Jake Maroc - Shan Part 3

Simbal grunted, swung around. The light was fading. "There's no easy explanation as to why a man's fried by a dragon. But one thing's certain: it was a gaudy public way to go, and that tells us something."

"A warning?"

Simbal nodded. "No doubt. But of what? Thune was the diqui's top American courier. Was he skimming from the diqui? Is someone making a move against them? Was it a personal vendetta? Did the diqui itself have some gripe against Thune?" He shrugged. "Right now it's impossible to say."

Donovan's gray eyes regarded his friend for a time, A French antique carriage clock tick-tocked on a chrome and rosewood sideboard across the room. Outside the window umbrellas were being shredded as the wind picked up. It sounded as if disgruntled demonstrators were throwing pebbles against the steel-mesh gla.s.s.

"I don't care for the word impossible. What's your best guess?"

Simbal went back to the chair, folded himself into it again. For a time, he said nothing. The carriage clock marked the interstices of silence. "I've run as much as I have through the computer." Simbal's voice carried a tone of absolute authority. "But you know what I think of computers, Rodger. They only spew out what other people have programmed into them. Federal agents are, by and large, nitwits. They are trained to think in terms of budgets and of what has happened before. They lack imagination and therefore their informational data banks possess the same drawback."

Donovan laced his fingers, began to tap their tips together. "Don't tell me that brain of yours hasn't narrowed the possibilities."

Simbal smiled thinly. "My nose says that it wasn't the diqui's doing. I've traveled after Thune for a long time. Unless he's done something very bad while I've blinked, his standing inside the diqui was solid. In fact, I suspect that he was being readied to move up. Someone was grooming him for bigger things than the Fun City run."

"Like who?"

Simbal shook his head. "Sorry, I haven't been able to get that far yet."

"Then take another tack." Simbal watched Donovan's head. It seemed he was holding it still with some great inner force and once again he asked himself, What's gotten under Rodger's skin? "Whatever it takes."

Simbal's eyes opened wide. "Schiffer won't like it." He was speaking of his dry section case officer. Field operatives were wet section. "He didn't even like it that I went off to New York without letting him know. He chewed my ear off about it first thing this morning."

"That's all in the past," Donovan said.

"Meaning?"

"From now on you report to me and me alone. Clear?"

Simbal's eyes seemed as pale as winter sunlight on inimical ice. "When I was in Burma, I met a woman. A girl, really. She was a Shan. She had that almost Polynesian beauty the Burmese possess.

"She was uneducated from a Western point of view, but she could outshoot three-quarters of the DEA's marksmen including me and her father possessed undreamed-of wealth, mainly in uncut gemstones, though I seem to recall that he dealt in the tears of the poppy as well.

"In the Shan States, Rodger, there is no such thing as civilization. There is only life and death. Only love and hate. That realization shook me apart. It was why, I realized, I had come there, why I turned down that plum job at Cray Computers that the rest of the top ten percent of our cla.s.s probably would have killed for.

"I am not, I suspect, a civilized man." Simbal hunched forward now and Donovan could see the power in his hands. "I do not like civilization's dictates and its rules. Cray was not for me. Neither was DEA, which has rules up the yin-yang, You couldn't pee without writing up forms. I don't like writing forms."

"And you didn't like reporting to Schiffer," Donovan said. "I know that." He looked at Simbal. "In my predecessor's time, the Quarry was mainly concerned with the machinations emanating out of Moscow. That was, perhaps, inevitable. Antony Beridien founded this organization during the reign of John Fitzgerald Kennedy."

Simbal snorted. " *Reign'? Isn't that a little grandiose to describe an American president's term of office?"

"Not when we're talking about JFK. Beridien spent many hours talking about those times. Camelot. Remember that's how the press spoke of Kennedy's reign. The shining hundred days." Donovan grunted. "Everything in America's reduced to the parameters of an advertising slogan. Advertising's what catches the American public's attention, Tony. Otherwise, they're too busy buying new Toyotas and Subarus to be aware of anything. But we both know advertising for what it is: bulls.h.i.t."

Simbal contemplated this all-American, fair-haired prodigy that his long-time friend had evolved into. Who'd have thunk it? he thought wonderingly. Back in the Stanford days we were just two s.e.x-charged boy geniuses. Look at the misfits we've turned into. "So the both of us need to get out."

