Riding the Snake (1998)

by Stephen Cannell

  He forced himself to ignore the feeling. He moved slowly, keeping his back to the wall the way his Special Forces training had instructed, keeping the light in front of him so his shadow wouldn't announce him. Then another voice inside his head spoke. The Prankmeister wanted to go home and have a tall one.

  "What're you doing, you asshole? What're you trying to prove? Cut the crap. You're no hero."

  He moved up to the glass door that led into his brother's den and stopped, remembering something important.

  "When you're goin' through a kill zone, you become a snake.

  Slide on your belly, scope the fire zone before you clear your position."

  Wheeler dropped to his stomach by the den door and slowly slid forward to look around the threshold into the room. He could see the legs of tables and chairs, but nobody seemed to be in there, at least as far as he could tell.

  He slid the door open from the floor, inching it slowly so it wouldn't make noise. Then he held his breath and listened.

  He lay there as he'd been taught, his ears probing for any sound that would give him an edge. After what seemed like an eternity, he wriggled into the den, careful not to scrape his belt buckle on the metal track of the sliding door.

  The den had been thoroughly searched. His brother's antique-book collection was emptied onto the floor. Old leather volumes of Dickens and Poe were spilled, face open, on the carpet. The drawers in the big TV credenza across from the bar had been pulled out and dumped. Then he heard distant voices upstairs speaking in Chinese.... He froze while the Prankmeister shrieked at him: "Hey asshole, listen to me! How's it gonna help anybody if you get killed? You're a fuck-up! They threw you outta Special Forces, or maybe you forgot that?"

  Wheeler moved slowly in the den, staying on his belly, remembering how they taught him to clear a building. "A well-trained force will deploy. Watch your back," his Platoon Commander cautioned.

  Still on his belly, Wheeler snaked out into the hall. Then suddenly, a racket in the kitchen. Someone was opening and closing drawers, spilling the contents loudly out onto the tile floor. Simultaneously he heard two, maybe three more voices upstairs, speaking Chinese. He felt a tinge of panic.

  "You're in between two fire zones. Preserve your exit line. Regroup."

  He back-slid out of the hall, into the den again, and sat up with his back against the curtain wall.

  And then the intruder in the kitchen moved down the hall, past the den door that Wheeler was hiding behind. Wheeler could see the man's Nike tennis shoes and black pant legs as he climbed up the stairs.

  "Go vertical," his training officer whispered.

  Wheeler slowly stood up and edged toward the stairs. He put his weight carefully on the first step, thankful that the house was new and the staircase didn't creak. He kept his back pressed against the wall and began slowly climbing the stairs, remembering to keep his knees bent for quick lateral movement.

  "This is nuts, Wheeler. You're gonna get killed here. Use your fucking head."

  Wheeler crept slowly up onto the landing. So far, so good. He could hear drawers opening and closing in the master suite. He had turned to move in that direction when, unexpectedly, somebody came out of Hollis's room behind him. Wheeler spun with the Beretta in front of him and found himself face to face with a young Chinese man. He was about five-six, rail-thin and around nineteen, dressed in black with a red bandanna.

  There was a moment frozen in time while the two just stared at each other. Then the Chinese intruder started to reach under his jacket . . . and Wheeler aimed the Beretta directly at the boy's chest. The drama was playing without sound until the Chinese boy yanked his gun out and screamed something in Chinese. Suddenly, still frames went to fast-forward. In milliseconds, the youth was blasting at Wheeler with an ugly square-barreled foreign automatic. For some godforsaken reason, Wheeler hesitated and then watched dumbly as the automatic in the gangster's hand spit fire at him. He felt a searing pain in his thigh that blew his leg out from under him. His gun flew from his hand unfired, landing at his feet. Blood oozed ominously out of his wounded thigh.

  "You happy? Is this what you wanted, asshole?" the Prankmeister screamed in terror.

  The boy ran up and grabbed Wheeler's Beretta. Two other Asian gangsters came out of the master bedroom. They all held guns on him, chattering at each other in Chinese.

  "Who are you?" Wheeler asked, his voice shaking from the adrenaline pump.

