Strong Darkness (6 page)

The class nodded to a smiling man and woman, even though they didn't comprehend him at all.

“These existentialists I've been reading are mostly full of shit, but they did raise a couple good points I wanted to share with you because I think they're especially appropriate to your situation. Specifically, I mean this existential notion that there's no meaning in the world beyond that which we give to it. I've learned that firsthand and nothing could be closer to the truth. See, I used to be an
asesino
. In a lot of ways I still am except now I only kill who I want for causes of my own choosing. My choice, not somebody else's, just like it was your choice to come to this country. You see what I'm getting at here?”

The class nodded enthusiastically again, although this time a few of the immigrants seated before Paz exchanged hushed words and looked confused.

“Here's what you need to know,
mis amigos
,” Paz continued. “The philosopher Kierkegaard believed that happiness was a function of man's ability to manage control of the external conditions transpiring around him. Not easy to handle, that much I can assure you, and I can see the whole concept has you a bit baffled, so let me give you an example from my own life.”

Here Paz felt his mind drifting, back to the time his refusal to burn a Venezuelan village and its people had led to his exile from his home country.

“I was a much different man before I met my Texas Ranger,” he told his students, “just like all of you today are much different from the people you'll be next week, next month, and next year. I looked into my Ranger's eyes and saw what was missing in my own.”

Paz stopped as if waiting for his words to sink in. His students looked on enthralled, captivated, recognition flashing in most of their gazes as if they could somehow glean the portent of words spoken in a language they hardly understood at all.

“Existentialism is mostly bullshit like everything else, but there are a few things we can learn from it. Take Albert Camus, for example. He was obsessed with the myth of Sisyphus, you know, the guy condemned to keep pushing the rock up a hill only to have it roll all the way back to the bottom as soon as he reaches the top. Camus's point was that the futility of the act wasn't as important as Sisyphus finding meaning and purpose in its completion. Why else would he continue to do something he knew was pointless? You see what I'm getting at here?”

His students didn't, their expressions utterly blank.

“Okay,” Paz continued, “let me put it this way. There are going to be days where you feel the same futility that Sisyphus did. But, as was the case for him, the key for you will be to find purpose and meaning, a sense of fulfillment and achievement in the completion of the simplest task. That's as good a definition of happiness as you'll ever find and it's what I want you to take from this class if you take nothing else. The language itself doesn't matter because what matters is what transpires in your own mind. Thoughts are more important than actions because they define those actions and lend purpose to them that—”

Paz stopped in midsentence, midthought. A curtain drew before his vision, trapping his students behind it and leaving Paz alone in a cold, dark place. It parted slowly, some mystical being tugging on a rope to draw it open again, leaving him looking straight at his reflection in the window. But he was gone, his very being erased from existence so he could see straight through the glass to the darkness beyond. Then something else began to take shape in place of his reflection. Obscure and unrecognizable and then licked at by flames that later burst into a bright inferno that utterly consumed whatever had been taking shape before him. The flames seemed so real Paz swung to see if the classroom might have caught fire. But nothing had changed, his students still in their seats, a few of them following his gaze toward the window as if wondering what it was he had seen.

The flames continued to lick at the world beyond the window, and Paz caught glimpses of shapes and shadows consumed within them. He squinted, hoping to better grasp the message and portent of what was unfolding before his vision. For a moment, brief and fleeting, the face of Caitlin Strong appeared amid the flames, threatened by them and yet untouched for the time being. Then the flames were gone, Caitlin Strong having vanished with them, nothing but darkness remaining beyond the window. Even the trees and campus beyond were gone, lost to a maelstrom of violence that was coming. At once, Paz felt blisteringly hot, as if the flames had found him. Just as quickly, though, he went cold, imagining the flames dying as if buckets of ice water were dumped over his person.

“¿Son esta usted bien, Profesor?”

“¿Pasa algo?”

“Yes,” Paz said in English, “something is very wrong. My Texas Ranger needs me.” Then he was in motion for the door. “
Clase desestimó.
Class dismissed.”

 

11

N
EW
B
RAUNFELS,
T
EXAS

“Look at me and tell me if I seem convinced,” the man named Brooks said. “That's because I'm not convinced the situation is contained at all.”

Li Zhen studied him dispassionately, viewing him as no more than another ornament within the Chinese garden around which he'd constructed the American headquarters of Yuyuan, the company he'd built from the ground up thanks to the support he'd won from the Triad sixteen years earlier.

“I was not aware I needed to convince you of anything,” he told Brooks.

“This is the United States, my friend, not China. An innocent kid getting the shit kicked out of him tends to rub people the wrong way here. Last time I checked, it was called a crime.”

“You can make your point without sarcasm or such unfortunate language.”

“Really?” Brooks asked him. “Because you don't seem to be getting my point at all.”

Brooks towered over Zhen's diminutive stature, with broad shoulders barely contained by the white dress shirt that fit him too tightly in the neck. His head too was large, his skull looking almost simian in shape beneath hair cropped so close that his scalp burned red beneath the sun, the shading exaggerated by the milky paleness of his skin. He looked like a man better suited for a military uniform, in contrast to Li Zhen's perfectly fitted Jhane Barnes suit that elegantly covered his athletic frame. It was the only brand Zhen wore, in recognition of the fact that Jhane Barnes was the first major label to relocate its apparel manufacturing to China.

And an American label at that.

“You seem unimpressed, my friend,” Li Zhen said, trying to keep the disgust he felt for the man from creeping into his voice.

“With your efforts to reassure me that things haven't spun out of control here, you're damn right.” Brooks was sweating despite the coolness dominating the air, even for October in Texas. “You should have told me the truth about the girl, Li. Holding back serves neither of our interests.”

