Free The Finder: A Novel by Colin Harrison Page B

that Chen had worried that someone else might steal the idea and set up a competing operation—if not in New York, then in London or Paris or any other Western city where the Chinese did a great deal of business.
    But that was then and this was now. Which company had gotten wind of what she was doing? Which company had sent the two men and the big truck after her? Why had they also killed the two Mexican girls? I am partly responsible, she thought sadly, I endangered them. Who had claimed their bodies? Who would tell their families in Mexico? They would want to know why this had happened.
    Could she have expected the attack? There were no complaints on file, and the accounts receivable were more or less up to date. Her company had been aggressively stealing information from eight firms in the last six months, and she could easily check the recent stock prices of them, but that would tell her almost nothing. Her brother and his cronies could be building a conventional position in a stock, they could have bet that it would fall, or they could be dealing with a company's competitors or suppliers. They could even be using her good information to sell disinformation. The one thing she did know was that they preferred smaller American companies for which the trading volume was low enough that they could move the price with their buying or selling.
    The CorpServe ploy had been in business for four years now, and in that time it was fair to say they had been spectacularly successful. Her brother had purchased three large buildings in Shanghai, built himself a new house, bought an apartment in Hong Kong for one of his mistresses, and started getting his face massaged each morning.
    And had Chen given Jin Li much in return? No, not enough. A good salary, by New York standards. By Chinese standards, a fortune. But no security. The opposite of security, even as he'd gotten rich.
She
was the one who could be prosecuted in the United States, thrown into federal prison or deported. The one the men had been after. Her brother needed to find her now, she knew, because his whole empire ran on the stream of information he received from her. No one else at CorpServe knew what to do, what to look for. No one else could be trusted to be loyal. Chen and his investors had taken huge speculative positions that required that Jin Li's hands and eyes be connected to their minds—to their
money.
A discarded scrap of paper on one side of the globe could conceivably be convertible to millions of dollars on the other side. Chen could not afford to lose touch with her, lose control of CorpServe, or have her disappearance known about. Her brother, she knew, was desperate now.
    But maybe she didn't want him to find her. And maybe he would figure that out. Chen would call Mr. Ling, an old Hong Kong lawyer who still worked in a little office above Canal Street in Chinatown, and Mr. Ling would figure a way to get into Jin Li's apartment and find her bank statements, credit card activity. Well, let them do that. She had plenty of cash set—
    Wait! A noise?
    She crept to the window, slid it open higher. Did she dare look out? Someone gazing up would easily see her.
    She hazarded a peek out of the window.
    Nothing.
    She glanced at her cell phone. She wanted to turn it on but knew not to. Chen would have called, just to see if she picked up. To talk, yes, but to continue their ongoing argument. That he had sex with Russian and Eastern European prostitutes meant nothing to him, but the factthat Jin Li preferred not to sleep with Chinese men was an insult to him. Why are Chinese men no good for you? he had screamed. She didn't have an answer. It was no one particular thing. She liked the whiskers on American and German men, she admitted it. She liked how they were taller and heavier than most Chinese men. You have a colonial mentality, her brother said, in your head. It is deep in your head, like one hundred years ago. Can you not see that? Her answer to her brother: