Don Winslow - The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

And the beauty of his own plan, to put that fear into Xao’s head. Manipulate him into sending Carey out as a test, and find that the test would turn into the real thing. And Xao had fallen-no, not fallen, leaped into the trap.

“Yes,” Xao said. “Send Carey down to Dwaizhou-”

“Is China Doll there?” Peng tried to keep the eagerness from his tone, and prayed that Xao hadn’t noticed the trembling in his voice.

“Yes.”

“Is Pendleton with her?”

Xao took a long time to light his damned cigarette.

“No,” he finally said. “Do you think I would put them in the same place until we know that it is safe?”

Peng bowed his head. “You are always the wiser.”

“So take Carey to Dwaizhou. If he sees her, observe how he reacts. If the police swoop in, we have lost China Doll and we shall have to keep the Pendleton hidden longer than we had hoped.”

“Surely China Doll would talk.”

“She would never talk.”

In my hands, Peng thought, she will talk.

“And Carey?”

“I would then rely on you to see he does not get the opportunity to tell what he knows.”

“And what if he sees her and keeps quiet?”

“Then we will know it is safe. You then take him on more touring to confuse the issue and send him home. End the howling of his American friends.”

“And if he doesn’t see her?”

“Then it doesn’t matter.”

So the conversation had gone precisely as Peng had wished, and he had been in such a fine mood until he found Carey and Wu, inebriated and still drinking on the hotel terrace. The rudeness of the American bastard, the foolishness of Wu, to be running around outside the prescribed schedule! What if Carey had spotted the other American? What then?

Xao wasn’t furious, but he was sad. The plan would work, of course, his plans always worked, but now he would have to put in effect the operation he had so hoped wouldn’t be necessary. He had hoped to do this all without more loss of life, and now there would have to be a sacrifice.

Because of poor, stupid, disloyal Peng. It would be different if Peng had betrayed him out of political conviction, but that was not the case. Peng was merely treacherous and ambitious, with the poisonous jealousy of small minds. He had set his paltry trap, just as Xao wanted, but the trap would need bait, and Xao saw no way for the bait to survive the springing of the trap.

Neal drank two of the beers in the bathtub and sipped on the last one while he packed Mr. Frazier’s country clothes. His big night out on the town was over, and in the morning they were going to haul him down to some bucolic commune and show him around. Or show him off. So what was on the farm? What’s on any farm? Farmers, of course, pigs, cows, chickens, manure… crops… fertilizer…

Fertilizer? Super chickenshit? Pendleton? Li Lan?

He worked on the beer and Roderick Random for another hour before falling asleep.

His breakfast arrived shortly before dawn, so whatever they were going to do with him, they were in a hurry to get started.

The coffee went right to his head, grabbed his hangover, and slapped it around a little. The throbbing stopped, and there was enough Catholic in him to feel better for having endured this act of penance. It’s hard to tell which an Irishman enjoys more, he mused, the high or the hangover.

Wu looked green around the edges when he came through the door, and his smile was somewhat constrained. He was decked out for the country in a white short-sleeved shirt and brown cotton trousers, although he was still wearing the stiff black leather business shoes. He carried a blue nylon windbreaker and a bright yellow nylon tube bag.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Some night.”

“Oh, yes.”

“You want some eggs?”

Wu made a face of horrified disgust.

“Coffee?”

“I’ll try some. But we must hurry.”

They hurried, and were down in the car in ten minutes. Neal was surprised to see Peng in the backseat. Wu got in front with the driver.

“Do you own a car?” Peng asked Neal, apparently as a form of greeting.

“No.”

“I thought all Americans owned their own cars.”

“And I thought all Chinese played Ping-Pong. Do you play Ping-Pong?”

“I am quite good at it.”

“Well, I am quite bad at driving.”

“You joke.”

“Okay, let me take the wheel.”

The driver put it in gear and pulled out of the parking lot before Peng could take Neal up on it. He eased onto South Renmin Road and headed south. The route took them through some industrial suburbs, past the airport, and quickly into the countryside.

“How long a drive do we have?” Neal asked.

“Perhaps three hours,” Wu answered automatically before looking deferentially at Peng.

“Three hours,” Peng said.

“Three hours it is,” Neal said. “Who brought the cards?”

“Perhaps,” said Peng, “you would do better to learn from the peasants than waste your time in decadent bourgeois pastimes.”

Man, you have some vocabulary for a guy who didn’t speak English just a day ago. And don’t call me bourgeois. Where I grew up, the bourgeoisie was anybody less than two months behind on the rent.

“Sure. What would you like me to learn?”

“What it means to labor for your food.”

You never worked for Joe Graham, pal.

“Do you know, Mr. Peng, what it means to labor for your food?”

“Both my parents were peasants. And yours?”

Wu jumped in. “Have you noticed the mulberry trees, Mr. Frazier? The silkworms feed-”

“I suppose your parents were intellectuals,” Peng said, pronouncing intellectuals as if the word had a bad smell.

“Sure. My mother graduated Summa Cum Stoned from Needle U., and my old man was an overnight success.”

“You are very rude, Mr. Carey.”

“Frazier. The name is Frazier.”

Peng hit him with one of those laser looks, the kind meant to burn right through you. Neal was discovering that people in China were either very calm or very angry, without a lot of middle range. He intended to push Mr. Peng into the very-angry zone. Very angry people make very stupid mistakes.

“Thank you for correcting me,” Peng said, “Mr. Frazier.”

“Don’t mention it. I just don’t want to get fucked up again by someone being careless.”

Wu started to do little hops in the front seat. He was trying to think of something to say to change the subject, but nothing very clever was coming to him.

“Pretty country,” Neal said as he turned his back on Peng and looked out the window.

The terrain was flat for a mile or so on each side of the narrow road. Low dikes, with tall, spindly mulberry trees, divided rice paddies into neat geometric patterns. In the background a range of hills rose from the plain. Their neat rows of terraces made them look almost like Central American pyramids overgrown with vegetation.

“Tea,” Wu explained. “Some of the very best tea in the world comes from the hills. Have you heard of Oolong tea?”

“I think so.”

“It is grown there.”

“Is that some of the stuff we used to trade you dope for?”

Neal watched Peng squirm a little.

“‘Dope’?” Wu asked.

“Opium.”

“Ah, yes.”

“You guys had quite a little jones-addiction-going there, didn’t you?”

Peng stared straight ahead as he said, “The problem of opium addiction-created by foreign imperialists-has been eradicated in the People’s Republic of China.”

“Yeah, well, if you just shoot them instead of shooting them up. ..”

“We treated them in much the same manner as we treated you after you had acquired the disease of addiction in the capitalist enclave of Hong Kong.”