Power and Empire

General Ma Xiannian exited the great hall that housed the general secretary’s office and turned left to make his way along one of the many wide pathways inside the high walls of the Zhongnanhai. His office was on the far side of the lake known as the Middle Sea, and he had to walk across a bridge to reach it. His status was such that he could have taken a cart, but the weather was dry and warm, and in any case, the walk allowed him to burn off some of his contempt for the young upstart who was now in charge of the party.

Deng Wenyuan, secretary of the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection, met the general before he reached the bridge. It was a well-known fact in the intelligence world that people stopped to chat on bridges, making them perfect spots in which to hide listening devices. People who wanted to speak openly avoided them, as well as any of the many benches that graced the parklike setting.

Secretary Deng was impeccably dressed in a dark business suit tailored especially for him in London on a recent junket. The CCDI oversaw the Propaganda and Organization Department, and as such had the power to sway and even direct public opinion.

The two men exchanged greetings, bowing slightly to each other. They kept their tone civil and their faces passive. Because they were senior members of the party, there was no doubt that passersby would pay them close attention, even while pretending not to do so.

“And?” Secretary Deng asked.

“It went as you might expect,” Ma said, keeping his words vague. He was thinking Pitiful, disastrous, unconscionable, but he said, “Disappointing.”

“Something must be done,” Deng said.

“And it is,” Ma said. “Even as we speak.”

“Something drastic?”

General Ma smiled. “Something final.”

10

Jack Ryan, Jr., parked the maroon Dodge Avenger across a side street from a weathered brick building in a sad parking lot tucked in off Harry Hines Boulevard. He and Chavez had purchased the car with cash from a dealership in East Dallas, on the off chance that someone had seen the rattle-can Taurus. Ryan now wore a shaggy wig with bleached-blond surfer tips pulled snuggly over his dark hair, just covering his ears. It was an expensive piece of equipment that looked ridiculously real and, he hoped, made him look a little less like the son of the President of the United States.

A large sign above the windowless building bore the red-neon outline of a busty woman bending over and peeking around her own thigh.

Ryan nodded toward the sign and mused. “Chicas Peligrosas,” he read.

Ding Chavez translated from the passenger seat of the Dodge. “Dangerous girls.”

Ryan rolled his eyes. “Even I could figure that one out.”

Chavez held a two-foot Yagi directional Wi-Fi antenna out his open window toward the front door of the Dangerous Girls strip club. The simple device resembled a miniature ladder made of a single aluminum bar with short aluminum cross-sections running along its length. Chavez fiddled for a few moments with the connected laptop, scrolling through a string of twelve-digit Bluetooth addresses, searching for Eddie Feng’s phone.

“Our tango’s in there, all right,” he said over the net, and then shot a glance at Ryan. “Don’t beat yourself up because you’re not multilingual, ’mano. You’re a damned savant when it comes to analysis.”

“Thanks for that,” Ryan said. “But I’ve decided I’m going to start working on my Russian.”

Chavez shut his computer and set it and the Yagi antenna on the floorboard at his feet. He opened the door and grinned. “We all got our individual strengths. You can’t help it if yours is staring at spreadsheets.”

Ryan laughed as he followed Chavez toward the double front doors of Chicas Peligrosas.

“You know I’m joking, right?” Chavez said.

Ryan patted Chavez on the back. “I learned a long time ago, if you’re not giving me shit, then something is terribly wrong.”

“Jack knows you love him,” Clark said over the net. “How about you guys go get us some intel on Eddie Feng?”

“Copy that,” Chavez said.

Gavin Biery had a GPS proximity notification on Eddie Feng’s phone, allowing the team to grab a few hours of much-needed sleep after he stopped moving for the night. But Feng was apparently a man on a mission. He was up and at ’em again just after noon.

Now Midas Jankowski and Dom Caruso were in the truck a half a block away. Adara Sherman was going it alone today, another block down Harry Hines Boulevard to the south. The daylight hour made climbing onto a rooftop problematic, so John Clark sat behind the wheel of a primer-gray Pontiac Firebird around the corner in the parking lot of a Pep Boys auto-supply store. He did not have physical eyes-on like he’d had the night before, but each team member’s location was transmitted via a small GPS tracker to his iPad, giving him a Common Operating Picture of everyone involved, as a color-coded icon representing each one moved around a digital map of the vicinity.