Dragon and the Dove (17 page)

“Do you want to explain your definition of
destroy?” she asked, throwing his question back at him.

He looked at her for a long moment,
unnerving her with the intensity of his gaze. When he spoke, his
voice was dangerously quiet.

“What do you know, Jessie?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You were sure enough two minutes ago to
cordon off the area and do a weapons check,” he said, correctly
interpreting her intent and her actions. “I want to know what was
behind your decision.”

She’d started the discussion. She was going
to have to finish it, but she didn’t have to give her knowledge
away. “I need some guarantees.”

Cooper stared at her. “Aren’t you forgetting
whose interests you are being well paid to keep in mind?”

“This isn’t about money.” She nervously
clasped her hands together near her waist.

“What is it about, then, Jessie?”

“A woman’s life,” she said, then blurted
out, “I don’t want her killed. I don’t want you to kill her.”
Jessica hadn’t even known how important that truth was to her,
until she’d realized she might hold the power to bring Baolian to
her knees at Cooper’s feet.

“Killing is her game, not mine,” he said,
lowering his gaze as he placed his empty glass back on the
table.

“I don’t believe you.” She’d seen him with
Chow Sheng. She remembered the way he’d looked the first time she’d
seen him—wild and capable of anything.

Anger darkened the eyes he slowly lifted to
meet hers. “Fair enough,” he said, not denying her accusation.

“You can ruin her financially, play any game
you want with her assets, take her to the cleaners. I just don’t
want you to kill her.” And that, she suddenly understood, was her
bottom line. Her concern wasn’t so much for Baolian’s life as it
was for Cooper’s soul. With that flash of insight, Jessica knew
she’d gone past the edge of lust, loneliness, and caring into—God,
help her—love. It was the worst news she’d had all day.

“You’re asking a hell of a lot,” he said.
“Are you sure what you’ve got is worth it?” The subtle warning in
his tone told her she could push him too far.

“No,” she said clearly, having no doubts
that her answer was a shove in the wrong direction. But the stakes
had gotten very high very quickly, and she couldn’t afford to be
anything less than honest with him.

Cooper felt all the tension of the afternoon
go out of him in one moment of pure incredulity. She was fearless.
There was no other explanation for her rash treatment of him and
her total disregard for his suggestion of caution. He wasn’t in the
mood to be trifled with, yet she trifled with him at her
leisure—and at her risk.

“I’m beginning to understand why I find you
so damnably attractive,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a compliment,
and he could tell by her reaction that she took the statement with
the same ambivalence with which he’d given it.

“Tell me you won’t kill her,” she insisted
once more.

“I won’t kill her.” The remark was
deliberately offhand, deliberately devoid of sincerity. She was
going to have to take a chance on him, because—so help him,
God—he’d been taking an incredible chance with her. She’d gotten
under his skin where he hadn’t wanted anyone to be. She shook his
carefully controlled sense of balance. She made him want, and he’d
figured out within a week of Jackson’s death that wanting was the
precursor to pain. The more you wanted, the more pain you were
setting yourself up to take.

“Okay,” she said, letting out a long breath,
apparently satisfied with his nonchalant guarantee. “I haven’t got
it all figured out yet, but something astounding just happened out
in reception and I think it’s the bait we’ve been looking for.”

Cooper kept his silence and waited, still
stewing over her high-handed approach.

“Did you feel anything happen when John and
Bo walked in?” she asked.

Feel?

He thought for a moment, then said the only
thing he could come up with. “No. I didn’t feel anything happen. I
felt anger, both at myself and at John for not being more
careful.”

“Well, I felt something happen.”

“You were behind a solid oak door,” he
reminded her, letting his skepticism show. “You weren’t even in the
room.”

“I still felt it.”

Okay, he thought, I’ll bite. “Felt
what?”

“Chow Sheng shaking in his boots.”

“Slippers,” he corrected.

“Whatever. He was the one who got caught in
your office, not Cao Bo, and it scared him. She scared him.”

“She scares me,” he admitted, not seeing the
problem.

