The conference was a nightmare, with the bosses eyeing him constantly for three days. He was sure they suspected something at first, but he finally realized they always looked at him like that, like they were disappointed he was such a rock star in the field of artificial intelligence that he was impossible to fire, no matter how much they didn’t like him.
Ackerman was smart, and he knew that the bosses might hang around Jakarta to hobnob after the conference wrapped up. He’d set up the meeting with the buyer in Bandung, a three-and-a-half-hour drive to the southeast nestled in the Parahyangan Mountains. Noonan told the bosses he wanted to experience a little of the mountain air before he left Indonesia. They were heading to Australia on some camel tour anyway, so they couldn’t really say much about him wanting to soak up a little culture. At least he wasn’t trying to tag along with them.
Bandung was all right, Noonan supposed. The third-largest city in Indonesia was cooler than Jakarta, and only slightly less crowded. They called it the City of Flowers or something like that. Noonan had hoped it was because of the girls, but it turned out to be because of the actual flowers. The rocky gray face of Tangkuban Perahu, an active 6,800-foot volcano, rose above the green mountains thirty kilometers to the north of the city and gave the air an odor that was far from floral.
Noonan met the buyer at a teahouse a block from his hotel. The guy looked like an Indonesian gangster — at least what Noonan thought an Indonesian gangster would look like — with dark slacks, black Oakley shades, and some kind of prison tattoo showing on the muscle of his upper arm below the short sleeve of a white linen shirt. The transaction was surprisingly simple, considering how much it would change Noonan’s life. Hand over the thumb drive, money gets transferred, Ackerman sends the activation codes. Bing, bang, boom.
It wasn’t like the movies, with any witty repartee or hoarsely whispered threat. The gangster dude just pushed back from the table and left with what he came for. Geoff Noonan had all but stumbled out of the teahouse, wrestling with the heady fact that he was now a multimillionaire. He’d walked for the better part of an hour through the teeming Bandung streets, dodging traffic and tourists who had fled the crowds of Jakarta to crowd into this new place. Stunned, that’s what Noonan was. He paid little attention to where he was going. The cacophony of horns, bike bells, and people jabbering away in a tongue he could not understand assaulted him like countless slaps coming in from every direction.
A little guy at a meat stall called out to him in a high-pitched voice, waving the piece of cardboard he used to fan the smoke away from his grill. It occurred to Noonan that he could buy any of the lowly schmucks on this street ten thousand times over. More than that. Most of these guys probably didn’t have more than their food stall and some shithole hovel somewhere. He’d always known he was smarter than everyone else. Now he was richer, too. The smug feeling vanished as soon as he saw his first policeman. He was a felon now. A thief. He needed to try to blend in.
Street vendors selling everything from chicken satay to Dutch pastries were everywhere. He’d bought a bowl of chicken porridge from a cart because the girl was pretty, and thrown it away after two bites halfway down the block. It tasted fine, but he was too queasy to eat. He kept walking, hoping that would help, deciding to check out the central square. He needed to tell his bosses he’d done something besides sit at the hotel bar. The Grand Mosque was right there, so everyone took off their shoes. The sulfur from Tangkuban Perahu volcano, mixing with the odor of other people’s feet, left him feeling bilious.
And guilty.
Somehow, Noonan had found his way back to the hotel again, and decided to drown his guilt at the bar. Then he’d seen the blue-eyed Sundanese girl — or, rather, she’d seen him. He hoped she would make him feel better.
The idea that she might be a prostitute didn’t occur to him until they got to her room and he saw the big floor-to-ceiling mirrors. His room was three floors above hers and didn’t have mirrors like that. Still, there was no mention of money. She was appropriately nervous, said she never did this sort of thing — never even went out on her own. Her girlfriend was supposed to meet her for a night on the town in the City of Flowers but never showed. That didn’t explain the room, but Noonan was beyond caring.
He pondered the situation while he kicked off his shoes. It sort of made sense: lonely girl, stood up by her friend, sees a lonely guy and hooks up. Truth be told, he had never done this kind of thing, either. He’d thought about it, a lot — tried, even — but no one ever wanted a piece of the Poison Dwarf. Until now.
The girl said her name was Betti Tamala. When the red dress came off in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror, Noonan decided she was a solid eight. It took less than a minute for him to realize that she had not only done this sort of thing before, she was extremely good at it.
Behind the mirror, Wu Chao of the Strategic Support Force — the cyber-, space, and electronic warfare arm of the People’s Liberation Army — stretched his neck from side to side, then pointed his chin toward the ceiling as if his collar was too tight. The four men who were packed into the tiny linen closet with all their video equipment filled it to capacity. The space was used for nothing other than this kind of lascivious work, and a dusty nastiness hung in the dank air like an illness.
The SSF consolidated most of the army’s intelligence capabilities, technical and otherwise. It was a relatively new organization, with all involved still squabbling for primacy as strata solidified. Wu had been an intelligence officer for almost two decades, coming up through the ranks working directly for PLA’s General Staff Department.
Wu Chao was a patriot. He’d not gone into intelligence work in order to leer through hidden peepholes at obscene Americans, but that was part of his job. Varied duties, his instructors at the School of International Relations had called such work. Wu was forty-three, with thinning black hair and square features that made him look like he’d been carved from a block of limestone. Those who knew him could be forgiven for assuming that he was a killer because of his chiseled look and hardened demeanor. He had, of course, taken lives. That was the way of the world. But he took no joy in it. His job was one of intelligence gathering, computer software, ones and zeros. If he had to kill, it meant something had gone horribly wrong. Kang, the man on the other side of the video camera, was an accomplished killer. Wu had known many assassins over the course of his career. Some he’d killed himself. With others, he’d shared a cup of tea. Almost all of them had some sort of redeeming quality — filial piety, patience with little children, a favorite charity.
As far as Wu could tell, the only thing redeeming about Kang was that he took good care of his teeth. Tall and fit but slightly disheveled in his dark suit, Kang stood at the far end of the little closet, looking the part of overworked businessman or harried police inspector as he stared, entranced, through the glass. Wu knew the cold reality. The man was a state-sponsored serial killer. He relished his work. If the government hadn’t found him, he would have been feeding his ugly habits on the backstreets of Shanghai. There was no doubt that Kang was intelligent, but intellect did not translate to conscience.
Conscience. Wu Chao’s belly writhed as if he’d swallowed a snake at the thought of the term. His job required horrific acts that were cruel but necessary. He had taken advantage of a widowed Japanese woman’s loneliness to infiltrate a radio station in Okinawa, befriended a Uighur child in Urumqi so that he might kill the boy’s terrorist father. He leveraged the secrets of other human beings until they’d finally broken and taken their own lives in shame. There seemed to be no bottom to the depths he would sink to for his country, but this clumsy scene on the other side of the glass was by far the most disgusting thing his eyes had ever witnessed. It was made even worse by the fact that he’d developed feelings for Betti Tamala. She knew too much, and would have to die.