by Matt Rogers
‘What’s on the street?’
‘Nothing good.’
Violetta nodded. ‘Are people panicking?’
‘Yes,’ King said. ‘They’ve seen this before. But this is 2008 on steroids.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Slater said, skewering a pair of fingers into his eyeballs in frustration. ‘How can there be no way to reverse this? It was artificially created by a band of rogue high-frequency traders, right? Can’t that be traced back to the source? Can’t it be expunged from the records, so to speak?’
Violetta shook her head. ‘That’s not how the market works. The cat’s out of the bag now. Even if we work out exactly what they did, it’ll be indecipherable. It’ll be swept up in the billions of trades happening every single day. There’s no way to stuff it back in.’
‘So — what?’ Slater said. ‘We wait for the economy to recover, and in the meantime target anything from the Chinese hardliners that could be seen as an aggressive hostile takeover?’
‘It looks that way…’ Violetta said.
‘There’s something that needs our urgent attention,’ King said.
All three of them turned to look at him.
He sighed and scratched the back of his neck.
‘What is it?’ Violetta said.
‘There were two Geosphere workers alive at the end,’ King said. ‘I let them—’
‘I know,’ Violetta said. ‘We already have them in custody — we had the townhouse under surveillance within minutes of you leaving, and we watched them try to sneak out. If we can’t win, we can at least make them regret everything they’ve ever done. They’ll be shamed for eternity for what they did, and the entire nation will hate them. We’ll shout everything they did from the rooftops. We’ll—’
‘It doesn’t fucking matter,’ King snarled.
Violetta froze. ‘What?’
‘They wanted to do anything they could to atone for their sins,’ King said. ‘Some sort of last-minute salvation. So they tried to make things right. Before I left, they called me back. And they told me everything they knew about the second event.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ Violetta said. ‘Tell me right now.’
‘They don’t know specific details. But you can find those out if I tell you where to look, right?’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ she said, desperate to get any and all information she could.
King said, ‘The next step is to artificially create a mass tragedy event. That’ll put the nail in the coffin, so to speak.’
Violetta said, ‘What?’
Slater said, ‘Fuck.’
Ruby said, ‘Oh, no.’
King said, ‘China’s spent years and years generating unrest towards the U.S. internationally, right? They’re spending billions and billions of dollars in Africa and other developing parts of the world, providing them with aid where they need it and creating an anti-U.S. movement by spreading their ideologies.’
Slater and Ruby turned to Violetta, who nodded.
Violetta said, ‘We’ve been keeping tabs on that for a long time. We should have moved to resist it earlier. We didn’t. We thought it was harmless.’
King said, ‘They’re going to leverage that. All they need now is to create a serious, horrific incident on our soil. Something that paints us in a shocking light, and shows them as victims. The rest of the world will hate us for it, and if you combine that with our crippled economy, it’s going to lead to a PR disaster. We’ll be the laughing stock of the world. Our demise will be easily accepted.’
Violetta said, ‘Go on.’
King took a deep breath, and said, ‘The San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival and Parade. They’re going to slaughter their own people on U.S. soil, and they’re going to dress it up as a racist attack from our backwards countrymen.’
Silence.
King said, ‘That’s what all the weapons were for in those crates Slater and I stole. They weren’t to defend the townhouse. I always knew there was too much firepower in there for a few sociopathic mercenaries wanting to protect a half-finished building in East Harlem. The black boxes were for East Harlem. The guns and claymores were for San Francisco.’
Violetta sunk into the couch, and put her head in her hands, and said, ‘Oh my God.’
Slater stared blankly.
Even Ruby lost the playful spark in her eyes.
There wasn’t a sound in the penthouse, save for the ticking of a clock hanging on the wall.
Slater said quietly, ‘When’s the festival start?’
‘Two days,’ King said.
No-one spoke.
Then Violetta said, ‘We’d better get to work.’
70
San Francisco
California
A family of four stepped out of the lobby of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco into a clear, sunny day.
They were a dysfunctional family, and the circumstances that had brought them together couldn’t be easily explained. But they never tried to explain them. They carried on with their lives, and strengthened the bond they all shared, and focused on human connection rather than the fact that one of them wasn’t biologically related.
She was still a young girl, having just celebrated her eleventh birthday, but she’d had more life experiences than the other three members of her family put together.
Her name was Shien.
She tried not to think about her past often. It always bogged her down in misery — she’d come out the other side alive, but she’d seen things that no eleven-year-old should ever have seen. So she tried to expunge those memories, and instead live in the present.
Which, right now, was all too easy. They were only in town for a week or so, but they were treating it like the vacation they deserved. Then they would all be back on the road, travelling from sight to sight. Shien had an education — her de facto mother homeschooled her — and that was all she could ask for.
