American Traitor Page 2

  Amena now sported her own grin, knowing I was going to have my ass handed to me. I turned around and saw Jennifer on the stoop of our Charleston single with a suitcase, looking like she wanted to gut me.

  I said, “Hey, wait a minute. You didn’t see what she did earlier. I was just acting like a front line on the court . . . She asked me to do it.”

  With a pious look, Amena said, “It’s hard practicing with him. He is very mean.”

  My mouth fell open and Amena broke into a smile, chasing after the ball. She came back, stood next to me, and gave me a small hip bump, both of us looking at Jennifer, waiting on the pain. Jennifer shook her head and said, “I can’t deal with two children. One is enough. Help me with the suitcase.”

  Amena lost her smile and said, “Why can’t I come with you guys? If it’s not a honeymoon?”

  Digging into her purse for her car keys, Jennifer looked up in surprise and said, “Honeymoon? Who said that?”

  She looked at me and I pointed to Amena, then picked up the suitcase, hustling to get out of the blast radius.

  Jennifer said, “Amena, go inside and make sure you’ve got everything you need. You won’t be able to come back here until we return in a couple of weeks.”

  Amena scowled, but unlike she would do with me, she listened to Jennifer and went back inside.

  Jennifer came over to me and said, “What was that about?”

  Cramming the last suitcase into the back of her little Mini Cooper, juggling the other bags, I said, “I’m getting that Jeep I saw online yesterday. I don’t care how much they’re charging. This is a clown car.”

  My ancient Jeep CJ-7 had been destroyed almost a year ago, and we still hadn’t replaced it because I was a picky shopper and hadn’t found one I liked, forcing both of us to use her little midget vehicle. But my attempt to deflect the question fell on deaf ears.

  She repeated, “What’s Amena talking about?”

  I sighed, closed the hatchback, and said, “She thinks she can’t go because I’m taking you on a honeymoon. That’s it. She came up with it all on her own.”

  Jennifer snorted. “We’re not having a honeymoon until we have a real wedding. You can’t weasel out of that by taking me to Australia and then calling it a honeymoon after the fact.”

  I raised my hands and said, “That’s not from me. That’s from her. I didn’t say a word. You know the only reason we’re going is to get her settled at school. That’s it.”

  Amena came out carrying a small satchel and Jennifer squinted at me. I lowered my voice and said, “Enough talk about why we’re going.”

  Jennifer whispered, “If you think going to Australia and hanging out with some old Taskforce guys is my idea of a honeymoon, you’ve got another thing coming.”

  I grinned and said, “Hey, he’s giving us a free place to stay. We’re diving the reef. That was your idea.”

  Amena came up and asked, “So? Is it a honeymoon?”

  Jennifer looked at me and I said, “No, it’s not. We can’t have that until after a proper ceremony.”

  “What’s a proper ceremony? You guys go to Australia and I’ll never see you again.”

  Jennifer laughed. “That’s not going to happen.”

  I said, “What are you talking about? We’ll be back in two weeks.”

  She became earnest. “Trouble follows you. It always has. You’re going to get in trouble. And I’ll be left alone.”

  I knelt down and said, “That’s not going to happen, doodlebug. It’s not.”

  She took my hands and said, “You promise?”

  “I do. It’s just a vacation. That’s all.”

  She looked into my eyes and said, “Until the bad man shows up.”

  And I knew what she was telling me. She’d seen the bad man more than once, and was convinced it was the natural way of things. The bad man just always showed up.

  I said, “Don’t worry about that. You’re in the United States. The bad man is gone.”

  I saw her eyes tear up and she said, “The bad man is always there. Even here. Don’t leave me to him.”

  It broke my heart. I hugged her and said, “Hey, come on. There is nobody out to get you here. You’re going to be in good hands. It’s what you wanted.”

  She broke my embrace, looked into my eyes, and asked, “If the bad man finds you on vacation, you’ll kill him, right? Come back to me?”

