Springboard

33

When Locke got to Mayli’s apartment, Wu opened the door before he could knock.

Wu led him into the living room. Mayli sat on the couch. Here was a surprise. Why…?

“Tell him,” Wu said.

Locke looked at her.

“Men came and took Shing,” she said. “Three of them. Two were Chinese, one was a Westerner. He did not speak, the Westerner, but he was in charge.”

“What did the Chinese say?”

“They pointed guns and told Shing he was coming with them. Shing did not resist. They left.”

“That’s all?”

“They knew who he was, they did not ask him to identify himself. They told me to sit still, and that was just what I did.”

Locke looked at Wu. “Police? Triad?”

Wu shook his head. “Not police. And I don’t think tong — his debt is not ripe enough for this.”

“Then who?”

“Who else would be looking for Shing?”

“Americans. Possibly the French.”

Wu nodded.

“How could they have found him?”

“Other than that he made a mistake? There are but four of us who knew what he was working on,” Wu said. “And three of us are here now.”

Locke pulled his cell phone and thumbed in a number. After a beat, a male voice he didn’t recognize answered, in English: “Yes?”

Locke broke the connection, slid the back off the phone, and pulled the battery, just to be absolutely sure the un-traceable phone didn’t hold any secrets. “That was Leigh’s secure number and somebody else answered it. They have Leigh — that’s how they got Shing.”

“How did they get Leigh?” Wu asked.

Locke shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

Wu said, “We’ll have to move the schedule up.”

“I don’t like that idea,” Locke said. “The fuse is still burning in the Americans’ computers, even if they have Shing, right?”

Wu said, “Shing will crack faster than an egg dropped on a sidewalk. He will tell them what he did, how he did it, and how to stop it. He is more American than Chinese.”

“I thought Shing said it couldn’t be stopped, short of shutting down their entire system.”

“I think we can safely assume that Shing lied. His arrogance would not let him give up that much control. We cannot chance that. We must move soon, or not at all.”

Locke tried again: “Shing knows nothing of our plans.” He glanced at Mayli. But she does. Why?

“She knows,” Wu said, confirming what Locke had just figured out. “But while Shing doesn’t know what I intend, he does know who he works for. If the Americans have him, they will eventually be coming to pay me a visit, one way or another. We must be finished by the time they get around to that.”

Locke nodded. He didn’t like it, but Wu was right. “All right. How soon can your men be ready?”

“They are ready now.”

“Yes, right, of course they are. How soon? Realistically?”

“Three days.”

Locke sighed. “Three days. I’ll go see the managers.”

He looked at Mayli, who wore a Mona Lisa smile. Here was an interesting development. No more fingers in that honey pot, not for him, he knew. Wu had claimed her for his own. Well. No matter. He could have a different woman every day for the rest of his life, given the money he stood to make. Mayli was not that special. Wu could have her, and he’d better watch his back, too.

Thorn looked up to see Marissa smiling at him from the doorway.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” he said. “Come on in.”

She did. “What did you do, Tommy? I’m getting rumblings from something transpiring on the Chinese front.”

“Jay ran down the Chinese hacker. My, uh, new boss thought it would be better if agents of the U.S. government got to him before the local police had a chance to talk to him.”

“Smart man. I thought it was something like that. This last day has seen more spooks than a big-city graveyard zipping around in the Orient. Did they get him?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t heard yet.”

“Maybe I can find out. So, I have a few minutes. Do you have time for another fencing lesson?”

“Always.”

He stood, and his secure line rang. The ID showed that it was Hadden. He held a hand up toward Marissa.

“Thorn here.”

“We have collected our bird, Commander. And he is singing like a canary. I need to see you, Colonel Kent, and your computer wizard whatshisname in my office at your earliest convenience.”

“Yes, sir.”

Thorn set the phone back into its cradle. “I’m afraid we’ll have to postpone that lesson for another time. Hadden wants to see me stat.”

“I understand.”

Jay had expected something a lot more posh than what it turned out to be, but what the office looked like was not as important as why they were here. He, Colonel Kent, and Commander Thorn sat at a conference table watching a recording of an interrogation, and the holoproj was sharp and clear.

A man sat at a table: Shing, he was called. He was dressed well enough, in yellow silk slacks and a blue pastel Izod shirt, and if he had been physically coerced or threatened or drugged, these things did not show. Off camera, somebody asked questions in English and the man, who was young and apparently unworried to the point where he smiled and nodded a lot, answered them without any hesitation that Jay could see.

At the end of the table, Many-Star General Hadden waved at the image and said, “Here’s the part we found most interesting.”

“And the name of the man who paid you to engage in these activities?”

“General Wu, of the People’s Army,” Shing said.

Hadden touched a button and the holoproj froze. He said, “Comrade General Wu’s current assignment is the security of the former Portuguese colony of Macao. He’s an old hard-liner, survived Mao and the Cultural Revolution, and is well placed and well respected by the military and Communist Party bigwigs. A patriot.”

Thorn nodded. “And you don’t suppose he hired Shing there to screw with the U.S. military computers just for the pure fun of it?”

Hadden smiled. “Sowing confusion among the ranks of one’s enemy is not generally a bad thing in itself, but that is usually done as a prelude to something else.”

“But you don’t expect to see the Chinese Army storming the docks in San Francisco anytime soon,” Thorn said.

“That would give the tourists on Pier 39 something more interesting than harbor seals to look at, sure enough, but — no.”

Colonel Kent said, “So the question becomes, why would Comrade General Wu be screwing around with U.S. military computers?”

