As they passed through crowds of men and women, some equipped like regular military units, others more resembling partisans, and all of them turning to gape at Connie, two more men in somewhat less complete camo-uniforms joined the entourage. Connie turned to Danko for a silent assessment of their situation, and he shrugged his shoulders. There was no point resisting, as all three men carried AK-47s – even though they probably could disarm them, it was by no means clear what that maneuver would accomplish. If Commander Wei meant to do them harm, they wouldn’t get very far on scooters in this terrain, even if the crowd merely watched passively.
They walked past several concrete buildings, down what seemed to be the main drag of the village, ultimately stopping in front of a small shelter composed half of bundled branches propped somehow vertically to form a wall, and half of a canvas roof suspended from a central pole.
“The larger buildings are easy targets for the Tatmadaw artillery,” Danko whispered.
Inside the shelter, Commander Wei sat in an incongruously modern-looking cloth and chrome office chair behind a makeshift desk consisting of a few planks laid across two stacks of truck tires. Off to one side, two more officers squatted against a wall, and several rectangular cases lay open on the floor nearby. The commander’s unit was getting ready to move, though it was unclear what they meant to carry in them.
“We have heard nothing from the saopha since yesterday.” Connie had picked up enough of the local pidgin to guess that the commander was referring to Tammy. “Our latest intel shows that the road from Hsipaw to Lashio is contested.”
“Will you take the pass through Mongyai?” Danko asked.
“Yes, it will require an extra day, but we will end up just north of the enemy position. You are welcome to accompany us.”
“Thank you, Commander. Your offer is generous, but we may be able to move more quickly on our own, if we take the pass north of Man Kat.”
“The area northeast of Loi Leng should be clear, but we have heard nothing of Sao Pha Khun Hsu in several days, Danko-sifu. This is worrisome, as much depends on her. May the fates smile on your journey.”
Commander Wei and his officers would take two more hours to martial the troops for the march to Mongyai, but Connie and Danko were able to fill two fuel tanks and turn north within fifteen minutes.
“Should we bring her along?” Connie asked.
“Who?”
Connie tipped her head toward the young woman who’d been following them from a discreet distance. “You know… the girl who helped with your stitches.”
“Do you even know her name?”
“I will as soon as you ask her.”
“What makes you think she even wants to come with us?”
“Oh, c’mon, Danko. Look at her. Does she seem like a soldier to you? What’s left of this village isn’t a home anymore, and she’s got nothing to contribute to the army… and if she follows them, it won’t be long before they start passing her around.”
“Fine,” he said, once he’d actually stopped to look at the girl. Connie was right – dressed in blue jeans and sandals, and a neatly tucked white button-down blouse. She certainly hadn’t dressed for the occasion. Her name turned out to be Ip Mao Bao – “Call me Ip,” she said to Connie, in the little bit of English she spoke. The Chinese-sounding surname said to Danko that she came from one of the Wa communities that straddled the border.
Ip climbed onto the back of a scooter and wrapped her arms around Connie’s midsection.
21
The Little Ones
Like a slumbering dragon, rumbling from a lofty height, Mt. Aso could be seen to puff out gray signals of his majesty on most days from as far away as the ridge running above the north bank of the Tanohara River. Emily glanced up at the ridgeline on the second evening, from the private bath reserved for them in the ryokan inn Wu Dao had found. They’d spent the morning being driven up to the caldera, though he’d hoped to be allowed to charter a helicopter for the trip.
“Have I mentioned that my day job is to pilot much larger, and more heavily armed birds for a living?”
“I thought you were an underpaid functionary toiling in the basement of an embassy?”
But for a rakish gleam in his eye as he spoke, and a bit of magic on his lips, she might have found his remark impertinent. In the end, the drive provided sufficient pleasures even for Wu Dao, careening up the switchbacks, and the flow of tourist traffic in late autumn was at a minimum. From the rim, some five thousand feet above the surrounding countryside, much of which had probably been spit out in an eruption ninety thousand years ago, Emily pointed out the keep of Kumamoto Castle forty miles to the west. Cranes towered over the walls, carrying out the vast work of restoration after a recent earthquake had shaken the foundations, rendering much of the complex structurally unsound.
