by Lee Goldberg
Sometimes he wished there was a button he could push that would instantly vaporize people who were too stupid to live. He’d use it to vaporize the idiot cryptographers right now. Perhaps a kill-the-morons button would be his next project. Sure, it seemed impossible to achieve, but at one time, so did the idea of China taking over the United States without a war. And he was about to pull that off.
The Yuen Po Bird Garden in Mong Kok was both a tiny park and a market for songbirds, their cages, and other bird-keeping accessories. Old men took their caged birds for walks along the tree-lined garden paths, passing other old men huddled with their friends, smoking cigarettes and playing cards, while their birds sang from cages that hung from low-lying branches in the trees. Free birds flocked here, too, filling the branches around the cages, taunting their more colorful, pampered, and imprisoned brethren with incessant chirping.
In the center of the park was an open-air pavilion crammed with market stalls selling hundreds of live birds, elaborate bamboo cages, hand-painted porcelain feeding cups, live crickets and grasshoppers, bins of birdseed, imitation birds, and anything else a bird owner might need.
Margo led Ian into the pavilion. “All of this was originally on Hong Lok Street, known for decades as the Bird Street, until it was all mowed down in the 1990s to build Langham Place, a sixty-story office building and a separate fifteen-story shopping mall. All of the merchants were moved here and their aging customers came with them. Collecting and caring for songbirds is a dying art, not many young people are getting into it, so this market will probably be demolished soon, too, for an office building or an apartment tower. In the meantime, I thought this would be a cool place for Straker to make a drop or pick up a package from a secret contact who doesn’t want to be exposed.”
“It’s narrow, cluttered, noisy, and exotic,” Ian said. “You’re right, it’s a perfect spot for a clandestine exchange.”
“I’m full of good ideas.”
Ian began taking pictures with his iPhone, drifting away from Margo and passing a couple of young Chinese tourists who were using their phones to take a video, which was being live-streamed to the command center in Ordos. The man and woman also had flesh-colored transmitters in their ears that allowed Yat Fu to tell them:
“Stay with him. This could be a meet or an exchange.”
Ian stopped at one of the stalls, where a ten-thousand-year-old Chinese man sat on a wobbly wooden stool surrounded by hundreds of birdcages and bamboo baskets filled with bird supplies and trinkets.
Ian browsed through a basket of tiny, stunningly lifelike imitation birds made of Styrofoam and feathers and an array of white-and-blue-painted feeding cups. He chose a fake thrush and a water cup and paid the ancient seller, who put the items into a paper bag that was as wrinkled as his face and had the same texture.
Margo joined Ian and gestured to his paper bag. “What are you going to do with those? You don’t have a birdcage.”
“They’re souvenirs to have on my desk when I sit down to write the book.” Ian stuck his purchases into his messenger bag. “Sometimes having a visual cue that brings back memories helps me get into a scene.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
“I sacrifice a goat.”
Yat Fu pointed to the screen. “I want that bag and whatever message was just passed to Ludlow by that old man. I also want the old man apprehended and brought in for interrogation.”
“Do we take Ludlow, too?” Pang asked.
“No, not yet,” Yat said. “Make the grab for his bag look like a mugging. It’s okay if Ludlow gets roughed up, but not too much. He’s no good to us if he’s in a hospital. He needs to be able to walk.”
“He’s not going to believe it was a mugging.”
“He will if our agents pay no attention to him and only to his bag,” Yat said. “As a spy, his fear is that he’ll be abducted or killed. If our men run off with his bag and leave him on the street, he’ll believe that his cover is still safe.”
“Understood,” Pang said. “The team will take the bag at their first opportunity.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ian and Margo left the bird garden and headed down Tung Choi Street, known locally as Goldfish Street. Both sides of the street were lined with storefronts that overflowed onto the sidewalks. Hundreds of baggies filled with water and live goldfish hung from corkboards at the doorway of each store. There were also buckets of colored gravel, buckets of coral, and shelves spilling over with plastic galleons, treasure chests, anchors, and other knickknacks for decorating aquariums.
“I’ve never seen an entire street devoted to goldfish before,” Ian said.
“The Chinese believe that having an aquarium is good feng shui. It brings wealth and luck.”
“This would be the perfect place for a Straker fight scene.”
“Maybe if this was Chainsaw Street or the knife market,” Margo said. “But there’s nothing dangerous about a baggie full of goldfish.”
“That’s why it works. Readers love it when Straker turns a harmless object into a deadly weapon. That said, is there a Chainsaw Street or a knife market?”
“Not that I know of, but you could create them.”
“I prefer my fiction to be based in reality.”
She rolled her eyes. “Is that so? In one of your books, you had Straker give a woman an orgasm so intense that she went into a coma for three days.”
Ian and Margo were so busy talking that neither one of them noticed the two men walking toward them, not that there was anything suspicious about them besides their laser focus on Ian. One man had a pockmarked face from a youth spent picking at his acne. The other man had a once-broken nose that looked like it was trying to climb over his left cheek.
“You love using that scene as an example whenever you talk about a Straker book,” Ian said. “You must have really liked it.”
“It was memorably awful.”
