Sitting at a mahogany desk, Kwan pretended to be too absorbed in her work to notice his entry. She wore a black slacks and a white blouse, conservatively fit. No jewelry or make-up adorned her during work hours. She never wore feminine attire at work, not even when the plan for the afternoon included receiving a visit from the exciting Maverick Duncan. Ever since that night at the seminar, when she spotted him standing behind the horrible looking Boa Yang, she had desired him.
Kwan Li stood up and motioned for him to sit down on the couch positioned against the wall. Content to enjoy his presence, Kwan smiled, sat back down, and waited several moments for him to speak.
Maverick removed his toothpick and tossed the mangled splinter into the trash can beside him, “Your Grandparents have been released, Kwan; they are on their way to Santa Barbara Airport, Air China flight 446 arriving at 3:30pm tomorrow. Here is a copy of their itinerary. Do you have the report?”
He held up the itinerary as Kwan rose from her chair and walked over to the couch to take the folded documents from him. She sat on the arm of the sofa and looked down at him.
“Yes I have the report. I am working on the translation. Of course, now that the author is on his way to jail, I will need much more time to complete this complex task.” The tone of her voice firmed as she spoke. Her admiring gaze turned serious.
Duncan was nice to look at, but Kwan was not happy with him. She suspected that he had had something to do with Dana’s troubles. Although he was even more smug and arrogant than his boss, she could not bring herself to hate him, or even dislike him. Maybe it was the way he filled out his tight, black, jeans and always had that look on his face, like he didn’t care if he lived or died, as long as he wasn’t bored. That’s what attracted him to her, she decided: he was crazy, and dangerous.
He slid over on the sofa and to allow her room. Trembling, she knew Duncan sensed her fear. He looked up at her and nodded as if he were the one in charge now. She slid off the arm of the couch and sat next to him. He smiled.
“We cannot allow anyone else to know about the findings in the Santa Rosa Island Report, otherwise they have no value,” Duncan said.
“Yes, of course, Duncan, but you shouldn't worry too much about anyone else seeing the information. There aren't but a couple people besides myself and Dana who would understand the report’s meaning anyway. And now Dana is in jail.”
Duncan nodded, and the two sat in silence for several moments. He took out a pack of cigarettes, pulled out one from the pack, and lit it.
“What do you know about Mike's murder?” Kwan asked.
Grinning, he leaned back, spread his arms out along the back of the sofa, and said, “Just what I read in the papers. Mike was stupid. I know he hated Dana, but he shouldn't have pushed him too far. I think the remark about him being a cripple who is only good enough for other crippled girls might have pushed that Mathers guy into doing something more than the punch in the mouth we planned on.”
Kwan raised an eyebrow, “I never read that detail in the paper, sounds like you might have some inside information. Do you?”
“What are you talking about, inside information?”
“You put Mike up to confronting Dana, didn't you?”
Duncan looked away and took a drag off of his cigarette.
Kwan drew closer. “Yes, you did, I saw you at the beach that morning; Mike, you, and that maniac you call Professor. You got Mike to start a fight with Dana so he would get arrested, didn't you?”
Duncan blew out the smoke from his cigarette and laughed. “You are hard to fool, Kwan Li,” he said, “Yeah, we encouraged him a little, but he didn’t need much. He hated Dana pretty bad, anyway. We hoped that the little dust up that they got into at Surfer’s Park would be enough to get Dana thrown in jail.”
“I knew it!” she said balling up her small hand into a fist and striking the air in front of her, “You were trying to get my best research scientist put in jail. You and Bao Yang, you got Mike killed.”
“You give me too much credit,” Duncan said as he slid over on the couch to give her space, “What do you think, I am God or something?”
“I hope you and Bao Yang are happy.”