Kumamoto was their next stop, and because Wu Wei had contributed several hundred thousand renminbi to the effort, they were allowed to tour the subterranean passageways still deemed safe but closed to the public. Later, Emily dodged engineers to race Wu Dao to the top of the keep, and pointed out various features of the extensive gardens contained within the lower terrace walls.
“It’s so strange to have this view to ourselves,” she said. “The last time I was here, the place was packed. This must be how the Hosokawa felt, you know, before they were displaced in the Meiji Restoration.”
“They were displaced?” Wu Dao glanced at her to see if she was serious. “A Hosokawa visited my father’s house when I was a boy, and I think he was Prime Minister at the time. Was he not part of the clan?”
“No,” Emily conceded. “He was.” But the Hosokawa she had in mind were not civil servants, even of the highest rank, or financiers and modern gentry, but feudal lords, the daimyos who dominated much of the island of Kyushu, and enjoyed absolute authority within their domains. She thought of them as Seiwa-Genji, Minamotos descended from Emperor Seiwa. Were they even distant cousins of a sort, two branches of bastards descended from the Queen of Heaven, Amaterasu-omikami? If that’s even who she really was, these cousins were senior to her by six or seven centuries. But their descendants eventually traded lordship for riches in money and influence, and were that much the poorer for it.
The city was famous for its special tonkotsu ramen, and ordinarily that would be enough to satisfy Emily. But it’s difficult to wear someone as fancy as Wu Dao around the nightlife of some place this provincial. He would find a way to amuse himself in whatever clubs they could find – he had, after all, danced outside her building with the neighborhood boys – but she noticed a yen for something… shinier. Neither of them felt like making the drive to Nagasaki, since it would eat up most of the afternoon, even if they took the ferry across Ariake Bay.
“We can book a room,” Wu Dao said. “There’s a couple of first rate hotels.”
“What about the ryokan back in Minamioguni? You’ve already paid for tonight.” She didn’t need to see his raised eyebrow to recognize the absurdity of her question, but she’d make it up to him.
Lounging next to him later in one of the private baths, she felt an urge to rinse off again after the evening’s soak. Somehow the water, heated by a pyroclastic flow emanating in the nostrils of the dragon sleeping fitfully beneath Mt. Aso, seemed sticky to her. She drew the kimono-style robe across her shoulders in a gesture towards modesty, though her primary wish for that evening was to feel his arms and legs against her skin. But she well understood the power of the veil to enflame desire, and the robes furnished by the ryokan hung just loosely enough to conceal what she would reveal, clinging here and draped provocatively there.
By the time Wu Dao had dozed off in her arms, some hours later, she found herself thinking again about Nyquist. Ought she to turn her lover into an asset, as ordered… or perhaps murder him in his sleep? Wu Yutian had read her heart and seen that his grandson was safe with her, despite recognizing the blood on her hands. She stroked one finger down the back of his neck, and wh
en he shivered, she nudged him off her arm.
A phone vibrated and her thoughts snapped into a more pragmatic focus, and she rolled off the futon with care, so as not to wake him. “This better not be Nyquist,” she muttered, crouching naked over her bag, digging beneath socks and underwear to locate the embassy phone. “Oh, crap,” she said, when she realized the call had come on the sat-phone, and didn’t really wish to talk logistics with her mother at this precise moment. Moving with considerable care, Emily located the kimono-robe and cinched it up tighter than she had earlier, closed the door without letting the latch click, and stood holding the phone on the public patio outside their room.
