by Bart Kosko
There were no neural nets like pain nets and the signals would never end.
Catton did not even wipe his puffed-up lip. He just stood up and pushed John back to the other side of the table. Then he sat down.
“John? Don’t go to sleep yet. Are you still with us? No?”
Catton nodded.
Mr. Pierre Rittenhouse reached across the table and stung John with the taser in a short tap on John’s forearm. John jumped and sat upright in his wooden chair. He hated to obey them. He hated the taser pain even more.
“Are you still with us?” Catton said.
“Cocksucker. Put away that taser and I’ll kill you right here.”
“That is in character with what the state will argue.”
“Fuck that. I will kill you.”
“Mr. Grant. Understand that we are taping this interview. And the tape is fully admissible in a court of law.”
“Court? Shit. This is a kangaroo court or at least the start of one.”
“The state will argue that you murdered Ms. Cheng when she refused to go along with your stock scheme. Your greed made you premeditate the killing. So it was first-degree murder.”
“It was self-defense.”
“So you admit killing Ms. Cheng?”
“I’d sure like to stick that taser up your urethra.”
“Answer the question. Did you kill Ms. Cheng?”
“I killed the thing that was in her body. She had a chip for a brain.”
“You are a hard one to the end,” Catton said.
“I told you. It was self-defense.”
“You have almost 80 pounds on her.”
“I want to talk to counsel.”
“The state will argue that you panicked. You killed her and lost control. Or you lost control and then killed her. Either way you became unnerved. You acted in a hasty mix of cunning and cowardice. Then you went to see Denise’s brother to try to build an alibi. Or you tried to involve Mr. Cheng in the scheme. I suspect you did both.”
“For the last time. Charge me with murder or let me go. And for the record no one read me my Miranda rights. Give me back my goddamn raisin!”
“Right now murder is not the primary issue. National security demands that we prosecute each action according to priority. I assure you that we are following legal procedure in this case.”
“Sure you are. What is your top priority? What are you charging me with? Driving across the fucking grass?”
“No. Treason.”
Chapter 26
Near Abaq
Inner Mongolia
People’s Republic of China
General Feng Pei rode a large red Mongol pony across the packed orange-red dirt of the Gobi Desert.
His staff could not believe that the old man wanted to be alone now with his horse. Too much was happening. The politicians in Beijing and Shanghai were meeting to decide if they would punish Israel. His young aide watched the old former Communist on the many surveillance cameras that studded the remote army supply center near Abaq in Inner Mongolia.
General Feng had no need for his staff or their ceaseless concern for what the politicians thought. The old man had seen China go from Mao to freedom and back to something in between.
Now Feng was just over 100 miles from the small Mongol village of Erenhot where he was born and where his name was Ulan. There he had scored so well on an IQ test as a child that the Chinese state moved him to Xian. The Chinese bureaucrats gave him his Chinese name Feng Pei. The state examiner had simply made up the name one day.
The Chinese also made the stoic boy a Red Guard. He was taller and darker than most of the boys in Xian. And he had the wide flat face of his Mongol ancestors. That face had earned him a childhood of Chinese nicknames but they ended in Hong Bao. The Red Bun. The Red Guard boys used to beat him when he ignored that name.
But he had always been smarter than the many schemers around him.
It began with horses. The young Feng was too smart to give up his love of horses. Horses were living grace and speed and wealth. And he never gave up the horsemen’s lama gods for their god of Mao. Mao was a god of ants. He was the god of scheming and devious ants.
But the Red Guards had taught him something. The schemers had taught him that he could kill Chinese with impunity if he knew which rule to cite. Their “radical” politics came to no more than that. It was just the latest power game of the Chinese bureaucrats. The right words and actions let him kill some of the ants.
That was a small price to pay for such a privilege.
Young Feng had dreamed of killing Chinese since the day they took him from Erenhot and put him on the old train to Xian. His Chinese teachers were so devious they had never known that he would kill them as gladly as he helped them kill others. He was just their Mongol pawn with the wide flat face.
Feng and his people had always hated the Chinese to the south. His whole village had hated the Chinese overlords even more than they loved horses.
He still hated them at Beijing Normal University where the horsemen had learned the way of math and the sciences. It had taken him until his senior year there before he found a Chinese girl who would have him. Her parents had approved the marriage only when they learned she was pregnant. She and the child died in childbirth the next year and he had never remarried. He still believed her parents had forced her to have a country abortion. They had twice mentioned his Mongol face at the one dinner they had invited him to in their small high-rise apartment in the old Maoist ghetto in Beijing.
It did not matter. Feng had no desire for a new Chinese marriage. The brief marriage had brought him little joy beyond the first pleasures of the flesh. His only joy came from his work and that he turned to with full force.
He joined the Red Army.
Feng let the party and then the people send him where they needed him to kill their enemies. He helped them crush the Tibetans. He could still taste the Tibetans’ foul yak milk and rotten cheese. Feng had drunk yak milk and eaten yak cheese in his own village but never so putrid. He suspected that the bad food helped drive the Tibetans to their extremes of religious nonsense. He had no patience or mercy for a grown man who still spun a prayer wheel.