  They ignored him and kept jabbering, their high-pitched conversation singsongy and piercing. It seemed they were deciding what to do. Whether to kill him. No . . . how to kill him.

  "Does anybody speak English?" he asked, his voice almost a whisper now.

  "No English. You dead," the oldest and tallest said.

  Wheeler then propped himself up on his elbows, while his right hand snaked unobserved behind his back where the second Beretta was tucked and chambered.

  "Make this good, soldier

  The oldest, who Wheeler assumed was the leader, aimed a revolver at him, about to fire. Then Wheeler did something the gangster didn't expect, and it bought him a few seconds. Wheeler smiled. It was his old Prankmeister smile. His U. S. C. frat-house grin.

  "Lemme show you guys something," he said pleasantly.

  They looked at each other, puzzled by his attitude, as he pulled his right hand away from the small of his back and, without warning, started firing the second Beretta.

  The sound was deafening on the enclosed landing.

  He got the oldest one on the first shot. The bullet went right through his neck, blowing him backwards. The one who had come out of Hollis's room pulled down on him with Wheeler's own Beretta. Wheeler's second and third shots blasted him in the chest and knocked him over the banister rail. He fell, cartwheeling, hitting the big chandelier in the entry, taking it down with him in a loud shower of breaking crystal. The remaining gangster ran back into the master bedroom. Wheeler fired twice, missing him, and then he heard sirens out front as the balcony door slammed.

  Wheeler had emptied all five shots from the second Beretta and was still lying on the hall floor, clicking the trigger maniacally on the empty automatic. Finally he became aware that he was reflex-firing and stopped.

  The silence was overpowering. Then he heard running and shouting outside, two more gunshots, then quiet. The front door opened and a man's voice called to him.

  "Mr. Cassidy? Police! ... are you okay?"

  "I've been hit! Think I'm okay," Wheeler tried to call out, but now his voice was barely a whisper. Feeling dizzy and weak, he lay back on the hallway carpet. He heard footsteps coming up the stairs to the landing.

  "Good fucking ground op," Lieutenant Kale McCoy drawled proudly.

  "Whatta you talking about, you cornbread asshole?" the Prankmeister whined. "We almost got fuckin' killed here."

  Before the cop reached him, Wheeler had gone into shock.

  Chapter 8.

  Willy's Garden

  Li Xitong didn't get out of the black Hong Xi (Red Flag) limousine. He was extremely fat and the effort it would require to exit the car and climb the steps to the lobby of the Kun Lun Hotel was not worth the gratitude it might engender. Instead, he sat in the car with the red window curtains pulled shut and struggled to breathe. His belly, when he was seated, pressed up on his diaphragm and his exhales came in gasps. It was the day before Chinese New Year and a fitting time for the meeting that was about to take place, a meeting that he knew might well determine the political future of Hong Kong.

  The Kun Lun Hotel was large and ornate, with beautiful sculpted gold pavilions on all four corners. It was located on the east side of Beijing. Everybody knew that the silent partner of the Kun Lun Hotel was the Chinese Public Security Bureau, which was just the fancy name for the State Police, who made a small fortune running the place.

  The visiting Triad leader from Hong Kong had made a wise decision when he elected to stay at that hotel. Li Xitong was forced to revise his earlier estimate of the man
, because the choice showed a delicate understanding of Guan-Xi. The visitor from Hong Kong could have also chosen the beautiful Palace Hotel in central Beijing, because that establishment's silent partner was the People's Liberation Army. In either hotel, he would appear politically respectable.

  The meeting about to take place was with Chen Boda, the head of the Chinese Communist Military Commission and, therefore, also the head of the Public Security Bureau.

  Li Xitong was the ex-Mayor of Beijing. He had retired because of health problems, but was often called upon by Chen Boda for special assignments that included escorting and hosting important visitors. Li Xitong was fun to be with, or at least he had been until his prodigious girth made him perennially uncomfortable and consequently grouchy. His nickname was "Five Oceans" because of the awesome amounts of fiery white Mao Tai liquor he could consume.

