The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [64]
“We were developing it for sale to Taiwan.”
“Why does Taiwan want an herbicide that kills the poppy?”
“Because heroin is power. Because they want to control the warlords of northern Thailand, Laos, and Burma. The border countries. And they sure as hell don’t want the PRC to have it, because the PRC would use it. Heroin is one of Taiwan’s biggest businesses. They’re scared shitless of the PRC getting that kind of hammer over them.”
So it was the Taiwanese, using their White Tiger subcontractors, who had taken a whack at what they thought was Pendleton in the Marin County hot tub. The Taiwanese want him croaked, the CIA want him alive, and they’re both using me to nail him. But what does Pendleton want?
“And you’re planning to take your product to the PRC?”
“I’m planning to go with Lan.”
Lan appeared in the doorway. She had put on a pair of blue jeans, a black pullover jersey, and sandals.
“She doesn’t love you,” Neal said. “Don’t you know that? She’s a Chinese spy. They sent her to sleep with you. It was in her job description.”
“I know all that. She told me.”
“Can we get out of the bathroom?” Neal asked. “It’s starting to feel like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.”
Lan and Pendleton sat on the bed, which seemed appropriate enough to Neal, and he sat down in the old overstuffed wingback in the corner, by the window.
“So it’s true love, right?”
Right. They told him the story, sharing the narrative like newlyweds telling a stranger how they met. She was a spy of sorts. It was her ticket out, the price for a life of relative freedom in Hong Kong and America. She really was a painter, and that was her cover in the States. Her handlers approved because it gave her access to culture, which in the States meant money, which meant power. She made it a point to attend all the cocktail parties, all the receptions, all the corporate bashes. Usually her bosses required nothing more than simple reports on who was who, who was doing what, and who might be sympathetic toward a struggling nation of communist reformers.
Then Pendleton’s conference had come along. She’d picked him up in an expensive restaurant—charmed him, flattered him with the simple gift of attention. She’d led him into leading her to bed, taught him the things that her trainers had taught her, talked to him, listened to him.
In the morning she reported back, in the afternoon received her orders, and that night went back to his bed. She took him to the clouds and the rain, and then lay still in his arms as he told her about his life, his work, his secret dreams. They went on a long, early-morning walk in Chinatown, watched the old ones do t‘ai chi, shopped in the markets, went for dim-sum and tea, and then back to bed. She had to go to Mill Valley for her show, and he visited her there and met her friends, and went there every day.
Then he came: the White Tiger soldier, Mark Chin. Their escape was narrow, they needed somewhere to hide, and Li Lan talked to her good friend Olivia Kendall. In the quiet of the Kendall house, Lan and Pendleton talked for hours, told each other the heretofore covert parts of their lives, wondered what to do. Pendleton knew that AgriTech would come looking for him, maybe send a Company errand boy to fetch him, and sure enough, Neal had turned up. They weren’t sure whether he was CIA or a rent-a-cop hired by AgriTech, but they had to get free of him. Along with dinner, they cooked up a plan to give him the slip: get him drunk, get him unclothed in the hot tub, and give him a good reason to sit there and wait for Li Lan to come back. Only, of course, Li Lan wasn’t coming back. They were going to run to Hong Kong, where she would play along with her bosses and their 14K allies to hide long enough to figure out what to do. She was as surprised as Neal when the shot whooshed through the air. Scared, she had run all the faster, and they’d caught the next flight to Hong Kong.
According to plan, she should have just turned him over to her handlers, but she hedged. They were in love, truly in love, and