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  ________

  Now he heard a heavy metal door slam across the alley. That was the sign. The fluorescent hands of his wristwatch told him that it was exactly 9:02 PM. He stubbed out his cigarette in the backseat ashtray.

  Norma’s high heels clicked loudly against the broken asphalt paving of the alley.

  Damien heard a soft beep as all four doors unlocked at once. A bead of sweat prickled the hair of his armpit.

  Norma opened the front door and sat down in the driver’s seat. She tossed her carryall bag and purse onto the passenger seat. Then she slammed the door so forcefully the whole car rocked. She fiddled with a set of keys until she found the one that unlocked the anti-theft bar securing the steering wheel. With great effort, she retracted the heavy device and dropped it to the passenger side floor with a booming thud. She hated that thing.

  That’s when she noticed the tobacco odor.

  She sat up straight for another whiff. When she did, a thin metal wire pressed into her throat, banging her head back into the headrest. She gagged and choked as the cold wire constricted around her windpipe. She kicked her legs wildly, banging both knees against the bottom of the steering wheel. She clawed at the wire and squeezed her eyes shut to mute the pain.

  “Stay outta’ North Philly, Bitch,” a male voice yelled from behind her head, blowing stale breath onto the side of her face. Then a coarse tongue licked the curvature of her right ear.

  The lick was Damien’s idea. It was his personal touch.

  He remembered Blake’s final instruction: steal her wallet to make it appear to be an everyday mugging. Blake had said she kept her wallet in the carryall instead of her purse to trick would-be muggers.

  Norma saw spots behind her clenched eyelids. She could barely think.

  Holding the wire in place with one hand, Damien thrust his free hand into the carryall. Flailing in the dark, his hand fell upon something furry. Then the fur moved. He instinctively lurched backwards, loosening his death grip on the wire.

  The resistance suddenly gone, Norma’s torso smashed into the steering wheel, causing the horn to blare loudly. Air rushed into her lungs.

  Dismayed, Damien lunged forward with both hands. As he did, Norma grabbed the shaft of her steering wheel lock and rammed the clawed end into her attacker’s approaching face with all her remaining might. The hard impact jarred the device from her hands.

  Damien’s head snapped back like the lid of a foot pedal trashcan. Screaming in agony, he rolled on the backseat, clutching his face.

  Coughing heavily, Norma desperately searched for the door handle. She fought the natural urge to cover her ears to block out the piercing screams from the back seat. She found the handle, but the door wouldn’t open. She pulled and pulled to no effect.

  Damien had unknowingly rolled over the lock button on his remote control.

  Still dazed, she flipped the manual lock and pushed the door open. As she crawled over the door well, it dawned on her that her wallet, bearing her home address, was still in her carryall. She didn’t want this monster coming to her house to finish the job. She reached back for the strap of her carryall, but an arm swiped at her from the back seat. She nixed the bag and dove out the car.

  She got to her feet and began to run. Shoeless on one foot, tiny pebbles of broken asphalt painfully pierced Norma’s left sole with every step. She tried to yell for help but all her injured throat could manage was a pathetic wheeze. She didn’t get ten steps before she heard the whoosh of the back door swinging open.

  She made the mistake of looking back. As she did, she stepped into a small pothole and broke the heel of her remaining shoe, causing her to stumble. She scrapped one knee against the ground, but quickly pounced back up.

  But not fast enough. Her attacker overtook her like lightning. He tackled her from behind, knocking the wind from her lungs when his heavy body crashed down on top of hers.

  He flipped her over and then beat her savagely with closed fists. Every blow felt like an anvil. She tried to shield her face, but he was so much stronger.

  Norma knew she would die then. The thought of abandoning her students pained her more than the thought of losing her life.

  The blows continued to pound her, like the sky was raining hammers. She saw dark spots again. Her energy to resist began to fade. She felt her bottom lip split, then a sharp piece of broken glass cut her cheek when a punch sent it slamming to the ground.

  Then it abruptly stopped and her attacker was gone.

  Norma just lay there, beaten to a pulp, thankful for her unexpected reprieve.

  But then a long shadow darkened her face and she knew he had returned. She peered up through swollen eyes to see her tormentor standing above her. He was holding her steering wheel lock in his right hand.

  She tried to ask “Why?” but she could only slur the word.

  When he lifted the heavy device high over his head for the final blow, she caught a glimpse of his face by the dim light of the streetlamp. He looked like a man possessed.

  She braced herself.

  When the steel bar fell down upon her, it felt like the whole world was being sucked into Hell through her face. And then everything went black.

  A light came on in the dormitory, startling Damien back to his senses. He dropped the heavy bar in his hand and fled into the night. Yet he couldn’t outrace the notion that the night had already fled into him.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Forbidden Drive, 6:01 AM

  With ninety-two hundred acres and more than a million individual trees, Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park is the world’s largest landscaped park system. It is so vast that some people say that Philadelphia is really a park with a city inside of it.

