Jackpot

33

Arrow Donaldson spent the morning regretting his involvement with Li Feng. He had known it would be risky to make a deal with her, to have her lie about her family and the Chinese government spying on the U.S. But he’d thought the risk would be from her family or the government, not from some two-bit Hollywood producer and a has-been gangster.

His original arrangement with Li Feng had been to get her a new identity and authentic papers so she could go to the U.S. and become famous as an actress or something. He’d never really bothered to ask her about it, because he didn’t care. This thing with Sonny Ma was tacked on to their deal, again without him paying too much attention to the specifics, and he figured it was something Ziggy Peng would handle quickly before the government delegation showed up in Macau. Now he was on his way to his stadium to meet with that delegation, to wow them with his power and his plan to remake the rural telecom market in the U.S. And all he could think about was how much he wished Billy Barnett and Sonny Ma were dead.

The delegates were already in the owner’s suite when he arrived, and his assistant mumbled something about diplomatic immunity with a shell-shocked look on her face before she scurried away.

“Gentlemen, I see you found your way to what will soon be the crown jewel of my empire in Macau and, hopefully, a gateway toward an even more advantageous relationship between Macau and the U.S.”

“Cut the crap, Arrow,” Bob Allen, the head of the FCC said, stepping forward. “We heard the Chinese girl was killed.”

“No, no, you’re mistaken. Li Feng is safe and sound in a protected bunker I arranged for her during our business here.”

“We had a meeting with the CIA this morning. We know she’s dead. The inspector general of the CIA was investigating the agent in charge of the operation before the FBI stepped in and took over the case.”

“The FBI? I don’t even know what to say to that. This is China, they have no jurisdiction here.”

“Something about a drone stolen from a U.S. defense contractor that was hacked through a U.S. computer server. All I know is an FBI agent showed up at a warehouse you own with a letter from the president of the United States giving them jurisdiction over the murder of a woman we are supposed to interview! Worse, we had to hear about it from a secretary at the CIA.”

“Millie Martindale,” Arrow said through clenched teeth.

“What else do you know that you haven’t shared with us?”

“She’s not a secretary. She works with Lance Cabot, the director of the CIA, on special projects.”

“Good for her. That still doesn’t answer the question of why you didn’t tell us about this murder.”

Arrow took a deep breath, silently went to the bar, and poured himself the largest drink he could without seeming desperate. He took a long gulp before returning to the group.

“I apologize for the confusion,” Arrow said. “This is a unique case and one that was put together quickly with as few people as possible knowing all of the details to maintain the witness’s safety.”

“You’ve told us that before. Get to the murder.”

“To help maintain Li Feng’s security, we used a decoy to move around town and deflect attention while we moved the real Li Feng into my secure bunker. Millie Martindale had the approval of Lance Cabot to handle the operation, so I trusted her and her agency and gave them control over the security of the decoy. Perhaps I was naïve given previous issues with how U.S. intelligence agencies have operated over here, but I thought Lance Cabot and I had built a better relationship than others in the past.”

Arrow knew that playing to the failures of the U.S. intelligence community was a fast-track to sympathy with this group, and it worked. Their murmurs of anger and frustration morphed into supportive nods and mumbles of camaraderie.

“I understand this has been a trying time for you, Arrow,” Allen said, “but you have to understand the position a dead girl puts all of us in.”

“It was never my intent to put any of you in an uncomfortable situation. The good news is that the woman you are scheduled to interview tomorrow, the woman all of you came here to meet, is still alive and under the protection of the best private security money can buy. There is certainly a place for limited governmental involvement in things like this, but I think recent events have shown that there really is no substitute for private industry.”

Before anyone in the group could think too long about what they’d heard, Arrow topped off all of their drinks, rounded up the most attractive women working in the office adjacent to the construction site, and whisked them all off on a tour of what he called the “cathedral to American-Sino relations through the religion of basketball.”

When the tour was done and the government delegation sufficiently inebriated and driven back to their hotel, Arrow flopped into his office chair and called his secret weapon in Hong Kong.