Tomorrow Girl - A Short Story in Shanghai

Part 3

Kangqiao Industrial Park

In the dead of night, Sarah climbed carefully over the barbed wire fence and dismantled the alarm system on the outer perimeter of the building. She entered the vast, dark chamber of the main production line, walking slowly with her flashlight. Hundreds of assembly tables were crowded with paint cans, synthetic hair, plastic limbs and other materials required to make the dolls.

At the far end of the production floor, a storage area connected to loading docks stacked high with supply crates. Sarah studied the labels for every shipment that had arrived in the past week. She realized that everything came from a common supplier except for one group of crates from Guangzhou. She read the Cantonese labels and opened several boxes from Guanghzou shipment. They were all full of glass eyes.

“What’s your favorite part, Mommy? I like their eyes.”

Strong hands crushed her throat like a vice. She swung both fists behind her but the assailant deftly dodged her blows. She knew it was only a matter of seconds before she either ran out of oxygen or the attacker snapped her windpipe.

As the hands pressed in with full force, a stray finger touched her lip. She bit down hard and tasted her attacker’s blood. He grunted in pain and released his grip. A gun shot rang out overheard and the man sprinted into the shadows.

David rushed forward and ran his finger across her neck to check the injury, keeping his revolver ready in the other hand. The assailant had escaped.

“How did you know I’d be here?” she asked in a weak voice.

“You said you needed to see the factory. I trusted you to do what you said, regardless of whether you had permission,” David said. “I am sorry I doubted you.”

“The man who attacked me, he must be the one who killed Reynolds.”

“His name is Dragon Cloud.”

“He has a plan to kill many more people in America, children like my daughter. I think I know what it is.”

**

Shanghai Police Counter-Terrorism Unit, Undisclosed Location

It was dawn by the time David and Sarah reached the conference room. They were momentarily surprised to find Zhou and O’Reilly side-by-side poring over the same case files. A day earlier both men had given them specific orders not to share information with the other side. The delicate dance of suspicion and cooperation could change from one moment to the next. Trust takes time, unless you don’t have any other option.

Zhou greeted Sarah with a respectful gaze and firm handshake. “Your instincts were correct, Agent Warner,” the Chief Inspector explained. “The company that began shipping the glass eye parts last week is not an official supplier to Tomorrow Girl. Someone in the factory must have tampered with the shipping records. We did a background check on this new mystery supplier and sure enough it is linked to a holding company owned by Dragon Cloud.”

“Did you run a lab test on one of the eyes?”

“We did and the results are terrifying,” O’Connor said. “Inside the glass casing there is a capsule with trace amounts of powdered cesium-137, a deadly radioactive material for sale on the black market. The capsule is light enough that it wouldn’t be detected passing through customs. But the minute one of these eyes is damaged enough to break the capsule, it becomes a dirty bomb. Each case of direct exposure could kill hundreds of people through contamination.”

“So the Dragon Cloud was going to use the dolls as his ‘unconventional weapon’, creating death and panic until we paid his ransom,” Sarah said.