Jordan woke up in Davis’s arms. It wasn’t what she’d planned or expected, but she hadn’t resisted. In her line of work, relationships were hard to maintain. She didn’t much go for casual sex, but she had to admit it—last night was nice.
Slipping out of bed, she cinched on a cotton bathrobe and made coffee.
“Sleep well?” Davis asked as she stirred in some creamer.
Jordan smiled. There hadn’t been much sleep. “How do you like yours?”
“Black.”
She poured him a cup, thinking back on the previous night. The two of them had eaten dinner at Restauracja Baczewski, a Galician restaurant dedicated to a famous family of nineteenth-century philanthropists who also happened to own the spirits factory. The food was a delightful mix of Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian, and Hungarian dishes, each course paired with a recommended shot of vodka. They’d both had too much to drink, and now her head felt fuzzy.
She jumped in the shower first. Then while Davis showered, she checked in with Lory about the satellite images. He told her he was still working on it. After that, she called the lab about the cell phone pictures. Henry wasn’t in yet.
The hotel concierge recommended a place for breakfast. Finding it proved difficult, the entrance unmarked except for a small easel propped on the ground next to the door. Davis knocked, and a peephole slid open.
“We’re looking for Kryjivka,” he said to the eyeball staring out.
The door opened, and a guard in military uniform holding a bullpup rifle shouted, “Slava Ukraini!” Glory to Ukraine. “Moskal’ee ye?” Are there any Russians among you?
At least that’s the closest translation she could pull.
“No,” Jordan answered in English. “Breakfast?”
The guard grinned, clapped an arm around Davis’s shoulders, and pulled them inside. It was a small room, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a table with a bottle of vodka and numerous glasses. He poured both of them a shot and insisted they drink.
Hair of the dog, thought Jordan. Davis must have been thinking the same because he didn’t hesitate before clinking glasses with her, both of them slamming back the sweet-tasting vodka. Then the guard opened a panel behind the bookcase, revealing a hidden stairway. At the bottom was the restaurant, a hidden bunker filled with weapons, war memorabilia, and a well-stocked bar. They both ordered a potato with cheese and sausage skillet.
About the time their food arrived, so did a band of guerillas. They came inside and fired off a pistol, which made Jordan reach for her weapon. Her ears ringing, she watched as they dragged away one of the customers. All part of the tourist show. She imagined it was much different during actual times of resistance.
“Interesting place,” Davis said.
“Hmmm.”
Davis set down his fork. “What gives?” He’d been watching her all morning. “Regrets?”
“About last night?” She smiled and shook her head. “Not at all.”
“Then what’s bothering you?”
Last night they’d talked about nonessential things, like childhood memories, their families, their ambitions. She’d told him a few things about her father, but not the secrets, and not about her conversation with Professor Fedorov.
“I think we’re missing something, some connection, some thread that ties all this together.”
Before she could tell him what the elderly man had told her about the Futurists and Operation Osoaviakhim, her phone beeped. It was an incoming e-mail from Henry. He’d managed to pull the photos off the mini SD card, run facial recognition, and gotten a hit.
Jordan opened the attached document. It was a dossier with a picture attached.
“Check this out.” She held the up the phone so Davis could see. “It’s a picture of the Chinese buyer.”
Sitting shoulder to shoulder, she held the phone so they could both read. His name was Deng Xue, a party committee secretary of the Hainan Province, commonly called the party chief. A rising star in the Communist Party, at forty-five he’d been named to the politburo. As party chief, he oversaw two hundred plus islands off the southern coast of China, including the disputed territory in the Spratly and Paracel Islands.
“He’s a bigwig.” Davis sounded surprised. “The politburo is the chief political decision-making body in China.”
“More importantly, the Chinese have a military base on the south end of Hainan,” she said, scrolling up the page to read on. “I’ll bet that’s where he was taking the gun.”
Davis picked up his tablet, tapped on the screen, and pulled up a map and some information on the Hainan Province.
“If China puts a railgun here, it would be able to intimidate anyone trying to stop their expansion into the South China Sea.” She reached across and pointed to the islands involved in the land-grabbing dispute.
“Meaning the U.S.?”
Jordan didn’t want to discuss the role she felt the United States had been forced to take in policing international policies and turned back to scrolling the dossier. Davis, to his credit, dropped his line of questioning.
“It looks like Hainan is a booming place,” he said.
“The cyberspying operation?”
Jordan nodded. They’d been infiltrating high-value targets around the world for almost a decade. “Of course the Chinese government vehemently denies in it. In fact, some of the research shows it might actually be a for-profit operation run by some unknown patriotic hacker.”
“Deng Xue?”
“It’s an idea.”
“If Deng’s an entrepreneur, it’s possible he’s looking for some state-of-the-art weapons technology to help him build his assets.”
“An arms dealer?” Jordan considered it.
“That might be the connection to the Russians.”
“Except there’s one hitch . . . if his intention is to mass produce and export weapons, why not hack the specs himself and build them in Hainan? It would make more sense.”
“Unless Ping outmaneuvered him.” Davis tapped a few more times on the tablet. “It says here Hainan Province is designated one of the special economic zones.”
That didn’t surprise her. The former Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping had allowed free-market economy policies and instituted more flexible government control in several areas. It encouraged exports and drew in foreigners interested in doing business with China.
“Hainan would be a natural choice.”
Davis looked up from the tablet. “It seems like the policy worked.”
“Just maybe not the way Deng planned.”
“How so?”
“Deng gets credited for being the architect of modern Chinese politics and expanding trade while trying to maintain the Communist Party’s socialist ideology, but it didn’t work. While the zones grew the wealth, when it came time to share and transfer the assets inland, the provincial governments fought to hold onto the money.”
“Money corrupts,” Davis said. “Any chance the two Dengs are related?”
Jordan picked up her phone again and scrolled down the buyer’s dossier to the section about family. “It says here that Deng Xue likes to think so, but he’s never been able to prove common lineage.”
What she read next tugged at the elusive thread.
“Wait a minute,” she said.
“What?” Davis draped an arm over her shoulders and leaned in to see what had caught her attention. Jordan repositioned her phone so he could see.
“It says here that back in the 1950s, the elder Deng helped establish a think tank system. He modeled it after the Soviet’s Science City.”
“I don’t see how that fits in.”
Of course he didn’t. She hadn’t told him about her talk with Professor Fedorov. The professor had indicated there were other groups scattered across the continents. If Deng Xue considered himself the inheritor of Deng Xiaoping’s legacy, the Futurists might be his tie to the Russians.
She felt Davis squeeze her shoulders. “Are you going to tell me what you’re thinking?”
“It’s a crazy idea.”
“You seem to have a lot of those.” When she glared at him, Davis pulled his arm back, feigning fear of reprisal. “I’m just saying.”
“You really want to know?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
She didn’t often have the desire to confide in people. But despite the fact he’d betrayed her before, she wanted to trust him. “I was thinking that maybe Deng and the Russians are working together.”