“There’s the house, the one with the high stone wall,” said CIA Case Officer Matthew Richards as he drove the car up the hill in Victoria Peak. “According to our information, there are marines all over the place, and it won’t do me any goddamned good being seen with you.”
“I gather you want to owe me a few more dollars,” said Alex Conklin, leaning forward and peering through the windshield. “It’s negotiable.”
“I just don’t want to be involved, for Christ’s sake! And dollars I haven’t got.”
“Poor Matt, sad Matt. You take things too literally.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m not sure I do, either, but drive by the house as if you were going to somebody else’s place. I’ll tell you when to stop and let me out.”
“You will?”
“Under conditions. Those are the dollars.”
“Oh, shit.”
“They’re not hard to take and I may not even call them in. The way I see it now, I’ll want to stay on ice and out of sight. In other words, I want a man inside. I’ll call you several times a day asking you if our lunch or dinner dates are still on, or whether I’ll see you at the Happy Valley Race—”
“Not there,” interrupted Richards.
“All right, the Wax Museum—anything that comes to mind, except the track. If you say ‘No, I’m busy,’ I’ll know I’m not being closed in on. If you say ‘Yes,’ I’ll get out.”
“I don’t even know where the hell you’re staying! You told me to pick you up on the corner of Granville and Carnarvon.”
“My guess is that your unit will be called in to keep the lines straight and the responsibility where it belongs. The British will insist on it. They’re not going to take a solo fall if D.C. blows it. These are touchy times for the Brits over here, so they’ll cover their colonial asses.”
They passed the gate. Conklin shifted his gaze and studied the large Victorian entrance.
“I swear, Alex, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s better yet. Do you agree? Are you my guru inside?”
“Hell, yes. I can do without the marines.”
“Fine. Stop here. I’ll get out and walk back. As far as anyone’s concerned I took the tram to the Peak, got a cab to the wrong house, and made my way to the right address only a couple of hundred feet down the road. Are you happy, Matt?”
“Ecstatic,” said the case officer, scowling, as he braked the car.
“Get a good night’s sleep. It’s been a long time since Saigon, and we all need more rest as we get older.”
“I heard you were a lush. It’s not true, is it?”
“You heard what we wanted you to hear,” replied Conklin flatly. This time, however, he was able to cross the fingers of both hands before he climbed awkwardly out of the car.
A brief knock and the door was flung open. Startled, Havilland looked up as Edward McAllister, his face ashen, walked rapidly into the room. “Conklin’s at the gate,” said the undersecretary. “He’s demanding to see you and says he’ll stay there all night if he has to. He also says if it gets chilly, he’ll build a fire in the road to keep warm.”
“Crippled or not, he hasn’t lost his panache,” said the ambassador.
“This is totally unexpected,” continued McAllister, massaging his right temple. “We’re not prepared for a confrontation.”
“It seems we haven’t a choice. That’s a public road out there, and it’s the province of the colony’s Fire Department in the event our neighbors become alarmed.”
“Surely, he wouldn’t—”
“Surely, he would,” broke in Havilland. “Let him in. This isn’t only unexpected, it’s extraordinary. He hasn’t had time to assemble his facts or organize an attack that would give him leverage. He’s openly exposing his involvement, and given his background in covert to black operations, he wouldn’t do that lightly. It’s far too dangerous. He, himself, once gave the order for beyond-salvage.”
“We can presume he’s in touch with the woman,” protested the undersecretary, heading for the telephone on the ambassador’s desk. “That gives him all the facts he needs!”
“No, it doesn’t. She hasn’t got them.”
“And you,” said McAllister, his hand on the phone. “How does he know to come to you?”
Havilland smiled grimly. “All he’d have to hear is that I’m in Hong Kong. Besides, we spoke, and I’m sure he’s put it all together.”
“But this house?”
“He’ll never tell us. Conklin’s an old Far East hand, Mr. Undersecretary, and he has contacts we can’t presume to know about. And we won’t know what brings him here unless he’s admitted, will we?”
“No, we won’t.” McAllister picked up the phone; he dialed three digits. “Officer of the Guard?… Let Mr. Conklin through the gate, search him for a weapon, and escort him yourself to the East Wing office.… He what?… Admit him quickly and put the damn thing out!”
“What happened?” asked Havilland as the undersecretary hung up the phone.
“He started a fire on the other side of the road.”
Alexander Conklin limped into the ornate Victorian room as the marine officer closed the door. Havilland rose from the chair and came around the desk, his hand extended.
“Mr. Conklin?”
“Keep your hand, Mr. Ambassador. I don’t want to get infected.”
“I see. Anger precludes civility?”
“No, I really don’t want to catch anything. As they say over here, you’re rotten joss. You’re carrying something. A disease, I think.”
“And what might that be?”
“Death.”
“So melodramatic? Come, Mr. Conklin, you can do better than that.”
