Springboard (42 page)

She paused, remembering, a small smile on her face.

“My grandmother taught me how to shoot a .22 rifle, how to skin and cook a squirrel, and how to run within my breath. My grandfather taught me how to ride a bicycle, to call quail right to the back door of their house, and how to strip down a lawn mower engine. And also about sonnets and plays. He did a mean Othello.”

She paused again. “I can’t imagine any better grandparents than Amos and Ruth. These pictures capture their essence for me. Who they were—who they still are.”

He looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Around here?”

“They live on a little farm down in Georgia. You’ll get a chance to meet them pretty soon. I thought you’d want to know a little bit about them first.”

Thorn felt a thrill, an almost electric sensation flash up his body—this conversation meant something more than family history. It took his breath away for a moment as he understood just what it did mean.

Then he said, “So, now is it okay to bring up that subject I wasn’t supposed to talk about?”

She grinned. “I like a man who can keep up. Go ahead.”

“You want to get married?”

“To you? Yes.”

He thought his face might break, he grinned so big.

Later, when they were lying on the floor between the two pictures in a state of dress the same as the painting of her grandmother, Marissa said, “So, how’s the thing in China going?”

“In the grand cosmic scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter to me right now. Not in the least. Not at all.”

She laughed. “You are waay too easy, Tommy.”

He laughed with her. She was smart, funny, and beautiful, and she wanted to be with him.

He didn’t see how it could get any better than this.

The rendezvous was at the warehouse where Locke waited, but even with what was supposedly an unbreakable cipher program in Wu’s and Locke’s telephones, the general never said anything that could identify them, or specific times and places, over a wireless connection. What was not spoken could not be intercepted.

Wu was in his command car, and the driver was one of his hand-selected elite robbery team. Too bad the man would be dead soon. He would last longer than some of the others—all the way to Taipei, but then, alas, he would have to become food for the worms. Regrettable, but necessary. The new Wu did not need any such baggage.

True, the People’s Government would want his head, but he had already begun making sure that anything they said about him would fall on less-than-interested ears in Taiwan. Of course they would offer all manner of slanders. He would be, after all, a defector. And if his new friends believed the story of the theft of millions—and certainly some of them would—one could buy a lot of goodwill with enough well-placed bribes. It was a very large pie, after all, and the reason he had baked it was to share it.

There were things that money could not buy, but poor and venal officials were seldom among these things. There was always a man who wanted more than he had, and you had but to find him and determine his price to make him yours.

Wu glanced at his watch. He was a little nervous—who wouldn’t be? His life was about to change, very much and forever, no matter what happened. If things went badly, then he would suffer. Prison would be the best for which he could hope, death a much more likely end. But if all went well—and it should—then Wu would be one giant step farther down the road to greatness, with the sun shining and not a tiger in sight.

He had found one weakness in the technological might of the United States. Shing was captured, and that secret lost to Wu, but what he had found once, he could find again, with enough money and power at his beck and call.

Wu was a man with large mountain ahead of him, and in his heart, he knew he would not fail to reach and climb it. To stand in the dragon’s lair . . .

He smiled as the driver honked at a wooden cart crossing the road ahead of them, a cart with automobile wheels and bald tires on it, being drawn by a pair of oxen, driven by an old man in a straw coolie hat. Here they were, in the twenty-first century, in a city thick with all the aspects of modern civilization, just down the hill from the Ritz Hotel, where a good, but not the best, room would cost HK$2,000 a night, and still such things as ox carts were not only possible, they were not even uncommon.

Wu laughed. He was on his way to becoming the man he was always destined to become, a man of the future, and here he was slowing for something out of history. How amusing.

Life did not get any better than this.

The plane was an old PS-1 ASW Flying Boat, a Shin Meiwa, made in Japan forty or fifty years ago, but registered to a Chinese tourist-transport company owned by the CIA. It wasn’t the most spacious craft for a full platoon, but it worked well enough, and it was what was available.

The Chinese pilot landed the plane in the bay not three miles away from Macao, and did a slow taxi to a dock on the northeast side of the city. Macao was small geographically, even with something more than half a million locals living there—but the plane’s dock was out of the way, and Kent and his team were able to leave in plain sight, disguised as tourists. They were strung with cameras, they carried overnight bags or day packs, there were women and men, and they looked like any other group of Westerners on a charter flight, come to lose money at the casinos.

The officials at the dock who were to check passports belonged to the Company, Kent had been told, and a uniformed and armed guard smiled and waved at them as they walked along the dock to where a chartered bus awaited them, so that seemed to be true.

On the bus, which was not air-conditioned, and which had all the windows down to allow the semitropical heat and breeze in, Fernandez, dressed in a bright blue Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts and sandals, said, “That seemed awful easy.”

Kent shrugged. “Who wants to sneak
into
China?”

“I guess.”

The CIA liaison, a tall and thin man with carroty red hair who called himself Rusty, dropped into the seat in front of Kent and turned to look at him. “We have your staging area set up, Colonel.”

“Any problems?”

“With the Chairman of JCS and the Director of the Company breathing down our necks? Not hardly. If I had a red carpet, I’d have rolled it out for you and saluted as you strolled by.”

Kent smiled. It was good to have a boss with clout when you needed it.

The ride didn’t take long, and ended at a small hotel, the Golden Road.

“Company owns this, too?”

“Enough of it so the co-owners don’t complain when we book conventions of rich tourists.”

“And we are . . . ?”

“American dentists,” Rusty said.

“Dentists?”

“It was that or lawyers.”

Fernandez shook his head. “My mother wanted me to be a lawyer. She was afraid of dentists.”

