Mahogany's Dream Page 3

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Dunleavy asked, still not looking up from his device. The shaft of the device was now spit-shine clean, which made Brian wonder if his colleague was simply working away nervous energy.

  “I’m getting help,” Brian said testily. “Traitor or not, this guy needs medical attention.”

  “He’ll get all the attention he needs when we’re done. He’ll make it until then. Besides, this is an Umbra class debriefing, so we can’t call anyone without the appropriate clearance. Not unless you want us to get indicted just so Jackie Chan here can get a band-aid.”

  Brian couldn’t believe his ears. Us? All of a sudden, Dunleavy was speaking as if the two of them were coconspirators. He was familiar with the technique. One of the first lessons he’d learned in station officer training was how to recognize loyalty traps. He remembered case studies about terrorist training camps in Sudan, where all new recruits were given a blank sheet of paper and instructed to write down the names of everyone in their home villages whom they suspected of being a traitor or an informant. Of course, the moment the recruits started writing, they become traitors and informants themselves. Only the recruits don’t realize it until they run into problems at the camp and try to leave. At that point they’re informed that because of what they wrote on the first day, the people at home will view them as infidels. And everyone knows what fate awaits an infidel. The terrorists then take that opportunity to remind the disgruntled recruits that there is only one sure way for an infidel to ever experience the shade of Paradise’s trees: Jihad. Brian recalled his instructors noting that it was a remarkably effective way to get someone under pressure to do what you want them to do. He surely agreed now, having belatedly realized that he had become Dunleavy’s new recruit.

  Brian’s cell phone automatically dialed 911 if he held down the 9 key. His thumb rested on that key. He wondered if pressing it would really make him an infidel. He pressed it and held it down. The phone’s screen displayed, “Calling 911…”

  Tsang began to stir on the floor.

  Brian raised the phone to his ear. A Police dispatcher answered the call. “9-1-1. What is your emergency?” Brian didn’t speak. “9-1-1. What is your emergency? Hello?” Brian just breathed into the phone, staring at Dunleavy’s back.

  Suddenly, Tsang began yelling, “Air Force Base! Air Force Base! Help me!”

  Brian’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. He swiftly snapped his phone shut. Then he did something he couldn’t believe: He kicked Tsang in the ribs with the point of his shoe and shouted, “Shut up! Who told you to talk?” Then he slammed his cell phone down into Tsang’s forehead, shattering its plastic display screen into tiny shards. Some of the shards pierced Tsang’s skin, causing him to cry out in agony once more.

  Dunleavy grinned at the wall. “I guess his other ear still works.”

  Brian didn’t say anything. He was too busy wondering how many trees there were in Paradise.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  2009

  In the spring, Dyson Conwell decrypted an email that contained this message:

  He stared at the message a long time, debating how to respond, or if he should respond at all. Everyone with his real email address knew his policy.

  When he couldn’t reach an immediate decision, he got up from his chair and strode toward the bank of picture windows that flooded his spacious living room with sunlight. As he made his way across the room, a network of sensors spread throughout his ceiling calculated his trajectory and notified the central server in his basement. The server immediately tinted the windows with an electrical charge so the sunlight would be neither too bright nor too warm when he stood before them a moment later. All this happened in nanoseconds.

  The view was not impressive. Instead of a glistening skyline or lush green park, all he saw was a long formation of starveling rowhouses stuck together like a gigantic pack of multicolored dominoes.

  In the middle of the street, a group of young girls jumped rope and sang. He focused on them. His windows were completely soundproof so he couldn’t hear them, but he knew from his own youth that the songs probably contained some fairly scandalous lyrics. For most of those girls, childhood would be but a fleeting moment of carefree joy followed by a lifetime of struggle. This fact briefly troubled him. That’s when he made up his mind about what to do.

  He walked back to his desk and sent this reply:

  AGREED.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The Spratly Islands,

  South China Sea

  Soft tidal waves gently rocked Chen Tsang’s yacht. He came to the Spratlys often during the spring and summer months to watch the spectacular cliff diving at Layang Layang. But that’s not why he was there today.

  “Were there any problems with the wire transfer?” Benjamin Lui asked him in English. Lui thought that speaking in English would keep their discussion beyond the understanding of Tsang’s Taiwanese crew.

  “Meiyou,” Tsang replied. None. Tsang only spoke in English when it was absolutely necessary, which had been hardly ever in the fourteen years since he had returned home to Taiwan.

  Lui smiled and sipped some wine. The thirty-six year-old communications engineer was pleased the old man had kept his word. The world didn’t look any different as a millionaire, as he had wondered if it might. “This wine is excellent,” he said.

  “It’s a German Riesling,” Tsang informed him. “Schmitt Sohne.”

  Lui raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never heard of German wine.”

  “Then you won’t forget it. Did you bring the data?”

  Lui removed a compact flash memory card from his pocket and passed it to Tsang. His host immediately pushed the card into a slot in his PDA, busying himself for the next ten minutes examining the data stored on it. Finally, Tsang smiled. He knew his comrades in the KMV would be pleased with what he had just obtained.

