Springboard Read online

  It was scut work, and not Jay’s thing, but it had to be done, it had to be done right, and it was his project.

  But, finally, it was finished. As far as Jay could tell, all traces of the tampering done by Shing and his allies were no more.

  His virgil beeped in its computer dock. Seurat.

  “Good evening,” Seurat said when Jay accepted the connection.

  “Hey.”

  “How goes it?”

  Jay managed a tired grin. “We got the guy, we got his modus, and I just finished cleaning it out. The military system—and yours—are as clean as new pennies. At least as far as this hack is concerned.”

  “Très bon, Gridley! Excellent!”

  “Just part of the job, Mr. Seurat.”

  “But you must call me Charles, mon ami.”

  “I must?”

  “Oui.”

  The man sounded way too happy, even though Jay had done him a good turn.

  “Do you like Paris, my friend?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then you must come and visit. To a wedding.”

  “Somebody getting married?”

  “Yes. Me. I have met a wonderful woman—an American, no less. She is perfect, the most beautiful and intelligent and funny woman in the world.”

  “Save one,” Jay said.

  “Ah, you are married?”

  “Yep. Got a baby son, too.”

  “This is wonderful, no?”

  “Yeah. It is. And after I take a shower, I’m going to go and spend some quality time with them. This has been a bastard of a case.”

  “But you have solved it, and all is right with the world, no?”

  “As close as it gets for me,” Jay said.

  After he and Seurat broke the connection, Jay smiled. For him, all was right with the world. Or would be, right after he took a shower. . . .

  36

  In the Air over the South Pacific

  The Net Force 747, an old workhorse but one that still did the job, droned along six miles up. Kent came awake and looked around. About half of his unit was napping, the others reading or working on their battle laptops.

  Kent had four squads, ten troopers each, and thus a single platoon. Each squad would be deployed in different parts of the operation—security, communications, transportation, with the actual strike team being six or eight strong. No way could he take enough troops into China to get into a shooting engagement with the Chinese Army.

  In fact, the unit would technically be spies if they were caught, because they were all going to be in civilian clothes—an uninvited, uniformed force on foreign soil was sometimes necessary, but in this case, a bad idea.

  Next to him, Julio Fernandez, who looked as if he were asleep, said, “General Howard is gonna be sorry he missed this.”

  “Only if we don’t screw it up.”

  Fernandez grinned. “Well, at least we can blame it on the jarheads if that happens. Sir.”

  Kent shook his head.

  The plan, hurried as it was, seemed pretty reasonable. They wouldn’t be flying into China, but to a military base in south Taiwan, where they would transfer to a seaplane that would rendezvous with a boat in the sea south of Macao. The final leg in would be the most tricky, but supposedly, that was covered with enough bribes to make it relatively safe.

  CIA and Military Intelligence, along with some intel from the Brits, would, Kent hoped, tag Comrade General Wu so that they could approach him away from his military base. They’d grab him, spirit him back to the boat, and, all things going well, haul him back the same way they’d gotten in.

  All things going well . . .

  Pan China Airlines Flight #2100

  Somewhere over the Arctic

  Chang had a bank of three seats to himself, a rare luxury, and he had lifted up the dividing arms and made himself a short couch, upon which he was lying. He kept the center seat belt loosely fastened around himself, just in case they should hit rough air while he was asleep. It was a long flight, and sleep would be welcome.

  As he dozed, he considered his trip to America. It had gone well, much better than he could have expected. He had not only seen how Net Force operated, he had done them a large favor, one which was already paying dividends. He had hardware and software he would not have been able to buy on his own, and the good will of Jay Gridley, Net Force’s top computer operative, which was worth more than gold.

  More, Chang’s government had in custody a man connected to the attack on the U.S. military, and, with luck, would soon be privy to what he knew about the situation, a thing that would stand Chang in good stead with his bosses.

  Who would have thought it? God, Chang realized, indeed worked in mysterious ways. . . .

  A pleasant feeling altogether as Chang drifted off to the land of dreams . . .

  Warehouse District

  Macao, China

  Locke stood in the small warehouse, checking supplies. Everything seemed to be in order. This was where the operation would begin staging, less than forty-eight hours from now. Wu’s strike team—and a couple of Locke’s own men—would gather here, collect their gear, dress for their roles, and set things into motion. Once that die was cast, there would be no turning back. It would succeed or it would fail. Failure meant imprisonment or death; success meant a life of luxury beyond the dreams of most men, the ability to go almost anywhere and do almost anything Locke could desire.

  The encrypted phone on his belt, smaller than his thumb and voice-operated, beeped. Locke unclipped the phone and raised it to his ear. “Yes?”

  “Are things in order?” It was Wu, of course.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I will see you at the rendezvous at the appointed time.”

  Wu discommed, and Locke clipped the phone back to his belt. His belly tightened, the flutter in his bowels a familiar sensation, though one he hadn’t felt since he’d killed that guard in America, and not for a while before then. A mix of fear, anticipation, and . . . joy.

  Jack Locke was about to put himself on the line, risking his life for another run at the sweet, sweet taste of a plan well made and executed.

  It didn’t get any better than this.

  37

  Washington, D.C.