“No, I mean it. Less than twenty minutes ago I saw someone killed, cut down in the street with forty or fifty bullets in her. She was blown into the glass doors of her apartment house, her driver shot up in the car. I tell you the place is a mess, blood and glass all over the pavement—”
Havilland’s eyes were wide with shock, but it was the hysterical voice of McAllister that stopped the CIA man. “Her? She? Was it the woman?”
“A woman,” said Conklin, turning to the undersecretary, whose presence he had not yet acknowledged. “You McAllister?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to shake your hand either. She was involved with both of you.”
“Webb’s wife is dead?” yelled the undersecretary, his whole body paralyzed.
“No, but thanks for the confirmation.”
“Good God!” cried the long-standing ambassador of the State Department’s clandestine activities. “It was Staples. Catherine Staples!”
“Give the man an exploding cigar. And thanks again for the second confirmation. Are you planning to have dinner with the Canadian consulate’s High Commissioner soon? I’d love to be there—just to watch the renowned Ambassador Havilland at work. Gosh and golly, I betcha us low-level types could learn an awful lot.”
“Shut up, you goddamned fool!” shouted Havilland, crossing behind the desk and plummeting into his chair; he leaned back, his eyes closed.
“That’s the one thing I’m not going to do,” said Conklin, stepping forward, his clubbed foot pounding the floor. “You are accountable … sir!” The CIA man leaned over, gripping the edge of the desk. “Just as you’re accountable for what’s happened to David and Marie Webb! Who the fuck do you think you are? And if my language offends you, sir, look up the derivation of the offending word. It comes from a term in the Middle Ages meaning to plant a seed in the ground, and in a way that’s your specialty! Only in your case they’re rotten seeds—you dig in clean dirt and turn it into filth. Your seeds are lies and deception. They grow inside of people, turning them into angry and frightened puppets, dancing on your strings to your goddamned scenarios! I repeat, you aristocratic son of a bitch, who the fuck do you think you are?”
Havilland half opened his lidded eyes and leaned forward. His expression was that of an old man willing to die, if only to remove the pain. But those same eyes were alive with a cold fury that saw things others could not see. “Would it serve your argument if I said to you that Catherine Staples said essentially the same thing to me?”
“Serves it and completes it!”
“Yet she was killed because she joined forces with us. She didn’t like doing that, but in her judgment there was no alternative.”
“Another puppet?”
“No. A human being with a first-rate mind and a wealth of experience who understood what faced us. I mourn her loss—and the manner of her death—more than you can imagine.”
“Is it her loss, sir or is it the fact that your holy operation was penetrated?”
“How dare you?” Havilland, his voice low and cold, rose from the chair and stared at the CIA man. “It’s a little late for you to be moralizing, Mr. Conklin. Your lapses have been all too apparent in the areas of deception and ethics. If you’d had your way, there’d be no David Webb, no Jason Bourne. You put him beyond-salvage, no one else did. You planned his execution and nearly succeeded.”
“I’ve paid for that lapse. Christ, how I’ve paid for it!”
“And I suspect you’re still paying for it, or you wouldn’t be in Hong Kong now,” said the ambassador, nodding his head slowly, the coldness leaving his voice. “Lower your cannons, Mr. Conklin, and I’ll do the same. Catherine Staples really did understand, and if there’s any meaning in her death, let’s try to find it.”
“I haven’t the vaguest idea where to start looking.”
“You’ll be given chapter and verse … just as Staples was.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t hear it.”
“I have no choice but to insist that you do.”
“I guess you weren’t listening. You’ve been penetrated! The Staples woman was killed because it was assumed she had information that called for her to be taken out. In short, the mole who’s bored his way in here saw her in a meeting or meetings with both of you. The Canadian connection was made, the order given, and you let her walk around without protection!”
“Are you afraid for your life?” asked the ambassador.
“Constantly,” replied the CIA man. “And right now I’m also concerned with someone else’s.”
“Webb’s?”
Conklin paused, studying the old diplomat’s face. “If what I believe is true,” he said quietly. “There’s nothing I can do for Delta that he can’t do better for himself. But if he doesn’t make it, I know what he’d ask me to do. Protect Marie. And I can do that best by fighting you, not listening to you.”
“And how do you propose fighting me?”
“The only way I know how. Down and very dirty. I’ll spread the word in all those dark corners in Washington that this time you’ve gone too far, you’ve lost your grip, maybe at your age even looney. I’ve got Marie’s story, Mo Panov’s—”
“Morris Panov?” interrupted Havilland cautiously. “Webb’s psychiatrist?”
“You get another cigar. And, last of all, my own contribution. Incidentally, to jog your memory, I’m the only one who talked to David before he came over here. All together, including the slaughter of a Canadian foreign service officer, they’d make interesting reading—as affidavits, carefully circulated, of course.”
“By so doing you’d jeopardize everything.”
“Your problem, not mine.”
