Power and Empire

Jack had found the tenuous connection while comparing some chatter on an Internet forum for the Confucius Institute at the University of Maryland. According to several U of M students, True Word Daily had run an article about the bombing of an unfinished subway tunnel on the outskirts of Beijing. There was a lot of detail in the article — at least the translation Jack read — details only someone familiar with the investigation or the person or group who did the bombing would know. Ryan happened to be privy to the same information in the form of a People’s Armed Police transmission grab by Fort Meade. This Feng guy was getting too much right about events that would be embarrassing to the ChiComs to be blowing smoke. The PRC hadn’t released anything about the subway bombing to the media yet. There was no chatter of it anywhere but for the NSA intercept — and Eddie Feng’s article.

Jack had taken his analysis to John Clark, who’d done some research of his own before calling Ryan into a meeting with Gerry — who’d okayed a more intrusive operation. Gavin Biery, IT director for Hendley Associates, would pull up Eddie Feng’s bank records, phone history, and anything else he could hack into — which was, according to Biery, “every digital jot and tittle” there was on the man.

It turned out Eddie Feng had made a recent payment of two thousand dollars to a guy named Fernando Perez Gomez, a car dealer in South Dallas who the Texas Department of Public Safety Gang Intelligence database said had ties to the Tres Equis offshoot of Sinaloa — and a second two thousand dollars to a Sun Yee On triad boss, a recent arrival to Plano, Texas, from Taiwan.

The information was thin, but considering the underworld players involved, and the fact that Eddie Feng had somehow gotten his hands on the information about the Beijing subway bombing, Clark and Hendley had agreed to spool up a short operation and use Eddie Feng as an “unwitting agent.” Feng would do the hard work, continuing to develop his sources and extracting information from them while they watched from afar and took notes. The Campus team would merely follow him during his investigation, see where he went, and who he met, and learn if he came up with any more useful intel from behind the Bamboo Curtain.

Biery had located Feng when his phone pinged a cell tower in Houston, but by the time the team had spun up and the Hendley Associates Gulfstream was in the air from Washington Reagan, Feng had already moved north. It didn’t take him long, though, to get down to business in the Fort Worth — Dallas metroplex. In the past seven hours, the team had followed him to four different strip clubs. None of them were particularly high-class joints, but Casita Roja was definitely the worst. What’s more, the club was located in an area of town where a couple bearded white guys like Jack Junior and Midas Jankowski stood out like… well, like bearded white guys in the barrio.

Ryan looked at the front door of the club, then back to Midas. “They say anything else useful?”

“Not really,” Midas said. “Other than the meth ingredients, they mostly talked about girls and shit.”

Adara Sherman, another member of The Campus’s operational cadre who was conversant in Mandarin, came over the net. “One of them has a girlfriend who dances in this hellhole,” she said.

John Clark spoke next. “Did the skinny one mention something about a Camaro?”

“He did,” Adara said, obviously impressed.

“Damn,” Ryan said. “Am I the only one who’s not fluent in a bunch of other languages besides English?”

Ding Chavez, John Clark, Adara Sherman, and Dominic Caruso all answered back in turn.

“Sí.”

“Da.”

“Oui.”

“Hai.”

Midas turned and looked at Ryan from the passenger seat, giving a little shrug in the darkness.

“Yep,” he said.

“Looks like I need Rosetta Stone or a multilingual girlfriend,” Jack muttered, reaching over the seat to grab the Gatorade bottle. He started to pop off and say something else, but he caught movement out the rear glass as he turned.

He froze.

“John,” he said. “You got a visual on our six? I’ve got movement out our back window.”

Clark’s slightly muffled voice came back a moment later, giving a play-by-play. Ryan could visualize the man’s cheek welded to the comb of his suppressed .308 Winchester model 70, his eye peering through the reticle of a night-vision scope.

“Two Hispanic males,” Clark said. “One female. Males have pistols tucked in their pants… One is carrying a cane or stick… Scratch that. It’s a golf club… The males just left the girl standing at the wall. They’re creeping your way, Jack, ten meters and closing.”

“We’re moving in from the west,” Chavez said. He was in the crew-cab pickup with Adara, a little more than a block away.