by Sam Powers
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Codename Water had chosen an out-of-the way spot, in a parking garage attached to a suburban outlet mall.
Ben flashed his cars lights once he saw her approaching.
The woman in the dark beret and stylish brown overcoat looked around cautiously before climbing into his vehicle and closing the door.
‘This parkade has non-functioning cameras on this level and at the entrance,’ she said without so much as introducing herself. ‘There’s no chance of your vehicle being spotted. But use the second identity to purchase a used sedan before the two of you leave. On the possibility that Fire has been spotted or identified, he should travel in the backseat and keep low until you’re at the target zone.’
‘The priest has been taken care of,’ Ben said. ‘The afternoon newscasts pegged it as a suspected electrical fire, so they know it’s a homicide and are trying to keep the details out of the press.’
‘He was not compromised?’
‘We performed a full sweep of the street and church over the weekend and there was no evidence of any cameras or surveillance. I suspect it was completely clean.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Fire is essential to the objective. Have you obtained everything you need?’
‘I have.’
‘And you’ve run the system?’
‘I have not, not yet. I’ll wait until we’re a little closer. Even with a well-disguised trail, any geolocation they turn up would give them D.C. and New York, and that would get someone’s attention.’
‘Fine. You know the security best. The list I messaged you is still good. Any one of those five will be present, and none are using proper care with their email. You’ll phish them?’
He nodded. ‘As a first effort. It usually works, if the email is skilfully constructed. In the event that it doesn’t, the fact that three of five ignore using encrypted message apps…’
She understood. Each of them had been trained to continue educating themselves, filling in the required skill sets as the years passed. Air’s skill was computers, hacking, although he was also fully trained in field medicine and small arms. Once he had compromised his target, they would be able to ensure that no one above her rank introduced any last-minute surprises. ‘Is Fire performing optimally?’
‘I believe so. His anger seems sufficiently suppressed for now. He… mentioned an incident…’ Ben had considered not raising it, but his training was thorough. ‘He had an altercation with a neighbor in Detroit…’
She frowned. ‘You should have alerted me to this earlier.’
‘It’s nothing…’
‘It has the potential to be a wild card, so it is definitely something. Whether it’s something we shall have to handle? That’s another question.’
Ben nodded agreement. ‘I’ll keep you informed if anything comes of it. You’re heading there tomorrow?’
‘Contact me when you’re ready,’ she said. ‘Fire’s contact in New Jersey is in place?’
‘He is. He does not know we’re coming however, as you suggested.’
‘Good.’ She opened the car door and got out, then walked toward the mall entrance. A moment later, Ben started the car, backed it out of the spot, and drove away.
33/
A VALLEY SOUTHWEST OF MAINDUHEZHEN, Inner Mongolia.
Brennan woke to the morning sun creeping across the car’s windshield, the bright light shining through his closed eyelids. His head hurt, dreams of being caught again by the Black Cranes fading away. The car was on a bumpy surface, like a country road. Chu was still behind the wheel.
The American looked back. Lee was asleep on the rear seat, slumped under the window. ‘Where are we? What time is it?’ he asked Chu in Cantonese.
‘It’s just before eleven, and we’re southwest of Hulunbeier, in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. It’s the last major stop before the Mongolian and Russian borders,’ Chu explained.
Brennan looked out the window. They were on a plain, in what appeared to be a vast valley, low-level mountains – or perhaps very large hills – surrounding them. The fields were filled with wild grass at chest height, though the area around the road was scrupulously maintained. ‘It looks like Idaho.’
‘Doubtless, like Mongolia, a hub of culture and refinement,’ Chu said sarcastically, his English perfect and tinged with an upper-crust accent.
Brennan stared at him judgmentally for a few seconds. ‘You know, Mr. Chu, you’re kind of a snob.’
‘Discerning, my good man, discerning,’ he said. ‘There’s a difference.’
‘It’s true.’ Lee had woken up, and she leaned forward, so that her head was between the two front passengers. ‘Jackson doesn’t care if you’re rich and snooty or poor and basic, so long as he can get his hands on your money.’
