Of the options, the only one that made any sense to Jay was the last. The best way to find a well-hidden body was to get the man who buried it to take you there.
The military program had, fortunately, been entirely written in the U.S., no outsourcing allowed for this level of sophistication. So whoever had screwed with it had been in the States during the creation of the program. It had taken three years and some to build and vet, and since Jay couldn’t be sure that the Chinese op had actually laid his own hands on it, he was going to have to take the long road to find him from this end. The guy had to be a player — even if he bribed another programmer, he’d have to know what to tell him to do, and in great detail. And Jay was sure by now that the guy was Chinese, so the way was apparent, if not easy:
Jay would have to run down every computer expert from China who had been in the U.S. during the years that it had taken to build the infected program. Chang could help, and he would — it would go a long way to building a bridge between his organization and Net Force, and Chang would also know that Net Force would certainly be grateful. Such gratitude could manifest in a lot of hardware and software for Chang, and the military would happily foot that bill if Chang helped them solve their problem, no question at all. They’d bury the guy in gold dust if he pulled their fat out of the fire.
Meanwhile, on this end, Jay could start by finding all the Chinese students in computer science programs, as well as any Chinese visitors who listed anything connected with computers on their passports or border entry logs. That alone could be tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, he had no idea. It wouldn’t be as hard as verifying multiple millions of lines of computer code, though. Even so, he was going to need major processing time. If they could track the guy down from Chang’s end, Jay didn’t have a problem with that, no, sir, not at all. He’d rather do it himself, of course, but the point was to catch the bad guy, to win. Everything else came second.
He chewed on a mouthful of boiled egg. With enough pepper, it wasn’t so bad…
30
Chang watched through a telescope. The man from the sampan definitely had something to hide.
Chang was a long way off, and mostly behind the cover of a rickety boathouse on the river’s south shore, two hundred meters, easy, so the telescope was necessary. At this distance, Chang would be virtually invisible to his quarry, but the telescope was of sufficient quality so that he could clearly see the man’s expressions. Holding the scope steady was tricky, but the gray and splintery boathouse wall made a good enough support to mostly manage this, though the wood smelled of dead fish and soured waterweed.
The man from the red-eyed sampan sculled his boat to the shore, well downriver from where Chang had first seen him. He tied the boat to a post, shouldered a small kit on a short pole, and started to walk along a muddy path toward the houses in the nearby village. He never stopped glancing around, looking for anybody who might be watching him.
Sampan-man had no fish, for he had not been fishing, even though that was his disguise. Another reason to think he was hiding something.
Chang smiled, remembering an incident in Beijing some years ago. A man had attempted to rob a high-end jewelry store, owned by a Vietnamese. Before he could pull it off, the clerk had become suspicious of him and pushed a silent alarm, so when the man pulled a knife and demanded gold, the police were waiting just outside the shop’s door. He walked right into their arms.
Why had the clerk become worried? Well, he said, it was the man’s appearance. His clothes were ragged and of poor quality, indicating that he did not have the money to be buying expensive jewelry.
Plus, he had a black eye patch and a wooden leg.
Chang smiled again. That would-be thief was never going to blend in anywhere, save maybe at a pirates’ convention…
This was not as blatant, but if sampan-man was a simple fisher, Chang was the son of two turtles and the brother of a sea snake.
Chang closed the telescope and hurried away from the boathouse, circling away from his subject. Following him directly would be risky; the quarry would be looking for anybody behind him, so better that he was in front of him. He had to be going to the village — there was no other place around, and on foot, dressed in fishing clothes, he wasn’t going to be hiking very far, not this late in the day.
There was a small outdoor market in the village, open for business, and Chang moved to stand with two women, three children, and a couple of old men in front of a fish-seller. Next to that stall, other patrons attended a man selling tubers and carrots, and past that, a third stall offered herbal medicines and acupuncture treatments, with several patients lined up there. Chang, dressed as the villagers, would not stand out.
Chang was careful not to look directly at sampan-man when he passed, but only watched him peripherally.
Sampan-man continued walking for half a block, then turned to his right into a narrow lane between two rows of small houses.
Chang hurried toward the lane. He slowed, and walked past, again using his peripheral vision only.
Sampan-man was not in sight.
Chang walked a bit farther, then turned around. So, the man had gone into one of those houses. Which one?
An old woman emerged from a house, carrying a broom. She began to sweep dust and pine needles from the packed-earth walk leading to the road.
“Good evening, Grandmother,” Chang said.
The old woman smiled, revealing a mouth missing more than a few teeth.
“I wonder if you might help me?” Chang continued. He pulled a copper coin from his pocket. “I was at the river, and I saw a fisherman drop this as he left his boat. I would return it to him, but I don’t know where he lives. His boat has red eyes, he is tall and thin.”
The old woman nodded. “Li,” she said. “That house, there, with the tall bamboo fence around it.”
“Thank you, Grandmother. May the gods smile upon your family.”
“Call out loudly,” she said. “Li does not like visitors and his yard is full of brambles and traps.”
He bowed, and she went back to her sweeping.
I know your name, sampan-man, and where you live. Now I will find out exactly who you are and what you are up to…
Gridley would be pleased with his news, Chang knew. And it would be more than a little pleasing to have helped Net Force in this matter. A matter of no small pride.
Locke stood outside a fan-tan parlor north and east of the reservoir, a small place that catered to those with less than sterling backgrounds. The gambling den was next to a pocket park, not much more than a large lot with trees and a trimmed lawn, and neither was prey to tourists or idle passersby.
Locke had dealings with the triads, going all the way back to his Hong Kong days, and the triads were not somebody with whom you wanted to get crosswise, so this would have to be done with care.
At this point, he wasn’t really sure they still needed Shing, certainly not as much as Wu seemed to think. Of course, Wu had longer-range goals, past the casinos, ambitions that he had not filled Locke in on completely, but that anybody with half a brain could figure out. Wu was doomed to fail in these, Locke was certain, but that wouldn’t be his problem, he’d be out of it by then. Living in luxury on an island off the coast of Spain, perhaps, or maybe New Zealand. Both — he’d be able to afford that and a lot more.