Eric van lustbader chi.., p.2
Eric van Lustbader - China Maroc 02, page 2
She felt him against her soft flesh and she had had enough. She summoned all her inner strength; she concentrated her qi down to this one point on his anatomy. The carotid meridian.
Opened her mouth wide and shouted, as Jake had taught her; simultaneously, she pressed inward at the meridian juncture.
The effect on the assassin was astounding. He jumped, a fish on a line. His eyes flew open; she could see the whites all around. They began to bug out as the color drained from his cheeks.
Realizing what she was doing, he responded instinctually; he hit out. His fists were like blocks of iron. They struck Bliss; tears of pain welled up in her eyes.
Dizzy, grinning, the man hit her again; he laughed. He was enjoying this. Perhaps he was still as hard as he had ever been.
Bliss abandoned the carotid meridian and smote the underside of his rib cage with the heel of her hand. She heard the sickening snap as the two lowest ribs shattered.
Jake, having heard Bliss’s cries, slammed around the left turning, racing down the near-deserted corridor of shadows. His peripheral vision brought him the movement of the struggle and he leapt into the opium den.
He grabbed the man with the slicked-back hair and jerked him backward. Bliss, so focused that she was still unaware that he had come into the room, saw her opening and jammed her hand into her assailant’s abdomen. As Jake had taught her to do she used her rigid fingers to puncture skin, muscles, organs, all in one blurred motion of such power that it was unstoppable.
“No!” Jake cried, as he saw her begin the lethal blow, but he was too late. She had been fighting for her life, and had become an organism too busy with the business of surviving to be concerned with outside stimuli.
The assassin spit blood and bile as he died. Reaching down, Jake scooped Bliss up off the floor and put the side of his face against hers. He kissed her on the lips. “Bliss. Are you all right?”
“Jake.” Her head against his chest.
“Brave one,” he said softly, and took her out of there.
Bliss sat in their apartment, a neat Scotch in her hand. Jake Maroc was in her eyes. He was stretched out at her side, his long legs crossed at the ankles.
“I messed it up,” she said softly.
“He was going to kill you,” Jake said. “You did what you had to do. You had no choice. Not too many people would have been able to survive that, let alone succeed. Concentrate on that.”
“But if I’d just disabled him we would have been able to question him.” The whiskey was against her opened lips. “Maybe we would’ve even found out who the spy is.”
“He was a professional, Bliss. Chances are we would have gotten nothing from him. I’m just glad we’re both okay.”
The Repulse Bay crescent was not far away but they were too high up to hear the crying of the gulls. A huge black kite sat in the treetop outside the window, the early morning sunlight turning its feathers iridescent.
“Another dead end,” she said, and swallowed half her Scotch. She had taken a long, hot bath, and then she and Jake had made love. That was what she had wanted the most.
“My father,” Jake said, staring at the kite. “He must be up for hours already.”
Bliss watched from her long almond eyes. After a long time she stirred, as if making up her mind. “Jake, you don’t understand. I am part of the yuhn-hyun, the inner circle. I am part of you. If I can’t be of help …”
Jake turned his head and smiled. He reached out, took her hand in his. “What would I do without you, Bliss. Joss that my contact was killed; joss that his murderer was, too. If I hadn’t wanted you with me I’d have made damn sure that you stayed behind.”
He frowned. “I need you with me. I don’t know what I’d do otherwise, in the middle of the night.” He was talking about the long ordeal he had so recently been through. For the entire nine months since he had returned to Hong Kong from Washington, where he had wiled Henry Wunderman, Jake had been able to sleep only an hour or two a night. Near midnight he would pass out as if drugged, and Bliss, in the middle of reading, would quickly turn out the lights and slide down next to him.
Between one and two his animal cry of terror would start her awake. He could never remember the nightmare that had gripped him, but Bliss was certain that his guilt at having killed his surrogate father was the source.
Bliss reached out now, her long cocoa-colored fingers twining about his slender waist. They traced the network of long, flat muscles. Out of the corner of her eye she watched the worry lines etch themselves across his face. ‘The hospital,” she said.
