“Do you know I was once a professor?” said Mhusa. “I taught English literature. I traveled. I studied. I have written a book. It is not a book one such as you would ever read. But I am an educated man.”
“And yet you’re a pirate,” the Briton said.
“A fitting enough job for a man who has died,” Mhusa said. He began to take experimental steps toward McCarter, whipping the blade of his machete ever closer to his opponent. “For a man who has killed his entire family.”
“I’m sure there’s plenty of murderers to go around among you lot,” McCarter said.
“No.” Mhusa swung once, very close now, cleaving the air where McCarter’s head had been a moment earlier. “You are fast, British. You are very fast. I have fought many men in my time as a pirate. You are one of the better ones, I think.”
“I try,” McCarter said. He was tempted to take a committed swing, to plant the edge of his blade in Mhusa’s face, but if he moved too quickly he would risk mortally wounding the man in a way that didn’t take out the heart monitor. That would set off the bombs. He risked a glance at the hostages. They were watching with rapt attention, frozen in place, probably wondering at which moment the signal would be sent to blow them all to bloody hunks of meat in the middle of this cargo hold.
“You do not understand,” Mhusa said. “I murdered my family, yes. But it was not because I wanted to. I brought them death. I brought them this death because of my work studying and teaching in other lands. From Sierra Leone I brought them Ebola. The disease is merciless. It kills almost all who catch it.”
“Almost all,” said McCarter. Keep him talking, he thought. Give Calvin time to work.
“I caught it,” said Mhusa. “I was very sick. But my doctors, they knew the secret. It is not the disease that kills a man with Ebola. It is the dehydration. The vomiting, the diarrhea. It dries out the body. When the blood begins to flow, there is nothing left. A man dies a dried-out husk.”
“That’s pretty awful, all right,” McCarter said. He advanced a step, jabbed with his blade. Mhusa slapped the weapon away with the flat of his own machete. The action was casual, almost contemptuous. Mhusa knew his way around a machete.
“They forced me to drink,” Mhusa said. “Water, water, water. Gallons of it. They gave me so much water I thought I would drown in it. I was exhausted. I could not throw it up fast enough. And still they drowned me in it.”
Despite himself, McCarter understood the man’s pain. He had read accounts of the disease—how it ravaged those it took. He did not wish that on any man. “Give me the hostages,” he tried suggesting. “Stop this and we can all live.”
“You don’t understand,” Mhusa said. “I told you. I am dead already. I was told I had survived Ebola. The disease did not take me. I grew well again. And when they judged that there was no more of it in me, I went home. I went home to my wife and child. But there was something that was not known then. Something that I learned only too late.”
“The virus lives on,” McCarter stated. He leaned back as Mhusa slashed at his neck then withdrew.
“Yes,” Mhusa said. “A man who is healthy can have Ebola in his semen for many days after he grows well. Ignorant of this, I came home to my wife’s bed. And it was because of me that she became sick. She gave this sickness to my child. And when Ebola began to spread, when the outbreak became pronounced, medical care was not so easy to come by.
“There were riots. People became afraid. In their desperation, they blamed the doctors who traveled from border to border. They began attacking medical professionals in the streets. Then they raided the Ebola clinics, stealing whatever they could find. This included sheets and towels bearing contaminated blood. And everything grew worse.”
Mhusa attacked in earnest this time. He advanced, slashing and chopping as he lunged. It was all McCarter could do to block the attacks, to keep the bigger man off him. As the two battled furiously, their machetes scraped and banged together, ringing out through the cargo hold. Mhusa began to sweat, great beads of it streaming down the sides of his black face. McCarter, too, was feeling the exertion. He was very aware that he was now fighting for his life.
“There was no one to treat my wife, no one to treat my only child,” Mhusa said as he fought. “I cannot even bring myself…to say their names!” As he spoke these last words he drove the blade of the machete down with all his might. It struck the deck of the ship, drawing sparks. The big African recovered quickly, but not before McCarter managed to slash his weapon arm. Blood flowed freely.
