Springboard

30

Chang watched through a telescope. The man from the sampan definitely had something to hide.

Chang was a long way off, and mostly behind the cover of a rickety boathouse on the river’s south shore, two hundred meters, easy, so the telescope was necessary. At this distance, Chang would be virtually invisible to his quarry, but the telescope was of sufficient quality so that he could clearly see the man’s expressions. Holding the scope steady was tricky, but the gray and splintery boathouse wall made a good enough support to mostly manage this, though the wood smelled of dead fish and soured waterweed.

The man from the red-eyed sampan sculled his boat to the shore, well downriver from where Chang had first seen him. He tied the boat to a post, shouldered a small kit on a short pole, and started to walk along a muddy path toward the houses in the nearby village. He never stopped glancing around, looking for anybody who might be watching him.

Sampan-man had no fish, for he had not been fishing, even though that was his disguise. Another reason to think he was hiding something.

Chang smiled, remembering an incident in Beijing some years ago. A man had attempted to rob a high-end jewelry store, owned by a Vietnamese. Before he could pull it off, the clerk had become suspicious of him and pushed a silent alarm, so when the man pulled a knife and demanded gold, the police were waiting just outside the shop’s door. He walked right into their arms.

Why had the clerk become worried? Well, he said, it was the man’s appearance. His clothes were ragged and of poor quality, indicating that he did not have the money to be buying expensive jewelry.

Plus, he had a black eye patch and a wooden leg.

Chang smiled again. That would-be thief was never going to blend in anywhere, save maybe at a pirates’ convention…

This was not as blatant, but if sampan-man was a simple fisher, Chang was the son of two turtles and the brother of a sea snake.

Chang closed the telescope and hurried away from the boathouse, circling away from his subject. Following him directly would be risky; the quarry would be looking for anybody behind him, so better that he was in front of him. He had to be going to the village — there was no other place around, and on foot, dressed in fishing clothes, he wasn’t going to be hiking very far, not this late in the day.

There was a small outdoor market in the village, open for business, and Chang moved to stand with two women, three children, and a couple of old men in front of a fish-seller. Next to that stall, other patrons attended a man selling tubers and carrots, and past that, a third stall offered herbal medicines and acupuncture treatments, with several patients lined up there. Chang, dressed as the villagers, would not stand out.

Chang was careful not to look directly at sampan-man when he passed, but only watched him peripherally.

Sampan-man continued walking for half a block, then turned to his right into a narrow lane between two rows of small houses.

Chang hurried toward the lane. He slowed, and walked past, again using his peripheral vision only.

Sampan-man was not in sight.

Chang walked a bit farther, then turned around. So, the man had gone into one of those houses. Which one?

An old woman emerged from a house, carrying a broom. She began to sweep dust and pine needles from the packed-earth walk leading to the road.

“Good evening, Grandmother,” Chang said.

The old woman smiled, revealing a mouth missing more than a few teeth.

“I wonder if you might help me?” Chang continued. He pulled a copper coin from his pocket. “I was at the river, and I saw a fisherman drop this as he left his boat. I would return it to him, but I don’t know where he lives. His boat has red eyes, he is tall and thin.”

The old woman nodded. “Li,” she said. “That house, there, with the tall bamboo fence around it.”

“Thank you, Grandmother. May the gods smile upon your family.”

“Call out loudly,” she said. “Li does not like visitors and his yard is full of brambles and traps.”

He bowed, and she went back to her sweeping.

I know your name, sampan-man, and where you live. Now I will find out exactly who you are and what you are up to…

Gridley would be pleased with his news, Chang knew. And it would be more than a little pleasing to have helped Net Force in this matter. A matter of no small pride.

Locke stood outside a fan-tan parlor north and east of the reservoir, a small place that catered to those with less than sterling backgrounds. The gambling den was next to a pocket park, not much more than a large lot with trees and a trimmed lawn, and neither was prey to tourists or idle passersby.

Locke had dealings with the triads, going all the way back to his Hong Kong days, and the triads were not somebody with whom you wanted to get crosswise, so this would have to be done with care.

At this point, he wasn’t really sure they still needed Shing, certainly not as much as Wu seemed to think. Of course, Wu had longer-range goals, past the casinos, ambitions that he had not filled Locke in on completely, but that anybody with half a brain could figure out. Wu was doomed to fail in these, Locke was certain, but that wouldn’t be his problem, he’d be out of it by then. Living in luxury on an island off the coast of Spain, perhaps, or maybe New Zealand. Both — he’d be able to afford that and a lot more.

Still, Wu thought Shing was necessary, and if Wu did fail, it wouldn’t be from anything Locke had done.

The night was warm and humid, and rain was moving in. He could smell it in the air. He looked at his watch. Almost eleven, and Three-Finger Wei would be on time — he was always on time.

Wei was an information broker, and this included being a police informer. Wei did very well at it. The police listened to him, for he was right more often than not. The man moved around a lot — he had enemies who would put a hatchet into his skull given an opportunity — but Locke had more than a few contacts, and he and Wei had done business in the past.

