Chapter 2
Coming Home
“What’s the source?”
“The Aussie’s man in the Sixth
Bureau. This is eyes only, understood?”
Don’t worry. I’ve got nothing in
the works. Has Burzynski seen it?”
“No, and let’s keep it that way for
as long as possible. If their contact gets burned it’ll come right back to us.”
“And Meacham?”
“He hasn’t seen it yet, but he will
soon. We can’t keep it buried indefinitely.”
“Let me know when he finds it.” The
line went dead.
Michael Cardano was holding a transcript
of the interrogation of Tang Tian, an operative of the Guoanbu. He was a decorated veteran of the PLA, an expert in hand
to hand combat who had been transferred to the Ministry a decade earlier. He
had spent several years working out of the Chinese Consulate in Manila. He was
later posted to the embassy in Tokyo and finally served as a Cultural Attaché
in Los Angeles.
In a sudden turn of events he was
recalled to Beijing and taken into custody by the counterintelligence bureau.
The interrogation mainly concerned a failed operation in the United States.
Cardano was transfixed by one passage in the transcript.
Int: Why didn’t you seize her?
Tang: My men
tried.
Int: You didn’t order the sniper to
fire?
Tang: He had been neutralized.
Int: So she had help. Were the
Americans there?
Tang: She needed no help.
Int: She beat you. Is her wu shu better than yours?
Tang: [no reply]
Int: The great Tang, beaten by a
girl?
Tang: [no reply]
Int: She looked you in the eyes,
stared you down. That’s what your men said.
Tang: [no reply]
Int: What deal did you make with
her?
Tang: You didn’t see what I saw.
You wouldn’t understand.
Int: Fine. What did you see?
Tang: Wind in the pine trees.
Int: What’s that, more Japanese
mysticism?
Tang: There are no genetic
shortcuts. There is only training.
Cardano had a pretty good idea who
the interrogator was asking about. He had looked into those eyes once at a
child’s birthday party. He knew what Tang must have seen: focus, discipline,
serenity. As he read the transcript over again he knew he was seeing the face
of an old adversary. But this passage painted him in the colors of an ally,
almost a friend. He was being held in a detention facility outside of Beijing.
From other parts of the transcript
it was clear his family was in danger. His wife had been beaten in the street
one day by unknown thugs. His six year old daughter, Tang Li Li, was shunned by
the children at her school. The interrogator made an ominous threat about
taking the child away. It was difficult to see a way out for Tang. Cardano had
received intelligence of a prison riot at Qincheng Prison which might mean Tang
was already dead.
He knew the Chinese had been
interested in the results of genetic experiments conducted in a secret facility
in Tokyo years ago. The idea had been to enhance the aggressor instincts and
neural function of soldiers. They came to nothing after foreign agents invaded
the lab. There was no sign a particular gene sequence had been isolated, no
samples of a virus encoded with the sequence. Nothing. The lead scientist, Dr.
Kagami, was humiliated by the affair and took his own life shortly afterwards.
The idea of a genetic code existing in some obscure files somewhere persisted
for awhile. It fit the classic espionage fantasy perfectly: a tiny bit of
dangerous data easily hidden anywhere. It was practically irresistible. But
eventually even that dream faded away and the whole project seemed to have been
forgotten.
Until, that is, the Chinese got the
notion the gene sequence existed, not in the form of a microdot or a digital
record, but in a living person. They searched the world over for any sign of
this person. But they mainly suspected the Americans had gotten there first.
After Kagami’s suicide, attention had naturally turned to his daughter, who had
been his main assistant. She was a biochemist in her own right. At first the
Chinese assumed she merely had the data in her possession. But someone spirited
her out of Tokyo before anyone else could seize her. Later they came to believe
she was the data, or at least that
she knew who was.
As he mused on these things Michael
gazed out the window of his study in Torbay. He was watching his son, Anthony,
in the backyard. He was getting some self-defense training from Jesse and
Ethan, members of their security team. It looked a bit more like horseplay than
a serious lesson. Andie came up from behind and kissed him on the back of the
neck.