  That took me aback. What kid thinks her parents are going to be attacked on vacation, and then wishes that the parents would kill the attackers? For the first time I realized that this was more than just a foster-parent relationship. We were never going to have a normal family, because we most decidedly weren’t normal, as much as we wanted to be. She’d seen me operate—had seen me kill—but because of her love for me, she couldn’t get it around her head that I was, in fact, worse than the evil she’d encountered. There was nothing on earth that would keep me from protecting her.

  I looked at Jennifer and saw a tear in her eye. I hugged Amena and leaned into her ear, whispering, “I am the bad man. Remember that.”

  Chapter 3

  Yu-Feng “Paul” Kao didn’t consider himself a bad man. When he looked in the mirror, he didn’t see a trace of evil, but he was doing something bad now. And he knew it.

  As an officer in the National Security Bureau of Taiwan—a combination of the United States’ FBI and CIA—he had a duty to protect Taiwan. And sometimes that duty led to doing unpleasant things.

  Tall and lithe, he had a shock of jet-black hair and an angular face full of sharp contours. His visage looked as if it were perpetually at stage three of a four-stage sketch, the drawing taken away before the artist was allowed to smooth over the rough edges.

  He pulled into the tourist parking lot at the Shifen Falls, about an hour east of his headquarters in Taipei, dodging the engorged tour buses and the myriad of pedestrians wandering about like cattle. He found a spot away from the crowds and turned off the engine.

  He turned to his passenger and said, “You ready to go?”

  A young man with fear in his eyes, the person next to him said, “I guess so. What do I do if he attacks me?”

  “He won’t attack. He wants what you have. He wants to make some money. Just don’t forget your cover story. Whatever you do, use the name Feng Main. Don’t slip up and give him your true one. That’ll be a deal breaker.”

  The kid nodded, seeming unsure. Paul patted his arm and said, “It’ll be okay. Just don’t forget to turn on the recorder. Get what he has to say, give him the money, and keep acting like you’re a conduit from the PRC. He wants to believe. He wants the pipeline to continue. I’ll wait right here.”

  The kid looked up sharply and said, “You’ll wait here? Am I alone? Shouldn’t we have more cops here? More people to help? Once I’m in the park, I’ll be on my own.”

  “We already have people in there. If he tries anything, we’ll be all over him. But don’t force that. I need him to continue. I want to break open the entire network.”

  The kid nodded vaguely. Paul waited a moment, then leaned back and said, “What’s your name?”

  Hesitantly, the kid said, “Feng. My name is Feng Main.”

  “What do you do?”

  With more courage, he continued, “I’m a university student. I’m a student.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  Like a robot, devoid of fear, he said, “The People’s Republic of China. The Ministry of State Security.”

  “Good. Stick to the truth and it’ll be okay.”

  The kid opened the door, took one look back, and left, walking toward the bridge spanning the river by the Shifen Falls. Paul watched him go and prayed he’d make it back. Not just because of the case he was building, but because he honestly felt a little twinge of guilt for sending him in. There were no other operatives in the park. If something went wrong, the kid was on his own.

  Feng Main was, in fact, a university student. A stupidly naïve Taiwanese native who had been approached by the People’s Republic of China to foment insurrection inside Taiwan. The tradecraft had been sloppy and the payouts easy to find, so much so that it scared Paul. If the masters in Beijing from the Guoanbu—the Ministry of State Security—were this sloppy with Feng, it meant they just didn’t care what he did. Which meant he was an afterthought, and Paul was missing the real penetration.

  The PRC’s MSS intelligence service was the largest in the world by far. It had tentacles that reached throughout the globe, and a history of successfully hiding what it did because it blended traditional trained operatives with people from the Chinese diaspora. It was impossible to tell whether someone was a real Chinese agent or just some immigrant with ties to the homeland whom they’d co-opted. And the MSS was very good at its mission.

  Russia eliminating double agents with nuclear poison in London? Amateur stuff. North Korea killing the half brother of the leader with a nerve agent in Malaysia? Ridiculously overt. The MSS would never even have been mentioned. They were a controlled beast, without emotion, like a wall of water directed at a rock. They had no fear, no pity, and no sense of failure. Eventually, Paul knew, the rock would lose. His job was to turn off the water.

