He saw Robert open the door of the Mercedes, then sit down, just as Adam pulled Robert’s Mitsubishi into its parking space facing him across the lane.
The CIA officer put the minivan in park as Robert looked up and noticed him. Adam smiled and waved sheepishly, an apologetic grimace for not having the minivan back until now.
Robert smiled.
And then Robert Kam disappeared in a flash of light.
The Mercedes exploded right in front of Adam Yao’s eyes, fire and shrapnel and a shock wave visible as a wall of dust rocked the parking garage, the new windows of the Mitsubishi shattered, and Adam’s head was slammed back against the headrest with the violent blast.
A hundred car alarms of luxury vehicles began whining and screaming and chirping, and pieces of car and concrete from the ceiling of the lot rained down on the minivan, cracking the windshield further and tearing holes in the hood and roof. Adam felt the trickle of blood on his face where auto glass cut into him, and the choking smoke of the explosion in the enclosed parking lot threatened to suffocate him.
Somehow he forced his way out of the damaged Mitsubishi and stumbled toward his Mercedes.
“Robert!” he screamed, and he tripped over an I-beam that had fallen from the ceiling. On his hands and knees he pushed and kicked through the twisted metal of other cars, his head pounding from the concussion he just received and his face dripping blood freely now. “Robert!”
He climbed on the hood of the Mercedes, looked into the burning interior, and he saw the charred remains of Robert Kam in the driver’s seat.
Adam Yao turned away with his hands on his head.
He’d seen Robert with his wife and his three young boys in the elevator or climbing into or out of their minivan a hundred times in the past year. The image of the kids in their soccer uniforms laughing and playing with their father rolled over and over in Yao’s mind as he stumbled and fell away from the burning wreckage of his car, back over the broken concrete and shattered Audis, BMWs, Land Rovers, and other twisted wrecks of hot metal that had been, seconds before, rows of luxury automobiles.
“Robert.” Adam said it this time, he did not shout it. He fell to the ground dazed and bloodied, but he fought his way back to his feet, then wandered through the dust and smoke for a minute, his ringing ears assaulted by the car alarms. Finally he found a clear lane to the exit through the smoke and dust, and he walked to it.
Men and women from the street ran up to him on the drive and tried to help him, but he pushed them away, pointing toward the scene of the blast, and they ran on to look for more survivors.
Adam was on the street a moment later. It felt cool here this morning high on the hill, above the congested streets of Central and the air thick with humidity down by Victoria Harbour. He walked away from his building, down a steep decline; he wiped blood from his face as emergency vehicles raced past him, up the winding roads toward the black smoke now two blocks behind him.
He had no destination, he just walked.
His thoughts were on Robert, his friend, a man just about Adam’s own age who had sat down in Adam’s own car and taken the full brunt of the bomb that had clearly been meant not for Robert Kam but for Adam Yao.
When he was five blocks from home, the ringing in his ears lessened and the pounding from the concussion abated just enough for him to start to put salient thoughts together about his own situation.
Who? Who did this?
The Triads? How the fuck would the Triads know who he was, where he lived? What car he drove? The only people who knew his identity and who knew he was CIA, other than CIA, were the Hendley Associates men and whoever was managing to compromise cable traffic out of Hong Kong and China.
No way in hell the Triads were getting intel directly from the CIA. The Triads ran hookers and pirated DVDs, they did not assassinate CIA officers and compromise tier-one intelligence agencies.
If it wasn’t the Triads, then it had to be the PRC. Somehow, for some reason, the PRC wanted him dead.
Had FastByte been here in China working with the Triads for the PRC?
None of that tracked with anything Adam understood about the way these organizations worked.
As confused as Adam was about what had just happened and what he’d stumbled onto, there was one matter on which the bruised and bloodied CIA operator was crystal fucking clear.
He wasn’t calling in to CIA; he wasn’t saying one damn thing to anybody about anything. Adam was a one-man band, and he was getting the fuck out of here on his own.
He continued staggering down the hill, toward the harbor, wiping blood out of his eyes as he walked on.
FORTY-FOUR
Brandon “Trash” White checked the seal of his oxygen mask over his mouth, saluted the catapult officer on the deck to his right, then placed his gloved left hand on the throttle of his F/A-18 Hornet. With some reluctance he wrapped his right hand around the “towel rack,” a metal bar handgrip high on the canopy in front of his head. He was just seconds from being airborne, and it was his natural inclination to keep his hand on the controls of his aircraft, but carrier rules were different. The catapult shot would shove Trash’s body back hard against his seat, and if his hand was holding on to his stick, there was a high probability his hand would fly back with the high g-forces, pulling the stick along with it and pitching the airplane up and out of control on takeoff.
So Trash held on to the towel rack and waited to be shot off the boat like a marble from a slingshot.
To his immediate right, the F/A-18 of Major Scott “Cheese” Stilton, call sign “Magic Two-One,” sprang forward toward the bow ahead of the steaming catapult track and flame-red engines. He was flying an instant later, banking to the right and climbing into a beautiful blue sky.
And then Trash was moving. Really moving. He went from zero to one hundred sixty-five miles an hour in two seconds along a three-hundred-foot-long cat-track toward the end of the boat. His helmet pressed into the headrest and his raised right arm pulled back to him, but he held on, waited to feel the thump of his nose wheel popping up at the end of the deck.
The thump came and he was over water, hurled screaming from the deck with no control over his aircraft. He quickly reached down for the stick, pulled his nose up slightly, and banked gently to the left for a clearing turn.
“Trash is airborne. Hoorah,” he said coolly into his interflight-comm radio, letting Cheese know he was in the air and flying, and he climbed into the sky on his way to the strait one hundred miles to the northwest.
The F/A-18s of the Ronald Reagan had been patrolling the Taiwan Strait for four days now, and Trash and Cheese had flown two sorties each of those days. Fortunately for Trash’s blood pressure, all his flights so far had been during daylight hours, but he doubted his luck would hold in that regard.
His blood pressure had spiked a few times from close encounters with PLA pilots. Trash and Cheese had been flying combat air patrols on the Taiwanese side of the strait, manning a sector just offshore of Taipei, at the northern part of the island. Republic of China F-16s flew most of the sorties over the rest of the strait, and they, just like the aircraft from the Reagan, were careful not to pass over the centerline of the strait into Chinese territory.
But the Chinese were not playing by the same rules. Some sixteen times in the past four days flights of PLAAF Su-27, J-5, and J-10 jets took off from their air base in Fuzhou, directly across the hundred-mile-wide strait from Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, and then raced directly toward the centerline. A dozen times so far the Chinese fighters actually locked on to American or Taiwanese aircraft with their radars. These “spikes” were considered aggressive, but even more aggressive were the three instances where Chinese Su-27 and J-5 fighters actually flew over the centerline before returning to the north.