Fisher pushed off the wall and slid out, gun coming up. The man sensed movement and started to turn, but too late. Fisher fired. The bullet penetrated beneath his left earlobe. The Glaser Safety Slug had devastating effect, instantly pulverizing the man’s brain stem. The man tipped sideways, but even as he started sliding down the wall, Fisher was up and moving. He caught the body as it fell, then dragged it beneath the stairwell. He checked the steps and wall for blood, wiped up two spots, picked up Lok’s gun.
A quick peek revealed the corridor was empty and thankfully short, with two rooms on each side and a vaultlike door at the end — which led to what Lok had called “the room.” The floor was covered with two black rubber tiles Fisher guessed were vibration dampeners. Shek had spared no expense on his doomsday bunker.
Fisher punched up OPSAT’s comm screen: The mysterious CIA signal was still there, and unless he’d missed finding something above or there was yet another level below this one, the beacon was coming from the first room on his right.
He slid the flexi-cam beneath the door. In the fish-eye lens he saw what looked like a college dorm room. Two single beds, one each on the left and right walls, separated by a desk, a clothes bureau at the foot of each bed. On the left-hand bed, a man reclined. He suddenly sat up and dropped his feet to the floor. He was Chinese. He rubbed his face in his hands, looked around.
He withdrew the flexi-cam, briefly considered his options, then decided simple was easier. He drew his pistol then lightly tapped his index finger on the door three times. From inside, the bed creaked, footsteps approached. The door swung open.
Fisher didn’t give the man a chance to react. He barreled through the door, palm against the man’s chest, shoving him, gun in his face. The man’s legs bumped into the bed rail and he fell backward onto the bed.
“Not a sound,” Fisher warned.
Mouth agape, arms raised, the man nodded. “Okay, okay…”
The man complied and Fisher checked the room. Only one of the bureaus contained clothes. No roommate. Fisher stood over the man. “We’re going to make this quick. I’m going to talk, you’re going to listen. For the past few hours you’ve been transmitting a beacon signal on a CIA carrier frequency.”
“No, I—”
“Yes, you have. Tell me why.”
The man hesitated.
Fisher said, “If I had a problem with your beacon, you’d be dead right now. The fact that you’re not should tell you something. The fact that I’m not Chinese should also tell you something. You can either believe me, or not, but I don’t have the time to waste on you.” He leveled the pistol with the man’s forehead.
“Okay, okay, wait. It’s in the desk drawer.”
“Open it. Slowly.”
The man did so. He pulled out a white 30GB iPod Video, unplugged a wire, and handed it over. “There’s a phone conduit behind the desk; I tapped into it.”
“Clever,” Fisher said. “Yours?”
“No. My handler gave it to me.”
This would be a CIA case officer from the Near East Division. The modified iPod would have come from Langley’s wizards in the Science & Technical Directorate. Fisher handed the iPod back.
“I’m going to put my gun away.” The man nodded and Fisher sat down on the opposite bed. “What’s your name?”
“Heng.”
His face was chalky and his eyes were red-rimmed and underlined with bags. He was clearly exhausted, and Fisher knew lack of sleep had nothing to do with it. Whoever Heng was — agent, informant, or something else altogether — he’d been under tremendous stress for a long time.
“What’s your job?” Fisher asked.
“You mean, what do I do here, or what am I doing for the agency?”
“The latter.”
“For the past year, I’ve been feeding them information about Kuan-Yin Zhao.”
Fisher felt like he’d swallowed a ball of ice. “Say that name again.”
“Kuan-Yin Zhao.”
And suddenly a big piece of the puzzle Fisher had been racing to assemble snapped into place.
46
If the now-mummified Bai Shek was China’s version of a Howard Hughes-ian cliche, then Kuan-Yin Zhao was its version of The Godfather, only more violent.
After a ten-year meteoric rise up the bloody ladder of Chinese tongs and triads, Zhao had for the last twenty years reigned as the undisputed kingpin of the Chinese underworld. Labor, transportation, gambling, prostitution, drugs — every vice or necessity of Chinese daily life was in some way, large or small, controlled by Zhao. It was the latter category, drugs, that had for the last eight years solidified his position, and he owed it all to something called Jagged.
A synthetic derivative drug developed by Zhao’s own chemical engineers, Jagged was both an addict’s nightmare and his fantasy. A dozen times more addictive than methamphetamine, Jagged provided the user with a mixed high — the smooth dreamscape of heroin combined with the energy rush of cocaine — all with an easy come-down that lasted less and less time with each dose, until the user couldn’t go for more than an hour or two without a fix. Withdrawl symptoms could last a month or more and were similar to those of hemorrhagic disease: fever, migraine headache, cramping, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding from the eyes, and ecchymosis, or the pooling of blood beneath the skin.
From a manufacturing perspective, Jagged was a dream come true. Its component chemicals were found in everything from food additives and pesticides to over-the-counter allergy medicines and household cleaning products — all cheap, legal, and nearly impossible to regulate. In the eight years it had been in circulation, Jagged’s chemical makeup had resisted all replication, which left Kuan-Yin Zhao not only its sole producer, but also one of the wealthiest men on the face of the earth.
In the first three years of its existence, Jagged had spread like the plague it was from China to Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and India, before finally leaving Asia and jumping into Russia and the former Soviet Republics, Eastern and Western Europe, and finally America. Everywhere Jagged went, rates of addiction and crime skyrocketed. It spread through high schools and colleges and into suburbia, addicting both the curious and recreational users as well as hard-core users.
The justice systems of affected countries were overwhelmed. State and federal legislators couldn’t allocate money fast enough to find a place to house those convicted not only of possesion of Jagged, but also of the crimes that inevitably trailed in its wake: prostitution, theft, murder, assault, rape.
Fisher had read the stats and he’d seen the results on city streets. In the five years since it hit the United States, Jagged’s rate of use — and thereby addiction — had outstripped its every competitior, having risen to 9.2 percent of the population, or almost 27 million people. For every ten people in the United States, one of them was a hard-core Jagged addict who would slit your throat for the spare change in your pocket.
That answered the
