by Tom Clancy
Caine tried not to look uncomfortable.
“Have you considered,” he said, “that I may have learned a few tricks from watching you on television?”
Armitage shook his head. “I occupy a unique niche. My readers and viewers don’t have to like me, just listen to me. And they will as long as my financial advice is solid … and I’m able to communicate it.” He paused and swallowed, the muscles of his throat straining to perform the basic function. “Would you like Carl to refill your glass, or should we get right down to what you wanted to discuss?”
“I’ll pass on the drink, thanks.” Caine wondered if Armitage’s brittle references to his disease were shading his own impressions of how quickly it was advancing, or whether his speech in fact seemed thicker than when they’d last sat face-to-face. It was entirely possible, he supposed. That had been well over a month ago, and the progression of ALS could be rapid even with experimental drug therapies. *‘Tell me how things went with the president of MetroBank.”
Armitage looked at him. “Don’t hold me to this, but I think I’ve convinced Halpem to accept your bid.”
Caine felt a stir of excitement. “Are you serious?”
“What’s important is that he seemed to be,” Armitage said. “Of course, he’s going to need his board of directors to rubber-stamp the sale, so it might be prudent to hold off celebrating until after he meets with them next week.”
Caine ignored the caveat. His face was suddenly hot. “Their stock comes to, what, nine percent of UpLink?”
“Closer to ten, actually,” Armitage said.
Caine made a fist and jabbed it stiffly in the air.
“Son of a bitch, this is fantastic,” he said. “Fantastic.”
They were quiet. Reynold’s crippled right hand twitched a little as a dying nerve cell in his brain misfired, his padded wrist brace rapping the armrest of his chair. Caine looked away. Nine percent, he thought. Added to the stock purchase already in the works, it would give him a hugely dominant share of UpLink. He’d have what he wanted, and so would the goddamned Chink who had him by the balls.
Several minutes passed before Armitage broke the silence.
“I hesitate to do this,” he said, “but there’s something I’d like to ask you on another subject.”
Caine shrugged absently. “Sure, go ahead.”
“It concerns the problem in Singapore . .. that Black-bum fellow who was poking around over there.”
“Forget it,” Caine said. “It’s finished.”
Armitage cocked an eyebrow.
“How was it taken care of?” he asked.
Caine shook his head like a dog shaking water off its fur. The subject troubled him and he didn’t like it impinging on his thoughts. What was it with Armitage’s seeming compulsion to make him uneasy?
“I neither know nor have any interest in knowing,” he said.
“Has anyone conclusively determined why the man was spying on you?” Armitage persisted.
“I told you, I stick to running my business. It isn’t my direct concern.”
“Not yet, anyway,” Armitage said flatly.
Caine shot him a glance. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t be irritated,” Armitage said. “I’m only pointing out that you’d do well to stay on top of even the more disagreeable aspects of your endeavors. If my health problems have taught me anything, it’s that control can slip away in a blink.”
Caine set his glass down on the table beside his chair.
“Well, thank you for the advice,” he said, and rose to his feet. “I’ll put it under my belt.”
The thin, vaguely scornful grin had returned to Armitage’s face.
“Leaving already?” he asked.
Caine nodded,
“I have a flight home to catch tonight,” he said. “As you suggest, I need to keep a close eye on things, which includes making sure the Left Coast hasn’t fallen into the Pacific while I’ve been away.”
Armitage regarded him steadily, “Marcus, my friend,” he said. “You’re finally learning.”
“This is all a bad dream,” Ed Burke said. “Right?”
“I wish,” Charles Kirby said.
It was the bottom of the eighth in the Stealers-Slammers contest with the Slammers leading 6-0, the Stealers at bat, one man languishing on second, and the third up. Dale Lanning of the law firm of Lanning, Thomas, and Farley, a strike away from going down to obliteration.
Huddled with his teammates in the dirt patch behind home plate, Kirby watched the Slammers’ outfielders move in so close they could see the flop sweat glistening above Lanning’s upper lip. While no one would have challenged his reputation for getting legal adversaries to back away from his clients, his display of batting skills had prompted a very different reaction on the diamond.
