Eric van Lustbader - China Maroc 01, page 3
As the automatic-seal door closed behind him, the room’s internal light devolved upon him, outlining his features. He had an abnormally large head with a wide, high forehead above which thick, curling hair sprouted, brushed carefully back. He had enormous eyes the color of cobalt that could, at times, appear just as hard. His heavily bridged, hawklike nose would otherwise have dominated that face. The deeply scored lines in his cheeks and brow, like notches in a revolver’s grip, were worn with pride rather than the fear of passing time.
Perhaps to compensate for his lack of height, he moved in a long, almost loping stride. Without a word he sat down, surveying them all. Then he turned his adamantine gaze on Wunderman.
“Your man Maroc took a crack Quarry unit off their preplanned assignment outside of Hong Kong and disappeared with them into the mist. He endangered a waiting Quarry network up near the border, alerting the Communist Chinese and destroying all chance of ever running that particular mission.”
“Nichiren,” Wunderman said, his knuckled fists hard against the wood tabletop. “He got a lead on Nichiren. The first iota of positive information we’ve come up with in sixteen months. He acted on that information. There was no time to notify you, to put it through proper channels.”
“For us to be implicated in the death of an inspector of police, for Chris-sakes, is unthinkable!” Beridien made no effort to calm himself. “Tell me one thing. Did he clear it with you? I mean, Wunderman, you’re his goddamned superior, aren’t you? You run the bastard, just like you run all our agents. That is in the job description of the head of wet section, if memory serves. Or is Jake Maroc running you, as has been my suspicion ever since the Sumchun River incident?”
Wunderman’s eyes flickered involuntarily toward Donovan, and Beridien, picking it up, said, “He’s not going to help you this time, Henry. Your personal loyalties have gotten in the way of the orderly running of this organization once too often for my taste. I ought to—”
“If we have serious business to discuss, we should get to it now,” Donovan said, with enough intensity that Beridien gave a quick, birdlike flick of his head.
“The Quarry comes first in all things,” Wunderman said. Angry at feeling so defensive, he was obliged to state the obvious. “It always has, ever since you created us.”
Beridien took a deep breath and his voice softened. “No one is accusing you of disloyalty, Henry. Good God, you are my mailed fist against the chaos out there in the world. But you are, like the rest of us, only human. We all have frailties, we all blunder every so often, or lose our way. In this gigantic labyrinth in which we’ve chosen to make our home, it’s quite understandable. I was only pointing that out.”
Dismissing the subject, he turned his head in the same quick, jerky fashion that had helped earn him the long-time sobriquet “the Owl,” and said to Donovan, “Any glimmer of what Maroc found on Nichiren, and how?”
Donovan shook his handsome head. “Not a thing. I’ve been personally monitoring the Soviets’ new polar cipher route over the past seven months.” He glanced at a page midway through his sheaf of printouts. “Nothing came over our normal international routes, of that I’m certain. Whatever Maroc filched, he did it solely on his own.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Anything we’d got would’ve been passed immediately on to you. Nichiren has been Code Red around here for more than three years.”
Beridien inclined his enormous head. The rose-colored overheads threw his eyes into deep shadow, making him seem even more birdlike. “It’s clear then that Maroc received some volatile information on Nichiren. He did so outside this agency’s aegis, without”—here his head swung in Wunderman’s direction again—“this agency’s knowledge, support, or sanction.”
“He had a good shot, it appears,” Donovan said, “at terminating Nichiren, which has been this department’s disposition for him ever since he surfaced a little more than five years ago as the number-one independent assassin-for-hire.”
“We’ll get to the consequences of Maroc’s failure in a moment,” Beridien said. “At this juncture, however, the operative’s success or failure is irrelevant. I’m afraid, Henry, that Maroc’s effectiveness in this agency has been permanently compromised.”
