he was a traitor?”

“So my theory goes. She knew that Chrissy and Bud had eyes on her from the adjacent room. So if in fact Ali is the shooter, she had to take them out and take their laptops at the same time.”

It was as if I were back in that room, looking at those two young people bloodied and dead on the floor, their power cords still plugged to the wall.

Joe said, “Chrissy and Bud hadn’t overheard any information about the defector’s travel plans. I was on the way up to check in with them, maybe wrap it up for the day— but the elevator took a long time to get down to the lobby floor. When it arrived, everyone standing around piled in. That car must have stopped on every floor.”

Joe ran a hand over his face and seemed to be back in the moment when his operation had come crashing down.

“It was all over by the time I got to the fourteenth floor. The kids were dead in 1418. Alison didn’t answer the door to 1420. I must’ve missed her by minutes, or seconds. Otherwise, she probably would have killed me, too. I learned later that Chan was dead. If my theory is right, she was shutting down her undercover job for us and cauterizing loose ends.”

“But why would she have changed sides, Joe?”

He shrugged. “I can think of a dozen maybes: payback for some long-held grudge, or she got an offer she couldn’t refuse. She’s crazy enough to have done it for the thrill.”

“She might have killed Shirley Chan,” I said.

“OK, yeah. It makes sense if she was mopping up. She wouldn’t take the chance that Chan was playing her and telling everything to his wife. Another sickening theory.”

Joe stopped talking. He turned up the heat, adjusted the airflow, and took a pull from his bottle of water.

My head was throbbing from all this information. I was trying to process it all, thinking that if Muller was a double agent—if it was true—then Joe felt responsible for everything Muller had done. Or maybe Joe, too, was readying himself to cauterize loose ends of his own.

Christ. No one knew where I was. Was I putting my trust in a man I didn’t really know? I shook my head, trying to dislodge that terrifying thought.

Joe said, “I know. It’s unbelievable, and I haven’t confronted her. Maybe I’ve got her all wrong.”

I said, “So why did she come all the way out here?”

“If she’s gone over to the Chinese, BC is not a bad jumping-off point to China. And that’s all I’ve got.”

Joe’s theory had the ring of truth, but was it true?

I asked him—actually, I blurted it out.

“Joe, are you trying to catch Muller, or save her?”