AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Ah, Christ.” He pounded one of the grain sacks in irritation. He was fatigued and no longer thinking clearly. “No, wait! What about Peter? No one could have planted the bomb with him waiting in the car.”
She blanched at the mention of Peter’s name, then composed herself and said, “Suppose he went to make a phone call or have a cigarette.”
“That’s possible.”
“So again, why not Guang?”
“Several reasons,” David said, and began itemizing them. “You said the person has to be of a certain age. Guang is that age, but he was with us. Do you really see him hiring someone else to hook up the bomb? I don’t. Besides, he didn’t have to say a word about the bile or Henglai. He could have kept quiet and we wouldn’t have had a way to stop the execution. Don’t you see, Hulan? Whoever wanted us dead wanted Spencer Lee dead even more.”
The
truck bumped over a pothole. David glanced around trying to determine where they were. When he couldn’t, he adjusted the collar of his coat to keep the wind off his neck and ears, then looked back at Hulan. She was staring at her hands clasped together in her lap.
“You’re thinking about Peter,” he said.
“How can I not?”
He let the silence hang. Finally she spoke. “From the day he was assigned to me I didn’t trust him. I knew he reported on me and I hated that. But when we were in L.A., I saw a different side of him. That day in Madeleine’s office he stood up for me. He didn’t have to do that.”
“He was just doing his job…”
“Which I’d never given him a chance to do before,” she said. “When we got back here, I thought, Things will be different and we’ll be real partners. In the past I never would have sent him to Cao Hua’s apartment. I never would have let him get this close to an investigation. And now?” Hulan looked at him in anguish. “If I’d just let him come with us…”
“Everything happened so fast,” he said. “The other cars, the people, Lee coming through the intersection. I would have done the same.”
She was going to say something more, but the truck pulled to a stop. They were at the back entrance to the Forbidden City. Wordlessly, Hulan grabbed her purse and jumped to the ground. From here, they caught a bus to her neighborhood. When they reached her house, they found a black sedan waiting outside, but Hulan didn’t stop to speak to its occupants.
“They’re from the MPS,” she said. “I recognize the car.”
She unlocked the front gate to her compound and they entered. Hulan stoked the embers in the living room stove, then excused herself to take a bath. David was dirty, exhausted from jet lag and the constant push of the investigation, and emotionally drained from seeing so much death. He wandered through the courtyards and open rooms, hoping to recover some sense of balance but realizing his senses were too jangled.
He’d had visions of how Hulan lived, but her home was far larger, far more beautiful than anything he had imagined. Her personality was everywhere—in the way a piece of embroidered cloth draped over a chair, in the way low celadon pots filled with narcissus bulbs perched on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, in the way she’d set up her New Year’s altar, in the way the rich hues of the antique wood pieces softened the rooms’ clean lines. He lingered by her desk, feeling the smoothness of the rosewood’s grain beneath his fingers, picking up a cloisonné letter opener, caressing the fine lines of a Cantonware vase. Here was Hulan’s life—a little plastic wind-up toy he’d given her more than a decade ago, a photograph of a woman David presumed to be her mother, a few bills, several bankbooks neatly stacked.
Absently he touched them with his finger, and they spilled across the table. Bank of China. Wells Fargo. Citibank. Glendale Federal. Chinese Overseas Bank. These were the same banks where Henglai and Cao Hua had kept their ill-gotten gains. If this weren’t damning enough, there was the matter of the Chinese Overseas Bank. Not only did Guang Mingyun own it, but the Rising Phoenix was laundering its money there. David picked up one of the books, opened it, and was stunned by the balance—$327,000. He checked another and saw a balance of $57,000. He looked through the others. The total was close to two million U.S. dollars.
His knees buckled and he stumbled back into a chair as the realization washed over him. She had betrayed him.
She came out of her bedroom with a silk kimono wrapped around her slim frame and her hair tied up in a towel. The dirt, soot, and grime of the fiery intersection and the back of the farmer’s truck had been washed away from her body.
“Should I hurry?” she asked, her voice as melodious as always. “I can have the car out front take us back to your hotel. I’m sure you’d like to take a shower and change.” Then she walked to the coal stove, put her hands up to feel its heat, and smiled. “Or you could take a bath here. We could spend the rest of the day here if you’d like.”
David was silent.
“Would you like something to eat? Maybe a cup of tea? David? Is something wrong? Are you all right?”
He opened his hands, let the bankbooks slip into his lap, and accused her with his simple question: “What are these?”
A pink flush began at her cleavage, then swiftly crept up her neck and into her face.
“Don’t you have an explanation?” he asked contemptuously. “I didn’t think so.”
“It’s my savings,” she said after a lengthy pause. It galled him that she showed no remorse.
“That’s one thing you could call it,” he said.
He watched as her mouth formed his name. “David?”
“All this must have been very entertaining to you,” he said bitterly. He closed his eyes, trying to wipe away her presence. When he opened them she was still there. “You are such a fucking liar. And I fell for it again.”