“Everybody is afraid of dentists,” the CIA man said. “Given a choice, most people would rather sit on a hot stove than go to the dentist. People are less afraid of death than dentists. Makes good cover.”

“Any word on Wu?” Kent asked.

“The last we heard, he had left the base with his driver in his staff car. But we lost him in the warehouse district, and we don’t have electronics on his vehicle. He’ll turn up again pretty soon. It’s not that big a town.”

“Good.”

Kent and his troops went into the hotel and were assigned rooms. He arranged to meet backup with the unit in a meeting room reserved for them in an hour, which gave everybody time to settle in and drop off their gear.

An hour later, as Kent strolled toward the meeting room, he was stopped at the door by Fernandez.

“Sir, I just got word from the spooks. We, uh, have a . . . situation on the ground here.”

Kent looked at him. “Which is . . . ?”

“Apparently there has been some kind of terrorist attack on several of the local casinos. The Army has moved in to deal with it.”

“And . . . ?”

“Wu himself is leading the troops.”

Kent nodded. “I can understand that. Some men don’t like to be armchair commanders.”

“It appears they have the problem in hand, but we can’t tell for sure—all communications from the sites have been jammed.”

“That would be standard—” He stopped. “Oh, my God.”

“Sir?”

“I can’t believe it.”

“What is that, Colonel?” Fernandez looked puzzled. Kent himself was feeling more than a little stupid.

“Wu. That’s what it’s all about. The misdirection—the computer attacks, trying to buy bombs—those were
cover
.”

“To do what? Rob some casinos?”

“Exactly!”

“Are you sure, sir?”

“Yes. It makes perfect sense.”

Fernandez frowned. “It seems like an awful lot of trouble just to knock off a few casinos.”

“We’re not talking about lunch money, are we? Got to be tens, maybe hundreds of millions involved.”

Kent could see as it sank in.

After a moment, Fernandez said, “He can’t get away with it.”

“Who is going to stop him, Captain?” Kent asked. “
He’s
the Army! He can outgun anybody who’d try—at least in the short run. Damn, why didn’t I see this before?”

Fernandez didn’t say anything.

“Get the teams ready,” Kent said. “He’ll have to move the money somehow. If we follow that, we can get him.”

Fernandez hesitated, then asked, “Do we really
need
to get him?”

Kent looked at him. “What are you talking about, Julio?”

“Well, Colonel, if all the computer attacks were to set up a robbery, we know what he’s up to now, don’t we? It’s not our money.”

“True. But he still pulled off those attacks, which means he could do it again, if he had a reason to. And a man this complicated has to have more on his agenda. What is he going to
do
with all this money?”

Fernandez shrugged. “Buy a new car?”

“Not around here, he won’t. And if he’s the guy trying to get hold of surplus Soviet nukes? We sure need to know about that. No, Captain, it was a good thought, but we continue with the operation. We have questions, and this is the man with the answers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go!”

“Gone, sir.”

Once Julio was in the wind, Kent considered his next move. He could make a secure uplink with a Marine comsat and put in a call to General Hadden, though he knew what the man would tell him. You don’t stop in the middle of a battle because you
think
you know what the enemy is planning. Yes, it would be wise to apprise the commander of the situation, but Kent was the man on the ground and he had the best picture. What the general didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. No point in stirring up those waters just yet.

The House of Good Fortune—now there was an appropriate name. The question was, of course,
who
enjoyed the good fortune. At the moment, it wasn’t the House—and they had no idea how bad it was yet to become.

Locke grinned. So far, his plan had worked like a fine Swiss watch. So simple, when you knew how. Almost an anticlimax.

When the heavily armed paramilitary “terrorists” had started their assaults on two casinos, firing submachine guns into the ceilings and throwing flash-bangs all around, it had been bedlam. The two casino security heads, who had been carefully primed earlier by Locke in his colonel’s disguise, warning of this very thing, had taken one look and done just as they had been told—they called the People’s Army antiterrorist hotline. They believed that the local police would be outgunned, just as Locke had told them. And even if they
had
called the police, Locke had that covered as well.

Everything
was covered.

A few guards were killed or wounded, but then the People’s Army charged in and saved the day, shooting, spraying tear gas, capturing the dozen terrorists in the House of Good Fortune, and being ever so heroic in the process. And how fortunate, no tourists had been slain!

When the second casino—the Palace of Jade—was hit, Wu had declared a state of emergency, then quickly surrounded and occupied the Jade and three more of the major casinos with his troops. The second “terrorist” team was captured as easily as the first. Then Wu had explained to the casino managers that such a large-scale raid indicated a major threat, and that it was better to be safe than sorry. Nobody argued with him.

The owners and managers had been more than grateful. It never occurred to them that Comrade General Wu was the one about whom they should be worried—that the “terrorists” were no more than a sham.

With the cooperation of the security people and the blessings of the owners, Wu temporarily shut down all casino and hotel communications from the gambling palaces, so, he said, any hidden confederates inside could not aid the robbers. Massive and powerful jammers blanketed each place so that not even cell phones would work.

Time was critical. A few hours was all they would have, and then higher powers would want to know what the devil was going on.

For now, Wu had control of the buildings, and even if those inside had worried and thought to call for help—which they would not—they couldn’t make that call.

So they held five casinos, with an average of over sixty million dollars U.S. each on hand: yen, dollars, euros, pesos, pataca, pounds, dinars, rupees, rubles. . . . Most of the money was used and unmarked, some of it in computer-accessible draw-upon accounts or certified flashmem deposited in the casinos’ computers.