“Sir—”
Beridien raised a pale hand. “Henry, please. We’re all professionals here. This is what I was speaking of before. Maroc was under discipline. We have nothing here—nothing at all—unless we maintain discipline. The Quarry was formed fifteen years ago, with the full consent of the then President of the United States, to fight what we perceived as a growing international chaos, fomented in part by foreign governments, all of which were and still are hostile to ours. I’m not, I know, telling you anything you don’t already know since you signed on with me, from the beginning. But perhaps you don’t know that each President, upon his inauguration, has a period of ninety days in which to reevaluate the Quarry in order to decide on its disposition. Not one, I’m gratified to say, has ever contemplated dismantling us.
“All of that’s for a very good reason. We’re the best and we’re rigidly controlled. So ironclad is our discipline that what happened in the CIA more than once could never occur here. We have never had to clean house and we never will.
“This crash meeting at State was difficult for the President to field. Unlike the CIA, which now belongs to the country, we are the President’s stepchild. Therefore, our blunders reflect directly on him. He takes any mistakes quite personally. Let me say that right now the Quarry is not very high up on his list of favorite government organizations.” Those eyes bored into Wunderman’s skull. “As for State, they were, as usual, in a panic over a series of particularly heated exchanges with the Tokyo chief of police, Ya-suhiro Tanaba. It seems his man, Higira, was an innocent-bystander fatality in Maroc’s abortive raid, as was the businessman Kisan.
“I was not happy to be the cause of the President’s difficulties today. His cause célèbre has been these reciprocal import-export agreements with Japan.
“In any case, Maroc broke discipline, and discipline is what makes us strong. It is also, Henry, what allows us to survive through changing administrations. The moment Jake Maroc set foot on Japanese soil, he cut himself off from us. He’s totally on his own now. That’s final.”
Wunderman said nothing, but his eyes dropped to his fingers, interlaced before him on the table. Why, he asked himself, did he feel like a schoolboy called out in front of the class by the principal? He felt a momentary lick of rage at Beridien’s cruel and, so it seemed to him, unfeeling summary judgment. Where was consideration for all that Jake had done for the Quarry over the years? Wunderman knew that he should speak up now, that the heroic thing to do would be to make an impassioned speech in Jake’s defense on just that subject. But he remained silent. Why? Was it because he felt instinctively that Donovan was right? That somehow, in some inexplicable fashion, the Sumchun River incident had marked Jake forever? That the trauma he had suffered there had impaired his effectiveness as an agent?
The fact was that Jake had broken discipline. Wunderman had had no idea what Jake had planned until the aftermath of the failed raid had been relayed into Quarry HQ. Damn him! he thought now. If only he’d let me know, I could have provided some backup. I’d be in some kind of tenable position to help him now.
What really had happened at the Sumchun River? Wunderman asked himself. Was it the trauma of seeing four of his men die and a fifth become a paraplegic that had turned Jake hard and inward-directed? Wunderman recalled the debriefing. It had been an effort to get Jake to talk in full sentences, let alone to get the entire story of what had happened. And in the end, Wunderman thought now, I suspect he gave me only pieces of the story.
“Now to Nichiren,” Beridien said, and Wunderman knew that his moment to defend Jake had passed. “Henry, do we have any leads as to what happened to him after the explosion?”
“No.” Even as he spoke, he wondered what would happen to Jake without the Quarry. Wunderman knew that he himself would be like a rudderless boat without this organization. Wouldn’t it be the same for Jake? “When the O.D. at Ciphers relayed the signal, I ordered an emergency team in from Hong Kong, which is our nearest station. One of the dantai had managed to drag Maroc out of there before dying. They took Maroc back with them to Kowloon. There was nothing else to do.”
“Five men.” Beridien shook his head. “How galling to have to add them to this long list. My God, Nichiren’s a one-man abattoir!”
“I’ve got to hand it to him, though,” Stallings said. “Maroc sure had the right idea about how to take out Nichiren.”
“What do you mean?” Beridien asked.
“Huo yan. The entire maneuver was like a potent wei qi move. Just like Jake.”
“Wei qi?” Beridien said. “What’s wei qi?”
“A Chinese game of military strategy.” Stallings was pleased to at last be in his element. “The Japanese call it go.”
Beridien snorted. “A game? Translated into real life? Oh, come on.”