“That’s not it,” Ian said, a chiding tone in his voice. “The truth is, it turned you on. That’s why you remember it.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“I’m not the one who keeps bringing up the scene,” Ian said. “By the way, the ancient erotic art of Seiteki chōetsu that Straker used to give her that orgasm is real.”
“No, it’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I looked it up,” she said. “I couldn’t find it anywhere.”
“Aha!”
“Aha what?”
“You were so aroused by what I wrote, and so eager to learn how to experience Seiteki chōetsu for yourself, that you rushed out to find everything you could about it. But you won’t find anything on Google or in any library. It’s a technique that’s taught only through experience. You have to find a Seiteki chōetsu sensei to teach you.”
“And I suppose that’s you.”
That’s when the pock-faced man charged forward, grabbing Ian’s messenger bag from his shoulder and knocking him off his feet.
In that same instant, Margo whipped out her rubber dildo, whacked the thief across the face, then spun and hit the second man in the groin. She spun again, clubbed the thief across the back of the head, then hit the second man once more across the face, breaking his nose. Both men dropped to the ground. She ended her spin in a defensive karate stance, brandishing her dildo like a short bō staff.
Ian was still on his back, shocked by the mugging and even more so by Margo’s physical prowess, when a third man charged out of nowhere, wielding a knife.
The third man stabbed at Margo, who swung her dildo to protect herself. The blade sliced the dildo in half, leaving her exposed. Margo quickly grabbed two bags of goldfish, tossed them in the man’s face, and then kicked him in the gut, sending him backward into the store.
Just as the guy with the knife was about to charge Margo again, Ian grabbed a bucket of aquarium pebbles and spilled them out on the sidewalk in front of the man’s feet. The pebbles were like marbles. The attacker sli
pped and fell backward, his head smacking against the sidewalk, knocking him out.
Ian stood up, grabbed Margo by the arm, and pulled her into the street. “Run!”
They rushed down the street, leaving the three men and Ian’s messenger bag behind. They dashed into an alley and onto another street market teeming with people browsing through piles of new athletic shoes. Ian didn’t stop running until he was sure that nobody was chasing them.
He stopped to catch his breath at a stall selling bootleg Air Jordans and looked at Margo. “What the hell was that?”
“Muggers,” she said, breathing hard.
“I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about you and what you did back there. When did you become Wonder Woman?”
“Don’t exaggerate. What you saw was pure desperation.”
“It was more than that,” Ian said.
“I took a few self-defense classes after everything that happened to us. I thought it would make my fear go away,” Margo said. “It didn’t.”
“I never knew a dildo could be used as a weapon.”
“It was all I had.”
“I’m glad you had it,” Ian said.
“It was my favorite one, too. I’m going to miss it.” That’s when Margo realized that she was still clutching the half dildo that remained. She gave it a wistful look, then tossed it in the street. “Sorry they got your bag. Was there anything valuable in it?”
“No, just the Straker script and the bird souvenirs. Certainly nothing worth dying for. I’ll buy another bag here,” Ian said. “But I was right.”
“About what?”
“Goldfish Street is a great place for a fight scene.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Classified Location, Kangbashi District, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. July 2. 2:30 p.m. China Standard Time.
There was silence in the command center. All of the operatives were staring at the screen in shock except for Yat Fu and Pang Bao.
Yat was red-faced with rage. He’d never seen anything more pathetic than the conduct of his agents, beaten into submission by a civilian waving a dildo. It would have been comical if it wasn’t so utterly disgraceful.
But Pang seemed more contemplative than shocked as he studied the various angles of Ian and Margo on multiple screens.
“They are on Fa Yuen Street,” Pang said. “They appear to be calmly browsing for shoes.”
“Maintain surveillance but keep our people back,” Yat said, his voice tight and even as he tried to keep his anger in check. It wasn’t just the way the embarrassingly inept bag snatch unfolded that pissed him off—he was also troubled by Pang’s analytical expression. What was his underling thinking?
He hadn’t picked Pang as his right hand. The operative was assigned to him by others within the small number of people at the Ministry of State Security who knew the details of Yat Fu’s operation beyond merely the global data mining and intelligence gathering. It was done to ensure that Pang’s ultimate loyalty would be to the state, not to him.
“If Ludlow is a professional spy,” Pang said, “why didn’t he defend himself and why did he run?”
Yat’s first reflex was rage. How dare his underling question his assessment of the situation, especially now, in front of everyone, after such a humiliating display of incompetence by his men. On the other hand, the question also revealed the limitations of Pang’s intellect. His underling could only see what was in front of him and lacked the ability to extrapolate the consequences or, in this case, greater meaning. It was that intellectual deficit that would keep Pang from ascending to Yat’s status as a spymaster who reported directly to the president.
“It would have blown his cover in front of his assistant if he displayed his skills,” Yat said in his most patronizing voice. “She doesn’t know he’s a spy.”
“But he let our people get away with his bag.”
“Think it through,” Yat said, still patronizing him. “It means that Ludlow already reviewed the message and either he thinks it will be meaningless to anyone who finds it or it is no longer in the bag.”
