“Who said crime doesn’t pay,” Simbal said as they headed for the bank of burnished-bronze elevator doors. Each was emblazoned with the triangular pattern that was the hotel’s logo. It was woven into the custom carpeting along the lobby floor.

  “Your paisan say whether old Yi was in?” Sirnbal asked.

  “He thought yes.”

  “Any visitors?”

  The Cuban looked at Simbal with some skepticism. “Come on, he’s the concierge not Superman. The Trilliant’s a goddamned big place. A truckload of Marines could come in and he might not know it.”

  “But at least you determined yours was the first bribe he’d taken tonight.”

  Gato de Rosa laughed.

  The sight of Bennett stepping out of one of the elevators cut it short. “Hijo de puta!”

  The lobby was jammed with guests in glittery outfits. Music was blaring from off to the left and the general flow of the people was in that direction. A late floor show at the nightclub. The amount of diamonds on display would have made even Murph the Surf salivate.

  Bennett was making his way against the flow of the crowd. He seemed in no hurry and hadn’t bothered to look behind him. Like most madmen he was very confident. Simbal and the Cuban started after him, shouldering their way through the Nipon and Ungaro dresses, the After Six tuxes. Clouds of Norell and Chanel No. 5 clung to them.

  Bennett disappeared through a side door and they picked up their pace. Through the doors they found themselves in a concrete corridor. The floor was covered with Astroturf. Affixed to one wall was a sign that said: NO SWIM SUITS ALLOWED IN THE LOBBY and Simbal said, “Shit!,” breaking into a sprint. He remembered what the Cuban had said, that Bennett never went anywhere not accessible by boat.

  They went through glass doors that opened at their approach, skirted the lighted swimming pool. It was as large as a ballpark. Past the lip of the vast concrete apron on which over a hundred lounge chairs were neatly arrayed in precise rows, were set a flight of wide stairs. They were dusted with sand and they went down them three at a time.

  In the glow from the pool lights they could see Bennett already at the water’s edge. As Simbal watched, he plunged into the surf and came up with a twist of his head. Hard, powerful strokes took him past the crash line. The Cuban went into the water after him.

  Moments later, Simbal caught sight of the sleek black cigarette bobbing at anchor.

  “Goddamn it!” he said and began to run back toward the hotel.

  The double mahogany doors to the suite were unlocked. Run-Run Yi lay on a sea-green sofa that wrapped around the living room. His flat Cantonese face was white as rice paper. His chest fluttered inconstantly and his eyes were closed.

  Simbal knelt, felt for a pulse. “Elder Uncle,” he said in Cantonese, “you’re going to be fine. Bennett did this to you. Edward Martin Bennett. Why?”

  Run-Run Yi’s eyes opened but Simbal knew that he wasn’t seeing anything except what was in his mind. “Bennett needed me dead,” he said slowly, softly, painfully.

  “Like he needed Alan Thune dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Yi said nothing. His eyes rolled in pain.

  “Why, Elder Uncle? Why did Bennett need you and Alan Thune dead.”

  The Chinese murmured something and Simbal, desperate, said, “What?” very loudly.

  And when he heard it, it did not compute. “Arms?” he said. And then with more urgency, “Elder Uncle, did you say arms?”

  Yi’s eyelids fluttered. “I’m dying,” he said in a guttural voice, thick with his own fluids. “You must inform my brothers.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “All gods bear witness,” Yi whispered. “I curse my murderer to sixteen generations.”

  “Bennett wanted you and Alan Thune dead because of arms?” Simbal said. He was very close to the other man now and could smell the peculiar odor of death stealing over him.

  “Yes.” Yi’s lips were trembling. “Is it cold in here?” “The arms, Elder Uncle.”

  “That is the province of the new generation, it seems. Bennett, Mako, the others.” “What others?”

  Consciousness was coming and going. Yi’s eyes fluttered closed. He seemed to be marshaling his energy. “Arms, antipersonnel weapons— Blackman T-93s—we are told, are what we must now transship. But there is no profit in these arms. We are not selling them.” “What then?” “Stockpiling.” “In Asia?”

  “Asia, South America, Europe, America. All places.” “But why?”

