the Americans.
One did not need to love the arrow one shot into the enemy’s heart…
Wu initiated a few minutes of polite civility, Shing responded appropriately, and eventually they came around to the reason the younger man was here.
“Things are progressing well?” Wu asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Shing said. “The U.S. Army hacks don’t know what happened. Can’t find how I got in, haven’t a clue how to keep me out or undo what I’ve started.”
Wu kept his polite smile fixed firmly in place. “There will be no problems with keeping to the schedule, then?”
“None I can see.”
“And the… other thing?”
Shing raised his eyebrows. He gave away entirely too much on his face — more of the legacy of all those years in America. “Well, that will be trickier — CyberNation’s security ops are the best. Our attacks there must be flawless. Still, I can do it. And set them against each other.”
“Good. Well, then, I will let you be about your business.”
Shing nodded. “Thank you, Comrade General.” He paused. “Do you suppose I might have another… small advance on my… stipend? There is, ah, a young woman I have met I wish to take to the casinos.” He smiled.
Wu’s answering smile was genuine this time. “Of course. Youth should not be wasted entirely in rooms full of computers.” He opened his desk drawer and removed from under a file folder a plain manila envelope containing a thick stack of Japanese yen. He handed it to Shing, who probably thought that the comrade general’s smile was there for reasons other than it really was.
Shing did not know that the young woman he had recently met was one of Wu’s agents. The woman, named Mayli, was beautiful, accomplished in many things — not the least of which were the erotic arts — and she had been instructed to do whatever was necessary to keep Shing happy. If that included marrying him and bearing his children, so be it. Wu already knew all about Shing’s favorite foods, the football team he rooted for, and his rather pedestrian sexual preferences. A handwritten report from Mayli detailing those — and much more — was in his desk drawer. He’d just moved it to retrieve the envelope of money he’d given to Shing.
The report was the reason for the smile.
Shing thought Wu a fossil, old, out of touch with modernity, and as a result, weak. Wu knew this because Shing was vain, egotistical, and prone to pillow talk, and Mayli’s memory was excellent. There was an old proverb Wu recalled, from his visits to the Middle East. It was Persian. One of the fighting instructors he had sometimes worked with there, Mushtaq Ali, a graybeard Sufi, had passed it along one day over thick, black, bitter coffee in some Turkish-style restaurant: “The young mouse thinks he can bite the lion’s tail because the lion is old.”
Wu’s grin was one of knowledge.
Mayli seemed to be doing her job properly. She had a watcher about whom she did not know, of course. Mayli’s watcher would eventually have one of his own, too.
Wu was not a man to trust anyone blindly.
Once Shing was gone, Wu walked back to the window again, to stare through the rain at the neon lights in the distance. Great plans took time, but this one was nearer the end than the beginning. Destiny was not that far in the distance.
Wu smiled.
He returned to his desk, and touched the intercom button.
“Locke?”
“Here.”
“Join me.”
“What did you think?” Wu asked. He now spoke in Yao, with bits of Sho thrown in, dialects Jack Locke had learned in Hong Kong while running with the street gangs. There were a lot of southern boys in the gangs, and Yao was a favorite dialect. Locke was also fluent in Cantonese, Putonghua, Guoyu, English, and a little Spanish. He was working on German.
Locke, sitting in that same chair in front of Wu’s desk, shook his head. “The boy is an idiot savant. He has the touch with computers and can make them sing and dance, but outside that…” He shrugged.
General Wu nodded. He leaned back in his chair, and steepled his fingers. “And our plans?”
“On target. If Shing does half what he claims he can do.”
“You foresee no problems.”
Locke laughed. “Oh, I foresee problems. Scores, hundreds,
“Fight them the same way as one,” Wu finished. He smiled slightly. “I am trusting you with a great deal,” he said.
“Comrade General, you don’t trust me any farther than you can see me,” Locke said. “Instead, you recognize that our interests lie on the same path, and you trust me to travel that way until we achieve our common goal.”
Wu smiled again, but did not speak.
It was a slight risk, tweaking the general’s nose this way, but Locke also knew that the man respected ability, and Locke would not be sitting here if Wu didn’t believe he had the skill and talent to do what the general wanted. Plus, toadies were easy to come by — to impress a general, you needed to show some starch.
Jack Locke was aware of the file on Shing in Wu’s desk. And he was certain there was a file on him somewhere — Wu never chose to be sightless when there was any way he could see.
Locke also had a pretty good idea what was in Wu’s secret file on him, and what was not. He knew he was not a particularly impressive or handsome man, at least not as he understood the words. Too many angles and planes in his face, nose a little too long, lips too thin, and almost-black eyes that, to him, seemed a bit bug-eyed from within deep sockets. His hair was black, with a sharp widow’s peak, and while he was in excellent shape from swimming and lifting weights, he was only average height, and not so muscular or broad in the shoulders as to draw attention. Most men looking at a crowd would pass over Locke without a second glance, just another Eurasian face, nothing to mark him out of the ordinary.
Most women, however, saw something there. He had tried to get them to explain it to him, but no two answers were ever quite the same, and there was a vagueness about them when pressed. The most consistent comment women offered was that he looked “interesting.” And that part of that look included a hint of cruelty.
Women were ever attracted to bad boys.
Wu would know all this, and more.
Born in Hong Kong, Locke was a mongrel foundling who had been dropped off at a British orphanage forty years ago. He had some Chinese in him, some European — probably English, given where he turned up. He had run away from there at sixteen, and they hadn’t made any great effort to find him and drag him back.
He spent some time learning how to live in the mean, crowded streets of Hong Kong, learned how to fight with a knife and his hands while in the gangs, and was certainly on the short road to jail or an early grave when he had been found by a high-born English woman, Lady Patricia Knowles. Patricia — one never called her “Pat,” even in bed — had thought him a diamond in the rough. She was richer than the Queen, thirty-six years old, and married to a dotty English lord who was pushing seventy-five and beyond Viagra’s help.
She cleaned Locke up, gave him his new name, installed him in an apartment in a good neighborhood, and taught him all manner of things, ranging from how to dress, eat, and behave in polite society to most of the positions found in the
After five years, she and her husband had returned to England, but by then Locke was more than a little adept at pleasing a woman, and polished enough to pass for a gentleman. Patricia had directed him to one of her friends, Martha, and he hadn’t even had to change apartments.
