A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [118]
A maid rapped on the door.
“Not now,” Stratton mumbled.
He had to get up. Move. Open your eyes.
The room was bright. The clock on the bedstand said eight o’clock.
“Jesus Christ.” He had spent a full day in bed.
He made a wobbly journey to the shower. He found a crimson dot on his leg, still tender from the hypodermic injection. He stood under the hot water for twenty minutes, letting his blood wake up.
Sorting out the reality from the nightmare wasn’t easy. Just where did Linda Greer fit in now? She had zapped him with something—elephant tranquilizer, it felt like. Why? And where was she?
On her own, that’s where. No Langley, no Peking. Wang Bin had become a personal project, but why? And how personal?
Stratton was angry, restless and, above all, baffled. She had let them get away. For whatever reason, that’s what she had done. It was one truth that had survived the horrible night.
Stratton toweled off and pulled on a pair of jeans. He called room service and ordered a big stack of pancakes, three eggs and a pitcher of black coffee.
His options were dismal. He could run to the State Department and lay it all out. Someone very polite would call China, and someone in Peking would reply—very tersely—that the body found in the Ming reservoir was positively Deputy Minister Wang Bin; that no clay soldiers were missing from the Xian excavation; that no visa had ever been issued to an American named Harold Broom. That’s what the Chinese would say—because they had to. They would admit nothing, because they could never permit themselves to be seen as fools.
And that would be it.
A better option would be confiding in old friends at the CIA. But what proof could Stratton offer? Vandalized grave plots? Hardly a red-hot trail.
It all came back to Linda. Was she in league with Broom and Wang Bin? Or was she trying for that solo coup that would edify her career—bringing the old Chinese bastard in from the cold? He remembered their dinner talk in Peking. Yes, that was probably it.
Either way, the lady had guts. Wang Bin was a killer, not easily induced, coerced or charmed. With some defectors it was easy. Bring them in gently. Pay them. Pump them. Pay them some more. A new name, a new passport, off you go.
Linda was wrong if she imagined it would be that simple with the deputy minister. He was the ultimate pragmatist.
Maybe she knew that. Maybe she was way ahead of him. I’m the one who’s fresh out of clues, Stratton thought ruefully.
He wolfed down his breakfast and went downstairs. He bought a copy of the Post in the lobby and walked out into the sticky heat to think. There was an empty bench on the mall near the Smithsonian, and Stratton sat down. Hearty joggers and lean cyclists flew by him, a reminder that he did not yet have his strength back. The sidewalks swarmed with foreign tourists who seemed to walk twice as fast as everyone else.
Stratton imagined himself back in Tiananmen Square, where the order and propriety that ruled Chinese history seemed also to govern those who came to celebrate it. Here in Washington, among the functional granite monuments to democracy, there was a holiday festiveness; in China, among the wildly extravagant temples, sobriety.
To Stratton’s eye, it was not merely a culture gap, but a canyon. Chinese tourists traveled thousands of miles just to stand where the emperor’s scholars had once gathered in the Hall of Supreme Harmony. In Washington, people lined up for blocks to watch the Treasury print money. Talk about awe.
If Americans seemed transparent, the Chinese mind was opaque. For Stratton this had become tragically obvious, first at Man-ling—a fatal grant of trust to a young boy—and now, with humiliating emphasis, at Arlington.
Stratton would never forget Wang Bin’s face as Stratton had aimed the gun. Such magnificent defiance. Stratton would have liked him to have begged for his life, but he would have settled for one tear from the steely bastard. A tear for his own brother.
Yet all that had shone in the deputy minister’s eyes had been an iron, immutable