Springboard

31

“You are a great man,” Mayli said when he was done speaking. She said it quietly, with what seemed to Wu to be real admiration.

She was dressed — Wu had not wanted to have this conversation in the raw — and they sat at the same table where he had discussed Shing with Locke only a day earlier. He had watched her face as he’d told it, and her amazement was genuine — or the best acting he had ever seen.

“No need to flatter me,” he said.

“Not at all, Wu,” she said. “I have never heard any idea so bold. If a man can accomplish such a thing, ‘great’ would be the least of his accolades.”

Wu resisted the smile. This had been a major step, to tell her, but the warmth he felt in his heart now justified it. “You must point out what you see as flaws in the plan.”

She shook her head. “What you say about Beijing’s reaction seems valid, but I am not political. And if the Republic does not act as you hope…”

Wu nodded. “The Taiwanese will. For the ROC to turn down the chance at collecting all that a most-respected general of the People’s Army can bring with his defection? No, they will offer me asylum. Even if I do not grease the ramp — which I will — they could not pass it up.”

“And the North Koreans?” she said. “You believe they will go forward?”

“They have been poised at the gate too long. The mad-man who rules them would kick it open tomorrow if he thought he had the advantage. With a couple of operational nuclear weapons in his hands? He will leap on the South as a starving tiger does a deer.”

“The Americans—”

“—will have enough distraction that they won’t know what is going on until it is too late. Their military computers will be crashing, and they will not be focused on the Koreans. They won’t be altogether asleep, but their current President is a cautious man. With the long and slow drain of Iraq and the problems with Syria still fresh in their memory, he won’t be in a hurry to get into a shooting war in Korea.”

“Even if the North uses atomic weapons?”

“I don’t think the Koreans will use them — not unless the battle turns against them, and even so, they will not aim those at American troops, but against their Southern kin. Many old hatreds there, and jealousy. Ever see a satellite picture of Korea after dark? The lights of the cities in the South are easily seen; the North is very nearly dark.”

He paused, thinking, then shrugged. “Of course, the Americans have the capability to squash the North Korean Army flat, albeit at a huge cost, but — I do not believe they have the will at this point in history.”

“And if you are wrong?”

He smiled now, most pleased. “That is the best part — if they do, it does not matter to my plans. If the Americans are willing to join the battle with serious intent, the North Koreans will find themselves mired in a great and stinking pigsty, and they will suffer large misery. Too bad for them. None of it will be linked to me. The bombs will be surplus Soviet Union, from one of the hungry and broke countries that still has them — but delivered by people who won’t be around to speak of the deed afterward. By the time the bombs are transferred and the Koreans ready to move, I will be on Taiwan, with hundreds of millions of British pounds at my disposal, nobody will be the wiser, and the path to power before me without obstacles I cannot overcome.”

“What of your family?”

“They will remain here,” he said. “Beijing will know what I have done, but they will lose so much face if it is known in the West that they will try to keep it quiet. My family will be safe enough — Beijing will be informed that if anything happens to my family, I will reveal all. I can show a Chinese link to the nuclear bombs, and I will let that fact be whispered into certain ears as well. The last thing Beijing will wish is that the United States believes they had anything to do with the Koreans’ attack. Beijing will swallow it and say nothing. The casinos lost money? Too bad for them. They can make more.”

She shook her head slowly, and was impressed, he could tell. “So you will be rich and respected and alone, living in Taipei?”

“Not alone,” he said. He reached across the table and took her hand.

They both smiled.

It was good to have a helpmate such as Mayli. A formidable woman who did not even blink at the idea of using a little nuclear war to cover one’s tracks.

Jay drank warm sake and watched the men — mostly samurai, but he was sure there were a couple of daimyo in disguise, and at least one ninja — as they laughed and flirted with the courtesans and geisha. Behind a screen, somebody played a shakahashi flute, something simple but bright.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the thickening clouds made the lamps in the large room necessary as the sky darkened. Rain soon.

This was the place that Leigh was watching. His quarry, and Jay’s, was in here.

Jay, also disguised as a samurai, shifted his position a little and smiled at the young woman attending him. She wore a flower-patterned kimono, and her face and neck were made up to be chalk white, with cherry-red lips painted on. When she smiled, her teeth were stained almost black. It was the look, but it wasn’t one that appealed to Jay. She was just cover, so that he could figure out which of the men in the pleasure house was his prey.

It was a good metaphor, Jay thought. There were people who lived in fortresses, massive, well-protected constructs that were so solidly built that getting into them took great skill. There were few such places that Jay couldn’t eventually crack, one way or another — stealth, bribery, even direct assault — though some would take a lot longer than others. If his quarry was inside one of those, that was the disadvantage. The advantage was, such forts were usually not that hard to find. The bigger and more elaborate they were, the easier they were to spot. You had to give up one thing to have another.