“Maybe he’ll pull it out under pressure,” Burke said.
“I’m not optimistic.”
Kirby snatched at a cluster of dandelion pods floating past him in the diffuse early autumn light. There had been a time when you wouldn’t have seen dandelions in the city any later than mid-August, he thought. But over the past decade New York summers had gotten longer and warmer, so that fall seemed more a calender event than a true seasonal shift. The previous year, in fact, the trees had remained in lush foliage until a January freeze finally snapped the deep-green leaves off the branches. They had hit the sidewalk and scattered like bits of glazed ceramic.
Deciding he’d postoned the inevitable long enough, Kirby turned to Burke and gave him a confidential little nod, motioning him aside from the rest of the team.
”Ed,” he said, “I need to ask a favor.”
“Let me guess,” Burke said. “You want me to kill our batting ace before he causes us further humiliation.”
Kirby opened his hand and released the dandelion seeds into the air.
“Actually, I’d like you to tell me who’s behind the raid on UpLink,” he said. “I’m talking about the person moving the chess pieces.”
Burke looked at him. “What makes you think I’ve got that information?”
Kirby just shrugged. Burke pushed some dirt around with the toe of his sneaker. At the plate Lanning let a low-pitch go by, and adjusted his grip on the bat.
“I give it to you, I’m putting in a great big whopping chit,” Burke said,
Kirby nodded. And waited.
“There’s a firm called Safetech in Dan vers, Massachusetts, that designs and manufactures polymer glass replacement products,” Burke said. “Security panels, hurricane-resistant windows, antiballistic laminates, and so on. Its clients range from real-estators to department-store chains to the State Department and DEA. Safetech is the corporate entity making the acquisition ... through various offshoots.”
“The person,” Kirby said. “I want to know the per-son!”
“I was just getting to that,” Burke said. He looked down at his foot, still scuffing out tracks in the dirt. “Safetech’s front men are a pair of MIT grads who were rich with technical know-how and nothing else. When they came up with their business concept, they took it to someone who offered them an interest-free startup loan in exchange for a silent partnership in the operation. A fifty-one percent share.”
“Not an unusual deal if you need to raise finance capital,” Kirby said. “Nor is it the worst.”
Burke shrugged. “What counts is the two underfunded brainstormers found the lending terms acceptable.”
“And the identity of the generous third party is . .. ?”
Burke looked at him again.
“Marcus ‘Moneybags’ Caine,” he said. “Your boy Gordian’s number-one detractor.”
Kirby took a deep breath, released it, and gazed out at the plate in time to see Dale Lanning swing his bat a mile high of the ball.
Burke bent to pick their gloves up of the ground, and handed one to Kirby.
“That’s allll, folks,” he said, frowning. “Time for us to let the prosecutor
s score more points. I’m telling you, this has got to be a goddamn nightmare.”
Kirby appeared to be looking out across the field at something Burke couldn’t see.
“It is,” he said, slipping on his glove. “It very definitely is.”
ELEVEN
SOUTH KALIMANTAN, INDONESIA
SEPTEMBER 22, 2000
ALTHOUGH IT WAS ONLY A LITTLE PAST EIGHT IN the morning, Zhiu Sheng had noticed a dramatic reduction of trade at the floating market as the motor canoe brought him to where the waterway narrowed and the wooden stilt houses of impoverished locals came crowding up on either bank. Most of the peddlers and buyers had appeared at daybreak, preferring to get their business out of the way before the heat and humidity became too oppressive—the former with their goods displayed on the decks of small boats or log rafts, the latter poling along in shallow dugouts, or arriving via klotoks like the one he had hired, forming long lines of slow-moving watercraft in the canals twisting through outer Banjarmasin like the tentacles of some languorous octopus.