“Then, again, I’d have no choice,” said the ambassador, ice once more in his eyes and in his voice. “As you issued an order for beyond-salvage, I’d be forced to do the same. You wouldn’t leave here alive.”
“Oh, my God!” whispered McAllister from across the room.
“That’d be the dumbest thing you could do,” said Conklin, his eyes locked with Havilland’s. “You don’t know what I’ve left behind or with whom. Or what’s released if I don’t make contact by a certain time with certain people and so on. Don’t underestimate me.”
“We thought you might resort to that kind of tactic,” said the diplomat, walking away from the CIA man as if dismissing him, and returning to his chair. “You also left something else behind, Mr. Conklin. To put it kindly, perhaps accurately, you were known to have a chronic illness called alcoholism. In anticipation of your imminent retirement, and in recognition of your long-past accomplishments, no disciplinary measures were taken, but neither were you given any responsibility. You were merely tolerated, a useless relic about to go to pasture, a drunk whose paranoid outbursts were the talk and concern of your colleagues. Whatever might surface from whatever source would be categorized and substantiated as the incoherent ramblings of a crippled, psychopathic alcoholic.” The ambassador leaned back in the chair, his elbow resting on the arm, the long fingers of his right hand touching his chin. “You are to be pitied, Mr. Conklin, not censured. The dovetailing of events might be dramatized by your suicide—”
“Havilland!” cried McAllister, stunned.
“Rest easy, Mr. Undersecretary,” said the diplomat. “Mr. Conklin and I know where we’re coming from. We’ve both been there before.”
“There’s a difference,” objected Conklin, his gaze never wavering from Havilland’s eyes. “I never took any pleasure from the game.”
“You think I do?” The telephone rang. Havilland shot forward, grabbing it. “Yes?” The ambassador listened, frowning, staring at the darkened bay window. “If I don’t sound shocked, Major, it’s because the news reached me a few minutes ago.… No, not the police but a man I want you to meet tonight. Say, in two hours, is that convenient?… Yes, he’s one of us now.” Havilland raised his eyes to Conklin. “There are those who say he’s better than most of us, and I daresay his past service record might bear that out.… Yes, it’s he.… Yes, I’ll tell him … What? What did you say?” The diplomat again looked at the bay window, the frown returning. “They covered themselves quickly, didn’t they? Two hours, Major.” Havilland hung up the phone, both elbows on the table, his hands clasped. He took a deep breath, an exhausted old man gathering his thoughts, about to speak.
“His name is Lin Wenzu,” said Conklin, startling both Havilland and McAllister. “He’s Crown CI which means MI-Six-oriented, probably Special Branch. He’s Chinese and U.K.-educated and considered about the best Intelligence officer in the territory. Only his size works against him. He’s easily spotted.”
“Where—?” McAllister took a step toward the CIA man.
“A little bird, Cock Robin,” said Conklin.
“A redheaded cardinal, I presume,” said the diplomat.
“Actually, not anymore,” replied Alex.
“I see.” Havilland unclasped his hands, lowering his arms on the desk. “He knows who you are, too.”
“He should. He was part of the detail at the Kowloon station.”
“He told me to congratulate you, to tell you that your Olympian outraced them. He got away.”
“He’s sharp.”
“He knows where to find him but won’t waste the time.”
“Sharper still. Waste is waste. He told you something else, too, and since I overheard your flattering assessment of my past, would you care to tell me what it was?”
“Then you’ll listen to me?”
“Or be carried out in a box? Or boxes? Where’s the option?”
“Yes, quite true,” said the diplomat. “I’d have to go through with it, you know.”
“I know you know, Herr General.”
“That’s offensive.”
“So are you. What did the major tell you?”
“A terrorist tong from Macao telephoned the South China News Agency claiming responsibility for the killings. Only, they said the woman was incidental, the driver was the target. As a native member of the hated British secret security arm, he had shot to death one of their leaders on the Wanchai waterfront two weeks ago. The information was correct. He was the protection we assigned to Catherine Staples.”
“It’s a lie!” shouted Conklin. “She was the target!”
“Lin says it’s a waste of time to pursue a false source.”
“Then he knows?”
“That we’ve been penetrated?”
“What the hell else?” said the exasperated CIA man.
“He’s a proud Zhongguo ren and has a brilliant mind. He doesn’t like failure in any form, especially now. I suspect he’s started his hunt.… Sit down, Mr. Conklin. We have things to talk about.”
“I don’t believe this!” cried McAllister in a deeply emotional whisper. “You talk of killings, of targets, of ‘beyond-salvage’ … of a mocked-up suicide—the victim here, talking about his own death—as if you were discussing the Dow-Jones or a restaurant menu! What kind of people are you?”
“I’ve told you, Mr. Undersecretary,” said Havilland gently. “Men who do what others won’t, or can’t, or shouldn’t. There’s no mystique, no diabolical universities where we were trained, no driving compulsion to destroy. We drifted into these areas because there were voids to fill and the candidates were few. It’s all rather accidental, I suppose. And with repetition you find that either you do or you don’t have the stomach for it—because somebody has to. Would you agree, Mr. Conklin?”