Harder, in Jay’s mind, was the quarry who lived in a small shack amidst hundreds or thousands just like it, with nothing to set it apart from those around it. The only way to find the man you wanted was to open each door and look inside. While the doors were flimsy and opening them was no problem, doing it a hundred or a thousand times was no small job. And a clever enough prey might step outside just before you kicked in his door and found an empty room, then sneak back in after you were gone.

A ranked samurai swaggered down the street arrogantly for all to see, the two swords in his sash, able to chop off the head of a lesser man — a farmer, artisan, or merchant— with impunity, if he so desired. Easy to see such samurai and mark them.

A ninja, on the other hand, never wore his black suit in public — the ninja’s stock in trade was stealth. He would be disguised — as a samurai, farmer, artisan, merchant — and the best of them would offer no clue as to their real identity. The ninja suit was worn for night assassinations or spying, and designed to blend into the darkness unseen. If you saw a ninja in this mode, he wasn’t very good at it.

If you could penetrate the disguise, however, you were halfway to defeating a ninja. Yes, they had weapons and dirty tricks, but if you knew that, you had the advantage. A man pretending to be a sake merchant on a rainy Edo street would have to go for a hidden weapon, and Jay could pull out his katana and lop off the man’s head before the ninja could come up with a shuriken to fling at him.

First man to move had the advantage.

Somewhere in this collection of warriors was a fake, and as soon as Jay figured out which one it was, he would have the Chinese hacker. A mistake would give Jay away as well, however, and so he had to be very careful before he moved.

He had managed to sneak onto the Chinese junk on the Yellow River, but the boat had been empty. Somebody had been there recently, there were signs of occupation, but Jay had just missed him. And because the boat had been easy to clamber up and into, he did not figure that the man who’d been there would be coming back. He was more certain than ever it was the hacker he sought.

It was easier to find Leigh, and once he found him, he knew his real target couldn’t be far away. He was right. Leigh had led him to this place, and the hunt was back on.

Jay had asked Chang to hold off having Leigh arrested and sweated, for two reasons. First, Jay wanted a shot at finding the hacker on his own. Second, if the Chinese got the guy, they would pry things out of him that the U.S. military surely would not want them to have.

If this didn’t work, he’d have to give Chang the go-ahead — if he hadn’t already decided to do it anyhow — and they’d get the ID from Leigh, who surely must know who it was he had been watching.

But Jay wanted his chance first. It wouldn’t take long — he’d either pass or fail in a hurry. Pass — and it would go a long way to making him feel as if he’d done his job; fail — and they could always take the other road. But they’d have to give up some things to do it. If Jay could catch him, it would be better.

Jay didn’t intend to fail. He sipped at his sake, and watched the men in the room. Which one?

The front door opened, revealing the gloomy outside. Rain began to splatter against the tile roof at that same moment. A samurai on the porch stepped into the building, and as he did, a fierce gust of wind blew in as a nearby lightning strike strobed and a loud boom of thunder vibrated the room. The wind blew the lamps out, and for a couple of seconds, the room was dim. The patrons laughed and cracked jokes as one of the serving girls relit a lamp.

When the lights came back up, it took Jay a moment to realize that one of the samurai, a short and somewhat swarthy fellow sitting to his right, near the door, was gone.

Jay scrambled to his feet and hurried for the door. The guy was onto him!

Outside, the storm raged; hard winds drove rain almost horizontally at Jay, blinding him. Where was the guy?

Jay caught a peripheral movement. He turned and saw the samurai running, splashing through puddles already ankle-deep, one hand holding his swords steady as he sprinted away.

No doubt about it, that was him!

Jay took off after the fleeing man.

He started gaining immediately. The guy was slow compared to Jay — of course, so were most people — and already Jay was grinning. Guy might look like a samurai, but he was a fake, and in this scenario, Jay was on a par with Miyamoto Musashi. He’d slice the guy into hamburger, figuratively, anyway—

The rainy air ahead of the ninja rippled and it was as if the man had stepped through time and space — he just… vanished, as if running behind a curtain—

What ninja trick was this?!

Jay skidded to a stop just short of the rent in the air, which, even as he watched, faded back into the rainy night.

Jay looked around, wiping the water from his eyes, hoping to spot some clue—

And there one was: a scrap of what looked like blue silk, flattened and soaked by the downpour. Jay moved to it, bent, and picked it up. A scarf of some kind. There was a tag in one corner, tiny, with writing on it, so small he could barely read it.

It said, “CyberNation.”

Jay shook his head. Somehow, the guy had slipped away from him by using CyberNation protocols. Shouldn’t be able to do that, but there it was.

Bag that. “End scenario!” Jay said.

He wasn’t out of moves yet.

Jay grabbed his virgil from the desk — he was still fully suited — and said, “Call Charles Seurat. Priority One.”