  “I guess this deal is a wrap then,” Lui said.

  Tsang smirked. He hadn’t heard that American idiom since Dyson had returned to the States. He briefly wondered how his golden goose was making out these days. He was curious to know if Dyson had gone ahead and married the pretty young legal eagle who had driven such a hard bargain on his behalf. Then, with only a tinge of regret, he realized that none of that would soon matter. “Not quite,” he told Lui. “There’s someone I want you to meet first.”

  Lui tensed. He did not like this surprise development. “Who?” he asked gingerly.

  “A friend,” Tsang said.

  As if speaking of the devil, Tsang’s PDA chirped with an instant message. A moment later, Lui’s mobile phone beeped with the tone of an unread SMS message.

  “That’s probably him now,” Tsang said cheerfully.

  Indeed it was. One man had received a longitude coordinate and the other a latitude coordinate. Tsang summoned the Captain of the yacht, while Lui summoned his own worst fears.

  __________

  It took nearly two hours to reach their destination, a remote stretch of water just off the Paracel Inlets. Night had fallen.

  Tsang’s “friend” turned out to be a shadowy figure known only as Koxinga. The stranger frightened Lui, not only because of the violence his well-built body radiated, but because it was rather obvious that the man was a PRC agent. Like many in Taipei, Lui had heard rumors about Tsang’s dealings with the Kuomintang Vanguard.

  Lui was worried by this sudden turn of events. It was one thing to sell commercial information to a fellow Taiwanese. That sort of thing went on all the time in Taiwan. It was as much a part of their business culture as cigarette smoking. But it was something all together different to get in bed with the PRC. That was like skinny-dipping in quicksand.

  The discomfort he felt being near Koxinga was mild compared to the sinking feeling he experienced when he found out the assignment that they had in mind for him. Tsang offered to double his bribe, but the prospect of additional m
oney gave him no extra comfort. He knew the money would be useless to him as a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. But what could he do? He was in the middle of an isolated ocean with an eccentric old man and a Chinese killer. He had the distinct impression they had made him an offer that he could not refuse. And, he rationalized, it was only smuggling. It wasn’t as if they had asked him to murder someone.

  With a nervous smile, he accepted their offer.

  _________

  Tsang could tell that Lui was more frightened than a gazelle first whiffing the scent of a cheetah in the downwind. He wasn’t surprised. That was the effect that American power had on most people in the world. Luckily, he wasn’t one of them. On the contrary, he belonged to a brotherhood of men who recognized that Taiwan had become America’s geisha. Taiwan is America’s seventh largest trading partner, yet the United States refuses to establish formal diplomatic relations and blocks the U.N. from recognizing it as an independent country. America welcomes Taiwan’s cable modems and flat panel televisions, but not its sovereignty. This became evident in 2005 when the U.S. had turned its back as the Chinese Navy surrounded the island, threatening to impose an embargo if the Taiwanese people moved forward with a referendum authorizing a constitution. It was the height of hypocrisy for a nation that promotes itself as the world’s greatest democracy. The threatened embargo had opened Tsang’s eyes. Prior to that, he too had supported independence for Taiwan. But when no U.S. aircraft carriers cruised into the Taiwan Strait to defend the island, he realized that the KMV had been right all along: America fears China more than it supports Taiwan. Therefore, the best way to ensure Taiwan’s welfare is to reunite it with Mother China.

  He knew the idea of reunification scared the hell out of most Taiwanese. But their fear did not change the fact that it was inevitable. He loathed the irresponsible intellectuals who trumpeted America’s independence from Great Britain as a model for Taiwan. He considered such talk reckless hogwash. If the American colonists had had five hundred British missiles pointed at them, as China does at Taiwan, then the Queen would still have a summer home in Maine. The KMV leadership frequently pointed out the fact that America and England are now the closest of allies, just as China and Taiwan must become if either is to survive in the poker game of the new world order.

  The secret partnership that the KMV had forged with the Chinese government was the vanguard of a coming alliance, like the first rays of sunshine on a new day. There would be bloodshed for sure; it was the grease of the wheels of change. But the KMV believed that it was better for a few thousand Americans to die in the cause of reunification than for millions of Taiwanese to do so in the cause of independence. It was simply the lesser of two unavoidable evils.

  The greatest men in history were all pragmatists, even if the world did not come to appreciate their pragmatism until long after their deaths. Tsang was convinced that the plan he had set in motion that night would one day prove that he was among the greatest of all.

  __________

  Koxinga never clouded his judgment with politics or money, unlike the two men who sat before him. They were both traitors, one to his employer and the other to his own people. He had orders to kill them both at later dates. But for now the PRC had use for them.

  __________

  When their business was concluded, Tsang called out, “Dawa!”

  At once, a strikingly attractive young woman wearing the black uniform of a servant appeared from below deck.

  Tsang ordered her to refill their glasses.

  When she poured Koxinga’s wine, he grabbed her wrist and pushed her shirtsleeve up to her elbow, exposing the tattoo on her forearm. It depicted a great dragon pursuing a butterfly. “Mei li de,” Koxinga remarked. Beautiful. But he was looking at her face when he said it.

