Don Winslow - The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

“And you think Chin is White Tiger?”

“Of course.”

Of course. I was set up from jump street, or at least from Kearny Street, at the good old Chinatown Holiday Inn. Mark Chin was on the same trail I was, and let me bird-dog for him. He took my hundred bucks at Coit Tower, walked down to a phone booth on his way to Pier Thirty-nine, and called in some troops, who put such a good tail on me I didn’t catch it. He must have been cracking up when I came to him and asked him to hide me in Hong Kong. He passed me right along to cousin Ben, who I brought up the Peak with me as protection. And who I also brought right here. Shit.

He asked Lan, “What does Taiwan have against the good doctor?”

Pendleton answered as he opened the bathroom door.

“They don’t want me to go to China,” he said. “What the hell is going on here?”

Neal stood up slowly and raised his hands in front of his chest. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out, and I don’t think I have a lot of time to do it.”

“You got that right,” Pendleton said. “Can you at least let her get dressed?”

“Yeah.”

Lan got up and went back into the bedroom. Neal could hear her opening drawers. He wondered if she was going to come back in with a gun. He wondered why he trusted her not to.

“You were telling me about Taiwan,” Neal said as if they’d been interrupted during polite chatter at a cocktail party.

“The Taiwanese want me dead.”

“Why?”

“They’re AgriTech’s biggest customer.”

“I had a long talk with a guy named Simms last night.”

“Who’s he?”

“He works with Paul Knox.”

“Oh.”

“Oh. And he told me about the stuff you create in your test tubes, Doc. Why should Taiwan give a shit?”

“We were developing it for sale to Taiwan.”

“Why does Taiwan want an herbicide that kills the poppy?”

“Because heroin is power. Because they want to control the warlords of northern Thailand, Laos, and Burma. The border countries. And they sure as hell don’t want the PRC to have it, because the PRC would use it. Heroin is one of Taiwan’s biggest businesses. They’re scared shitless of the PRC getting that kind of hammer over them.”

So it was the Taiwanese, using their White Tiger subcontractors, who had taken a whack at what they thought was Pendleton in the Marin County hot tub. The Taiwanese want him croaked, the CIA want him alive, and they’re both using me to nail him. But what does Pendleton want?

“And you’re planning to take your product to the PRC?”

“I’m planning to go with Lan.”

Lan appeared in the doorway. She had put on a pair of blue jeans, a black pullover jersey, and sandals.

“She doesn’t love you,” Neal said. “Don’t you know that? She’s a Chinese spy. They sent her to sleep with you. It was in her job description.”

“I know all that. She told me.”

“Can we get out of the bathroom?” Neal asked. “It’s starting to feel like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.”

Lan and Pendleton sat on the bed, which seemed appropriate enough to Neal, and he sat down in the old overstuffed wingback in the corner, by the window.

“So it’s true love, right?”

Right. They told him the story, sharing the narrative like newlyweds telling a stranger how they met. She was a spy of sorts. It was her ticket out, the price for a life of relative freedom in Hong Kong and America. She really was a painter, and that was her cover in the States. Her handlers approved because it gave her access to culture, which in the States meant money, which meant power. She made it a point to attend all the cocktail parties, all the receptions, all the corporate bashes. Usually her bosses required nothing more than simple reports on who was who, who was doing what, and who might be sympathetic toward a struggling nation of communist reformers.

Then Pendleton’s conference had come along. She’d picked him up in an expensive restaurant-charmed him, flattered him with the simple gift of attention. She’d led him into leading her to bed, taught him the things that her trainers had taught her, talked to him, listened to him.

In the morning she reported back, in the afternoon received her orders, and that night went back to his bed. She took him to the clouds and the rain, and then lay still in his arms as he told her about his life, his work, his secret dreams. They went on a long, early-morning walk in Chinatown, watched the old ones do t‘ai chi, shopped in the markets, went for dim-sum and tea, and then back to bed. She had to go to Mill Valley for her show, and he visited her there and met her friends, and went there every day.

Then he came: the White Tiger soldier, Mark Chin. Their escape was narrow, they needed somewhere to hide, and Li Lan talked to her good friend Olivia Kendall. In the quiet of the Kendall house, Lan and Pendleton talked for hours, told each other the heretofore covert parts of their lives, wondered what to do. Pendleton knew that AgriTech would come looking for him, maybe send a Company errand boy to fetch him, and sure enough, Neal had turned up. They weren’t sure whether he was CIA or a rent-a-cop hired by AgriTech, but they had to get free of him. Along with dinner, they cooked up a plan to give him the slip: get him drunk, get him unclothed in the hot tub, and give him a good reason to sit there and wait for Li Lan to come back. Only, of course, Li Lan wasn’t coming back. They were going to run to Hong Kong, where she would play along with her bosses and their 14K allies to hide long enough to figure out what to do. She was as surprised as Neal when the shot whooshed through the air. Scared, she had run all the faster, and they’d caught the next flight to Hong Kong.

According to plan, she should have just turned him over to her handlers, but she hedged. They were in love, truly in love, and she knew full well what was in store for him in the PRC. And her life of freedom would be over. Her cover blown, she could not return to the West. She would be given some drab bureaucratic job, and there would be no more decadent painting. So she made up stories, said she was having difficulty persuading him, she needed more time, more space. Besides, their trail was still too hot. She urged patience.

“Then I turned up again,” Neal prompted.

She nodded. “You were telling everyone where we were.”

So she had to stop him. He was bringing the world down around them. Her bosses were getting nervous, White Tiger might pick up the trail, the CIA was surely sniffing around. He was putting them in great danger. Himself as well: Her bosses wanted to have him killed. So she had to stop him, had to meet with him to persuade him to stop this crazy search.

“That’s when you called me to set up the meeting at Victoria Peak. But you still weren’t exactly sure who I was, so you brought backup along, just in case,” said Neal.

“Her people insisted,” Pendleton said. “These 14K goons trailed along. And it was a good thing they did.”

Because she spotted Ben Chin, whom she mistook for his cousin. Not that it made any difference, he was still a White Tiger Triad member assigned to kill them. She thought that she had made a terrible mistake, that Neal was not a private detective or a government agent, but a White Tiger hireling paid to set them up. She ran him right into the ambush, the ambush that Ben Chin was too smart to fall into. He went right for his target, but couldn’t catch them in a spot where he could gun them down and hope to get away. They shook him off and came back to their hideout, the obscure YMCA.

“And now you have come again,” Lan said. “But alone.”

Not quite, Lan. But he skipped that part for the moment, and told them about Friends of the Family, about his assignment, about being duped by the Chins. He told them about Simms’s rescue, about the debriefing, and about the deal that Simms would offer if he had the chance.