Stallings ignored his tone. “Unlike Western games, wei qi has a strong philosophical side. A player’s wei qi strategy is a translation of his view of life.”
“And what is Jake Maroc’s view of life, Stallings?” Beridien wanted to know. “According to this game?”
“The raid was like huo yan, a move known as ‘the movable eye.’ An ‘eye’ is created when a player’s pieces surround an intersection on the board. By leaving a space in the center, he creates a defensive formation which he then repeats across the board. No enemy piece can be placed within the ‘eye.* Surrounded, it will die.
“But”—Stallings raised a long forefinger—“an ‘eye’ can also be used for offensive purposes. When it is, it is called huo yan. That was the essence of Jake’s raid.”
“Yet it failed,” Beridien pointed out.
Stallings nodded. “Obviously Jake was outplayed.” He shrugged again. “Pity.”
Wunderman’s coarse-featured face was set in a frown. “We’ve got a somewhat more immediate problem,” he said. When he was certain he had their attention, he turned his gaze on Beridien and said, “Jake Maroc’s wife, Mariana, is missing.”
From out of the hollow silence, Beridien’s baritone rose. “What the fuck are you telling us? Missing? Goddammit, what do you mean, she’s missing?”
“I think you’d better tell us all of it, Henry,” Donovan said in his calm, unhurried voice.
Wunderman squared his shoulders and did as he was bade. “Mariana Maroc was at home in Hong Kong on the night of the chaos raid. Using Donovan’s brainchild, the Random Intervention Surveillance Sweep, which we now keep on every active field operative’s home base, the Janitors picked up a phone call to Maroc’s apartment at 5:57, local time.”
“Local or long distance?” Beridien wanted to know.
“Long distance. As you know, the RISS is meant as a trace, not as a recording device. Therefore we can pinpoint the origin of the call, but not who made it or what was said by either party.”
“Go on,” Beridien said.
“The call emanated from Japan. Tokyo, to be more specific.”
“Maroc?” Beridien meant did Jake make the call.
“It’s the most logical explanation, of course,” Wunderman said. “But it doesn’t hold. According to the ETA we’ve been able to piece together on the dantai, Jake would’ve been en route at 5:57. In the air, he would not have been able to reach her or anyone else by phone. All we know is that within fifteen minutes of that call, Mariana Maroc was gone.”
“Gone where?” Donovan asked.
“We’ve been able to trace her as far as Tokyo.”
“She or Maroc have any known friends there?” Beridien asked.
“Jake did but strictly on the business side,” Wunderman answered. “As far as we know, Mariana knew no one there.”
“How far is that?” Beridien barked.
“Far enough.”
It was very quiet in the windowless room. Beridien’s dark eyes bored into Wunderman’s from across the table. “Do you have more specifics on the call’s origin, Henry?”
“The Janitors are working on that now. As Rodger knows, there are still a couple of bugs in the system. They tell me, however, that we have a shot at narrowing it down to at least a district and possibly even the actual number.”
There was a peculiar scent in the room, as if somewhere out of their sight a fire had been lit.
“Mrs. Maroc’s disappearance may mean nothing,” Donovan said. “I understand they were having some, er, difficulties lately.”
“Missing is missing,” Stallings said, “That kind of thing’s always serious.”
“The more so under these circumstances,” Beridien said shrewdly.
“Meaning what?” Wunderman said.
“Meaning that I don’t trust coincidences. Maybe the two—Maroc’s chaos raid and his wife’s disappearance—are connected.”
“I don’t see that,” Wunderman said, and knew it was a mistake the minute the words were out of his mouth.
Beridien’s primeval head swung around. “Oh? This—what did you call it, Gerry?—‘movable eye’ of Maroc’s, it should have worked. It didn’t. Maybe it’s because Maroc isn’t the operative he once was. Maybe Sumchun River has undermined his effectiveness. Or maybe, just maybe, Nichiren had some kind of inside information about the raid. If so, there could be only one source. No one within the Quarry knew about it. Only Maroc and his dantai. His flaming tigers.”
