Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (31 page)

5. Test of Loyalty

John Praxis told the HUMV-IX’s intelligence to hold the door open while he loaded the bodies of Pamela and her killer into the vehicle and transported them back to the Fremont compound. He himself directed the unloading: his former bodyguard to the hospital morgue, the man who had killed her to the Defense Force’s Office of Investigation and Forensics. From the armored car
en route,
he had already signaled Callie and Paul, respectively, to take charge of each body.

The next morning, he met with them in his office to hear their reports.

“The man is not in any of our databases,” Paul said, flashing on Praxis’s comm wall a still of the assassin’s eyeless head, its jaw askew and throat mangled,. “Cyber reconstruction of the facial tissues, as well as genetic markers, suggest he was a Chinese national. But more interesting was what we found in his pocket.”

The screen showed a piece of red paper with Chinese characters.

“That’s rice paper, dyed red,” Paul continued. “The letters spell out—crudely attempting to phoneticize—your name and Callie’s, as well as certain dollar amounts. A red poster or card was the ancient technique used by the tongs, the community associations of old San Francisco’s Chinatown, to identify a target for assassination. The weapon—a hatchet with a triangular blade—fits that profile as well.”

“There are no more San Francisco tongs,” Callie said.

“No, the nearest one is in Seattle, Xin Dalu Tong,” Paul agreed.

“And they’ve decided they want Callie and me dead,” Praxis finished.

“It would appear so,” his general replied.

“All right,” Praxis said. “We’ve been down this road before—although it’s been a while since the Chinese have tried covert action. Put extra guards on all senior family members, Paul, and alert anyone traveling alone.” Then to Callie: “Put Stacy on the job of finding out why we’ve incurred the wrath of the Chinese government.”

“Xin Dalu is very carefully not a government agency,” she said.

“Yeah,” he replied. “So they say—and so nobody believes.”

Praxis nodded for Paul to go, but lifted a finger toward his daughter, indicating she should stay.

“I’m very sorry to hear about Pamela,” Callie offered when the two were alone.

“She was one of the best of our retainers, I think. Good at her job. Loyal, too.”

“She was with us for, what? Almost seventy years,” she said. “A long time.”

“Pamela said a funny thing just as she died. ‘Good-bye, Grandfather.’ Isn’t that sweet? As if, in her delirium, she actually thought she was one of my granddaughters.”

Callie stirred uncomfortably. Her eyes were shining.

Praxis stared at her. “What is it?”

“Do you remember the time after your heart attack, all those years ago? You were in the hospital for weeks and weeks, and Leonard had just taken over the company.”

“Yes. His first taste of real power—”

“It was Leonard who brought Pamela in as receptionist on the thirty-eighth floor, the executive offices. She wasn’t very good at the job. Not at the beginning.”

“I remember now. A headstrong young woman.”

“We all heard rumors at the time …”

“What rumors?” he asked.

“That Pamela was Leonard’s natural daughter by one of his early mistresses. She was supposed to be a woman named Skinner or Skelton—maybe Sheldon, or something like it. The stories all differed. I never met the mistress, of course, because I would have been about twelve at the time. And I was too young to hear the really good family gossip. But ever since then, every so often, when I looked at Pamela, I thought I caught a resemblance to Leonard.”

“Why did no one ever tell me?” Praxis asked.

“Because we never knew for sure. And then Leonard was dead.”

Praxis remembered the stories of Leonard’s infidelities. He recalled there was supposed to be a child somewhere, sometimes more than one. But when Pamela Sheldon appeared as a receptionist on the executive floor, he never gave it a thought. And though he had worked with her for all those years, he never noticed any resemblance. If he had, he might have done more for her.

And Pamela herself never presumed, never hinted at her status, never complained about her fate. She simply stood at his elbow, watched his back, and took a blow for him that cut halfway through her body. She was, indeed, the best of them—and he never even knew.

“See that she is honored,” he said now, his eyes suddenly filling with tears. “A place at the lake, I think, on the edge of the woods.” He paused over that for a moment. “Make it the start of a new family gravesite.”