"Out?"

"It's civilization, Rodger. It stinks. I've said it. Now you have, too. In your own way."

Donovan thought about that for a moment. "I was speaking about Antony Beridien."

"And Kennedy."

"Kennedy gave the Quarry its original charter. It was Beridien's brainchild but it was JFK who breathed the breath of life into it. The Quarry, Tony, was born out of paranoia. The world was shrinking at a terrifying, overwhelming rate in the sixties. It seemed as if the Russians were right next door. The Cuban missile crisis proved that dramatically.

"Anyway, Beridien and Kennedy were a.s.shole buddies. The President knew strength when he saw it and he gave Beridien his head. But there was a caveat. Each incoming president had the option to cancel the Quarry's charter within the first month of his term of office. That was for a specific reason.

"The Quarry is the President's responsibility, period. We don't have nosy senators ferreting around; we're not dependent on Capitol Hill for funds. No one knows us or what we really do. We're a lone-wolf quant.i.ty a undoubtedly the last in American governmental history. I want you to remember that."

Donovan put his hands flat on the table. "It was Beridien's obsession to go after the Soviets, not mine. These days, there are other, more pressing matters that require our attention. Which is why I appropriated you from the DEA. The diqui was your bailiwick there and we need that experience here in the Quarry."

"International dope smuggling's not exactly the Quarry's thing," Simbal said. "DEA's got that tied up pretty tightly and I don't have to tell you how my old boss, Max Threnody, guards his territory. He gets bent out of shape if someone extra-agency even requests DEA data."

"That's just fine by me," Donovan said. "Threnody can have all the cocaine and opium his operatives can lay their hands on. You're right, dope's not our thing. But Kam Sang is. I've been trying to get a line on that top-secret Chinese project for a year-and-a-half. That's the main reason I tried to reenlist Jake Maroc some months ago. I got a hunch he knows what Kam Sang's all about. I have reports that his father has some link to Kam Sang. What the old man knows, I figure Jake knows too."

"Why don't you ask him, then."

"Very funny. Jake was loyal to the old Quarry regime. Then they threw him out. He wouldn't tell me the time of day if it didn't suit his purpose."

Simbal came over to the desk. "What has Kam Sang got to do with Alan Thune's incineration?"

"I don't know," Donovan admitted. "Maybe nothing at all. But all of a sudden our Far East signals eavesdropping is detecting diqui interest in Kam Sang. Why? That's not their bailiwick either."

"Anyone been on this?" Simbal wanted to know.

"Powers and Choi."

"Shouldn't I speak to them in person?"

"You'd better have a line on a good medium," Donovan said. "They're six feet under."

"Dead?"

"Shot through the eyes, both of them."

"Diqui trademark." Simbal wondered whether this was why Donovan was p.i.s.sed off.

Donovan stood. "I've got a feeling, Tony, that something's been started and now it's out of control. Alan Thune's death may be the start of an international bloodbath,"

Simbal watched Donovan's face. "About Threnody, "he said. "What do I tell him?"

"Oh, Christ, use your imagination," Donovan said. "But whatever you tell him, make sure it isn't the truth."

Just east of a section of Connaught Road Central was Sawyer Place, the only street in Hong Kong named after an American. The centerpiece of the two-block narrow thoroughfare was the Sawyer Building, a white-stone and blue-granite affair that had been built in the mid-1950s when such grandiose workmanship was still affordable. Now even the Bank of China had to have its stone cut in Canada to help defray the impossible cost of labor.

Many companies were housed within this structure that stood between Connaught Tower and the equally ornate building that had until some months before been the home of Mattias, King & Company, once the oldest and most renowned of all the major trading houses in Asia.

Mattias, King & Company's new London-born tai pan had seen fit, perhaps at the urging of the Queen herself, to move the venerable house's headquarters to Bermuda. Ostensibly that had been to ensure a tax-free haven for the company but, privately, the other tai pan in the Crown Colony knew that it was a panic move away from what the British obviously saw as Communist Chinese intervention on the free-market running of Hong Kong.

While it awaited the building of its gargantuan new office tower designed by I. M. Pei, the Bank of China had temporarily moved into the Mattias, King building. It was, Andrew Sawyer said, a sign of the changing times.

