Stuart Woods and Bryon Quertermous
Jackpot
1
Teddy Fay just wanted to sleep. He’d never had trouble sleeping, even in war zones and on the trail of high-profile targets. But a series of Hollywood scouting meetings across three continents in seven days in his identity as movie producer Billy Barnett had done him in.
He was in the first-class lounge at the Hong Kong airport waiting for the final leg of his flight back to Los Angeles, when he felt someone approaching. He ignored his instincts and closed his eyes tighter. When the sensation of being watched wouldn’t go away, he opened his eyes just in time to see a face leaning in toward him.
In one motion, Teddy rolled off the leather couch he’d been curled up on and shot his right elbow out toward the face in front of him. When he hit the ground, he was fully awake and expected that to be the end of it. But the person was still there. It was an Asian woman with hard, beautiful features and a lithe frame. She took a step toward him and stretched out her hand. He swatted at her hand as he stood up, but instead of pulling away, she engaged with his hand and tugged his arm.
As Teddy fell toward the woman, he spun around so his back was facing her and dropped into a less than graceful version of the splits. He snapped his right leg back at the woman and swept her legs out from underneath her. Again, he expected that to be the end of it. If this woman was a thief looking for a quick score from a sleeping tourist, Teddy had made it very clear he was not an easy target. Since it was the middle of the night, there were only a few other people around, and all were absorbed in their own business. Maybe she would go away and pick a new victim.
Or maybe she wasn’t trying to rob him. Maybe she was trying to kill him.
As far as Teddy knew, the short list of people looking to kill Billy Barnett had been taken care of back in Los Angeles. Was she there for Teddy? The list of people wanting to kill Teddy was more robust, but he wasn’t traveling under that name and he’d taken great care to keep Teddy in the shadows as much as possible.
He never carried a gun when he was traveling on Centurion Studios business, and that had rarely been a problem. Now he was looking around the minimal furnishings of the lounge area to see if there was anything he could use as a weapon, but his thought process kept being interrupted by the woman repeatedly coming at him.
Teddy rolled around the floor away from her approaches, quickly processing his surroundings. Before he’d settled on a course of action, he saw security approaching and, for once, he was happy to see armed guards in uniform. He stopped rolling and lay flat on his back, waiting for the guards to take the woman away. But they came for him, too. He saw the Tasers just before he felt them, and then he was finally asleep.
“I wasn’t attacking him, I was trying to wake him,” Teddy heard a woman say in clear English.
He opened his eyes and saw he was in a brightly lit small office that looked like a bathroom with all the fixtures removed. An enormous man in a pristine white security uniform with thick black hair and a thin, drooping moustache sat behind a desk with a gold nameplate that read sergeant lam. The woman who had been attacking him was standing in front of Sergeant Lam, waving her arms dramatically.
“Your hand-to-hand combat is as good as mine,” Teddy said, without thinking.
“You’re a movie producer and I’m a secretary,” the woman said, spinning toward Teddy, giving him a meaningful look. “I wouldn’t say either of us should be good at hand-to-hand combat.”
This woman clearly knew more about Teddy than he was comfortable with.
Sergeant Lam sighed and gripped the sides of his desk tightly. Teddy watched the man’s knuckles drain of color. When Sergeant Lam finally spoke, his words were precise.
“Fighting in the lounges is forbidden,” Lam said.
Teddy cringed at the word forbidden. It sounded so dramatic and ridiculous. He just wanted to get back to L.A. and to the two lives he led that nowadays rarely involved hand-to-hand combat that wasn’t staged.
“I’m sorry, sir. I haven’t been sleeping well and my emotions got the better of me,” Teddy said.
Sergeant Lam groaned but didn’t say anything.
“I’m a movie producer,” Teddy continued, “and I’ve been working on an action movie that has a lot of—”
“I don’t care. Leave now. No more fighting.”
Teddy didn’t need to be told twice to leave and was out of the office and almost back to the lounge before he heard the woman yelling his name.
“Leave me alone,” Teddy said.
“Peter Barrington sent me. He needs your help.”
2
Millie Martindale boarded a plane in Washington, D.C., Thursday afternoon and was finally seeing the end of the trip more than twenty-four hours later as her CIA-chartered private plane landed in Macau. She sat at the back of the small plane. The rest of the seats were full of older white men representing both branches of Congress as well as the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Justice. She took the final sip of her bottled water, poured the rest of her trail mix into her mouth, then followed the others off the plane.
They moved quickly to another area of the Macau Business Aviation Center where they watched a private jet larger than their own land. A man, who looked almost exactly like the other men in her group, stepped off and joined them in the waiting area. Arrow Donaldson was the head of a giant telecom conglomerate, as well as the owner of a professional basketball team in Los Angeles and a casino conglomerate in China.
The testimony was scheduled to be given at the U.S. Consulate General Hong Kong & Macau building, forty-five minutes away in Hong Kong, but their base of operations was in Macau due to unrest in Hong Kong. Millie also believed a big part of it was Arrow Donaldson wanting to show off the power and prestige he wielded in Macau. Arrow shook hands and patted backs with the government delegation, ignoring Millie.
Millie stuck out her hand and smiled pleasantly.
“I’m Millie Martindale. I work with Lance Cabot. He sent me to meet you.”
“Where’s Lance?” Arrow asked, not taking the hand Millie was offering.
Millie dropped her hand but kept her smile pasted in place, her eyes on Arrow.
“We’ve met before. I’m sure you don’t remember, but I was the lead on the initiative at your casinos with the Chinese government officials,” she said.
Arrow quickly moved in close to Millie, glaring at her.
“Shhhh. You never know who’s listening around here.”
“I know exactly who’s listening. That’s the point. I’m with the CIA.”
“I only ever talked to Lance about what we were doing at the casino. He never mentioned you.”
“Lance is the face of the operation, of course. He’s the director of the CIA. I’m the one who handles the details behind the scenes. Millie Martindale.”
Millie had been working with Lance Cabot on a task force in one of Arrow’s Chinese casinos to identify Chinese government workers with gambling problems and recruit them as U.S. spies. But Lance had reassigned her to this detail when Arrow approached Lance about bringing Li Feng to the U.S. to give testimony that could impact a new trade deal in the works between China and the U.S.
Li Feng was the chief financial officer and daughter of the founder of QuiTel, China’s largest telecom company. QuiTel was suspected of using the cell phone equipment they sold in the U.S. to spy on U.S. citizens and was supposed to have been blacklisted from doing business in the country. But the suspicions were just that — suspicions, however well-founded. And without proof of wrongdoing, the company had been granted an exemption to that ban for several years. The exemption was due to expire at the end of the week, but China wanted the exemption for QuiTel to be made permanent as part of the new deal. If the CFO were to testify that the spying was real, it would squash the exemption for good.