“Are you suggesting that Mariana Maroc could have told Nichiren?” Wunderman was incredulous.
Antony Beridien’s eyes seemed to pierce through him, pinning him to the wall. It was deliberate. Beridien did not like Wunderman possessing salient facts that he himself did not. “I am suggesting nothing, Henry, merely positing a train of thought. Because of Maroc’s dangerously precipitous actions, we are now under pressure. The kind of pressure that can be, if it is not eliminated immediately, the most debilitating kind for us.
“Perhaps random chance has forced us into this position. If so, we will accept it and go on from there. But the possibility exists that what we are facing here is an iceberg: an inimical design of foreign manufacture. That would put us under attack. If that is the case, I put you all on notice that I mean to get to the bottom of this iceberg in the most expeditious manner. And, gentlemen, God help the man who gets in my way.”
“All gods defecate on this weather,” David Oh said in Cantonese. Outside, rain filled the Hong Kong streets to overflowing. His mood turned blacker; he slammed the heel of his hand against the windowsill, praying to Buddha that Jake wasn’t going to do something stupid, like not wake up. All the tests had been made and analyzed. Physically, Jake had come away from the debacle at O-henro House with nothing more than multiple abrasions and contusions. The intervention of Mandy Choi’s body between him and the blast had assured that.
Except there was concussion to think about. EEG readings found Jake’s brain patterns undisturbed. Yet he had not regained consciousness. A matter of time, the doctors had said, shaking their heads. Gray rain as dark as David Oh’s mood streaked the windowpanes, turning dust to grime.
On the fourth floor, he had stood for a time with his back against the closed door, as if wary of coming into the room itself. Shadows built a bizarre superstructure out of thin air. He heard the sound of breathing and was not certain whether it was his or Jake’s.
He did not want to move, did not want to approach any closer, as if by this denial he could also deny what he knew he must eventually see.
David Oh wondered what Jake’s breaking discipline would mean for Hong Kong Station. Nothing good, he was certain. He found himself afraid of that. Before Jake Maroc had joined the Quarry, Hong Kong Station had been nothing but a bunch of ill-trained errand boys scurrying about the Colony like so many ants. Without his force, it could so easily revert. Fornicate unnaturally those in Washington who control our future without taking any risks themselves, he thought. I’m sure they’re bleeding inside for Jake, Mandy Choi, and the others.
At the bedside, he stared down. There was nothing much there to which he could relate. If this is what it leads to, why do any of us do this? he asked himself. But he already knew the answer. The risk was secondary to the objectives they were dedicated to accomplishing. Dedication, David Oh knew well, had many origins, but it was the one element that bound all of them in the Quarry together.
“Jake.” The whisper was out before he knew it. It hung in the air, mingling with all the other shadows spun in the room, hovering peaked and angular.
There was movement from the shadows and David started. He peered into the gloom. He heard only the steady drumming of the rain. Then he recognized the figure.
“Formidable Sung,” he said sharply. “What are you doing here?”
“Jake Maroc is a friend,” the other man said, moving silently into the light. “I am showing my concern as I would toward any friend.”
David Oh snorted derisively. “Oh, I get it. Your concern about whether you will get this month’s payment, more likely.”
The two men had a natural antipathy. David Oh was Shanghainese; Sung was Cantonese. The two did not mix well.
Formidable Sung’s heavy moon face was as blank as a garden gate. “The protection we provide for you and all the members of the Quarry here at your residences demands remuneration. That cannot be so difficult to understand.”
“Not at all,” David said. “But let us not confuse business with friendship. Your money will be disbursed in the same manner as always.”
“That is not why I came. If I had required such information, I would have contacted you at your office. As I said, it was Jake Maroc’s condition that brought me.”
David Oh had nothing more to say, so he turned away. Why did the Cantonese have to be here now at this moment? It had been Jake’s idea to put his contacts to good use when he had been assigned here. Making his deal with Formidable Sung had been one of them, and it had proved an excellent one. David’s relatives were rivals of Formidable Sung. David hated him for that. Or perhaps it was only the primitive railing of Shanghainese against Cantonese.
