The plan, hurried as it was, seemed pretty reasonable. They wouldn’t be flying into China, but to a military base in south Taiwan, where they would transfer to a seaplane that would rendezvous with a boat in the sea south of Macao. The final leg in would be the most tricky, but supposedly, that was covered with enough bribes to make it relatively safe.
CIA and Military Intelligence, along with some intel from the Brits, would, Kent hoped, tag Comrade General Wu so that they could approach him away from his military base. They’d grab him, spirit him back to the boat, and, all things going well, haul him back the same way they’d gotten in.
All things going well…
Chang had a bank of three seats to himself, a rare luxury, and he had lifted up the dividing arms and made himself a short couch, upon which he was lying. He kept the center seat belt loosely fastened around himself, just in case they should hit rough air while he was asleep. It was a long flight, and sleep would be welcome.
As he dozed, he considered his trip to America. It had gone well, much better than he could have expected. He had not only seen how Net Force operated, he had done them a large favor, one which was already paying dividends. He had hardware and software he would not have been able to buy on his own, and the good will of Jay Gridley, Net Force’s top computer operative, which was worth more than gold.
More, Chang’s government had in custody a man connected to the attack on the U.S. military, and, with luck, would soon be privy to what he knew about the situation, a thing that would stand Chang in good stead with his bosses.
Who would have thought it? God, Chang realized, indeed worked in mysterious ways…
A pleasant feeling altogether as Chang drifted off to the land of dreams…
Locke stood in the small warehouse, checking supplies. Everything seemed to be in order. This was where the operation would begin staging, less than forty-eight hours from now. Wu’s strike team — and a couple of Locke’s own men — would gather here, collect their gear, dress for their roles, and set things into motion. Once that die was cast, there would be no turning back. It would succeed or it would fail. Failure meant imprisonment or death; success meant a life of luxury beyond the dreams of most men, the ability to go almost anywhere and do almost anything Locke could desire.
The encrypted phone on his belt, smaller than his thumb and voice-operated, beeped. Locke unclipped the phone and raised it to his ear. “Yes?”
“Are things in order?” It was Wu, of course.
“Yes.”
“Good. I will see you at the rendezvous at the appointed time.”
Wu discommed, and Locke clipped the phone back to his belt. His belly tightened, the flutter in his bowels a familiar sensation, though one he hadn’t felt since he’d killed that guard in America, and not for a while before then. A mix of fear, anticipation, and… joy.
Jack Locke was about to put himself on the line, risking his life for another run at the sweet, sweet taste of a plan well made and executed.
It didn’t get any better than this.
37
Thorn wasn’t exactly sure what he’d expected, but whatever it had been, Marissa’s new townhouse wasn’t it.
The place was in a nice enough neighborhood, in a row of two-story condos that looked pretty much the same — not rich folks, not poor, a little above the middle of middle-class. No yard to keep up, at least not in front, just a sidewalk on the street and a couple of small trees in big pots.
There was an alarm system, and one that needed both a thumbprint and vox-ID to unlock the door — which appeared to be steel painted to look like wood. He also noticed wrought-iron grills over the windows, very artistic, but serving as bars to keep all but the most serious of would-be burglars out.
Thorn’s security wasn’t bad; Marissa’s was better.
“What do you have in here, gold bullion?” he asked, as she opened the door.
“Something better, I think,” she said.
When he got inside, he saw what she meant:
There were two paintings in the living room. They were fairly large, five feet by three or so, on opposite walls, directly facing each other — oils or acrylics, Thorn couldn’t tell for sure.
One was of a large, muscular black man, shirtless, in stained overalls half held up by one strap, with a red handkerchief in a front pocket, sitting in an unfinished wooden glider hung by iron chains under a wide front porch. There was a thick book on the swing’s seat next to him. The man was sweaty, and looked very warm; the painter had captured a kind of nobility in his position, as if he were royalty, but a king who worked with his hands. He had a smile that Mona Lisa would envy.
Across the room, the second painting was of a black woman. She was lean, dark, and naked, one arm stretched wide to show a muscular definition, her breasts high and small, belly flat. The artist had shaded the figure so that her sex was in deep shadow, barely hinted at. Her hair was plaited in long braids that flared and reached to the middle of her back, hung as though a strong wind stirred them to her right. She stood against a background of green land, blue mountains, and a cloudy sky, with the sky going darker and into a star field behind her head.
Both of the subjects looked to be about thirty, though it was hard for Thorn to judge — black people had always seemed to him to age better than paler-skinned folk.
“The artist is Rick Berry,” Marissa said. “You might have seen his work on some book covers, he has done a lot of that.”
“Impressive,” Thorn said. He knew quality when he saw it, and this was definitely that.
He looked at her. Caught a hint of something in her smile. “What else?” he said.
“The man is Amos Jefferson Lowe. The woman is Ruth Lewis Jackson Lowe.”
Thorn nodded. “Your grandparents, on your father’s side.”
“No points for that one, Tommy.”
He smiled. “I think my grandmother would spin like a gyroscope in her grave if she knew I had a picture of her without clothes on my wall.”
“Not mine,” she said. “My mother’s parents died when I was a child — a car accident in Alabama — a drunk in a truck crossed the centerline and hit them head-on. But Grampa and Grandma Lowe tried to make up for that. Amos was a machinist at a mill who read Shakespeare and published articles about the Bard. Ruth taught third grade for forty years, but had been a champion runner in her youth — held the state record in the mile for twenty years after she graduated. Salt of the earth — with a few other spices mixed in.”
Thorn nodded.
“They decided when I was a little girl that whenever I had a birthday, or for Christmas, or other special occasions, they weren’t going to give me toys or clothes, they would give me adventures. They took me to museums; to see sailing ships; to the tops of tall buildings where I could look down upon the world. The summer I was ten, we visited a diamond mine in Arkansas. At eleven, the Carlsbad Caverns. At twelve and thirteen, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. I took lessons and scuba-dived the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico when I was sixteen. When I graduated from high school, they paid for a trip to Spain; when I graduated from college, they sent me on a month-long walkabout in Australia.”
She paused, remembering, a small smile on her face.
“My grandmother taught me how to shoot a.22 rifle, how to skin and cook a squirrel, and how to run within my breath. My grandfather taught me how to ride a bicycle, to call quail right to the back door of their house, and how to strip down a lawn mower engine. And also about sonnets and plays. He did a mean Othello.”