War of Shadows

by Leo J. Maloney

  Lulu seemed a bit surprised, then relaxed, as if Dan had passed an unnecessary, even petty test.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said. “You could.”

  She directed him in her manipulations until they had created a little amphitheater of the oil-drum-sized cans.

  “We’ve got a network of small businesses,” she explained during the maneuver. “United in trying to keep our little country free of outside influence…”

  “And finding Smith,” Dan added.

  She lowered her head, then looked up at him craftily. “Beyond the death of my parents,” she said, “our Mr. Smith always seems to be at the very center of international influence. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  She reached behind some more barrels and pulled up a plain old laptop computer, which she then set on a barrel top, facing him.

  “Sit,” she offered, waving at a can a few feet from the computer screen.

  He did so as she punched a button on the keyboard and the screen lit up. On it was a list. A long list.

  “There are more than five hundred intelligence agencies in the world,” she said, scrolling down the list. “India alone has twenty-seven.” She looked back from the screen to stare at him. “And all of them, apparently, are after you.”

  Dan made a harrumphing sound. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” she replied. “Remember the spearman?”

  Dan straightened.

  “Apparently, he wasn’t quite dead yet,” Lulu said pleasantly. “So my boss lady had a little chat with him.” Lulu stared over Dan’s head, clearly picturing something extraordinary. “You should see that woman filet a milkfish. I’ve never seen anyone more deft with a knife.”

  Dan found that his mouth was dry. He cleared his throat. “And?”

  “Seems he said you have something they all want,” she told him. “Something you don’t know you have.”

  Dan went over everything he had experienced in the last few days, then went over it again. “Any idea what that might be?” he wondered aloud.

  “Oh, sure,” she said with a humorless smile, “and I think you and your superiors have some ideas too. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter.”

  Dan was honestly taken aback. “How can you say that?”

  Her smile took on some mirth, and she gave the smallest of shrugs. “All that matters is that everyone on this list wants it, and somehow, miraculously, knows you have it.” Her voice took on the tone of a wide-eyed teacher lecturing a group of credulous children. “Now how could something like that have happened? Who on Earth could have slipped something into your drink and told all of them”—she pointed at the laptop screen—“about it?”

  The young Taiwanese and the seasoned American operative locked eyes. They gave each other a look they both recognized. They had seen that expression on each other’s faces at least twice before. From that moment on, they would refer to it as the “Smith Face.”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out,” Dan said.

  “Then you’ve come to the right place,” Lulu replied while pressing another button.

  The screen changed to a slide show of images. He recognized location photos of the Boston Commons, Washington D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, New York City’s World Trade Center Memorial, London’s Hyde Park, Zurich’s Grossmünster Church, Moscow’s Red Square, Mumbai’s Siddhivinayak Temple, Beijing’s Forbidden City, and an impressive skyscraper that looked like an architectural bamboo reed against the sky—all of which Dan recognized, save for the final one.

  “What was that last place?” he asked her, figuring it would be important to know, if not now, then soon.

  Her expression held surprise, but then changed to a sort of realization. “Taipei 101,” she explained. “Formerly known as the Taipei World Financial Center, which, for six glorious years, was the planet’s tallest building until Dubai’s Burj Khalifa beat it.”

  “Thanks for the tour,” Dan commented as his mind whirled without success.

  “It wasn’t for your entertainment, Mr. Morgan,” Lulu assured him. “You’ve personally met the man, correct? I mean, face to face, right? Unlike me, which was face to profile.”

  “Yeah, I met the man,” Dan said.

  Lulu pressed another keyboard button. The pictures played again, in the same order, only this time, each was treated with a digital close-up on a specific person in each of the crowds.

  Dan saw Mr. Smith nine times. It was never a clear, direct shot, but it didn’t have to be.

  “Wonderful things, security cams,” Lulu mused. “So thorough. So hackable.”

  “Over how long a time were these pictures taken?” Dan asked with an edge of urgency.

  She gave him a you’re-not-as-dumb-as-I-was-afraid-you-were smile.

  “Two weeks,” she told him. “And the last shot was forty-two hours ago. Whatever he was doing in each of those places, it was a surgical, hit-and-run strike. And I think, and I think you think, it was leading up to today. Now.”

  “How did you focus in on those pics?” he wondered. “I—I mean we—have been trying to track Smith for years and got nothing.”

  Lulu sat on a closed can opposite him. “You had lots of other things to do. I didn’t. And I had a dozen years head start.”

  “But, still…”

  “This is Taiwan, Mr. Morgan,” she sighed. “The country that a certain big mommy wants to make sure is always under the radar. Why do you think you recognized all those other world landmarks but not Taipei 101? So while the rest of the world overlooks us, or purposely looks the other way, we’re free to develop all manner of helpful stuff, including facial recognition software and behavioral algorithms that make even Apple and Microsoft look like Dick and Jane.”

  Dan had stopped trying to identify all the young woman’s pop culture allusions, but there was one word she used that all but slapped him.

  “Algorithms,” he repeated, eyes narrowing.