“Personally or those of our countries?”

“What's the difference?” Brooks smirked. “And that's the point I'm trying to make here.”

Zhen knew “Brooks” wasn't the man's real name but didn't care about that any more than he cared about the man himself. He was a distraction, a part of his overall operation to be tolerated as necessary and placated as much as possible.

“Did you think we wouldn't find out the truth?” Brooks, or whoever he really was, continued. “We're pretty good at this stuff. You should keep that in mind.”

“I have, my friend,” Zhen said, his voice calm in a cold and disinterested manner. “I always do. The girl will be found.”

“Which implies she hasn't been yet. That's why I'm not reassured by your insistence that the situation is contained, especially since your efforts ended up putting an innocent kid in the hospital. It's only a matter of time.” Here, Brooks enunciated his point by tapping his watch, further annoying Zhen.

“A matter of time before what?”

“Your indiscretions lead back to you. And if they lead back to you, there's a risk they could lead back to us, and that's a risk we cannot accept.”

Zhen simply shook his head, seemingly unmoved as he gazed about the garden. “All this beauty and you seem not to even notice.”

The Yuyuan Gardens, as Zhen had come to think of them, formed an elegant testament to a tradition dating back thousands of years in his home country. A classical mix of tumbling waterfalls, flowering plants, and thickly lavish vegetation all laid amid beautiful layered stone and rock of varying colors and sizes keyed to the particular area of display they inhabited.

“What's that have to do with anything?”

Zhen smiled, enjoying the fact that the American believed he, and his people, were in charge, just as the Triad had upon their initial meeting. “I built this garden because I wanted the employees of Yuyuan to find true beauty just steps away from their offices. Because in this beauty they will find purpose to their work. They will know that while their individual contributions might seem to mean nothing when compared against the greater whole, each of those contributions are actually like all of the flowers you see around you. Each one adds its own element of beauty. Remove it and the garden suffers. But in beauty, there is also danger.”

Zhen strolled on, leading the American along the garden's winding paths, the flowers they passed so beautiful that they looked part of a landscape painting dropped onto the scene instead of grown there. He caught his own reflection in a still stream, feeling he had not aged a single day in the sixteen years since his new life had begun. He wore his still thick hair slicked back. His complexion was unmarred by wrinkles and his skin tone even except for a tint of red that seemed to perpetually flush his cherub-like cheeks.

Zhen stopped before a nest of beautiful red, pink, and white flowering plants. “This is oleander, among the most beautiful flowers known to man,” he told Brooks. “But also among the most poisonous. Just breathing in the aroma from a strain as pure as this is enough to induce symptoms that include heart palpitations that can lead to death if not treated almost immediately. There are stories of besieged Chinese villages burning fields of oleander to forestall the approach of their enemies, sometimes turning them back altogether.”

Brooks nodded impatiently. “So your point is that the girl is beautiful and dangerous. I get that, Li.”

“Actually, that's not my point at all. In the case of oleander it is not the flower that may cause death, it's the ignorance of the man unaware of the danger it portends. Do you see my point?”

Brooks smirked again. “Let me make
my
point, Li. Your whole operation here is under my control and my discretion. We may serve each other's needs, but it happens on my terms. Is that clear?”

Zhen bowed slightly in feigned reverence again.

“What is it that old Chinese curse?” Brooks asked him. “‘May you live in interesting times,' isn't it?”

Zhen just looked at him.

“Well,” Brooks continued, “I suppose we're both cursed, aren't we? That's a point we need to keep in mind in the hope the day never comes when we find our interests opposing each other.”

At that, Li Zhen reached up and pulled an entire oleander flower, stem and all, from its bush.

“For that day,” he said, handing it to Brooks.

*   *   *

Li Zhen remained alone in his gardens for some time after Brooks departed, stroking the oleander petals as if the flowers were pets, enjoying the risk he was taking by sucking in their deceptively dangerous aroma. Finally he entered the building through a private entrance and stepped into an elevator cleverly disguised as a closet. The compartment swept him downward through four stories of hardened concrete to make sure the true purpose behind Yuyuan's very existence was never detected by spy satellites orbiting hundreds of miles in space.

The elevator opened onto an underground floor that made up a single cavernous space that could have been part of a brokerage house or call center, except its stations were unmanned. Everything in Li Zhen's true headquarters, the ultimate product of his initial meeting with the Triad captains all those years ago, was automated. And everything keyed off two dozen wall-sized monitor screens that provided the floor's only light until sensors picked up his movements and activated the dull fluorescents recessed overhead. Each screen represented a region of the United States, all of them showing a constant scroll of numbers rolling from top to bottom. Those numbers, collected and received from a pair of satellites launched by the Chinese government, were then programmed into the drive of a supercomputer that powered the various substations lining the floor before terminals that might as well have been manned by ghosts. Their screens glowed eerily, the collective light forming a kind of haze in the floor's dehumidified air that seemed thick enough to touch.

The total count, according to the central monitor, had exceeded a hundred million for the first time two days ago and was already a hundred and twenty-five million now. And before too long, Li Zhen fully expected that number to double to nearly two hundred and fifty million.

Representing eighty percent of the United States population.

All of whom would be dead in a week's time.

 

P
ART
T
WO

When we see him at his daily task of maintaining law, restoring order, and promoting peace—even though his methods be vigorous—we see him in his proper setting, a man standing alone between a society and its enemies.

—Walter Prescott Webb,
The Texas Rangers

 

12

P
ROVIDENCE,
R
HODE
I
SLAND