And there wasn’t a damn thing Punky could do to stop her.
Colt had wiped away some of the blood from her forehead, then helped her out of the Corvette and set her on the ground, leaning against the front wheel. Seeing that she was alert, he went to check on the woman who had been driving the Japanese import and returned a few minutes later, asking to borrow Punky’s phone to call for help. She was already starting to feel more alert but knew the worst of her aches and pains wouldn’t set in for another day or two. She removed her phone from her pocket and started to hand it to him when it vibrated with an incoming call.
“Who’s Uncle Rick?” Colt asked, seeing the name appear on the caller ID.
She ignored the question, answered the call, and brought the phone to her ear. “Uncle Rick? Are you okay?” She heard noises on the other end like something was rubbing against the phone’s microphone, but she couldn’t make out anything recognizable. “Uncle Rick?”
Colt knelt in front of her. “Put it on speaker,” he said.
She did, and they heard the unmistakable sound of a gunshot. “Uncle Rick!”
Then she heard his voice, though weak and woozy, come through clearly. “Who… are you?”
She leaned in closer to the phone, straining to hear the other voice speaking with an elegant feminine crispness. Colt leaned closer as well, understanding that they were eavesdropping on a conversation her Uncle Rick wanted her to hear. She saw him react when they heard the words aircraft carrier, but otherwise, he remained silent.
“Punky,” Rick’s strained voice said, and her heart skipped a beat.
“Who’s Punky?” the woman asked.
“The person who’s… going to stop you.”
She let out a sob and felt Colt wrap his arm around her head, pulling her close to his chest. It was almost as if he knew what she would hear next, but even muffled, the sound of the gunshot made her flinch. He took the phone from her hand and held her there, but all she could think of was finding the woman who had killed the last person she cared about.
Chen walked out of the brick building and closed the door behind her. After delivering the borrowed and slightly damaged fertilizer tender back to the warehouse across the street, she returned to the used car dealership to reclaim her Jeep. The salesman had been more than happy to speak with her in his air-conditioned office, but his eagerness quickly faded.
She watched the security footage before erasing it, confirming that the FBI agent had stopped to recover a tracker he had used to follow her from Long Beach to San Luis Obispo, and ultimately to his demise. With the tracker now on a farm road inside the wrecked BMW, she could continue to the Santa Maria airport without fear of being followed.
She walked across the dirt lot and unlocked her Jeep before climbing inside. The salesman had been another casualty in a growing list of bodies she was leaving scattered across Southern California, but it was another loose end tidied up. All that mattered was completing the mission and proving her worth to Mantis. She started the Jeep and removed her phone to open a dating app she never used for its intended purpose.
She entered a specific set of unlikely search parameters and began swiping through potential suitors, spending more time on each profile’s “About Me” section than she suspected most of the app’s users spent. She knew the one she was looking for. Without the key phrase embedded innocuously in the profile, she would swipe left and continue her search.
Then she saw it.
“…my other half…”
She swiped right and made a match. It wasn’t the phrase itself but the first letters of the three words that mattered. Other Ministry operatives used varied and clever phrases containing the same sequence of letters to spoof the application’s algorithms, but always a three-word phrase beginning with M-O-H.
…my own home…
…making our history…
…made over here…
They all referred to one thing: Mandate of Heaven.
The ancient Chinese philosophy justifying an emperor’s rule was first used to support the Zhou dynasty and legitimize the overthrow of the Shang dynasty. But the Ministry used the Mandate of Heaven to empower its operatives abroad, and they used it to establish an unorthodox means of seeking assistance without the excessive impediments of going through official channels.
A red bubble appeared over the app’s internal messaging platform. She tapped on the icon and read the message.
ARE YOU CLEAN?
She thought about the dead FBI agent in a wrecked BMW, the tracker he had planted now removed from the Jeep, the erased surveillance footage from the dealership, and the salesman who hadn’t lived long enough to tell anybody about the Chinese woman interested in a four-door Wrangler.
YES, she replied.
ETA?
She consulted the map on her phone before replying. 20 MINUTES.
CENTRAL COAST JET CENTER. 30 MINUTES.
Chen backed out of the parking space, then pulled out of the lot and headed south on Highway 1. She could have cut across the valley on West Main Street and approached the airport from the north, but that would have taken her by the scene of the accident. Instead, she followed the highway as it wended along the southern edge of the valley and exited in Santa Maria.
From the highway, it was a five-minute drive north on Blosser Road to the airport. Central Coast Jet Center, the fixed-base operator that provided fuel and basic maintenance services, was located at the south end of the airport between the two intersecting runways. She parked the Jeep in a long-term lot outside the fence line, then walked to a gate located next to RLC, an offshore helicopter transportation company servicing the oil platforms Harvest, Hermosa, Hidalgo, and Irene in the Santa Maria basin off the coast of Point Arguello.
Walking through the gate, the fence line guided her to a side entrance into one of the two buildings. She entered a four-digit access code into the keypad next to the door and waited for the light to turn green before opening the door and walking into the unlit helicopter base.
Standing in the darkness, she listened for a sign that she wasn’t alone, then crept through the building for the exit onto the flight line. In the distance, she heard the reverberating echo of a helicopter approaching the airport. She approached the window next to the door and peered through the blinds as a blue and white Sikorsky S-76 lowered its landing gear and approached the landing pad.
Chen smiled as she watched her ride touch down, then opened the door and stepped out into the sunlight.
27
Wu Tian paused from his chore to wave at the passing sixty-five-foot catamaran carrying passengers to the pier at Scorpion Ranch. A few waved back, but most were preoccupied looking up at cliffs bearing down on them. He waited until they had moved past, then went back to packing the equipment he had removed from the container into the watertight dry sack. The gentle swell made it more difficult, but as a career sailor, he felt as sturdy atop the Tillotson Pearson forty-four-foot sloop as he did on the Yonggan De.
His phone chirped, and he scrambled in bare feet across the sailboat’s open cockpit to read the message.