Locke pulled his cell phone and thumbed in a number. After a beat, a male voice he didn’t recognize answered, in English: “Yes?”
Locke broke the connection, slid the back off the phone, and pulled the battery, just to be absolutely sure the un-traceable phone didn’t hold any secrets. “That was Leigh’s secure number and somebody else answered it. They have Leigh — that’s how they got Shing.”
“How did they get Leigh?” Wu asked.
Locke shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
Wu said, “We’ll have to move the schedule up.”
“I don’t like that idea,” Locke said. “The fuse is still burning in the Americans’ computers, even if they have Shing, right?”
Wu said, “Shing will crack faster than an egg dropped on a sidewalk. He will tell them what he did, how he did it, and how to stop it. He is more American than Chinese.”
“I thought Shing said it couldn’t be stopped, short of shutting down their entire system.”
“I think we can safely assume that Shing lied. His arrogance would not let him give up that much control. We cannot chance that. We must move soon, or not at all.”
Locke tried again: “Shing knows nothing of our plans.” He glanced at Mayli. But she does. Why?
“She knows,” Wu said, confirming what Locke had just figured out. “But while Shing doesn’t know what I intend, he does know who he works for. If the Americans have him, they will eventually be coming to pay me a visit, one way or another. We must be finished by the time they get around to that.”
Locke nodded. He didn’t like it, but Wu was right. “All right. How soon can your men be ready?”
“They are ready now.”
“Yes, right, of course they are. How soon? Realistically?”
“Three days.”
Locke sighed. “Three days. I’ll go see the managers.”
He looked at Mayli, who wore a Mona Lisa smile. Here was an interesting development. No more fingers in that honey pot, not for him, he knew. Wu had claimed her for his own. Well. No matter. He could have a different woman every day for the rest of his life, given the money he stood to make. Mayli was not that special. Wu could have her, and he’d better watch his back, too.
Thorn looked up to see Marissa smiling at him from the doorway.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” he said. “Come on in.”
She did. “What did you do, Tommy? I’m getting rumblings from something transpiring on the Chinese front.”
“Jay ran down the Chinese hacker. My, uh, new boss thought it would be better if agents of the U.S. government got to him before the local police had a chance to talk to him.”
“Smart man. I thought it was something like that. This last day has seen more spooks than a big-city graveyard zipping around in the Orient. Did they get him?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t heard yet.”
“Maybe I can find out. So, I have a few minutes. Do you have time for another fencing lesson?”
“Always.”
He stood, and his secure line rang. The ID showed that it was Hadden. He held a hand up toward Marissa.
“Thorn here.”
“We have collected our bird, Commander. And he is singing like a canary. I need to see you, Colonel Kent, and your computer wizard whatshisname in my office at your earliest convenience.”
“Yes, sir.”
Thorn set the phone back into its cradle. “I’m afraid we’ll have to postpone that lesson for another time. Hadden wants to see me stat.”
“I understand.”
Jay had expected something a lot more posh than what it turned out to be, but what the office looked like was not as important as why they were here. He, Colonel Kent, and Commander Thorn sat at a conference table watching a recording of an interrogation, and the holoproj was sharp and clear.
A man sat at a table: Shing, he was called. He was dressed well enough, in yellow silk slacks and a blue pastel Izod shirt, and if he had been physically coerced or threatened or drugged, these things did not show. Off camera, somebody asked questions in English and the man, who was young and apparently unworried to the point where he smiled and nodded a lot, answered them without any hesitation that Jay could see.
At the end of the table, Many-Star General Hadden waved at the image and said, “Here’s the part we found most interesting.”
“And the name of the man who paid you to engage in these activities?”
“General Wu, of the People’s Army,” Shing said.
Hadden touched a button and the holoproj froze. He said, “Comrade General Wu’s current assignment is the security of the former Portuguese colony of Macao. He’s an old hard-liner, survived Mao and the Cultural Revolution, and is well placed and well respected by the military and Communist Party bigwigs. A patriot.”
Thorn nodded. “And you don’t suppose he hired Shing there to screw with the U.S. military computers just for the pure fun of it?”
Hadden smiled. “Sowing confusion among the ranks of one’s enemy is not generally a bad thing in itself, but that is usually done as a prelude to something else.”
“But you don’t expect to see the Chinese Army storming the docks in San Francisco anytime soon,” Thorn said.
“That would give the tourists on Pier 39 something more interesting than harbor seals to look at, sure enough, but — no.”
Colonel Kent said, “So the question becomes, why would Comrade General Wu be screwing around with U.S. military computers?”
“Oh, yes, indeed. And here’s something that makes us really curious. CIA operatives in Asia have passed along a little tidbit that may or may not have anything to do with this: Somebody has been poking around in a couple of the former Soviet republics trying to buy tactical nuclear bombs. Which in and of itself is not that big a deal, since Third World operatives have been trying to do that since the evil empire broke up; only this time, the word is that the would-be buyer might have a Chinese connection.”
“Ah.”
Jay frowned. “I don’t understand. Why would the Chinese do that? They already have nukes, don’t they?”
“Good question,” the general said. “And yes, they do.”
“I’m still not connecting the dots,” Jay said, shaking his head.
Kent said, “Suppose you had a neighbor who really irritated you, to the point where you want to throw a brick through his front window. And you’ve got a pile of old red bricks right there in your driveway. But down the street a few houses, there’s another neighbor who has a pile of white bricks in his backyard.”
“Oh,” Jay said, getting it. “You, ah, borrow one of your neighbor’s bricks and throw that. Guy finds a white one in his living room, he doesn’t charge over to your house.”
“Exactly.”
Thorn said, “But the real question here is, and assuming one thing has anything to do with the other, if Wu wants to throw a brick, whose window is he going to toss it through? And when?”
Jay blinked and shook his head.
“We don’t even know if this is the case,” Hadden said, “but we do know that Wu is a big fan of Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Musashi, and both of them are big on misdirection and sneaky business.”
“Wu is up to something unofficial,” Kent said.
Hadden nodded. “Our man Shing here knows only what he was paid to do and it’s all computer gobbledygook. He does not have any idea why Wu wants it done.” He looked at Jay. “I’m sending this recording with you. Shing gets into the technical stuff a little later, and I need you to run it down and fix things — our people will assist as necessary.”