The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror nc-2

by Don Winslow

“Exactly.”

  “Or any bothersome defense attorneys or judges or that shit.”

  Simms sighed. “Try to be professional about this, Carey. Her options aren’t all that rosy. If she came with us, we’d debrief her for a year or two and set her loose with a nice new identity and a bank account. For a Third World baby like Li Lan, that’s like winning the lottery.”

  Yeah, maybe it is, Neal thought. She could stay with Pendleton, paint her paintings, go to the supermarket and shop for elaborate Chinese dinners. There are worse lives.

  “What would you do to Pendleton?”

  “Nothing. Frankly, his brains and his knowledge protect him. We’d rather have him working for us than for the Chinese. Of course, you’ve fucked all this up, Carey, with your heroic chase up Austin Road. When you first slipped your leash in San Francisco and bolted over here, I was ready to have you busted. But then you actually came up with a half-bright plan, so I thought, let’s go with it. Mind you, we’ve had you followed since day one.

  “I figured that you weren’t coming up to Victoria Peak just for the view, so I was all nice and ready to make contact with our little friend. But you spooked them and they called out the troops and I lost them. Mostly because I had to save your worthless butt. Thanks.”

  Neal contemplated the red hue of the room reflecting in the golden color of the scotch. Maybe it’s all true, he thought. In which case I was the target in the hot tub, just like I was a candidate for the slice-and-dice treatment tonight. But then why would she want to meet with me at all? Just to set me up? Sure, so the track is a little colder for the next guy. And if she thought I was the CIA hound, that’s exactly what she would do. Come on, Neal, face it. How many times do you have to dodge the bullet, so to speak, before you face the facts? She’s a killer. A spy and a whore and a killer. A triple threat.

  “So what’s next?” Neal asked.

  “Well, I’m going to have the staff bring in some food and we’re going to have a nice long chat. You’re going to tell me everything-and I mean everything-you can remember about your friend and mine, Li Lan. What she wore, what she said, what she did-everything. Then I’ll have the driver drop you off at the ferry and you go back to your hotel and stay there until the next flight out.”

  “And what about Li and Pendleton?”

  “If I can find her before she bolts to the PRC, I’ll offer her the deal. She’ll take it.”

  “What if she won’t talk to you? What if she bolts?”

  Simms poured a cup of tea and savored the smell.

  “Well,” he said, “I can’t let her take Pendleton to China.” He slipped the lapel of his jacket back to show the butt of his automatic pistol. “More tea?”

  8

  Neal shuffled down the hotel hallway in his Chinese clothing. He was played out. The debriefing had taken over two hours, and he had told Simms everything. He had told him about the bus tickets, about the art gallery, about the dinner. He had even told him about the seduction in the hot tub. Told him about everything except the shot that had almost killed him.

  He wasn’t sure why he had held that back, except that he suspected Simms knew about it anyway, and he had wanted to see if the CIA man brought it up. He hadn’t.

  The hallway was empty. No protective net, no Doorman. Obviously Chin was through protecting him. Good, he thought. I’ve had all the protection I can stand. He fished his room key out of his pocket and opened the door.

  Ben Chin was sitting on his bed.

  “You were great back there on the Peak,” Neal said. “Too bad there weren’t any old ladies for you to push around.”

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “The Doorman isn’t.”

  Chin shrugged. “He did his job.”

  “That’s right. Where were you?”

  “Doing my job. I followed your friends.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “True. I went up into the gardens and picked up their trail.”

  “Where are they?”

  Chin looked down at the bedcover. “I lost them coming off the ferry.”

  “Kowloon side?”

  “Sure.”

  Neal went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He was as tired as he could ever remember being. His chest ached from the old shotgun wound he’d taken the last time he’d stepped in between predator and prey, and he just wanted to fall asleep in a steaming bath. He brushed his teeth, rinsed his mouth out, and then ran hot water to shave. When he was finished he stood in the bathroom doorway and said to Ben Chin, “You’re fired. Get out.”