Jake smiled absently. I remember. What a shock to see you again after all that time.”
“We were childhood sweethearts, in the streets of Hong Kong.”
“Is that what we were?” He pulled himself close to her.
“I always thought so.”
“That’s because you were precocious.” The palm of his hand slid along her cheek. “To me you were my best friend.”
Bliss laughed. “You see what I mean? What other boy would think of a girl as his best friend.”
“I guess you’re right,” Jake said. “I must have been in love.” Watching as Bliss’s eyes closed. To his caress or his words? He was not certain it mattered. “Or crazy!”
Her eyes flew open and now it was his turn to laugh.
“I’m glad you’re not angry with me,” she said.
“Why should I be angry?” he said, sliding out of bed.
“Because when I came back into your life a year ago, it was as an agent of your father … because I was forbidden to tell you about certain things, the inner circle included, before a specific time.”
Jake’s extraordinary copper-colored eyes were hooded, as dark now in their centers as lead. “You were chosen by my father to lead me back to my family. Because of you, I found my half-brother, Nichiren. I found my real father, Shi Zilin. Because of you I am part of the yuhn-hyun, the inner circle of people who will control all of Asia someday.”
“You are much more than that, my darling,” Bliss said. “You are Zhuan. Your father is preparing you to be the new leader. Don’t you see, you are becoming the most powerful and influential man in the entire Eastern Hemisphere.”
Jake looked away, and Bliss thought, What is wrong? He went barefoot into the bathroom. He did not bother to close the door. Bliss heard him urinating, then the tap water going. She drew her knees up to her chin and watched his shadow blocking the bathroom light. It fell upon the tiles in sharp angles.
When he came out of the shower, he looked into her beautiful face and seemed to see right through to the core of her. “No one else in the world could have done what you did,” he said. “You fought at my side against spies and assassins. Like tonight. The extreme danger never fazed you.”
“My father trained me well,” Bliss said. But her mind was far away. She was thinking of how Jake had changed since Zilin had arrived in Hong Kong. He had become at once more in command and more secretive. She wondered whether the one was part of the other, and found herself fervently hoping that was not true.
Jake was very close to her. She felt the force of him. It was like being bathed by the noonday sun.
“The struggle is just beginning.” His voice was very quiet. “It’s on a larger scale than any of us could have dreamed. Before it’s over, Bliss, we’ll all need every ounce of strength we possess.”
His words fell like hammer blows. Bliss felt her heart beating fast. “What’s happening, Jake? What aren’t you telling me?”
He smiled suddenly, and kissed her hard on the lips. “Nothing,” he said, and kissed her again. “Speaking of your father,” Jake said, “I’ll need to see Three Oaths Tsun this afternoon.”
“Do you wish to see the inner circle’s other tai pan, or just my father?”
What was it, she wondered; what was darkening Jake’s thoughts? She could feel it. Was it the specters of the dead he had so recently buried? For just an instant, she had a premonition; a remarkable sword of light pierced her consciousness. There was something more. Something that even he might not be aware of. She felt a chill of fear run through her. If Jake was out of phase with his environment or with himself, the consequences could be disastrous. He needed all his concentration in order to formulate his own strategy within the inner circle—and to try to discern the strategies of his enemies. If his qi was not in harmony, his decision-making prowess would be in serious jeopardy.
No. I want to see Three Oaths Tsun alone,” Jake said. “Will you set it up for three o’clock?”
Bliss nodded. “Of course.” She thought of Three Oaths Tsun as her father because he had brought her up. Bliss had never known her real father, and remembered her mother only as a distant blur, like a badly out-of-focus photograph.
“And don’t forget the emergency meeting Andrew Sawyer has called for noon,” Bliss said. “That was the soonest all the tai pan could be rounded up.” Jake nodded.
“Do you know what that’s all about?” she asked anxiously. “Andrew sounded quite upset when he called.”
Jake said, “Andrew’s always upset about one thing or another.”
She opened her mouth to tell Jake that she wanted to help him more, but he had turned away; she sensed that he was gone from her just as surely as if he had already walked out the door. His mind, no doubt, was already on this morning’s meeting with his father, the great Jian, Shi Zilin.