“This is a waste of time.”
“No, it’s not,” corrected the diplomat. “Explain to Mr. McAllister. Believe me, he’s valuable and we need him. He has to understand us.”
Conklin looked at the undersecretary of State, his expression without charity. “He doesn’t need any explanations from me, he’s an analyst. He sees it all as clearly as we do, if not clearer. He knows what the hell is going on down in the tunnels, he just doesn’t want to admit it, and the easiest way to remove himself is to pretend to be shocked. Beware the sanctimonious intellect in any phase of this business. What he gives in brains he takes away with phony recriminations. He’s the deacon in a whore house gathering material for a sermon he’ll write when he goes home and plays with himself.”
“You were right before,” said McAllister, turning toward the door. “This is a waste of time.”
“Edward?” Havilland, clearly angry with the crippled CIA man, called out sympathetically to the undersecretary. “We can’t always choose the people we deal with, which is obviously the case now.”
“I understand,” said McAllister coldly.
“Study everyone on Lin’s staff,” went on the ambassador. “There can’t be more than ten or twelve who know anything about us. Help him. He’s your friend.”
“Yes, he is,” said the undersecretary, going out the door.
“Was that necessary?” snapped Havilland when he and Conklin were alone.
“Yes, it was. If you can convince me that what you’ve done was the only route you could take—which I doubt—or if I can’t come up with an option that’ll get Marie and David out with their lives, if not their sanity, then I’ll have to work with you. The alternative of beyond-salvage is unacceptable on several grounds, basically personal, but also because I owe the Webbs. Do we agree so far?”
“We work together, one way or another. Checkmate.”
“Given the reality, I want that son of a bitch, McAllister, that rabbit, to know where I’m coming from. He’s in as deep as any of us, and that intellect of his had better go down into the filth and come up with every plausibility and every possibility. I want to know whom we should kill—even those marginally important—to cut our losses and get the Webbs out. I want him to know that the only way he can save his soul is to bury it with accomplishment. If we fail, he fails, and he can’t go back teaching Sunday school anymore.”
“You’re too harsh on him. He’s an analyst, not an executioner.”
“Where do you think the executioners get their input? Where do we get our input? From whom? The paladins of congressional oversight?”
“Checkmate, again. You’re as good as they say you were. He’s come up with the breakthroughs. It’s why he’s here.”
“Talk to me, sir,” said Conklin, sitting in the chair, his back straight, his club foot awkwardly at an angle. “I want to hear your story.”
“First the woman. Webb’s wife. She’s all right? She’s safe?”
“The answer to your first question is so obvious I wonder how you can ask it. No, she’s not all right. Her husband’s missing and she doesn’t know whether he’s alive or dead. As to the second, yes, she’s safe. With me, not with you. I can move us around and I know my way around. You have to stay here.”
“We’re desperate,” pleaded the diplomat. “We need her!”
“You’ve also been penetrated, that doesn’t seem to sink in. I won’t expose her to that.”
“This house is a fortress!”
“All it takes is one rotten cook in the kitchen. One lunatic on a staircase.”
“Conklin, listen to me! We picked up a passport check—everything fits. It’s him, we know it. Webb’s in Peking. Now! He wouldn’t have gone in if he wasn’t after the target—the only target. If somehow, God knows how, your Delta comes out with the merchandise and his wife isn’t in place, he’ll kill the one connection we must have! Without it we’re lost. We’re all lost.”
“So that was the scenario from the beginning. Reductio ad absurdum. Jason Bourne hunts Jason Bourne.”
“Yes. Painfully simple, but without the escalating complications he never would have agreed. He’d still be in that old house in Maine, poring over his scholarly papers. We wouldn’t have our hunter.”
“You really are a bastard,” said Conklin slowly, softly, a certain admiration in his voice. “And you were convinced he could still do it? Still handle this kind of Asia the way he did years ago as Delta?”
“He has physical checkups every three months, it’s part of the government protection program. He’s in superb condition—something to do with his obsessive running, I understand.”
“Start at the beginning.” The CIA man settled into the chair. “I want to hear it step by step because I think the rumors are true. I’m in the presence of a master bastard.”
“Hardly, Mr. Conklin,” said Havilland. “We’re all groping. I’ll want your comments, of course.”
“You’ll get them. Go ahead.”
“All right. I’ll begin with a name I’m sure you’ll recognize. Sheng Chou Yang. Any comment?”
“He’s a tough negotiator, and I suspect that underneath his benevolent exterior there’s a ramrod. Still, he’s one of the most reasonable men in Peking. There should be a thousand like him.”
“If there were, the chances of a Far East holocaust would be a thousand times greater.”
