Jake Maroc - Shan Part 48

Simbal sighed. "I'm tired," he said.

"Hey, don't bulls.h.i.t me, dude," the Cuban insisted. "You were talking to the c.h.i.n.k. I heard you."

"He was ranting," Simbal said. He felt as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

"Bulls.h.i.t!"

"d.a.m.n-f.u.c.king-right!" Simbal flared. He stood up. "You let me handle Bennett."

"f.u.c.k that!"

"You've got no choice. It's out of your hands now."

"You think so?"

Something in his tone sent a warning bell through Simbal. He remembered the feeling he had tried to interpret from the Cuban's words while they were at the marina.

Abruptly, he began to walk across the room. When he got to the front door, the Cuban said, "Where you going, dude?"

"See you around sometime, Martine."

Gato de Rosa jumped up. "Hey, hey, you can't do that. Hey, dude!"

Simbal turned around. "What are you going to do, shadow me?" He gave a ghostly smile. "You know better than that."

There was silence for a time. They stared at each other.

"Hey, man, this suite's gonna begin stinking like a tuna boat any minute."

"You going to tell me who it was you called from the marina, Martine?"

"I told you, dude."

"Yeah. Right."

"Oh, s.h.i.t." Gato de Rosa came across the room. "He told me to keep an eye on you. He told me to go where you went. I don't think he trusts you, dude."

"Who's that?" But he already knew.

"Max," the Cuban said. "It was Max."

Max Threnody, Simbal thought. First he got to Monica and now the Cuban. But Gato de Rosa was a SNIT and Max was the head of the DEA. Just what the h.e.l.l is Max up to? Simbal wondered.

"You tell Max that if he wants me shadowed he can G.o.dd.a.m.ned do it himself. I know where Bennett's off to and that's where I'm going." With each word getting closer to the Cuban.

"You're going to have company, then, hombre."

"Bulls.h.i.t," Simbal said. Moving very fast he went beneath Gato de Rosa's suit jacket. Pulled out the tiny snub-nosed .22. "A woman'sweapon," he said, "but you know better than I do the damage it can do this close in."

"Hey, dude, hey. You crazy?"

"Nothing personal, Martine." Simbal leveled the .22. "Get over to the couch."

"Hey, for Christ's sake, man, lighten up, uh?"

"Just do as I say," Simbal said low in his throat.

He used the belt from Yi's silk robe to tie the Cuban's hands behind his back. "I don't mind letting you walk around," he said. "The police will be here before you can get out of that. I'll be long gone by then."

"Gone where, dude? Where you off to?" The Cuban's eyes had turned the color of coffee.

Simbal took the bullets out of the .22 and threw them at Gato de Rosa's feet. "Tell Max when he gets here." Tossed the gun after them. "Tell him I've gone to the Shan."

Qi lin slept.

"You see how marvelous the human brain is." Huaishan Han stared down at the supine form with such hunger in his eyes that Chen Ju was momentarily appalled. "You see how fantastically complex a machine it is." Huaishan Han's odd, bowed gait was exaggerated by the bare-bulb lighting, turning him into some truly grotesque figure. "Colonel Hu knew and appreciated that."

Chen Ju grunted. "Colonel Hu is dead."

Huaishan Han smiled and again Chen Ju felt a little thrill go through him. That smile was the kind used by those more than a bit mad. "Always the pragmatist, my friend, eh?" Han nodded. "But I divine your message." His hand moved out, stroked Qi lin's unlined brow. "Yes. She killed Colonel Hu, and she escaped his compound. A heavily fortified military complex, I might add."

"It seems to me," Chen Ju said, "that whatever it was Hu did to her, didn't take."

"Is that so?" Huaishan Han gave off that smile again, as a lambent sun throws off heat. "The war in Cambodia had marked Colonel Hu irrevocably. He was a master at his trade, true enough. But he drank himself into a stupor almost every night. The men had begun to question his commands, his leadership.

"You know what that meant. His unit was hand-picked to accept orders unthinkingly. That was essential, especially if they were going to march into Kam Sang, disarm the members of the army guardingthe installation, imprison everyone withinincluding members of the intelligence serviceand take what we require."

Huaishan Han sighed. "In short, my friend, Colonel Hu had become a liability." He reached out, stroked Qi lin's brow once again. "My precious lizi, my plum did just as I asked. Do you think it was joss that brought her within sight of General Kuo's soldiers? No, no. She was programmed for all of this. To kill Hu, to escape and come here."

Chen Ju looked doubtful. "But how?"

