Don Winslow - The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

Right, Neal thought. He peeled off the Chinese clothes and changed into the black pullover, jeans, and tennis shoes he had last worn in Mill Valley. Then he took two glasses off the bar, poured two fingers of scotch into each, and handed one to Chin. It gave him a chance to look right into Chin’s eyes.

“It’s okay,” Neal said. “I know where they are.”

Oh, yeah, Neal thought as he saw Ben’s eyes widen ever so slightly, you’re interested. But why? Because she was responsible for killing one of your boys? Job satisfaction?

“Where?” Chin asked.

“They’re at the Y.”

“How do you know?”

“Bob Pendleton may be a hell of a biochemist, but he makes a lousy fugitive. He was fiddling with a key chain when I saw him. I got a quick look at the thing. It had the YMCA symbol on it.”

“There are two in Kowloon. One right by the ferry, the other up Nathan Road.”

“The second one is in Yaumatei?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go.”

“I thought I was fired.”

“You’re rehired. I need someone who speaks Chinese and who can bribe a desk clerk. With money, not muscle, right?”

“Right.”

Right.

It was two in the morning and there were still people on the street. The lost souls of the small hours lingered on the edges of the light pools thrown by the streetlamps, or hovered around the fires set in trashcans. Vagrants slept on cardboard sheets in the middle of the wide sidewalks or crouched in the doorways of closed shops. Most of the night clubs and gambling joints were still open, their neon lights reflecting brightly off the puddles in the gutters. A few prostitutes too old or too ugly for the tourist trade farther down the road stood stoically outside the gambling halls, hoping to rent a celebration to the winners or solace to the losers. Here and there a slice of darkness broke the neon glow, and each niche was like a cave that sheltered a human being-a scraggly kid too weak to join a gang, a dull-eyed opium addict lost in his private dream, a psychotic woman babbling her outrage at omnipresent enemies, a hungry mugger waiting for the improvident drunk to stumble by at the right moment-each a player in the slow game of musical chairs that makes up the urban food chain.

The YMCA was on Waterloo Road, two blocks west of Nathan. Neal waited on the steps while Ben talked to the nervous night clerk. The place reeked of good intentions and bad bank statements. Metal screens shielded the broken glass in windows and doors. The pea-green high-gloss paint was cheap and easily cleaned, and the smell of disinfectant overpowered the aroma of the musty mud-brown carpet.

It was the sort of place that offered anonymity and Neal knew that Li Lan or her handlers must have chosen it quite deliberately.

Chin’s conversation didn’t take long.

“Room three-forty-three,” he said to Neal, as if it were an offering.

“Thanks. See you tomorrow.”

“I’ll wait down here.”

“No.”

“Dangerous neighborhood this time of night.”

“Go home.”

Chin shrugged. “Whatever you say, boss.”

“That’s what I say.”

Chin turned around and went out the door. Neal watched until he had turned the corner on Nathan Road.

Neal was surprised that the elevator had an operator, an old man with withered legs and a grotesquely distorted face. Neal held up three fingers and the man leaned forward on his stool and used a lever to shut the door. The elevator whined with age as it crawled up the three floors.

The third-floor corridor was narrow, and covered in old green carpeting. Neal stood outside of 343 for a full two minutes and listened. He couldn’t hear anything. It’s just another gig, he told himself as he took his AmEx card from his wallet and slipped it behind the bolt. The lock gave up quicker than a French general, and Neal was in the room just as quickly.

A shaft of light from a streetlamp pierced the thin curtain and outlined her in a golden glow where she lay sleeping on the bed. Pendleton lay beside her, his back toward the door. Neal shut the door behind him, just the way Graham had taught him to, keeping the knob open until the bolt was aligned and then slowly letting the knob turn shut. Then he squatted next to the bed, brought his right arm over her head, and clapped his hand over her mouth as his thumb and index finger pinched her nostrils shut. He put his left hand under her jaw and pressed his thumb and index finger under the two joints. Her eyes popped open and she stared at him in fright. He slowly shook his head back and forth, and she accepted this warning to keep quiet. He stood up slowly and lifted her by the jaw. She grabbed his wrist and he squeezed harder. Her eyes widened in pain. He lifted until she was perched on her toes and then walked her to the bathroom door and set her down on the edge of the bathtub. He closed the door behind them, then turned on the light.

“Hi,” he whispered. “Bet you didn’t think you’d see me again, huh?”

She didn’t answer.

“The CIA is looking for you, but I guess you already know that.”

She shook her head.

“Right. Anyway, they have a pretty good deal to offer you. I think you should take it. We can wake up Bobby baby in a minute and use the phone. I’ll make the call for you, but I want you to answer a few questions for me first.”

She was staring at him. Just staring, and it was making him mad.

“What was that all about back in California? The little striptease that ended with a bang? That’s a lousy way to set somebody up, and why set me up anyway? Why did you think you had to kill me?”

She kept on staring. He tried to look back into her eyes and ignore the fact that the T-shirt was all she was wearing.

“Goddamn it, I deserve an answer!”

“I didn’t try to kill you. Someone was trying to kill Robert.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I only wanted to make sure you would stay there, in the hot tub, while we had a chance to escape. Then I heard the shot… I became afraid… I ran away.”

“You thought I was dead.”

“Yes, until you began leaving those messages everywhere. I was happy you were alive, but I wanted to warn you of the very big danger. So I wanted to have a meeting with you, but you came with that man.”

“What man?”

“The man who was hunting us in California. The very big Chinese man.”

“I came with a Hong Kong man.”

“No. I saw him at hotel in San Francisco.”

“Mark Chin?”

“I do not know his name.”

Mark Chin and Ben Chin, who looked so much alike… she thought Ben was Mark, figured she’d been tricked, and called out the troops.

“Are you with CIA?” she asked.

“No, I’m a private cop.”

“I do not understand.”

Neither do I. “Did you think I had come to the Peak to kill you? To set you up?”

She nodded.

“Do you think that’s why I’m here now?”

She nodded again.

“Because you think I’m CIA?”

“No.”

“Who, then?”

“White Tiger.”

White Tiger? What the hell is a White Tiger?

White Tiger, she told him, was one of the most powerful of the Hong Kong Triads. It had been shattered during a government crackdown in the early Seventies, and its leaders had fled to Taiwan, where they found a warm welcome in the form of shelter, money, and sage leadership. Reorganized and refinanced, White Tiger reinfiltrated Hong Kong and recolonized outposts in New York, London, Amsterdam, and San Francisco. It was involved in the usual gang enterprises of loansharking, drug dealing, prostitution, and extortion, but it also took out subcontracts from the Taiwanese secret service for surveillance jobs, kidnappings, and hits. Its primary role in Hong Kong was to serve as a counterbalance to the procommunist Triads, such as the 14K.