Hu looked up at him. Liu was stoic. Hu himself was humbled. He had been informed that they would be spreading pneumonic plague bacteria through the old smuggling tunnels below the city. But to actually see the receptacles of the bacteria, hold them in containment—
“It is magnificent,” Liu Tang added. “But if there were an earth tremor now, we ourselves might be in a rather unfortunate position.”
“Yes, of course.”
“The delivery system?” Liu asked.
Hu Kai straightened. He walked to the large locker in the back of the Eastern Rim office. They were alone and the noise of the city sounded far away. The powdery white dust of the clinic operations came off his work boots in little puffs as he walked.
Hu opened the combination lock. He put on work gloves, removed an old fax machine, and carried it carefully, slowly, to the card table. He held it with his fingertips gripping the top, not the bottom or the sides. The interior of the machine had been hollowed out. Near the top of the fax machine was a plate with a series of thirty-two screws facing thread upward. Hu removed the white king from Liu’s chessboard and set it aside. Carefully, he screwed the other pieces into place inside the machine.
When there was just one open peg he said, “Once the king is inserted here and turned to the right, the explosion will occur fifteen minutes later.”
“It is not triggered by cell phone?” Liu asked.
“That kind of detonator can be blocked. The environment and structural elements of the tunnel could interfere with reception. No,” Hu said, looking at the king in his palm. “This device will be activated by hand. Sensors are attached by wire to the plate and to the other five sides of the steel container. The wires are held in place with an anti-seize paste. When the king is turned to the right, it will start a countdown to turn on a heater that will melt the paste. After fifteen minutes the stripped ends of the wires will pop off and send a current to the bomb, which is under this.” Hu tapped the plate with the screws.
“And the bomb will then detonate,” said Liu Tang.
“Yes,” said Hu. “If someone manually tampers with the device—which I assure you will not happen—we have a fail-safe: the sensors on the wires. Proximity of bodies, of body heat, will register on the sensors and cause the paste to soften.”
“The gloves,” Liu said.
“Exactly. They minimize my own heat. The bomb will detonate immediately if the temperature of the grease on the sides of the steel container rises. We have maintained the temperature in the office so that it matches that in the tunnel.”
“Ingenious. What about the smaller blasts you will be using to ventilate the tunnel?”
Hu shook his head. “The contacts will not be broken by those vibrations. The paste can only be weakened by heat. It is my greatest design,” Hu said. “In a way, I am sorry I must leave it behind. Either way,” he went on, “once the king is in play, the game is over.”
Liu nodded admiringly. “And you? Where will you be?”
“We will meet you and the others and Jintao Zhŭxí on the boat,” Hu said. He had used a title of respect reserved for leaders of towering stature. “Together, from the sea, we will watch America die.”
Liu laid a hand on his shoulder. “Jintao was right to select you,” he said. “This is a great day for the new Chinese Empire.”
Hu bowed humbly. It was a strange contrast, the rush of humility. For at that moment, with the chess piece in his hand, he also felt like the most powerful man on the planet.
~ * ~
Maggie Yu spent a restless day at the grocery, troubled by things unseen.
The attack on the helicopter in Fairfield had fueled fears of terrorism and business was brisk. Customers were using the grocery—as they used the nearby nail salon and bookshop and rebuilt electronics store—as an impromptu meeting place. Their discussions skittered nervously from hearsay to vaguely relevant anecdotes, but they always returned to the speculation of reckless newscasters, that what had occurred in Fairfield was not an accident.
Maggie half-listened and nodded in agreement with whatever was said. Her mind and soul were in the basement, lost in the labyrinth of the story she had been told by Sifu Qishan—
Not a story, she reminded herself. It was many stories linked by the tunnels and the strong reactions they generated—fear, pain, and violence. Each girl who was pushed or pulled through those tunnels was a person who left behind something of what they were feeling.
San Francisco had known many horrors over the centuries, but this one was right below her feet. Even if she had not heard those sounds, the tunnels should be opened and purged. She was waiting for the evening when the grocery closed and her father went to play mah-jongg and she could move crates and shelves to look for an entrance to the underground world.
When eight o’clock finally arrived, Maggie flipped the OPEN sign, kissed her father on the cheek, and shooed him to the door.
“I’ll break down the cash register,” she said.
“I don’t mind counting out the drawer,” he told her. “You seem tired—”
“No, I’ve been husbanding my energy all day for this task,” she teased.
Her father grinned. “ ‘Husbanding’ your energy? Is that a puzzle?”
She was confused.
“Never mind,” her father smiled, hurrying out. “Your secret rendezvous is safe with me.”
