Power and Empire

by Marc Cameron

  Moco pounded his fist against the steering wheel, causing dust to rain down from the headliner of the S-10 pickup. He had to be the luckiest son of a bitch in the world.

  The tat—a skulled female figure with scythe and beckoning bony fingers—was a prison job he’d gotten while incarcerated in Huntsville’s Eastham Unit. The guy running the block had suggested the design—as long as Moco was ready for what went along with it—and sent him to another guy who worked in the kitchen. This other guy was a crazy old Mexican artist from Reynosa who used ink from the soot of burned baby oil mixed with pages from the Bible.

  That ink must have been some potent shit, because La Santa Muerte had protected Moco well over the years—if you didn’t count the nickel he did in Darrington for selling a tiny bit of black-tar heroin to an undercover cop in Bridgeport, Texas. The state was serious about punishing drug crimes. But nobody shanked him while he was inside, and that was saying something in a place as bloody as Darrington.

  La Santa Muerte was sure as hell looking out for him today. At first he’d been pissed that his truck had broken down, but if the alternator had not gone out he and Gusano would have been inside Chicas Peligrosas when the Feds showed up—which meant they would have tried to put him back inside, which in turn meant he would have shot it out and very likely ended up dead. But that hadn’t happened, thanks to La Santa Muerte.

  Now he watched as his friends were frog-marched one by one out the front door of the strip club, hands cuffed behind their backs, and stuffed into waiting cop cars. A tall Hispanic and a pissed-looking redhead, both wearing FBI raid jackets, came out last, flanking that asshole Eddie Feng. Moco had never trusted that guy. He was always snooping around, paying good money for girls who weren’t worth a dime bag, and asking questions about things that were none of his business. One way or another he was behind this.

  Moco used his cell phone to snap photos of as many of the cops as he could, paying special attention to the ones in the FBI jackets. The curly-haired bitch was in charge. He could tell by the way she carried herself, all haughty and nose in the air. Goya hated girls like that—and so did his boss. Oh, yeah, the patrón would be most interested in this one. Moco grinned at the thought of what they’d do to her.

  The boss had some very special methods to deal with bitches who got in the way of his operation.

  12

  The man known as Coronet sat on the flimsy plastic chair on Roxas Avenue. He would have liked to put his back against something more substantial than a wooden utility pole, but it was the best he could do. He was working, after all, and in his line of work, danger was a given.

  Davao City, Philippines, was familiar to security experts and foreign policy wonks because of its crime—and the mayor’s brutal crackdown to curb it. Attention spans being what they were, interest waned until someone set off a bomb in Davao’s Roxas Night Market, killing fifteen and wounding seventy. The radical Islamic terror group Abu Sayyaf, based in the southern Philippine islands of Jolo and Basilan, had claimed, and then denied, responsibility. There had been arrests, but none of those arrested had been affiliated more than tangentially with Abu Sayyaf. Coronet made it a priority to find out who was behind the bombing. In his business, bombers who did not get themselves captured were good people to have on the payroll.

  Coronet himself had never been arrested—though he’d done plenty to deserve incarceration, and in some countries, something a little more permanent.

  He’d been identified as a likely candidate for intelligence work when he was nineteen years old and flunking out of National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu. NCTU was considered one of the top schools in Taiwan, and just getting in was an accomplishment. He’d majored in business management with a minor in foreign languages—and proved a brilliant, if extremely lazy, student. His near perfect memory allowed him to score top marks on every test. But he couldn’t be bothered with any essays or projects. His professors, especially the females, were smitten by his charm. None of them wanted him to fail, which allowed him to hang on far longer than he should have—and long enough for an agent of mainland China to make contact.