  When Brian was appointed head of the Philadelphia field office, he’d set a personal goal to see every inch of the famous Park. He’d seen the waterfalls at Valley Green and the covered bridge on the Wissahickon Creek. He’d marveled at the wetlands off Belmont Avenue and gawked at the astounding height of the black walnut trees in Pennypack Park. At the Andorra Wildlife Preserve, he’d caught a red fox curiously peering at him from the underbrush. A fox watching a fox, he’d thought. He’d hiked and biked thousands of acres. He’d gotten lost in patches that were so quiet and remote that he had the sensation of being stranded in a medieval forest. Yet after all that, he was disheartened to learn that he had seen less than half of the system. His maps were tearing at the creases.

  But there was one section of the Park he knew intimately well, for he returned to it every morning. Forbidden Drive, a five-mile footpath through a wooded gorge, had become his replacement for the jogging trails in Maryland that he had enjoyed so much.

  __________

  He had immediately noticed the stranger lingering in the brush, but he proceeded with his warm up stretches as usual. When the stranger got too close, Brian said, “What do you want Jill?” without looking up.

  Ten yards away, Jill stepped out from behind a weather beaten map hut. “Jeez, what did you, smell me out?”

  She was wearing droopy blue sweatpants, an oversized UCLA sweatshirt and a white baseball cap with F-B-I stitched in big block letters. Brian thought his best agent looked ridiculous and uncomfortable.

  “What do you want?” he repeated frostily.

  “I thought I could earn some brownie points if I went for a run with my boss.”

  “I’m your boss’ boss,” he corrected her. “And this is my personal time. You better have a hell of a reason for showing up here looking like an out-of-shape law enforcement cheerleader.”

  “I need to speak with you off-the-record,” she said.

  “You can do that at the office.”

  “Actually I can’t, not with Miss America sitting outside your office keeping a log of all your visitors and gossiping the way she does.”

  “Janaya is trying to make friends at work, unlike you. All you have to do is tell her you need an off-the-record meeting and she won’t post it in the log. She
’s been doing this a long time, she knows the drill.”

  Jill thought of her last encounter with Brian’s secretary. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather talk to you here.”

  “I’m sure you would. Problem is, I don’t want to talk to you—or anyone else, while I’m here. I come here to workout and to be alone. If you want to talk, find a Starbucks.”

  He turned to walk away.

  “What does Chen Tsang have to do with this whole thing?” Jill asked his back.

  Brian stopped in his tracks. “Walk with me,” he said.

  Jill caught up.

  “You’re supposed to be investigating Conwell, not HMC,” he said, all the irritation magically gone from his tone.

  “And you’re not supposed to send me on wild goose chases for answers you already know,” she retorted.

  Jill had followed the money trail from Conwell’s offshore trusts. Sorting through numbered accounts spread around the world, the breadcrumbs eventually led her to HMC. And what breadcrumbs they were. After getting a friend in the financial crimes unit to do some currency conversions for her, she discovered that HMC and its various subsidiaries paid Conwell several million dollars per year. The payments continued to the present day even though Conwell had left the company and returned to the States seven years ago. The really intriguing thing was that some of the payments had been wired to Conwell from Tsang’s personal account in Hong Kong.

  When she tried to investigate Tsang, she ran into a brick wall. Not only did Tsang already have an FBI file, it was classified. The file number had been issued by the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Operations Center in Washington, where Brian just happened to have worked before taking his current post.

  “It was the only way I could get you up to speed without violating any security protocols,” he said, waving to a pair of joggers running in the opposite direction.

  “I’m not up to speed on anything,” she admitted. “One day I’m doing a routine background check and the next day I’m in a fucking Tom Clancy novel. Thanks for the heads up, sir.”

  As they walked, he filled in some of the gaps for her.

  “Fourteen years ago, Tsang was an engineer at an Air Force research lab in New Mexico.”

  “The Kirtland base. I’ve heard of it,” she said.

  “You haven’t heard what I’m about to tell you. The lab where Tsang worked was developing some very advanced weapons systems for the Pentagon. Top secret stuff. Lasers and particle beams and other shit you wouldn’t believe. An important part of one of these weapons—the Active Denial System— was compromised by the PRC. Tsang was a natural suspect because he worked on the ADS team and he was Asian.”

  “Tsang is not Chinese,” Jill interjected.

  “Right, he’s Taiwanese. But Carl said that was like the difference between a sweet potato and a yam. I know that sucks, but that’s just the way it was back then.”

  “Carl? You mean the Director himself actually worked on this?” Carl Dunleavy’s exploits were legendary both inside and outside the Bureau. His intelligence work had famously disrupted several terrorist attacks against America.

  “In the flesh,” Brian said. “But it wasn’t his best work, which is why nobody has ever heard about it. Anyway, to make a long story short, Tsang was cleaner than the Board of Health. We couldn’t pin anything on him. The guy was a little shook up by the whole experience, so he quit the lab and went back home to Taiwan and set up HMC. We kept close tabs on him for years, but he never had any contact with the PRC. And his company doesn’t even exploit technology he picked up at the lab. Up until six years ago, all they did was make computer chips for digital cameras, CCDs I think they’re called. So we downgraded his threat status. But just to be safe, we moved the ADS program to another lab.

