Wingrove, David - Chung Kuo 02 (3 page)

"Good
night,
Chieh Hsia,"
she said softly, backing away. "May
Kuan Yin bring you peace."

* *
*

SUN LI HUA stood
there after the maid had gone, perfectly still, awaiting his master's
orders.

"Come in,
Master Sun," Wang Hsien said after a moment. He turned away and
walked slowly across the room, sitting down heavily on his bed.

"Are you
all right,
Chieh Hsia
?" Sun Li Hua asked. He set the bowl
down on the small table at the bedside then looked at his master.
"Has one of the maids done something to upset you?"

Wang Hsien
glanced at his Master of the Inner Chamber almost without
recognition, then shook his head irritably. "What is this?"
he said, pointing at the bowl.

"It is your
sleeping potion,
Chieh Hsia.
Lotus seeds mixed with your own
life elixir. It should help you sleep."

Wang Hsien took
a deep, shuddering breath, then reached out and took the bowl in one
hand, sipping from it. The
ho
yeh
was slightly bitter
to the taste—a bitterness augmented by the salt tang of his own
yang
essence, his semen—but not unpleasant. He drained
the bowl, then looked back at Sun Li Hua, holding out the empty bowl
for him to take. "You will wake me at five, yes?"

Sun Li Hua took
the bowl and backed away, bowing again. "Of course,
Chieh
Hsia."

Sun Li Hua
watched the old T'ang turn and slide his legs between the sheets,
lower his head onto the pillow, and pull the covers up about his
shoulders. Two minutes, he thought; that's all the good Doctor Yueh
said it would take.

Sun Li Hua moved
back, beneath the camera, waiting in the doorway until he heard the
old T'ang's breathing change. Then, setting the bowl down, he took a
key from inside his silks and reached up, opening a panel high up in
the door's frame. It popped back, revealing a tiny keyboard and a
timer unit. Quickly he punched the combination. The timer froze, two
amber lights appearing at the top of the panel.

He counted to
ten, then touched the EJECT panel. At once a thin, transparent card
dropped into the tray beneath the keyboard. He slipped it into his
pocket, put its replacement into the slot at the side, and punched
SET.

"Good,"
he said softly, closing the panel and slipping the key back inside
his silks. Then taking a pair of gloves from his pocket, he stepped
back inside the bedchamber.

* *
*

six floors
below, at the far end of the palace, two soldiers were sitting in a
cramped guardroom, talking.

The younger of
them, a lieutenant, turned momentarily from the bank of screens that
filled the wall in front of him and looked across at his Captain.
"What do you think will happen, Otto? Will they close all the
companies down?"

Captain Fischer,
Head of the T'ang's personal security, looked up from behind his desk
and smiled. "Your guess is as good as anyone's, Wolf. But I'll
tell you this, whatever they do there'll be trouble."

"You think
so?"

"Well,
think about it. The volume of seized assets is so vast that if the
Seven freeze them it's certain to damage the market badly. However,
if they redistribute all that wealth in the form of rewards there's
the problem of who gets what. A lot of people are going to be jealous
or dissatisfied. On the other hand, they can't just give it back.
There has to be some kind of punishment."

The lieutenant
turned back to his screens, scanning them conscientiously. "I
agree. But where do they draw the line? How do they distinguish
between those who were actively against them and those who were
simply unhelpful?"

Fischer
shrugged. "I don't know, Wolf. I really don't."

They were
discussing the most recent spate of Confiscations and Demotions, a
subject never far from most people's lips these days. In the past
eighteen months more than one hundred and eighty thousand First Level
families had been "sent down" and all their material goods
confiscated by the Seven as punishment for what had been termed
"subversive activities." A further five thousand families
had simply vanished from the face of Chung Kuo—to the third
generation as the law demanded—for active treason against the
Seven. But now, with the War in its final stages and the clamor for
peace growing daily, the Confiscations had become a delicate subject
and a major bone of contention between those who wanted retribution
and those who simply wanted to damp down the fires of resentment and
bitterness that such retribution brought in its wake.

The lieutenant
turned, eyeing his Captain speculatively. "I hear there's even
talk of reopening the House."