Lin Wenzu slammed his fist down on the desk, jarring the nine photographs in front of him and making the attached summaries of their dossiers leap off the surface. Which? Which one? Each had been certified through London, each background checked and rechecked and triple-checked; there was no room for error. These were not simply well-schooled Zhongguo ren selected by bureaucratic elimination but the products of an intensive search for the brightest minds in government—and in several cases outside of government—who might be recruited into this most sensitive of services. It had been Lin’s contention that the writing was on the wall—the Great Wall, perhaps—and that a superior special Intelligence force manned by the colony’s own could well be its first line of defense prior to 1997, and, in the event of a takeover, its first line of cohesive resistance afterwards. The British had to relinquish leadership in the area of secret Intelligence operations for reasons that were as clear as they were unpalatable to London: the Occidental could never fully understand the peculiar subtleties of the Oriental mind, and these were not the times to render misleading or poorly evaluated information. London had to know—the West had to know—exactly where things stood … for Hong Kong’s sake, for the sake of the entire Far East.
Not that Lin believed that his growing task force of Intelligence gatherers was pivotal to policy decisions; he did not. But he believed thoroughly, intensely, that if the colony was to have a Special Branch it should be staffed and run by those who could do the job best, and that did not include veterans, however brilliant, of the European-oriented British secret services. For starters, they all looked alike and were not compatible with either the environment or the language. And after years of work and proven worth, Lin Wenzu had been summoned to London and for three days grilled by unsmiling Far East Intelligence specialists. On the morning of the fourth day, however, the smiles had appeared along with the recommendation that the major be given command of the Hong Kong branch with wide powers of authority. And for a number of years thereafter he had lived up to the commission’s confidence, he knew that. He also knew that now, in the single most vital operation of his professional and personal life, he had failed. There were thirty-eight Special Branch officers in his command, and he had selected nine—hand-picked nine—to be part of this extraordinary, insane operation. Insane until he had heard the ambassador’s extraordinary explanation. The nine were the most exceptional of the thirty-eight-man task force, each capable of assuming command if their leader was taken out; he had written as much in their evaluation reports. And he had failed. One of the hand-picked nine was a traitor.
It was pointless to restudy the dossiers. Whatever inconsistencies he might find would take too long to unearth, for they—or it—had eluded his own experienced eyes as well as London’s. There was no time for intricate analyses, the painfully slow exploration of nine individual lives. He had only one choice. A frontal assault on each man, and the word “front” was intrinsic to his plan. If he could play the role of a taipan, he could play the part of a traitor. He realized that his plan was not without risk—a risk neither London nor the American, Havilland, would tolerate, but it had to be taken. If he failed, Sheng Chou Yang would be alerted to the secret war against him and his countermoves could be disastrous, but Lin Wenzu did not intend to fail. If failure was written on the northern winds, nothing else would matter, least of all his life.
The major reached for his telephone. He pushed the button on his console for the radio operator in the computerized communication center of MI6, Special Branch.
“Yes, sir?” said the voice from the white, sterile room.
“Who in Dragonfly is still on duty?” asked Lin, naming the elite unit of nine who reported in but never gave explanations.
“Two, sir. In vehicles three and seven, but I can reach the rest in a few minutes. Five have checked in—they’re at home—and the remaining two have left numbers. One is at the Pagoda Cinema until eleven-thirty, when he’ll return to his flat, but he can be reached by beeper until then. The other is at the Yacht Club in Aberdeen with his wife and her family. She’s English, you know.”
Lin laughed softly. “No doubt charging the British family’s bill to our woefully inadequate budget from London.”
“Is that possible, Major? If so, would you consider me for Dragonfly, whatever it is?”
“Don’t be impertinent.”
“I’m sorry, sir—”
“I’m joking, young man. Next week I’ll take you to a fine dinner myself. You do excellent work and I rely on you.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“The thanks are mine.”
“Shall I contact Dragonfly and put out an alert?”
“You may contact each and every one, but quite the opposite of an alert. They’ve all been overworked, without a clean day off in several weeks. Tell each that, of course, I want any changes of locations to be reported, but unless informed otherwise we’re secure for the next twenty-four hours, and the men in vehicles three and seven may drive them home but not up into the Territories for drinks. Tell them I said they should all get a good night’s sleep, or however they wish to pass the time.”
“Yes, sir. They’ll appreciate that, sir.”
“I myself will be wandering around in vehicle four. You may hear from me. Stay awake.”
“Of course, Major.”
“You’ve got a dinner coming, young man.”
“If I may, sir,” said the enthusiastic radio operator, “and I know I speak for all of us. We wouldn’t care to work for anyone but you.”
“Perhaps two dinners.”
Parked in front of an apartment house on Yun Ping Road, Lin lifted the microphone out of its cradle below the dashboard. “Radio, it’s Dragonfly Zero.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Switch me to a direct telephone line with a scrambler. I’ll know we’re on scrambler when I hear the echo on my part of the call, won’t I?”
