“But you are going to kill him?” Betti mused, almost to herself. Her lips brushed the glass as she spoke. “Eventually?”
“Yes,” Wu said. “Of course. His flight is not until tomorrow night. We have some time.”
She turned to face him, her lips pursed in a tremulous pout. “It saddens me that you would trade my virtue for a computer thumb drive.”
“I mean you no offense, my dear,” Wu said. “But your virtue was long since—”
She pressed a finger to his lips.
“You are supposed to say, ‘Yes, but this is no ordinary thumb drive.’”
Wu merely shrugged. Betti was correct. He doubted if the American even knew the value of what he had. This was no ordinary gaming software. Wu kept the rest to himself, though it didn’t matter what the girl knew. Kang would kill her before the night was over—someplace private, away from the hotel, and Noonan. His death would come later, also away from here, and after Wu was certain Calliope was in his hands.
2
Domingo “Ding” Chavez rested his plastic cup of bubble tea on the concrete ledge of the pedestrian path on the Manhattan Bridge, facing west over East Broadway. Intelligence work rarely involved shooting someone in the face—though sometimes it came to that. In truth, it was ninety-eight percent monotony and two percent trying not to get shot in your own face.
Visitors to New York City tended to think of Canal Street as the epicenter of Chinatown, but the bustling restaurants and markets of East Broadway in the shadow of the bridge could have easily been parts of Beijing or Shanghai. English was a second language here—or not spoken at all.
It was warm for May. Cherry trees were shedding the last of their blossoms just a few blocks away, but here, the odor of fish and overripe fruit mingled with the stench of garbage and gas fumes drifted upward, making Chavez thankful for the aromatic tea.
A leather messenger bag hung from a strap over his shoulder. He held his cell phone in his free hand. Six moving dots were superimposed on the screen—a COP, or common operating picture, of the two rabbits and four members of his team.
Jack Ryan, Jr.’s voice buzzed in the tiny, flesh-colored bud in Chavez’s ear.
“Adara, you got two white dudes tracking you, fifty feet off your six. Gray sweatshirt. Dark blue hoodie.”
“Gotcha,” Adara Sherman said, steering clear of professional-sounding words like copy or affirmative over the radio so as not to arouse the suspicions of passersby—if such a thing was even possible in New York City.
Chavez shot a glance at John Clark, who stood beside him, looking over the rail, holding a cup of coffee. Plain coffee. No rubbery tapioca globs. Clark gave him an it’s-your-show shrug.
Chavez took a sip of tea. Knock it off, guys, he thought. You’re makin’ me look bad. He watched a lady on the street below wait for her dog to take a dump and then, instead of picking it up, spend two minutes trying to kick the turds into the street without getting any on her shoe. “People are strange when they don’t know they’re being watched.”
“You’re half right,” Clark said. “People are just strange. Period.” He took a deep breath, blowing it out hard the way every older man Chavez had ever met did when remembering a particular story. “I once watched two Vietcong for five full minutes while they took a smoke break less than five feet in front of my hide. I could have reached out and touched their Ho Chi Minh sandals.” Clark breathed out hard again, settling the memory. “I’d been in country long enough I could understand a little of what they were saying. It took me a minute, but I realized these two guys were telling jokes. Funny, but I never thought of them joking with each other, laughing about the same sort of dirty stuff we laughed at . . .”
“What happened?” Chavez asked, regretting the words as soon as they left his lips. He was a soldier. He knew better.
“War happened,” Clark said simply. “And that’s no laughing matter.”
Even after two decades of working with John Clark, and being married to his daughter, the dude could still send a chill up Chavez’s spine. At the same time, though he was pushing fifty years old, Ding couldn’t help but think he wanted to be John Clark when he grew up.
Ryan’s voice broke squelch on the radio again.
“They’re giving you the stink eye,” he said. “Countersurveillance team, maybe.”
Jack Ryan, Jr., was the boss’s boss’s boss’s son. Athletic and smart as anyone Chavez had ever seen, he could think on his feet and read a given situation with near lightning speed. Yeah, he’d been a bit of a rogue, known to chase tail when he should have been focusing on, well, just about anything else. Hell, he’d been all but fired twice—grounded for sure, stuck behind a desk—and that was as good as being fired once you’d tasted fieldwork. Ding and Clark had both vouched for him—and he’d stepped up. All signs indicated he’d finally matured to match his intellect.
And now he was seeing bogeymen.
There wasn’t any countersurveillance team. Chavez knew it. He’d set up the operation.
Ding enjoyed putting together training, but he missed pounding the pavement, acting several different parts, masking his hunter/killer persona so he could blend in on the street and not look too aggressive. There were few joys in life better than bringing justice to the bad guys—putting warheads on foreheads, they called it. As much fun as it was standing around drinking bubble tea with his father-in-law, he missed being out there with his team.
“Okay,” Adara said. Her dot on Chavez’s phone showed her moving west on Canal, approaching Elizabeth. “Dom’s staying on the rabbits. I’m going to slow at this shop window and give them a chance to pass.”
A former Navy corpsman, Adara Sherman had seen action in most of the Stans, where most of the killing was being done these days. A CrossFit fanatic, she was an extremely competent operator, and, more important, dead calm under pressure. She was also romantically involved with Dominic Caruso, the only actual federal officer on the team—seconded to The Campus. Ryan’s cousin, Caruso was a Feeb—still on the FBI rolls. Chavez imagined that the tight-ass middle managers in the Bureau—every agency had them—surely wondered what the hell kind of special duty their agent had disappeared to do for such a long period. The director knew. That was enough.
“Running some countersurveillance, eh, Ding . . .” Adara said.
Chavez looked at Clark again, more than a little embarrassed that his guys were seeing ghosts. Clark’s face remained as passive as one of those stone dudes on Easter Island. Completely unreadable.
As the director of operations for the off-the-books intelligence agency known as The Campus, John Clark was grading Chavez, just as Chavez was grading his team.