  Over drinks one night, an English professor named Wang promised that if Coronet would commit himself and finish his studies, there would be a job for him that would be more exciting than he could possibly imagine. There was great adventure to be had for a man who could go places without being noticed. According to the professor, Coronet’s medium complexion and innocuous Asian face gave him an ambiguous ethnicity, allowing him to blend in with one group or another in most parts of the world. In addition to being brilliant, the younger man’s inconspicuous looks, medium stature, and a combination of fearlessness and brains put him in the Goldilocks Zone for work as an intelligence officer.

  Looking back, Professor Wang had known all the right words to say to hook the naive young man who’d eventually become Coronet, and whip him into a frenzy.

  Goldilocks Zone indeed.

  He was thirty-two now, and he worked hard to stay “just right” for his job. So far he’d retained the thick black hair that he kept neatly trimmed and just long enough to part on the side. His slim, athletic build looked especially good in his lightweight blue European blazer and khaki linen slacks. Some might say that he was overdressed for a visit to the night market, where T-shirts and flip-flops were de rigueur. His mentor in the business warned him that he’d grown up watching too much James Bond—but Coronet held firm to the notion that while one could be underdressed, it rarely hurt to dress well. Apart from the Mandarin of his native Taiwan, Coronet spoke Cantonese, English, and Malay. He did not, however, speak Tagalog, and it was a thorn in his paw that he could not understand most of the people in the crowd around him. He’d not survived the last seven years in his present employment by being oblivious to his surroundings. Meetings with men who cut off other men’s heads as a matter of course required a heightened sense of awareness.

  A sea of people chattered in Tagalog and English amid the smells of grilling meat and burned sugar, munching on skewers of fried chicken intestine, or, if they’d braved the insanely long queue, a cone of Mang Danny’s ice cream. Coronet used the varied composition of the crowd to his advantage. To tourists, he looked like a local. To locals, he was a dandy tourist. To roaming police—whose presence had increased tenfold since the bombing—he was too well dressed to be a militant.

  His vantage point by the utility pole gave him a direct view across Roxas Avenue, where a girl in a pink T-shirt sold lemonade and other colorful drinks. The man Coronet had come to meet had never seen him before, so he sat, eating his grilled chicken kebab, and did not worry that he sat just fifty feet away from his dead drop.

  He’d worked in places far more pleasant than the Philippines. The humidity was stifling and the native tongue harsh against his ear. Trash sometimes obscured the broken concrete. Homeless children begged for food when they saw his nice clothes. Many of the smells caused him to gag outright.

  And he loved every minute of it.

  There was something invigorating about a city where leftist Sparrow units, police death squads, and radical Islamic terrorists roamed the filthy streets. A public outcry and government crackdowns had pushed the violence underground, but just barely. Murders happened in the jungle instead of on city streets. Graves were dug deeper. Mouths kept shut. But the same killers were still out there. Coronet was sure of that.

  He was, in fact, counting on it.

  Five minutes before his contact was due to arrive, a HiLux pickup truck backed into a stall a dozen feet down from where Coronet chewed on his kebab. The sudden smell was nauseating, and he felt sure he must have stepped in something. A quick scan of the area revealed the awful odor—as if someone had vomited up a dinner of onions and turpentine—was coming from the pile of spiky, melon-sized durian in the back of the HiLux. Nothing to be done about it now. The NFC was already in place, and this observation point was too good to
abandon, so he tried to ignore the noxious smell and focused on his mission.

  He’d placed the NFC sticker almost three hours before, just after the girl had set up her lemonade stand. Roughly an inch square, the drab, off-white adhesive paper blended perfectly with the plastic folding table on which the lemonade girl set up her wares. The glare from a string of overhead lights provided plenty of shadows in the night, rendering the small sticker invisible to all but the most discerning eye. Coronet considered putting the NFC tag under the counter, but the memory of the bombing was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Applying it would have drawn no notice, but his contact would have certainly garnered plenty of attention when he came along and attempted to read it by putting his mobile phone under the counter. No, better to keep movements normal, ordinary. A mobile phone set flat on the plastic table would read the NFC in an instant and raise concerns with no one.

