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.
38
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
“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
“To do what? Rob some casinos?”