  After the unrest in Hong Kong and the explicit indications that the MSS had been operating inside the city since before the riots, Paul had been directed to ferret out Taiwan’s own hidden threat. In short order, he’d found Feng. And it hadn’t been hard. Which made him question what he was missing. Clearly, the MSS hadn’t put a lot of stock in the success of Feng. But they had recruited him to interface with the Bamboo Triad, and that would be enough to help.

  The Bamboo Triad was a criminal gang not unlike the Cosa Nostra, an organized crime ring solely concerned with profit, running everything from prostitution to drugs in Taiwan—with one exception: They also worked for the MSS to destabilize Taiwan.

  Paul watched the kid disappear on the path and felt a pang of guilt. Maybe the MSS had been sloppy for a reason. Maybe they were trying to ferret out his own security service’s reach. If that was the case, the kid was dead, but that alone would provide some help for Paul. He wouldn’t be able to penetrate whatever plan the Triad had in play, but at least Feng’s death would prove that the MSS had penetrated his own organization somehow.

  It would be a small consolation to Feng, but sometimes bad things had to happen to protect the nation.

  The kid reached the pedestrian bridge crossing the river and took one look back. Paul saw it, but ignored the fear spilling out. Feng disappeared, and Paul settled in to wait.

  He would be waiting a long time.

  Chapter 4

  Feng hesitantly walked across the footbridge, getting run over by kids and grandparents all marching to the falls. A light drizzle began to fall, coating him in a dusting of water. The other tourists began breaking out umbrellas, forcing him to dodge the spines. He slipped past one, hit another pedestrian with his back, apologized, and then was yelled at for stepping into a selfie picture attempt on the bridge. The encounters frazzled him.

  He continued walking in a daze, wondering how his life had gone so wrong. He wasn’t the only university student who had been approached by the PRC for help. They were brazen in their attempts, just as they were with the state-run television stations and every other aspect of Taiwanese life. The PRC was everywhere, and he still didn’t understand how he’d been picked up when everyone else was doing it, and none of it was harmful as far as he could tell. Just small things, really.

  He’d gotten money to spread stories accusing the incumbent government of corruption, or talking about how China had only helped Taiwan. Nothing but social media posts, and he was paid good money to do them. Then the PRC had asked him to do something more, and he’d agreed. More good money. It wasn’t like it affected anything in Taiwan. He still heard his parents and grandparents bitching about Beijing, so it wasn’t as if he were altering the balance of power, even with the presidential elections happening in January, three short months away.

  And then he’d been put in touch with a man called the Snow Leopard. A leader inside the infamous Bamboo Triad. A completely criminal organization that was continually tracked by the police for drugs, prostitution, extortion, you name it. Only now they’d formed a political party, giving them protection for their political actions under the constitution of Taiwan while also giving them cover as being “persecuted” for their “political” beliefs. Called the Chinese Unification Promotion Party, it took all its direction from Beijing, and was a small but growing presence inside Taiwan, with a stated goal of allowing the PRC to absorb Taiwan.

  Feng had put no thought into the Triad’s control of CUPP because, honestly, politics bored him. Unlike his parents, who had had to practice air-raid drills as children, or his grandparents, who were convinced that every day was their last, he’d grown up in a democracy. It was unfathomable to him that a giant country like China would do anything against his little island. Which is why he took the money. It was all harmless.

  Until it wasn’t.

  When Paul had first knocked on his door, a file of evidence on his misdeeds in hand, Feng’s heart had dropped to his stomach. He was no master spy, and he’d immediately admitted everything he’d done, professing it was harmless. All he’d wanted was a little money, and nothing he’d done was that bad. It wasn’t like he was selling state secrets. Just some social media stuff, which was allowed in Taiwan. What had he done that was criminal?