Fischer looked
back at his junior officer sternly, his voice suddenly hard. "You
would do best to forget such talk, Lieutenant."

"Sir."
The lieutenant gave a curt bow of his head, then turned back to his
screens.

Fischer studied
Rahn's back a moment, then leaned back, yawning. It was just after
two, the hour of the Ox. The palace was silent, the screens empty of
activity. In an hour his shift would be over and he could sleep. He
smiled. That is, if Lotte would let him sleep.

He rubbed at his
neck, then leaned forward again and began to catch up with his
paperwork. He had hardly begun when the door to his right crashed
open. He was up out of his seat at once, his gun drawn, aimed at the
doorway.

"Sun Li
Hua! What in Hell's name?"

The Master of
the Inner Chamber looked terrible. His silks were torn, his hair
disheveled. He leaned against the doorpost for support, his eyes wide
with shock, his cheeks wet with tears. He reached out, his hand
trembling violently, then shook his head, his mouth working mutely.
His voice, when he found it, was cracked, unnaturally high.

"The T'ang
. . ."

Fischer glanced
across at the screen that showed Wang Hsien's bedchamber, then back
at Sun Li Hua. "What is it, Master Sun? What's happened?"

For a moment Sun
Li Hua seemed unable to speak, then he fell to his knees. A great,
racking sob shook his whole body, then he looked up, his eyes wild,
distraught. "Our Master, the T'ang. He's . . . dead."

Fischer had
known as soon as he had seen Sun Li Hua, had felt his stomach fall
away from him with fear; but he had not wanted to know—not for
certain.

"How?"
he heard himself say. Then, seeing what it meant, he looked across at
his lieutenant, pre-empting him, stopping him from pressing the
general alarm that would wake the whole palace.

"Touch
nothing, Wolf. Not until I order you to. Get Kurt and Alan here at
once.

He turned back
to Sun. "Who else knows, Master Sun? Who else have you told?"

"No one,"
Sun answered, his voice barely audible. "I came straight here. I
didn't know what to do. They've killed him, killed him while he
slept."

"Who? Who's
killed him? What do you mean?"

"Fu and
Chai. I'm certain it was they. Fu's stiletto ..."

Fischer
swallowed, appalled. "They knifed him? Your two assistants
knifed him?" He turned to his lieutenant. "Wolf, take two
copies of the surveillance tape. Send one to Marshal Tolonen at
Bremen. Another to General Helm in Rio."

"Sir!"

He thought
quickly. No one knew anything. Not yet. Only he and Wolf and Sun Li
Hua. And the murderers, of course; but they would be telling no one.
He turned back to his lieutenant. "Keep Master Sun here. And
when Kurt and Alan come have them wait here until I get back. And
Wolf . . ."

"Sir?"

"Tell no
one anything. Not yet. Understand me?"

* *
*

THE BOARD lay on
the desk in front of DeVore, its nineteen-by-nineteen grid part
overlaid with a patterning of black and white stones. Most of the
board was empty; only in the top right-hand corner—in
Chu,
the West—were the stones concentrated heavily. There the
first stage of the battle had been fought, with black pressing white
hard into the corner, slowly choking off its breath, blinding its
eyes until, at last, the group was dead, the ten stones taken from
the board.

It was an
ancient game—one of the ten games of the West Lake, played by
those two great masters from Hai-nin, Fan Si-pin and Su Ting-an, back
in 1763. DeVore played it often, from memory, stopping, as now, at
the fifty-ninth move to query what Fan, playing white, had chosen. It
was an elegant, enthralling game, the two masters so perfectly
balanced in ability, their moves so exquisitely thought out, that he
felt a shiver of delight contemplating what was to come. Even so, he
could not help but search for those small ways in which each player's
game might have been improved.

DeVore looked up
from the board and glanced across at the young man who stood, his
back to him, on the far side of the room. Then, taking a wafer-thin
ice-paper pamphlet from his jacket pocket, he unfolded it and held it
out. "Have you heard of this new group, Stefan—the
Ping
Tiao
?" Lehmann turned, his face expressionless, then came
across and took the pamphlet, examining it. After a moment he looked
back at DeVore, his cold, pink eyes revealing nothing. "Yes,
I've heard of them. They're low-level types, aren't they?

