by Don Winslow
“Okay… okay… you win,” he said. “I’ll just go back the way I came.” I’ll go all the way back to Yorkshire, if you want. Walking. Backwards.
He heard movement in the bushes above him. Maybe it was Ben Chin. Maybe he had broken their deal and hidden his whole vicious crew in the woods. Please… Neal slowly turned his head to see three more armed men come down through the woods to block the path behind him. Wrong crew.
Oh shit, oh dear. Okay, Ben Chin, where are you? Nowhere to be seen. You’re pretty tough with old ladies, Ben, but when it comes to your peer group…
Neal risked a glance to his right. Maybe, just maybe he could make it to the low stone wall and jump over the edge. The problem was that he didn’t know what was over the edge, a nice soft fir tree or a fifty-foot precipice culminating on a rock.
Leather Boy One raised his chopper and made a crisscross motion in front of his chest. Neal heard the fighters behind him close in another couple of feet. Then the line in front of him did the same thing.
The fifty-foot-drop option didn’t seem so bad. Being smashed on a rock seemed preferable to being chopped to pieces. His Eighteenth Century Lit friends would call that a Hobson’s choice.
Leather Boy One raised his chopper.
The Doorman dropped from the limb of the banyan tree right on top of Leather Boy One. They crashed to the ground and the Doorman reached out and grabbed the ankle of another one of the gang and pulled his feet out from under him. The Doorman was no match for Leather Boy One but held him down long enough to look up at Neal and gesture with his eyes to jump over the tangled mass-he had opened the door.
Neal heard a mass of running footsteps from behind and then in front, and Chin’s crew filled the path in both directions. One of them sliced the third Leather Boy across the arm with a chopper while the other reached out and pulled Neal over the top of the Doorman and Leather Boy One, who were still grappling on the ground. Then he pushed Neal along the path.
“Run!” he yelled.
Leather Boy One got a leg behind the Doorman’s ankle and flipped him over. He brought his chopper down on the back of the Doorman’s knee. The Doorman screamed in pain and grabbed Leather Boy One’s ankles and held on. The chopper came down again, on the other knee.
Chin’s assistant was pushing Neal away from the scene.
“Go, go, go!” he yelled.
“We have to help him!”
“He’s dead!”
Neal looked behind him and saw that both gangs were fighting. Screams of rage and the clang of metal on metal hit his ears, and the flashes of steel under the streetlamps dazzled his eyes. He felt more arms pulling on him now, moving him away from the fight, away from where the Doorman lay bleeding and whimpering, away from the danger. He could run now and make it, and Chin’s assistant and the others would protect his back. He felt the cool, clean air of safety.
He tore himself away from the arms and headed back toward the Doorman, who lay in the middle of the fight. Neal grabbed one of the Leather Boys by the back of his jacket and ran him over the side of the wall. Another one was leaning over the Doorman, searching for money. Neal grabbed the back hem of his jacket and pulled it over his head, trapping his arms. He hauled back and hit him in the face four times and the boy dropped. Neal reached under the Doorman’s arms and began to drag him back along the path, where Chin’s assistant and two of the others stood watching in disgust and confusion. They were outnumbered, they had just enough manpower to get Neal out, not fight a pitched battle, and the kweilo had fucked it up, and wasted a good doorman in the bargain.
“Help me!” Neal yelled to them.
The rest of Chin’s gang were now backing off in the opposite direction, back toward the observatory, flashing their choppers in front of them to hold off their advancing enemies. Leather Boy One and two of his comrades placed themselves squarely between Neal and Chin’s assistant, who began to back down the trail. Neal was surrounded again.
Fuck it, he thought, and knelt down over the Doorman. He had never seen so much blood. It was all over them. He took off his jacket, ripped off a sleeve, and wrapped it around the Doorman’s leg above the wound, trying to remember how to tie a proper tourniquet. The leg was almost severed, the tendons cut through. The Doorman had lost a lot of blood. His face was gray and his eyes were faint. He looked at Neal with reproach, an expression Neal read to mean, “You have wasted my sacrifice.”