  A pink bubble formed between Yi’s trembling lips. “Thune was against it. I was against it. We should have known better. But it is dangerous. So dangerous for the world.”

  “What kind of danger?” Simbal urged, his face close to the other’s. “The worst kind.” “What do you—”

  “These weapons—will have the power to destroy the world.” The cold sweat was rolling off Yi’s flat face. His skin had taken on an awful pallor. “When Bennett—”

  Simbal waited, breathless. He could hear his pulse hammering in his ears. Mother of God, he thought. What have I fallen into? ” ‘When Bennett,’ ” he repeated.

  “Bennett is the jinn who opens the door.” What did that mean? “Where has he gone?” “To the Shan,” Yi said, and shuddered. “The source.” “Elder Uncle?” Simbal reached out, felt for a pulse that was not there. In a moment, he sat back.

  The diqui into arms shipments? he wondered. Antipersonnel weapons, specifically Blackman T-93 one-man rocket launchers. Why? And how could those small arms cause the destruction of the world? Simbal found himself shivering, He felt as cold as the dead.

  “What was that all about, man?” Gato de Rosa said, coming into the room. He was making puddles on the thick carpet. Simbal did not look at him. “Bennett?” “The cigarette,” the Cuban said. “It was waiting for him.”

  Simbal sighed. “I’m tired,” he said.

  “Hey, don’t bullshit me, dude,” the Cuban insisted. “You were talking to the Chink. I heard you.”

  “He was ranting,” Simbal said. He felt as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  “Bullshit!”

  “Damn-fucking-right!” Simbal flared. He stood up. “You let me handle Bennett.”

  “Fuck that!”

  “You’ve got no choice. It’s out of your hands now.”

  “You think so?”

  Something in his tone sent a warning bell through Simbal. He remembered the feeling he had tried to interpret from the Cuban’s words while they were at the marina.

  Abruptly, he began to walk across the room. When he got to the front door, the Cuban said, “Where you going, dude?”

  “See you around sometime, Martine.”

  Gato de Rosa jumped up. “Hey, hey, you can’t do that. Hey, dude!”

  Simbal turned around. “What are you going to do, shadow me?” He gave a ghostly smile. “You know better than that.”

  There was silence for a time. They stared at each other.

  “Hey, man, this suite’s gonna begin stinking like a tuna boat any minute.”

  “You going to tell me who it was you called from the marina, Martine?”

  “I told you, dude.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Oh, shit.” Gato de Rosa came across the room. “He told me to keep an eye on you. He told me to go where you went. I don’t think he trusts you, dude.”

  “Who’s that?” But he already knew.

  “Max,” the Cuban said. “It was Max.”

  Max Threnody, Simbal thought. First he got to Monica and now the Cuban. But Gato de Rosa was a SNIT and Max was the head of the DEA. Just what the hell is Max up to? Simbal wondered.

  “You tell Max that if he wants me shadowed he can goddamned do it himself. I know where Bennett’s off to and that’s where I’m going.” With each word getting closer to the Cuban.

  “You’re going to have company, then, hombre.”

  “Bullshit,” Simbal said. Moving very fast he went beneath Gato de Rosa’s suit jacket. Pulled out the tiny snub-nosed .22. “A woman’s weapon,” he said, “but you know better than I do the damage it can do this close in.”

  “Hey, dude, hey. You crazy?”

  “Nothing personal, Martine.” Simbal leveled the .22. “Get over to the couch.”

  “Hey, for Christ’s sake, man, lighten up, uh?”

  “Just do as I say,” Simbal said low in his throat.

  He used the belt from Yi’s silk robe to tie the Cuban’s hands behind his back. “I don’t mind letting you walk around,” he said. “The police will be here before you can get out of that. I’ll be long gone by then.”

  “Gone where, dude? Where you off to?” The Cuban’s eyes had turned the color of coffee.

  Simbal took the bullets out of the .22 and threw them at Gato de Rosa’s feet. “Tell Max when he gets here.” Tossed the gun after them. “Tell him I’ve gone to the Shan.”

  Qi lin slept.

