Emerald Buddha (Drake Ramsey Book 2)

by Russell Blake

  Elliot’s stomach somersaulted as the floor dropped away and the elevator free-fell a hundred and fifty feet, its emergency braking system disabled. The plunge lasted the longest few seconds of Elliot’s life, which was extinguished abruptly when it crashed into the cement subbase, moving at well over a hundred miles per hour.

  Hours later, firefighters pried the wreckage apart and found Elliot’s mangled remains. Nobody noticed when one of them pocketed a flash drive from the victim’s pocket, and immediately after left the site due to dizziness.

  A glowing obituary honored Elliot’s tireless work in exposing corruption, and within a week his death was forgotten by all but his family, who moved two months later, their home too filled with the ghosts of the past to ever be comfortable again.

  Chapter 9

  Malibu, California

  Spencer, Allie, and Drake sat on the deck, watching the sunset over the Pacific, cold beers in hand, a mild offshore breeze ruffling their hair. A few stragglers and beachcombers roamed the sand as the last of the diehard after-work surfers caught their final waves.

  “How is it down in Laguna Beach, Spencer?” Allie asked, as the sun sank into the sea.

  “Gorgeous. Not as many trust-fund kids and Hollywood hotshots as Malibu, but stellar views.”

  “Hey. Watch it – that’s my hood you’re dissing,” Drake said, and held out a sweating bottle of Anchor Steam to clink against Allie’s. She obliged with a happy sigh and went back to contemplating the salmon sky.

  “Shame about the house. I hope you get that straightened out,” Allie said.

  “Yeah. Nothing’s ever easy, is it? What about you? Sounds like you have your hands full with your dad’s estate.”

  “I’m hoping to get the last of it settled in the next couple of weeks. I’ve got an excellent legal team out of Houston that’s keeping the worst of the leeches at bay.” She shrugged. “I can’t believe how many there are when big money’s involved.”

  “Tell me about it,” Spencer said with a frown. “Are you planning to stay in Texas?”

  Allie looked at a spot somewhere to the left of Drake’s shoulder. “Depends. This is pretty sweet. I’m just not sure I could get used to the whole Baywatch lifestyle.”

  “Hazzle-whatever’s a star in France. Like Jerry Lewis, without the telethon,” Spencer said.

  “Good to know I might have that to fall back on. Is that where unemployed treasure hunters go to die? Take up miming or painting or something?” Drake asked.

  “It’s sad. The bistros are lousy with them,” Spencer said. “They’ll usually leave you alone if you buy them a drink.”

  Allie nodded. “Or they start crying. I hear it’s kind of like the island of misfit toys, only without claymation.”

  “Or the songs,” Spencer agreed, and they all laughed.

  “We should probably grab some dinner before the flight. There are some amazing restaurants nearby,” Drake said, glancing at the time. “We have three hours to get to the airport.”

  “You’d think the CIA could whisk us through security. Like making us take our shoes off and X-raying us is going to prevent anything. I can think of a dozen lethal weapons you can make from crap you buy in gift shops on the jetway side of security. Do they really think terrorists don’t have web access?” Spencer griped.

  “I guess we just aren’t special enough,” Allie said. “Besides, Drake’s hands are lethal weapons.”

  “Absolutely,” Drake agreed. “Just put a gun or a Lambo in them, and bam, it’s curtains.”

  Music flooded the quiet area from next door as the sliding door opened, and Kyra sashayed onto her deck, wearing spandex exercise shorts and a jogging top. She raised a beer and toasted them all. “Hi.”

  Spencer smiled like a Cheshire cat and Allie rolled her eyes.

  “Hi back atcha,” Spencer said. Drake gave an embarrassed wave.

  “Are you going to be around tomorrow for the barbecue? You didn’t forget, did you?” Kyra asked. The breeze carried the scent of vanilla and coconut from her as she neared the glass railing. Allie coughed.

  “Oh, um, no, I can’t make it,” Drake said, flushing as Allie’s eyes bored holes through him. “I’ve got to go out of town for a few days.”