Zhiu saw small boats loaded with bananas, star fruits, lichees, melons, and salaks; with green vegetables; with fish, eel, Cray, and frog; with selections of precooked foods. Conspicuously, he did not see a single vender selling chicken meat, once the largest source of animal protein for Indonesia‘s citizens, now an imported delicacy served mainly to foreigners in Jakarta‘s expensive restaurants. Rising feed prices coupled with the devaluation of the rupiah had devastated the poultry industry when the so-called ”Asian miracle” lost its glow, resulting in most of the native breeding stock being liquidated. The American chicken farmers had moved in to exploit the livestock shortage and essentially captured the market… their success ironically assured by the greed of Chinese and Malaysian feed producers, who had refused to lower their prices or extend credit to the Indonesians.
Zhiu understood supply and demand, but it vexed him nonetheless.
He rode in silence, looking with steady fascination at the other vessels winding along the canal. In addition to the market craft, there were postal boats, water buses, and tublike rice barges with sailcloth tops wobbling toward docks at the city center. It was a scene that brought back memories of his last visit to this district nearly three decades ago, when Sukarno’s PKI was at its height of power and had sought to establish a united Communist front with the government in Beijing. He had come, then, as an official envoy of Zhou Enlai to help organize state construction projects … a straightforward assignment for a man whose revolutionary passion was still in full blush.
Like many things in life as one became older, the circumstances of his present trip were laced with greater complexity, Zhiu thought.
He accepted the differences and rarely looked back on his beginnings, but supposed returning to this place after so long a duration of years had made him reflective. How hard Sukarno had struggled to eradicate the stain of Western cultural influence, and how painfully he would have viewed its indelibility. Even here it could not be ignored. A few moments earlier, a group of white tourists had darted past in rented speedboats, reminding him of noisy macaques with their round eyes, sunburned red cheeks, and loud excited voices. But he’d clamped down on his annoyance, preferring, as always, to look on the bright side. At least the water spouted by their outboards dispelled the mosquitos, and added a relieving coolness to the semblance of a breeze coming off the Barito River.
”Pelan-pelan saya,” Zhiu told his canoe guide in Mandarin-accented Bahasa. He pointed toward a woman selling rice cakes from a boat that had been cobbled out of warped old boards.
The canoe man cut his motor, paddled up to the rickety boat, and reached down beside him for a bamboo pole with a nail fastened to one end. Extending the pole across his bow, he speared a rice cake for Zhiu Sheng and held it out for him to sample.
Zhiu took a bite, swallowed, and tossed a bronze-colored coin onto the vender’s deck.
”Terima kasi banyak,” she said, smiling with gratitude.
Zhiu instructed the guide to restart the outboard, and settled back for his light breakfast.
A short while later, the canoe man turned a bend in the canal, swung toward a house and rice bam overhanging the near bank, and informed his passenger they had reached their destination. Zhiu did not bother saying that he’d already guessed it for himself. The further they had progressed beyond the market, the more he’d sensed eyes watching from behind shuttered windows, and noticed hard young men tracing his progress with quick, covert glances from the walkways connecting the ramshackle structures.
Khao Luan was like a feudal warlord to the people of this area, giving them just enough to keep them loyal, but not so much that they might become independent of him.
Now the canoe man again silenced his engine, and rowed up to a ladder running into the muddy water from the dwelling’s front door. Three teenagers sat on separate rungs—two boys in faded denim shorts and T-shirts, and a girl wearing similar shorts and a halter of some sheer, revealing material that had been tied below her breasts to expose her midriff. There was a kind of affected sexuality about her that at once saddened and disgusted Zhiu Sheng. The boys also seemed to be playacting at roles they did not quite grasp, sitting with their shoulders hunched and smoking unfiltered cigarettes as they listened to an enormous radio blasting out American rock music.
They slouched under the hot sun, staring into the water as if they might find something other than aimless drifts of reeds and sediment beneath its torpid surface.
The Asian miracle, Zhiu Sheng thought dryly.
He saw them raise their eyes from the crawling water as his guide brought the canoe up beside the ladder. All of them had bad complexions. All looked dirty and undernourished. Their expressions were bored and impassive and uniformly sullen.