Before Henry Wunderman, Jake’s surrogate father, Jake had had foster parents. Solomon and Ruth Maroc, Jewish refugees in Shanghai, had taken him and his mother in. She had been sick and dying. The Marocs cared for Athena and her frightened child.
By that time, Jake’s real father, Shi Zilin, had already gone with Mao, giving up his family, all that he held dear, in order to direct the fate of the new China.
Zilin worked behind the scenes with Mao, consolidating his power, entrenching himself through all the agonizingly bloody years of revolution and struggles for power, through the fall of Mao, the Gang of Four, the abrupt end to the Cultural Revolution. Until he was beyond all the infighting, the internecine warfare that led, inevitably, to the purges. Philosophies eddied and flowed around the seat of power in China. But because he was secreted away from it, Zilin was always spared.
Not that there weren’t those who had tried to destroy him. The latest in the long line had been Wu Aiping, who had set himself up at the head of the group known as the gun, reactionary ministers who were opposed to Zilin’s forward-thinking views on economic and industrial progress.
But Jake’s father had outfoxed Wu Aiping, as he had all his other enemies. Now the thinking of those who ruled China had turned his way, and though old and ill he had journeyed south to meet his grown sons, Jake and Nichiren, the child of his mistress.
One son had lived, the other had died in the pitched battle on the veranda of the villa high on the cliffs overlooking Repulse Bay. Nichiren, having found out that his father had also been his Control, had attacked Zilin. Jake had only wanted to protect the old man. His father. And in the process Jake had killed his brother. One could say half-brother, but what in the end was the difference? The same blood— Zilin’s blood—flowed through their veins. Neither had known it until the very end. They had spent a good deal of their adult lives hunting one another, hurting one another, as bitter enemies. It had been Nichiren who had been responsible for Jake’s daughter’s murder at the Sumchun River three-and-a-half years before. As part of the American organization known as the Quarry, Jake had done his best to track Nichiren down. As he had peeled away the layers of deceit, he had gone from seeing Nichiren as a lone-wolf assassin to being controlled by the Russians—by General Daniella Vorkuta. Until recently Vorkuta had been the head of the KGB’s most feared extraterritorial wing, the KVR. And then, Jake had discovered that Nichiren was in fact being controlled by Zilin out of Beijing.
It was all part of Zilin’s master plan, what the old man called his Ten, his harvest. Shi had created an inner circle, a yuhn-hyun of powerful people. Included in the inner circle were the major tai pan— the heads of Hong Kong’s most powerful trading houses—and also the dragons, the overlords, of the three largest Triads, the secret societies.
And the man to direct them all? Jake Maroc or Jake Shi, take your pick. The tai pan of all tai pan, the most special one. Jake was Zhuan.
Ever since he had been reunited with Zilin, Jake’s obsession had been the old man, his father. His days were spent at Zilin’s side, deep in conversation. His zeal taxed even the old man’s phenomenal endurance.
They would sit by the shoreline, their trouser legs rolled up, their bare feet in the surf. Even hunger did not stop their dialogue; they ate while they spoke, hardly tasting the food they were brought. Neither of them noticed the Triad members assigned to them, who strolled the beach, looking fondly at babies toddling on still-soft legs, carefully searching the faces of any others who entered the vicinity of father and son. Both Jake and Zilin appeared oblivious to danger.
On this day, there was a mist in the air, as if the night had refused to relinquish its hold. It is time for you to begin your work as Zhuan.”
Zilin sat as a child might, his legs straight out in front of him. The brace was off the right leg, but his gnarled hand massaged the atrophied muscles along its upper length.
“Talk is constructive up to a certain point,” Zilin said. “After that, only action matters.”
Though it was in the low sixties, a winter coat was draped across Zilin’s bony shoulders. His baggy cotton trousers were rolled to just below the knee. Still, in spots, the fabric was darkened, splashed by the surf of the South China Sea.