Unlike conventional phones, the connection on the sat-phone always took a second or two longer to complete than one might expect, as the handset sent a return signal to the satellite relay, and only then would the party initiating the call know they’d gotten through. Emily leaned against a railing and looked out over the Tanohara River, and let the sound of the water clear her mind before raising the phone to her ear.
“Hello… hello?” The voice was insistent, and it wasn’t her mother’s.
Perry knew exactly how sat-phones operate, and what sort of time-lag to expect, which meant his impatience with the connection was not a good sign. Emily’s heart pounded in her ears as she tried to decide how to answer.
“I’m here.”
“Where, exactly, is here?”
“Japan,” she said, after reminding herself that no GPS-location data would be transmitted from the handset Michael had arranged for her. A frivolous concern, since there would be no way to track her phone on Perry’s end, but at such moments, strange ideas often come to one. “I’m in Osaka… with the family. It’s late here. What time is it where you are?”
“2300,” he snapped. Perhaps he wasn’t alone, and was merely adopting an authoritative tone because of the other people in the room. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
Her voice shook as she replied: “No.”
“Don’t you want to ask if there’s something I want to tell you?”
“Is there?”
“You know goddamn well there is. Your face is all over the tabloids, and now it’s plastered all over the base… you and some Asian playboy. What the hell is going on? At least have the decency to tell me to my face.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“And what the hell should I think? Are you sleeping with him? I’m the laughingstock of my unit, thanks to you. One of the comms-techs found pictures of you in a celebrity gossip rag, draped all over… some guy… being driven around in his fancy sports car…”
“What did it say… the gossip rag, I mean?”
“How should I know? I don’t read Chinese. But I don’t need to read the damn captions to know what’s going on. Everyone here thinks you’ve hung horns on me.”
Emily glanced behind her to make sure Wu Dao hadn’t followed her out, though Perry’s voice only boomed in her ear, and could hardly have awakened anyone else. With one hand, she reached down to lift the bottom of her robe and slipped through the plantings at the edge of the patio, and stepped down a shallow slope to the river’s edge. Here, at least, she could speak freely.
“It’s not what you think.”
“What is it, then?”
“You understood what was likely to happen with this damn embassy posting. I’m under orders… it’s an assignment, to get close to….” The lie she was preparing herself to tell would be remarkably safe, but that didn’t prevent it from sticking in her throat.
“Who assigned you?”
“The station chief at the embassy… who do you think?”
“So, you’re an agent now.”
“No, of course not… well, maybe, yes, sort of. All I know is, one minute I’m at a state dinner, receiving some stupid medal, and this guy asks me to dance…”
“Wait, there was dancing at a Chinese State dinner?” Perry’s tone suggested he thought he’d caught her in a lie.
“Yeah, President Liang likes to mix it up… keep his rivals off-balance. Anyway, as soon as I get to work the next morning, the station chief is all over me, saying I’ve got to develop my dancing partner as an asset.”
“What does Michael say about this? I mean, the station chief works for him, right?”
“What can he say? Apparently, the guy I’m supposed to turn is all kinds of connected, the son of a wealthy industrialist, so Michael’s man would be remiss in not pushing me to try, and Michael can’t shut the whole thing down without raising a lot of sticky questions.”
“Well, did you… turn him, I mean?”
“No. What the hell do I know about tradecraft? I played along for a couple of weeks, you know, for appearances…”
“… for appearances,” Perry practically yelled into her ear. “The appearances suck on my end.”
“I’m sorry about that, sweetheart.”
It felt so strange to use the vocabulary of affection after everything that had happened, and it rang somehow both false and true. She really did have, in her heart, the feelings that ought to accompany such a term of endearment. But everything else about the situation tinged it with falsehood. Did love always announce itself in this way, as a lie and a truth simultaneously? Wu Yutian had been right – she did only want to wear his grandson ‘for the festival’, and now it was time to send him back home.