The old tai pan, his snowy hair much receded on his freckled scalp, turned away from the ten-foot-high windows that looked out at all of Kowloon, Victoria Harbor and the hazy recesses of the Asian continent from his office aerie atop the Sawyer Building.

Sawyer & Sons was one of the handful of most successful Western trading houses in Hong Kong and it had been so for many years. In Shanghai, where the firm had been started by Andrew Sawyer's father, Zilin had begun a clandestine partnership with Barton Sawyer. The Shis were not only a secret part owner of Sawyer & Sons, but Andrew Sawyer owed Zilin a personal debt he could never fully repay. Without Zilin's intervention when he had been young and foolish, Andrew Sawyer would never have become tai pan of the trading house. That exalted position would have gone to Chen Ju, Barton Sawyer's trusted comprador.

"Peter Ng's being revealed as a Soviet spy," Andrew Sawyer said now, referring to his former comprador, "was the beginning of our woes. It left security in a G.o.dd.a.m.ned mess, and the first thing I want to do is to hang Sir John Bluestone up by his thumb."

"I don't think that would be the most prudent thing to do." Jake, sitting in a leather sofa at the side of the enormous office, said this slowly and calmly.

There was enormous tension in the room; it had generated even before this extraordinary meeting of the yuhn-hyuns principlesJake, Sawyer, Three Oaths Tsun and T. Y. Chunghad gotten under way. It was Sawyer, the ring's day-to-day caretaker, who had called the emergency session. Since the business feud between Three Oaths and T. Y. Chunga ruse dreamed up by Zilin to allow both his brothers to ama.s.s fortunes and allies who would never have joined the two togetherwas still very much a public issue, it was most dangerous for the two to be seen together. Nothing less than a full-fledged emergency would have caused Andrew Sawyer to bring the men together in broad daylight. He felt that he had had no choice.

"It was fornicating Bluestone who turned my comprador; it's Bluestone who is the Soviets' most high-ranking agent in all of Asia," Sawyer said angrily. He tapped a manila envelope. "We've got more than enough hard proof to convict him. I told you before that we should have shut him down. Give me one good reason now why we shouldn't have Special Branch come and haul him away."

"The primary one is that we now know who our enemy is," Jake said reasonably. "You are asking me to give up an enormous advantage and that I will not do. We are in a position to monitor Sir John Bluestone, the Soviets' most important agent on this continent. If he is removed, who will Daniella Vorkuta replace him with? We won't know the man until, perhaps, it is too late. Also, Bluestone's networks, which we are finally beginning to infiltrate, will be blown along with him. His control at Moscow Center, Daniella Vorkuta, is sure to see to that. She'll close everything down and start over. We'll be in the dark again. Is that what you want?"

Sawyer came and sat down in a chair at Jake's left. He ran a thin hand through the wispy strands of hair combed down over his mottled skull. "Of course not, no." His cool blue eyes flashed. "But I want my justice against Bluestone."

"And so you shall have it," Jake said evenly. "In time. The season has not yet come for reaping, Andrew."

"Meanwhile, our empire is falling down around us. Bluestone is fighting us by proxy for control of our companywhich includes Pak, the subsidiary invested in the Kam Sang project. It is vital that we maintain a majority interest in that warren of companies, isn't that so, Honorable Tsun?"

"I created the companies," Three Oaths said. "I would say, yes. Without that subsidiary we would lose close to two hundred million dollars American."

"And the yuhn-hyun's control of Kam Sang is absolutely vital," Jake said. "There can be no debate about this."

"But our fight for control of Pak combined with our own increased investment in Kam Sang, has seriously depleted our liquidity," Sawyer said.

"Do you know what that means?" T. Y. Chung jumped in. "Never in my life have I seen so much capital expended so quickly as we have poured into InterAsia Trading. We are three of the most wealthy tai pan in all of Asia. Yet because of the extraordinary guidelines laid down to us by Shi Zilin, we have a.s.signed all our a.s.sets over to the Zhuan. I do not even know where my capital has gone to."

