Before Jake could respond, Lin said something to the men and they immediately turned around and briskly walked away.
“So, you speak Vietnamese,” Jake said.
She hesitated with a sigh of air through her nostrils. “Yes. Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and enough Thai to get by. You let me up now.” It wasn’t a question.
Jake considered his options, not sure if he could trust this woman. Finally, he slid to the side and sat in the grass.
She sat up. Without warning, she slapped him across his face.
“What the hell was that for?” he asked.
“Feeling me up.”
“I was searching for weapons.”
“I assure you I don’t carry my gun in my vagina.”
“Okay, you got me there.” Jake was a bit confused by her presence in Saigon. Something wasn’t working for him.
She crawled over and picked up her gun, wiped it down on her shirt, and then shoved it into the holster, covering it with her black sweater.
“There’s a problem with your story,” Jake said. “Once Remington was killed, why are you still following me? Why’d you try to kill me?”
“Where is your girlfriend?”
“Do you always answer a question with a totally unrelated question?”
“You just did the same thing.”
She had a point. “Still, why didn’t you head back to Taiwan once Remington was killed?”
They both stood up now and Jake could finally see that she had to be no more than five-four and a hundred pounds. She was a beauty, though.
She finally answered. “Remington was not my real mission. He was just one of the pawns.”
“He was a pretty big pawn. I would say more like a bishop or a knight.”
“Not to our real target.”
“General Wu Gang.”
Lin couldn’t hold back her surprise.
“How did you find me in Saigon?” he asked her.
“I didn’t. I found the nun.”
He didn’t think his spy craft was that bad. This Taiwanese officer had simply staked out the American consulate and picked up the nun coming out with the weapons. That was one of the oldest tricks for any intelligence agency. “Okay, now what do you want from me?”
She was obviously considering her options, based on her delay and facial expression. “The general has brought us to the brink of war with the Communists across the strait.”
“For what purpose?”
“We don’t know for sure. But conflict is good for sales. His companies will make billions.”
“He’s already a billionaire,” Jake informed her.
“Yes, but he wants more. With the money comes power.”
Jake knew that to be a universal fact. Very few in power didn’t want more. Very few with money didn’t want more. The two seemed to be inextricably linked. “So, what’s your mission?”
“That’s classified.”
Jake turned to walk away.
“Wait.”
He stopped and glared at her. “What?”
“You help me. I help you.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“Right. You have that big girlfriend.”
Jake laughed. “She’s only big compared to you. And she’s not my girlfriend.”
“Okay. What did they call that in college? Friends with benefits.”
She had this endearing smirk that was starting to piss off Jake. But he had two choices. He could work with an American ally, or he could continue to look over his shoulder as this Taiwanese intelligence officer continued to shadow him.
“What do you propose?” Jake asked.
She smiled and moved closer to him. Then she told him what her government wanted, perhaps providing more classified information than her bosses in Taipei would have allowed.
“You’ve been trying to kill me for the past week,” Jake said, “and now you want me to work with you?”
“I did not try to kill you,” she said. “I tried to make it look like I tried to kill you.”
“You came pretty damn close when you killed that tuk tuk driver in Cambodia.”
She lowered her head. “That was an accident. I hit a bump in the road just as I shot. Can we start over?”
“Again, why were you even shooting at me?” he demanded to know.
“I thought you were working for General Wu Gang,” she said with great deference. “I had no intelligence on you. I am sorry.” Lin bowed her head to him.
Jake had a number of choices, but he had no good reason not to at least try her plan. After all, this was her turf. She had more to lose than Jake. And she was sorry.
In the penthouse suite of the finest hotel in Saigon, General Wu Gang lay back on the bed, propped up by multiple pillows, while a beautiful young naked Vietnamese woman sucked on his unremarkable penis like a little girl on a hot day trying to keep a popsicle from dripping. Another naked woman lay on the bed next to them playing with herself, waiting her turn.
The general puffed on a large cigar, a Cuban, and tried to make himself hold off from exploding in the young woman’s mouth. Delayed gratification was far superior to instant relief.
Suddenly, his bedroom door opened and his chief of security, Shangwei, rushed in. His man looked rather haggard, but he wasn’t at all surprised by the scene, since he had acquired the two woman from the high-end agency in Saigon.
“Sir,” Shangwei said, trying his best to keep his eyes averted from the display of fellatio.
The general put one finger in the air as he puffed on the cigar and then blew a stream of smoke into the air just as he exploded into the woman’s mouth. She took down every drop and then pulled away as the general dismissed both women to the attached bathroom.
“What?” the general finally said.
“I just heard from our men in Cambodia,” Shangwei said slowly, deliberately.
“And?”
“The shoot out in our hotel there resulted in a complication.”
The general twirled his hand for his man to hurry up. There was still a lot of sex to have this evening.
“We lost a couple of men, as I mentioned before. But one man was shot in the knee and taken to the hospital. He was questioned by the local police, but once they realized he worked for you, they stopped their inquiry. By the time our people got to him, he was in surgery and then sedated for the pain. He finally woke up and had an interesting story.”
The general put his underwear on. He had a feeling this story would require at least one drink. He found the wet bar and mixed himself a rum and coke. Then he turned back to Shangwei and told him to continue.
“The man was shot by Jake Adams.”
The general thought for a moment and took a long drink of his rum and coke. “This man is becoming a problem. Maybe it was a problem letting Remington’s men take Adams out.” Deep down he really wanted this American operative to kill Bill Remington, leaving himself isolated from the action. “Continue.”
“Something makes no sense, though. This Adams could have just killed our man. But instead Adams left our man alive to tell us he was still coming.”
The general shook his head. He sucked down more of his drink and then put some life back into his Cuban cigar, bringing the end to a bright orange glow. “Adams is smarter than I thought. I heard he was the one who found the connection between our organization and the satellite destruction recently. I thought we could just ignore the man. But I guess I was wrong. He’s like that little gnat buzzing around your face in the darkness. You can’t see it, but you still want it to die.”
“What would you like us to do, sir?”
Sometimes the little bug needed to be squashed. “Simple. Find him and kill him.”
The security officer was about to leave, but he hesitated. “How do we find him?”
“That’s why we pay so much money to the Vietnamese government,” the general said. “So we have access to their border enforcement database and their hotel security systems. Every foreigner who enters this country has their passport scanned and entered into this database. The hotels do the same thing. Jake Adams entered Vietnam somewhere today. Access the database and scan the passports. He won’t be traveling under his real name. And don’t only look at American passports. He could be traveling under any country. Keep in mind the woman he’s traveling with. They would have come through the border about the same time.”