Rising Tiger (2 page)

Still no sirens, Jake thought, as he closed in on his target. Again, he tried his best to look for additional assailants. Killers of this type rarely worked alone.

Suddenly the man ahead of him turned to the left and disappeared down another street.

Jake rushed forward faster through the crowd, pushing people aside with his left hand. When he got to the place where the man went, Jake saw that it was simply a narrow passage between two buildings. He could easily reach across from one side to the next. A good place for an ambush.

Stepping down the passageway ten yards, Jake stopped when he heard something shuffle. He expected to see a rat. But what he saw was a cat with a rat in its mouth. He let the feline pass to his right.

Then Jake stepped forward again. When the attack came, he was ready.

He saw movement in the darkness and he shoved himself alongside the stone wall. But this distracted him from the way he had come. Another man rushed toward him from behind.

The long-haired man rushed him, the blade in his right hand swishing through the air and catching Jake’s left arm, which he’d thrown up instinctively. Now Jake rushed in closer, punching the man in the sternum and taking his wind away. He followed that with a knee to the man’s face, knocking the man backwards to his butt.

Then, without thinking, Jake shoved his right foot back and caught the approaching man in the groin with his heel. With a backfist Jake caught the second man with the knife in the guy’s right shoulder. He swiveled and simultaneously took the man’s feet out from under him and removed the blade of his knife from the guy’s shoulder.

Now with a clear path to escape, Jake considered his options. These two had somehow been sent to kill him and Kwan. Or maybe just Kwan and Jake was a bonus. Did he need to know any more from these two? Not really.

Jake hurried out of the narrow passageway and tried to blend into the crowd as much as possible. Panic still enveloped the normal flow of the street market. Some wanted to get closer to see what was going on, while others were heading in the opposite direction, perhaps already knowing the horror of the scene. Jake followed those. He thought about getting rid of the knife. If some vigilant cop found him with the blade, they might assume he had something to do with the murder of Kwan. But he decided to keep it. He would need to find his way toward the next subway stop on the red line, nearly a mile down the crowded street.

●

The slight of frame Asian man had watched what he could of the encounter the western man had with the two locals who had killed the banker. The man with the hat had some major skills, he thought.

When the western man with the hat had come out of the alley alone, surviving the attack, Shangwei knew he had just seen the man they had heard was coming.

He kept his distance now, considering his training years ago as a captain in the People’s Liberation Army intelligence branch. The general had told him to simply observe and report back. “Do not encounter,” the general had emphasized.

As he tried his best to simply wander at a safe distance, he couldn’t help scratching at his neck, where he had recently gotten the rest of his tattoo completed. His entire back contained tattoos of the fighting dragon and tiger, with the heads of each beast swirling around his neck. The dragon, the defender, was losing the battle to the aggressive tiger. Yin and yang was no concern for Shangwei. He was the tiger.

Ahead, the man with the hat hurried up the stairs and Shangwei did his best to catch up with his target once he got out of sight.

He slowed when he got to the top of the stairs and saw the Metro train doors closing. Then the train slowly pulled away from the platform and quickly picked up speed.

Shangwei scratched at the dragon on his neck again, as if he too was attacking that mythical beast.

●

Jake had barely made it to the train when the door closed behind him. He quickly got behind a pack of youths standing between the doors listening to their ear buds.

Glancing over the top of the young people, Jake could see the man who had been following him from the street market. Other than the nervous scratching at the tattoo on his neck, the man’s skills were quite good. He looked to be in his mid 40s, so he had probably been in the game a while. Longer than the two who had jumped him in the alley and tried to kill him after taking out Kwan. Maybe he was their boss. Regardless, someone knew he was in Taiwan. And that was a problem.

He rubbed against the jump drive in his pocket and wondered what had gotten Kwan killed.

German Federal Intelligence Service (BND)
Pullach, Germany

Alexandra couldn’t take it any longer. She had worked for the BND for more than twenty years and had watched the service go from somewhat competent and focused to its current condition of underfunded and just another bureaucratic nightmare. She knew she needed to get out soon or she would be inclined to eat her gun. She had given everything to them. And what had it gotten her? She was over forty without children and without a man. She had always wanted both, but now her time was running out.

She sat alone in a secure office waiting for her boss to come in and give her some direction to her current investigation. She was working as a high-level administrative assistant at a Munich defense contractor, one of the largest arms merchants in the world, trying to get information on their current dealings with some foreign entities—especially China.

Her problem was not so much direction, but resolve on the part of her superiors. She looked around the office at some of the archives her boss displayed, most of which had to do with his no longer budding soccer career. Christ, the man was only thirty-five, and had only gotten his job because of his aunt, who was a member of parliament from Hamburg, and a member of the German uber rich. Alfred Schlemm, despite the unfortunate coincidence of sharing his name with a famous Nazi general, was a pacifist.

Alexandra stood and gazed at herself in the large mirror against the far wall. She had to admit that this undercover job had actually helped with her appearance. She was required to wear the gray business skirt and matching top, but she made sure her white silk blouse showed more cleavage than normal or necessary for her position. It was important to distract those men in the office with any power or control. She needed them to see her as competent but nothing more than tits and ass. And she exercised both assets to perfection. Her hair, which was normally curly and flowing over her shoulders, was now pulled back tight and rolled up in a French braid at the back. Her look gave her the appearance of a much younger woman. She wished she had a Euro for every time a man, and a few women, in the office hit on her.

Just as she turned to check out her tight butt and straighten out her wool skirt, the door opened and her newest boss strut in.

Alfred himself stopped at the mirror to check on his long blond hair before taking a seat behind his enormous desk.