An image came up on-screen of the broken-nosed agent in a car using his cell phone camera to speak to them. He held a napkin to his bloody nose as he spoke. “We have the bag.”
Yat glowered at the screen, though the agent couldn’t see him. “You were nearly defeated by a frightened civilian wielding a sex toy.”
“She took us by surprise.”
“You sicken me,” Yat said, then turned to Pang. “I don’t want to see his face or hear his voice.”
Pang hit a button and the image disappeared. Yat leaned close to Pang and spoke sharply into his ear. “I want the bag and its contents analyzed immediately and those three incompetent agents reassigned to janitorial services for the rest of their worthless lives.”
“Understood,” Pang said.
“Destroy all the records, audio and visual, of today’s operation. It’s humiliating. If anybody in Beijing ever sees it we’ll all be cleaning toilets or summarily executed.”
Pang swallowed hard. It pleased and reassured Yat to see that Pang appreciated the danger of the situation for both of them. They were in this together now.
“Consider it done,” Pang said. “Those three men will certainly never speak of it, either.”
Yat knew that was true. He straightened up and tugged on his Mao coat. “If they had any dignity, they’d kill themselves.”
And if Pang was smart and ambitious, as Yat had been at his age, he’d take the initiative and have them killed so there would be no dirt on him that anybody could use against him in his rise to power.
But Yat doubted that Pang would take the hint. Such a shame.
Les Riaux, Marseille, France. July 2. 4:00 p.m. Central European Summer Time.
Chen crouched at the edge of the abandoned limestone quarry atop the chalky, windswept cliffs of Les Riaux that overlooked the town of L’Estaque and the Bay of Marseille. He trained his binoculars on Lucio’s yacht, which was headed out of port and into the Mediterranean.
“It looks about two miles out to me,” he said in Mandarin.
“Closer to three,” Tan Yow responded in the same language. She’d flown to Paris after poisoning Senator Tolan in Washington, DC, and had been waiting for Chen in the van at the Marseille airport when he’d arrived from Turkey.
“That’s even better.” Chen turned to Tan, who’d assembled the missile launcher on its tripod and was aiming the targeting laser. Although she was adept at covert ops and assassination, her primary skill set was in electronics. “Are we ready?”
Tan slid out from under the firing tube, which extended out at both ends over the tripod. The shooter was safe underneath the weapon, but anyone standing behind it when the missile was launched would be blown apart by the back-blast. She’d seen it happen more than once on the battlefield.
Chen rose to his feet and took a moment to openly admire her. She was in a tank top and tight jeans that accentuated her lean, perfectly muscled body. He knew from experience how strong and flexible she was. Last night she’d used his erection like a gymnast on a set of parallel bars. His groin still ached.
“We’re good to go,” she said, being just as open about appraising his body. He knew she found it to her liking. “It’s pretty much point and shoot. The rocket will go wherever you point the targeting beam, even after launch.”
“So I can track a moving target.” He handed her his binoculars and she handed him a pair of headset earmuffs that matched the pair around her slender neck.
“Or change your mind about what you want to destroy.”
“I won’t,” he said, putting the earmuffs around his neck and sliding underneath the tripod.
Tan crouched beside him and he felt a new ache in his groin as he began to harden, aroused just by the nearness of her body. He could almost feel the heat radiating from her smooth skin and taste her on his tongue.
“In the unlikely event that we are caught or killed before we
can act, Yat Fu has ordered me to retrofit this with a timing device that will automatically fire the missile in our absence.” She pointed to where she’d installed the new device on the weapon’s central housing, below the firing tube and above the viewfinder.
“We’ll be there to fire it.” Chen peered in the viewfinder and saw the laser beam reaching out to the yacht. He slipped on his earmuffs, indicating that he was ready.
Tan put on her earmuffs, laid down on the ground beside him, and looked out to sea with her binoculars.
Chen fired. There was a loud crack and a whoosh. The missile’s front and rear fins unfolded as it blasted out from the firing tube and rode the laser beam to its target at 250 meters per second.
The yacht exploded in a fireball that utterly obliterated the craft. Chen knew it was overkill, like using a stick of dynamite to blow up a Styrofoam cup, but he needed to be sure that the weapon system worked. He was sorry to see Lucio and Fina go, though. They were a fun couple. But he couldn’t let anyone live who could lead investigators back to him and, by extension, China after the mission was completed.
Chen removed his earmuffs and glanced at Tan. “It will do.”
Tan smiled and it was like she’d flicked his glans with the tip of her tongue. She knew it, too. He could see it in her mischievous eyes.
It took them five minutes to dismantle the weapon, put its two remaining component pieces into the van, and then drive off, Tan at the wheel for their eight-hour journey to Paris.
He had no problem being a passenger. She was more familiar with the roads in France than he was. And it was painful driving for hours with an erection.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
An excerpt from the third yellow draft of Straker.
EXT. BIG WHEEL — CABIN — NIGHT
Straker and Eve are standing alone in a glass cabin on the Big Wheel . . . an enormous Ferris wheel by the Hong Kong ferry terminals. The view of the Hong Kong skyline on one side, and Victoria Harbor on the other, is spectacular . . . and romantic.