“No, she doesn’t, Cooper.” She started
toward the table, taking a quick sidestep around one of the clawed
feet of the dragon woven into the rug. The movement was so subtle,
so unconscious, Cooper doubted if she was even aware she’d done
it.

Stopping next to one of the chairs, she
rested her hip on the arm. Her voice took on an earnestness as she
leaned forward. “What or who she might represent scares you, but
she
doesn’t scare you. With Chow it’s personal. She
actually frightens him.”

Cooper wasn’t buying it. There were too many
facts lined up on the other side. “Chow Sheng had two bodyguards
with him, and Cao Bo probably doesn’t weigh in at more than a
hundred and five pounds soaking wet. I’m not convinced,
Jessie.”

“I’m not talking about on-the-spot physical
violence,” she said, sounding thoroughly exasperated.

“Blackmail?” he asked, though he wasn’t sure
how being seen in his office would provide anyone with leverage
against Chow Sheng. When Cooper was in residence, many people came
through his office, most of them with no pretense of friendship as
their motive. People did show up to shake his hand every now and
then and conduct a little business, and some people showed up
simply to shake him down.

“No,” she said, drawing the word out as she
seemed to search for another. “Blackmail isn’t quite right. It was
more as if Bo had given him something he didn’t want, something
dangerous, like a scorpion nestled on a bowl of hibiscus.”

She was inscrutable, Cooper thought
impatiently, totally inscrutable—
like Fang Baolian
. The
subtleness of Jessica’s reasoning finally hit home, and his senses
did an immediate shift from uninterested confusion to full
alert.

“Who do you think she is?” he asked.

Jessica recognized the change in his
attitude. He was taking her seriously. “I don’t know, but my guess
is that she’s very important to Baolian, and part of what
frightened Chow was knowing she was in the enemy’s hands. He’s
going to try to take her.”

She was right, and Cooper knew it down to
his bones.

“Then the quicker we get her out of here,
the better. Gather up any data you’re going to need for the next
couple of days.” He strode toward the dragon doors. “We won’t be
coming back.”

* * *

An hour later Jessica stood on a balcony
overlooking the rugged coastline and stretch of beach between
Cooper’s house and the Pacific Ocean. The house itself was not what
she had expected as they’d driven north out of San Francisco. She’d
expected redwood and glass, something with two or three stories,
craggy and masculine. She’d gotten an oasis of white pine, wood
floors, and stark simplicity all on one level and no larger than
two thousand square feet.

An apartment over the detached garage
belonged to John, while the house was built closer to the sea, with
steps leading down to the beach. The cries of gulls filled the air,
a strident avian backdrop to the more primal sound made by the
ocean and the melody of the chimes hanging from the porch roof.

A gust of wind swept in from the sea and
ruffled her hair. She absently pushed the strands back off her face
and turned to go inside. Cooper hadn’t brought her to his home to
admire the view. They had work to do.

She headed toward the north wing of the
house, where she could hear John and Cooper setting up the
equipment they’d brought. On her way, she passed an open door and
her steps slowed, her curiosity aroused.

Unlike the quiet sophistication of the rest
of the house, the room looked like it belonged to someone who
didn’t know how to stop moving. Every sport she could imagine was
represented by the appropriate equipment, from skiing—cross-country
and downhill—to snorkeling and scuba diving. There were surfboards,
tennis rackets, racquetball rackets, a hockey stick, old baseball
mitts, a basketball, a mountaineering pack, and lengths of neatly
coiled climbing rope next to a chalk bag. Underneath all the
clutter was a futon, a television with a VCR, and a large wicker
dresser. The stereo system was everywhere, with speakers placed in
all four corners.

Jessica knew it was Jackson’s room. The rest
of the house was elegant, like the office where she worked. This
room was exuberance and energy running amok, but it looked
untouched, painfully quiet. The evidence of a life lived hard and
to the fullest, but finished, made her all the more sad for Cooper.
The place was a testament to what he’d lost, to the vitality that
was no more.