  “That totally sucks. I guess it will be just me and my home girls, then. How boring.”

  “Drake hates to miss an orgy. Maybe a rain check?” Allie asked innocently in a low voice.

  “What?” Kyra said. “Let me turn down my stereo.”

  “She said maybe a rain check,” Drake offered. “Anyway, have a good time.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Drake stood and went into the house before the conversation could go astray, and Allie and Spencer followed him in. “Let me change and we can hit the road,” Drake said, and didn’t wait for a response, opting to duck into his bedroom before being subjected to further torment.

  At Allie’s request they ate a delicious Italian dinner at Gravina on Pacific Coast Highway, and then returned to Drake’s house to await the taxi to the airport. The ride south took an hour, and they were in the international terminal of LAX with ten minutes to spare. Alex was waiting for them at the Cathay Pacific counter, dressed casually, looking in his wrinkled safari shirt and cargo pants more like a midlife-crisis backpacker than a CIA field supervisor.

  “Nice to see you made it,” he said. “First-class check-in is over there. I’m in business class.”

  Drake noticed that his eyes never stopped roaming around the terminal even as he greeted them.

  “No pampering for the wicked, I suppose,” Spencer said.

  “Not terrible, though. I’m a good sleeper. I suggest you try to get as much rest as possible, because we’re going to hit the ground running. The only wait will be for the final go-ahead on the permits.”

  They checked in and left all but their carry-on bags with the friendly counter staff, and then moved to the security checkpoint. There was the inevitable line, where bored dullards were searching grandmothers and kids as though they were smuggling bazookas, making for a tedious half hour of shuffling toward the imaging machines.

  The first-class lounge was lavish and half empty, and they spent their time online until the flight was announced.

  Boarding began almost an hour before takeoff due to the size of the plane, and both Drake and Allie were asleep by the time the 777 trundled down the runway and lifted into the sky. Spencer watched the lights of Los Angeles disappear beneath its wings as it climbed into the heavens, the quest he was depending on to replenish his fortune about to begin.

  Chapter 10

  Beijing, China

  Jiao Long sat at the long rectangular conference table, facing his superior, Xiaoping Wu, the second-highest-ranking member of the MSS. Next to him was a nervous technician in charge of analyzing the servers that had been removed from Moontech’s headquarters.

  Xiaoping listened impatiently as Jiao gave his report. When he was finished, Xiaoping leaned forward, lit a cigarette, and exhaled a pungent gray cloud at the overhead light.

  “So this Huang didn’t know anything? He wasn’t in bed with Liu?” he growled.

  Jiao nodded. “I’m confident he wasn’t.”

  “Will he make it?”

  “No. He suffered a stroke during our interrogation. He’s on life support now, but not expected to regain consciousness.”

  Xiaoping grunted and tapped ash from his cigarette into a porcelain ashtray, taking care to shape the ember with the side – a peculiar habit Jiao had seen too many times to count. “Then what does that leave us with?”

  Jiao looked to the technician, who began speaking in a soft, almost feminine voice. “There’s no question that the intrusion into our computers came from Moontech. But when we were going through the logs, I found an anomaly that was very interesting. It appears that the attack on our system was directed remotely, via a Trojan horse that was able to co-opt one of the Moontech servers and make it look like the operator was in the building.
”

  Xiaoping waved an annoyed hand. “We know that.”

  “Yes, well, what was interesting was that we were not the only target.”

  “Don’t play games. Spit it out.”

  “It looks like Liu was accessing the U.S. Department of Defense network. Their internal, most sensitive servers.”

  “What?” Xiaoping exclaimed. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. The signature is…let’s just say that it’s distinctive.”

  “How? We’ve been trying to crack that for years. We’ve never been able to do it,” Jiao demanded.

  “I’m not sure. That’s the puzzling part. But he was able to gain access.”