“And what do we put on the stone?” Callie asked.

“ ‘Pamela Sheldon Praxis,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘Most loyal of all.’ ”

* * *

Knock, knock,
came the thought in Instant Memory.

Who’s there?
Stacy replied, although of course she knew.

It didn’t work.

She paused mentally.
It didn’t work … who?

Your plan. It didn’t work,
Jay-Jay sent, ignoring the punch line.
I mean, the Chinese took the bait, they sent an assassin, but he mucked it up.

So? We try again. Eventually our luck has to—

Luck! Are we relying on
luck
now
? Some sense of his indignation came through the memory system’s neutralizing filters.
Father now has instructions, direct from the Patriarch, to boost surveillance on everyone. And you will be asked, through Aunt Callie, to find out what the Chinese are doing.

She hasn’t approached me yet.
In truth, Stacy was less concerned with her great-grandfather John’s reaction than with her great-aunt Callie’s. Her aunt was the tougher nut and more astute.
But I can handle her,
she sent back.
She has nothing to go on. The Chinese were acting alone, and I can verify this through our diplomatic contacts.

At least that bitch Sheldon is out of the way.

She was just collateral. The target was always John. After him, Callie.

Yes, but only if your plan had worked,
Jay-Jay sent.
Getting rid of them was supposed to prevent this kind of blowback. Now the target’s aware. They have heightened security, are making inquiries—

All of our links to the action are sealed. Besides, none of the older generation understands how this brain-to-brain stuff works. They will be looking for a document, written notes, a trace recording—some kind of physical evidence. And there isn’t any.

I hope you’re right,
he replied.

Trust your big sister.

* * *

The argument from the night before, when Angela had returned to the apartment she shared with Antigone, after leaving it with Ken that afternoon, had been terrible.

First, her aunt had accused him of being a shallow, unfeeling man. She told Angela about every woman Antigone knew he had bedded and about the feeble excuses he had made for his behavior. He was a womanizer, addicted to sex, and there was no true love in him at all. Angela knew this was false, because she had grown up with Ken, had seen over the years that he was a serious, sober man, and sensed that he loved her deeply. She would be the last woman in his life, Angela said—but her aunt had just laughed at that.

Then Antigone had accused Angela herself of gross ingratitude, and that was untrue, too. Angela said she owed everything—the clothes on her back, the food in her mouth, the sum of her life experience—to her two aunts who had taken her in as a baby when her father and mother had died. But still, she was a separate person. She had to find her own way, her own life, not Antigone’s. She could not be a child forever—no one could—and now she had said as much.

And finally, in desperation, Antigone had accused Angela of having base and unnatural appetites. She had been betrayed by her hormones rather than her heart, when it should have been her head making the decisions. And again, Angela said she could see her future life most clearly, and it lay with Ken and his connection to the Praxis family, not in Antigone’s apartment in San Francisco.

“That will never be,” her aunt had said darkly.

With this final verdict, the two women had gone to their separate bedrooms and closed their doors. But while Antigone may have gone to sleep that night, Angela became busy. She took two suitcases from the back of her closet—luggage bought for the trips that she and Antigone had planned but never seemed to take—and began filling them with her life. And in the early morning, not yet five o’clock, she let herself out of the apartment. She left her key with the doorman and took the first ferry of the day across to Oakland, landing at the terminal on Jack London Square. From there it was a short walk down to the converted warehouse where Ken kept a studio loft.

She rang the buzzer on the outer door and, when he answered in a sleepy voice, said only, “It’s me.”

The lock clicked immediately. As she climbed the stairs to the third floor, lugging her suitcases, she prayed that she was right, Antigone was wrong, and that he would be alone.

He opened the door before she could knock. He was standing in a pair of pajama bottoms, his face lined with sleep, his hair mussed. “What time is it?” he asked.

Before she could answer, the nails in his head told him. “Early,” she said anyway.

Ken looked at the suitcases on the floor at her feet. “You’ve made a choice.”

“Yes, I did.” She did not look past the door to see if it was the right one.

“Come in then.” He swung the door wide. “You want some coffee?”