Maggie let him go on thinking that she was meeting some young civil servant. That was what he wanted for her, a holdover from the values of the old world: that a daughter’s greatest security was to marry a member of the Nine Ranks, a system that originated a millennium ago in the Zhou Dynasty. It was a court hierarchy that reached from the Ninth Pin—county officials— to the First Pin, bureaucrats who answered personally to the emperor. Maggie would have been happy to oblige, but most men were intimidated by the fact that she could deflect unwanted advances with a finger to the windpipe. Those who were not were her fellow students, and they were more like brothers.
She counted out the cash, measured the sum against the receipts, and put the money in a deposit bag. She grabbed a water bottle, went downstairs, and put the cash in the safe. Then she looked around. Whatever she did, she wanted to return everything to normal before her father got back. He was not a spiritual man but he believed in leaving the past in the past.
“It’s better for the digestion to always look forward,“ he said.
The floor under the shelves was stuffed with things she rarely if ever touched: boxes of tools, dropcloths, cans of paint—some so old she doubted the containers could be opened—and cardboard filing cabinets that were stuffed with old ledgers. She had pulled those out, years before, to wrap the books in plastic to keep them from mildewing.
Maggie had not heard the humming the few times she had come down to check. But now that the store was empty and traffic was thinning, there were faint noises. The earlier sounds had been a whirring; this was more like hammering. It was coming from the same direction, the wall with the oak closet. She began removing the cleaning supplies: the broom, mop, squeegee, sprays, detergents. There was a clothesline her mother used down here before the cleaner opened down the street. Maggie used to jump rope with it. She smiled when she saw the old calendar hanging on the wall, from May 1996. That month’s photo was a picture of the Huangpu River—coincidentally, the spot where her father had proposed to her mother. She ran her hand across it lovingly.
There is good energy here, too, she reminded herself.
The closet was bolted to the wall to keep it from falling during tremors. She didn’t know how she would get behind it to see if there was a door. Perhaps if she cut a section from it, behind the calendar?
As she contemplated the problem she remembered something that Sifu Qishan had said: people came and went using trapdoors.
Her eyes drifted to the left, to the safe. The yard-high iron box sat flat on the floor next to the closet. She didn’t remember w
hat was there before; she was just two years old at the time. But it was the perfect way to seal a trapdoor.
Maggie went to the small storage area under the staircase. That was where her father kept the dolly he used to move larger boxes around. He also had a crowbar he used to pry open wooden crates. She brought them over and, using a small mallet, she was able to knock the tapered end of the crowbar under the left side of the safe, away from the closet. That allowed her to slip the dolly under the raised edge. She kicked it in as far as it would go, then tied the safe to the dolly with the clothesline.
She pulled back on the dolly. Even with all her weight on it, the safe failed to move. She tried walking the safe back by shifting the dolly from side to side. She stirred dust, nothing more.
There’s only one way you’re going to move that, she knew.
Maggie got on top of the safe. This wasn’t going to be pretty but it had to be done. She braced her back against the side of the closet and placed her feet against the top of the dolly. Her knees were bent straight up. She placed her hands against her legs, against the quadriceps, so she could push them out toward the dolly. The young woman was used to drawing energy from the ground. Kung fu required a center of gravity that worked its way up from the feet, along the spine, channeled to the arms and hands. She rarely had the opportunity to train parallel to the ground.
You’ve done cartwheels and handstands, she told herself. The energy still comes from the ground. It’s just entering at a different point.
She took a moment to feel the closet against her upper back. She thought of the good memories represented by the calendar, the positive energy left behind by her father as he looked at that photograph over the years. She let that flow into her shoulders. And then, with a cry to focus that strength, she simultaneously pushed out with her palms and extended her legs.
The dolly leaned outward and the safe went with it. So did Maggie. Even as her back left the side of the closet she was pushing energy into her arms and legs. The roped safe-dolly combination fell over, tipping slowly enough so that Maggie was able to drop her rear onto the top, ride it down, and end up standing, facing away from the closet.
The dolly was bent by the weight of the toppled safe.
So much for returning everything to normal before Dad comes home, she thought.
Maggie walked around to the other side. She looked down at a piece of plywood that had been pressed so hard by the safe that it split into a series of slats. They weren’t level with the concrete floor, flattened by the weight of the safe. She had to pry them up with the crowbar. Underneath were the rotted planks of a trapdoor. There was a large iron ring set in the side away from the wall.
The young woman knelt beside the door; it almost felt as if she were praying. Perhaps she should be. She needed the crowbar to lift the latch out as well. The ring creaked upright, shedding particles of rust; the trapdoor groaned with it.
Keep going, Maggie told herself.
She reached for the ring, pulled it, and moved her head back as the dust of a century wafted up. It was not quite the dry, musty smell she had been expecting but a smell of putrefaction, like damp soil and rotted leaves.
Water from the bay must have leached its way in, she realized.
The hammering was clearer, echoing from somewhere to the north. She left the trapdoor resting against the wall and got a flashlight. She squatted by the edge and shined it down. Four steep steps ended on a packed dirt floor.