"With this." Huaishan Han produced a bottle of alcohol, a wad of cotton. He took Qi lin's arm and turned it so that the inside of her elbow was facing him. Using the cotton, he swabbed down an area of her skin. In a moment, he had a syringe in his hand. He uncapped it, squeezed a bit of the clear fluid out its tip. Then he inverted it, plunged it into Qi lin's vein. "A steady supply of this drug. It was Hu's own discovery. It works directly on the central cortex, inhibiting ego and superego. In effect, it stimulates the primitive emotions. Hate, fear, desire become matters of life and death. In this unbalanced state, the subject is akin to a piece of clay, ready to be molded by the artisan's fine hand." He put the materials back in his pocket.

"And she knows nothing of this?"

"There is a consciousness-blocker," Huaishan Han said. "She is mine from the inside out. Mine forever. By coming here, by escaping, she proved her skills to me. Now she has a most difficult task before her."

Huaishan Han looked up at Chen Ju. "Many before her have tried to kill Jake Maroc Shi. All have failed. Joss, eh? But I have found that jossis like the tide of the ocean. It flows, it ebbs. You see?"

I want to control the world, Chen Ju thought, and this old, broken man is concerned with nothing more than warping a young girl's mind. It is shameful. He seeks only personal revenge, a petty and foolish undertaking at best. The fall down the well did more than disfigure his body, it scarred his mind as well. Once he would have understood the grand design that I am weaving; once he would have joined me.

Chen Ju shook his head. Perhaps his many years in the Shan had changed him subtly. There wealth meant nothingwarlords strolled their compounds with handfuls of rubies, sapphires, Imperial jade in their pockets. They guided the distribution of the tears of the poppy and thereby reaped enormous profits. But their power was over people. Material wealth in the Shan was secondary. The reason that the Americans and the Russians had been locked, out of the Shan was that they had no mastery over the people. Their CIA and KGB, respectively, had invaded the Shan using basically the same methodology: handing out money to everyone they met.

The Shan laughed at the Westerners; their warlords sneered at them and turned them away. Power was distribution. Control of the farmers who grew their fields of poppies; control of the armies who guarded the factories where the raw opium was refined, and guided the mule trains down the steep sides of the Shan to where greedy wholesalers waited.

And if Chen Ju had learned anything during his long exile from Hong Kong it was this: that true power resided in man's mastery over his fellow man. Those who wielded only wealth possessed an illusion.

Huaishan Han, so long deprived of true power, had filled his villa with the acc.u.mulated archaeological wealth of the centuries. But what meaning did it have? When he died, that wealth would be reapportioned, broken up, dispersed like so much sand. What would be left? Nothing. Nothing at all to mark his pa.s.sing.

But Chen Ju knew that what he himself had embarked upon would surely change the world for all time. Like the pharaoh Cheops he was building an eternal monument to mark his brief time upon the earth.

Greed I leave to lesser spirits, he told himself. And he recognized greed in Han's face as he gazed down upon the slumbering countenance of the young girl who was so important to him. He longs for what he can never have, Chen Ju thought, and that is an apt definition of greed; he longs for a child. It is from this loss that his burning hatred of Shi Zilin stems. And perhaps that is the root of his obsession with this poor girl; why he openly adores her so, why he cannot understand how he tortures her.

Looking at Huaishan Han, Chen Ju was struck by the damage that time can do to mortal mind and body. All the more reason, he told himself, to get on with what I have to do. The world is about to enter a new age.

Daniella Vorkuta received her intelligence reports from MitreSir John Bluestone's KGB code nameon Thursday mornings. They came coded, by special courier, and it was Daniella's habit to set aside an hour just before lunch to pore through the progress her most active a.s.set was making toward burrowing inside Kam Sang.

However, this particular Thursday was a nightmare. She was woken out of sleep by the duty officer. Army intelligence required liaisonwith her people in the field in Afghanistan. That crisis was handled as she was dressing. At the office, she found wheels had come off no less than four separate operations, two of which were in their final phases and therefore needed her undivided attention as she guided the respective case officers through harrowing twists and turns in order to keep their field agents alive and ticking.

Lunch brought no respite since the frantic morning had required the administrative meetings be held in abeyance until the missions were past their crisis phases. A dozen department heads were kept waiting for her appearance so an entire round of morning meetings had to be crammed into the lunch hour.

And the afternoon was even worse. News was brought to her that despite her best efforts one of her agents in the field had been overrun by the opposition. Even worse, he had been captured alive. Daniella was required to begin sensitive and humiliating negotiations to try to bring him home.