  “You’re the one who fucked up, not me.”

  “You lied to me. You brought your crew along when you promised me you wouldn’t.”

  “If I hadn’t, you’d be dead.”

  “So the Doorman’s dead instead.”

  “It was his job to die so you could escape.” Chin’s jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed. “Would you rather be dead instead of him? Tell the truth.”

  The truth. What the hell does the truth have to do with anything?

  “No,” Neal said. “No. I wouldn’t.”

  Chin smiled triumphantly-one of those smiles that says, That settles it, then.

  “Where’s your crew now?”

  “They don’t want to work with you anymore.”

  Okay, Neal thought. Which means you know what happened up there. You know your boys left me for dead. Why were you waiting for me here, then? Why weren’t you surprised to see me walk in?

  Okay, you can’t give Chin the chance to realize he just screwed up.

  “So,” Neal said. “You couldn’t stay on their tails, huh?”

  “It’s hard to do without help.”

  Right, Neal thought. He peeled off the Chinese clothes and changed into the black pullover, jeans, and tennis shoes he had last worn in Mill Valley. Then he took two glasses off the bar, poured two fingers of scotch into each, and handed one to Chin. It gave him a chance to look right into Chin’s eyes.

  “It’s okay,” Neal said. “I know where they are.”

  Oh, yeah, Neal thought as he saw Ben’s eyes widen ever so slightly, you’re interested. But why? Because she was responsible for killing one of your boys? Job satisfaction?

  “Where?” Chin asked.

  “They’re at the Y.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Bob Pendleton may be a hell of a biochemist, but he makes a lousy fugitive. He was fiddling with a key chain when I saw him. I got a quick look at the thing. It had the YMCA symbol on it.”

  “There are two in Kowloon. One right by the ferry, the other up Nathan Road.”

  “The second one is in Yaumatei?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “I thought I was fired.”

  “You’re rehired. I need someone who speaks Chinese and who can bribe a desk clerk. With money, not muscle, right?”

  “Right.”

  Right.

  It was two in the morning and there were still people on the street. The lost souls of the small hours lingered on the edges of the light pools thrown by the streetlamps, or hovered around the fires set in trashcans. Vagrants slept on cardboard sheets in the middle of the wide sidewalks or crouched in the doorways of closed shops. Most of the night clubs and gambling joints were still open, their neon lights reflecting brightly off the puddles in the gutters. A few prostitutes too old or too ugly for the tourist trade farther down the road stood stoically outside the gambling halls, hoping to rent a celebration to the winners or solace to the losers. Here and there a slice of darkness broke the neon glow, and each niche was like a cave that sheltered a human being-a scraggly kid too weak to join a gang, a dull-eyed opium addict lost in his private dream, a psychotic woman babbling her outrage at omnipresent enemies, a hungry mugger waiting for the improvident drunk to stumble by at the right moment-each a player in the slow game of musical chairs that makes up the urban food chain.

  The YMCA was on Waterloo Road
, two blocks west of Nathan. Neal waited on the steps while Ben talked to the nervous night clerk. The place reeked of good intentions and bad bank statements. Metal screens shielded the broken glass in windows and doors. The pea-green high-gloss paint was cheap and easily cleaned, and the smell of disinfectant overpowered the aroma of the musty mud-brown carpet.

  It was the sort of place that offered anonymity and Neal knew that Li Lan or her handlers must have chosen it quite deliberately.

  Chin’s conversation didn’t take long.

  “Room three-forty-three,” he said to Neal, as if it were an offering.

  “Thanks. See you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll wait down here.”

  “No.”

  “Dangerous neighborhood this time of night.”

  “Go home.”

  Chin shrugged. “Whatever you say, boss.”

  “That’s what I say.”

  Chin turned around and went out the door. Neal watched until he had turned the corner on Nathan Road.