She rose, took a long drink of water, then wedged one end of the crowbar behind the closet and slipped the other end in the ring. She didn’t know where the tunnel would take her but she wanted the light shining in so she could find her way back.
Maggie felt a chill. It was more than the cool air of the tunnel, but a sense that nothing good awaited her down there.
She also knew that growth required challenge, answers demanded effort, and that self-respect came from doing the difficult.
After taking several slow, cleansing breaths, she climbed down the ladder.
~ * ~
Jing Jintao stood alone in the conference room on the forty-eighth floor of the Transamerica Pyramid. Ordinarily the room was restricted to tenants of the building but the consul general had only to mildly suggest that he would like a few minutes of undisturbed time in the room, to receive it.
The 360-degree view of San Francisco, so world-renowned that a trip to this floor was considered a cultural gift to visiting dignitaries, was not his interest. To Jintao, the city resembled sugar cubes stained by tea. He had once witnessed an American ambassador add sugar to his rare, triple-steeped Anxi Ti Kuan Yin, an offense so profound Jintao could almost taste it in his own tea. No, he was not here to marvel at the city, but at the sea in the late afternoon light. Soon Jintao would be on that sea, leaving this place at last, looking back only to see it dissolve.
The weaponized pneumonic plague, maximized for toxic potency and extended airborne motility, would be spread through inhalation. The city would send first responders to the bombsite but most of them would take breaks from wearing their cumbersome masks. They would be infected.
Wind would carry the plague to other residents. At first, people would think they had the flu—a fever, a cough. Not nearly enough of them would seek medical treatment. Even if they did, the necessary antibiotics would not be available fast enough or in sufficient quantities. Over the next few hours other people would be wondering why they suddenly couldn’t breathe. Doctors would misdiagnose it as asthma, then they, too, would become sick after coughed particles of saliva infiltrated their nasal linings. Everyone the doctors treated after that would become ill. The social and medical infrastructure would quickly collapse.
Within hours, every person infected in the initial wave would start coughing up blood, in some cases vomiting. Septic shock would set in. Some people would wander in anxious confusion, their hearts racing, rasping for breath. Others, their blood pressure plummeting, would collapse where they stood. As airborne bodily fluids were inhaled, spreading the infection further, the panic would be well under way—the military sent in, the quarantine, the armed theft of vehicles to get out, the traffic accidents, the accidental shootings as people sought to protect themselves, the intentional shootings as people did protect themselves, the suicides off the bridges.
The death rate would be nearly one hundred percent above the tunnels and seventy to eighty percent in the rest of the city. There would be no escape—and anyone who did would infect more Americans.
Jintao glanced again at the small piece of paper that his deliveryman had brought to him just before he left his office. The source was unidentified but Jintao knew it was from the cell leader. Written upon the paper was only: măn yi. “Satisfied.”
When he exited the Transamerica Pyramid, Jintao passed the Mark Twain Plaza and smiled. That location had always pleased him, almost more than any other in the city. The bow of the Niantic, a triple-masted ship from the mid-nineteenth century, was still buried somewhere beneath the plaza. The Niantic had originally transported goods from China, the usual tea, silk, and most likely, opium hidden in the hold. The ship was then converted into a whaling vessel. Jintao considered that singularly appropriate as his harpoon was sharpened for this bloated behemoth that he was about to depart, forever.
~ * ~
When they were still an hour out of San Francisco, Jack got a text from Doc. He gave the phone to Dover to read.
“He says that Abe and his boat are MIA and there’s something strange at the Farallon Islands. He did a flyover. He wants you to go out there with him as soon as possible.”
“Tell him we’ll take the Sea Wrighter. Ask him how fast he can get her to a marina on the San Francisco side to pick us up.”
Dover started texting. Jack felt a twinge of guilt. He hadn’t thought about Abe since he left Sausalito on his Defever. Their friend was an adult who was known to go off on mushroom-induced “walkabout” adventures from time to ti
me. Still, the news about the boat was troubling.
Dover read a new text. “He says he can get to the side-tie wharf in the marina by seven.”
Jack looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was six o’clock. They could make it if they went straight there.
“OK, that’s good,” Jack said. “Ask him to bring sweaters, since we’re not dressed for nighttime boating.”
“Will do. He should probably walk Eddie first,” she said.
“If Doc’s worried, we don’t have time,” Jack said. “Eddie will use the shower stall. Survival mode.”
“You trained him to do that?”
“It was either that or a scrub brush and Simple Green,” Jack said.
Jack fell silent then. His mind was still on the Chinese situation—more so than it was before. The picture was naggingly incomplete.
He said out loud, “The real story here is not what we’ve been looking into but something Hawke revealed.”
A Time for War Page 29