  Dawa smiled politely until he released her arm. She silently returned to her station in the galley, having determined from Koxinga’s accent that he was from one of the southern provinces, Guangzhou perhaps.

  Above deck, Tsang raised his glass into the air. Lui and Koxinga joined him. Each man had a different reason to celebrate, but the toast that Tsang proposed was, “E ke Chung kuo!” One China!

  CHAPTER

  4

  Gladwyne, Pennsylvania

  Norma Hawthorn sighed. Here we go again, she thought as the grand old willow trees lining Route 23 whizzed by outside the car window. Blake liked to come into the city this way to avoid the morning traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway. She wasn’t convinced that the serpentine two-lane road was a more efficient route, but it was certainly more scenic.

  Through the clear glass of the sunroof she saw geometric patches of blue sky pierce the thick, dark leaf cover. It was a gorgeous spring morning. Too gorgeous for the same tired argument.

  But Blake persisted anyway of course. “I don’t understand your reluctance about this thing, Norma. You’ve always supported me in the past.”

  “And I always will,” she said.

  “So what’s different this time?”

  She was different. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt fulfilled and purposeful. She was happy with the life they had built there over the last nine years. “I’m not moving again,” she said. “When we came here, you promised me that it would be our last move.”

  “C’mon Norma,” he pleaded. “You’re not being fair. You know I made that promise based on the information we had at the time. We both thought I would retire at CSB when we came here.”

  “Speak for yourself,” she said. She didn’t believe that he would have ever voluntarily retired. In that sense, maybe the merger had been good for them. “You accepted an early retirement package, Blake. Technically, you did retire at CSB.”

  “Fuck their early retirement package,” he hissed. “Call it whatever you want, but those bastards gave me the ax. And to think, the merger was basically my idea.” He squeezed the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white.

  Although it had been nearly a year, he was still bitter. More bitter than Norma had ever seen him in twenty-two years of marriage. She noticed that he used profanity a lot more these days.

  “And I’m not retired,” he went on. “I would appreciate it if you would stop saying that. Nobody retires at fifty-three.”

  She didn’t say anything and they drove in silence for a while.

  Other than Blake driving too fast for her to really appreciate the scenery, she had enjoyed commuting with him. It was genuine quality time. Since his “early retirement” from the bank, Blake had insisted on chauffeuring her to work every morning and then picking her up every evening. He claimed that it gave structure to his day. The arrangement had worked out fine until about two weeks earlier, when Blake received an offer to run a division of Wells Fargo out in Phoenix. It was an offer that, as usual, he had already accepted before consulting with her. Now, every trip turned into a sales pitch for Phoenix. She hated the tension it caused between them and the way it sprang up in every conversation like an unwanted houseguest.

  She was considering telling him that she would start driving herself to work again when he said, “They have poor kids in Phoenix too, you know.”

  This was a spin she hadn’t heard before. “Is that right?” she said sarcastically. “I guess it would make sense that it has at least a few of those. According to you, the only thing Phoenix doesn’t have is the Tree of Life. But then, it’s probably being shipped in from one of the crumbling East Coast cities.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Norma. All I ever said was that Phoenix is growing and I think it’s the best place for us to be, career-wise.”

  “The best place for my career,” she said, “is here with my students. God knows most of them have had enough abandonment experiences already.”

  “You’re being selfish,” he said.

  “Selfish would be asking you to uproot your life and follow me as I hop around the world building replicas of the Academy everywhere. Kind of like what I’ve done for you the last tw
enty-two years. Why does an American bank even need an office in Hong Kong anyway?”

  He didn’t even dignify that with a response. “I have an idea,” he said.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “It has something to do with moving to Phoenix.”

  “Why don’t you move your school to Phoenix? I mean, these kids don’t have families right?”

  “Why don’t we relocate the Liberty Bell while we’re at it, Hon? Not even considering the trauma it would cause for my students, who do you suppose would pay for that?”

  “Why can’t the Black Santa Clause pay for it?” he asked. “You seem to depend on him for everything else.”

  She glared at her husband. “His name is Dyson,” she said. “And I swear Blake, you can really be an ass sometimes.”

  “I don’t recall you becoming so protective when they started calling me Blade Hawthorn just because I cut a few costs to save the merger.”

  She chirped a small laugh at the sound of it.

  “See what I mean,” he said accusingly.

  “Oh, Blake,” she said. “You have to admit that it’s original.”

  “And Black Santa Clause is not?”

  “Black Santa Clause is neither original nor funny,” she said. “And it’s racist.”

  Here we go again, Blake thought. We-are-the-world time. “Was I racist when I gave him my seat on the Board?”

  “You know what the Bylaws say about that, Darling: The largest contributor is automatically the Chair. For Pete’s sake, you put that provision in yourself. If I didn’t know any better, I would say you were jealous. Really, Hon, he’s young enough to be our son.”

  “We don’t have any kids!” he thundered. “And unlike some people in this car, I don’t try to overcompensate for that fact by taking in every hard luck kid I meet.”