A Time for War (35 page)

“Yeah. I recognize you from the news. I got a call from the FBI field office in Frisco saying there was some kind of emergency here, that an undercover team needed backup,” he said. “Are you it?”

“We are,” Jack said. “But things are under control now.”

“I don't often get calls like that,” the sergeant said. “In fact, that was my first one.” The man looked from Jack to Dover then back again. “You two are Feds?”

“Undercover,” Jack said. “Honorary.”

“I would never have guessed,” the sergeant said. “So we're done here?”

“We are,” Jack said.

The sergeant returned to his car and the police drove away. Jack returned to Wilhelm and headed back down Scenic Road.

“That was a helluva job you did, Jack,” Dover said with open admiration.

“Thanks, but it didn't really get us much.”

“What are you talking about? You aren't going to tell Forsyth about Hawke?”

“We can tell Forsyth what he's dealing with, let his tech team chew on it.” He handed Dover his cell phone. “You can text the details as we drive. But we gave our word to Hawke.”

“You're serious?”

“Absolutely. Besides, prosecuting Hawke doesn't get us anything.”

“Like hell! It puts other industrialists on notice!”

“No. Guys like Hawke will always find a reason, a loophole, a justification for what they do. The thing we have to watch out for isn't opportunists but a philosophy, the idea that there's no moral gulf between shooting down hardware loaded with software and shooting down hardware loaded with people.”

“So then what do we do now?”

“There's something else that concerns me,” Jack said. “Two other things that happened over the past few days involving Chinese. Both were relatively small and local but the timing bothers me.”

“What were they?”

“A suspicious attempt to buy a grocery in Chinatown and a deadly explosion at a Chinese clinic. The San Francisco area isn't usually a hotbed for this kind of activity. When you have these incidents on top of a Chinese terrorist flying in here and picking a local air base to attack—”

“It does seem a little more than coincidence,” Dover agreed.

“Exactly. I need to think about this,” Jack said.

Dover typed a text to Carl Forsyth as Jack got back on the Pacific Coast Highway. He was pleased his plan had worked. He had punched through Hawke's defenses and confirmed the existence and nature of the EMP device. But he hadn't gotten the magic bullet he had been seeking and that bothered him—especially when he considered something Johnny had said back at the grocery:

“When Chinese seek something, they never want just that one thing.”

There was another plot afoot. And it was up to Jack Hatfield to uncover it and stop it.

San Francisco, California

Liu Tang's plastic chess pieces were arrayed on their board in the center of a wooden card table. The magnets had been removed from the pieces, exposing the drilled holes in their bases.

“Lovely,” Hu Kai remarked. He was bent over the pieces, his gloved hands on his knees, his smile wide, admiring. “You carried these, actually used them shipboard?”

“They are completely safe,” Liu said. “The aerosolized
Yersinia pestis
cannot penetrate these sealed vessels.”

Hu looked up at him. Liu was stoic. Hu himself was humbled. He had been informed that they would be spreading pneumonic plague bacteria through the old smuggling tunnels below the city. But to actually see the receptacles of the bacteria, hold them in containment—

“It is magnificent,” Liu Tang added. “But if there were an earth tremor now, we ourselves might be in a rather unfortunate position.”

“Yes, of course.”

“The delivery system?” Liu asked.

Hu Kai straightened. He walked to the large locker in the back of the Eastern Rim office. They were alone and the noise of the city sounded far away. The powdery white dust of the clinic operations came off his work boots in little puffs as he walked.

Hu opened the combination lock. He put on work gloves, removed an old fax machine, and carried it carefully, slowly, to the card table. He held it with his fingertips gripping the top, not the bottom or the sides. The interior of the machine had been hollowed out. Near the top of the fax machine was a plate with a series of thirty-two screws facing thread upward. Hu removed the white king from Liu's chessboard and set it aside. Carefully, he screwed the other pieces into place inside the machine.

When there was just one open peg he said, “Once the king is inserted here and turned to the right, the explosion will occur fifteen minutes later.”

“It is not triggered by cell phone?” Liu asked.

“That kind of detonator can be blocked. The environment and structural elements of the tunnel could interfere with reception. No,” Hu said, looking at the king in his palm. “This device will be activated by hand. Sensors are attached by wire to the plate and to the other five sides of the steel container. The wires are held in place with an anti-seize paste. When the king is turned to the right, it will start a countdown to turn on a heater that will melt the paste. After fifteen minutes the stripped ends of the wires will pop off and send a current to the bomb, which is under this.” Hu tapped the plate with the screws.

“And the bomb will then detonate,” said Liu Tang.

“Yes,” said Hu. “If someone manually tampers with the device—which I assure you will not happen—we have a fail-safe: the sensors on the wires. Proximity of bodies, of body heat, will register on the sensors and cause the paste to soften.”

“The gloves,” Liu said.

“Exactly. They minimize my own heat. The bomb will detonate immediately if the temperature of the grease on the sides of the steel container rises. We have maintained the temperature in the office so that it matches that in the tunnel.”

“Ingenious. What about the smaller blasts you will be using to ventilate the tunnel?”

Hu shook his head. “The contacts will not be broken by those vibrations. The paste can
only
be weakened by heat. It is my greatest design,” Hu said. “In a way, I am sorry I must leave it behind. Either way,” he went on, “once the king is in play, the game is over.”

Liu nodded admiringly. “And you? Where will you be?”