  The door of the Red Flag limousine was suddenly opened and Willy Wo Lap Ling entered the car.

  Ling appeared surprisingly fit. In 1994, he had been a shriveled old man with dying kidneys and a yellow-gray complexion. Now the seventy-three-year-old Triad leader seemed reborn, trim, with carefully barbered white hair and robust red cheeks.

  Aside from exchanging brief introductions, the two men didn't speak. They rolled along Beijing's busy streets listening to a mixture of sounds: the faint purr of the car's engine; the red flags flapping on the front fenders; Li Xitong's labored breathing.

  The meeting was to take place in the beautiful restaurant on the twenty-fifth floor of the OTIC building located on Chang An (Boundless Peace) Avenue. Willy Wo Lap knew that CITIC stood for China International Trade and Industry Corp. CITIC had many connections with Poly Industries, which was the commercial arm of the People's Liberation Army, a lucrative business that sold arms to everybody. Poly Industries had almost single-handedly made the market on Russian ordnance after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Willy had felt that sales of Russian nuclear weapons would be a lucrative market and had been trying for several months to purchase, through Poly Industries, some Russian suitcase bombs. It was rumored that one hundred of these highly portable nuclear weapons had gone missing from the Russian war lockers, and Willy was very close to arranging the purchase of ten of them. Poly Industries was already responsible for supplying the very Russian automatic weapons that Willy's Triad sold to Black teenagers in the streets of America for top dollar.

  The elevator doors opened onto the top-floor restaurant, where Chen Boda was waiting. The diminutive head of the Chinese Communist Military Commission seemed ageless. It had been four years since Willy had lain on the rolling gurney in the Friendship Hospital and watched through the glass as the slight politician ordered the surgeon to plunge the scalpel into the young radical's chest, beginning the lifesaving kidney harvest that "protected" Willy from the storm.

  The two men shook hands. Willy had been summoned here, and he knew, just like the last time he had been invited to Beijing, that something important was about to happen.

  Several military attendants set up folding screens around a corner window table. The Chinese screens were thin, delicate silken artworks, decorated with dragons breathing gold-threaded fire. It would be easy to hear through them, but Willy knew that nobody else would be allowed into the restaurant this morning. Willy was given the view position that looked out onto the city of Beijing, which sparkled under a bright February sun. The preparations for New Year's were well under way. Flags and decorative banners flapped from spires below them. The American Embassy compound could be seen a few blocks away to the east.

  They said very little as the first course of steaming mushrooms was served. The dish had been prepared in ginger sauce in the traditional Cantonese way.

  The deal they had made in the Year of the Dog was perfect. Chen Boda had given Willy the gift of new kidneys and in return got the gift of Willy's smuggling routes. It was a very Chinese solution. One gift extracted poison from Willy's bloodstream. The other had inserted it into the American enemy. Better still, Willy had established even stronger Guan-Xi with American politicians. China had again received Most Favored Nation trade status, despite the protest of the U. S. Congress over Human Rights violations. Both men knew it was the money that Willy had poured into U. S. political campaigns which had helped to accomplish this. Investigations into campaign funding violations were still taking place in the American Congress, and China had been accused of trying to subvert the U. S. political process, but nobody had mentioned Wo Lap Ling. In fact, quite the opposite had happened. He was now on many U. S. corporate boards and had achieved great recognition as the Vice President of the American Red Cross in Asia. Now it was time to discuss a new arrangement.

  The diminutive politician began a careful conversation that played on two levels because of the hovering waiters. "I hear the lichees in Guangdong are the sweetest in the world," Chen Boda began, referring to the sweet fruit that abounds in the province that contains Hong Kong. This fruit symbolized Hong Kong, which was now in China's hands.

  "That is true," Willy said in Mandarin. "The summer crop was especially rich," referring to the hand-over of Hong Kong to mainland China that had happened last July.

  "I understand that your own garden is flourishing, that many Americans now buy your fruit," Chen Boda said, referring to the Triad leader's Guan-Xi in America.

  "Yes. When one has the right gardeners, things grow."

  Chen Boda added, "But I have heard that to protect the garden, you had to pull out several weeds quickly and without mercy. I hope you got them all and that none will grow back."

