The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [65]
“Then I turned up again,” Neal prompted.
She nodded. “You were telling everyone where we were.”
So she had to stop him. He was bringing the world down around them. Her bosses were getting nervous, White Tiger might pick up the trail, the CIA was surely sniffing around. He was putting them in great danger. Himself as well: Her bosses wanted to have him killed. So she had to stop him, had to meet with him to persuade him to stop this crazy search.
“That’s when you called me to set up the meeting at Victoria Peak. But you still weren’t exactly sure who I was, so you brought backup along, just in case,” said Neal.
“Her people insisted,” Pendleton said. “These 14K goons trailed along. And it was a good thing they did.”
Because she spotted Ben Chin, whom she mistook for his cousin. Not that it made any difference, he was still a White Tiger Triad member assigned to kill them. She thought that she had made a terrible mistake, that Neal was not a private detective or a government agent, but a White Tiger hireling paid to set them up. She ran him right into the ambush, the ambush that Ben Chin was too smart to fall into. He went right for his target, but couldn’t catch them in a spot where he could gun them down and hope to get away. They shook him off and came back to their hideout, the obscure YMCA.
“And now you have come again,” Lan said. “But alone.”
Not quite, Lan. But he skipped that part for the moment, and told them about Friends of the Family, about his assignment, about being duped by the Chins. He told them about Simms’s rescue, about the debriefing, and about the deal that Simms would offer if he had the chance.
“I don’t know,” Pendleton said. “Can we trust them?”
“It’s not a matter of trust. You have something they want.”
“Li Lan, you mean.”
“There’s a wicked kind of symmetry in this situation. You can go to China, where she turns you over, or back to the States, where you turn her. The issue is simple. Which is better? You go to China, you’re a prisoner for life and so is she. You go back to the States, she’s a prisoner for a while and you’re a free man. They’ll even let you stay together, as long as you’re a good boy.”
“What’s in it for you?”
Good question, Doc. What is in it for me? I lose Li Lan, but then again, I never had her. And maybe if I bring you back, the powers that be will let me come back too, back to my comfortable cell. Maybe that’s the best you can expect in this world, a comfortable cell.
So he explained his deal to them. If he could bring them in, he could go back to school, back to his own research.
“We can have it all,” he said. “You can play with your test tubes, you can paint, I can muck around with eighteenth-century literature. It’s what I’d call a happy ending.”
“Except Li has to betray her country,” Pendleton said, although it was more like a question.
She stared at the floor. “It is not a country. It is a prison.”
“What about family?” Neal asked.
“Dead.”
He wanted to hold her. Throw his arms around her and tell her that it was all right, that there were all kinds of families and that she had found herself a new one. She looked tired and hurt and played out.
“Shall I make the call?” he asked.
Pendleton looked at Lan. It was her decision to make.
“Please,” she said.
Neal picked up the phone and dialed the number Simms had given him. It took a couple of minutes to clear for Simms to come to the phone.
“Did you forget something?” asked Simms.
“Your order’s ready. You want to pick it up or you want me to deliver?”
“Jesus H. Christ. Where are you?”
“A YMCA on Waterloo, near Nathan Road.”
“Stay put! I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Hurry up.”
Simms’s voice took on an edge.