“Give up!” McCarter said. “Give me the hostages! Get on your launch and get out of here.”
“There is no going back,” Mhusa said. “There is nothing for me to go back to. I traveled the world after I watched my family die. I was hoping for someone, something, to give me meaning before I found the strength to kill myself. Always, when I thought of taking my own life, I saw my wife. And she urged me not to do it. She said it was a sin. It was Wijeya who found me, hired me, gave me a reason to fight on. He promised me much danger. He promised me a way to fill my days with work, so that at night I would sleep the dreamless sleep of a man who is exhausted. And so I devote myself to him because there is nothing else, and no other reason.”
McCarter went for broke. He pressed his attack, slashing and jabbing, trying to work his blade up and past Mhusa’s formidable guard. “Why are your men impersonating the Chinese?” he demanded. “Where did you get the weapons?”
“The weapons were given to us by Wijeya,” Mhusa said, as if that explained everything. “We pretended to be Chinese because Wijeya asked it. His reasons are his own. What do I care? I have told you. I am dead. I seek only the courage of one man who can make this so. One man who can give me back my family.”
“You could…save a lot of trouble,” McCarter said, breathing heavily now, “if you would just…kill yourself…”
“But I cannot,” Mhusa said.
He was in incredible shape for a globe-trotting pirate, McCarter thought. He barely seemed winded, even with all the talking he was doing.
“I told you. Every time I take my pistol and put it under my own chin, I see my wife’s face. She cannot abide the sin of suicide. She tells me I cannot. That this way is too easy. That I am a fighter.”
“Bloody hell,” McCarter said. Under his breath, he said, “Calvin, if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to do it now. I don’t have much left.”
“David, I can’t,” James reported. “There’s simply no shot.”
Well, that was that, then. McCarter was just going to have to do it himself. He scanned the battleground, looking for something he could use to his advantage. There was only the nearby dead man, the man on whose chest Mhusa had placed his pistol, the man whose machete McCarter even now wielded.
“I can feel it coming,” said Mhusa. “Can you feel it, British? I am going to choke you to death. I am going to feel the life leave you as I crush your neck.”
McCarter lunged. With a furious burst of energy, he hammered away at Mhusa’s machete, driving the man back, focusing on the blade and not the man.
Mhusa was taken off balance by his approach, which was designed simply to shove him back, not to kill him. He did not realize, until it was too late, what McCarter was trying to do.
Mhusa tripped over the dead man.
He fell back and hit the deck. McCarter dove on top of him, slamming the blade of his machete down with both hands, one on the handle and one on the back of the blade. The edge of the machete cleaved the electronic device taped to Mhusa’s chest and buried itself half an inch in the African’s torso.
Mhusa screamed.
McCarter didn’t try to dislodge the machete. Instead he let go of it, scooping up Mhusa’s pistol from atop the corpse beneath them. In the same motion, he jacked the hammer back, made sure the safety was off, and shoved the pistol under Mhusa’s chin.
“Thank you,” Mhusa said. “Thank you, British.” He reached up and wrapped his big hands arou
nd the Briton’s throat.
McCarter pulled the trigger. “Say hello to your family, then.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Atlanta, Georgia
The man known in America as “Harold Rhemsen” signed his name at the end of the entry in his personal journal: Cheung Yeong. As it always did, that simple act of rebellion, that tiny piece of defiance, made him smile.
Over the years of his charade it was this journal, his real journal, that had kept him sane. To have kept this journal, in addition to the faked one in which he had also written dutifully every week for years, was a tremendous breach of security. If his superiors in Beijing knew what he had done, they would have him punished for it, maybe even executed him. The existence of the journal, had anyone discovered it through the years, would have endangered his mission and everything for which he had worked since he was a teenager.