“No, Bao Yang is not pleased. I swear to you, nobody was supposed to get killed, especially Mike. We were counting on his support. We needed his editorial comments about the moratorium to help us with our plans, and besides, murder is not allowed for me. I am an agent for the Chinese Ministry, not an assassin. Mike’s death almost ruined our whole plan.”
Kwan stood up and hugged the itinerary as she walked toward the window and looked out at the ocean. The sun lit her forlorn face with a streak of soft gold as she watched it sink slowly behind a black hillcrest on Santa Rosa Island. She didn’t like not being able to see where things were heading. When she started her game with Bao Yang, it was supposed to be about money and business. She didn’t want to hurt anyone; she just wanted to get ahead.
Now it was no longer a game, now there were real people’s lives involved, other people’s lives that she knew and respected. She had never thought the simple theft of information she committed would lead to the death of a good friend’s son, and the imprisonment of her most talented new prospect, Dana Mathers. She blamed and accused Bao Yang and Duncan out loud, but it was to herself that she reserved the severest rebuke. She stood there in silence for several minutes, and then she turned around to face him. “But why did you want to get Dana thrown in jail?” she said. “It doesn’t make sense. I needed him as bad as or worse than you needed Mike.”
“Bao Yang was afraid he would talk about his oil discovery to someone.”
“Who?”
“Anyone, maybe Jack Tanner. Anyway, we weren’t trying to get him put away, just arrested. Then we could save him, bail him out, and make him our friend. We thought he would work for us on his own. That fat sheriff was supposed to arrest him the first time he and Dana fought. The second time we tried it at Rincon Beach, hoping for better cops. We tracked them on the scanner and thought the two policemen we targeted were going to show up. Instead that pig Cyrus Fleming and that Max Stern guy, Robocop Junior, are put on the case. That did not work out so well. And then Dana kills him before we get there, what a mess.”
Noticing that Maverick was looking for somewhere to duck his cigarette ashes, Kwan walked around to her desk, set the itinerary down, and found an old coffee cup. She didn’t have an ashtray; Maverick was the first person who ever dared to smoke in her office. She handed him the cup and asked, “How do you know it was Dana if you weren't there?”
“I don't know. That's just what the cops say and that Briana girl that the Professor is so fond of. She was supposed to call the cops before anything bad happened.”
“What the hell, Mr. big shot spy; you blew it bad didn't you? If you would have let me handle Dana, none of this would have happened. Didn't you know that Dana grew up with that fat sheriff? He probably wouldn't have arrested Dana even if he saw him murder Mike. Now you get the only man who can understand this algorithm for finding oil put in jail for murder.”
“I know, I told you Bao Yang is not pleased with me, either. I can’t control everything, especially the Professor. And I don’t think anybody can handle Dana Mathers. I read about how he got out of that car wreck. He is one cool cowboy,” Duncan said as he stood up and stretched. He walked over to Kwan and put his arms around her waist. The stench of the cigarette made her queasy, but she liked the feel of his warm body next to her. She smiled and leaned back into his arms. The new fact that Mike hated Dana, and that their conflict was inevitable, helped her to rationalize away the guilt she was feeling over the tragic events of the last few days. Whatever had happened to Mike and Dana had nothing to do with her own schemes.
“Don’t worry, Kwan, Dana is safe,” Maverick said. “He is safer in jail than he is on the outside. Besides, Bao Yang has our people there watching out for him.”
“What do you mean safer than on the outside?” She pulled
away from him and looked up at him with narrowed eyes, “You mean…You mean because the Professor wants to kill him, doesn’t he?”
Maverick burst into laughter, and then he said, “The Professor is crazy; he wants to kill everybody-even me, you, and himself, until there are only a couple thousand people left. Then his Mother Earth will be happy. What a lulu.”
“You and Bao Yang are playing with fire, literally. The FBI is looking for him. If they find you with him you will ruin everything. We will all go to jail. What do we need him for?”
“We need him to restore the moratorium permanently, and get rid of all the other offshore oil rigs.”