  Xiaoping took another deep drag on his cigarette and his expression grew pensive. Nobody spoke until he stubbed the butt out and nodded. “We need to understand what he was doing. This significantly complicates matters. The Americans’ DOD is the best-fortified network in the world. If Liu was fishing around in there, we need answers.”

  The technician cleared his throat. “There is one more thing.”

  Both older men stared at him. “What’s that?” Jiao asked.

  “It looks like I may be able to reproduce the protocol that enabled him to access their servers.”

  If the technician had levitated around the room, it would have had less impact on Xiaoping and Jiao.

  Jiao’s eyes narrowed and he gave the younger man an appraising stare. “The hell you say.”

  The technician nodded. “It’s true. I’ll need some time, but there still might be enough on the server to put the pieces together.”

  Xiaoping sat back. “If you can do that, I’ll promote you to the highest possible position. You should be running our cyber efforts.”

  The technician smiled nervously. “I will do my best.”

  “Don’t sit here any longer, then. Go do it,” said Xiaoping. “Report to me at any hour of the day or night if you get through. But…the Americans cannot know it’s us. Under any circumstances. That would be disastrous.”

  “Oh, I’ll bounce it through a half-dozen servers. They’ll never suspect.”

  “I thought you told us that’s what Liu did,” Jiao said.

  “He didn’t know about the program I wrote that could trace it back through to the source. It technically doesn’t exist. Except it does. And we have it.” The technician smirked like a guilty schoolboy. “I could explain exactly how it works, if you’re interested.”

  Xiaoping shook his head. “I care about results. Don’t waste any more time with talk. This is the highest priority. Commandeer whatever resources you need. I cannot underscore its importance enough.”

  The technician rose. “I will report when I have a solution.”

  Jiao and Xiaoping watched as the slight man left the conference room, and stood for a moment without speaking, considering all they’d just learned.

  “This could be an enormous breakthrough,” Xiaoping said.

  “Yes, but what troubles me the most is that we have no idea what this Liu was doing in the DOD servers to begin with. If you recall, we thought he was trying to sabotage our systems, which is why we took such…swift action.”

  “At your recommendation, as I remember it.”

  “Which perhaps was an overreaction, in light of his achievement. Our very best have been banging their heads into that wall for a decade, with no success.” Jiao looked off into space. “Hard to believe a single rogue amateur could do what a team of a hundred top programmers couldn’t.”

  “There was only one Einstein, too. Occasionally one man sees something the majority misses. I suspect that’s the case this time.” Xiaoping stood. “But we can’t take back what is already done. Our best hope lies with our new prodigy, since we blew the old one out of the sky.”

  “At the time it seemed the prudent course. The penalty for espionage is death. We simply saved the tribunal the effort of trying him.”

  “As with most things, nothing is ever completely black or white.”

  Jiao remained seated as his boss left the room, the only sound the faint hiss of the air-conditioning and the steady ticking of the wall clock. He rubbed his eyes, which constantly burned from the pollution that was a regular feature of China’s large industrial cities. The rebuke in Xiaoping’s tone had been as plain as a backhand, although delivered subtly, as was his way. Jiao had made an informed decision to sabotage the plane in which Liu had been fleeing the country. There was no way he could have been expected to second-guess that the dead man had posed no threat they could find, at least not to China. To the U.S.?

  The first thing they needed to learn was what Liu had been doing in the DOD system. Once they understood that, then they could take appropriate action. But at the very least, having a clandestine window into the Americans’ deepest military secrets would be of incalculable value to the MSS.

  It could well shift the balance of power, wherein the U.S. presently held most of the cards. With ten aircraft carriers to China’s one, and a military budget that dwarfed the next twenty-six industrialized nations combined, the U.S. projected its agenda through superior firepower as well as through its financial system. If China had access to its plans, it could take steps to block those most harmful to China’s interests, and prevent the American war machine from dominating at least China’s piece of the global pie.

  What had Liu been after?

  The question haunted Jiao as he rose and moved to the door, his tread that of a far older man than had entered the room only minutes before.