He did not care. Without the journal, he would have gone mad long ago. He needed the affirmation, each time he lied, each time he wrote in the journal he had given Fitzpatrick. He needed to know, each time he concluded those lies, that he was himself. That he was Cheung Yeong. That he was born to prominent members of the Communist Party in China, a child of the ruling elite, a man who would live and die a Chinese national. Yes, he was half European by birth, but that had never been held against him. His parents were Party faithful. He was Chinese, despite his unusually pale complexion, his slightly European features. He was Chinese. He was Cheung Yeong.
Without his secret second journal to periodically remind him of whom he truly was, what his mission was supposed to be, he would either have lost himself in the identity they had chosen for him…or he would have put the barrel of a gun in his mouth and ended his own life. Certainly there were guns aplenty in this lawlessness. How anyone survived to adulthood and beyond in this place of individualism and chaos, this place of unfettered me-first childishness, awash in crime and gangs and drugs, with the weight of weak leadership and even weaker foreign policy hanging around their collective necks…it was a mystery to him.
It was supposed to be an honor, and in his heart, he knew that it was. To be chosen as one of China’s most highly placed assets, one of her most deeply positioned sleeper agents, with access to funding and resources that were, for all practical purposes, completely unlimited…this was a prize beyond prizes, an honor that most members of the party went their whole life and never realized.
The day his parents had come to him, told him that he had been selected to perform this service to the People’s Republic of China, he had been overjoyed. But that had been many long years ago now. Much had happened. There were days that he woke up realizing that he had lived his entire life as another man, a false man, a man he had himself murdered. To realize that most of his life had been spent devoted to a lie…it was humbling. It was also maddening. He had devoted many pages in his journal to this fact, and ripped just as many out. Some thoughts were not meant for posterity, no matter how true. It would not do for someone in Beijing to discover his records and decide that, even long after his death, the least patriotic of his thoughts was worthy of punishment visited on any who descended from him.
But would any descend from him? Would he ever have a son to carry on his line? Over the years he had indulged in sex, usually with vapid American women who could be impressed with money and power. Certainly his looks would not earn him the favors of women. He would find no one worthy of him in such company. The physical act brought with it some small amount of gratification, but he was alone, living in complete isolation, carrying a secret that only he and one other man, now, shared.
That man had been Lao, his handler. Lao alone knew what Harold Rhemsen was and, working together, Lao and Cheung Yeong had formulated the plan they were now executing. That plan had been approved at the highest levels of government in Beijing, but if Cheung Yeong failed, if anything went wrong, he and Lao knew they would be disavowed. That was the way of it. He understood it. He accepted it.
Now Lao was dead, blown to bits by an ignorant fool who would never know the secret that Lao and Cheung Yeong had shared. It bothered him to know that Fitzgerald had so casually ended the life of the one person alive—excepting their superiors in Beijing—who knew that he was not really Harold Rhemsen. He and Lao had not been friends. They had not been close. But when speaking to Lao, he could let down fully the barriers that normally came second nature to him. He could speak as he might speak if he were home, on Chinese soil, and not pretend to be this man whose life he had stolen.
When his parents had informed him of his mission, to infiltrate the United States and to place himself in a position of a power, he had thought little of it. These were just words, vague concepts. He was very intelligent, he was driven and he was capable and adaptable. He had been chosen over many of his fellow students, they’d told him, because his aptitude scores ranked him as most likely to be able to sustain the commitment, the concentration, the focus that would be required to endure such a long and arduous mission.