  "Yes. When weeding, it is very important to destroy the roots."

  Both men smiled at this casual exchange, which referred to several influential Americans who had worked for Willy, but had been murdered recently because they had been contacted by the American FBI. Willy had judged them to be dangerous liabilities.

  The mushrooms were soon devoured. Waiters cleared used plates and placed the ivory chopsticks on small ceramic props beside each diner's elbow.

  Now other waiters in Red Army captain's uniforms brought the main course, enormous "dragon" shrimp, called Long Xia. Again, the two men ate in silence. The only sound was the clicking of ivory until the course was completely finished. Then came the Beijing Kao Ya, which was a delicious Peking roast duck. It arrived completely chopped up in a large dish. Chen Boda and Wo Lap Ling wrapped it in thin pancakes and added a sumptuous plum sauce. The skin of the duck, the "crackle," was the choicest part of the dish. They also had a side dish of chicken cooked inside a clay coating, which was known as "Buddha Jumping the Wall," because legend had it that the Lord Buddha interrupted his prayers when he smelled it and jumped over the garden wall for a taste.

  Chen Boda nodded to one of the officers, indicating it was time for all of them to withdraw. The waiters closed the screens, leaving Willy and Chen Boda alone in the enclosure.

  "It is time for you to play a larger role," the head of the Chinese Communist Military Commission said softly. "The Americans and the British do not trust us to rule Hong Kong with benevolence, and they are probably shrewd in this assessment. It is difficult to control some of the powerful tides of reform, and while we open our Motherland to the outside world, sometimes it is almost impossible to manage our destiny. Politics, like love, makes fools of everyone."

  "But if you change the 4One Nation, Two Systems' agreement promised in the Sino-British accord, Western business will flee from Hong Kong. You will have inherited an empty house. It achieves nothing," Willy said, watching Chen Boda carefully.

  "I see that you have finally become a student of the Master's wisdom," the politician said softly.

  "Sometimes observers can see a chess game more clearly than the players," Willy replied. He knew they were close to the reason he'd been brought here.

  "Crows are black the world round," Chen said, sighing slightly. "And only rats know the way of rats." Chen was referring to the nature of men, and Willy was surprised to hear such blatant
skepticism from the politician whose career had flourished because he refused such narrowness of thought.

  "You have great Guan-Xi with the Americans," Chen Boda continued. "The West trusts you. They seek your wisdom even while you smuggle guns, drugs, and immigrants into their country. You have done your part skillfully."

  Willy lowered his head to accept this compliment.

  "And you are right. ... It is imperative that we live up to the joint accord and have the free elections in Hong Kong in mid-1998, just as we promised Mrs. Thatcher when we signed the agreement. As you say, to fail to do this would be disastrous to Hong Kong's economy." Chen Boda hesitated, then smiled, "However, as you know, water can both sustain and sink a ship. The trick here is to give the impression of compliance. In this regard, I have finally persuaded the Central Committee that the free elections must take place, that this course is mandatory."

  "But the Hong Kong Democratic Party is bound to prevail in an election. They will throw your Chief Executive and the Beijing-appointed legislature into the sea," Willy said.

  "Not if it is you who runs for Chief Executive. You are the candidate to lead the Colony. You will be the first elected Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region. It will be a master stroke of world diplomacy. We will get all of your new friends in the U. S. government, the ones we helped to elect, to endorse you. Bill Clinton will support you as you have supported him. You must no longer run the Chin Lo Triad. We can't accept the risk that your criminal past will become known. You must turn the Triad over to your White Fan. After the election, you will run only the government of Hong Kong. It is the perfect deception, because you are from the New Territories with a dual passport.

  Born in Kowloon, you have strong ties to the West, but you owe your life, hence your allegiance, to Mother China . . . and to me."

  "I can still run the Triad. Nobody has discovered my association yet. Nobody will. I have taken great care to shield myself."

  "There are rumors. . . . Already, several Hong Kong police have had to be weeded from your garden. There will be too much scrutiny. You must choose. One man cannot stand on two boats."