‘And if that isn’t the true spirit of egalitarianism, I don’t know what is,’ Chu replied.
‘That’s also true,’ she said. ‘He really doesn’t.’
‘Very funny, Ms. Lee. Nonetheless, I’m the one helping the two of you, against my own better judgment.’
‘And out of the goodness of your heart?’ Lee’s tone was snide. ‘Please, Jackson! If word got around Macau that you have a heart…?’
‘I know, my reputation would be ruined.’ Chu reached down to the center console under the armrest and retrieved a brown-filtered Dunhill cigarette from a gold-and-scarlet pack. ‘No… as I said, Mr. Brennan shall owe me a favor of equal or lesser value, to be determined, as we bargained back in Harbin.’
‘What else?’ Brennan said. ‘That’s a nebulous reward at best. You’re assuming we even make it out of the country. You’re taking a hell of a risk for not much chance of a return. I’m guessing your father back at Black Crane Central is going to want to tan your hide.’
‘Oh… I imagine he’ll want to do worse than that,’ Chu said. ‘But… I have a personal stake in this matter, this… ‘Legacy’ situation, whatever it may be.’
Lee’s attention perked up. ‘And what might that be?’ She’d been a poker player for long enough to keep her tone light, though she was sure it was making the smug American smirk again.
‘I had a cousin, a dear friend to my brother and uncle. He was a superintendent with the Hong Kong Police, and tasked with interviewing your colleague in Kowloon, Mr. Brennan…’
‘The raid. The two men shot in the police station the same night.’
Chu nodded but did not elaborate. ‘And so now we are here, enjoying the banal beauty of a place no one goes and a road no one uses.’ He flicked his cigarette ash into an ashtray mounted under the stereo.
‘Aiyah!’ Lee bickered. ‘Lower a window if you’re going to smoke those terrible things.’
‘Apologies,’ Chu offered. ‘But I’ve been good so far. That was only half a pack since we left Harbin last night.’
‘You’re practically the surgeon general of the middle of nowhere,’ Brennan offered. ‘And about that… are we heading somewhere in particular?’ He glanced out the window again. They hadn’t seen another vehicle for miles, the same fields of long, fallow grass passing endlessly.
‘You wanted to meet Master Yip? This is where we need to be. He’s ancient. He doesn’t have a phone, and he doesn’t stray into the city often.’ Then he glanced toward the back seat. ‘Did either of you bring some money or something?’ He’ll expect some tribute of some kind.’
‘Brennan?’ Lee asked.
He looked back with a withering glance. ‘You’re a multi-millionaire poker player and you want me to pick up the tab?’
‘You can expense it,’ she reasoned. ‘I’m not supposed to be here, remember?’
‘Maybe… I’m not even sure where here is…’ Brennan began to say. The car crested a swale in the land, the road running up and over a steep hill. As they reached its summit, he got a view of the valley ahead.
The town was a few miles away, but even at distance something was different about it, off from everything else he’d seen in Asia. I
t was just a few buildings and streets, but it almost felt…
‘Heads up,’ Chu said, breaking his concentration. The driver gestured toward the bottom of the hill a few hundred yards ahead. ‘There’s a checkpoint up here.’
‘A checkpoint?’ Lee leaned forward again. ‘Why on Earth would there be a checkpoint in the middle of nowhere.’
‘Well… that’s the thing. Master Yip lives in what was once an official nuclear test zone.’
Brennan’s head swiveled quickly to his left. ‘WHAT?!?’
‘I… may have neglected to mention this earlier,’ Chu said.
Lee took a deep breath, as if trying to shed the weight of his omission. ‘You may indeed.’
‘If it helps, Master Yip has always insisted the warning was greatly overstated for political reasons.’
‘Probably not,’ Joe said. ‘Background radiation has a tendency to stick around for… oh… millions of years.’
Chu shrugged. ‘I’ve been here a few times. I’ve never had a problem.’
