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Page 4.
 As he stood waiting on the hotel balcony, Jack had languid daydreams of Xue, mingled with worry for her safety. She was downstairs in this same hotel, working in the top secret electronic lab surveillance set up for this mission. She would be the last and only person in there, since the observation post had officially been shut down. She was working at Jack’s special request, against orders, and on his responsibility if anything went wrong. She was hunched over a dimly lit terminal—an island of light in a dark room. She was monitoring digitized voice patches—stray pickups amid message traffic—looking for Yang’s acoustic signature the way an attack submarine cruises in silent and deadly darkness, pinging the cold depths all around and hoping to pick up the sounds of its enemy. So far, MSS had apparently not picked up her electronic activity and put her out of business. Jack gritted his teeth for her—just another hour, maybe, and she could abandon her station as the shooting, running, and screaming began in the growing nightfall around Yang’s looming fortress.
When he’d last seen Xue, earlier that evening, she’d smiled intimately across the ballroom now behind him. Jack and she had worked together for several weeks, and it was time to cut the cards and deal. They were starting to communicate with their eyes, in that unspoken language of seduction and speculation, cutting through the veneer of professional coolness. He carried a still-smoking mental snapshot of her slender, diminutive form: rouged lips, dark almond-shaped eyes, and a seductive cheongsam dress slit down one side to reveal a creamy-skinned leg (a hint that he’d see the other leg soon).
Fly me to the moon… Jack whistled lightly as he thought of her.
His phone signaled quietly in his ear. This time it wasn’t Claire Lightfield or Rector, or even the Dragon Lady. This was the call he’d been waiting for—from Xue.
In the ballroom behind Jack, several hundred trade representatives and their spouses danced slowly while embracing. They were elegantly dressed in suits and gowns. Light jazz wafted in the air—along with tinkling ice cubes, laughter, and conversation—as did the aromas of five-star cuisine and expensive champagne fountains.
Jack had entered the premises with a phony card showing him to be a trade liaison for a German sausage company, named Herr Kutt.
It was a last-minute joke by Xue of the sparkling smiles, dimpled cheeks, and intriguing eyes.
Upon receiving his I.D. card from her earlier that day, in order to get into the convention, Jack had told her his new name for her—Miss Chief. He'd added: "And I have some ideas for special language lessons you can help me with when all this is over."
Xue got it. She'd watched a thousand U.S. movies, loved the culture, and understood the lingo. She actually preferred to be called Sue, but Jack insisted on going native, so she made an exception for him, as she was willing to do in matters of the heart. The best part, like toppings on taste ice cream, was her whip-crack sense for the absurd. Her humor was seductive as it wrapped itself around one’s laugh button. "As your translator, I am here to help you with any tongue you want to try, Jack.”
“Your tongue will do."
“Oh Jack, you can be so hard to swallow.”
“Try, darling, try.”
“I’ll make a special project of you, Mr. Gray.”
“You’ll have me licked in no time.”
Poor, sweet Xue. She was a college student, moonlighting on a government job to make ends meet. She could have ended up translating parts lists for Swedish phone makers, or customer contacts for Brazilian trade representatives in Shanghai, but what did she draw? Ministry of State Security, office of Dragon Lady, working with an American loner—who smelled of danger, despite his charms, the way a match smells of sulfur before it’s even lit.
Xue dutifully listened to message traffic in her spare time, and passed nuggets along as local linguists collected intelligence data. The operatives maintained anonymity. It was their main hope of survival, because Big Yang’s Shanghai-based triad had infiltrated to top levels. Innocent little Xue had passed along the deadly crypto-ultra involving Sunrise Engine Corp and an as yet unknown mole inside MSS. Even Claire Lightfield and Rector didn’t know.
Okay, Rector, so it is personal—not just business. Her name is Xue. If you met her, you’d agree. If not, to hell with you.
“Jack,” said Xue in his earpiece.
He started. “You okay? Keeping your pretty head down?”
“I’m copacetic, Jack.” Her voice was dry and self-assured like a good fumé blanc. It was the crisp, clear tone of a young woman who knew she was smart and attractive, and comfortable in her skirt. Her command of English took his breath away. Not just vocabulary—but nuance and undertone. She spoke American idiom without a flaw.
Fly me to the moon…
“Where are you? Are you in any danger?”
“I was just gonna ask you the same question, Bwana.”
Xue loved U.S. movies, and spoke West Coast American though she'd never been east of Shanghai. As with so many exploded Eurocentric myths, Jack found absolutely nothing inscrutable about Asians, especially when someone like Xue (she taught him to pronounce her name sort of like 'chewy') signaled that she wanted to scrute, or get scruted, or whatever one wanted to call steamy, privatized romance. Hey big boy, want to scrute? Her family name Sechen (Siquin), to the Western ear, seemed to Jack’s ear just a breath away from Mandarin she-she, meaning 'thank you.' Jack found it fit refreshingly for his dreams of him and her. And of course he hoped she would be delighted to cha-cha, even if this moment wasn't a real ha-ha.