“He’s finally having some fun.”
“I don’t think he’s learning much
about fighting,” he replied.
“He misses her, you know.”
“I suppose. But we mustn’t rush
back there.”
“Has it occurred to you that she
may need us?”
“I have the strangest feeling we
may end up needing her more than she needs us.”
“Remember how he would follow her
around the estate? And those camping trips?” Michael nodded with a sigh.
“They’d strap on backpacks and she’d take off for the woods at a dead run, and
he’d run after her. He’d follow her to the ends of the earth if he could.” He
couldn’t help but smile at this.
“There are still some arrangements
I have to make before we can go back.”
“I’m not sure how much longer you
can keep Yuki here,” she said with a smile. “We’re going into town, a bit of
shopping. We’ll be buying new luggage,” she said archly and gave him another
peck on the cheek. She went to find Yuki.
Michael was expecting a call.
Rumors were flying about a major martial arts tournament where an unlikely
competitor had dominated the field. He knew the Chinese had been there even
before he received the transcript. But were they the only ones? The phone in
his pocket hummed quietly.
“I hear you helped her in Norfolk.
If that’s true, I am in your debt,” he said into the phone. “Tell me what
happened.”
“She didn’t need any help,” the
woman on the other end of the line replied. “She faced the Chinese on her own,”
she said in a still trembling voice.
“And they let her leave?”
“They didn’t really have a choice,
I suppose,” she said with a shiver of pride, still living in the moment. “She’s
amazing, you know.”
“Yes, but how exactly did she
manage to escape them?”
“She didn’t escape.”
“Wh, what…,” he stammered out. He
knew she was safe, but the thought of her in danger clearly upset him.
“She fought them, seven or eight of
them, in a dark parking lot. She could have killed them all, if they hadn’t
backed down. I think they must have felt lucky to get away themselves.” He
recognized Emily in that account. She was certainly her father’s daughter. “In
the end, she spoke to one of them,” the woman continued, “the leader, I
suppose. They reached some sort of understanding, and then the Chinese left.”
“What did they say, do you know?”
“No, I couldn’t make it out, and
she wouldn’t say. But she seemed satisfied with whatever it was.”
“Were you watching the whole
scene?”
“Yes,” she sighed. “I was on the
roof of the hotel. I saw it all through a rifle scope.”
“Why didn’t you just take them out
for her,” he asked with increasing agitation. It was a rude question in a
disconcerting conversation: one more sign of how much he cared about George and
Yuki’s daughter.
“I wanted to, let me tell you. But
she made me promise not to shoot anyone, not unless they threatened her
friends.”
There was an awkward silence.
Michael knew who she was: a trained assassin, one of Meacham’s people. But
Meacham was on the run now, and many of his agents had gone their own ways. She
was one of these. That didn’t make her trustworthy, and he knew nothing of the
circumstances surrounding her departure. What he most wanted to know was how
she got involved with Emily in the first place. Had she been sent to kill her?
Perhaps she was just waiting for the right moment. Maybe she was still working
for Meacham. Still, Emily had asked a favor of this woman, and Michael had
learned to respect her judgment. She seemed to see right through people. And she
was barely eighteen.
“Shall I trust you,” he asked
himself out loud.
“That’s up to you. I wish I could
say I had helped her, repaid what I owe. But she had so little need of me….”
“She saw something in you. That
says something, I suppose,” Michael mused. “How do I contact you?” The woman
gave him instructions, and a name: “Connie.”
He was making preparations for
their return home. He had already accepted a position in a defense industries
related think tank specializing in East Asian economies, the Seacord
Foundation. He was arranging for a large house just north of Charlottesville,
big enough for his family, his security team and house guests. This location
had a couple of significant advantages. It was an easy drive to D.C., and it
would be an even easier one to Emily’s high school. He knew how important that
last detail would be to her mother.