“Naturally, sir.”
The faint echo pulsated over the line, with the dial tone. The major punched in the numbers; the ringing began and a female voice answered.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Zhou. Kuai!” said Lin, his words rushed, telling the woman to hurry.
“Certainly,” she replied in Cantonese.
“Zhou here,” said the man.
“Xun su! Xiao Xi!” Lin spoke in a throated whisper; it was the sound of a desperate man pleading to be heard. “Sheng! Contact instantly! Sapphire is gone!”
“What? Who is this?”
The major pressed down the bar and pushed a button to the right of the microphone. The radio operator spoke instantly.
“Yes, Dragonfly?”
“Patch into my private line, also on scrambler, and reroute all calls here. Right away! This will be standard procedure until I instruct otherwise. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” said a subdued radioman.
The mobile phone buzzed and Lin picked it up, speaking casually. “Yes?” he answered, feigning a yawn.
“Major, this is Zhou! I just had a very strange call. A man phoned me—he sounded badly hurt—and told me to contact someone named Sheng. I was to say that Sapphire was gone.”
“Sapphire?” said the major, suddenly alert. “Say nothing to anyone, Zhou! Damned computers—I don’t know how it happened, but that call was meant for me. This is beyond Dragonfly. I repeat, say nothing to anyone!”
“Understood, sir.”
Lin started the car and drove several blocks west to Tanlung Street. He repeated the exercise, and again the call came over his private line.
“Major?”
“I just got off the phone with someone who sounded like he was dying! He wanted me to …”
The explanation was the same: a dangerous error had been made, beyond the purview of Dragonfly. Nothing was to be repeated. The order was understood.
Lin called three more numbers, each time from in front of each recipient’s apartment or boardinghouse. All were negative; each man reached him within moments after a call with his startling news and none had raced outside to a random sterile pay phone. The major knew only one thing for certain. Whoever the infiltrator was, he would not use his home phone to make contact. Telephone bills recorded all numbers dialed, and all bills were submitted for departmental audit. It was a routine containment procedure that was welcomed by the agents. Excess charges were picked up by Special Branch as if they were related to business.
The two men in vehicles three and seven, having been relieved of duty, had checked in with headquarters by the fifth telephone call. One was at a girlfriend’s house and made it plain that he had no intention of leaving for the next twenty-four hours. He pleaded with the radioman to take all “emergency calls from clients,” telling everyone who tried to reach him that his superiors had sent him to the Antarctic. Negative. It was not the way of a double agent, including the humor. He neither cut himself off nor revealed the whereabouts or the identity of a drop. The second man was, if possible, more negative. He informed headquarters-communications that he was available for any and all problems, major or minor, related or unrelated to Dragonfly, even to answering the phones. His wife had recently given birth to triplets, and he confided in a voice that bordered on panic—according to the radioman—he got more rest on the job than at home. Negative.
Seven down and seven negative. That left one man at the Pagoda Cinema for another forty minutes, and the other at the Yacht Club in Aberdeen.
His mobile phone hummed—emphatically, it seemed, or was it his own anxiety? “Yes?”
“I just received a message for you, sir,” said the radio operator. “ ‘Eagle to Dragonfly Zero. Urgent. Respond.’ ”
“Thank you.” Lin looked at the clock in the center of the dashboard. He was thirty-five minutes late for his appointment with Havilland and the legendary crippled agent from years past, Alexander Conklin. “Young man?” said the major, bringing the microphone back to his lips.
“Yes, sir?”
“I have no time for the anxious if somewhat irrelevant ‘Eagle,’ but I don’t wish to offend him. He’ll call again when I don’t respond, and I want you to explain that you’ve been unable to reach me. Of course, when you do, you’ll give me the message immediately.”
“It will be a delight, Major.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The ‘Eagle’ who called was very disagreeable. He shouted about appointments that should be kept when they were confirmed and that …”
Lin listened to the secondhand diatribe and made a mental note that if he survived the night he would talk to Edward McAllister about telephone etiquette, especially during emergencies. Sugar brought gentle expressions, salt only grimaces. “Yes, yes, I understand, young man. As our ancestors might say, ‘May the eagle’s beak be caught in its elimination canal.’ Just do as I say, and in the meantime—in fifteen minutes from now—raise our man at the Pagoda Cinema. When he calls in, give him my unlisted fourth-level number and patch it into this frequency, scrambler continuing, of course.”
“Of course, sir.”
Lin sped east on Hennessy Road past Southorn Park to Fleming, where he turned south into Johnston and east again on Burrows Street and the Pagoda Cinema. He swerved into the parking lot, taking the spot reserved for the assistant manager. He stuck a police card in the front window, got out, and ran up to the entrance. There were only a few people at the window for the midnight showing of Lust in the Orient, an odd choice for the agent inside. Nevertheless, to avoid calling attention to himself, since he had six minutes to go, he stood behind three men who were waiting in front of the booth. Ninety seconds later he had paid for and received his ticket. He went inside, gave it to the taker, and adjusted his eyes to the darkness and to the pornographic motion picture on the distant screen. It was an odd choice of entertainment for the man he was testing, but he had vowed to himself he would permit no prejudgments, no balancing of one suspect against another.