He had no idea, then, what he was doing to himself. He had no clue what his life would become. Over the months that he was trained in Beijing, at a special facility in which everything was furnished with American goods, with American literature, where all the handlers and Cheung Yeong himself spoke nothing but English, he began to understand the enormity of what faced him. He was given rudimentary courses in espionage. He was trained to pick locks. He was taught how to take photographs using conventional cameras and microfilm. He was instructed in hand-to-hand combat—this last, relatively familiar and even easy, for he had long been a student of Kung Fu under his own father—and then in how to kill a man quickly and efficiently. The two, martial arts and killing, were not the same thing, as he’d quickly learned. He’d embraced his training first from duty, then from necessity, and finally from destination. As the day approached for him to leave Beijing and begin his undercover life, he knew a mounting anticipation, almost a dread, that drove him to learn whatever he possibly could that might keep him alive.
The man who knew, in his heart, that his name was Cheung Yeong took a moment to examine the cramped handwriting filling the pages of his journal. Over the years he had filled many such volumes, of course. Each time he filled one, he burned it, destroying it utterly—but not before summarizing the accounts that it held, so that each journal was a complete account, with necessary and important dates and facts, of his mission on American soil.
The mission had not started in America. It had started with his education. Beijing had arranged for him to be educated at Oxford. His identity was completely fake, of course; he had a convincingly vague lineage and an elaborate cover story that explained where his family money was supposed to come from. In reality, Beijing itself was backing him. Over the years he had become adept at routing money through holding companies and other means of concealing where it came from. Avoiding discovery, especially in the modern era of interlocked data networks, was the watchword. It had become more difficult as the years wore on, but he had become smarter, too.
His first task was to select a suitable identity. His cover identity was good, yes, but it was not good enough. If tested, it would unravel. He needed to become someone who was unquestionably American. There were many American students at Oxford. Their isolation from their home country, their distance from their families, was one of the reasons Beijing had selected Oxford as the site for his infiltration. He got to know his fellow students, ingratiated himself to them, and made sure he was known to be affable and cooperative. This required, at every turn, pretending a joviality he did not truly feel. He hated these foolish, insipid children. He hated their empty lives of wealth and privilege. He hated that he, along among them, was saddled with a burden that far outweighed their world.
Harold Rhemsen was at that time a young man from the southern United States whose family was quite wealthy. The child of aging parents, he had experienced the double blow of losing both his mother and his father to natural ailments while awa
y at school. He had no extended family. Alone to inherit the family fortune, he spoke often of the loneliness that confronted him. Cheung Yeong was quick to capitalize on that, to become Harold Rhemsen’s best friend. They became inseparable, bonding in their loneliness, for Cheung Yeong had no family that was not hundreds of miles distant.
Soon, when time and their class schedules allowed, the pair began to take trips into the surrounding countryside. There, frequenting the pubs in which they were barely old enough to be welcome, they established a wider circle of friends. These locals were, of course, merely using their newfound foreign friends for the money that Rhemsen and Cheung Yeong spread around, but that was all right. Rhemsen enjoyed drinking, and Cheung Yeong was content that his plan was moving accordingly. When he judged that the time was right, he alerted his handlers in Beijing. It was Lao himself who met Cheung Yeong for the first time, late at night in yet another English pub, and explained to him how the plan to murder Harold Rhemsen would proceed.
Their circle of pub friends invited Cheung and Rhemsen to a party in the country. It was the usual late-night affair around a blazing fire. The liquor flowed. Cheung made sure to lace the bottle with a drug given him by Lao. He had never known the sedative’s name, but it worked quickly and made those affected sleep heavily.
Cheung feigned imbibing all night, secretly tossing his drinks when no one was looking, staying completely sober. When the party started to wind down and the rest of the partygoers began to drift off to drugged slumber, Cheung continued to stoke the fire.
It was easy to drag Harold Rhemsen into the fire.
He would never forget the smell. At his signal, the Chinese intelligence troops concealed in the surrounding woods came forward, secured the burned body, and accompanied both the corpse and Cheung Yeong back into the city. There, thanks to the switching of medical records and the corpse’s regrettably incinerated condition, Cheung Yeong’s fake identity was retired. He was officially listed as dead, the victim of a terrible drunken accident that would be written off to a bad case of alcohol poisoning that affected all present.
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