  Coronet loved the tradecraft even more than he loved the exotic travel. Dead drops, social engineering, disguises—he reveled in them all. He did SDRs—surveillance detection routes—even when there was no need to do so, though the longer he stayed in the business the more necessary they became. On the road, he kept to a strict regimen of push-ups and sit-ups, every morning in his hotel room. At home, he was in the gym five days a week, doing a “fight gone bad” workout or on the mat sparring with one of the many white-collar boxers who lived in his area. He’d studied kung fu from the time he was a small boy, but migrated to the harsher styles of hapkido and American boxing. Unlike James Bond, he shied away from rich food and too much booze. He limited himself to the occasional girl, always young, and always paid for.

  Like Bond, he enjoyed working alone, but he was smart enough to know when he needed help. He had a small crew of operators who worked for him, all of them young and, like him, in it for the excitement and money over any misguided idealism. Ideals were whimsical. Policies shifted and regimes toppled, leaving operators too closely aligned with any one side out in the cold.

  Coronet wasn’t particularly enamored of communist China. He could just as easily have been spying for his native Taiwan or even the United States. As a matter of fact, the ChiComs paid shit. But in order to be a provocateur for the West, one had to live in the East. That’s where the work was. Even with China’s burgeoning middle class and new social freedoms, it was still rife with the problems of a communist state. It was one thing to visit Beijing for a quick meeting or zip in and out of Kashgar to chat up some enraged Uyghur separatists. Coronet sure as hell didn’t want to live there on anything close to a permanent basis. He wanted his Internet browser free from the Great Firewall and his indiscretions overlooked, thank you very much. He’d had a gutful of communist overwatch during his six months in Suzhou while he attended satellite classes run by the Institute of Cadre Management—the Ministry of State Security’s spy school.

  He’d endured five separate polygraph examinations and countless hours of interrogation—some of it bordering on torture—all while trying to attend a school that his handler had invited him to. Other MSS methods were more insidious. Once a pretty girl had approached him in a bar and offhandedly remarked how stupid it was that there were people in the government who held fast to the Two Whatevers Policy—the political statement that “we will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.” Coronet had read enough concerning modern Chinese foreign policy to know that not even everyone in the politburo still believed in this archaic notion. He was, however, bright enough to know that no matter how handsome he was, attractive women did not approach strangers in bars and discuss politics, especially in China.

  The girl was in her mid-twenties, older than he preferred, so he’d called her an idiot and moved to another table.

  The next day he was subjected to a three-hour interview in a very cold room with a woman who said she was a psychologist. Her job, she explained, was to make the final decision as to his devotion to the state. He pointed out that it was a member of MSS who had recruited him, but the woman had just sat there, blinking at him behind her thick round glasses and smiling a bloated smile as if she had indigestion.

  In the end, she gave him a passing grade and provided instructions on where to report. Had he failed, he was told later, he would have been an unwitting class project for those already in the program and would have ended up at the bottom of Taihu Lake.

  Once admitted to intelligence training, he’d studied evasive driving, shooting, surveillance, advanced communications, killing—which his lead instructor had called by the ominous “methods for final application of lethality.” It was all great fun for a college boy, but in the end, he’d grown exhausted at the constant government scrutiny. There were certain proclivities in which he liked to indulge, practices that would get him thrown in prison in a place like China. He narrowly avoided being booted when he found and removed cameras and listening devices from his dormitory room. Tradecraft, it seemed, was to be practiced outside the walls of the facility, not in it.

  No, Coronet preferred to live in his flat near LAX, where his neighbors thought he was a simple businessman who traveled to China every year to buy greeting cards for his small company—and generally left him to his own devices. There was no way he wanted to live in China full-time. So he threw in with the East and enjoyed the comforts of his new enemy, the West. Life was good and he didn’t give a damn which side he worked for, so long as he could afford good clothes and sleep in his Egyptian cotton sheets at least a few nights each month.

