The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [63]
She was staring at him. Just staring, and it was making him mad.
“What was that all about back in California? The little striptease that ended with a bang? That’s a lousy way to set somebody up, and why set me up anyway? Why did you think you had to kill me?”
She kept on staring. He tried to look back into her eyes and ignore the fact that the T-shirt was all she was wearing.
“Goddamn it, I deserve an answer!”
“I didn’t try to kill you. Someone was trying to kill Robert.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I only wanted to make sure you would stay there, in the hot tub, while we had a chance to escape. Then I heard the shot … I became afraid … I ran away.”
“You thought I was dead.”
“Yes, until you began leaving those messages everywhere. I was happy you were alive, but I wanted to warn you of the very big danger. So I wanted to have a meeting with you, but you came with that man.”
“What man?”
“The man who was hunting us in California. The very big Chinese man.”
“I came with a Hong Kong man.”
“No. I saw him at hotel in San Francisco.”
“Mark Chin?”
“I do not know his name.”
Mark Chin and Ben Chin, who looked so much alike … she thought Ben was Mark, figured she’d been tricked, and called out the troops.
“Are you with CIA?” she asked.
“No, I’m a private cop.”
“I do not understand.”
Neither do I. “Did you think I had come to the Peak to kill you? To set you up?”
She nodded.
“Do you think that’s why I’m here now?”
She nodded again.
“Because you think I’m CIA?”
“No.”
“Who, then?”
“White Tiger.”
White Tiger? What the hell is a White Tiger?
White Tiger, she told him, was one of the most powerful of the Hong Kong Triads. It had been shattered during a government crackdown in the early Seventies, and its leaders had fled to Taiwan, where they found a warm welcome in the form of shelter, money, and sage leadership. Reorganized and refinanced, White Tiger reinfiltrated Hong Kong and recolonized outposts in New York, London, Amsterdam, and San Francisco. It was involved in the usual gang enterprises of loansharking, drug dealing, prostitution, and extortion, but it also took out subcontracts from the Taiwanese secret service for surveillance jobs, kidnappings, and hits. Its primary role in Hong Kong was to serve as a counterbalance to the procommunist Triads, such as the 14K.
“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