3
Singapore
August 25, 8:57 p.m. SGT
Eight thousand miles away, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Han Chenglong, who called himself Charlie Han, stepped into an elevator at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.
He rode the elevator down from the fortieth floor to the garishly lit Shoppes, his hand rubbing the back of his neck. In the middle of drawing out information from the girl, a weariness had descended on him with the force of one of Singapore’s monsoon thunderstorms, bringing with it a headache and the need for fresh air.
Interrogation, no matter how subtle or crude, was hard work. Even a Guóānbù professional like Charlie sometimes required a break. He hoped he could trust Dai Shujun not to touch the girl while he was away. Dai was a brute.
He went out through glass doors into a velvet night. Heat and humidity enveloped him. He followed a sign to a designated smoking area and removed a Marlboro from a gold case.
The cigarette case was the only thing of value his parents had given him. That, and the wisdom that forgiveness is more easily obtained than permission.
And, often, forgiveness didn’t matter.
As the tobacco hit his lungs, his shoulders came down. The headache lifted. He tilted his head back and watched insects dance in the streetlight.
The interrogation of the girl was going well. For a pampered ang moh —a Caucasian—Cassandra Brenner was tough. Even so, she had already told him much about Red Dragon . Never mind that he already knew everything she’d so far offered. The details he sought would come before morning.
But getting those details might necessitate a higher degree of force. He walked a tightrope. The splashy locale his boss had insisted on. The bribes he might have to pay. Being saddled with a beast for a partner. And the risk that the girl could die. If she did, it would be a slap to the CIA. But her death could not, must not, come back on him or the Guóānbù.
He tipped his head back farther, searching all the way up to where the hotel belled out, concealing the upper floors. While he would have preferred to grab the girl off the street, a public operation was too risky, given Singapore’s surveillance and Cassandra Brenner’s status as an American businesswoman. Fortunately, she’d fallen for his ruse—helped along by her own assistant—to meet at the hotel. Once she’d arrived, everything had clicked into place.
Charlie and his men had tracked her through the hotel lobby and watched as she’d boarded an elevator under the lewd gazes of two British businessmen.
Earlier, Charlie’s contact inside the hotel had made sure the cameras observing the fortieth and forty-first floors had gone offline at 5:2 p.m. A few minutes after that, Charlie had ridden an elevator to the forty-first floor, where he’d booked a room ostensibly for a business client and a girl Charlie had procured for him. Hiring a prostitute for an associate was a not-uncommon arrangement among Chinese financiers. But in this case, the businessman had been one of his men, the girl a nobody from the red-light district in Geylang.
Once their target was in her room, Charlie and another of his men had taken the stairs down to the fortieth floor, still without cameras tracking their movements. A key from his contact had gotten them inside Cassandra Brenner’s room.
Tonight, once Charlie finished with the ang moh , the prostitute would disguise herself as the American girl and walk out of the hotel for the benefit of the surveillance cameras.
Oh, so easy.
It was good fortune for him that the American CIA was still weak. In 2010, Guóānbù had gutted CIA operations in China, killing or imprisoning twenty of their sources. After that, the Americans became timid, pulling in like a sea anemone while the Chinese dragon found its voice and breathed fire. These days, an occasional CIA operative might be brilliant. The Texan running the woman—Virgil, she’d called him—had been decent. He’d even tried to recruit Charlie, and it hadn’t been a bad pitch. But it had proved fatal for the Texan, who, as the Westerners liked to say, now swam with the fishes.
Charlie swatted away a mosquito and puffed out a satisfied ring of smoke. George Mèng—aristocrat, entrepreneur, owner of Red Dragon —would soon be his. This was the best way for a poor farmer’s son to prove his worth to those at the highest echelon of the Chinese Communist Party: expose the treachery of one of their own. As Sun Tzu said, “In the midst of turmoil, there is opportunity.” The Chinese Communist Party was in chaos. And Charlie was superb at seizing opportunity.
He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, careful not to let ash fall to the ground. The Singaporean police were bastards about litter. He pocketed the cigarette butt in case there was an investigation. Cameras were one thing. DNA another.
And there would be an investigation if the girl stopped cooperating.