It was admittedly difficult in this case, however. Not that he particularly liked the man who was somewhere in that darkened theater, watching along with the feverishly attentive audience the sexual gymnastics of the wooden “actors.” In truth he did not like the man; he simply recognized the fact that he was among the best in his command. The agent was arrogant and unpleasant, but he was also a brave soul whose defection from Beijing was eighteen months in the making, his every hour in the Communist capital a threat to his life. He had been a high-ranking officer in the Security Forces, with access to invaluable Intelligence information. And in a heartrending gesture of sacrifice he had left behind a beloved wife and girl child when he escaped south, protecting them with a charred, bullet-ridden corpse that he made sure was identified as himself—a hero of China shot and then burned by a roving band of hoodlums in the recent crime wave that had swept through the Mainland. Mother and daughter were secure, pensioned by the government, and like all high-level defectors, he was subjected to the most rigorous examinations designed to trap potential infiltrators. Here his arrogance had actually helped him. He had made no attempt to ingratiate himself; he was what he was and he had done what he had done for the good of Mother China. Either the authorities could accept him with all he had to offer or he would look elsewhere. Everything checked, except the well-being of his wife and child. They were not being taken care of in the manner the defector had expected. Therefore money was filtered through to her place of work without explanation. She could be told nothing; if there was the slightest suspicion that her husband was alive, she could be tortured for information she did not possess. The in-depth profile of such a man was not the profile of a double agent, regardless of his taste in films.
That left the man in Aberdeen, and he was something of a puzzle to Lin. The agent was older than the others, a small man who always dressed impeccably, a logician and former accountant who professed such loyalty that once Lin had almost made him a confidant, but had pulled himself up short when he was close to revealing things he should not reveal. Perhaps because the man was nearer his own age he felt a stronger kinship.… On the other hand, what an extraordinary cover for a mole from Beijing. Married to an Englishwoman, and a member of the rich and social Yacht Club by way of marriage. Everything was in place for him; he was respectability itself. It seemed incredible to Lin that his closest colleague, the man who had imposed such order on his personal life but still wanted to arrest an Australian brawler for causing Dragonfly to lose face, could have been reached by Sheng Chou Yang and corrupted.… No, impossible! Perhaps, thought the major, he should go back and examine further a comical off-duty agent who wanted all clients to be told he was in the Antarctic, or the overworked father of triplets who was willing to answer phones to escape his domestic chores.
These speculations were not in order! Lin Wenzu shook his head as if ridding his mind of such thoughts. Now. Here. Concentrate! His sudden decision to move came from the sight of a stairway. He walked over to it and climbed the steps to the balcony; the projection room was directly in front of him. He knocked once on the door and went inside, the weight of his body breaking the cheap, thin bolt on the door.
“Ting zhi!” yelled the projectionist; a woman was on his lap, his hand under her skirt. The young woman leaped away from her perch and turned to the wall.
“Crown Police,” said the major, showing his identification. “And I mean no harm to either of you, please believe that.”
“You shouldn’t!” replied the projectionist. “This isn’t exactly a place of worship.”
“That might be disputed, but it certainly isn’t a church.”
“We operate with a fully paid license—”
“You have no argument from me, sir,” interrupted Lin. “The Crown simply needs a favor, and it could hardly be against your interests to provide it.”
“What is it?” asked the man, getting up, angrily watching the woman slip through the door.
“Stop the film for, say, thirty seconds and turn up the lights. Announce to the audience that there was a break and that it will be repaired quickly.”
The projectionist winced. “It’s almost over! There’ll be screaming!”
“As long as there are lights. Do it!”
The projector ground down with a whir; the lights came up, and the announcement was made over the loudspeaker. The projectionist was right. Catcalls echoed throughout the motion picture house, accompanied by waving arms and numerous extended third fingers. Lin’s eyes scanned the audience—back and forth, row by row.
There was his man.… Two men—the agent was leaning forward talking to someone Lin Wenzu had never seen before. The major looked at his watch, then turned to the projectionist. “Is there a public phone downstairs?”
“When it works, there is. When it isn’t broken.”
“Is it working now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is it?”
“Below the staircase.”
“Thank you. Start the film again in sixty seconds.”
“You said thirty!”
“I’ve changed my mind. And you do enjoy the privileges of a good job because of a license, don’t you?”
“They’re animals down there!”
“Put a chair against the door,” said Lin, going outside. “The lock’s broken.”