  Thorn wasn’t exactly sure what he’d expected, but whatever it had been, Marissa’s new townhouse wasn’t it.

  The place was in a nice enough neighborhood, in a row of two-story condos that looked pretty much the same—not rich folks, not poor, a little above the middle of middle-class. No yard to keep up, at least not in front, just a sidewalk on the street and a couple of small trees in big pots.

  There was an alarm system, and one that needed both a thumbprint and vox-ID to unlock the door—which appeared to be steel painted to look like wood. He also noticed wrought-iron grills over the windows, very artistic, but serving as bars to keep all but the most serious of would-be burglars out.

  Thorn’s security wasn’t bad; Marissa’s was better.

  “What do you have in here, gold bullion?” he asked, as she opened the door.

  “Something better, I think,” she said.

  When he got inside, he saw what she meant:

  There were two paintings in the living room. They were fairly large, five feet by three or so, on opposite walls, directly facing each other—oils or acrylics, Thorn couldn’t tell for sure.

  One was of a large, muscular black man, shirtless, in stained overalls half held up by one strap, with a red handkerchief in a front pocket, sitting in an unfinished wooden glider hung by iron chains under a wide front porch. There was a thick book on the swing’s seat next to him. The man was sweaty, and looked very warm; the painter had captured a kind of nobility in his position, as if he were royalty, but a king who worked with his hands. He had a smile that Mona Lisa would envy.

  Across the room, the second painting was of a black woman. She was lean, dark, and naked, one arm stretched wide to show a muscular definition, her breasts high and small, belly flat.
The artist had shaded the figure so that her sex was in deep shadow, barely hinted at. Her hair was plaited in long braids that flared and reached to the middle of her back, hung as though a strong wind stirred them to her right. She stood against a background of green land, blue mountains, and a cloudy sky, with the sky going darker and into a star field behind her head.

  Both of the subjects looked to be about thirty, though it was hard for Thorn to judge—black people had always seemed to him to age better than paler-skinned folk.

  “The artist is Rick Berry,” Marissa said. “You might have seen his work on some book covers, he has done a lot of that.”

  “Impressive,” Thorn said. He knew quality when he saw it, and this was definitely that.

  He looked at her. Caught a hint of something in her smile. “What else?” he said.

  “The man is Amos Jefferson Lowe. The woman is Ruth Lewis Jackson Lowe.”

  Thorn nodded. “Your grandparents, on your father’s side.”

  “No points for that one, Tommy.”

  He smiled. “I think my grandmother would spin like a gyroscope in her grave if she knew I had a picture of her without clothes on my wall.”

  “Not mine,” she said. “My mother’s parents died when I was a child—a car accident in Alabama—a drunk in a truck crossed the centerline and hit them head-on. But Grampa and Grandma Lowe tried to make up for that. Amos was a machinist at a mill who read Shakespeare and published articles about the Bard. Ruth taught third grade for forty years, but had been a champion runner in her youth—held the state record in the mile for twenty years after she graduated. Salt of the earth—with a few other spices mixed in.”

  Thorn nodded.

  “They decided when I was a little girl that whenever I had a birthday, or for Christmas, or other special occasions, they weren’t going to give me toys or clothes, they would give me adventures. They took me to museums; to see sailing ships; to the tops of tall buildings where I could look down upon the world. The summer I was ten, we visited a diamond mine in Arkansas. At eleven, the Carlsbad Caverns. At twelve and thirteen, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. I took lessons and scuba-dived the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico when I was sixteen. When I graduated from high school, they paid for a trip to Spain; when I graduated from college, they sent me on a month-long walkabout in Australia.”

  She paused, remembering, a small smile on her face.

  “My grandmother taught me how to shoot a .22 rifle, how to skin and cook a squirrel, and how to run within my breath. My grandfather taught me how to ride a bicycle, to call quail right to the back door of their house, and how to strip down a lawn mower engine. And also about sonnets and plays. He did a mean Othello.”

  She paused again. “I can’t imagine any better grandparents than Amos and Ruth. These pictures capture their essence for me. Who they were—who they still are.”

  He looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Around here?”

  “They live on a little farm down in Georgia. You’ll get a chance to meet them pretty soon. I thought you’d want to know a little bit about them first.”

  Thorn felt a thrill, an almost electric sensation flash up his body—this conversation meant something more than family history. It took his breath away for a moment as he understood just what it did mean.

  Then he said, “So, now is it okay to bring up that subject I wasn’t supposed to talk about?”

  She grinned. “I like a man who can keep up. Go ahead.”

  “You want to get married?”

  “To you? Yes.”

  He thought his face might break, he grinned so big.

  Later, when they were lying on the floor between the two pictures in a state of dress the same as the painting of her grandmother, Marissa said, “So, how’s the thing in China going?”

  “In the grand cosmic scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter to me right now. Not in the least. Not at all.”

  She laughed. “You are waay too easy, Tommy.”

  He laughed with her. She was smart, funny, and beautiful, and she wanted to be with him.

  He didn’t see how it could get any better than this.

  Penha Hill

  Near the A-Ma Temple Macao, China

  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

  Zhujiang Kou Bay

  East of Macao, West of Hong Kong

  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 wa
ved 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 into China?”

  “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.”