Edge of War

order.

“Why is the matter personal?” Mr. Wong asked.

“The scientist murdered a companion.”

“You speak of murder in war?”

Jing Yo did not explain the circumstances. Finally, Mr. Wong continued.

“In this matter, your interests and your country’s interests lie in parallel,” he said. “But you must be careful. Putting yourself ahead of your country is not desirable. You know that from your apprenticeship.”

Jing Yo finally realized that Mr. Wong had himself trained in Shaolin. It should have been obvious, he realized now — but the most obvious things were always the last to be learned.

“I am a prisoner of my ego,” Jing Yo admitted, lowering his head in shame as he would have at the temple.

“We are all, in one way or another,” said Mr. Wong softly.

* * *

Mr. Wong had the car drive him to Queens. They turned onto local roads immediately after the bridge, threading their way onto a residential block midway between Astoria and Long Island City.

“This opens both doors,” said Mr. Wong, handing Jing Yo a small silver-colored key. “You will find everything you need inside. One last thing — your phone. You no longer require it.”

Jing Yo handed over the phone, then got out of the car. Mr. Wong lowered the window.

“Thank you,” Jing Yo told Mr. Wong.

“Remember your training,” said Wong. “And be true.”

The building was a small two-family row house. The key was to the apartment downstairs; there appeared to be no one living upstairs. It was sparsely furnished with generic furniture; it would have been difficult to guess the ethnic background of the person who lived here.

A satellite phone sat on the kitchen table. Jing Yo turned it on, then put it in his pocket.

At first, Jing Yo thought that the place was simply “clean” — an empty shell where he would wait for orders. But as he began to examine it more closely, he realized that it was in fact outfitted specifically for him. The closet in the rear bedroom had a variety of clothes in his size, from casual to formal suits. The ones that had been made for him by the tailor had been transferred here, and supplemented with others. Underwear and socks in his size were in the dresser drawers. Two pairs of shoes, one dress, the other casual, sat in the closet. There was a wallet in the small box in front of the bureau. Inside the wallet was a set of identification cards, business cards for several professions, credit cards, and a thousand dollars in bills ranging from fives to a hundred. Beneath the wallet were magnetic card IDs, including one that showed he was a temporary translator at the UN, specializing in different varieties of Mandarin Chinese, and another that indicated he was an aide to the Malaysian ambassador.

A nice irony there.

He found a door to the basement in the hall and went downstairs. A door at the far end led to a small backyard, fenced off from the alley behind by a tall, solid fence. The yard was only a few feet deep, and covered with old cement.

The basement was mostly empty, with a small metal kitchen table near the outside door. A set of old flower pots sat in the middle of the table. Closer to the stairs were a washing machine, a dryer, and the boiler. Next to the boiler was an old room used to store coal when the building was new. The door had a padlock, with a key still inserted in it.

Metal shelves lined the walls. On the shelves to his right were four pistols, in varying sizes, from a two-shot derringer to a Magnum. There were submachine guns — an FN-P90 bullpup-style gun, a mini-Uzi, and an MP-5N. And there was a Remington bolt rifle, outfitted with sniper scope and small bipod, in a black case that looked as if it were for an electric guitar.

Strongboxes filled with ammunition were stacked on the opposite shelves. At the base was a kit for an RPG-29V rocket-propelled-grenade launcher, with four thermobaric antipersonnel rounds and four rounds designed to pierce a main battle tank’s armor.

Jing Yo took only the Glock 9 mm pistol and the small derringer, locking the door and taking the key with him back upstairs.

The second bedroom had been converted to a study. The desk was an old secretary, packed with books and dictionaries, the sort of thing a scholar might have had in his house before the Internet.

A briefcase sat next to the desk. Jing Yo opened it, and found a custom-built laptop inside. When he booted it up, it asked for a password.

His name in pinyin unlocked it.

There were several programs installed, including a Web browser that connected via a satellite modem card. Jing Yo clicked on an icon for Google Earth. The program zoomed on the house he was sitting in.

The detail was extremely fine — much better than he would have seen with Google. As he moved the cursor, he saw a time stamp at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. The image had been taken earlier in the day.

He opened the Web browser and examined the bookmarks. One led to Senator Grasso’s calendar, apparently posted on an internal Web site used by the senator’s staff. Others led to pages with information about the places where the senator was due to appear the following day: a Catholic school on Long Island, a science museum in Queens, and the UN.

As he examined the links, Jing Yo’s stomach began to growl. He’d skipped lunch and forgotten dinner.

He got up and went to the refrigerator. It was stocked with a variety of food. He took out a frozen pizza and began to preheat the oven. As he waited for it to reach temperature, he noticed a coffee cup with two sets of keys on the counter beneath the cabinet. One set said Ford on it; the other was blank, but looked to him as if it went to a motorbike.

He placed the pizza in the oven, then went out to the front stoop and looked up and down the block. There was a Ford Taurus parked across the street. He walked over slowly and, after making sure no one was around, placed the key in the lock.

It didn’t fit.

He spotted a pickup truck near the corner, but decided not to try it when he saw some people approaching.

Jing Yo turned the corner and continued walking. He’d have to wait until it was much darker to check the truck. He spotted an alley up on his left and, realizing it must be the one behind the house, turned down it.

Cars were parked along the backs of the property, with just enough room to back out without scraping one another or the tall fences on the other side.

There was a van parked at the back edge of the house where he was staying. The key opened it.

The scooter was in the back. The registration documents were in the van’s glove compartment, as was the key for the storage case between the front seats. Jing Yo opened the case and discovered a pair of boxes. One had a hand-held GPS unit. The other looked similar, but when activated flashed only a single-word message:

Searching…

It was a locator unit, used to track shipments. In this case, Jing Yo suspected, it would help lead him to the senator.

“If I fail at this,” Jing Yo thought as he returned to rescue his burnt pizza from the oven, “the fault will be only mine.”

22

Hainan Island

Now that they had the Chinese patrol boat, it was easy to scout the harbor area, though Zeus was careful to keep the ship well away from other military vessels. They moved east slowly, Zeus and Christian both scanning carefully with their binoculars.

There were so many landing craft jumbled together that it was impossible to get a precise count. The