Shadow of the Dragon

34

Fu Bohai woke to the hum of his mobile phone on the nightstand next to his hotel bed. He peeled back the Egyptian cotton sheet, sodden with sweat, and rolled away from the naked Russian woman who lay draped across his chest and thigh.

She stirred, smacking her lips in sleep. “Tell them to crawl away and die,” she said, her Russian thick with the aftereffects of too much blini and Ossetra caviar, and precisely the right amount of vodka and sex.

Her name was Talia Nvotova. They’d met that evening at a Chinese embassy function in Moscow where Fu had been tasked to look into a Chinese diplomat suspected of selling secrets to the Russians. They were “strategic partners,” Russia and China, tenuous allies. But, as the adage went, there were friendly countries, but not friendly intelligence services.

Fu Bohai was known by his superiors to be particularly unfriendly, and it was this quality for which he was sent to Moscow. His direct supervisor, Admiral Zheng, who commanded PLAN intelligence, operated by what he called the fifty-fifty rule. If Fu was fifty percent convinced that the diplomat had turned traitor, he was to take care of the matter then and there, sparing the Motherland the bother of a trial. Beijing had suspected for over a year that someone within the Ministry of State Security or PRC military intelligence was leaking classified information to both the Russians and the Americans. They hadn’t narrowed the field very far as of yet, and could not very well approach the SVR and say, “One of your spies who has betrayed China is also betraying you to the Americans,” though Fu Bohai suspected it would come to that eventually if the traitor could not be found, in order to plug the leak. He smiled at the idea of the mushroom cloud that would cause in both countries.

Officially, Talia was a Russian/Mandarin translator for Moscow state television. Her surname was Czech, but she was a Russian citizen. Fu made certain of that. Well-known in diplomatic circles, Talia had been invited to the function because of her beauty and ability to keep the conversation going. Fu Bohai felt she was probably a case officer with SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service akin to MSS and the American CIA. He was a newcomer to the embassy, so the alluring Miss Nvotova had naturally done her job and cozied up to him at the party. It did not hurt that he was over two meters tall, had a boyish face but the experience of forty-two years, and could bench-press over a hundred and fifty kilos. He happily went along with the getting-to-know-you charade, inviting her to stroll with him around the park across Druzhby Street from the embassy. Moscow springs are notoriously chilly and Talia looked ravishingly Russian in her silver fox coat and sable ushanka. She’d complimented his fedora; he’d complimented her cold pink cheeks. They’d ended up together at his hotel, where she looked ravishingly Russian with nothing on at all.

She tried to roll back to him, but he pushed her away again, harder this time, giving himself distance.

She snorted, collapsing onto her back in a huff, not bothering with the sheet while he lifted his fedora to retrieve the phone under it.

Fu spoke in Chinese, knowing Talia understood every word. He shifted in bed so his thigh ran alongside hers as he talked, skin to skin. He kept the volume of the phone low, so she could hear only his side of the conversation.

It was Admiral Zheng.

SURVEYOR had information that someone from the CIA office in Albania had spoken with a Uyghur refugee who had links to separatist groups in China, possibly the Wuming. It was weak, as far as intelligence product went, but it had caused some movement from the Americans. The admiral wanted Fu to speak to the Uyghur and the woman from CIA — find out what they knew that might help lead him to Medina Tohti, and then do with them what he did best. Fu did not know the entirety of the situation with Tohti. He did not need to. What he did know was that it was a sensitive matter that the admiral did not trust the Ministry of State Security to handle. What’s more, the admiral cared little about finding anyone associated with the terrorist organization known as Wuming. Locating them would provide a method to capture Medina Tohti. She had to be brought in alive and able to think and communicate. The last was an important detail. A prisoner could be very much alive, but unable to do much beyond a blink or grunt. Anyone else should be terminated if possible, but Fu was not to go out of his way for that. Wuming was a problem for law enforcement. The admiral wanted Medina Tohti in custody sooner rather than later — and the fewer people who knew about it, the better.

Fu picked up his watch, a Tissot, also on the nightstand by his hat. “I will check the flights,” he said. “But it will take all day to get there via commercial airline.”

Talia’s beautiful thigh tensed — possibly because he spoke about leaving…

“Stand by,” Fu said, muting the phone and holding it away from his ear to check the distance between Moscow and Tirana, Albania, on the Internet. He turned the phone away so Talia could not observe his search.

The movement brought a whiff of Talia’s shampoo and he had to rub a hand across his face to stay focused.

“If I take a company plane I can be there in under four hours,” he said.

Her leg tensed again. Relaxed. A delicate foot tick-tocked back and forth at the end of the mattress, red toenails bright and stark against the white sheet. Her brain was working through some problem. Was it how to get Fu to stay with her, or was she instead envisioning a large map, as he would have done had he heard her having this same conversation? Was she trying to work out what important destinations a corporate jet might reach in less than four hours?

The admiral easily agreed to Fu’s use of the company plane, a Cessna Citation CJ3 registered to an Internet gaming company in Beijing. The company did not mind the use of their name on the international paperwork, and members of Admiral Zheng’s intelligence service enjoyed some degree of anonymity when they traveled. Four of Fu’s men were already in the air from Beijing. They would meet him in Tirana.

Fu ended the call and set the phone back on the nightstand beside his hat. He waited for Talia to speak.

She rolled toward him, draping her leg across his thighs again, nuzzling his neck with her button nose, kneading gently at his shoulder with her chin. “Do you really have to leave me, dorogoy?” My darling.

“I am afraid so,” Fu said, attuned to the reaction of the muscles in her belly as she lay flush against his hip.

She groaned, pouting, pulling herself closer to him, as if getting any closer were even possible. “Ya nye magu byes teebya zheet.” Fu didn’t understand her, but he’d observed many times since he’d taken her to his bed that though her Mandarin was near perfect, she stuck to her native Russian in matters of the heart. She stuck out her bottom lip and translated. “I cannot live without you.”

She did not ask where he was going, which made him doubt his earlier assessment. Instead, she asked when he was coming back.

“I am not certain,” Fu said, being honest. He did not know if he would ever return to Moscow.

She nuzzled him harder, breathing against his neck. “You have at least one more hour, no?”

He shook his head. “I must leave now.”

She pulled away, far enough to lift herself up on one elbow and stare down at his face, head tilted, auburn hair draped to one side, exposing the small diamond stud in her beautiful ear. She kept her leg where it was, hooking him gently with her heel.

“What could be so important that you have to rush away?”

“Work,” he said, leaving it at that. Now her questions would come. The angled interrogation of a spy hiding under the guise of a wistful lover.

Instead, she collapsed beside him, dejected and glum, and pressed him no further. “Very well,” she said. “I am not accustomed to this. It is usually I who leaves.”

Fu kissed her on the shoulder and got out of bed.

Talia pulled the white sheet to her chin and rolled on her side to watch him get dressed. She slipped back and forth between Chinese and Russian as she talked about all the things they might do together when he came back to Moscow.

She was still in bed, naked but for the sheet, when he shrugged on his long wool coat and pulled his gray hat snug. The odds were sixty-forty against her working for the Russian SVR — and that saved her life.

For the moment.