He stopped, for the first time noticing how Hung Mien-lo stood there.
"What is it, Chancellor Hung?"
Hung Mien-lo kept his head lowered. "It is your brother, Excellency. He is dead."
"Dead? How?"
"He . . . killed himself. This afternoon. An hour before you returned."
Wang Sau-leyan set the glass down on the table and sat, his head resting almost indolently against the back of the tall chair.
"How very convenient of him."
Hung Mien-lo glanced up, then quickly looked down again. "Not only that, but Li Shai Tung's armory at Helmstadt was attacked this afternoon. By the Ping Tiao. They took a large amount of weaponry."
Wang Sau-leyan studied the Chancellor's folded body, his eyes narrowed. "Good. Then I want a meeting with them."
The Chancellor looked up sharply. "With the Ping Tiao? But that's impossible, Chieh Hsia . . ."
Wang Sau-leyan stared at him coldly. "Impossible?"
Hung's voice when it came again was smaller, more subdued than before. "It will be ... difficult. But I shall try, Chieh Hsia."
Wang Sau-leyan leaned forward, lifting his glass again. "Make sure you do, Hung Mien-lo, for there are others just as hungry for power as you. Not as talented, perhaps, but then, what's talent when a man is dead?"
Hung Mien-lo looked up, his eyes meeting the new T'ang's momentarily, seeing the hard, cold gleam of satisfaction there. Then he bowed low and backed away.
KAO CHEN STOOD in the corridor outside the temporary mortuary, his forehead pressed to the wall, his left hand supporting him. He had not thought he could be affected any longer, had thought himself inured to the worst Man could do to his fellow creatures; yet he had found the sight of the mutilated corpses deeply upsetting. The younger ones especially.
"The bastards . . ." he said softly. There had been no need. They could have tied them up and left them. Surely they'd got what they wanted? But to kill all their prisoners. He shuddered. It was like that other business with the hostages— Captain Sanders' young family. There had been no need to kill them, either.
He felt a second wave of nausea sweep up from the darkness inside him and clenched his teeth against the pain and anger he felt.
"Are you all right, sir?"
His sergeant, a Hung Mao ten years Chen's senior, stood a few paces distant, his head lowered slightly, concerned but also embarrassed by his officer's behavior. He had been assigned to Kao Chen only ten days before and this was the first time they had been out on operations together.
"Have you seen them?"
The sergeant frowned. "Sir?"
"The dead. Cadets, most of them. Barely out of their teens. I kept thinking of my son."
The man nodded. "The Ping Tiao are shit, sir. Scum."
"Yes . . ." Chen took a breath, then straightened up. "Well. . . let's move on. I want to look at their dead before I report back."
"Sir."
Chen let his sergeant lead on, but he had seen the doubt in the man's eyes. All of this looking at the dead was quite alien to him—no doubt his previous officers hadn't bothered with such things—but Chen knew the value of looking for oneself. It was why Tolonen had recruited Karr and himself, because they took such pains. They noticed what others overlooked. Karr particularly. And he had learned from Karr. Had been taught to see the small betraying detail, the one tiny clue that changed the whole picture of events. "Here it is, sir."
The sergeant came to attention outside the door, his head bowed. Chen went inside. Here things were different, more orderly, the bodies laid out in four neat rows on trestle tables. And unlike the other place, here the bodies were whole. These men had died in action; they had not been tied up and butchered.
He went down the first of the rows, pausing here and there to pull back the covering sheets and look at a face, a hand, frowning to himself now, his sense of "wrongness" growing with every moment. Finally, at the head of the row, he stopped beside one of the corpses, staring down at it. There was something odd— something he couldn't quite place—about the dead man.
He shook his head. No, he was imagining it. But then, as he made to move on, he realized what it was. The hair. He went closer and lifted the head between his hands, studying it. Yes, there was no doubt about it, the dead man's hair was cut like a soldier's. Quickly he went down the row, checking the other corpses. Most of them had normal short hair, styles typical of the lower levels; but there were five with the same military-style cut, the hair trimmed back almost brutally behind the ear and at the line of the nape. "Sergeant!"
The man appeared at the doorway at once. "Bring me a comset. A unit with a visual connection."
"Sir!"
While he waited he went down the line again, studying the men he had picked out. Now that he looked he saw other differences. Their nails were manicured, their hands smooth, uncallused. They were all Hung Moo, of course, but of a certain kind. They all had those gray-blue eyes and chiseled features that were so typical of the men recruited by Security. Yes, the more he looked at them, the more he could imagine them in uniform. But was he right? And, if so, what did it mean? Had the Ping Tiao begun recruiting such types, or was it something more ominous than that?
The sergeant returned, handing him the comset, then stood there, watching, as Chen drew back the eyelid of the corpse with his thumb and held the machine's lens over the eye, relaying an ID query through to Central Records.
He had his answer almost immediately. There were six "likelies" that approximated to the retinal print, but only one of the full-body descriptions fitted the dead man. It was as Chen had thought: he was ex-Security.
Chen went down the line, making queries on the others he had picked out. The story was the same: all five had served in the Security forces at some point. And not one of them had been seen for several years. Which meant that either they had been down in the Net or they had been outside. But what did it signify? Chen pressed to store the individual file numbers, then put the comset down and leaned against one of the trestles, thinking.
"What is it, sir?"
Chen looked up. "Oh, it's nothing, after all. I thought I recognized the man, but I was mistaken. Anyway, we're done here. Have the men finish up then report to me by four. The General will want a full report before the day's out."
"Sir!"
Alone again, Chen walked slowly down the rows, taking one last look at each of the five men. Like the other dead, they wore the Ping Tiao symbol—a stylized fish—about their necks and were dressed in simple Ping Tiao clothes. But these were no common terrorists.
Which was why he had lied to the sergeant. Because if this was what he thought it was, he could trust no one.
No. He would keep it strictly to himself for the time being, and in the meantime he would find out all he could about the dead men: discover where they were stationed and under whom they had served.
As if he didn't know already. As if he couldn't guess which name would surface when he looked at their files.
NAN HO, Li Yuan's Master of the Inner Chamber, climbed down from the sedan and returning the bow of the Grand Master of the Palace, mounted the ancient stone steps that led up to the entrance of the summer palace.
At the top he paused and turned, looking back across the ruins of the old town of Ch'ing Tao. Beyond it the bay of Chiao Chou was a deep cobalt blue, the gray-green misted shape of Lao Shan rising spectacularly from the sea, climbing three li into the heavens. A thousand li to the east was Korea and beyond it the uninhabitable islands of Japan.
It was a year since he had last visited this place—a year and two days, to be precise—but from where he stood, nothing had changed. For his girls, however, that year had been long and difficult, a year of exile from Tongjiang and the Prince they loved.