Alexandra had a theory about men with big desks. They usually had small dicks. They had something to prove. If not in the bedroom, then at least in the office. She took a seat across from the man and noticed his finger nails looked better than hers.

“How’s it going?” her boss asked.

“Wonderful,” she answered with a touch of attitude.

“How long have you been at Kreuzwelt Industries?”

“A month.”

“I doubt you have found anything interesting,” Alfred said. “I didn’t expect you would.”

“If you look to find nothing, you will find nothing,” she said with derision.

He shrugged and put his hands in the air. “If there is nothing to find, your work is done.”

Now she was getting pissed, but she held back from reaching across the desk and strangling the bastard. After all, she would like to retire with a pension and not summary dismissal.

“I didn’t say there was nothing to find,” she assured him. “Our government has sold diesel submarine engines to the Chinese, along with many other arms that should be restricted based not only on EU regulations, but on our alliance with NATO.”

“I understand,” Alfred said. But now he had picked up his cell phone to check for texts. Either that or he was playing a game again.

“Those submarines will run so quiet that even our American allies will have a hard time finding them,” Alexander declared. “Just last year a Chinese sub surfaced within torpedo range of an American aircraft carrier. Now they have carrier-busting missiles.”

“Maybe that will make the American fleet obsolete,” her boss postulated. “It’s good that they get knocked down a notch or two.”

“Our American friends could have taken over Germany after the war. But instead they helped us rebuild and protected us from the Russians for decades.”

Alfred put his finger in the air as if scolding Alexandra. “For their own greedy needs.”

“Herr Schlemm, your family has made billions since the war because of your freedom to do business here without the interference of the Soviet Union and Russia.” She said this with increasing harshness.

Alfred was about ready to explode, his face beet red. “Your problem is you don’t know your place.”

“You mean because I’m a woman?”

He hesitated with uncertainty. “Because I am your boss.”

“I’ve worked here more than twenty years. You’ve worked here less than twenty months. I’m sure they taught you math at gymnasium.” She knew that Alfred had only finished two years at the University of Trier, where he studied mostly soccer and women. It was a sore point she had used against the man since he was put in charge of her.

He stared at her with the least bit of intimidation. The man couldn’t scare a toddler.

“I need results,” Alfred finally said. “What do you have for me?”

She had plenty, including the fact that the Chinese were not only buying up technology from Kreuzwelt Industries, they were secretly buying up shares of their stock. Alexandra suspected they were intent on not just licensing German weapons technology, they intended to purchase the company in a leveraged buyout. But she didn’t want to tell her boss this. Not yet.

“I need just a little more time,” she said.

He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. Finally he said, “Is the rumor true?”

“What rumor?”

“That you plan to retire after this case.”

She had intimated her displeasure with her work at the BND with her former boss recently, but had no idea that her words had reached Alfred Schlemm. “I have the time in. Perhaps I need to move on.”

“Perhaps you are correct.”

Great. Now this bastard would spread rumors within the service that he had forced her out. That smug asshole.

“When will you be done with this case?” Alfred asked.

She considered her answer carefully and then checked her watch. Jumping to her feet, she said, “I’ve got to get back to the office. I took a long lunch and asked for time off to bring a friend to the airport.” She started for the door.

“Alexandra.”

She stopped and turned.

“I’ll give you to the end of next week,” he ordered.

She got out of the BND headquarters as fast as she could. Now, perhaps, she finally had a retirement date. Herr Schlemm had practically made the choice for her. This would be her last case. Then she would either take an extended vacation before retirement, or she would let them pay out her vacation to her as a departing bonus.

Alexandra got back to Kreuzwelt Industries on the northern outskirts of Munich just after 1300, her disposition somewhat subdued by the realization that her current career was coming to an end. Perhaps she could just stay on with this company as an administrative assistant. She smiled at that thought. No, they couldn’t afford her, she guessed. Only if she lowered her expectations of her future. What does an ex-spy do after retiring? Most in Germany went to work for companies like this. And then there was her good friend, Jake Adams. He had created a security consultant firm of one, and from what Jake had told her, he had been paid quite well for a number of his cases. Enough so that he could really retire.

But she had work to do here. Her last case. If she had anything to say about it, she would nail these bastards to the wall and let buzzards pick away at their flesh. They were selling weapons and weapons-related dual-use items to the Chinese. The problem was her boss didn’t seem to give a crap, and she had a pretty good suspicion that those at higher levels of government knew about this as well. She could leak the information to the German press, but they would probably applaud the move—anything to do as her boss said to ‘take the Americans down a notch.’

It was Friday afternoon and she needed to make a bold move. Nearly all of the upper management left early on Friday, and many had gone to Garmisch skiing after a nice snowfall last night. Despite what her real boss said, she knew that not all was right with this company. But she could do this right.

Having spent weeks gathering access to the most secure areas of this building, she used the lazy Friday afternoon to get into the main computer room—the only way to access certain files on a dedicated highly-encrypted system.

First, from her desk computer, she accessed the security camera system, recorded a fifteen minute loop, and then turned the recording on so the security men on the first level would see nothing but that recording. She could only do this for fifteen minutes, she knew, because the system automatically rebooted after fifteen minutes.

Then she made her way through the first cipher lock without a problem. The code was due to be changed on Monday. She looked up at the camera and smiled.

The computer room was a little more difficult. It had a retina scanner along with a magnetic strip on her identification name tag. Both had to match to get her inside. Of course she had no access to this room officially. But she had upgraded her access to every level in the building just minutes ago. There would be a record of her entry that she would not be able to erase, but she didn’t plan on coming in on Monday anyway. She hoped to have everything she needed.