Her parents weren’t made of money, but they had enough to live comfortably for as long as they needed. And that was all she could ask. For the first time in her life, she had a stable reality. They’d been living on the road for a little over a year, ever since a man named Will Slater had rescued her from hell twice, and almost sacrificed his life several times in the process. She would be eternally grateful for what he’d done for her.
So would her new parents.
Frank and Anastasia Nazarian.
They’d been through hell, too.
They made an odd group — Frank, Anastasia, their biological daughter Abigail, and Shien.
But it worked.
Now, Shien was uncharacteristically silent as they strolled through the pristine suburbs. The sun was out, the trees were green, and the sidewalks were quiet and calm.
Frank noticed her forlornness, and put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him, and he gently guided her away from Anastasia and Abigail, who went on ahead.
So they could talk in private.
‘What is it?’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘Thinking about Will.’
‘Nothing wrong with that, after what he did for you. What he did for us all.’
‘Do you think about him?’
‘Not often. I’ve tried to move past it. So we can create our own lives, y’know?’
She nodded. ‘What about Ruby?’
He didn’t respond, and when she looked up there were the foundations of tears in his eyes. He was staring into the distance.
She said, ‘Frank?’
Finally, he said, ‘Ruby chose her own path. She’s doing what she thinks is right by keeping away from us. All we can do is respect that.’
Shien nodded. ‘But you still think about her?’
‘Of course. Every day.’
‘Will said that she had a good heart.’
‘I’m sure she does.’
‘They did terrible things to her in the Lynx program,’ Shien said. ‘They had only just started doing them to me when Will rescued me. And she came out the ot
her side a good person. I don’t know if I would have been a good person by the end of it. So … I don’t know what I’m trying to say, Frank … I guess Ruby is stronger than me. So you should be proud of her.’
Frank tousled her hair. ‘Don’t be stupid, kid. You’re the strongest little girl I’ve met.’
‘I’m getting old now,’ Shien said. ‘You can’t keep calling me little.’
It was true. She was in the midst of a growth spurt — she’d always been undersized, tiny and frail, but now she was catching up to everyone else her age. Maybe now that the constant stress of her turbulent past life had receded, it was no longer stunting her growth. Now she could focus on having a normal future.
‘When does the parade start?’ she said, trying to change the subject.
‘In a couple of days,’ Frank said. ‘Don’t worry — we’ll be there.’
Shien tried her best to mask her excitement. Before Will Slater, most of her life had been spent in Macau, in the care of two biological parents that equally wanted nothing to do with her. Her father had been a Chinese triad gangster, and her mother had been an American groupie from Texas who’d married a far older man for the money.
So Shien was half-Chinese, and she hoped that the festival would remind her of her childhood. That’s why they were there in the first place — she’d seen an advertisement for the festival and parade in the newspaper, and expressed interest in seeing it. She didn’t ask for much. It hadn’t taken long for Frank and Anastasia to oblige her.
Even though her early years had been far from perfect, she didn’t want them to fade from her memory forever.
So she quickened her pace to catch up to her de facto mother and sister, and in a rare occurrence the worry faded from her mind.
She hoped the celebrations would be as amazing as she envisioned.
71
At two p.m. the day after King had revealed the plan for the ying pai’s second event, he and Slater were grappling on combat mats in King’s penthouse gymnasium.
They were drenched in sweat, wearing their traditional gi to adhere to the customs of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. They rolled in a state of flow, keeping their minds sharp, staying focused on each precise movement, figuring out how to get into the right position to submit each other.
It kept their minds off dark feelings of uncertainty, which had been plaguing them almost non-stop since Violetta had set to work gathering intelligence behind-the-scenes on the festival in San Francisco.
After an hour of intense physical exertion, a timer rang in the corner.
They broke apart and lay on their backs to gather their breath. Their chests rose and fell in unison, and as they lay there recovering, Ruby stepped down off the treadmill. She’d jogged at a ten percent incline for two hours, and she was sweating just as hard.
All the wounds they’d sustained over the course of the last few days had proved superficial after an assessment by a government-employed doctor, who’d visited the penthouse late the night before. They’d been patched up and given pain relief medication, which they’d both refused to take. Today, they were supposed to be resting in anticipation of a whirlwind of chaos tomorrow.
But all three of them were terrible at sitting around doing nothing.
If their bones weren’t broken, and their muscles weren’t torn from the bone, all they wanted to do was get straight back to work.
Habits, and neural conditioning, and mental pathways.
All that good stuff.
All they knew was work, and exertion, and improvement.
It had paved the way to where they were now.
They weren’t about to let it go in a hurry.
Dressed in tiny athletic shorts and another tube top, Ruby bent over to catch her breath and tucked wet strands of hair behind her ears.
She looked down at Slater. ‘Have either of you heard anything?’
‘Not a word,’ King answered.
He didn’t sound too happy about it.
Because he wasn’t.
Violetta had disappeared the previous morning, shrinking back into the shadows of the covert world. It was understandable, of course — King had pointed her in the right direction, and now all the resources in the government’s arsenal had to be mobilised within twenty-four hours.
