“A few. Rich, poor, you all look alike in the dark.”
He laughed.
“So, what’s this restaurant you’re taking me to, Mr. Moneybags?”
“Ah, that’s part of the surprise.”
“Okay. You want to get me a beer while you’re up?”
“While I’m up?”
“Have to get up to get me a beer, won’t you?”
He laughed again. “Not much incentive there.”
“Want to join the Mile High Club?”
He stood up quickly. “I’m getting that beer now,” he said.
Locke tapped on the door, smiled at the camera, and waited for Leigh to answer. It was good to be back.
China was not the United States. Locke doubted that there would ever be the degree of personal freedom here as there. Still, it was his home, and he was more comfortable here than anywhere else. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t…
To look at, this house he was visiting was nothing special. A middle-class bungalow, built in the 1970s or ’80s, on a street with two dozen others just like it. If you knew how to look, though, you’d spot some differences.
The entrance, which looked like imitation wood, was actually a steel fire door in a steel frame, and probably weighed a hundred kilograms. Locke knew that there were three dead-bolt locks, plus a police brace-bar on the inside. You could ram a truck into the door and it wouldn’t go down. The back door was much the same.
The outside walls were brick. The roof was heavy ceramic tile, and there were banks of solar cells that fed enough juice into a dozen heavy-duty marine batteries to run everything in the house for days. The phone antenna on the roof looked like a television satellite dish. There was a gasoline-powered electrical generator in an armored shed in the back, inside a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Locke also knew that the building’s interior walls were wood slats over steel posts and expanded metal sheets, and you’d have trouble driving a truck through them, too.
Not that you could get a truck up the short but steep hill that was the yard, and past the heavy cast-iron furniture — benches, chairs, a table — all of which were bolted into concrete pilings.
The windows looked innocuous, but hidden behind the shades were hardened steel grills that would resist any casual attempts at burglary — or even a would-be thief with hammers, saws, and determination.
The house’s power supply and phone landline arrived via a buried cable inside a steel conduit, and the electric meter was locked inside a steel box. The water meter’s valve box was welded shut, and the meter reader had been bribed to ignore it.
There were state-of-the-art alarms and automatic CO2 fire extinguishers installed in every room.
It was about as secure a place as one could have in this city.
The door opened, and Bruce Leigh stuck his head out, looked right and left to make certain Locke was alone, and said, “Come in.”
Locke did. Leigh shut the door behind him and relocked it, clicking the wrist-thick police bar into place. One end of the bar slid into a plate on the floor, the other angled into a second plate welded to the middle of the door. Such a setup would hold the door in place even without locks or hinges. The bar had to weigh ten kilos, but Leigh, a fitness freak, handled it easily.
Leigh, an ex-pat Brit, was short, broad, muscular, and an expert on security computer systems. And also seriously paranoid, if not to the extent of clinical schizophrenia.
Locke doubted that anybody ever gave him any grief about his name.
“You changed cabs?”
“Three times.” Three was the magic number. Not two, not four, but three.
Leigh nodded. He turned and walked away. Locke followed him.
The house was filled with computers, at least thirty of them, ranging from some ten or fifteen years old to those still warm from the maker.
Leigh led him through the gym, wherein he had installed a treadmill, a rowing machine, a stair climber, a mini-tramp, a stationary bike, and two Bowflex machines, along with half a ton of free weights on various barbells and dumbbells. Locke had never asked Leigh how often he worked out — you didn’t ask the man personal questions — but there was a computer in the room whose screen showed a schedule, and a passing glance once had told Locke that Leigh spent three hours every day in here.
The man worked, and he worked out, and that seemed to be it. If he had women, they came here, as did all his groceries and other supplies. As far as Locke knew, Leigh never went out. He was a serious introvert. And one of the best computer geeks in the world, much less China.
Down the hall, the main computer room had four large-screen monitors and two holoprojectors, arranged in a U-shape.
Leigh sat in a padded leather chair inside the surrounding computers and started waving his hands over various optical sensors.
“I’ve got the building plans, the communication codes, and the alarm system specs — don’t have the codes on all those yet, but I will have them by the end of the week. I have also built the traffic signal program, and the electrical grid system is no problem.
“Do you have a date yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Let me know. There’s a rotating encrypt on the transfer protocols for the bank’s armored trucks, and we’ll have to get that no sooner than a week in advance.
“The police systems are nailed.”
“Everything seems to be in order,” Locke said.
“Yes. Of course.”
“There is a new variable,” Locke said.
Leigh snapped his head around as if Locke had slapped him. “What?”
“Apparently Net Force and CyberNation have come to some kind of agreement regarding their situation.”
Leigh relaxed. “That’s Shing’s problem. Even he should be able to handle that.”
“I just thought you might want to know.”
Leigh shook his head negatively. “All I have to worry about is Chang. Not that he’s any real problem. Besides which, he’s gone to the U.S.”
“To do what?”
“Who cares? Probably trying to score some gear. Chang has a few moves, but no real equipment, and his programs are garbage. He doesn’t even know I’m out here. Nobody in the world knows I’m here.”
Locke nodded. He removed an envelope full of cash from his jacket pocket and handed it to Leigh. The only way the man would accept payment was in small, used bills. He surely had some kind of electronic banking presence, some credit somewhere, to get all the computers he had, but Leigh kept that to himself and Locke didn’t know what or where it was.
Leigh stood and the two men headed for the front door.
“I’ll see you again in a week.”
“Don’t forget to change cabs when you leave,” Leigh said. “Three coming, three going.”
“Of course,” Locke said.
Chang had visited the Smithsonian — the Air and Space Museum, some of the art galleries. He had seen the Hope Diamond, and gone to see the copies of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights in the dark and quiet room where they were kept in armored glass cases full of inert gas.
He had gone to pray in some of the larger mosques — Masjid Baitullah, the Muhammad, the Ul-Ummah, Ush Shura, as well as some of the newer ones, the Madjid China, and the Sino.
