7
Jake walked calmly along the stone sidewalk in a back street two blocks from Tiananmen Square, the darkness broken only by distant street lights and the occasional lantern marking a bar or cafe. Although it was closing in on midnight, the streets were still full of life. Not like Paris or London or New York. But his native Portland would be nearly deserted at that time of night on a Wednesday.
Accustomed to working at night, Jake’s eyes adjusted well to the darkness, and his other senses would heighten along with them, he knew. Time couldn’t dull training and experience.
It was at times like this, when he had no idea why he was here at this hour, that he wished he had his normal 9mm automatic strapped under his left arm. Just in case. But, unlike Europe, he had no contacts in China who could acquire such weapons. Nor did he think, until now, that he would need one. After all, his back story indicated he was only in Beijing to accompany an American businessman, who had just that morning signed a huge fiber optics deal that would link hard lines and speedy data transfer to not only every corner of the city, but also, he hoped, to every major city in China. Jake had learned as much as he could about the man in the last few hours in case anyone cared to ask the question.
But now Jake was on his own. He had followed the American to the airport earlier in the day and then gone back to his hotel in the Qianmen region, just six blocks from his current location. And then, as he rested in his room trying to figure out what the Agency had in store for him in the next few days before flying back to Austria, he had gotten the strange phone call. That was five hours ago. The caller, a man of indistinguishable age or ethnicity, although Jake was sure he must have been Western, had simply said to meet him behind the Museum to Chinese History if he wanted to find out about his old girlfriend, Toni Contardo. It was a ruse, he knew.
He hadn’t heard from Toni in six months. They had been living together in a nice apartment overlooking the river in Innsbruck, he thinking their relative domestication was actually working out, and she obviously thinking the tranquility of seclusion in Austria reason enough to go back to work for the Agency. So, as far as he knew, she had done just that, having first gone through extensive Arabic language training before being assigned to…well, that was the problem. He had no idea where she was.
So the caller would know that, he had said. Then he either had a choice to hit the sack early and take a tour of the Great Wall in the morning, or end up in a dark alley at midnight to meet someone he didn’t know for unknown reasons. Jake didn’t think for a moment that he would find out anything about Toni. But, hope was like the concept of happiness. You never knew you had found it until after it had passed.
He turned from the relatively busy sidewalk down a narrow lane, where only a lone woman shot her eyes away from him and scurried in the opposite direction. After making it halfway down the street, Jake stopped and leaned against a wall in the shadows, glancing across the narrow street at a back gate to the museum.
On both ends of the street was a clamor of voices and footsteps and laughter, but here the street had cleared and he was alone.
His eyes shifted back and forth with each sound.
Suddenly, out of the shadows of the courtyard across the street, behind the gates, there was movement. Then Jake heard the lighter flicker and watched the glow of a cigarette being lit.
That was his sign.
He crossed the alley and opened the gate with a slight squeak, slid inside, and moved toward the glowing cigarette.
“That’s close enough,” came a muffled voice from the shadows. It was almost a whisper. “To your left, into the darkness.”
The cigarette dropped to the ground and the man twisted his foot over it as Jake moved into the shadows.
“You could have just come to my hotel,” Jake said. “We could be drinking a beer right now instead of freezing our asses off out in the darkness.”
Jake was close enough to hear air forcing its way out of the man’s nostrils, so he knew it was the same guy who had called him earlier.
“Asthma,” Jake said.
“What?”
“You have asthma, so the Agency sends you to Beijing in February with all this Gobi sand in the air. How smart is that?”
The man gave a slight laugh. “I heard you were a smart ass.”
Jake flicked on a penlight, illuminating the man’s face for a second, and quickly turned it off.
“What the hell are you doing?” The man whispered loudly.
“I like to see who I’m dealing with. Show me some I.D.”
“Are you on drugs?”
“I must be,” Jake said, “or I wouldn’t be standing in a dark alley at midnight with an asthmatic Agency man who wants to use me for some reason.”
The man laughed again through his nose. It was barely audible, but Jake was comforted somewhat knowing the Agency had actually hired someone with a sense of humor.
“What do you want from me?” Jake asked.
There was silence, so Jake started to walk away.
“Wait.”
A hand grasped his arm, and Jake removed it, twisted the man’s arm around, and jammed the guy’s face into the metal fence. With Jake’s free hand, he clasped his fingers around the left side of his face and placed his thumb behind the guy’s left ear, applying pressure. Most people could last only a few seconds without feeling like their brains would pop out of their ears. This Agency guy made it a full thirty seconds. Impressive.
“All right,” he forced out through his teeth. “Inside right pocket.”
Jake slid his left hand from his grasp and inside the guy’s front pocket, retrieving a passport. He still had a hold of the guy with a right arm twist, but now he needed his light, and that would take two hands.
He took two steps back and let go of the arm. Jake could hear the man rotating his right arm back into place as he pulled the light from his pocket and shone it on the passport, cupped inside his jacket. It was a standard U.S. diplomatic passport. Definitely Agency. He turned off the light and slapped the passport against the guy’s chest.
“Okay, Mr. Brian Armstrong…what do you want from me?”
“I need you,” he said. “I heard what you did in Odessa years ago.”
Jake hadn’t thought about Odessa for a long time. So much had gone right, but so much had also gone tragically wrong there. Then it all clicked. The face had looked familiar. And now the name.
“Any relation to Quinn Armstrong?”
The man hesitated. “Quinn was my brother.”
Damn. “I’m sorry.”
“He died for his country.”
Still, Jake might have been able to save the man’s life. They had worked together in Odessa, and Quinn had been killed by his own boss, a rogue Agency station chief.
“I’m sorry,” Jake repeated.
“I read the report,” Armstrong said. “You had no idea my little brother would be killed. And you did bring down the guy who shot him.”
Bring down was not really true. Jake had found out about the corrupt officer and was present when he ate his own gun.
Changing the subject, Jake said, “So why me?”
“Easy. You were with the Agency. I can trust you. And….”
“And nobody knows me in China.”
“Right.”
“What do you need?” Jake asked.
“Meet me tomorrow morning at ten in the center of Tiananmen Square.”
He didn’t hear the sound first, but Jake did see the flash. He grabbed Armstrong by the coat and pulled him to the ground. Now the clinking of metal against metal followed each flash as bullets glanced off the gate and ricocheted into the night.