Why are you
interested?"

"A man must
be interested in many things," DeVore answered cryptically.

* *
*

WANG HSIEN lay
there on his back, his face relaxed, as if in sleep, yet pale—
almost Hung Moo in its paleness. Fischer leaned across and felt for a
pulse at the neck. Nothing. The flesh was cold. The T'ang had been
dead an hour at least. Fischer shuddered and stepped back, studying
the body once again. The silk sheets were dark, sticky with the old
man's blood. The silver-handled stiletto jutted from the T'ang's
bared chest, the blade thrust in all the way up to the handle. He
narrowed his eyes, considering. It would have taken some strength to
do that, even to a sleeping man. And not just strength. It was not
easy for one man to kill another. One needed the will for the job.

Could Fu have
done it? Or Chai? Fischer shook his head. He could not imagine either
of them doing this. And yet if not them, who?

He looked about
him, noting how things lay. Then, his mind made up, he turned and
left the room, knowing he had only minutes in which to act.

L
eaning
forward to take a white stone from the bowl, hefting it in his hand.
"The
Ping Tiao
want what we want—to destroy the
Seven."

"Yes, but
they would destroy us just as readily. They're terrorists. They want
only
to destroy."

"I know.
Even so, they could be useful. We might walk the same path a while,
don't you think?"

"And then?"

DeVore smiled
tightly. Lehmann knew as well as he. Then there would be war between
them. A war he would win. He looked down at the board again. The
fifty-ninth move. What would
he
have played in Fan's place?
His smile broadened, became more natural. How many times had he
thought it through? A hundred? A thousand? And always, inevitably, he
would make Fan's move, taking the black at 4/1 to give himself a
temporary breathing space. So delicately were things balanced at that
point that to do otherwise—to make any of a dozen other
tempting plays—would be to lose it all.

A wise man, Fan
Si-pin. He knew the value of sacrifice: the importance of making
one's opponents work hard for their small victories, knowing that
while the battle was lost in
Chu,
the war went on in
Shang
and
Ping
and
Tsu.

So it was now,
in Chung Kuo. Things were balanced very delicately. And one wrong
move . . . He looked up at Lehmann again, studying the tall young
albino.

"You ask
what would happen should we succeed, but there are other, more
immediate questions. Are the
Ping Tiao
important enough? You
know how the media exaggerate these things. And would an alliance
with them harm or strengthen us?"

Lehmann met his
gaze. "As I said, the
Ping Tiao
are a low-level
organization. Worse, they're idealists. It would be hard to work with
such men. They would have fewer weaknesses than those we're used to
dealing with."

"And yet
they
are
men. They have needs, desires."

"Maybe so,
but they would mistrust us from the start. In their eyes we are First
Level, their natural enemies. Why should they work with us?"

DeVore smiled
and stood up, coming round the desk. "It's not a question of
choice, Stefan, but necessity. They need someone like us. Think of
the losses they've sustained."

He was about to
say more—to outline his plan—when there was an urgent
knocking at the door.

DeVore looked
across, meeting Lehmann's eyes. He had ordered his lieutenant,
Wiegand, not to disturb him unless it was vitally important.

"Come in!"

Wiegand took two
steps into the room, then came sharply to attention, his head bowed.
"I've a call on the coded channel, sir. Triple-A rated."

DeVore narrowed
his eyes, conscious of how closely Lehmann was watching him. "Who
is it?"

"It's
Stifel, sir. He says he has little time."

"Stifel"
was the code name for Otto Fischer in Alexandria. DeVore hesitated a
moment, his mind running through possibilities; then nodded.

"Okay.
Switch it through."

It was a
nonvisual, Fischer's voice artificially distorted to avoid even the
remote possibility of recognition. "Well, Stifel? What is it?"

"The moon
is down, sir. An hour past at most."

DeVore caught
his breath. "How?"

"Eclipsed."

DeVore stared
across at Lehmann, astonished. He hesitated a moment, considering,
then spoke again.