Power and Empire

Four other sets of ears listened to the conversation over the encrypted net. Ryan had hoped Midas might admit he needed a relief break as well, to make him feel a little more human in his time of need. No such luck. Jankowski was relatively new to The Campus, but Jack had been on enough ops with the retired Delta Force commander to know he possessed a bladder the size of a watermelon.

“I went an hour ago,” Domingo “Ding” Chavez’s voice came over Jack’s earpiece, gloating a little. “When I slapped the microphone up.”

Chavez, a senior member of The Campus — and a former CIA officer — had made an educated guess about their target’s next stop, and arrived in just enough time to stick a magnetic hi-gain microphone to the light fixture outside the doors of the Casita Roja. About the size of a matchbox, the little mic broadcast on the scrambled radio frequency of the team’s net. It was surprising what useful intelligence could be picked up from people just before they walked through the door of an unfamiliar location. Even when alone, they sometimes just blurted out things to themselves.

Chavez continued to rub it in. “I had me a few sips of a cold one while I was inside. Had to blend in, you know, go with the flow.” He made no comment about the nude girls gyrating on the stage. His father-in-law, The Campus’s director of operations, John Clark — a legend in the intelligence community — happened to be working overwatch on this op from the roof of a payday loan place halfway up the block with a good view of both the front door of Casita Roja and Ryan’s Taurus. He was listening on the same net.

Ryan sighed. “Maybe I should go in and try to get a listen on what our guy’s talking about.”

“Negative,” Clark said. “We have the tracker on his car and we’re up on his phone. Right now we’re just building patterns.”

Chavez spoke through a barely concealed chuckle. “’Mano, a white guy like you would stand out in there.”

Ding had a master’s degree in international relations, but he could turn on his East L.A. accent at the drop of a hat.

“Hold up,” Clark said. As the boss, his radio was primary and had the ability to override any chatter — which he frequently did. “Two Asian males coming out the main entrance now.”

Jack threw his own monocular scope to his eye and got a good look at the two men. In their early twenties, with short cropped hair, both wore faded jeans. Loose white wife-beater shirts displayed arms and shoulders covered with tattoos. They loitered by the doors, each lighting up a cigarette. Ryan could make out the print of a pistol stuffed down the front of one guy’s jeans, barely hidden under his shirt. The team had already identified several members of the Sun Yee On triad. Casita Roja was a strip club run by Tres Equis, a small cell of the Sinaloa Cartel known for the three figurative X’s formed by a single bullet hole between the two dead eyes of their victims. Since the capture of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, factions of the cartel were becoming even more bloody — if more violence than that brought on by the Sinaloa was even possible.

It made sense that everyone in the club would be packing. The men out front spoke in rapid Mandarin — which to Ryan made them sound highly pissed about something.

Midas cocked his head to one side, listening. The Chinese men took a couple cursory looks up and down the street, saw nothing to alarm them, and settled in to smoke and joke. They finished their cigarettes, stood outside, and then talked for two more minutes before going back inside, as if on a time clock.

“I’m guessing those two are triad,” Ryan said.

Midas gave a slow nod. “Sounds like these Sun Yee On assholes are into some heavy shit with Tres Equis. Prostitution, drugs, you name it. According to these guys, they’re supplying the Mexicans precursor chemicals to cook up some meth. My Mandarin’s a little rusty, but I’m pretty sure I heard ‘red phosphorus’ in there.”

Clark concurred. “Thought I caught that.” He wasn’t fluent in Mandarin, but he’d been around long enough to pick up more than a few words and suss out the interspersed English. “Any mention of Eddie Feng?”

“Nope,” Midas said.

Their target, Eddie Feng, was a Taiwanese national. Apart from being addicted to strip clubs and lap dancers, he called himself a reporter for a rag called Zhenhua Ribao — True Word Daily. This online journal specialized in juicy exposés about the secret lives of the political elite in the People’s Republic of China. The ZRB was, at best, sensationalized click-bait. At worst, it was just plain fake news.

Gerry Hendley, CEO of Hendley Associates, the financial arbitrage firm and white-side face of The Campus’s clandestine activity, would never have approved the unwarranted surveillance of a bona fide journalist. But Eddie Feng was more of an entertainer and propagandist. Feng did, however, appear to have stumbled on something going on with Taiwanese operatives and the PRC.