Neal looked up at Leather Boy One.
“Get a doctor.”
Leather Boy One stepped over to them and kicked the Doorman in the leg, right on the wound. The Doorman howled. Neal held him as tightly as he could and stared up at Leather Boy One, memorizing his face. If I ever get out of this, he thought. Leather Boy One smiled broadly at him and raised his big knife over Neal’s face. Neal summoned up every bit of courage and rage he had to stare him in the face. Leather Boy One prepared to bring the chopper down in a smooth backhand stroke into Neal’s throat. Leather Boy One was smiling.
The bullet hit him squarely between the eyes. He crumpled to the ground with the smile still on what was left of his face. Two more silenced shots whooshed in the air and the rest of the Leather Boys scattered into the woods.
The man lowered the pistol and stepped into the light of a streetlamp. He was a white guy in a khaki suit.
“Mr. Carey,” he said. “You have fucked things up, but good.”
“Call an ambulance.”
The man stepped over and took a cursory look at the Doorman.
“It’s too late.”
“Call a fucking ambulance!”
The man spoke in a mild Southern accent. “The tendons are cut. Have you ever seen the life of a cripple in Kowloon? You’re not doing him any favors.”
The image of the beggar across the street from the hotel came back to Neal. He stroked the Doorman’s head and then felt along the side of his neck. There was no pulse.
“Believe me, he’s better off,” the man said. “Now it’s time to go.”
“What about the bodies?”
“They’ll be taken care of.”
Neal took off his watch and put it on the Doorman’s wrist. Then he looked up at the man.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
“You might say I’m a friend of the family.”
Neal figured that the house was somewhere on the Peak, because they hadn’t driven more than five minutes before they were let in through a guarded gate to a long driveway. Neal couldn’t see very well through the heavily tinted windows in the back of the car, but he could tell that the house was large and secluded. The man ushered him in through a downstairs door and led him down a hallway past a large study and into a bathroom.
“I’ll see if we can scare up some clean clothes,” the man said.
“Who-”
“I’ll answer all your questions later. Right now I don’t want you getting bloodstains all over these people’s nice furniture. Why don’t you get washed up and then join me in the study?”
The man left and Neal stripped off his clothes. His slacks and his shirt were sticky with blood. He bundled them up and threw them in a trashcan. The he ran some hot water into the sink, took a washcloth and soap, and scrubbed himself. His hands were trembling. He looked at himself in the mirror, and the man who looked back seemed a lot older than he remembered.
Then he heard a timid knock on the door. He opened to see an old Chinese man in servant’s livery. The man handed him a white short-sleeved shirt, some baggy black cotton trousers, and a pair of black cloth rubber-soled shoes, then shuffled away. Neal put the clothes on. The shoes were a little too large, but they would do. He padded down the hallway into the study.
Thick red drapes masked wall-to-ceiling windows, and a rich Oriental carpet covered the floor. The effect was one of tremendous quietude. An enormous black enameled desk took up most of one wall, and a smaller black enameled coffee table flanked by a sofa and two straight-backed chairs occupied another. The man was sitting
in one of the chairs. His tie was unknotted, his shoes were off, and he was sipping from a nearly translucent cup.
“You want some tea?” he asked Neal.
“Fuck you and your tea. Who are you?”
“Sorry about the coolie clothing. It’s all we had around.”
Neal didn’t answer.
“My name is Simms,” the man said. He had thick blond hair cut very short, and blue eyes. He looked about thirty plus.
“Are you with Friends?”
“I’m not against them.”
“I’m not in the fucking mood-”
Simms set his cup down. “See, I really don’t care what you’re in the fucking mood for. I just had to kill someone because of you, because you just couldn’t do what you were told. So let’s forget about your mood, all right? Have some tea.”