Her gaze traveled the length of the room
once again, taking in all the recreational equipment, a couple of
guitars and assorted electronic gizmos
stacked here and there, and another realization struck her,
startling her. Her brow furrowed as she stepped inside. Looking
again with a more discerning eye, she walked around the room,
carefully touching the things she discovered.

Her fingertips grazed a poster of a
heavy-metal band. A matching T-shirt proclaiming their world tour
lay on the wicker dresser. From the characters on the shirt, she
surmised the concert had been heard in Japan.

An odd clay sculpture stood in one corner of
the room and was being used as a hat rack. It was half tree, half
man and poorly done. She knelt by the base and ran her fingers over
the name etched into the glazed surface—Jackson. The accompanying
date was less than a year earlier. A few feet away was another
sculpture of exquisite quality and the same half-tree design, but
with a woman’s face and body. The name on it was Olivia.

On a wrought-iron bench pushed against the
far wall were a number of photographs. One was of Cooper as she had
never seen him, laughing wildly, with a glint of pure mischief in
his eyes as he held a large half-eaten fish from a gaff. Next to
him was a boy holding a somewhat smaller fish. But the smaller fish
had the other half of Cooper’s hanging out of its mouth. The boy’s
smile was pure innocence, all cocky pride and artless guile set off
by a sly wink and a dark, silky ponytail.

The boy appeared again, a few years older,
hair a little longer, in a number of the other photographs. One was
a high-school graduation picture taken with Cooper by his side.
Another, in which he had even longer hair, was with a young woman.
She was tall and blond and willowy, dressed in a sequin-spangled
minidress. He was in a tuxedo. The picture was signed:
To
Jackson with love. Don’t forget. Martha.

Jessica picked up the photograph and brought
it closer. This, then, was Jackson, she thought, not quite
believing what she saw. He had been beautiful. No one could deny
the appeal of the clean, sculpted lines of his face, or of his
rakish smile, or the sensuality of the ebony hair falling nearly to
his waist.

The pictures proved what she had suspected.
Jackson had been much younger than Cooper, young enough for Jessica
finally to realize just how far Cooper would go to destroy the
woman who had killed him.

Jackson had been more of a son to Cooper
than a brother, or rather a half brother. The dark hair, a higher
angle on his cheekbones, the deep rich green of his eyes, and the
warm color of his skin bespoke a mixed heritage.

Jackson could actually have been Cooper’s
son, for all she knew. Cooper certainly had a penchant for
beautiful Oriental women, and one way or another, he seemed to come
in contact with quite a few.

She set the photograph down and let out a
heavy sigh. If Jackson had been his son, she knew nothing would
stop Cooper from exacting revenge, nothing short of his own death.
For his sake, she hoped it wasn’t so.

A change in the air, rather than any sound,
warned her she was no longer alone. Her intuition told her who was
watching. She’d been caught again.

Resigned to his anger, she turned around and
was surprised and concerned to find his expression much more
difficult to read. His face was a mask of stone, utterly blank.

“We’re all set up and ready to go,” he said.
“I want you to research the name Pablo Lopez gave me, the man on
Grand Cayman. Start with the banks. If you get a trace to anything
in the U.S.A. that he’s siphoning money back into, then we’re in
business. If Baolian has put a sizable portion of her assets in the
States, it’s because she’s looking for a stable government and a
capitalistic economy. If we find it, we’ve found her nest egg, her
crown jewel.”

He turned to leave, but her voice stopped
him.

“Was he your son, Cooper?”

“No,” he said gruffly, without moving to
face her. “He was the son of Sun Yi and my mother.”

“Who was Sun Yi?”

Even from across the room, she saw the
telltale twitch of a muscle in his jaw, the cracking of his facade
of indifference.

“Sun Yi was the man who loved my mother, but
couldn’t save her. He was also a pirate, running the biggest
syndicate out of Hong Kong until he died and left it all to Fang
Baolian.”

Dusk was edging across the eastern horizon
and falling into the ocean before Jessica pushed away from her
computer
. She stretched her arms above her
head and rolled her shoulders, easing the strain of too many hours
without moving. The room she was working in encompassed the whole
north end of the house, giving her both the landward view and the
beauty of the sunset in the west.