  But just because he didn’t care to live full-time in a communist country didn’t mean he hadn’t listened in class. He took tradecraft, OPSEC, and PERSEC seriously. That was all part of what made the job exciting. It was a rare event that he met a contact at the first prearranged location. He preferred a rolling meet, sending the contact hustling from place to place, much like he would if he were collecting a ransom. Sometimes he just wanted to avoid the local gendarmerie, or get a preview of the contact’s state of mind. More often than not, dangerous people ran countersurveillance teams, at least one man or woman to watch their backs. Putting a contact through the trouble of going from spot to spot made these allies easier to identify while allowing Coronet to follow at a safe distance, unseen. It was the opposite of running a surveillance detection route—sending people to designated locations they did not know about until the last minute in order to ferret out any of their friends who might be following and providing cover.

  Dazid Ishmael arrived right on time, wearing a black Coca-Cola T-shirt and baggy shorts. Instead of flip-flops like most of the people here, he wore sneakers—a good choice for a ranking member of Abu Sayyaf. Wanted by the Philippine National Police, he had Red Notices filed with Interpol by national law enforcement in both Indonesia and Malaysia. He’d shaved off his trademark beard, and now looked more like a kid than a murderer, Coronet thought, but the dead and dismembered bodies he left in his wake proved his abilities many times over.

  Coronet watched as Dazid placed his mobile phone on the table, nudging the device around as he ordered a lemonade. Coronet imagined the phone reading and then registering the tag, instantly downloading the location for the next meet. The man slipped the phone back into the pocket of his shorts and shot a glance over his shoulder while he waited for his cup. Coronet glanced away, not wanting to seem overly interested—though there wasn’t much chance of him being seen at all, across the street and in the dark.

  The Near Field Communication tag made for the perfect dead drop. Working on the same principle as a touch key for a hotel room or a subway pass, the inconspicuous NFC tags contained nothing but a simple set of GPS coordinates, with the latitude and longitude transposed. Dazid would know to reverse the numbers before attempting to go to the next location. The time he’d spend transposing the two numbers also worked to Coronet’s advantage, keeping the man on site for a few extra moments. Dazid knew the dan
gers and took the security measures in stride. The incredible sum of money Coronet’s handler had authorized may have had something to do with his easygoing temperament.

  At first, Coronet noticed no one but Dazid. But when the bomber finished up with his mobile phone and headed southeast on Roxas Avenue, a man who looked suspiciously like an off-duty policeman did a double take. He was standing at a food stall with his chubby wife, a small boy of two or three clinging to his leg. The policeman obviously thought he’d seen someone important, but could not be sure in the darkness. His eyes locked intently on Dazid, and he leaned in quickly to whisper something to his wife, peeled his little boy off his leg, and then walked into the darkness to investigate.

  It was an extremely foolish thing for him to do.

  Coronet had two choices. He could disappear and let Dazid be arrested, or he could act as the wanted man’s countersurveillance. He looked at his watch and realized he truly had only one choice. There was no time to develop another asset. Groaning within himself, he got to his feet. He grabbed a paring knife from the stall next to him while the owner was busy fanning away the smoke. It was a small blade, not quite four inches long, but he’d watched the man cut chicken and knew it to be razor-sharp, perfect for his purposes.

  Coronet dropped the knife into the pocket of his jacket for the moment and fell in behind the policeman. He remained hidden in the crowd, closing the distance slowly so as not to arouse suspicion. As he walked, he took a slender canvas bag from his other pocket. Veering off the path slightly so he was along the edge of the canal, he scooped up a handful of gravel, which he poured into the mouth of the canvas tube. He repeated this procedure three times on the move, filling the tube until he had a makeshift cosh, or bludgeon, weighing a little over a pound. An American would have called it a sock full of rocks; it would make a formidable stunning weapon in the hands of someone who knew how to apply it.