Slater and King and Ruby were cannon fodder in the grand scheme of things, so they were kept in the dark until concrete orders were passed down the pipeline.
None of them were thrilled about it, but at the same time, they understood.
They moved out into the kitchen and started preparing post-workout meals. They were functioning effectively as a trio — they’d only been together twenty-four hours, but aside from Slater and Ruby peeling off late the night before to sleep in Slater’s apartment, they’d spent nearly every waking moment together.
Because they were cut from the same cloth.
Slater looked up at the clock on the wall and said, ‘It can’t be much longer, can it?’
‘I assume not,’ King said.
‘It’s a five hour flight, and we’ll need to be in San Francisco by tomorrow morning at the latest.’
‘So we’ll fly overnight. We’ll take another jet.’
‘I don’t like this,’ Slater said. ‘I can’t be kept in the dark much longer. It’ll drive me crazy.’
Ruby said, ‘What happens if this works?’
They both turned to look at her.
‘Huh?’ Slater said.
‘Let’s say we pull it off,’ she said. ‘We foil the plot, we nullify their plans, and the ying pai shrink away into obscurity. Then what?’
‘For the country, or for us?’ Slater said.
But he knew the answer, deep down.
He knew how much uncertainty there was between the three of them.
‘As far as I can tell, all of us are in a state of limbo right now,’ she said. ‘You two don’t know what the hell you’re doing. Your vigilante business didn’t go the way you wanted it to. Now you’re back in bed with the government. You’re both saying it’s just this one job, but who are you kidding?’
King said, ‘Where are you going after this?’
‘I was enjoying life on the beach,’ she said.
Slater said, ‘You can’t go back to Tulum.’
‘I didn’t know you were making decisions for me now,’ she said.
He looked at her. ‘Are you insane?’
‘Why?’
‘You’re not seriously entertaining going back there, are you?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Because—’
She held up a hand. ‘I get it. You care about me. You don’t want me to do anything stupid. It’s coming from a place of genuine concern. And of course I’m not going back to Tulum. But you’re not going to be the one to decide for me.’
‘I know that,’ Slater said.
‘Good. I’ll do whatever the hell I want.’
‘You might not have a choice,’ King said.
She raised an eyebrow.
He swept his hand around the penthouse. ‘Here we are. The government’s three best operatives. The top three on the Chinese hit list, but that’s not the point. The point is — Uncle Sam wanted this. They wouldn’t have turned to us unless they had ulterior motives. They would have fed us to the sharks when the hired guns came after us. They wouldn’t be supporting us now unless there was a damn good reason for the investment.’
‘To save their own skin,’ Slater said. ‘They need us to get the job done.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe there’s more to it than that.’
‘We can make our own decisions,’ Ruby said. ‘When this all ends, we can choose what we want to do.’
‘Can we?’ King said. ‘Or have they been letting us run wild this whole time? I mean, if they really wanted us to work for them again … we’d be forced to.’
‘I’m not doing it,’ Ruby said.
‘Me neither,’ Slater said.
King said, ‘I told you — we mi
ght not have a choice.’
The door thundered open.
They all twisted on the spot, and all three of them instinctively reached for their belts. But they weren’t armed, and they regretted their mutual lack of preparation…
But they spotted the flowing blonde hair in unison, and a half-second later identified Violetta as the intruder.
She pulled to a halt, breathless, and she said, ‘Wheels up in an hour. I’ll brief you all on the way to California.’
72
In the comfort of the same Gulfstream Slater had taken to Tulum, they arranged themselves in a small circle around one of the polished wooden tables jutting out from the side of the fuselage.
The jet lifted off the tarmac, and Slater knew the pit of tension in his stomach wasn’t a byproduct of the takeoff.
It was the mystery of what they would encounter in San Francisco.
Violetta had kept her mouth shut all the way to the airport — she wanted to brief them together, and make sure none of them missed any important details. It had resulted in a tense but silent car ride to the airport, and when they’d finally piled out of the Suburban onto the runway, they’d practically run for the plane.
Now, Violetta said, ‘The body of the Chinese hardliner we recovered in the East Harlem townhouse proved invaluable. King, I can’t thank you enough. You might have just saved the country from a brutal decline.’
‘Not yet,’ King said. ‘We haven’t done shit yet.’
She nodded. ‘But it’s a start. The man—’
‘He told me his name was Jian.’
‘We know that. We identified him.’
‘Was it true what the Geosphere crew said? Was he in the inner circle around the Chinese president?’
Violetta nodded gravely. ‘He’s the equivalent of the head honcho in the Chinese secret world. Just as we have our own crews operating behind-the-scenes, they do too. We’ve been slowly amassing a portfolio of all the top dogs we could identify, and Jian was one of them. Frankly, none of us ever expected to encounter him or any of his cronies in mainland America.’
‘And yet, here he is.’