“Working for Sonny Wong, they take their chances. If they have time to get out, good for them. If they don’t, too bad. Now do as I say.”
“What about Wong?”
“He can leave with me or die here. His choice.”
Rip Buckingham took a deep breath. “When you deliver a message, you really deliver, Grafton.”
Jake walked Wong over to the stove, a large gas burner with blue flames from several of the jets. Nearby was a deep-fat fryer full of hot grease. Jake turned the flames under it up as far as they would go.
He traced out the gas lines, which were routed along the junction of the deck and bulkhead. Through a door, into a storage room. There it was, a tank of bottled gas or propane, Jake couldn’t tell which.
Jake led Wong to the door to the dining area. He pushed it open a crack, watched Rip getting the small crowd off the floating restaurant onto sampans. Some of the employees kept looking toward the kitchen, but Rip insisted that Sonny himself wanted everyone to leave.
“Give me your shirt,” Jake said to Wong.
The Chinese unbuttoned the short-sleeve shirt and handed it over. With the pistol right against Wong’s neck, Jake marched him to the deep fat fryer and dipped the shirt in. When it had absorbed a fair amount of grease, he tossed it onto the stove. The grease flared up.
Taking a step sideways to get a good view, Jake thumbed back the hammer of the revolver and aimed at the gas line. He missed with the first shot, but his second was rewarded with a loud hissing of escaping gas.
Jake eared back the hammer one more time, put the pistol against Wong’s lips.
“There is no place on this planet you can hide, Mr. Wong. If any harm comes to my wife, I’m declaring war on you.”
Then Jake ran. Out the kitchen door, across the dining room as fast as he could scramble toward the sampan dock at the main entrance. He heard Sonny Wong running behind him.
The kitchen exploded with a dull boom.
Rip Buckingham was standing alone on the dock. There were no boats.
The fire came out the kitchen door; the dining room quickly filled with smoke.
Jake said, “Shall we?” to Rip, took a last look at Wong, then dove into the black water. Rip was right behind him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When the van brought Eaton Steinbaugh home after his radiation treatment, his wife, Babs, was waiting by the curb. He felt like hell. Babs helped him inside. He wanted to go to the study and lie down on the couch, and today she let him. Usually she insisted he go to the bedroom and get in bed, but not today.
“You got an E-mail,” she told him.
“Did you print it out?” he whispered.
“Don’t I always?”
She handed him the sheet of paper. The message was from Hong Kong, somebody in Hong Kong — he had never before seen that E-mail address. The body of the message was a series of letters, arranged as if they were a word. He counted the letters. Twelve of them.
The letters appeared to be a code. And they were, but the code wasn’t in the message. The twelve letters was the message.
He handed the sheet of paper back to Babs.
“Want to tell me what that means?” she said sharply.
“Within four hours.”
“Cole?”
“Yes.”
“Really, Steinbaugh, I don’t know about you. Sick as you are and you’re messing in other people’s business. All the way around the world, in China, no less.”
“Umpf.”
“They could prosecute you.”
“For what?”
“How would I know? Something, that’s for sure.”
“They already did that,” her husband replied. “Years and years ago.” When he was twenty he spent two years in a federal penitentiary for hacking into top-secret Pentagon computer files. Of course he was thrown out of the university and ended up never going back. That was over ten years ago.
“Prison didn’t teach you a damned thing, obviously,” she snapped, and walked out with her head down.
A husband dying of cancer was a heavy load, and he appreciated that. Not much left for Babs to smile about.
Virgil Cole!
It was really happening.
Cole promised him it would. “Have faith,” he said. “The time will come.”
“I might be dead by then,” Eaton Steinbaugh told Cole. He hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer then. Maybe it was a premonition.
“Hey, man, the Lord might call us all home before then. Just do your best to make it work when the hour comes.”
“They might change the codes. They might change the system.”
“If they do, they do. That’s life. I don’t want you to guarantee anything. Just do the best you can and we’ll all live with it, however it turns out.”
Babs was sure as hell wrong, he reflected wryly, about what he learned in prison. While doing his time he taught a computer course for the inmates. Every day he had hours alone on the machine, hours in which he was supposed to be preparing lesson plans. He spent most of those hours hacking into networks and databases all over the globe. What he didn’t do was tamper with the data that were there, so no one came looking for him. Locked up with nothing to occupy his mind, the hacking kept him sane.
That was then. Today just getting into a network was tougher, and a lot of the security programs had alarms that would reveal the presence of an unauthorized intruder. System designers finally were waking up to the threat.
But Eaton Steinbaugh had also learned a few things through the years. One was that getting in was a lot easier if you had access to the software and constructed a back door that you could use anytime you wanted.
He became a back door specialist. As soon as he was released from prison he was heavily recruited by software companies. Through the years he took jobs that interested him, and the demand for his skills forced the companies to pay excellent wages. For his own amusement, when he designed or worked on networks, he put in a trapdoor for his own use.
He was working for Virgil Cole’s company when Cole called him in one day. Cole found one of the back doors, which was the first time anyone ever managed that trick.
That Cole! He was one smart cookie, shrewd and tougher than cold-rolled steel. Steinbaugh had never met a man like him.
Cole didn’t fire him. Just told him to do a better job on the back doors or take them out.
He was working for Microsoft when Cole telephoned him eighteen months ago, wanted him to accept a job with Cole’s company, which Cole was no longer with, go to China to do some Y2K remediation.
Steinbaugh had always refused Y2K remediations, which he regarded as mind-numbing grunt work, but he did it because Cole asked.
On his way to Beijing he went through Hong Kong and dropped in to see Virgil Cole at the consulate. Cole took him to the best restaurant in town, which was French of course, where they ate a five-star gourmet dinner on white linen in a private alcove and sipped on a two-thousand-dollar bottle of wine.
“You didn’t have to do this for me, you know,” Eaton Steinbaugh told Virgil Cole.
“I needed an evening out, and you’re a good excuse.”
They were sipping cognac and sucking on Cuban cigars after dinner when Steinbaugh remarked, “When you stop and reflect, life’s contrasts are pretty amazing, aren’t they?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I grew up in blue-collar Oakland, Dad worked on road-paving crews, we never had a whole lot. Then I wound up in prison, which was a bummer. Since then I’ve been all over the world, married, had a kid, and here I am in Hong Kong having a five-star dinner with a billionaire, just like I was somebody. You know?”
Cole laughed. Later Steinbaugh realized that Cole had hoped for this reaction, indeed, had played for it.
“I spent a lifetime working to get here, too,” he said. “The low point in my life was a night in Vietnam. I was a bombardier-navigator on A-6 Intruder aircraft. One night near the end of the war the gomers shot us down.”