That night, she and Carelin did not go back to her place. Instead he took her to a small apartment on the top floor of a red-brick building on Solyanka Street, just off Pokrovsky, one of the Green Boulevards, so-called because of the gra.s.s and parklands that are part of their makeup. From one of the tiny windows, one could see the Ustinsky Bridge and lights glinting off the dark face of the Moskva. The view, Carelin told Daniella, had been better before the tractors and road-rippers had come in, part of the munic.i.p.al plan to turn this cul-de-sac into the Internatsionalskaya and the Ulyanovskaya which would eventually link the boulevard to the south bank.

" They were here because of Carelin. Or, more accurately, because he could no longer suffer the vigil Maluta had on her. This was a place no one knew about. "I am tired of making love to you," he had said, "while Maluta's soldier watches from the shadows."

Too exhausted, physically and emotionally, to eat, Daniella had stripped off her clothes and had stood under a shower so long that Carelin was obliged to hammer repeatedly on the door to ask her if she was ever coming out.

Eventually she emerged, unsmiling, wrapped in a thick American-made towel. Her gray eyes met Carelin's and he leaned forward, kissing her tenderly on the cheek. He went into the bathroom, closed the door. In a moment, she heard the sound of the shower.

Daniella, on the bed, listened to the drumming of the rain, watched the lurid splashes of electric-blue lightning pierce the shades like knives. She closed her eyes and remembered the unread report from Mitre.

She was so tired she thought fleetingly of leaving it for the morning. But, in the end, her desire to read about any progress on Kam Sang broke through her lethargy. She rolled over, dug it out of her bag. There was no danger in reading it here. The code made it indecipherable to anyone but Mitre and herself.

She propped herself up against the pillows, slit open the envelope and began slowly to read.

In a moment, she put down the sheets of flimsy and stared at the closed bathroom door just as if she had acquired x-ray vision. She sat up fully and read through the report again. It was absolutely revelatory. It contained the intelligence Neon Chow had given to Bluestone regarding the Quarry a.s.set Apollo. The last line contained Apollo's ident.i.ty: Mikhail Carelin.

When Daniella came to his name written out in code, her stomach gave a lurch and she gagged, for an instant overwhelmed by nausea. She put her head back against the pillows and did nothing but breathe deeply for a long time.

Mikhail Carelin was an agent working for a foreign powerfor her most powerful enemy!

Now that she knew this, she should begin devising ways to find out what his a.s.signment was. She should be thinking of ways to turn him. Or, alternatively, to bring him to justice. He was a traitor, after all.

But she was thinking about none of these things. With a kind of jolt, she realized that it did not matter to her. Traitor or patriot, there was absolutely no difference. Carelin was still the man she loved. And she knew that she was going to do nothing that would jeopardize her relationship with him.

Daniella Vorkuta, trained and bred in the elite Soviet underworld of the sluzhba, was now nothing more or less than a human being. Her rank of general meant as little, she realized, as her elevation to the head of the First Chief Directorate or, even, G.o.d help her, the Politburo.

Her career, her life within the sluzhba meant nothing. What mattered was this. How could that possibly be? she asked herself. She put her fingertips against her lower belly, and then further, pushing them through the fur between her thighs. She probed into the heat between her legs until she was certain of her previous findings. The mucus was there; that meant her time of the month was now, her egg was ready and waiting. Her hands, when she took them away, were trembling. Had she gone mad? There was no other rational explanation. But, sheknew, there was nothing rational about this decision. It was purely emotional. It was the true difference between a woman and a man.

In time, Carelin padded into the bedroom. He saw that she was not reading, was perhaps even asleep, and she had turned off the lamps. When he was next to her, she stretched, as if in sleep, and turned her long, naked body against him. Her fingers cupped him, began to ma.s.sage him.

After the longest time: "Da.n.u.shka?" he whispered. "Are you awake?"

She brushed her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against him, trailing her nipples over his flesh. When they reached his belly, they were hard. Her lips opened, enclosed him in exquisite heat. Her tongue rose up his stem, lashing his expanding tip. When he was hard and quivering, she replaced her mouth with her mons.

She scrubbed him with it until he was groaning, until his own hands guided her onto him. He went in with a rush and when he arched up, bringing her with him, when he felt his hot seed jetting high into her, he heard her crying, "Mikhail, Mikhail, Mikhail!" And felt her face wet with tears.

Bliss felt the bullets going inone, two, three, four, five!like slices of silver, a hungry civet's slashing grin in the emerald jungle. White on black, their brief, whirring journeys were broadcast to her through da-hei, the great darkness.

As they entered the man sitting at her left elbow, the empathic flow caused her to cry out with the agony that he was sustaining. Big Oysters Pok jerked up and back with each hit, as if he was a marionette whose strings were being pulled by a madman or a drunkard.

