At fourteen years old, he had deified Du Mochou, and seen the day they met as the best day of his life. Now Crooked Tooth was getting in the way. Now unimaginably rich thanks to Fen, he rose to the height of the Triad, but he was still essentially the same thug-minded small-time racketeer from the slums of Shenzhen.
Once Fen had dealt with Sheppard, Mochou’s turn would come. It was high time the old man retired.
Chapter 1. Still Big Po
THERE WAS A MEMORIAL to the victims of the Third World War in enormous Freedom Park, which stretched for a good sixty square miles along the edge of our district.
Yoshi advised us to meet Big Po there for two reasons: there was nobody around and there were plenty of places to land. The name was nicely descriptive: it was quite literally a park of freedom, where the police dared not tread. A lawless zone. Orderly citizens didn’t go there, the criminals slept in the morning, and non-citizens couldn’t access the district at all. All this meant the park was relatively empty until lunchtime.
It was a popular place among the homeless, drug addicts, prostitutes and anyone willing to accept the risks of immersing themselves in an atmosphere of excess and lawlessness. And of course, ‘free ones’ could often be found here — citizens who refused the ‘medical’ chips that allowed the authorities to track everyone.
Studying the police reports, Hairo said:
“The place gets dozens of emergency calls every night. Dangerous spot. And the medics don’t fly into the park, so anyone injured has to get outside it on their own. Hard to even guess how many people have gone missing there.”
“If Wesley’s afraid of the park, there’ll be no meeting,” I said.
By then I’d already calmed down and no longer felt the need to find out how exactly Mogwai had done that trick with Tissa. It was enough to remember how I’d gotten out of the sandbox and reached Kharinza. If that was possible, then why wouldn’t it work in reverse too? Not out of the sandbox, but into it. Especially for a Supreme Legate. It would be easy. The rest was obvious: either Tissa betrayed us, meaning she acted voluntarily, or it was Subjugate Mind. Taking control of someone gave you access to all their skills. I remembered that from my own experience.
But I still wanted to meet with Wesley Cho. Despite all the shit he’d shoveled onto the Dementors and the Awoken, I couldn’t deny that Wesley was a strong player. And, importantly, a good strategist and tactician. Much would, of course, depend on how he behaved at our meeting, but I knew that wars aren’t won alone.
Wesley wasn’t afraid. Sheppard? This is a surprise… Yeah, we can meet. In Freedom Park? I’ll be at the indicated coordinates in an hour, he said, overcoming his initial surprise and making a decision right away. He earned some points for that too. We could talk over the comm or in CrapChat or meet in a private room, but there was a big drawback to all those options: I wouldn’t see his face, his true feelings. The risk was justified, unlike the meeting with Hairo when I offered him work.
“What if someone tails him? Or he gives us up?” Hung asked. His dislike for Wesley was the strongest of all, but the stakes were too high.
“We’re armed and dangerous,” Roj van Garderen grinned. “Let ‘em come.”
“Agreed,” his colleague Maria Saar said. “We’ll leave one alive so we can beat some intel out of him and find out who’s hunting you, Alex.”
“It’s already obvious who’s hunting him,” Hairo objected. “But who exactly broke into the base and how they found out — that I’d really like to know.”
The security officer cast a glance at Roj and Maria, studying their reactions. They didn’t so much as twitch.
“I’m having everyone do a lie detector test after we land,” Hairo said.
“Don’t forget yourself,” Maria snapped back.
“Can I do the test too?” Hung asked. Catching confused looks, he shrugged: “What? I’ve never taken one before.”
“Ask uncle Hairo, he’ll teach you how to fool a detector,” Yoshi laughed.
We were the first to arrive at Freedom Park. Yoshi sent the coordinates to Wesley’s comm, Sergei and Hairo launched a flock of eye drones and gave me a camouflaging baseball cap that changed my face to a holomask. I climbed out of the flyer onto a small asphalt pad next to a dilapidated fountain — a woman of antiquity with her head falling off.
We had to walk through the woods a little. The bodyguards followed behind silently, melding with the trees.
There were tents beneath almost every tree, bare feet sticking out of sleeping bags. The ground was littered with cigarette ends, empty bottles, spent needles and condoms.
A branch cracked behind me and I flinched. Don’t turn around, I heard Maria say in my ear. There was a rustle, a dull grunt, then silence.
At the assigned point — where two park paths crossed, with another broken fountain at the center of the crossing — a public flyer landed. Wesley looked out, turned his head, saw me and climbed out. It had been less than three weeks since we last met. I remembered the day: it was Malik’s birthday, and that night I went to the frontier, met Zoran and Ehehe, got to the Lakharian Desert for the first time… All that seemed a lifetime ago, but the years in the Nether probably had something to do with that, even if they were virtual.
It looked like the guy had gotten even wider: his head was