In the lobby beneath the staircase the major passed the exposed pay phone. Barely pausing, he yanked the spiral cord out of the box, and proceeded outside to his car, stopping at the sight of a phone booth across the road. He raced over and read the number, instantly memorizing it, and ran back to the car. He climbed into the seat and looked at his watch; he backed up the automobile, drove out into the street, and double-parked several hundred feet beyond the theater’s marquee. He turned his headlights off and watched the entrance.
A minute and fifteen seconds later the defector from Beijing emerged, looking first to his right, then to his left, obviously agitated. He then looked straight ahead, seeing what he wanted to see, what Lin expected him to see, since the telephone in the theater was not working. It was the phone booth on the other side of the road. Lin dialled as his subordinate ran over to it, spinning into the plastic shell that faced the street. It rang before the man could insert his coins.
“Xun su! Xiao Xi!” Lin coughed as he whispered. “I knew you would find the phone! Sheng! Contact instantly! Sapphire is gone!” He replaced the microphone, but left his hand on the instrument, expecting to remove it with the agent’s incoming call on his private line.
It did not come. He turned in his seat and looked back at the open, plastic shell of the pay phone across the road. The agent had dialed another number, but the defector was not speaking to him. There was no need to drive to Aberdeen.
The major silently got out of the car, walked across the street into the shadows of the far pavement, and started toward the pay phone. He stayed in the relative darkness, moving slowly, calling as little attention to his bulk as he could, cursing, as he often did, the genes that had produced his outsized figure. Remaining well back in the shadows, he approached the phone. The defector was eight feet away, his back to Lin, talking excitedly, exasperation in every sentence.
“Who is Sapphire? Why this telephone? Why would he reach me?… No, I told you, he used the leader’s name!… Yes, that’s right, his name! No code, no symbol! It was insane!”
Lin Wenzu heard all he had to hear. He pulled out his service automatic and walked rapidly out of the darkness.
“The film broke and they turned up the lights! My contact and I were—”
“Hang up the phone!” ordered the major.
The defector spun around. “You!” he screamed.
Lin rushed the man, his immense body crushing the double agent into the plastic shell as he grabbed the phone, smashing it into the metal box. “Enough!” he roared.
Suddenly, he felt the blade slicing with ice-cold heat into his abdomen. The defector crouched, the knife in his left hand, and Lin squeezed the trigger. The sound of the explosion filled the quiet street as the traitor dropped to the pavement, his throat ripped open by the bullet, blood streaming down his clothes, staining the concrete below.
“Ni made!” screamed a voice on the major’s left, cursing him. It was the second man, the contact who had been inside the theater talking with the defector. He raised a gun and fired as the major lunged, and Lin’s huge bleeding torso fell into the man like a wall. Flesh blew apart in Lin’s upper right chest, but the killer’s balance was shaken. The major fired his automatic; the man fell clutching his right eye. He was dead.
Across the street, the pornographic film had ended and the crowd began to emerge on the street, sullen, angry, ungratified. And with what remained of his enormous strength, the badly wounded Lin picked up the bodies of the two dead conspirators and half dragged, half carried them back to his car. A number of people from the Pagoda’s audience watched him with glazed or disinterested stares. What they saw was a reality they could not contend with or comprehend. It was beyond the narrow confines of their fantasies.
Alex Conklin rose from the chair and limped awkwardly, noisily to the darkened bay window. “What the hell do you want me to say?” he asked, turning and looking at the ambassador.
“That given the circumstances I took the only road open to me, the only one that would have recruited Jason Bourne.” Havilland held up his hand. “Before you answer, I should tell you in all fairness that Catherine Staples did not agree with me. She felt I should have appealed to David Webb directly. He was, after all, a Far East scholar, an expert who would understand stakes, the tragedy that could follow.”
“She was nuts,” said Alex. “He would have told you to shove it.”
“Thank you for that.” The diplomat nodded his head.
“Just hold it,” Conklin broke in. “He would have said that to you not because he thought you were wrong, but because he didn’t think he could do it. What you did—by taking Marie away from him—was to make him go back and be someone he wanted to forget.”
“Oh?”
“You really are one son of a bitch, you son of a bitch.”
Sirens suddenly erupted, ringing throughout the enormous house and the grounds, as searchlights began spinning through the windows. Gunfire accompanied the sound of smashing metal as tires screeched outside. The ambassador and the CIA man lurched to the floor; in seconds it was all over. Both men got to their feet as the door was crashed open. His chest and stomach drenched in blood, Lin Wenzu staggered in, carrying two dead bodies under his arms.
“Here is your traitor, sir,” said the major, dropping both corpses. “And a colleague. With these two, I believe we’ve cut off Dragonfly from Sheng—” Wenzu’s eyes rolled upward until the sockets were white. He gasped and fell to the floor.
“Call an ambulance!” shouted Havilland to the people who had gathered at the door.
“Get gauze, tape, towels, antiseptic—for Christ’s sake, anything you can find!” yelled Conklin, limping, racing over to the fallen Chinese. “Stop the goddamned bleeding!”