"Overextension," Three Oaths said. "I dislike saying it but perhaps the Jian has erred." He turned to Jake. "I still do not understand why we needed to start up this new ent.i.ty, InterAsia Trading. At a time when, as the Honorable Chung has pointed out, we are all expending our ready cash to keep Kam Sang on line, it seems to me a grave miscalculation to have generated an entire new corporation. Especially one in which all our acc.u.mulated wealth has been sunk. G.o.ds, all our money is in InterAsia Trading. This can no longer be a secret from our enemies. You know that, Zhuan. I fear that InterAsia will become a lodestone, attracting the business sharks. What that dung-gatherer Bluestone wouldn't pay to take control of InterAsia Trading."

"There is the other side to consider," Jake said quietly. "Because of my father's maneuvering, we now have a new business ent.i.ty without a history or a modus operandi. We can, in short, utilize InterAsia Trading for any and all purposes we desire, without causing even one eyebrow in the business or governmental sectors to be raised. Such freedom is impossible with our existing companies, including Southasia Bancorp, our banking subsidiary. It is impossible with any of our other sector companies engaged in shipping, warehousing, real estate and so on. InterAsia Trading is an ent.i.ty for the future; a company to mold as we see fit. Eventually, it will become an umbrella of new sector companies."

"But precisely what businesses will InterAsia be used for, Zhuan?"

T. Y. Chung asked. "We are still in the dark as to why we have all put our entire financial empires on the line."

"InterAsia is not the subject of this session," Andrew Sawyer interjected. "Pardon me, Zhuan, but I have withheld this news too long as it is." Using a linen handkerchief to wipe his sweating pate, he continued. "It is my sad duty to inform you that as of midnight this morning our auditors have found that the comptroller of our Southasia Bancorp arm has systematically tunneled over twenty-five million dollars into private holdings outside the Colony."

Jake sat very still and he thought, When this. .h.i.ts the press, we'll be ruined.

"All G.o.ds strike down worm-ridden bankers!" Three Oaths exploded. "Nothing good ever came of those inst.i.tutions. I put my gold bars underneath my bed and don't have to worry about such defecators!"

Jake waited patiently until the tirade ended. Then he said, "You're certain it was Teck Yau."

"Absolutely," Sawyer said. "We've traced him to an Air India flight to New Delhi. He is no doubt already in Switzerland or Liechtenstein, laughing his head off about how much he stole from us."

"Leaving us to deal with the mess he made." Jake tapped his finger against the arm of the chair. "The first thing we must do is make sure there is no scandal. One whiff of this in the local press, and the Southasia Bancorp could suffer an irreversible loss of confidence among its depositors." He did not have to add that the majority of them were Chinese who, like Three Oaths, did not have much confidence in such Western concepts as banks to begin with. A scandal of this magnitude could cause a run that would shut down the Southasia Bancorp within a week. Since a majority of the yuhn-hyun's free-market cash flowed through the inst.i.tution, such an occurrence would be an utter financial disaster. One from which, Jake very much suspected, they could not recover.

Surely, he thought, my father could not have antic.i.p.ated this. Perhaps my uncle is right. Perhaps I have overgambled our position. He thought again of Bluestone's weekend boat party; what did it portend?

It would be unthinkable for him to go to his father in this situation. That would undermine his authority permanently. No. He was Zhuan. He must take control, and immediately.

"Andrew, I want everything you've gotten so far on the loss." Jake turned to Three Oaths. "Uncle, I want you to contact the Triad dragons who are part of the yuhn-hyun. All their power is to be exerted in clamping down on the incident. If it reaches the press, we're dead in the water."

"Even they won't be able to keep tongues from wagging forever, Zhuan," Three Oaths said. "You know how rumors spread in this city.

"True," Jake said, rising. "But all we need is a week or so. By that time, I'll have found a way to siphon money back into Southasia."

Three Oaths nodded. "I'll do what you ask. And so will they. I'll see to it personally."

"Good," Jake said. And he thought, We arc already on the brink. One tiny gust of wind will send us tumbling over the edge.

He thought of what he had once learned many years ago. One must seek to injure the comers when one comes up against a strong enemy, Fo Saan, his teacher, his guide, the extraordinary man Zilin had sent to train him, had counseled Jake. If you attack a foe who is obviously stronger than you in a direct fashion, his spirit will overcome you and he will smite you down. Seek then to strike swiftly at the corners of his force. In that way, the main body's spirit will be weakened and you may find a path to your enemy's heart.