“We will meet you and the others and Jintao
Zh
xí
on the boat,” Hu said. He had used a title of respect reserved for leaders of towering stature. “Together, from the sea, we will watch America die.”

Liu laid a hand on his shoulder. “Jintao was right to select you,” he said. “This is a great day for the new Chinese Empire.”

Hu bowed humbly. It was a strange contrast, the rush of humility. For at that moment, with the chess piece in his hand, he also felt like the most powerful man on the planet.

*   *   *

Maggie Yu spent a restless day at the grocery, troubled by things unseen.

The attack on the helicopter in Fairfield had fueled fears of terrorism and business was brisk. Customers were using the grocery—as they used the nearby nail salon and bookshop and rebuilt electronics store—as an impromptu meeting place. Their discussions skittered nervously from hearsay to vaguely relevant anecdotes, but they always returned to the speculation of reckless newscasters, that what had occurred in Fairfield was not an accident.

Maggie half-listened and nodded in agreement with whatever was said. Her mind and soul were in the basement, lost in the labyrinth of the story she had been told by
Sifu
Qishan—

Not
a
story,
she reminded herself. It was many stories linked by the tunnels and the strong reactions they generated—fear, pain, and violence.
Each girl who was pushed or pulled through those tunnels was a person who left behind something of what they were feeling.

San Francisco had known many horrors over the centuries, but this one was right below her feet. Even if she had not heard those sounds, the tunnels should be opened and purged. She was waiting for the evening when the grocery closed and her father went to play mah-jongg and she could move crates and shelves to look for an entrance to the underground world.

When eight o'clock finally arrived, Maggie flipped the
OPEN
sign, kissed her father on the cheek, and shooed him to the door.

“I'll break down the cash register,” she said.

“I don't mind counting out the drawer,” he told her. “You seem tired—”

“No, I've been husbanding my energy all day for this task,” she teased.

Her father grinned. “‘Husbanding' your energy? Is that a puzzle?”

She was confused.

“Never mind,” her father smiled, hurrying out. “Your secret rendezvous is safe with me.”

Maggie let him go on thinking that she was meeting some young civil servant. That was what he wanted for her, a holdover from the values of the old world: that a daughter's greatest security was to marry a member of the Nine Ranks, a system that originated a millennium ago in the Zhou Dynasty. It was a court hierarchy that reached from the Ninth Pin—county officials—to the First Pin, bureaucrats who answered personally to the emperor. Maggie would have been happy to oblige, but most men were intimidated by the fact that she could deflect unwanted advances with a finger to the windpipe. Those who were not were her fellow students, and they were more like brothers.

She counted out the cash, measured the sum against the receipts, and put the money in a deposit bag. She grabbed a water bottle, went downstairs, and put the cash in the safe. Then she looked around. Whatever she did, she wanted to return everything to normal before her father got back. He was not a spiritual man but he believed in leaving the past in the past.

“It's better for the digestion to always look forward,”
he said.

The floor under the shelves was stuffed with things she rarely if ever touched: boxes of tools, dropcloths, cans of paint—some so old she doubted the containers could be opened—and cardboard filing cabinets that were stuffed with old ledgers. She had pulled those out, years before, to wrap the books in plastic to keep them from mildewing.

Maggie had not heard the humming the few times she had come down to check. But now that the store was empty and traffic was thinning, there were faint noises. The earlier sounds had been a whirring; this was more like hammering. It was coming from the same direction, the wall with the oak closet. She began removing the cleaning supplies: the broom, mop, squeegee, sprays, detergents. There was a clothesline her mother used down here before the cleaner opened down the street. Maggie used to jump rope with it. She smiled when she saw the old calendar hanging on the wall, from May 1996. That month's photo was a picture of the Huangpu River—coincidentally, the spot where her father had proposed to her mother. She ran her hand across it lovingly.

There is good energy here, too,
she reminded herself.

The closet was bolted to the wall to keep it from falling during tremors. She didn't know how she would get behind it to see if there was a door. Perhaps if she cut a section from it, behind the calendar?

As she contemplated the problem she remembered something that
Sifu
Qishan had said: people came and went using trapdoors.

Her eyes drifted to the left, to the safe. The yard-high iron box sat flat on the floor next to the closet. She didn't remember what was there before; she was just two years old at the time. But it was the perfect way to seal a trapdoor.

Maggie went to the small storage area under the staircase. That was where her father kept the dolly he used to move larger boxes around. He also had a crowbar he used to pry open wooden crates. She brought them over and, using a small mallet, she was able to knock the tapered end of the crowbar under the left side of the safe, away from the closet. That allowed her to slip the dolly under the raised edge. She kicked it in as far as it would go, then tied the safe to the dolly with the clothesline.

She pulled back on the dolly. Even with all her weight on it, the safe failed to move. She tried walking the safe back by shifting the dolly from side to side. She stirred dust, nothing more.

There's only one way you're going to move that,
she knew.

Maggie got on top of the safe. This wasn't going to be pretty but it had to be done. She braced her back against the side of the closet and placed her feet against the top of the dolly. Her knees were bent straight up. She placed her hands against her legs, against the quadriceps, so she could push them out toward the dolly. The young woman was used to drawing energy from the ground. Kung fu required a center of gravity that worked its way up from the feet, along the spine, channeled to the arms and hands. She rarely had the opportunity to train parallel to the ground.