Jackpot

16

Bingo was still planning how to spend his bonus when the security guard from Arrow Donaldson’s condo building called to let him know that the Americans had arrived and were on their way up to the penthouse to get Li Feng.

Li Feng.

The woman whose family was as responsible as the Chinese government for what had happened to his wife, and led him to working for a man like Ziggy Peng. After the government had murdered his lead programmer on the deepfake video app team, they sent Bingo’s wife to a work camp — and threatened to do the same to Bingo unless he agreed to go undercover to stop the Americans from recruiting high-level spies with gambling addictions. They put him in touch with Arrow Donaldson, who pawned him off on Ziggy Peng to do the dirty business they didn’t want to be traced back to themselves.

Bingo thought of his wife, ripped away from their house in the middle of the night. Later he’d found out from Arrow Donaldson that the real reason the government punished him was because he refused to sell his app to QuiTel for peanuts.

He would use his bonus from killing the American woman and attacking Li Feng to hire an investigator who’d had much success finding people who’d run afoul of the government. Those who survived were mostly dumped into the labor camps that were off the grid and so primitively run that Bingo’s hacking skills were useless in tracking her.

Bingo pushed those thoughts out of his head so he could concentrate on the task at hand. First he had to hack into the drone. Fate was with him that day, as the drone was assigned to an aerial patrol route very close to the building where Li Feng was staying, making it easier to reroute its path without too much attention. By the time the person monitoring the drone realized something had gone wrong, Bingo would be done.

As the drone approached the penthouse, Bingo typed in the code to raise the window shades in the entire penthouse. Through the monitor showing the feed from the drone’s camera, Bingo saw the group of Americans scatter. Then he saw Li Feng.

He forgot about the Americans and he forgot about the bonus. All he could think about was the night that his wife disappeared, and the look on her face as the men with guns dragged her out of the apartment. Li Feng had the same look on her face when Bingo pulled the trigger.

Arrow Donaldson had already yanked Millie around once about transferring Li Feng to her custody. She wasn’t going to let him get away with doing it a second time. She didn’t even care that the woman pretending to be Li Feng could overhear her call.

“Is Li Feng with you yet?” Arrow asked by way of greeting.

“The woman in this apartment is dressed like Li Feng, and she says her name is Li Feng, but I don’t—”

“Then your intelligence training should tell you that she is Li Feng.”

“My intelligence training is telling me that you’re lying to me and avoiding transferring Li Feng to my custody once again.”

“I knew you were the wrong person for this job. You can’t even tell a real person from an impostor.”

Determined not to let Arrow get her riled up so she’d say something she’d regret, Millie looked out the window to calm herself — just in time to see a drone buzzing outside. She assumed one of the agents was playing a joke on her and was about to yell at the group when the drone began firing. Millie dove toward the woman posing as Li Feng while one of the agents fired at the drone with an assault rifle.

When the drone finally exploded, Millie waved for the agent to go and track down as much of the drone’s wreckage as he could find. Her attention was focused on the woman bleeding in the middle of the room. Millie wondered if she should call in an emergency response team. But once she was standing over the woman, she realized the woman definitely wasn’t Li Feng, and the woman definitely wasn’t alive.