Even before that, however, Bliss had upended the table, crashing dinnerware, gla.s.ses, the piled remains of their meal. Now three good inches of solid wood and iron braces were between her and the sixth shot that embedded itself into the center of the table instead of in her heart.

From her vantage point she could see the lower half of Big Oysters Pok's sprawled figure, his legs tangled up in the overturned chair. Blood was running darkly along the floor.

She turned away from the a.s.sa.s.sin who had spun and was loping away, shouldering roughly past the Chinese waiters and the screaming, cringing gwai loh patrons. Slipping in the muck as she scrambled on her knees to where Big Oysters Pok lay.

Five shots point blank and da-hei showed her the ending of life.

But she put her fingertips against the side of his neck anyway because she needed the physical a.s.surance. There was no pulse. She bent, put her lips near his. No breath, either.

She had been so close. Bliss closed her eyes and sighed. Now she had nothing to go on. Her search for the murderers of the Jian had hit a stone wall.

The only thing Huaishan Han could see when he looked into her face was the well. He stared into Qi lin's face and saw madness. The well was madness.

Echoes. Wet echoes, slime, mold, rust and mud. The slide of viscous substances across his goosepimpled flesh. The exquisite agony of being on the rack, of one's numbed fingers supporting one's entire weight forhow long? Buddha, how long! An eternity. Not a moment less.

Now as she looked upon Qi lin and saw the madness, he no longer knew whether it was hers or his own. He thanked Buddha for his great good fortune. Oh, his joss must be powerful indeed!

Colonel Hu's mind sculpting had done its work. Chen Ju had advised him and he had pa.s.sed the information on to Hu. The best place for a fugitive from the Chinese government to cross over was this section of the China-Burma frontier.

The Shan States were a wild and, at best, unfriendly place. The ethnic tribes of the regionthe Shan, Wa, Lahu, Akha, Lu, Lisu migrated here during the fifteenth century. Fiercely independent, they had resisted all efforts by various Burmese regimes to incorporate them into the nation as a whole.

Today, many of the warlords who ruled tribal armies and fiefdoms of medieval splendor, are descendantsor claim to beof the original sawbwas, the hereditary Shan princes. Other warlords are renegade officers from the Chinese army, lured into the Shan by the promise of power and riches beyond imagining.

And of all the warlords here in the Shan States, it was General Kuo who was the most powerful.

He commanded by far the most men, armed well enough to dissuade the Chinese army from invading his territory. How then could she fail to be stopped by one of his border patrols?

Her beauty struck him like an arrow through his heart. Now that she had come back he was aware of how much he had missed her. She was the granddaughter of his enemy. Shi Zilin lived on through her, as he did through Jake Maroc. There was a certain exquisite ironyin using Shi Jake's daughter to a.s.sa.s.sinate him. That thought made laughter bubble up in Huaishan Han's throat.

General Kuo disliked the sound of Han's laughter. It was unwholesome and peculiarly obscene, like an old man peeping under a little girl's skirts to catch a glimpse of something pure and pink.

General Kuo said nothing of this, however. He was paid a king's ransom to supervise the harvesting and the refining of the tears of the poppy, not to render his opinions on the personalities involved. Number Four opium was his first priority. His second priority was keeping the American CIA, the Russian KGB, the Chinese and Burmese armies at bay. After that, no one gave a d.a.m.n what he did or did not do. He had admired Huaishan Han more than any other man alive.

General Kuo knew that he could line up twenty men right now and order them shot and Huaishan Han would not even turn his head in the direction of the shots. The high Shan plateau was General Kuo's territory, pure and simple. And Huaishan Han knew it.

But then it was General Kuo who had saved Huaishan Han from the hideous depths of the stinking well in Fragrant Hills Park, so long ago. Kuo had been no general then. But his quick, shrewd mind had already set him apart from his contemporaries who seemed content to bury their heads in the sand blowing in off the Gobi.

General Kuo had disliked taking orders. He was in the military because to him the army was synonymous with power. He craved power in the same way that most people needed food and sleep. Kuo could never remember sleeping for more than three hours a night; he had never needed to. What he required was power.

He was no politician. He had an incredibly ordered mind. Discipline. He was born with a disciplined mind. He was natural for the armyexcept that he resented taking orders from superiors who were that in rank only.

General Kuo had discovered wei qi, the board game of master strategy, at an early age. He learned to play by observing an old man who took on all challengers every day in the park. Kuo had been involved in wei qi now for close to sixty years and he had never encountered a better player in all that time than the old man in the park.

It was wei qior more accurately the strategy learned in its pursuit that allowed Kuo to see an opportunity of a lifetime when he discovered the well and its contents.