His ear piece made a faint tuning sound. Had he lost her? He tapped it lightly with his index finger to reopen the line. "Hello, Xue. You still there?"
"Are you hiding, Jack?" her dusky voice teased. Jack had a theory, based on experience, that women with rich voices were exceptionally passionate in bed. He had a feeling he might test his theory, if he survived the next ten minutes. Xue was a graduate student at Shanxi University. She'd watched endless U.S. movies, and closely studied the patois. Her U.S. English sounded educated, yet nicely colloquial. She dreamed of emigrating to L.A. (her term) for a few years of surfing, partying, and graduate studies—not a typical Chinese order of things. Never mind—in reality, her priorities were in good Confucian harmony, she'd told Jack.
"Did you want to dance?" he asked, glancing at the colorful sea of swaying men and women in the ballroom beyond the heavy plate glass windows to his back.
"I’m on the first floor patio below you. Look and wave."
He looked over the concrete railing and saw a lithe figure in a seductive cheongsam dress, slit down the sides. She was very pretty, even if he could not see her clearly in this light. She had long, blue-black hair and large, serene, almond-shaped eyes. He saw her teeth in the dark as she smiled. She wrinkled her nose at him and waved.
He waved back. "Want me to come out and play?"
"When the fat lady sings, Mr. Gray. We are still on the clock."
"I'm glad at least one person agrees with me." Tell it to Rector and Claire Lightfield.
"We are singing from the same sheet of music, Mr. Gray."
"What do you say we sing under the same sheet, Xue?"
"Foreign devil deal with Dragon Lady first," she said in an imitation Asian villainess accent found in ancient 1930s Charlie Chan movies. They were her favorite. As she told it, she'd once nearly died, choking on popcorn, while laughing with her friends in the Shanxi U dorm one night, watching Fu Manchu movies while wreathed in marijuana smoke.
"Ah so," Jack said in that same spirit. Dragon Lady. Jack assumed their conversation was being recorded by one spy agency or another, probably corporate rather than state. In modern China, corporate espionage was more intense than state espionage had been during bad old Commie days. Xue's barely concealed code referred to their coordinator, Mme. Col. Zhang Mei of MSS, the new Ministry of State Security.
“Stay out of sight,” he told Xue. “Do we have a date when it’s over?”
“You bet, Tarzan. You bring Toto, I bring Jane.”
“That’s Cheetah. Toto is from the Wizard of Oz.”
“You Tarzan, me Jane. We fly united.”
“You look delicious.”
She waved. “You catch me, you bite me. I catch you, I eat you.”
Jack felt a glow after he signed off with Xue. He lifted his gin and tonic for one more sip.
For a few moments, time continued standing still as shadows of palm fronds waved slowly across Jack’s tanned, half-hidden features on the balcony. The music played on in the ballroom behind him, while hundreds of elegant men and women swayed in a scene out of. The tune was right out of 1960s Las Vegas: Mack the Knife… old Mackie’s back in town… The dance ended in applause and laughter. These poor people had no idea.
As Jack waited in a corner, a few couples came out onto the balcony for fresh air, and quickly went back in for drinks and dancing. Most were middle-aged, upper echelon executives and their spouses. If any noticed the slender, dark-haired man in the white dinner jacket, standing among vines and trellises, they barely gave him a second glance.
Jack did not dazzle or easily impress at first meeting. If the casual passer-by met his serious, penetrating gray eyes in a glance—cold, calculating, deadly—the passer-by quickly looked away. Men and women had commented after some dinner party or agency luncheon that a first exchange of looks with Jack Gray was like (they always groped for the right word) being pierced to their core. They remembered being blinded by the glint of a life and death evaluation by someone who had gone through the fire somewhere, on some battlefield or in some alley, and come away tempered like steel. That stare could weaken the knees of men and women not expecting it. His handshake, if you got that far, was hard like that of a construction worker—Jack was a master of the Wing Sun martial art, which required both circular and angular motions in a blur of speed—deriving strength and focus from endless kicks, sit-ups, punches, and push-ups. Jack’s hooded look, the quick evaluation, the life or death decision, was just as quickly veiled behind broad smiles and warm talk. As much as he worked alone, he was not a loner but a superb social animal. That was the best survival skill.
The eye contact magic worked well for Jack when the hard stare was turned down to a low, ember glow. Jack had an inner charm engine that he could revv up when he struck up a mutual love interest with a beautiful and intriguing woman. So far, he and Xue had mainly exchanged words and looks, along with a few tingling ‘accidental’ brushes of skin on skin.
He and Xue had agreed to meet by the hors d’oeuvres table after the raid. He would do what he could to lead Chinese security to Yang, but he must not be identified. Her Kutt it must be. As soon as possible, he and Xue must make their escape. They would drive to Beijing for a night or two in a luxury hotel, before he flew back to California and she returned to her home province and graduate studies at her university. The alternatives were too terrifying to contemplate.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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