Jake frowned at Carmellini. “We’re going to need some weapons that have a little more oomphf than this thirty-eight. Send the head marine up here and let me talk to him.”
Carmellini nodded and headed for the door.
“Take the bugs with you,” Jake added.
There were three of them, tiny things, cleverly hidden. Carmellini pocketed them, then left the room and closed the door behind him.
“Want to tell me about it?” Jake said.
“The administration wants the Communist era in China to end, and they are willing to help the rebels make it happen. But they don’t want anyone to know they helped.”
“You’re the fall guy?”
“I suppose. They had to have someone to blame and I volunteered. I thought you had figured that out. Life in California was getting to be a burden that I couldn’t carry, and…” Cole shrugged.
Jake just nodded. He finished off his whiskey in one gulp and set the glass on the table by the couch.
“I guess the left hand and the right hand are still strangers in Washington,” Cole added.
“Yeah,” Jake Grafton replied. “They never tell all of it.”
“Do you know these people who kidnapped us?” Callie Grafton asked Wu Tai Kwong between chattering teeth. He had used a piece of sheet to wash her wounds after she was brought back to the stateroom around midnight. He thought she had had a mild concussion, but she was shivering uncontrollably from her hours in the meat locker.
“I know them,” he replied. He had ripped a sheet into strips and wrapped them around the cuts in his arm. The bleeding seemed to have stopped.
“They wanted to know what was on the tape. The CIA had a bug hidden in China Bob Chan’s library and taped the conversations there the night he died. I listened to the tape.”
“Sonny Wong is worried about what you heard.”
“You think?”
“He might be on the tape.”
“So who is Sonny Wong?”
“A gangster. Maybe the last big one in Hong Kong. There are many little gangsters, people who want to be big, but Sonny is big. Makes lots of money.”
Callie wrapped herself tighter in the blankets. She couldn’t stop shivering. Her face hurt like hell and she was bruised and ached all over, but the deep cold she felt was worse.
“Is this about money?” she asked. “Is that why we were kidnapped?”
“I think so.” Wu sat down on his bunk. His hand and arm were hurting. He rested his elbow on his knee with the hand elevated. “Cole has so much. The temptation was too much for Sonny.”
Callie waited for Wu to say more. She saw a broad-shouldered, medium-sized Chinese man of about thirty years, not handsome, not ugly, the kind of man who could melt into any crowd bigger than three. Or could he?
There was something…
“Sonny Wong is the security chief,” Wu said. “Every revolution needs someone to enforce secrecy or the whole thing will collapse of its own weight. That is his job.”
Callie began to see it. “So if someone talked to the police…”
“Sonny heard of it. He had people in every cell who reported to him. He plugged the leaks.”
“He killed people who talked?”
Wu lowered his head. “Sometimes,” he admitted. “Sometimes people saw the error of their ways and agreed to talk no more.”
“He’s a thug.”
“An enforcer. It takes more than dreamers with stars in their eyes to make a revolution.”
“He’s the dirty end of the stick.”
The metaphor threw Wu. Callie didn’t feel like explaining.
“You trusted him that much?” Callie pressed.
“No one else wanted the job. No one wanted blood on his hands.”
“How did you know this loyal murderer wouldn’t betray you?”
“I didn’t know. Anyone could have betrayed me, any hour of any day.”
“Who is your thug in Beijing, Shanghai, et cetera?” Callie asked.
“Sonny has friends throughout most of China. Really, there was no one else who could do the job.”
Callie was unwilling to leave the subject. “So you must have known that someday Wong might turn on you, take over the entire organization, put himself at the head? There is plenty of precedent, I believe. Saddam Hussein and Joe Stalin leap immediately to mind.”
“That was a possibility,” Wu Tai Kwong reluctantly admitted.
“So what did you plan to prevent that move from succeeding?”
“I planned to kill him before he killed me.”
“Looks like you may have miscalculated,” Callie snapped.
Thoroughly disgusted, she carried the blankets into the tiny bathroom and shut the door. The door had no lock.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Virgil Cole’s daughter, Elaine, was an associate professor of mathematics at Stanford University. She was attending a women’s political caucus in Washington, D.C., when she received a coded E-mail from her father. Like the message received by Eaton Steinbaugh, the E-mail consisted of a nonsense word, a dozen random letters, from an address in Hong Kong.
She received the message at noon when she checked her E-mail on her laptop in her hotel room. She got off-line, left the computer running, and gazed about her distractedly, the political meeting forgotten.
She opened the drapes on the window. Georgetown was visible but none of monumental Washington, which was out of sight to the right.
She had a small notebook in her computer case. She got it out now, opened it, and examined the notes she had written there. The handwriting was neat, almost compulsively so. She had made the notes the last time she was in Hong Kong visiting her father, over spring break.
Being Virgil Cole’s daughter had always been a mixed blessing. He was quiet and unassuming, brilliant and rich. Somehow her mother’s second husband never measured up. He was very nice, and yet… When she was young she had thought her mother was crazy for not staying with her father, but as an adult, she could see how difficult Cole was, especially for her mother, who was neither brilliant nor quiet and unassuming.
Perhaps it had all worked out for the best.
Except for her half brother, of course, who had never come to grips with the fire in his father’s soul.
A Chinese revolution. Yes, that was Virgil Cole. A great impossible crusade to which he could give all of his brains and energy and determination would attract him like a candle attracts a moth.
She had never seen him so full of life as he was in April during her visit.
A crusade! A holy war!
She had seen the fire in his eyes, so of course she said yes when he asked her to help. He didn’t come right out and baldly ask. He explained what was needed, how the worm programs were already in place and at the right time needed to be triggered from a location outside of Hong Kong, triggered in such a way that the identity of the person doing it could never be established… beyond a reasonable doubt.
He explained the worms, how they were designed, and she carefully wrote down the instructions she needed to make them dance.
She played with her computer keyboard, checked the E-mail again.
So the revolution was now.
And she was going to help.
And she might never see her father again.
She was mulling that hard fact when the execute message came. She turned off the computer and stored it carefully in its carrying case. She left the case on the bed and took only the notebook with her.
She caught a taxi in front of the hotel and told the driver she wanted to go to the main public library.
Sure enough, the library had a bank of computers that allowed Internet access. The librarian at the desk near the computers was a plump, middle-aged woman. “The fee is a dollar,” the lady told Elaine, who dug in her purse for a bill. “Such a terrible irony — the computers are here for people who can’t afford their own, but the users must help defray the cost.”