  Lulu went on. “Yep. Helpful, insidious things. Like our own cells. One second they’re creating us, the next second they’re destroying us. All depends on whether they’re used regeneratively or degenerately.”

  Dan waved the digression away, choosing instead to stand and stare down at her, his fists clenched. “Where is he?”

  Before she could answer, Foo re-entered the back room, holding a garment bag in each fist.

  “Ready,” he interrupted with a big, relieved smile on his face.

  Lulu looked at Dan, held up a forefinger, and went over to retrieve the larger of the two garment bags. She laid it atop three closed cans in front of Dan and, with a look to make sure he was paying attention, unzipped it all the way down.

  Inside was one of the most impressive, striking tuxedoes he had ever seen.

  “Had it made as a cross between the Brioni and Brunello Cucinelli cuts,” she murmured. “Turned out pretty well, don’t you think?”

  Dan Morgan usually thought of himself as fairly balanced, but all the twists and turns this trip was taking had him wobbling. “How much was this?” was all he could think to ask.

  She smiled. “Normally around a hundred and twenty thousand dollars,” she calculated, then amended it when she caught a glimpse of his surprised face. “Oh, sorry. That’s Taiwan dollars. Around four thousand U.S. dollars.”

  “That’s not much better,” he said. “Where did you get the money?”

  Her smiled widened. “Didn’t need it. Best tailor in Taichung is a friend of the family.” Her expression became curious as she tried to read the look of stupefaction on his face. “Well, if you think the suit’s something,” she assured him, “wait ’til you see the shoes.”

  “What,” he demanded, “is all this for?”

  Lulu stepped back to take the other garment bag from Foo’s hand.

  “What do you think it’s
for?” she replied. “You want to know where Smith is, don’t you? Well, one thing I can tell you for sure, he’s not out front in the neon booth with Zen handing out betel nuts.”

  She pulled down the zipper of the second garment bag to reveal a beautiful evening gown.

  “Suit up, Mr. Morgan,” she advised with a big, evil grin on her face. “We’re going to a party.”

  Chapter 26

  The shoes really were something. So dark it was like looking into a black hole, and so comfortable it was like wearing an expert foot massager’s ever-moving fingers. After trying them on, Dan understood something he had never understood before: why any man would ever pay thousands of dollars for shoes.

  He covered his impressed surprise with another question. “Did the guy who made these also make the tux?”

  Lulu looked at him as if he had mistaken Chinese dim sum for Japanese sushi.

  “Of course not,” she replied, while putting on her own gold-stitched evening slippers. “Making clothes and shoes of this quality are two completely different arts.”

  “Let me guess,” Dan interjected while letting his eyes move up from her shoes to her dress. “Friend of the family?”

  “Of course,” she said with a grin. “And my eyes are up here.”

  Dan mirrored her grin as their eyes met. But prior to that he had taken in her transformation. She was wearing a dark blue, ankle-length cheongsam dress with a high neck, a tear-drop eyelet atop her cleavage, a side-slit down from her mid-thigh, and a subtle black lace stitching of a rising phoenix that wove up and around the entire garment.

  She, along with the dress, was stunning, but there was no way Dan was going to tell her that.

  “I think it would look better in red,” he said instead.

  “Red is the color of wedding dresses in this part of the world,” she informed him. “And we may be doing many things this evening, Mr. Morgan, but getting married will not be one of them.”

  She saw a cloud pass his face, and realized she had hit a sore spot, but did not call attention to it. Instead, Dan tried to defuse the moment.

  “You wish,” he replied with a mock sneer. “What did you do to your face, anyway?”

  He thought he was being playfully insulting, but Lulu let him know there was method to her makeup.

  “Good call,” she told him. “It’s the latest fashion for models in China, Japan, and Korea: to make them look like plastic or porcelain dolls. Some women spend thousands on surgery. I wasn’t about to go that far, even for Smith.” She stood, checked that her hair was still solidly affixed in a braided bun, and did the same ogling of him that he had done to her. “And you clean up real nice. Ready?”

  He was, and they left the shop by the same door they had entered. Dan wondered how they would both look in a CMC Zinger, but like so many things on this mission, he never got the chance to find out. The Space Wagon was gone. In its stead was a black car Dan instantly recognized as a Porsche 718 GTS.

  Three hundred and sixty-five horsepower popped into his mind. Zero to sixty in four point four seconds. Top speed a hundred and ninety miles per hour. About eighty thousand dollars…

  “What?” he asked Lulu in amazed admiration. “A friend of the family didn’t have a Pagani you could borrow?”

  She didn’t even look at him as she circled to the passenger door. “A little too showy,” she said. “There are only four Paganis in the country, and everyone knows their owners.”

  “I did good?” Foo asked her from behind the steering wheel. He was wearing a chauffeur’s jacket and hat.

  “You did fine,” Lulu assured him as she prepared to squeeze into the tiny space behind the seats.

  Dan held up his hand to stop her as he walked over to the driver’s side door. He was going to ask her what the Taiwanese word for ‘out’ was when he realized the R-comm might drown it out during translation anyway. So, he just motioned at Foo with his forefinger in what he hoped was a universal sign of “come here.”