The trick with Wei was not to give him a tip, which might make him suspicious, but to point him in a direction without him knowing that was what you were doing. Locke had already set up part of the sting, and if he did this right, Wei would take care of the rest of it.

At ten seconds before eleven o’clock, Locke saw Wei strolling across the little garden toward him. He smiled. Dependable as the sunrise, Wei.

They exchanged polite greetings, talked about the weather, the state of the world, and local politics for a few moments.

Finally, Wei got to it. “What can I do for you, old friend?”

Locke said, “I need some information on a big police action upcoming against the triads,” Locke said. “Regarding the smuggling of surplus Russian guns into the district.”

“What exactly do you want to know about it?” Wei asked, never hesitating a beat. Locke wanted to laugh. Wei couldn’t know anything about such an action, because there was no such action being contemplated, given as how Locke had just made it up. But one did not make money as an information broker by looking puzzled when a question was asked. Any question.

“I know there are shipments on the way, but I don’t know when or where the police are going to do their main raids. I have some… business that might be affected by the law showing up at the wrong place and time, and I want to avoid that. The date is more important than the place.”

“I am to meet a man about this very subject in the morning,” Wei said. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “I’ll have more specific information after I speak with him. We can get together again tomorrow.”

Locke nodded. “That will do. Thanks, Wei.”

“I live to serve.”

Locke headed one way, Wei another, and Locke allowed the smile he had been suppressing to break free. Wei’s go-to guy on the major crimes strike force was a clerk who had a weakness for expensive prostitutes. Locke had, through a cutout, approached this clerk and bribed him. The clerk would be able to indulge himself in three-hundred-pounds-a-night call girls for a couple of weeks if he would tell Wei that the police would be mounting a major operation against the triads in four days. Hundreds of agents, scores of locations, smashing down doors and arresting anybody who so much as looked at them crooked.

Once Wei had this information, he would find a triad buyer and sell it to him. Word would get out, it always did, and the triads would button up faster than a sailor expecting a typhoon. The effect would be the same as if the police actually did launch the raids — the triads would be hunkered low, keeping their heads down, and it would not be business as usual. Shing would hardly be on anybody’s to-do list for a while.

But the real beauty of it was, once the criminal organizations went to ground, the police would pick up on it immediately. The good cops were like hounds, they could smell something in the air, and that would instantly bother them. What was going on? What do we need to know that we don’t know?

They’d hear a rumor about gun-running, and since the triads were obviously hiding something, then the police would roll.

It was bootstrapping at its best.

In the end, nobody would find any guns, and things would eventually go back to normal, but Locke’s purpose would be served, and nobody would ever be the wiser. Wei would come out smelling like a rose with the police and the triads, since what he’d sold both would have happened. That the triads were able to keep the smuggled guns hidden would just be part of the game, and not Wei’s fault — unfortunate, but what can you do?

The only person who could gainsay it would be the clerk with the addiction to high-class snatch, and even if he wanted to tell somebody, his contact was an anonymous go-between, a former member of Locke’s street gang who had been imported from Hong Kong, and who was already back there.

And if Locke wanted to be absolutely sure? Locke could arrange for the clerk to have an accident. A similar misfortune could befall his old running buddy in Hong Kong, too, and then there would be nobody who knew anything about anything…

Jay met Chang in VR, a little scenario Jay had built of a red sand beach in Fiji. The sun was shining, the breeze warm, the sea birds wheeling and calling.

Chang said, “His name is Bruce Leigh.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Different spelling, L-e-i-g-h. He’s British, living in a house in Macao. I asked a friend in the People’s Special Police Investigation Unit to check him out. There is not much to see, he keeps a low profile, but my investigator indicated that he uses more electricity than anybody else in his neighborhood, and that he has disguised communication gear on his house, which house also boasts unusual security. What does that tell you?”

Jay said, “He’s growing dope or he’s a hacker.”

“Yes, my thought as well. I expect the only reason I was able to follow him is that he doesn’t believe anybody can — certainly not in China. He is very cautious.”

“So you think this might be our man?”

“No.”

Jay shook his head. “Why not?”

“Because he is not doing anything that seems connected to your problem. He is spying upon somebody else who is Chinese. I think this man is a watchdog, and since he would have had to go to no small amount of effort and expense to put himself in that position, and he is obviously more adept than most in my country, then whoever he observes is likely of large importance.”

Jay watched a particularly large gull settle down on the sea, just outside the breaker line. “Go on.”

“So far, I regret that I have been unable to find out anything about the junk, or who, if anyone, is actually on it,” Chang continued. “I cannot find a way to approach it undetected.”

“You think maybe our quarry could be on the junk?”

“My skills are humble, but I cannot imagine there are that many computer experts in my country who are so much better than I that I had no clue they exist. Especially when one of the best I’ve seen is busy carefully watching another. There may be no connection at all. But still…”

“It’s something we need to know,” Jay said.

“Exactly.”

“Thanks, Chang. I guess I’ll be taking a run at that big boat on the Yellow River, to see if I can figure out what’s what.”

“Let me know what you find out.”

“Oh, yeah. We owe you, man.”

Chang smiled. Yes. He knew.