“Restore it permantly? I think you are as crazy as the Professor. How are we going to get the oil if the moratorium is restored?”
“We drill horizontally from a secret place. Everybody else will be gone except for CNOOC.”
“What do you mean gone? What secret place?”
“It’s secret. That’s all I can talk about now, Kwan.” Maverick walked over to her desk and turned through the pages of the Santa Rosa Island Report. “It’s really better you don’t ask anymore questions.”
Kwan sat back down on the couch and folded her arms. As much as she hated not being in control, she decided to comply. Probably it was better not to know too much about what was going on.
“This is a very old mud log, where did you get this data?” Maverick asked.
“It’s from Unocal and you’re right the data in that log is over forty years old. It is the last log Unocal made before the moratorium. Dana took the data from it and constructed a 3D model.”
“This report is based on forty year old data? How reliable is that?”
“By itself, not very, but when you add other data, like sonic transmission data, and RF transmission data, you can see that Dana is right, there is a huge oil deposit off the coast of Santa Rosa Island.”
“How did you get the other data? I thought the moratorium forbid exploratory drilling.”
“We didn’t drill. We got all that data from a submarine, Dana’s idea. We conducted non-intrusive, surface exploration.”
“How can you be sure the oil is there?”
“We can’t be a hundred percent certain, but we have data from other oil deposit discoveries and they match up pretty close to what we have found off the coast of Santa Rosa. We are more than ninety percent certain there is an oil deposit there.”
“That’s good. I would hate to go through all this trouble just for nothing. I see you need a little help with your Chinese, this character is wrong, may I?” Maverick picked up a pencil and waited.”
Kwan got up, walked over to her desk where Maverick was sitting, and looked down at her translation, “Where?”
Maverick pointed to the character.
“Oh, you are old school,” Kwan said. “That’s a simplified character. You can change it if you like. Where did you learn Chinese?”
“I learned it where I was born, Szechuan.” Maverick replied as he carefully changed the character.
“I wasn’t sure if you were Chinese or not. You look more European than Asian.”
Maverick laughed, then sat down in her chair and said, “That’s why I work for Bao Yang in the Ministry of Intelligence. My mother was a blonde Russian. I am told that except for the hair and the eye color, I look just like her. I guess it’s true. My father met her in the early eighties, while she was working for the Soviet Embassy.”
“That must have been difficult for them. I’ve read that the relationship between the Soviets and the Chinese during that time were as bad as between them and the US.”
“Yes, it was, but they married anyway and had me. Despite being a Russian, my mother is well respected and she lives in Szechuan; ten years after my father’s death. China is still her home.”
Maverick had been studying the mud log the whole time he was talking to Kwan. She guessed from the expression on his face that he understood what he was reading.
“You can help me fix the report later. Are you hungry?” Kwan put her arm around his shoulder and hugged him gently.
“Yes, I am.” Maverick set her pen down, stood up, and put his arms around her. “How about Chinese?”
Chapter 10
The next morning Cyrus, still lying in his bed, opened his eyes. He could feel each bone and joint in his body ache, even his ears. His swollen ribs sent waves of pain through his chest when he breathed too deeply. He lay there on his bed for several minutes and stared at the ceiling.
Slowly, he stood up and tried to remember when was the last time he had felt this beat up and he couldn’t. He had been shot once, accidently by another cop when he was a rookie patrolman. He crossed his partner’s line of fire going after a carjacker. Cyrus, much younger then, was able to chase the perp down, wounded shoulder and all. He still had the scar from it. Figures he got hit in the only spot his body armor didn’t cover, except for his head. Another time he had been rear ended, while assisting on a high speed chase. His back hurt for months. Martinez had guessed right, the scar on his right temple was a present from a drunken surf punk who hit him on the side of the head with a full can of soda just when he took his riot helmet off. The can broke his jaw; it took six months to heal.