‘Yes, Jackson,’ Lee said, ‘but that’s because you have poor impulse control, like most criminals, and are of ill health generally, because you smoke, drink and sleep with whores.’
‘Also all true,’ he admitted.
They reached the checkpoint and he slowed the car to a halt. A white-and-red gate barred the road, extending from a booth.
‘What now?’ Brennan asked.
‘I don’t know, to be perfectly frank,’ Chu said. ‘Master Yip always knew that I was coming and met me here.’
Lee seemed unimpressed. ‘Because… he didn’t want to bother you, or because there’s nuclear waste past this point?
‘As I said… I don’t really know.’
The booth’s rear door opened and a boy walked out. He was perhaps ten, in shorts and a faded old t-shirt, a pair of simple sandals on his feet. He shielded his eyes from the morning sun as he checked them out; then he walked over to the bar and lifted it, leaning his slight form on one end as the other rose and unblocked their path.
The boy walked around the front of the car to the driver’s side and made a motion for Chu to lower the window.
The boy spoke rapidly in an accent Brennan could not follow. Chu nodded, then turned to his passengers. ‘Master Yip will meet us. He is in the last house, at the end of the main street, according to the boy.’
‘I didn’t get a word of that,’ Brennan admitted.
‘Ulanchaab Baarin,’ Lee murmured. ‘It’s a local dialect. They forced us to learn it at the academy and I think I’ve used it exactly once.’
‘Oh yeah? When?’
‘About six seconds ago.’
The boy walked back to the booth and re-entered it as Chu did up his window. The Black Crane boss pulled the car back onto the road. The asphalt ribbon continued for another mile before dipping into a gulley and banking to the left in a long ‘s’ turn. As the Infiniti exited the last turn, a sign on the left side of the road grew nearer, until it was the size of a small billboard. The colors had faded to muted shades over time, but the picture under the type was still visible, a Middle American kitchen scene from the Fifties, a mom with curls and pearls pouring milk on her boy’s cereal while a pipe-smoking dad in a brown waistcoat looked on approvingly, over the top of a newspaper.
Splayed across the sign in a Disney-ish script were the words “Welcome to Plenty, Montana!
‘What the actual fuck...’ Brennan began to mutter, before Lee hushed him.
‘Shhh… Slow down, Jackson! I’m trying to read the second line,’ she said. ‘Home of the world’s largest bison, Matilda. Population 1,412. A family kind of place!’
Brennan turned slightly to face her as Chu stopped the car. ‘It doesn’t make any sense, does it?’
Chu was nonplussed. ‘Didn’t your government also set up fake towns to see the effects of their weapons tests? I imagine that’s precisely what this is.’
Lee shook her head. ‘No, Brennan’s right; this doesn’t make sense. The test towns were clapboard, false fronts and streets, and the building were generally razed in any blast. And all of China’s sites on that scale are well-documented in reports to international nuclear regulatory bodies. This place looked like a pristine town from two miles away…’
The car carried them up the other side of the gulley and over a small hill. Brennan saw the sign before anyone else, coming up on the left, a spindle of rusting iron with bubbled and peeling off-white paint, shooting up from the long grass; on top, an oval logo was stained with bird dung, holes punched through its glass veneer by the ravages of weather and nature. But he could read the ‘76’ logo underneath the mess, and see the clear plastic shelf, where oversized numbers once relayed the cost per gallon of motoring to locals.
Behind it, above the top of the long grass and weeds, they could see the top two-thirds of a building. ‘Lee…is this what I think it is?’ Brennan asked.
‘If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a petrol station,’ she replied. Then she saw his annoyed reaction. ‘But I’m guessing you were asking about the town. And I suspect we’re both thinking the same thing.’
‘Would one of you perchance enlighten me?’ Chu asked. A row of houses began to appear on both sides of the street, grass grown up above head height, held back at the roadside by temporary fencing that fronted each property. It appeared to have been tacked up after the fact, perhaps to protect the road and make it easier to maintain. The homes were boxy, two storeys, with sloping tile roof and siding, front pillars suggesting there was a porch back there somewhere.
