Dean Koontz - Dragonfly

Chai was sitting in one of these circles, finishing his breakfast, when the commune director brought him a large envelope. “For you, Comrade.” The director was a short, squat man with an enormous chest and thick biceps. He never smiled. Now he seemed to be frowning more deeply than he usually did.

Chai took the envelope. “What is it?”

“You are being transferred from Ssunan,” the director said.

Chai quickly opened the envelope.

K'ang Chiu-yeh, Chai's closest friend at the commune, stopped eating. He set his bowls aside on the earth and came up onto his knees. He shuffled closer to Chai and said, “Transferred to where, my friend?”

“Back to Peking,” Chai said.

“How wonderful!”

Chai said nothing.

“But you should rejoice!” K'ang said. “And instead, you look at me as if you've just found weevils in your rice.” He laughed. Unlike the director, K'ang had a marvelous smile and used it often.

Five months ago it would have been the most wonderful news that Chai could have received. But not now. He said as much.

“But that makes no sense,” K'ang said. “Certainly, it would have been better if it had come five months ago. But it is no less a good thing for having come late.”

Chai looked at his friend and felt a great sadness well up in him. K'ang had been a medical student at Shanghai University before his name had appeared on a list of thirty-seven thousand young people who were to leave Shanghai in order to serve the proletariat and the Maoist cause in the Fifty-Year Farm Program. K'ang was not going home; he would not leave Ssunan for years and perhaps not ever. K'ang did not have a powerful father; therefore, his duty would remain with the Fifty-Year Farm Program.

“What is the matter?” K'ang asked him.

Chai said nothing.

K'ang shook him by the shoulder.

Chai thought of the thousands of displaced young men and women who were in no better position than K'ang. Tens of thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands… Now, instead of laughing aloud at his transfer as he would have done five months ago, Chai Po-han began to weep.

He was going home.

The International Date Line made it all very complicated. In order to minimize the effects of ordinary jet lag compounded by the radical change of clock-calendar time, David Canning allowed himself only five hours of sleep in Honolulu, rose at six in the morning, had an early breakfast, and read a paperback novel until it was time for him to go to the airport. His flight for Tokyo departed shortly after noon. Aboard the plane, he ate a light lunch and drank two martinis. Then he settled back for a nap, and because he had not allowed himself a full night's sleep in Honolulu, dozed off almost as soon as he closed his eyes. He was asleep when the jet crossed the International Date Line, switching instantly from Thursday to Friday. After nearly a five-hour nap he woke forty minutes out of Tokyo and had a third martini while the aircraft worked into its landing approach. They touched down in Japan at two o'clock Friday afternoon, which was seven o'clock Thursday evening in Hawaii and midnight Thursday-Friday in Washington, D.C.

Just after he had passed through customs, with the aid of his State Department credentials, Canning saw the first Committee agent. Any Westerner would have found it impossible to run a surveillance on Canning in this airport without his noticing it. In the predominantly Asian crowd, the man's pallor and height made him as obvious as a dead fly atop an uncut wedding cake. He was standing near the boards that listed the departures and arrivals, and he stared openly at Canning.

Canning stared back at him and nodded.

The agent looked through him.

Smiling grimly, Canning walked out into the crowded main hall of the terminal. He sensed rather than felt the man fall into step behind him, and he walked with his shoulders tensed.

But there would be no killing here — and for the same reason that they could not possibly run a secret surveillance of him. The killers were tall and white, and they could not count on anonymity to help them escape through the hundreds of incoming and outgoing passengers. Furthermore, the Japanese were generally not as apathetic about crime as were most Americans. They admired tradition, stability, order, and law. Some of them would surely give chase to anyone who tried to commit murder in a public air terminal. And although the Japanese police — stationed throughout the building — relied for the most part on the sort of nonviolent techniques of the British bobbies, they were capable of swift and terrible action when it was necessary. The Committeemen, therefore, would merely follow him to be certain that he went to the Imperial Hotel, where, having had his real and cover names for more than twenty-four hours, they would surely have traced his Otley reservation. Then, at the hotel, in the comparative privacy of a corridor or an elevator, or perhaps in his own room, they would make a hit.

Or try.

He wouldn't be an easy target.

Outside the terminal, there were more people than cabs at the taxi line. Most of them were Westerners who had too much luggage or not enough self-confidence to use the city's bus system. Canning walked to the back of the line, stepped off the curb, and put down his suitcases. He held up three fingers and waved them prominently at the taxis that were just turning into the approach lane: this was a sign that told the drivers he would pay three times the meter price, and it was often the only way to get a cab in Tokyo, where the drivers worked as much as sixteen hours a day for quite modest wages. He got a taxi at once, much to the consternation of the people who had been waiting there some time before he arrived.

“ Konnichiwa,” the driver said, smiling at him as he climbed into the taxi.

“ Konnichiwa,” Canning said, smiling back at him. The automatic cab door closed and locked behind him. He asked the driver to take him to the Imperial Hotel.

The Committee agent also knew the three-fingered trick. His taxi followed immediately behind Canning's cab.

The driver spoke no English, and Canning spoke only a few words of Japanese; therefore, the ride into the city was silent, and he had nothing to do but take in the scenery — what there was of it. On both sides of the road there were shabby houses, unpainted warehouses, gray factories, gasoline stations, and power lines. There were no cherry trees, landscaped gardens, or flower-encircled temples as seen in all popular illustrations of the Orient.

The tourist guidebooks did not lie; there was great beauty in Tokyo, but it existed in pockets, like oases in the desert of urban sprawl. This was possibly the only city in the world where great mansions could flourish with shacks on both sides of them. The imperturbable Japanese, so quick to smile and so eager to help strangers, had somehow managed to transform the planet's most crowded and polluted metropolis into one of the most pleasant capitals in the world. The Tokyo Tower came into view, a monstrous blot on the skyline, taller than the Eiffel Tower which had inspired it, yet just incongruous enough to be charming. Then they entered the narrow, unbelievably congested streets of the central city area that made the busy avenues of midtown Manhattan seem like quiet country lanes. As usual, the pollution index was high: the gray-yellow sky hung so low that it looked like a roof spanning the boxlike high-rise buildings. At first Canning had a vague but quite discomforting feeling of suffocation; however, that soon turned into a not unpleasant sense of hivelike protection. Then they breezed along Hibiya Park, weaved wildly from lane to lane, and stopped with a squeal of brakes directly in front of the magnificent Imperial Hotel.