  Neal was surprised that the elevator had an operator, an old man with withered legs and a grotesquely distorted face. Neal held up three fingers and the man leaned forward on his stool and used a lever to shut the door. The elevator whined with age as it crawled up the three floors.

  The third-floor corridor was narrow, and covered in old green carpeting. Neal stood outside of 343 for a full two minutes and listened. He couldn’t hear anything. It’s just another gig, he told himself as he took his AmEx card from his wallet and slipped it behind the bolt. The lock gave up quicker than a French general, and Neal was in the room just as quickly.

  A shaft of light from a streetlamp pierced the thin curtain and outlined her in a golden glow where she lay sleeping on the bed. Pendleton lay beside her, his back toward the door. Neal shut the door behind him, just the way Graham had taught him to, keeping the knob open until the bolt was aligned and then slowly letting the knob turn shut. Then he squatted next to the bed, brought his right arm over her head, and clapped his hand over her mouth as his thumb and index finger pinched her nostrils shut. He put his left hand under her jaw and pressed his thumb and index finger under the two joints. Her eyes popped open and she stared at him in fright. He slowly shook his head back and forth, and she accepted this warning to keep quiet. He stood up slowly and lifted her by the jaw. She grabbed his wrist and he squeezed harder. Her eyes widened in pain. He lifted until she was perched on her toes and then walked her to the bathroom door and set her down on the edge of the bathtub. He closed the door behind them, then turned on the light.

  “Hi,” he whispered. “Bet you didn’t think you’d see me again, huh?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “The CIA is looking for you, but I guess you already know that.”

  She shook her head.

  “Right. Anyway, they have a pretty good deal to offer you. I think you should take it. We can wake up Bobby baby in a minute and use the phone. I’ll make the call for you, but I want you to answer a few questions for me first.”

  She was staring at him. Just staring, and it was making him mad.

  “What was that all about back in California? The little striptease that ended with a bang? That’s a lousy way to set somebody up, and why set me up anyway? Why did you think you had to kill me?”

  She kept on staring. He tried to look back into her eyes and ignore the fact that the T-shirt was all she was wearing.

  “Goddamn it, I deserve an answer!”

  “I didn’t try to kill you. Someone was trying to kill Robert.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I only wanted to make sure you would stay there, in the hot tub, while we had a chance to escape. Then I heard the shot… I became afraid… I ran away.”

  “You thought I was dead.”

  “Yes, until you began leaving those messages everywhere. I was happy you were alive, but I wanted to warn you of the very big danger. So I wanted to have a meeting with you, but you came with that man.”

  “What man?”

  “The man who was hunting us in California. The very big Chinese man.”

  “I came with a Hong Kong man.”

  “No. I saw him at hotel in San Francisco.”

  “Mark Chin?”

  “I do not know his name.”

  Mark Chin and Ben Chin, who looked so much alike… she thought Ben was Mark, figured she’d been tricked, and called out the troops.

  “Are you with CIA?” she asked.

  “No, I’m a private cop.”

  “I do not understand.”

  Neither do I. “Did you think I had come to the Peak to kill you? To set you up?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you think that’s why I’m here now?”

  She nodded again.

  “Because you think I’m CIA?”

  “No.”

  “Who, then?”

  “White Tiger.”

  White Tiger? What the hell is a White Tiger?

  White Tiger, she told him, was one of the most powerful of the Hong Kong Triads. It had been shattered during a government crackdown in the early Seventies, and its leaders had fled to Taiwan, where they found a warm welcome in the form of shelter, money, and sage leadership. Reorganized and refinanced, White Tiger reinfiltrated Hong Kong and recolonized outposts in New York, London, Amsterdam, and San Francisco. It was involved in the usual gang enterprises of loansharking, drug dealing, prostitution, and extortion, but it also took out subcontracts from the Taiwanese secret service for surveillance jobs, kidnappings, and hits. Its primary role in Hong Kong was to serve as a counterbalance to the procommunist Triads, such as the 14K.