  “You see how marvelous the human brain is.” Huaishan Han stared down at the supine form with such hunger in his eyes that Chen Ju was momentarily appalled. “You see how fantastically complex a machine it is.” Huaishan Han’s odd, bowed gait was exaggerated by the bare-bulb lighting, turning him into some truly grotesque figure. “Colonel Hu knew and appreciated that.”

  Chen Ju grunted. “Colonel Hu is dead.”

  Huaishan Han smiled and again Chen Ju felt a little thrill go through him. That smile was the kind used by those more than a bit mad. “Always the pragmatist, my friend, eh?” Han nodded. “But I divine your message.” His hand moved out, stroked Qi lin’s unlined brow. “Yes. She killed Colonel Hu, and she escaped his compound. A heavily fortified military complex, I might add.”

  “It seems to me,” Chen Ju said, “that whatever it was Hu did to her, didn’t take.”

  “Is that so?” Huaishan Han gave off that smile again, as a lambent sun throws off heat. “The war in Cambodia had marked Colonel Hu irrevocably. He was a master at his trade, true enough. But he drank himself into a stupor almost every night. The men had begun to question his commands, his leadership.

  “You know what that meant. His unit was hand-picked to accept orders unthinkingly. That was essential, especially if they were going to march into Kam Sang, disarm the members of the army guarding the installation, imprison everyone within—including members of the intelligence service—and take what we require.”

  Huaishan Han sighed. “In short, my friend, Colonel Hu had become a liability.” He reached out, stroked Qi lin’s brow once again. “My precious lizi, my plum did just as I asked. Do you think it was joss that brought her within sight of General Kuo’s soldiers? No, no. She was programmed for all of this. To kill Hu, to escape and come here.”

  Chen Ju looked doubtful. “But how?”

  “With this.” Huaishan Han produced a bottle of alcohol, a wad of cotton. He took Qi lin’s arm and turned it so that the inside of her elbow was facing him. Using the cotton, he swabbed down an area of her skin. In a moment, he had a syringe in his hand. He uncapped it, squeezed a bit of the clear fluid out its tip. Then he inverted it, plunged it into Qi lin’s vein. “A steady supply of this drug. It was Hu’s own discovery. It works directly on the central cortex, inhibiting ego and superego. In effect, it stimulates the primitive emotions. Hate, fear, desire become matters of life and death. In this unbalanced state, the subject is akin to a piece of clay, ready to be molded by the artisan’s fine hand.” He put the materials back in his pocket.

  “And she knows nothing of this?”

  “There is a consciousness-blocker,” Huaishan Han said. “She is mine from the inside out. Mine forever. By coming here, by escaping, she proved her skills to me. Now she has a most difficult task before her.”

  Huaishan Han looked up at Chen Ju. “Many before her have tried to kill Jake Maroc Shi. All have failed. Joss, eh? But I have found that joss is like the tide of the ocean. It flows, it ebbs. You see?”

  I want to control the world, Chen Ju thought, and this old, broken man is concerned with nothing more than warping a young girl’s mind. It is shameful. He seeks only personal revenge, a petty and foolish undertaking at best. The fall down the well did more than disfigure his body, it scarred his mind as well. Once he would have understood the grand design that I am weaving; once he would have joined me.

  Chen Ju shook his head. Perhaps his many years in the Shan had changed him subtly. There wealth meant nothing—warlords strolled their compounds with handfuls of rubies, sapphires, Imperial jade in their pockets. They guided the distribution of the tears of the poppy and thereby reaped enormous profits. But their power was over people. Material wealth in the Shan was secondary. The reason that the Americans and the Russians had been locked, out of the Shan was that they had no mastery over the people. Their CIA and KGB, respectively, had invaded the Shan using basically the same methodology: handing out money to everyone they met.

  The Shan laughed at the Westerners; their warlords sneered at them and turned them away. Power was distribution. Control of the farmers who grew their fields of poppies; control of the armies who guarded the factories where the raw opium was refined, and guided the mule trains down the steep sides of the Shan to where greedy wholesalers waited.

  And if Chen Ju had learned anything during his long exile from Hong Kong it was this: that true power resided in man’s mastery over his fellow man. Those who wielded only wealth possessed an illusion.

