Shadow of the Dragon полностью

Hala didn’t move until he took her gently by the shoulder and herded her into the corridor.

“I’m sorry you had to see such awful things,” he said.

She leaned against his leg and sighed. Still trembling, she spoke matter-of-factly, like a woman twice her age. “It was awful, that is true, but if you had not been here, it would have been much worse.”

Midas Jankowski was pretty damned certain that no one in the history of history had ever calmed down because someone else told them to “calm down.” Fortunately, no matter what Gerry Hendley was reading into his tone, Midas wasn’t spun up, he was just surrounded by camels and goats and weird-looking big-assed sheep.

A Uyghur with four goats stacked like cordwood on the back of a three-wheeled motorcycle truck barked “bosh-bosh, bosh-bosh” as he nosed Midas aside with the front tire and rode past. Hendley must have heard the change in Midas’s voice and was doing his level best to try and talk him off some ledge.

A woman’s voice playing an incessant loop over a loudspeaker forced him to cup his hand over the phone in order to be heard.

“Seriously, Boss,” Midas said. “I’m fine. Just got bosh-boshed out of the way.”

“What the hell does that even mean?”

Midas thought of telling Hendley to think about calming down, but decided being a wiseass to the boss’s boss was not the smartest thing to do.

“Not sure,” Midas said. “Probably ‘get out of my way.’ Anyway, something’s come up with our mutual friend.” The line was presumed secure, but he still refrained from using names.

“All right,” Hendley said. “Let’s have it.”

“Everyone’s intact,” Midas said. “Our problem is egress. Our friend’s message said he has the package.”

“Has the package? With him?”

“Sounds like it,” Midas said. “From the sound of things, something really bad went down in the neighborhood he was looking at. I’m not sure about the details, but I’m hearing three dead.”

“Our friend?” Hendley asked.

“Well enough to send the message,” Midas said. “He must have rescued the package.”

Midas’s plane had arrived in the middle of the night, really in the wee hours of the morning, when he would have been getting up to do PT during his days as a lieutenant colonel in the Unit, commonly known as Delta Force. Halfway around the world, Gerry Hendley was hungry to know what was going on.

They spoke over an encrypted Internet connection, the virtual IP address bouncing around the globe to discourage local authorities in Kashgar from monitoring the call or tracking his signal. This had been the first opportunity Midas had been in the clear enough to call in with a report.

He’d done his usual TSCM — Technical Surveillance Countermeasures — sweeps covertly as soon as he arrived in the hotel room, always assuming the walls were bugged and equipped with at least one camera. Chinese security services surveilled everyone on the street, and it stood to reason that they wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to bug the rooms where foreigners spent the night. He’d found two listening devices, one in the lamp by the house phone — too obvious — and another at the corner of the bathroom mirror. Those wily MSS guys, assuming people might conduct their nefarious conversations while sitting on the john. Midas had used enough laser listening devices himself that he left the draperies closed to keep anyone from picking up the subtle vibrations of his voice against the window glass.

In case anyone happened to be watching, he’d used his phone to take the obligatory YouTube video of his Chinese vacation, getting a 360 of his room. Pinhole cameras in the walls would show up as shiny dots. Lenses in other objects — smoke alarms, wall hangings — might or might not give themselves away.

Even so, covert phone conversations from a hotel room in Communist China were too big a risk, so Midas waited until he got to the market — Rally Point Bravo, where Clark’s message had said to meet.

He’d just begun to bring Hendley up to speed on the new turn of events when the goatherd bosh-boshed his way past.

“We’ve got an emergency bugout plan,” Midas said. “But it didn’t take the package into account. We should be meeting up soon.”

“Very well,” Hendley said, obviously not wanting to end the connection and be left in the dark. “Three dead, you say?”

“As far as I know,” Midas said. “We passed a bunch of XPCC armored personnel carriers and troop trucks rolling into the neighborhoods behind Jiafang market this morning on the way in from the airport. My driver said he heard through the cabbie network that three officials were murdered with knives. XPCC and cops are saying it was Uyghur terrorists. I guess they’re already rounding up the usual suspects, at least the ones who aren’t already in detention camps.”

“Any word that a foreigner might be involved?”

“None so far,” Midas said, sidestepping a fresh pile of what he believed to be camel shit. “You need to cut back on the fruit, Mister,” he said under his breath.

“Pardon?”