Neal took the other chair. He poured himself a cup from the teapot that was set on the table.
“And please don’t trouble yourself to thank me for saving your ass. I’m just a public servant doing my job,” Simms said.
“Thank you.”
“You’re just barely welcome. Believe me, Carey, if I didn’t need you, I just might have let them chop you up, I’m that pissed off at you.”
The Book of Joe Graham, Chapter Eight, Verse Fifteen: Don’t give the bastards anything, not when you’re right, and especially not when you’re wrong.
“Boo-hoo, boo-hoo,” Neal said. “And by the way, fuck you. I’ve been doing this shit for half my life and I’ve never seen anyone killed before. Now I see a kid get his legs half hacked off and another get his face blown away and I’ve got blood all over me, literally and figuratively, and I figure you’re involved in all of it. So don’t give me this guilt trip, you preppie fuck. I have plenty already.”
Simms smiled and nodded his head.
“Can I have a real drink instead of this goddamned tea?” Neal asked.
Simms went to the sidebar and poured Neal a healthy scotch.
So you have a file on me, Neal thought. And you’re not with Friends. Which leaves alphabet soup.
“CIA?” Neal asked.
“If you say so.”
“So AgriTech is just a paper corporation.”
“AgriTech is real, all right. It has laboratories, offices, a lunchroom, company picnics, the whole nine yards.”
The whiskey burned pleasantly in Neal’s stomach. He wished he could just go out and get drunk.
Instead he said, “Yeah, AgriTech also has a treasurer named Paul Knox, who has a-how shall I put this-‘fantastic’ employment record.”
“Paul’s a good man.”
“Yeah, I’m sure he’s a credit to his race and a terrific fourth if you’re caught short at tee-off time, but I want to know why one AgriTech research scientist is worth all this killing.”
Simms held his teacup gently in both hands and inhaled the smell, as if the answer were in the tea’s aroma.
“AgriTech,” Simms explained in a slow, soft drawl, “is what we call a ‘bench company.’ It’s a place to put players you can’t use on the field at the moment but who you want around in case you need them. In the good old days before Watergate and Jimmy ‘I’ll never lie to you’ Carter, we had a lot more money to keep people on our full-time payroll. As it is now, anytime we want to hire a janitor, we have to appear before a Senate subcommittee and explain to some alcoholic wazoo why we can’t clean the toilets ourselves.
“So we took some of the monies that were sitting around in nooks and crannies and invested it in businesses that perhaps needed a little help. We even created companies out of whole cloth. These companies are expected to conduct actual business, turn a profit, meet a payroll-”
“The whole nine yards.”
“-and in return they employ some people we can’t keep on our lists but might want to use from time to time. Naturally, we need to have understanding people in executive positions in these companies, because, as you have demonstrated, the books do not always bear the closest of scrutinies.”
“And these execs might have to okay some frequent and lengthy leaves of absence.”
“That too.”
“But Pendleton isn’t on an authorized leave.”
“Not hardly.”
“So what happened?”
“So what happened is we got greedy. See, we had ourselves this bench company called AgriTech. AgriTech makes pesticides. At the same time, we found it a little difficult to obtain appropriations for research funds. So it seemed like a natural solution to ask AgriTech to carry a little bit of that load for us.”
Neal finished his drink. He didn’t feel any better.
“So you funneled illegal money into AgriTech to conduct unauthorized chemical experiments.”
“Which is another way of putting it.”
“Under the watchful eye of Paul Knox.”
“Probably.”
“And Robert Pendleton was conducting the actual research.”
“Can I freshen that drink for you?”
“So that whole story I was given about chickenshit-”
“Was chickenshit. For all I know, Pendleton might have been working on some sort of super-fertilizer for AgriTech, but for us he was working on herbicides.”