The apartment was empty. She breathed again. “Yes, please.”

* * *

With some misgivings, John Praxis determined that he must take the initiative and seek a meeting, under a flag of truce, with representatives of the Xin Dalu Tong. He suggested the Oyasumi Inn in Eureka, California, as the closest thing to neutral territory. It had once been the Holiday Inn, but the franchise was bought out by years ago the Japanese.

The notion had met with stiff resistance from the rest of his family.

“You’re just going to serve us up on a platter,” said Callie.

“This will undo my years of work!” wailed Anastasia.

“What protections will you have?” asked Paul.

“None,” he replied. “And that’s the point.”

Praxis arrived in the parking lot by ariflect, accompanied by Callie and Stacy as witnesses to the negotiations. He felt truly exposed without Pamela walking two steps behind him. In her place, he had Paul, who was the only person wearing a side arm. It was not the same. The hotel was downtown, surrounded by low-rise buildings. The roof of any one of them might have harbored a sniper team that could take them out with no blowback on the tong or the Chinese government. And yet Praxis was banking on the Chinese being honorable people who would meet his honesty with restraint—if not with curiosity.

A middle-aged man in a black silk jacket with a round collar met the Praxis party at the hotel’s main entrance. “My name is Mr. Fu,” he said. “I am to be your representative—your translator and advocate—to the members of our community association.” He looked at Paul’s weapon. “I’m afraid I must ask you to relinquish that until the meeting has ended.” He put out his open hand, palm upward.

Paul looked at Praxis, who nodded.

His grandson handed over the pistol.

“Any other weapons?” Mr. Fu asked.

“This is a mission seeking peace,” he said.

“Of course,” Fu said. He placed the weapon on the hotel’s registration desk, where the clerk carefully tagged it and handed the receipt to Paul.

“We have reserved a conference room for this occasion,” Fu told them and led down a separate hallway to a large room with two tables arranged in parallel with space between them. On the far side of one table sat three men whom Fu introduced as Zhang Fuhua, Dong Geming, and Li Guiren. “They are deputies in our organization—what you in the west might call a ‘tong.’ However, we are merely a benevolent association, much like your Rotary or Elks Club.”

Praxis nodded and introduce the members of his own party, whom he emphasized were all close family members, and Fu dutifully translated for him. The three men smiled at them.

After that, Fu offered tea and refreshments. Zhang, in Chinese, asked about the weather in San Francisco. “Cloudy” was Praxis’s reply, translated as something like
yin.
And Praxis asked about Seattle. “Raining” came back from Fu in English. They exchanged pleasantries about the prospects for the harvest, and Dong praised the Praxis Family Association for its food processing capability. As Stacy had explained beforehand, they could expect twenty minutes or more of such polite chitchat before either side might broach the main topic of discussion. Finally, that moment arrived.

“We had an unfortunate occurrence a few days ago,” Praxis said, with Fu speaking simultaneously in Chinese. “My aide and I were attacked in the street by a man wielding a hatchet. My aide was killed, but I was clearly the intended victim. I found this most disturbing, because the man was Chinese.”

The three men looked concerned. “What did that man have to say for himself?” asked Li in English.

“Nothing,” Praxis replied. “He did not survive the encounter.”

“That is most unfortunate. He might have told you his grievance.”

“He had no grievance that I’m aware of. He did, however, carry this.”

Praxis pulled from his pocket the folded red paper and handed it to Fu.

The man took it, opened it, and dropped it on the table. “What is this?”

“I’m told it’s the ancient way the Chinese tongs would hire an assassin.”

“Someone is playing a trick on you,” Fu said. “Today we use telephones.”

“We have also received a query from the Chinese consulate,” Praxis said.

“Their artificial intelligence asked us about nuclear weapons,” Stacy added.

“Ah,” said Dong, also in English. “They would defend the Treaty of Kitsap.”

“A matter of grave concern to the government of Greater China,” Zhang said.

“But one that has nothing to do with the Xin Dalu Tong?” Praxis suggested.

“Oh, no!” said Zhang. “Our association also worries deeply about such things.”