Halfway along, the buildings changed to low rise brick, only a few fully visible over the grass. One had a Pepsi-Cola sign still visible above where the front door likely was, raised letters on the front fascia declaring ‘Brookman’s Pharmacy.’ Another had large white script painted on the side. ‘First Bank of Plenty. Deposits. Savings. Security. FDIC Insured.’
‘Oh, sure,’ Brennan said. ‘Even out here, they’re too big to fail.’
‘What on Earth is going on?’ Chu asked, slowing the car down again, exasperated. ‘Why is there a picturesque American town in Inner Mongolia?’
‘It’s a training town,’ Lee said. ‘Whether it was the Soviets or us, I’m unsure. This area was closely aligned with them until the Sixties, even as a de facto province of China. This is definitely more their kind of thing, and that pharmacy looked like it was from the Fifties…’
To their left, a rusted vehicle fronted one of the properties. The body had corroded and collapsed into itself, perished rubber laying on the road around the wheel hubs. On top was the tell-tale pair of ruby-red cruiser lights. ‘Straight out of Adam 12,’ Brennan said. ‘That must’ve been the police station.’
‘It looks like there are a couple of blocks of houses on each side behind the main street, but that’s about it…’ Lee said.
The road dipped once more, revealing another small valley just ahead of the hill leading out of the town. It was only a half-mile across, if that, but was just deep enough to look down from the road above, to see the top of a building the size of a football field. On the property next to it, a church steeple poked out of the overgrown field.
‘Any guesses?’ Chu asked.
‘A school,’ Brennan said. ‘If I was driving into an actual Montana town and I hadn’t seen one yet, that’s what it would be.
‘Whatever it is, it’s the last building at the end of Main Street,’ Lee said. ‘Park the car, Jackson. Let’s see if we can find the venerable Master Yip, and finally get some answers.’
Master Yip Po occupied the school office, fifteen or twenty feet from the front doors and off the main hallway. He had a cot stretched out along one wall, an oil lamp on an adjacent side table providing gloomy illumination. He was sitting at his desk when they arrived, a wizened, tiny man with a bald scalp, white mustache and goatee, and a pair of wire rimmed glasses. He ran his finger across the pages of a book, the tips tracing the lines of text so that he could follow it.
Then he heard them approach and his head tilted up slightly, cocked to one side. ‘Jackson?’ He said before they’d announced themselves. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes, Most revered Master…’
‘I knew that smell was familiar.’ The old man turned wrinkled his nose once more. ‘My eyes have almost failed me now. Who are your friends?’
‘They are government agents, Master.’
‘One American, the other Chinese. They also smell… unique. Why are they here?’
‘They require details on a project called ‘Legacy,’ Master…
His reaction was immediate, a worried look, a frown that suggested senility… or perhaps just sincere regret. He looked down at the book. ‘It… is about time, I suppose. Eventually, someone had to utter that word. This world has become one in which it was inevitable.’
‘What is it?’ Daisy asked. ‘Forgive my forwardness, Master Yip. I am with the intelligence service. You trained my mentor.’
‘Ah!’ he smiled for the barest moment at the notion. ‘The service. I am glad it is one of our own…’
‘Well… not entirely,’ Brennan interjected in Mandarin. ‘I am Joseph Brennan, an American.’
The old man nodded. ‘That is also not surprising, given everything.’
‘We know so little,’ Brennan said.
The old man struggled to rise, pushing himself to his feet using the desk as a brace. He straightened his belted robe and used his left hand to feel his way from the desk to the wall, then to the other side of the room, helping his failing vision. A filing cabinet stood against the whitewashed concrete, next to a sink and two old red-and-white metal drums. He reached down to the third drawer and haltingly pulled it open, rummaging around inside for a moment before withdrawing a stack of old film reels in metal containers. Four were locked with clips, the other in a simple carboard box. He removed it from the pile, then placed the others back in the drawer.