“The Zhuan is the tai pan of all Hong Kong tai pan. He is the head dragon of the inner circle. The Zhuan will eventually control all business throughout Asia. He will be the funnel through which Beijing will make its deals, through which the Indonesianized Chinese businessmen will clear their profits. Through him the British will do their trading. As will the Americans, the Japanese, the Thais and Malaysians.”
Zilin stared out to where the sunlight was a swath of beaten brass over the waves. “This is the ultimate stage of my ren, my harvest. For fifty years this has been my dream—a united China. I have told you how I came upon the beginnings of Communism in China. My first wife, Mai, was Sun Zhongshan’s assistant.” He was speaking of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Guomindang. “We met in Shanghai at the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.
“I have already told you of my boyhood in Suzhou, of how much time I spent in the garden of my mentor, the Jian. Here it was that I was taught the overriding importance of artifice in life. The Jian’s garden looked so perfectly natural that I believed for some time that every tree, bush, shrub, rock and hill in it had been there for hundreds of years—since, even, the beginning of time.
“Imagine then my consternation when the Jian revealed to me his secrets… the secrets of the garden. The hillock he had made himself to create a certain calming effect. The stones he had had brought from a brookside; these trees planted from here, those shrubs he had lovingly put in but three weeks ago. Yet all was harmonious, natural. Surely, I had thought, the hand of Buddha had shaped this space—not the mind of one man.
“But it was true. I saw that it was true; I became part of the Jian’s plan for his garden.
“All this was never truly out of my mind as I grew up. And by the time my family moved to Shanghai and I went to college I knew that somehow I must employ the Jian’s strategy in the game of life. I was already a wei qi grand master. On the game board, as well, I was able to use artifice to win matches.
“In those days, Jake, my friends spoke about nothing other than ridding our shores of the foreign devil who had invaded us. The foreign devil systematically pulled the natural resources out of China for their profit and at our expenses.
“But China was divided, at war with itself. How then could it also fend off the foreign devil? This was the subject of many debates. I listened but rarely made a comment, for I saw how clever the foreign devil were. And I thought, if we could only employ artifice—give the foreign devil what they thought they needed—then we could begin to use them as they had been using us. We could begin to harness their talents in the service of China.
“But first China had to be united. I had no clear idea how such a vast country, riddled with poverty and unrest, could be tamed.
“Then I went to the fateful meeting in Shanghai. I came face to face with the concept of Communism. And I knew instinctively that I had found the means of bringing peace to China.
“This, Jake, was the first stage of my ren, of my fifty-year harvest. But it required that I leave Shanghai, leave Athena, my second wife and your mother … leave you. I had no choice. China came first. China has always come first.
“Now at last we are in the final stages. You will be the conduit through which the power of all Asia will flow. China will at last be whole again. Not by destroying Hong Kong as some in Beijing still fervently wish to do, but by utilizing all the advantages that the foreign devil have given to this Colony: free trade, open markets, an unhindered, unlimited pipeline to the West. Without losing face we can solicit the industrial and electronic aid we so desperately need from the foreign devil.
“Within the spreading arms of the inner circle all China will prosper and grow.
“It is your joss to see the fruits of my ren, my harvest. Over the years Communism will wane. It was a powerful tool for us in the past. It roused the colossus that is China out of its slumber and moved it to a certain point. But now it is stagnating us. We have been strangling on doctrine while the world around us has moved into another age. If we cannot move also into this great new realm, then China is doomed to backwardness and is in real danger of being subordinated to Moscow. The Soviets have sought for many decades to control the direction of our future.”
Zilin moved uncomfortably and for the briefest moment a flicker of pain shadowed his face. “I knew from the beginning, Jake, that I could not go beyond the stage of Jian. I have accomplished enough in my lifetime—now that I have found my son. I am the creator. It was for you to be Zhuan, the international conduit through which all Asian and Asian-related business flows. I admit that I could not control all the forces that must now come into play, not only from the Mainland and Hong Kong but in Bangkok, Singapore, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi, Tokyo and Osaka. Some of those contacts have been made and have been passed on to you. Others you must make yourself. That is for the Zhuan to do—as it is to continue the fight to subdue our enemies.”