  In 2000, this kid Conwell showed up in Taiwan. Right after Tsang hired him, HMC set up a Special Projects Group and put the kid in charge. The Taiwanese don’t ordinarily put young black guys from America in charge of anything, so our eyebrows went up.

  They went up even further when the Special Projects Group started hitting homeruns. Improbable homeruns. First they came out with something called a protein hard drive that HMC claimed could store all the information in the Library of Congress on a chip the size of a fingernail. Our science people checked it out and said it’s the real deal. One of them taught Conwell at Princeton and said the kid is the real deal too. Like everybody else, he wanted to know what the hell Conwell was doing in Taiwan. We weren’t entirely sure, so we started trying to find out. Meanwhile, the Japanese and Korean electronics companies are buying licenses for HMC’s hard drive technology like candy. HMC stock goes through the roof on the Taipei Exchange, making Tsang worth close to a billion, even in U.S. dollars”

  “More like two billion the last time I checked,” Jill said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Brian replied. “We never focused on Tsang’s money because it wasn’t an immediate security threat. But then again we didn’t have to because the big campaign donors out in Silicon Valley did that for us. They couldn’t believe that a little no-name Taiwanese company had come up with such a technology on its own. They insisted HMC must’ve stolen it from an American company. The White House practically forced us to open a separate file on HMC and prove they were right.”

  “Were they?”

  “Not from what I saw. None of our defense labs had anything close. IBM was the only private company with a research program even remotely similar, but they never came close to getting it to work. But that wasn’t the real issue. What really got our people upset was the fact that HMC refused to license its technology to American companies. Tsang went so far as to make the Japanese and Koreans promise not to sublicense it to us. Some people thought that was a slap in the face since Tsang got his Ph.D. at Berkeley.”

  “What does Tsang have against us?” Jill asked.

  “While we were trying to figure that out, 9/11 happened.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Not long after the towers went down, we found out that HMC’s Special Project Group had developed a quantum encryption system. We already had several, but HMC’s was radically more advanced. No backdoors. Truly unbreakable. What’s more, the HMC system maintained its integrity over continental distances, whereas our best system had a maximum range of just a few miles. I don’t have to tell you what would happen if a terrorist group got a hold of a system like this. And given the way Tsang felt about us, it was a real problem. So we had the State Department put the screws to the Taiwanese government. We told them that we wanted HMC out of business immediately and the encryption system turned over to us or we’d have Taiwan kicked out of the World Health Organization and would no longer agree to defend it against an invasion from China.”

  “Wow,” Jill said. “Now that’s how you play hardball.”

  “Right, except it didn’t work. The Taiwanese government claimed they didn’t even know HMC had developed such a system until we told them. They went crying to Colin Powell. Being the statesman that he was, Powell worked out a deal that required HMC to give up the encryption system in exchange for not being shut down. Tsang was not a happy camper. He was hoping this encryption system would be HMC’s next big score. His marketing people had named it the Total Confidence System. He was so sure he had a hit on his hands that he had HMC stop making camera chips altogether. He thought HMC was on its way to becoming the next Microsoft.”

  “I think I’m starting to understand why he hates us.”

  “Tell me about it. It was like pulling teeth, but he eventually caved in to our demands. But right in the middle of our negotiations with Tsang, Conwell quit HMC and came back home. Tsang was furious. He thought we pressured the kid.”

  “Did you?”

  “I didn’t. Like the rest of the Bureau, the CTOC has no authority to operate outside the country. I can’t speak for anyone else though.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “I heard the CIA and couple of knucklegraggers from
the intelligence branch of State gave Conwell a refresher on American patriotism.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you can’t always play fair if you want to win. And it means you’re getting me off track with pointless questions.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Anyway, Tsang was pissed when his golden goose flew the coop. I mean really pissed. He broke off the negotiations with the State Department and started financially supporting an extremist Taiwanese political group called the Kuomintang Vanguard. The KMV’s primary emphasis is the reunification of Taiwan with Mainland China. Even though it’s a fringe group in every sense, Tsang’s backing was big news in Taiwan. It was kind of like the reaction Bill Gates would get if he joined Al Queda.

  We wouldn’t have cared except the Kuomintang is crawling with PRC agents. We got concerned enough to re-upgrade Tsang’s threat status. We shadowed him everywhere. If he took a piss, we knew the color.”

  “What about Conwell?”

  “Hold your horses, I’m getting to him. Six years go by with no action whatsoever. The KMV used most of Tsang’s money to set up fancy offices in China. The bad news for them is that the standard of living in Taiwan got higher every year and fewer and fewer Taiwanese were interested in their message. Before I left the CTOC, I read a poll that said that nine out of ten Taiwanese don’t even consider themselves Chinese. That’s a sea change from twenty years ago.” Brian sighed. “When I read that, I had a glimmer of hope that we could put this whole thing behind us and focus more resources on the threats from the Middle East.”

  “I take it you were wrong.”

  “Dead wrong. Earlier this year, and I remind you this is classified, one of our agents intercepted some data that Tsang passed to a known PRC agent.”

  “The encryption system!” Jill gasped.

  “No,” Brian said remorsefully. “It was actually a portion of a diagram for a millimeter wave generator.”