Connie told him Meacham no longer
posed any substantial threat to him, and as far as she could tell the Chinese
didn’t either. He was inclined to agree with her on the first point. Meacham
had been effectively neutralized in Taipei. Several of his key followers had
been killed, many others had begun to move to a safe distance from his
interests, in case they should collapse entirely. It might take him several years
to rebuild his position. One consequence of this turn of events was that his
chief rival in the intelligence community, Burzynski, now had a much freer hand
to pursue his own agenda. Michael was uncertain what the implications of this
new freedom might be. Particularly worrisome was his willingness to work with
the North Koreans, to play them off against the Chinese. Michael didn’t know
what this might mean for his family, for Yuki, and especially for Emily. Even
if she had come to some sort of resolution with the Chinese, they might not be
the only dangerous players left in the game.
In the end, Michael didn’t have
much choice about returning home, even if he had wanted to stay in hiding. Once
Andie and Yuki learned Emily had confronted the Chinese there was no longer any
support within the family for living in concealment. They wanted to live again
as a normal family, they wanted to follow Emily’s lead. He had started pulling
the arrangements together a few days earlier. Anthony was enrolled for the remainder
of the spring term in a Charlottesville middle school. Building the shell
corporations and other fronts to conceal his interest in the house would take a
little longer
Yuki no longer needed to hide under
the title of cook in his household, as she had for so many years. There was no
point anymore. And Andie had grown close to her since Christmas, having seen
the way she felt around Emily when they were all together in New Zealand. She
had always seemed inscrutable before, in large part because they hadn’t
realized Emily was actually her child. But once the relationship was known,
Yuki’s heart was like an open book. In fact, Emily had become a daughter the
two women practically shared, especially since she had started wearing Andie’s
clothes. Michael arranged for Yuki to have a position at Seacord as his
assistant. She was an expert on the subject of bio-engineering and genetics for
military purposes and would surely prove extremely useful.
Connie sat for a moment in the food
court of the Georgetown Park mall after she ended the call. It was a pay as you
go phone purchased a few moments earlier. She removed the sim card and snapped
it in two. She was apparently not interested in receiving any calls on this
phone. Her precautions were probably unnecessary, but the habit was ingrained
at this point. She tossed the phone into a nearby trash can, one with a lot of
greasy food waste in it. Might as well make tracking her a messy task even if
no one was paying attention.
She took a peculiar route through
the mall, a few extra turns that brought her past various kiosks and especially
reflective display windows. She rode an escalator to an upper floor, and then
down a glass elevator to the parking garage. She walked out the garage entrance
on to M street. It’s not especially hard to spot a tail on a busy sidewalk if
you’re observant and not in such a hurry that you can’t afford to stop every
once in a while and look in a shop window.
Connie wondered how observant Emily
really was. Did she understand what it would take to outmaneuver the people who
were interested in her? People had wanted her dead just a few months earlier.
She herself had been sent to kill her in a public restroom on the
Charlottesville campus. Emily was there on a college visit. She disarmed her attacker
and defeated her. But it wasn’t because she was observant. She was just faster.
And when she had the upper hand she should have killed her with her own poison
syringe. That’s what Connie would have done, without hesitation. But Emily
didn’t kill her, no matter how much she may have deserved it. That kind of
compassion was dangerous.
She was genuinely worried for the
girl who had given her a second chance. But it wasn’t as simple as paying a
debt. When Emily stared her down that day she looked back into her eyes, too.
What she saw there was terrible, even sublime. It haunted her to this day: a
pitch black serenity, a wellspring of generosity. There was a storm there, too,
violence of inhuman proportions, titanic forces held in a precarious balance.
The girl was dangerous, Connie knew it, but she wasn’t invulnerable. Quick
reactions were not going to be enough to keep her safe.
She walked over to the Foggy Bottom Metro station and
caught a blue line train to Washington National Airport where she boarded a
plane to Seattle.
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