Neal took the fresh glass from Simms. Well, well, well, Doctor Bob, he thought. This does put a different light on things. Good old, kind old Doctor Bob doesn’t make things grow, boys and girls-he makes them die.
“You see,” Simms continued, “if you know how to make something grow, you have a pretty good shot at knowing how to make it not grow. Killing it when it’s still in the ground is a whole lot nicer for all concerned than spraying it with, for example, Agent Orange.”
“It’s real humanitarian work, all right.”
“It is, in fact. Especially if the plant you’re thinking about killing is the poppy plant.”
The next shot of scotch still didn’t provide Neal the soothing warmth he was after. “Okay, so Pendleton gets the Nobel Peace Prize. What’s your beef with him?”
“The woman, of course.”
Of course.
“You’re an art critic?” Neal asked.
“She’s a spy.”
“Oh, come on!”
This is getting too fucking ridiculous, Neal thought. Li Lan a spy? Next thing you know he’ll tell me A. Brian Crowe is an FBI agent.
“She’s a Chinese operative,” Simms insisted. “Look, Pendleton went to this conference of biochemists at Stanford. The opposition covers those things as SOP. We do the same with their meetings. Li Lan-and let’s call her that for convenience, who knows what her real name is-is assigned to snuggle up to one of the scientists. Share a little pillow talk, you know: ‘Who are you? Where do you work? Gee, that’s fascinating, tell me all about it.’ It just gives the opposition an idea about who’s up to what. Usually it doesn’t go beyond that, but little Li hits a home run. The mark falls in love with her.
“She contacts her bosses, who do a little research of their own. Let’s face it, Carey, if a half-baked rent-a-cop like you can tumble AgriTech, Beijing can do the same. They tell her to stick with him, do that voodoo, etcetera, until he’s so pussy-whipped he’ll follow her anywhere.”
“Like to Hong Kong.”
“Like to Hong Kong, where he’s just a midnight boat ride from the PRC. Maybe they grab him, maybe they’ve already turned him and he goes willingly, but whichever… Li Lan gets a promotion and Pendleton gets an eight-by-ten hospitality suite in some Beijing basement and an opportunity to answer all kinds of interesting questions on a daily basis.”
Dinner should be surprises.
“Where did I fit in?” Neal asked.
“No offense, but we used you like a springer spaniel. Your job was to flush them from the bushes and make them run. You did a great job, by the way, Fido.”
Okay, except Fido here went on point and the hunter didn’t let them run, he took his best shot. What’s wrong with this metaphor?
“Than
ks, but why did you want them to run? Why not arrest them in the States? Wouldn’t that have been easier?”
“Sure. The only problem is that the old boys in the Congress won’t allow us to conduct operations within the States. That’s why we used Friends of the Family instead of sending one of our own pups. If we had picked up Li Lan in the States, we’d have had to turn her over to the FBI, and that would have been a damn shame. They’d have just had a big old trial and chucked her lovely ass into prison, which is not the best and highest use of that particular piece of flesh.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Li Lan wants to turn Pendleton. We want to turn Li Lan.”
Neal settled back into the rich red velvet of the seat cushion. This was getting interesting. Maybe there was a way everybody could survive this thing, although Simms’s explanation was still one bullet shy of a load.
“See,” Simms went on, warming to his subject, “we don’t take these things personally. We harbor no ill will toward Li Lan or Pendleton. Hell, we have so many Russians defecting we can’t keep the safe houses stocked in vodka. We turn them away. But a Chinese defector? A rare bird, my friend. A rare bird who could sing some interesting songs.
“We knew she’d run to Hong Kong to cover the trail before she took him into the PRC. If we could trap her here and explain her options… well, we think she’d choose air conditioning, ice cubes, color television, and the good old U.S.A. over a Hong Kong jail cell. Hell, she’d probably prefer that over the pure numbing blandness of the PRC. A lot of the comrades will defect just to go shopping.”
“And if you take her in Hong Kong you don’t have to deal with the FBI.”