“I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be on you, or I would never have gone along with it.” Perry grunted something that seemed to signal grudging acceptance, though she would never know if he was truly satisfied by this fable she’d just spun out until she saw him in person again. “You don’t need to worry about that guy. I’ve already cut him loose. The station chief is pissed, but it’s not like I wanted a career in the agency.”
Once Perry seemed sufficiently mollified, Emily filled him in on the basic outline of the plan to bring Li Li home to Jiang Xi. How unsettling it seemed to use the word ‘home’ in this context. She took the opportunity to reaffirm, at least for his ears, her devotion to him, and when the moment seemed right – “I’d better go before we wake up the kids” – she ended the connection.
She was about to climb the slope back up to the common patio outside their room when something, a movement, a sound, she wasn’t sure which, caught her attention. Two men moving quietly on the walkway above her, dark suits – either security or operatives – Wu Wei’s men, or perhaps Jiang Xi’s? The thought crossed her mind that they might have a more sinister purpose, and worse yet, that they could have overheard her conversation. How freely had she spoken with Perry, about her plans for Li Li, about Wu Dao, about everything?
Now in full stealth mode, Emily shifted slightly to avail herself of the cover the surrounding foliage could provide, and it was fortunate that the floral pattern on her robe was not so bright as to stand out in the light of a waning moon. The men paused outside her room, and it occurred to her that if these men were not here to protect Wu Dao, she might need to protect him from them. She readied herself to hitch up the robe and dash to the top of the slope if they moved in a direction she didn’t approve of. A voice crackled faintly, probably in an earpiece, and the men moved on. She watched until they were out of sight, and shivered in the cold.
Back in the room, Emily slipped under the covers next to the dalliance she hadn’t quite given up, despite the assurance she had just given Perry. But the next morning, after a breakfast of rice, egg and pickled vegetables, she broke the bad news and sent him home alone.
The bullet train from Fukuoka to Kyoto gave Emily a couple hours to get some perspective. Earlier, at the airport, Wu Dao hadn’t wanted to leave, and she’d had precious little leverage to persuade him. Even invoking the dread specter of a prior boyfriend would hardly have deterred him, whether he believed it or not, and she definitely didn’t want to let him know her family was nearby. She’d never be rid of him, then.
“You have to give me a little space,” she’d said.
The gate attendant cleared her throat, until Wu Dao acknowledged her with a shoulder shrug. “She’s flirting with him, too,” Emily thought.
“Space?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.” Almost reflexively, she touched his cheek, and kissed him on the mouth, even though she knew it wouldn’t help her cause, but she felt a sudden urge to put the gate attendant in her place. Brilliant.
“Won’t they miss you at the embassy tomorrow?”
“That’s my concern, not yours.”
“Then come back with me. Why would you stay on here?”
“I have my reasons… and you don’t need to know them.”
Later, in the ‘Green Car’, which is what Japan Rail calls the first-class carriages, Emily’s seat was luxurious, and only one other passenger had a seat nearby. A crowd pressed past her window, and an attendant handed her a warm napkin to refresh her face and hands. Finally, the platform lurched slightly toward the rear of the carriage, though none of the people outside seemed to notice, and this was followed by a second lurch and a third, each one gentler than the last until the station receded smoothly out of sight, and the urban landscape of Fukuoka took its place, only to give way to trees and fields, most of which were empty after the recent rice harvest.
The late morning sun streamed in through the window opposite, glistening off the black ponytail of the woman seated across the aisle, but Emily tried to focus on the outside world, and not the one faintly reflected in the window. This was the countryside she’d wanted to explore with Stone and Li Li, and now that she was going to see them, perhaps they’d find a moment. She entered her mother’s number on the sat phone, and hoped for a connection before the Shin-Kanmon tunnel blocked all transmissions.
“I should be there by 12:30, in time for a late lunch, if the kids can wait.”
“There’s a good tonkatsu place on the top floor of the train station,” Yuki said. “Stone will like that, and it’s probably not too exotic for Andie.”
Girl Goes To Wudang (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 7) Page 22