  Chapter 11

  Bangkok, Thailand

  The Airbus A330-300 jet banked on approach to Suvarnabhumi International Airport and slowed as the pilot cut airspeed. The flight from Hong Kong, the connecting point for the trip from Los Angeles to Thailand, had been mercifully calm compared to the uncomfortably rough slog across the Pacific. Allie yawned and peered out the window, and Drake tried not to be too obvious in his admiration of her charms, which were still holding his attention as they neared their twentieth hour of travel.

  “How are you doing?” Drake asked.

  Allie shrugged. “Okay. I wish we had gotten more sleep. That part completely sucked.”

  “Yeah, well, it is what it is. We’ll be on the ground soon.”

  “I was reading about Bangkok on our layover. It’s supposed to be pretty modern.”

  “Probably the last we’ll see of running water or flush toilets until we’re back out of the jungle.”

  “Still a romantic, huh?”

  Drake was momentarily at a loss for words at Allie’s ability to throw him with her abrupt shifts. By the time he’d decided on a response, he’d lost her to the Bangkok skyline glittering below in the morning sun.

  The landing gear lowered into place with a thunk, and then they were dropping toward the ribbon of tarmac that stretched before them. The big plane seemed to float for an instant just above the runway, and then landed with a rough bounce before steadying as it slowed.

  Spencer smiled at them from across the aisle as the aircraft neared the gate. “It’s showtime,” he said with a theatrical flair. “Bangkok awaits the great white hunter.”

  “If you’re referring to me, it’s not necessary to flatter,” Allie said. “Although you can use ‘Goddess’ if you absolutely must.”

  They disembarked and filed to the immigration area, where stern clerks stamped their passports. Once finished with the formalities, they waited by the baggage carousels. Alex joined them, and after collecting their things, they moved out to where the drivers were gathered, holding signs and jabbering loudly. Alex turned his head toward Drake as he led them to the barrier that separated travelers from the waiting Thais. “We have a guide. I’ve worked with him before. He’s a character, but knows the ins and outs of Thailand like the back of his hand.”

  Allie and Drake nodded, wondering what a CIA veteran would describe as being a character, and didn’t have long to wait. A gaunt man of indeterminate late middle-age, with pecan-color
ed skin, his gleaming ebony hair slicked back with gel, and a Fu Manchu mustache that would have been the envy of any B-movie bad guy stood behind the barrier, watching them approach expectantly.

  Alex’s face relaxed for a split second as he neared the short Asian, who offered a crisp bow, the traditional wai greeting. Alex returned it and introduced them, and the guide bowed in turn to each.

  “This is Uncle Pete. Uncle Pete, meet Allie, Drake, and Spencer,” Alex said.

  “Most honored,” Uncle Pete said in heavily accented English, and then turned and snapped at a porter, who ran over and began stacking their luggage on a rickety hand truck. “My truck parked outside,” he explained. “I have policeman watch it. About only thing they good for these days, besides take bribes and shake down innocent driver.”

  “Can you fit everyone?” Alex asked.

  “Of course. I rent SUV just for you.”

  “Lead the way.”

  Uncle Pete marched briskly toward the departure terminal exit and then slowed so the porter could catch up. He nodded to Alex and grinned, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “Been long time, no?”

  “We can catch up later. What’s the word on the permits?”

  “Still wait. You know how that go. Someone holding out for more baht. But we promise we have tomorrow.”

  “Plan was to get into the field this afternoon,” Alex said.

  “Missionary man say, man propose, God dispose, right?” Uncle Pete said, his English suddenly improving. “In the meantime, I book you into top good hotel.” He regarded Allie. “First time in Thailand?”

  “Yes. I’ve heard lovely things.”

  Uncle Pete gave the porter and then the throng of locals meeting travelers a sour look. “Not from me. Lazy crooks.”

  Alex laughed, the first time he had since they’d met him. “Uncle Pete’s a perpetual optimist.”

  “Bangkok full of snakes in grass,” Uncle Pete snarled, and then cautioned the porter to hurry up.