China Gate

Prologue

Beijing

Raymond O. Flowers sat hunched over his office computer, his right index finger poised over the button of his mouse. He had entered the amount of $50,000,000.00 and placed the mouse pointer on a button labeled "Transmit." Should he transfer the money? It was a large amount that would be easy to spot by American law enforcement agencies.

He lifted his handsome, Cary Grant-like face and glanced out his high-rise window. The streets of Beijing were purged of buses, cars, and bicycles by the highly contagious and deadly SARS virus. Only the occasional pedestrian hurried past, features obscured by a surgical mask. A sweet breeze swayed trees with their buds and young blossoms, belying the dangerous germs that it bore.

Behind him, his department was eerily empty, cleared of his smoothly efficient Chinese and American staff. His young family waited in the lobby twelve floors below. Their bags were loaded in a taxi, which stood ready to bear them to the international airport.

He checked his pocket for his airplane tickets. By noon, he and his wife Carolyn and two small children could be out of the disease-ravaged country and on their way to San Francisco.

Everyone, from the President of the United States, to his company's head honchos, to his loving family, depended on him to make the final transfer into the President's bank account in the Cayman Islands.

But it was a decision he knew he would regret for the rest of his life.

He closed his eyes and pressed his index finger down. The mouse clicked, and fifty million dollars transferred instantly from China to a secret account halfway around the world. It was an illegal act that he prayed nobody would ever discover....

 

 

Eight months later, the following article appeared in the Washington Post, touching off both the Chinagate investigation and the search for Raymond O. Flowers.

 

By mid-winter, Raymond O. Flowers' family was deceased, his job was a distant memory, and he was vilified in the press by the White House. He was all alone, possibly abroad, and running scared, somewhere in the vast, unruly sea of humanity. Raymond O. Flowers had become the world's most wanted man.