“Oh, yes, indeed. And here’s something that makes us really curious. CIA operatives in Asia have passed along a little tidbit that may or may not have anything to do with this: Somebody has been poking around in a couple of the former Soviet republics trying to buy tactical nuclear bombs. Which in and of itself is not that big a deal, since Third World operatives have been trying to do that since the evil empire broke up; only this time, the word is that the would-be buyer might have a Chinese connection.”

“Ah.”

Jay frowned. “I don’t understand. Why would the Chinese do that? They already have nukes, don’t they?”

“Good question,” the general said. “And yes, they do.”

“I’m still not connecting the dots,” Jay said, shaking his head.

Kent said, “Suppose you had a neighbor who really irritated you, to the point where you want to throw a brick through his front window. And you’ve got a pile of old red bricks right there in your driveway. But down the street a few houses, there’s another neighbor who has a pile of white bricks in his backyard.”

“Oh,” Jay said, getting it. “You, ah, borrow one of your neighbor’s bricks and throw that. Guy finds a white one in his living room, he doesn’t charge over to your house.”

“Exactly.”

Thorn said, “But the real question here is, and assuming one thing has anything to do with the other, if Wu wants to throw a brick, whose window is he going to toss it through? And when?”

Jay blinked and shook his head.

“We don’t even know if this is the case,” Hadden said, “but we do know that Wu is a big fan of Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Musashi, and both of them are big on misdirection and sneaky business.”

“Wu is up to something unofficial,” Kent said.

Hadden nodded. “Our man Shing here knows only what he was paid to do and it’s all computer gobbledygook. He does not have any idea why Wu wants it done.” He looked at Jay. “I’m sending this recording with you. Shing gets into the technical stuff a little later, and I need you to run it down and fix things — our people will assist as necessary.”

Jay nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Hadden said, “That will take care of the immediate problem with the software, but I’m guessing that’s just the tip of a nasty iceberg. Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities have collected Mr. Leigh, courtesy of Mr. Chang, and we don’t know what Leigh knows, if anything, and what he will or won’t give up. So we are in something of a quandary. For Wu to risk what he’s risking by screwing around with us, we aren’t talking about a bunch of fraternity guys on a panty raid risking a demerit on their records. If this isn’t official — and we can’t see how it could be — and his government finds out, they’ll crucify him, since they are trying very hard to become a world power and, until that happens, be our best friend. They would lose great face, not to mention a boatload of trade, if it turns out Wu has some plan that involves blowing up something that belongs to us. We might blame them and drop a few big fire-crackers of our own on Beijing to indicate our displeasure.”

“We wouldn’t, though, would we?” Jay asked.

Hadden looked at him. “I would hope not, son, but I answer to a civilian, and given the nature of life in the world today, you never can tell. The thing is, given the stakes at risk, we have to know what Wu is up to, we don’t particularly want his bosses to know if they don’t already, and we can’t mess around with ambassadors and protocol to find out. If he’s warned, he might be able to cover his tracks.”

Colonel Kent spoke up. “Don’t you think grabbing Shing and Leigh will alert Wu?”

Hadden nodded. “Of course, but it couldn’t be helped.”

“Frighten a man holding a loaded gun and he also might pull the trigger,” Kent said.

“That thought had crossed our minds,” Hadden said. He looked at Kent. “How’s your Chinese, Abe?”

“Worse than my Portuguese, sir, and that’s pretty bad.”

“Brush up, Colonel. How soon can you be ready?”

“To get my team in the air? Forty-eight hours.”

“Which means you need half that, minus another thirty percent. The clock is ticking, Colonel.”

“Yes, sir.”

Outside, on the way back to their car, Jay said, “You’re serious? You are going to fly to China and kidnap a Chinese general?”

“That’s the idea.”

“But — why doesn’t the Army just use the spooks who got Shing? Or put a bug in the Chinese authorities’ ear?”

“Because Shing was easy. He had no security, and no reason to think he needed it. But you can bet that Wu knows we have his man, and that we know something, so a couple of CIA ops aren’t going to just waltz in and point guns at Wu and get him to come along with them.”

Commander Thorn added, “And remember, we don’t want the Chinese to know about this if we can help it. Our friendship with them is both new and iffy.”

“But why us? Why Net Force?”

Kent shrugged. “We’re qualified. I have the right people to do the job, and I’m already in the chain of command regarding this mess. The fewer people who know about it, the better. Bring in somebody else, that’s just more tongues that might accidentally wag someday.”

“Can you…?” Jay stopped.

“Get him? Probably. Thirty years ago, I built a deck for my aunt. Took me four days, morning to evening. I had to use a power saw and sander, square, level, posthole digger, measuring tape, and a lot of nails and screws, not to mention a bucket of sweat. About forty hours of solid work. The deck lasted for twenty years, then started to rot, so, then I went back to take it down for her.” He paused.

“It took me less than two hours and a pickax to turn the deck into a pile of scrap lumber.”

Jay looked puzzled. “Which, uh, means what?”

“It’s a lot easier to tear something down than it is to construct it. We can get to Wu. But it’s a whole bunch less work to shoot him than capture him in one useful piece.”

“You have to take him alive?” Jay said.

“If it comes to a choice of killing him or letting him get away, better dead than fled. Whatever he’s up to, if Wu joins his ancestors pushing up daisies, he won’t be causing us any more problems.”

“But if he’s not alone in this…” Thorn said.

“Which is why we would rather take him alive,” Kent said. “To be sure.”

Jay shook his head. “What a mess.”

“Welcome to the military, son,” Kent said. “Situation normal — all fouled up.”