Power and Empire

He’d been identified as a likely candidate for intelligence work when he was nineteen years old and flunking out of National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu. NCTU was considered one of the top schools in Taiwan, and just getting in was an accomplishment. He’d majored in business management with a minor in foreign languages — and proved a brilliant, if extremely lazy, student. His near perfect memory allowed him to score top marks on every test. But he couldn’t be bothered with any essays or projects. His professors, especially the females, were smitten by his charm. None of them wanted him to fail, which allowed him to hang on far longer than he should have — and long enough for an agent of mainland China to make contact.

Over drinks one night, an English professor named Wang promised that if Coronet would commit himself and finish his studies, there would be a job for him that would be more exciting than he could possibly imagine. There was great adventure to be had for a man who could go places without being noticed. According to the professor, Coronet’s medium complexion and innocuous Asian face gave him an ambiguous ethnicity, allowing him to blend in with one group or another in most parts of the world. In addition to being brilliant, the younger man’s inconspicuous looks, medium stature, and a combination of fearlessness and brains put him in the Goldilocks Zone for work as an intelligence officer.

Looking back, Professor Wang had known all the right words to say to hook the naive young man who’d eventually become Coronet, and whip him into a frenzy.

Goldilocks Zone indeed.

He was thirty-two now, and he worked hard to stay “just right” for his job. So far he’d retained the thick black hair that he kept neatly trimmed and just long enough to part on the side. His slim, athletic build looked especially good in his lightweight blue European blazer and khaki linen slacks. Some might say that he was overdressed for a visit to the night market, where T-shirts and flip-flops were de rigueur. His mentor in the business warned him that he’d grown up watching too much James Bond — but Coronet held firm to the notion that while one could be underdressed, it rarely hurt to dress well. Apart from the Mandarin of his native Taiwan, Coronet spoke Cantonese, English, and Malay. He did not, however, speak Tagalog, and it was a thorn in his paw that he could not understand most of the people in the crowd around him. He’d not survived the last seven years in his present employment by being oblivious to his surroundings. Meetings with men who cut off other men’s heads as a matter of course required a heightened sense of awareness.

A sea of people chattered in Tagalog and English amid the smells of grilling meat and burned sugar, munching on skewers of fried chicken intestine, or, if they’d braved the insanely long queue, a cone of Mang Danny’s ice cream. Coronet used the varied composition of the crowd to his advantage. To tourists, he looked like a local. To locals, he was a dandy tourist. To roaming police — whose presence had increased tenfold since the bombing — he was too well dressed to be a militant.

His vantage point by the utility pole gave him a direct view across Roxas Avenue, where a girl in a pink T-shirt sold lemonade and other colorful drinks. The man Coronet had come to meet had never seen him before, so he sat, eating his grilled chicken kebab, and did not worry that he sat just fifty feet away from his dead drop.

He’d worked in places far more pleasant than the Philippines. The humidity was stifling and the native tongue harsh against his ear. Trash sometimes obscured the broken concrete. Homeless children begged for food when they saw his nice clothes. Many of the smells caused him to gag outright.

And he loved every minute of it.

There was something invigorating about a city where leftist Sparrow units, police death squads, and radical Islamic terrorists roamed the filthy streets. A public outcry and government crackdowns had pushed the violence underground, but just barely. Murders happened in the jungle instead of on city streets. Graves were dug deeper. Mouths kept shut. But the same killers were still out there. Coronet was sure of that.

He was, in fact, counting on it.

Five minutes before his contact was due to arrive, a HiLux pickup truck backed into a stall a dozen feet down from where Coronet chewed on his kebab. The sudden smell was nauseating, and he felt sure he must have stepped in something. A quick scan of the area revealed the awful odor — as if someone had vomited up a dinner of onions and turpentine — was coming from the pile of spiky, melon-sized durian in the back of the HiLux. Nothing to be done about it now. The NFC was already in place, and this observation point was too good to abandon, so he tried to ignore the noxious smell and focused on his mission.