  Huaishan Han, so long deprived of true power, had filled his villa with the accumulated archaeological wealth of the centuries. But what meaning did it have? When he died, that wealth would be reapportioned, broken up, dispersed like so much sand. What would be left? Nothing. Nothing at all to mark his passing.

  But Chen Ju knew that what he himself had embarked upon would surely change the world for all time. Like the pharaoh Cheops he was building an eternal monument to mark his brief time upon the earth.

  Greed I leave to lesser spirits, he told himself. And he recognized greed in Han’s face as he gazed down upon the slumbering countenance of the young girl who was so important to him. He longs for what he can never have, Chen Ju thought, and that is an apt definition of greed; he longs for a child. It is from this loss that his burning hatred of Shi Zilin stems. And perhaps that is the root of his obsession with this poor girl; why he openly adores her so, why he cannot understand how he tortures her.

  Looking at Huaishan Han, Chen Ju was struck by the damage that time can do to mortal mind and body. All the more reason, he told himself, to get on with what I have to do. The world is about to enter a new age.

  Daniella Vorkuta received her intelligence reports from Mitre—Sir John Bluestone’s KGB code name—on Thursday mornings. They came coded, by special courier, and it was Daniella’s habit to set aside an hour just before lunch to pore through the progress her most active asset was making toward burrowing inside Kam Sang.

  However, this particular Thursday was a nightmare. She was woken out of sleep by the duty officer. Army intelligence required liaison with her people in the field in Afghanistan. That crisis was handled as she was dressing. At the office, she found wheels had come off no less than four separate operations, two of which were in their final phases and therefore needed her undivided attention as she guided the respective case officers through harrowing twists and turns in order to keep their field agents alive and ticking.

  Lunch brought no respite since the frantic morning had required the administrative meetings be held in abeyance until the missions were past their crisis phases. A dozen department heads were kept waiting for her appearance so an entire round of morning meetings had to be crammed into the lunch hour.

  And the afternoon was even worse. News was brought to her that despite her best efforts one of her agents in the field had been overrun by the opposition. Even worse, he had been captured alive. Daniella was required to begin sensitive and humiliating negotiations to try to bring him home.

  That night, she and Carelin did not go back to her place. Instead he took her to a small apartment on the top floor of a red-brick building on Solyanka Street, just off Pokrovsky, one of the Green Boulevards, so-called because of the grass and parklands that are part of their makeup. From one of the tiny windows, one could see the Ustinsky Bridge and lights glinting off the dark face of the Moskva. The view, Carelin told Daniella, had been better before the tractors and road-rippers had come in, part of the municipal plan to turn this cul-de-sac into the Internatsionalskaya and the Ulyanovskaya which would eventually link the boulevard to the south bank.

  · They were here because of Carelin. Or, more accurately, because he could no longer suffer the vigil Maluta had on her. This was a place no one knew about. “I am tired of making love to you,” he had said, “while Maluta’s soldier watches from the shadows.”

  Too exhausted, physically and emotionally, to eat, Daniella had stripped off her clothes and had stood under a shower so long that Carelin was obliged to hammer repeatedly on the door to ask her if she was ever coming out.

  Eventually she emerged, unsmiling, wrapped in a thick American-made towel. Her gray eyes met Carelin’s and he leaned forward, kissing her tenderly on the cheek. He went into the bathroom, closed the door. In a moment, she heard the sound of the shower.

  Daniella, on the bed, listened to the drumming of the rain, watched the lurid splashes of electric-blue lightning pierce the shades like knives. She closed her eyes and remembered the unread report from Mitre.

  She was so tired she thought fleetingly of leaving it for the morning. But, in the end, her desire to read about any progress on Kam Sang broke through her lethargy. She rolled over, dug it out of her bag. There was no danger in reading it here. The code made it indecipherable to anyone but Mitre and herself.

  She propped herself up against the pillows, slit open the envelope and began slowly to read.

  In a moment, she put down the sheets of flimsy and stared at the closed bathroom door just as if she had acquired x-ray vision. She sat up fully and read through the report again. It was absolutely revelatory. It contained the intelligence Neon Chow had given to Bluestone regarding the Quarry asset Apollo. The last line contained Apollo’s identity: Mikhail Carelin.

 

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