Maybe Thurston is right, I should retire, he said to himself as he got dressed for work. His head ached. The sight of his bruised face in the mirror startled him. His puffed out eyes looked like tiny, purple, inner tubes. He put on his members only jacket, went out the door and got into his Jeep.
The Jeep always made him feel comfortable. It reminded him of his Army days. It was back in 1985, while he was in the Army, he had decided to be a cop. He was twenty years old. He didn’t like the idea of joining the infantry and playing the role of a gung ho fighting GI Joe, so he became an MP. He never thought of himself as ever being especially patriotic and he didn’t like war; he just wanted to do his time in the Army and collect his bonus money so he could go to college and be a lawyer.
For a few minutes he sat there in the seat and wondered. Maybe I should go back to bed and call it a day, he said to himself, or maybe I should just call it a career. Instead, he turned on the car ignition and drove off toward the precinct. He really wanted to quit, spend his days bowling and eating pastries. But being a cop was like an addiction for him and he couldn’t give it up. I am going to die either way, might as well die with my badge on. I probably should have stayed on in the Army, he concluded.
It was the Army that got him interested –no, devoted to police work. He was assigned to the 287th MP Brigade and tasked to guard a rarely used checkpoint on the northern end of the city. That was O.K. by him; he didn’t believe all those stories about the Ruskies being monsters, anyway. He figured they were just like Americans, except for their language and customs. They had just chosen to follow communism and we followed capitalism, they were no worse than the US. They weren’t evil, just different and after all, weren’t we trying to take over the world the same as they were?
When he saw his first cold war casualty his world view changed for good. By chance he spotted a woman through his binoculars walking close to the watchtower where the East German guards were posted. She was a young, brunette woman in her early twenties. She decided to make a run for it across the no man’s land between the east and west wall; it was known as the death strip. It was nearly five football fields of open ground filled with barbed wire and crossed railroad ties. No one had ever tried to escape the East at this point.
Trying to make it across the death strip during the day was suicide. The only explanation that made sense to Cyrus was that she had heard rumors the Schiebenbefel, the standing order to shoot anyone who attempted to cross the wall, had been lifted. It had happened before.
Gorbachev had been challenged by Reagan to “tear down this wall” only a month before and many people believed the East Germans were going to end the Schiebenbefel. The false rumors had been spreading all over Berlin. Everyday Cyrus’s company commander
would remind them that their SOP, standard operating procedure, was still in effect, Schiebenbefel or not. That meant no interference with anything happening on the Red’s side of the border, no matter what.
He watched her, shaking his head the whole time.
It was on a beautiful summer afternoon and he knew she didn’t have a chance. The East German guards picked her up fifty feet from their side of the wall. Cyrus’s view from the ground level guard house was at one of the few places where one could see the death strip from the western side. Through his binoculars, he observed the guards manning the East German tower smiling and pointing at her. One of them had a Russian made, 91/30 PU sniper rifle with a scope, which he would aim at her several times and then put his weapon down and laugh. They never once fired a warning shot; they never let her know they saw her. They made it into a game. He could see the desperation in her ivory, strangely familiar, face. Running out of his guard post, he shouted at her, “Go back; go back!
She waved to him and smiled. She must think I am encouraging her, he said to himself. You are a stupid fool, Cyrus, she doesn’t understand English. He put his binoculars to his eyes again and followed her. The crackling sound of a single gunshot, like the snap of a giant bullwhip, pieced the air. Then silence followed. The Stazie had waited until she was less than fifteen feet from freedom and then he shot her. Cyrus saw her head slump forward, and the top portion of it break into red pieces and scatter through the air. He saw her hit the pavement face first. Blood streamed from the side of her mouth and pooled beside her.
The Stazie put his gun down, smiling proudly, as though he had won first prize at a country fair. His comrades all gave him a pat on the back and shook his hand. It seemed so much more startling to him that it happened on such a bright, sunny, warm, day.
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