Later Feng had helped the Chinese conquer northern Vietnam down to Vinh. That secured the Tonkin oil for China. It did so in a way the Americans could have never allowed. Feng had had even fewer qualms about killing the small Viets than he had had about torturing and shooting the old counterrevolutionaries in Xian and Kumming. He thought the Viet language sounded like birds fighting over a nest site. Still the Chinese made him learn to speak and write the Viet language.
Feng never felt he understood the Vietnamese as he did the Chinese. He had once watched Viet villagers roast large green grasshoppers on a rice-stalk bonfire and then pray to their gods before they ate the burnt insects. Feng did not like their hot sticky air or their primitive food or their lack of horses. But the Viets had fought well with the few weapons they had. A jungle sniper had even blown out three of his left ribs with an old deer rifle. He and his troops had in the end killed thousands of Viets for each of those ribs.
Feng had spent his life helping the Chinese empire grow and the Chinese had rewarded him. They had made him a general in their army. Now they had shipped him back to where he had come from. The old schemers must have laughed at that. Maybe they would try to kill him here. Feng could accept that if it came to it. His had been a full life even if it had in some small way helped them build their empire.
And the bureaucrats had conquered and patched together quite an empire. This Feng had to admit. But he believed that no one knew what to do with the empire but make it grow. That was the final logic of all their devious power games. Grow it bigger.
Feng knew what he would do with the empire if he ever had the chance.
Now the old man stopped and let the red pony pull at some thin green plantain leaves. The cold north wind blew light dust in his face but did not chill him.
The
old man would have loved to have ridden hard to the hills to the north and see his old village of Erenhot the way it had looked when he was a boy. He still had not been back there. He did not want to see what the Communists and the capitalists had done to it. He had not heard from his parents or anyone in the village since the Chinese had taken him away to Xian.
Feng often thought of his uncle Rago. He wondered if Rago was still famous in the village for his horsemanship. His uncle had taught him to ride and play goat-head polo with the older boys. But now the question still hung in his mind and would not go away. Had the younger generals in Beijing sent him here to his old land as a favor or as a way to get rid of him? That too did not matter.
Young Ulan was back now and he had never forgotten.
The schemers had told him he was to protect China from the Russians and Japanese and Koreans to the north. The Chinese always looked to the north now. Feng had watched as millions of Chinese workers went north in the last two decades in the greatest land rush and oil and gold rushes in history.
Millions moved past his old lands and on up to the vast lands of Siberia. The great northern territory still held the world’s largest reserves of most natural resources despite its massive strip mining and diverted rivers and its forests of oil derricks and pipelines.
It was the Wild East.
Cheap Chinese labor poured in from the south. Investment capital poured in from Japan and later from Korea and Taiwan. This time the Americans and British had come too late. Even the Germans and the Russians fell behind the Japanese and their hordes of Chinese laborers.
The Russians and Sibers controlled the vast Siber province in name only. The Russians had lost real control of the province to the Japanese. Now many in Moscow regretted that they had not sold Siberia to the United States when the Americans had offered them dollars and citizenship for the land. The Russian nationalists had killed any chance of such a land swap.
Now the Russian nationalists wanted to send in the Russian army to rout the Japanese and Chinese from their new towns and factories. The Russians also wanted to drive them from the aquafarms and fisheries along the coast and far into the Pacific. But Moscow received over half its hard currency from the Japanese and Chinese. The two countries held almost half of Russia’s debt as bonds. The Japanese and Chinese also traded over half the shares on the Moscow Stock Exchange.
There were a billion and a half Chinese in China and almost 100 million in the Siber regions. There were less than 5 million Japanese in Siberia. But the Japanese still ran it. Chinese workers worked for both Chinese and Japanese firms. Japanese workers worked only for the Japanese.
And the Chinese still hated the Japanese more than they hated anyone else.
General Feng almost smiled at that. But the smile died before it tightened his face muscles. His uncle and the Red Guard had taught him to never say or show what he thought. Never show them.
It was a simple lesson and most people never learned it. They might practice it for a minute or for an hour. They did not have the strength to practice it for a lifetime. And it was so simple. Never show them no matter what they said or did or threatened to do.
Only fools let others read them. That let others predict them and thus control them. Feng could not decide whether the fools were so weak because of their genes or their training or their will. The cause did not matter. Their actions did.
Never show them.
Feng had no special hatred for the Japanese. He had always admired them. They were the one group in his world that his Mongol ancestors had failed to conquer. His uncle Rago had told him the stories of how the Japanese had once conquered the devious Chinese. He had wished he could have seen that.
And General Feng did not hate the Russians or the Siber tribesmen who had grown rich in the oil and gold and platinum fields. He did not care that they stripped the forests and dredged the rivers and wiped out whole fisheries in the sea. Let them make their money. Let them buy their BMW Jeeps and import wives from Indonesia and dress like Americans.
In the end he felt about them as he felt about the Chinese.