He waited until the canoe had been lashed into a berth composed of four vertical bamboo poles, then paid the guide, lifted his carryall onto his shoulder, and rose to step ashore.
The teenagers watched him a moment longer. Then the taller of the boys stood up to block his approach, crossing his arms over his puffed-out chest, doing what he thought was expected of him under some artificial standard of toughness.
It would probably kill him in a streetfight before he was twenty.
Zhiu Sheng finished his rice cake, then rubbed his fingertips together to wipe off its pasty residue.
“Saya mahu laki bilik,” he said from the prow of the boat. “I’m here to see the men inside.”
The tall boy stared down at him, letting his cigarette dangle from his lips the way they did in American gangster movies. The smoke curling from its tip carried the pungently sweet odor of cloves.
“What is your name?” he asked.
Zhiu was in no mood. “Go on. Let the men know their friend from up north has arrived.”
”I asked you—”
”Berhenti!” Zhiu checked him with a motion of his hand. “Stop wasting my time and do it.”
The boy stared at him for a second, then turned and went up the ladder to the door, taking longer than he should have, wanting to save whatever face he could with his companions.
Let him have that, at least, Zhiu thought. He may never have anything else.
The boy knocked on the door—two slow raps, a pause, followed by three rapid ones—and waited a moment before pushing it open. Then he leaned his head through the entry and said something and waited some more. After a brief interval Zhiu heard a male voice answer from inside the house. Though the words were unclear to him, their tone was unmistakeably harsh and reprimanding.
The boy turned from the door and shooed away his friends, who climbed down to the landing and went hurrying off somewhere along the bank.
”Ma afsaya,” he said nervously, offering Zhiu Sheng a contrite bow. “I did not mean to offend—”
“Never mind.”
His patience exhausted, Zhiu brushed past him and ascended the shaky ladder, half expecting it to buckle under his feet.
He was
met at the entrance by a pair of lank, brown-skinned islanders with undulant kris tattoos on their hands. Was it not said that such a dagger could claim a victim merely by being driven into one’s shadow? Perhaps so, Zhiu thought. But ancient myths aside, he believed the semi-automatic rifles slung over the men’s shoulders would prove much more lethal.
‘ ‘Selamat datang,” one of them said. He bowed his head deferentially. “Welcome.”
Zhiu nodded and went inside.
The interior of the dwelling was a large rectangle, its floor and walls made up of bare plywood boards, the high peaked roof supported by tiers of slanting beams. Midway down the length of the right-hand wall was a closed door with a third islander standing guard in front of it. Towering and rigid, he had coarse features, long black hair, and was bare-chested under an open denim jacket with cut-off sleeves. The blockish muscles on his torso and upper arms were heavily covered with tattoos. In addition to his rifle, he carried a knife—a kris, no doubt—in an elaborately tooled leather sheath on his belt.
Zhiu ran his eyes over to the middle of the room, where the men he had come to meet—General Kersik Imman, Nga Canbera, and the drug trafficker, Khao Luan—were waiting at a long plank table.
Glancing up from a conversation with the others, Kersik was the first to acknowledge his presence.
“Zhiu Sheng, you look well,” he said, dipping his head. “How was your trip?”
“Hot, tedious, and hopefully worthwhile,” Zhiu said.
A smile touched Kersik’s thin, lined face. While the eyes below his shaggy brows were as strong and sharp as ever, he had aged a great deal over the past several months and, in civilian clothes now, possessed an almost grandfatherly mien that hid his true severity of nature.
By contrast, Zhiu thought, Canbera looked scarcely older than the children outside, and like them seemed to be working at a role that was beyond him. Political subversive, champion of the poor. His soft features and vain demeanor put the lie to it, though. As did his social position. The eldest son of a diamond baron, Nga had been bom into immeasurable wealth, and handed control of Banjarmasin‘s largest bank only to serve as a place marker on his family’s sprawling financial game board. He understood nothing of human struggle, and less of material hardship. Nor did the spoiled upper-class activists with whom he secretly consorted… and whose national reform movement he was helping to fund.