  And then he’d been shown the last exchange, where he’d actually transported money and dropped it off in a trash can. He’d protested, saying he had no idea where the money had come from or why he was delivering it. It was just another avenue for cash, and he’d done it. Paul had shown him how the money had ended up financing propaganda at a state-run television station, and Feng had become queasy, finally asking what Paul wanted him to do. He couldn’t bring shame on his family, and he most certainly couldn’t be outed as a Chinese spy. And now he was going to meet a member of the most brutal Triad on the island, ostensibly to get the man to commit to treason so Paul could rip the Triad apart.

  It was a far cry from posting a couple of social media posts.

  He reached the other side of the bridge, walked through the crowds surrounding various food stands. The rain began to pick up, but the children were still tromping about, riding metal horses and bench swings, running about through a mix of locals and foreign tourists.

  He kept going, reaching the stairway to the lower viewing level, his breath starting to come in small gasps. He descended for what seemed like an hour, one switchback of stairs after another, all of them built into the rock face leading to the viewing platform. He reached the bottom and saw the giant granite wall to his front, the water spilling out like a miniature Niagara Falls. He glanced around and found that the metal stairs he had been using were grafted onto the old, ancient ones carved out of the stone, back when the miners came here for relaxation. They went right, behind the rocks to the river, but the new path led to the left, toward the viewing area.

  He went that way, seeing the falls spilling out to his front. Ordinarily there would be a huge crowd fighting for selfies with the falls as a background, but the rain had put a damper on that. There was only a smattering of people in the overhang, and a single man sitting on a bench, ignoring the waterfall.

  Feng hesitantly went forward, circling a family taking pictures, an umbrella blocking all of the shots from the falls. He approached and saw a man of about sixty, with salt-and-pepper hair, a thin mustache, and cruel eyes. It wasn’t until he came close that he noticed a vicious scar circling his neck, like someone had tried to slit his throat and had missed.

  The man looked up from his newspaper and said, “Feng?”

  Feng nodded, and the man stood, saying, “Follow me.”

  As soon as his back was turned, Feng turned on the recording device, and then began to follow. They left the viewing area, going back the way Feng had come, but when the staircase began rising against the cliffs, the man took the old route. The one carved right into the rock. Feng looked around him, trying to spot the protection he had in the sparse people around, but saw no one who resembled a policeman. He wondered if they were hidden in the cliffs.

  Feng continued following, and within minutes they were lost to the tourists, crossing over the rock wall and walking along the land next to the river, the expanse of stone blocking the view from the official tourist path. They descended into a small bowl, the waterfall lost from sight, and he saw two other men waiting, both of them squatting on their haunches like they were cooking dinner at a camp, a spilling of cigarette butts at their feet. They had been waiting awhile.

  One had tattoos covering his face. The other had a narrow smile with gaps in his teeth that reminded Feng of a snake’s jaw, but what drew Feng’s eyes were his hands. They looked like they’d been dipped in acid, the skin misshapen as if melted wax had been poured over them. Feng felt the adrenaline rise, once again wondering about his police protection.

  The man leading him felt the reticence and said, “I’m Chao Zheng. The Snow Leopard. Do not worry. Come.”

  Feng descended deeper into the bowl, shoved his hands in his pockets, and waited. The two men rose and circled him, until he was in a ring of them. The Leopard said, “You have the money?”

  Feng shrugged a messenger bag off of his shoulder and lowered it to the ground, saying, “Yes, yes. But it must be used in a certain way.”

  The Leopard said, “I know. A very special way. But not the one you intended.”

  Feng said, “What?”

  The Leopard pulled out a knife and said, “Not the way you intended. You claim to work for China, but you don’t. I’ll take the money, but it will be used for them, not what you wanted.”

  Feng said, “Wait, what? I’m here because you asked for me. I’m just the messenger. I’m a nobody.”

  “Take off your shirt.”

  And Feng knew he was dead. He didn’t move. The tattooed man leapt forward and ripped his shirt upwards, exposing the recording device. Feng began to tremble, looking wildly around for a police presence that wasn’t coming.