They all needed killing.
Chapter 27
Sa’ad
Israel
Michael Riesman had flown the old B-2 stealth bombers against Jordan and Iraq. He had made the rank of major and lost all the red hair on his head by age 40 when he had left the Israeli Air Force for the Mossad. Now he had a paunch and a red mustache to balance his shining round head.
He thought of the many screens and windows before him as an old man’s version of the inside of a stealth bomber. He did not have the clearance or desire to keep up with the new stealth cockpits. This panel of screens was the best he would ever do and it was all he wanted to do. And right now he had stumbled on the intelligence find of his career.
He had Hamid Tabriz on his main screen.
The Sufi radical had come to pray at a new mosque in Gaza.
A field agent had told one of Riesman’s agents that a major figure in the Hamas underground would come to the small mosque. The figure would meet a teenage recruit and maybe give him a weapon and a mission. The Israelis did not have clear intelligence on this point. Riesman had the mosque bugged and taped earlier that evening.
Now he saw an older Palestinian man praying with a dark-skinned teenage boy. He had the complete Gaza file on the boy but no match on the older man. Tabriz had walked into their prayer session and sat next to the older man. So far they had not spoken.
Riesman did not notify his cell chief. That could only lengthen the chain of permissions and increase the chance of a leak. This takedown was too important to cross lines of authority.
He would call Avi Hurwicz himself when they had Tabriz in hand and had made a positive ID. Riesman knew the capture would stun his old friend Eytan Baum. It would put to rest the dozens of questions the Mossad and AMAN had about the elusive Sufi leader.
He gave the verbal order to proceed.
An old man with a long gray beard and white head wrap and white robe stood outside the mosque. He watched his two colleagues in gas masks as they kicked open the door and ran inside.
The Palestinian boy jumped to his feet and drew the stiletto his father had bought for him in Cyprus. One commando fired an automatic tear gas gun. A can of the white gas hit the boy in the chest. It knocked him backward over a brown wooden stool as he struggled to hold on to the stiletto.
The other commando shot taser darts at the older man and Tabriz.
Both commandos ignored the small old bearded cleric who ran the mosque. The cleric shouted at them to leave as he rubbed his eyes and coughed.
The commandos subdued Tabriz and the older man in seconds. They kicked the two men in the solar plexus to knock the air out of them. Then they tied their hands and feet with blue bungee cord and taped their mouths and eyes with gray duct tape. The teenage boy ran outside past the old man in the white head wrap and away into the night. The Israelis knew where to find him if they needed him.
Riesman lit a cigarette and rubbed the sweat on his bald head. He watched each commando run from the mosque with a bound and gagged man over his shoulder.
The commandos dropped the men into the trunk of an old black oil-burning Mercedes they had just stolen from a Palestinian taxi firm. Riesman lost sight of them as the car drove off to his command station.
Riesman used emergency access to get through to Colonel Hurwicz. He had never done that before. He lit a new cigarette as he waited for the comm link to open.
Chapter 28
Southern California
“You have quite a file,” Catton said. “Do you recall this image?”
The white board showed a news tape from 10 years ago at the University of California at Berkeley where John and Richard had met as undergraduates.
Hundreds of young men and women shouted at and gave the finger to the Republican presidential candidate who had come to the school to campaign. The candidate had short-cropped black hair and claimed to ha
ve been a Navy SEAL. The crowd of extreme free-market anarchists had crashed the rally of the Berkeley Republicans to protest the baby-boomer buyout of Social Security. A few students threw eggs and water balloons made from red and white and blue rubbers.
“So what?” John Grant said. “Somebody had to kick the fucking Republicans back to third-party status. My generation did it.”
The Republican Party had splintered after Social Security collapsed and a rare coalition of Democrats and Libertarians legalized many drugs. Most older ex-Republicans joined the Green-leaning Democrats to secure the vast state subsidies that still went to those over 50. Most younger ex-Republicans joined the Libertarians to fight those subsidies and to fight the massive centralized bureaucracy that gave them out and taxed and borrowed to fund them.
The religious right made up both the core and fringe of the Republicans.
“That’s you right up front with the blue water balloon. Here is where you lob it. You know what? That lob got you an agent assigned to you.”
“You?”
“No.”
John’s ribs still hurt but he did not feel the twitching pain that had followed the taser stuns.
John thought he had gone through the worst of it and now even smiled at Catton and Rittenhouse. He just hoped they had not taken the extra raisin from his wallet. He might get to his other backups but that one had stayed in wireless contact with the raisin on the tabletop.
The next image showed John at the front of a crowd outside an Oakland post office.
He screamed back and forth with a fat middle-aged man who still wore his red Generation-X ball cap backward. Then the screen showed dozens of John’s e-mail posts that attacked the latest stop-gap taxes to bail out Social Security and Medicare. Other e-mail posts called for private health and retirement accounts and for an end to the legal and medical monopolies.
“Big deal. That stuff bounced all over the net along with hundreds of thousands of flames just like it. What matters is that we finally privatized Social Security. You two civil servants should thank me.”