  Foo looked at Lulu, who was standing beside the car, framed in the passenger side doorway.

  “What if we need the car from valet parking for a quick getaway?” she asked Dan.

  “What, we’re going to wait for him to drive up?” the operative exclaimed. “If all five hundred agencies are gunning for me, let them see me live this large, okay?”

  Lulu took a second to consider it. “Okay,” she said, then shooed Foo out from behind the wheel.

  Dan took his place in growing anticipation, then remembered where he was and what they were doing.

  “Where to?” he asked the beautiful “jade vase” beside him.

  She told him where and how before his foot hit the accelerator. She may have asked if he wanted a betel nut for the road. But it was drowned out by the screeching of tires and the splash of gravel across Foo’s chauffeur uniform.

  * * * *

  Dan made the twenty-mile trip to Hualien County in ten minutes flat. It would have been even faster if he hadn’t had to slow for the final stretch of farm-lined country road.

  The sun was going down as they approached, so he was able to see the mountains with seemingly endless green slopes on either side. Then she directed him to turn left at a break in some hedges as the sky began to be dotted by thousands of stars. The sports car moved along a narrow, winding gravel driveway.

  “Too much to ask where we are?” he inquired.

  Lulu was peering through the windshield, seemingly looking for any signs of trouble.

  “It’s a family resort named after the patriarch, who never chose an English name,” she told him. “So its title would be meaningless, but you have to see it to believe it.”

  “It doesn’t look like much now,” Dan commented, making sure he stayed on the gravel, rather than the bowls of grass all around them.

  “We came in the servants’ entrance,” she explained. “The head of housekeeping and food services are …”

  “Yes, I know,” he interrupted. “Friends of the family.”

  The car made it out of a glen, and moved out onto a plateau overlooking the entire property. Dan had to stop the car in a cloud of gravel just to take it all in.

  “Eighteen hundred acres,” she told him, also staring at the expanse. “Right smack dab in the middle of a neo-volcano. Part resort, part museum, part farm, part orchard, part wildlife sanctuary. Parrots, pheasants, cranes, peacocks…”

  “And that’s just the party guests,” Dan commented as he started driving the car slowly down the gravel again.

  Lulu laughed nervously at his joke. He could feel her tension rising the farther they went. And since she had shown no sign of tension before, he knew things were getting more than spearman serious. She seemed to try to deal with it by becoming a tour guide.

  “One million hand-planted trees,” she said as if a recording were playing out of her mouth. “The milk produced by the farm here is sold in 7-Elevens and Starbucks…”

  “Where are we going?” he interrupted her seemingly unconscious drone. “The barn?”

  “No,” she replied, getting ahold of herself. She pointed out the right side of the windshield. “We’re going there.”

  Spread out in the distance were three extraordinary structures in a rough frowning formation. On the right was a banquet hall, adorned in royal purple, complete with Mediterranean domes, pediments, and porticoes. On the left was a hot spring spa seemingly made as a tribute to Noah’s Ark and the Japanese Royal Palace, complete with a torii gate, bamboo paneling, and multi-colored lanterns.

  And in the center was a huge reception hall that nearly defied description. Dan would not have been able to, but Lulu tried.

  “Taiwan has been occupied by the Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese,” she said. “There are aboriginals still living here. This …this …place was created with all of them in mind.”

  D
an believed it. It looked like Eastern, Western, American, and Asian influences were fighting each other to a standstill. Out front there were Buddhas, Taiwanese folk gods, rearing bronze horses, Greek gods and goddesses, and even a marble dinosaur adorning the junctures of a giant garden which wouldn’t look out of place at Versailles. And it all was lit so brightly it probably could be seen from space.

  “We’re going there?” Dan echoed in disbelief.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Lulu said. “At least at first…”

  By the time Dan pulled the car along its circular driveway in front of the main entrance to the reception hall, both occupants of the Porsche 718 were back to relatively normal. A handsome man in flowing Chinese robes opened the driver’s side door. A beautiful woman in the feminine equivalent opened the passenger’s side door. Neither valet reacted to Lulu. Both reacted to Dan—with recognition, frozen features, and up-raised eyebrows.

  Their faces returned to placid servitude, and they quickly retreated as another beautiful woman, who was even taller than Dan and even more plastic looking than Lulu, appeared at the bottom of the reception hall steps. This hostess was also wearing resplendent ancient Chinese robes that gave the local temples a run for their rainbow money.

  “Mr. Morgan,” she said. “You are expected. This way please.”

  The woman acted as if Lulu didn’t exist, but Dan didn’t. He waited until she had reached his side before following the hostess.

  They all entered what appeared to be a massive hunting lodge, with huge beams, fireplaces, gigantic furniture ripped from trees, and a big menagerie of taxidermied animals—as well as many more animal heads mounted in every open wall space. Dan wouldn’t have been surprised to see the spearman’s head tucked in the crook of a vaulted ceiling.

  Amid all this was, apparently, the cocktail party of the year. Dan took a second to take it all in, as well as study the faces of every party guest he could see. There was every color, sex, size, and shape, adorned in everything from silk pajamas to highly decorated military uniforms. But there was not a single person he recognized.