“You going to smoke that?” Gideon asked, eyeing the torpedo-shaped aluminum tube.
“No, you are. I like watching a man smoke a cigar.”
Giving in to his baser instincts, Gideon removed the cigar, ran it under his nose. It was very fine. He cut off the end with the supplied trimmer and lit it.
Jackson eyed him sideways. “Like I said. You look good with a cigar.”
“Let’s just hope I don’t get cancer and they have to cut my lips off.”
“Such nice lips, too.” She sipped her drink, still looking at him. “You know, I’ve never seen anyone with quite your looks. Jet black hair, bright blue eyes.”
“Black Irish. Except I’m not Irish.”
“I’ll bet you sunburn easily.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Here, so far from home, Jackson seemed like a different person. “You have any idea what those numbers mean?” he asked her.
“Not yet. I’ve already phoned them in.”
“I’d like to know if they find anything.”
Jackson remained silent. The band slid into another Ellington classic, “Mood Indigo.”
Having given her the numbers, Gideon felt he could push just a little harder. “So tell me more about this Nodding Crane character. He sounds like something out of a Bond movie.”
“In a way he is. A bred assassin. We know very little about him — comes from the Chinese far west, of Mongolian extraction, got more than a little Genghis Khan in him. He was raised — so we hear — in a special training unit that immersed him in American culture. Employed by the 810 Office, apparently.”
“The 810 Office?”
She looked at him strangely. “For an operative, even a private one, you’re unusually ignorant.”
“I’m a new hire.”
“The 810 Office is the Chinese version of the Gestapo or the KGB, only smaller and more focused. It’s under the personal control of a few top Communist Party officials. Nodding Crane is one of their best men, and it appears he’s been chemically and hormonally pumped up. He’s trained to the max, but he’s not the crude killing machine you might think. He’s intelligent and, like I said, steeped in American pop culture. I saw one report that says he plays bottleneck guitar. Blues.”
“Seems hard to believe. But if he’s so good, why did he fuck up with Wu?”
“Fuck up? His orders were to kill Wu and escape. And that’s exactly what he did. The collateral damage was of no consequence — to him.”
“But he didn’t get the plans.”
“He didn’t expect to — not then. That’s phase two. He’s working on that now.”
“Why’s he after me?”
“Come on, Gideon. There are half a dozen witnesses who saw you writing down those numbers. He doesn’t need the numbers — his job is to make sure anyone who knows them is dead.”
Gideon shook his head, took a small puff from the cigar. “If he’s that good, I’d be dead already.”
“You’ve been awfully clever so far. Or maybe it’s dumb luck. Thing is, you’re unpredictable. Going to Hong Kong — that’s the last move anyone would have expected.”
“You expected it.”
“Not at all. There’s a general alert on you at the airports, your exit was flagged. When you return to the States, Nodding Crane’ll be waiting for you. I doubt you’ll survive.” She smiled and fished an olive out of the glass, lobbed it into her mouth.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. I might point out that now I’ve told you the numbers, you’re a target yourself.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
He took another puff. “How could Wu just walk off with the plans, anyway?”
“Maybe he’d been considering it for some time. He’s one of their top people, he’d have had complete access. It could be the honey trap was the final push he needed.”
“How do you know he even had the plans?”
“That’s the intelligence we received. It was expensive, and it’s ironclad.”
“Could the scientist himself be a red herring? A setup?”
“Doubtful.”
“Any specifics about the weapon itself?”
“That’s the scariest part. We don’t know if it’s an enhanced thermonuclear device or something completely new. The mix of scientists at Lop Nor suggests the latter — there’s a lack of nuclear physicists and HE experts on site, but a lot of metallurgists, nanotechnologists, condensed matter and quantum physicists.”
“Quantum physicists? It sounds like it might be an exotic particle weapon — a laser weapon, mini black hole — or even a matter — antimatter device.”
“You’re smarter than you look. What exactly do you do at Los Alamos, anyway?”
“I design and test high-explosive lenses.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s classified. Suffice to say they’re lenses of conventional high explosive that go into the assemblies used for imploding the cores of nuclear devices.”
She took another sip of her drink. “And just how does somebody go about getting background experience for a job like that?”
Gideon shrugged. “Well, in my case, I liked blowing things up.”
“You mean, like cars? People?”
“Nah. Started out as kid stuff. I used to make my own pyrotechnical devices, mixed my own gunpowder. Fireworks, sort of. I’d set them off in the woods behind our house and charge neighborhood kids a quarter to watch. Later on they proved to have…other uses.” He yawned.
“Quite the renaissance man. Want to order food?”
“I’m too tired to eat.”
“Tired? In that case, should we book two rooms?” Her voice trailed off and her lips curled into a suggestive smile.
He looked at her green eyes, glossy hair, freckled nose. He could see the pulse in her throat throbbing softly. “Not that tired.”
She dropped a fifty on the table and rose. “Good. I’d hate spending the government’s money on a room if no one’s going to use it.”
37
Roger Marion locked and bolted the door to his apartment with a sigh. It was a busy Thursday in Chinatown and Mott Street had been awash with humanity, the animal murmur still filtering up into his apartment through the closed and barred windows looking onto the fire escape facing the street.
He paused to collect himself, to reestablish the center of calm destroyed by the city’s incessant chaos. He closed his eyes, entered into stillness, and performed the set of movements known as mile shenyao, his motions free and unconstrained. He could feel the Law Wheel turning, turning, forever turning.
When the exercises were complete, he went into the kitchen to make tea. Placing the kettle on to boil, he took down the heavy iron teapot and a can of loose white tea, arranging them on the counter. Just before the water came to a boil he removed the kettle, poured some water into the iron pot to heat it, swished it around and dumped it out, spooned in a batch of curly white tea leaves, and covered them with more hot water. He carried the pot and cup into the living room and found a man standing in the middle of the room, arms crossed, a smile on his face.
“Tea, how lovely,” said the man in Chinese. He was dressed in a nondescript suit, white shirt, gray repp tie; his face was as smooth and unlined as a bolt of silk; his eyes cool and empty, his movements graceful. Underneath the clothes, Marion could see he was a perfect specimen of lean athleticism.
“It must steep,” said Marion, revealing no surprise, although it astonished and confounded him that the man had been able to enter the apartment. “Allow me to bring another cup in for you.”
The man nodded and Marion turned, going back into the kitchen. As he took the cup down from the cupboard, he eased a small knife out of a block on the counter and slipped it behind his back.