In a moment Jake had made his decision. It was obvious to him that the person who would benefit the most from the dissolution of Southasia was Bluestoneand Daniella Vorkuta. Could Bluestone have infiltrated the inner circle yet again? He had done it once, as Andrew had been quick to point out. Why not a second time?

Jake rose and looked at the other men. *Til leave you to get down to work, then."

He hardly remembered going down in the elevator and getting into his car. The moment he left Sawyer's office, he had pushed the Southasia fiasco to the back of his mind. Nothing to be done about that until Sawyer delivered more detailed information.

Jake turned his mind to the news reports coming out of Tokyo and Osaka. Bliss had called him in from the shower and, dripping, he had watched the television cameras recording the shattering aftermath of what the announcer called "the bloodiest clash yet in the recent territorial wars between the rival Yakuza clans, Kisan and Komoto." Jake's closest friend, Mikio Komoto, was oyabun, boss of the Komoto clan. Jake was most concerned about Mikio.

"These scenes of death and destruction"three twisted bodies, headless and bloated; a burned-out building in Osaka; flames engulfing yet another structure in downtown Tokyo, following a thunderous detonation that many apparently took to be an earthquake"follow hard on the heels of a tactical battle that until earlier this month had remained very much in the shadows as an ongoing series of skirmishes."

More shots, panning, terrified faces, more blood, black and smeared by the imperfections of the broadcast medium. "Now the wholesale slaughter that some officials of Tokyo's special anti-Yakuza task force had been predicting is here at last.

"The only question remaining is: where will it end?"

Jake had made a grab for the phone and called his friend. But Mikio Komoto was not at home, he was told. Yes, his message would be pa.s.sed on. Any way Jake could be of help, he would.

This morning, after reading the newspaper dispatches, Jake tried to phone his friend. No answer. On his way into Sawyer's office, he had asked Sei An, Sawyer's secretary, to try Mikio Komoto's home number again with the same negative result.

Where is Mikio? Jake asked himself. What has happened to him?

When Tony Simbal arrived at Max Threnody's townhouse in Georgetown, the party was already in full swing. Threnody, a tall, slight Bostonian, had about him a rather donnish air, as if he had come straight across the quad at Oxford and was brushing the ivy leaves off his academic robes.

Because of this image, n.o.body in his right mind would believe that he was one of the ranking members of the Drug Enforcement Agency. He had also been Simbal's immediate superior in the DEA; it had been Threnody's devious mind that had put Simbal in the Shan States to begin with. The Shan States, in the middle of the Golden Triangle, was where the majority of the world's opium was harvested and refined into heroin. Of course it was a major DEA target.

The Shan States, a mountainous region of northern Burma, shoved up against the China border, were ruled by any number of tribal warlords whose armies were at constant war with the Burmese and Chinese governments. Both governments wished to wipe out the opium trade.

Threnody's cream-colored townhouse was on R Street in the hinterlands of Georgetown. From his kitchen windows could be seen a generous corner of Dumbarton Oaks. From his upstairs bedroom, one could see patches of Lovers' Lane through the brushstrokes of the trees.

The party was mainly DEA, but as Simbal strolled through the downstairs he saw a sprinkling of representatives from State, Congress, even the CIA. There was nothing official about this party, so whoever was here was strictly on "amorous" status with DEA. In other words, it was a friendly affair.

The place was cozy, filled with French Provincial furniture more comfortable than might be expected. The color tones tended toward the earth range, built, it seemed, around the paintings displayed with such loving care. Whatever investments Threnody had made were in the form of art which, besides his work, was his lone pa.s.sion. He loved the Impressionists such as Degas, Monet and Manet, and the related but less subtle p.i.s.sarro and Cezanne, whose almost hallucinatory work he could absorb for hours on end. Like them, he shared that tangential resonance with later luminaries, so that it was not surprising to find a small Pica.s.so drawing here, a minor Braque there, among the work of their artistic forebears. The house had always had a calming effect on Simbal.

He picked up a beer and went to say h.e.l.lo to his host. Threnody was in the kitchen, his hands deep in some concoction he had just pulled from the Cuisinart.