  “And you think Chin is White Tiger?”

  “Of course.”

  Of course. I was set up from jump street, or at least from Kearny Street, at the good old Chinatown Holiday Inn. Mark Chin was on the same trail I was, and let me bird-dog for him. He took my hundred bucks at Coit Tower, walked down to a phone booth on his way to Pier Thirty-nine, and called in some troops, who put such a good tail on me I didn’t catch it. He must have been cracking up when I came to him and asked him to hide me in Hong Kong. He passed me right along to cousin Ben, who I brought up the Peak with me as protection. And who I also brought right here. Shit.

  He asked Lan, “What does Taiwan have against the good doctor?”

  Pendleton answered as he opened the bathroom door.

  “They don’t want me to go to China,” he said. “What the hell is going on here?”

  Neal stood up slowly and raised his hands in front of his chest. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out, and I don’t think I have a lot of time to do it.”

  “You got that right,” Pendleton said. “Can you at least let her get dressed?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lan got up and went back into the bedroom. Neal could hear her opening drawers. He wondered if she was going to come back in with a gun. He wondered why he trusted her not to.

  “You were telling me about Taiwan,” Neal said as if they’d been interrupted during polite chatter at a cocktail party.

  “The Taiwanese want me dead.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re AgriTech’s biggest customer.”

  “I had a long talk with a guy named Simms last night.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He works with Paul Knox.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh. And he told me about the stuff you create in your test tubes, Doc. Why should Taiwan give a shit?”

  “We were developing it for sale to Taiwan.”

  “Why does Taiwan want an herbicide that kills the poppy?”

  “Because heroin is power. Because they want to control the warlords of northern Thailand, Laos, and Burma. The border countries. And they sure as hell don’t want the PRC to have it, because the PRC would use it. Heroin is one of Taiwan’s biggest businesses. They’re scared shitless of the PRC getting that kind of hammer over them.”

  So it was
the Taiwanese, using their White Tiger subcontractors, who had taken a whack at what they thought was Pendleton in the Marin County hot tub. The Taiwanese want him croaked, the CIA want him alive, and they’re both using me to nail him. But what does Pendleton want?

  “And you’re planning to take your product to the PRC?”

  “I’m planning to go with Lan.”

  Lan appeared in the doorway. She had put on a pair of blue jeans, a black pullover jersey, and sandals.

  “She doesn’t love you,” Neal said. “Don’t you know that? She’s a Chinese spy. They sent her to sleep with you. It was in her job description.”

  “I know all that. She told me.”

  “Can we get out of the bathroom?” Neal asked. “It’s starting to feel like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.”

  Lan and Pendleton sat on the bed, which seemed appropriate enough to Neal, and he sat down in the old overstuffed wingback in the corner, by the window.

  “So it’s true love, right?”

  Right. They told him the story, sharing the narrative like newlyweds telling a stranger how they met. She was a spy of sorts. It was her ticket out, the price for a life of relative freedom in Hong Kong and America. She really was a painter, and that was her cover in the States. Her handlers approved because it gave her access to culture, which in the States meant money, which meant power. She made it a point to attend all the cocktail parties, all the receptions, all the corporate bashes. Usually her bosses required nothing more than simple reports on who was who, who was doing what, and who might be sympathetic toward a struggling nation of communist reformers.

  Then Pendleton’s conference had come along. She’d picked him up in an expensive restaurant-charmed him, flattered him with the simple gift of attention. She’d led him into leading her to bed, taught him the things that her trainers had taught her, talked to him, listened to him.

  In the morning she reported back, in the afternoon received her orders, and that night went back to his bed. She took him to the clouds and the rain, and then lay still in his arms as he told her about his life, his work, his secret dreams. They went on a long, early-morning walk in Chinatown, watched the old ones do t‘ai chi, shopped in the markets, went for dim-sum and tea, and then back to bed. She had to go to Mill Valley for her show, and he visited her there and met her friends, and went there every day.