Will Staeger - Painkiller

Accordingly, Deng decided to reach out to a few supposed ideological comrades around the Orient. He never took a meeting directly; he used Li and, later, a Caucasian associate as his front men. Once the operation was moving forward and the Trident missiles were found intact, he extended his recruiting effort beyond the Pacific Rim. If there weren’t such a stark prerequisite of secrecy, he would have welcomed every would-be revolutionary into his gala scheme, but instead settled on a dozen organizations, most of them nation-states, all with declared communist or socialist intentions, all totalitarian in their management style. He instructed his middlemen to speak grandly of the New World Order, a revolutionary brotherhood that would return the leadership of the world to its people. The working people. To each according to his needs.

Sending his front men to hold secret, face-to-face meetings, he would have them pose a single question. Imagine, his script went, if we could guarantee you that the military superpower now standing guard against your imperialist intentions would be rendered impotent, immobile, and blind. That, say, if you were to march your army straight down into South Korea and annex that country into yours, and in the process receive no resistance whatever from that superpower-what, Deng’s men asked, would that be worth?

Early on, Deng asked for comparatively minuscule membership fees-sixty million a pop, divided into semiannual payments-and provided comparatively vague promises. He also discovered a flaw in his scheme and scrambled to correct the error: anybody who heard this question and happened to decline to enroll in the brotherhood presented an immediate problem, even with the buffer of the middlemen. Fortunately for Deng, though, the three leaders who rejected his vision died soon after the rejection: one in an airline crash, one in a hit-and-run automobile accident, and another who’d managed to drown while swimming alone in a private pool that lacked a deep end.

Finally, just under four years ago-or about the time Julie Laramie was signing the requisite thirty-month commitment letter making her a trainee of the Central Intelligence Agency-Deng asked Admiral Li and the Caucasian to convene his revolutionary brethren inside of a bank vault in Zurich, where they were told that the yet-to-be-identified visionary behind the operation would, in fact, make good on his promise.

They were told they could now take the final preparatory steps to prepare for their military operations. They were told that their investment would now, imminently, yield the sought-after freedom from the evil capitalist superpower they despised-the freedom promised in those very first meetings. Deng also had his middlemen tell the brethren they should gather a few hundred million dollars so that they could afford the final installment of their membership dues.

After an additional year of delays brought on by a Caribbean hurricane-and about the time Laramie spotted the first invasion simulation-Deng sent the official invoice for one final, whopping payment from each member of the revolutionary brotherhood, graciously extending an invitation along with the invoice. What Deng offered as bait to warrant delivery of the final payment was an opportunity for each investor to witness history in the making: the members of the revolutionary brotherhood would be invited to observe, firsthand, the facility the investments had enabled their mentor to construct.

Upon deposit of their invoiced payment, Deng would bring his league of revolutionary leaders to see the launch headquarters for the project he had not yet named in correspondence with the brotherhood, but had privately come to call Operation Blunt Fist.

The customary flourish of an appearance by General Deng Jiang was dampened by the logistics of Mango Cay’s lagoon: to get from the pontoon of the seaplane to the dry sand of the beach required a calf-deep, three-step wade through the Caribbean. Deng, who had been here before, had come prepared: he’d removed his shoes and socks and rolled up his khakis to the knee while still inside the float plane. Ill-prepared by comparison, PLN Rear Admiral Li Zhu strode into the water in his tennis shoes and jeans. Li, at least, unlike Deng, had dressed in the assigned disguise-Levi’s jeans, Nike T-shirt, Reebok sneakers. He looked as American as a man like Li was capable of looking.

Deng and Li were met on the beach by the island’s security director, a grotesquely muscle-bound man with oily black hair and perhaps the thinnest neck ever seen on a man of his bulk. With dark bags under his eyes, whitehead zits spread across his forehead, and an upper body befitting a winner of the World’s Strongest Man competition, he represented a rare dichotomy of both sickly, blemished weakness, and near-ideal physical health. There was no one on earth who resembled this man.

His name was Spike Gibson.

Gibson gave General Deng a halfhearted bow.

“Lou bahn,” he said, Mandarin for boss.

Deng nodded at his middleman and kept walking, barefoot in the sand. “You have taken care of our guests, I gather,” he said.

“Eleven strong, most of them relaxing in the cabanas. The first six came in last night, the other five an hour ago.” The oddly disproportionate muscles in Gibson’s chest were nearly splitting the fabric of the tropical print shirt he wore, but when he spoke, his neck stretched even thinner than its normal, scrawny state.

Deng looked sternly about the resort.

“I don’t see any of them utilizing the facilities,” he said. “This is not what I ordered.”

Two steps behind, Li peered past Deng to take in the pool, the bar, the racks stacked full of plush towels, the rows of portable lounge chairs, the cabanas, the bartender, the maid. The sun was oppressively hot; Deng and Li had each already begun to sweat.

“Our guests are a little shy, General,” Spike Gibson said, telling a bald-faced lie. “Most of them are staying inside-looking to keep cool.” In fact Spike Gibson had instructed the men they were not allowed on the beach for longer than five minutes at a time.

Deng grunted. “Tell them that while they’re here, the point is to appear that they are vacationing. Tell them I expect all of them to take full advantage of the resort and all its amenities.”

Gibson said, “Of course, Comrade General. As you want it.”

“And your other projects?”

Gibson returned Deng’s gaze without speaking.

Deng didn’t budge. Gibson shrugged.

“All is well,” Gibson said.

Deng turned and walked onto the poolside tile, Admiral Li in tow. Gibson summoned the maid, asking that she show the leaders to their rooms.

Passing Gibson, Li caught the security director’s eyes and kept hold of them as he crossed the poolside patio. Just before turning the corner, he bowed officiously, the act meant to emphasize that Li was the honored guest, and Gibson, his subservient host. Gibson jerked his chin at Li-a bow in Gibson’s language-and watched as he walked away, Li’s wet tennis shoes squeaking on the tile as he went.

Deciding he needed a break from the stakeout routine, Cooper took a drive to the bar where it might have appeared, to the untrained eye, that the albino’s dark-skinned girlfriend was working as a cocktail waitress. He parked the Taurus around the corner from the place around six-forty-five, which gave him a good two hours before Jim came to collect his woman for another night of rapture.

The minute he came through the door, Cooper, private-eye-for-the-dead, confirmed the obvious: the girl was working there, all right, but not as a cocktail waitress. The only legitimate employee in the place was the bartender. He stood behind the bar, facing a pair of rummies, who sat on two of the pub’s four stools. The joint was a dump-a couple of naked bulbs dangling above the bar, some reggae playing on a boom box behind it, a handful of seats and tables in the narrow corridor between the bar and the opposing wall.