Backfire

They were walking toward the parking lot when Savich got a call from the ICU.

Cindy Cahill had gone into convulsions. She hadn’t made it. She was dead.

San Francisco General Hospital

Xu walked at a brisk pace through the San Francisco General Hospital campus to Potrero Avenue. He turned right and walked to Twenty-second Street, where he’d parked his Audi on a quiet residential side street.

The San Francisco air was fresh and chill, clouds scuttling across a gray sky. Finally he could take a second to look at them and breathe a sigh of relief. He grinned. He’d taken a huge risk coming to the hospital, and now that Cindy had had the grace to die, he hadn’t had to take the even greater risk of trying to kill her himself.

That little scrap of a woman, Lin Mei, had ended up a murderer after all.

He’d worried at it like a dog’s bone. Cindy would have had every reason to talk to the FBI now, and if she had told them what she knew, they would eventually have found the Xian Xu who became Joe Keats. The National Security Agency would have no record of a Joe Keats or of his connection to Chinese intelligence, but he could never have been Joe Keats again. He would have become an international fugitive wanted for murder, dependent on the Chinese for his very life, if they chose to let him keep it.

Had Cindy managed to speak to the FBI agents he’d seen leaving the ICU before she died? He couldn’t be sure, but it was unlikely. She’d had major surgery; she’d had a tube down her throat until this morning. If she’d been conscious at all, it wasn’t for long. He’d heard the frenetic beeping from the monitors, watched the staff rush to her cubicle. They’d been in there a long time. When they’d come out, he knew she was dead by the expressions on their faces.

Cindy had gone to meet her maker, whoever that was, and she’d taken his secrets with her. He thought about her death, wondered if she’d even known she was dying or if she’d been too drugged out to even recognize what was happening to her. To his surprise, Xu saw his mother’s face, saw her heaving for breath as he’d stood there, a bloody knife in his hand, watching her in the kitchen of their small vacation house, grabbing her throat because she couldn’t breathe as she sank to her knees on the floor.

He walked faster. His mother’s death was long ago, long over and done. He’d been trained to block out memories that were of no use to him, to focus on what was important, and immediate, not wallow in the past, reliving moments he couldn’t change. His immediate task was to get back to his superior in Beijing, Colonel Ng, a tough-as-nails little man with a gold tooth in the front of his mouth. He would have to rehearse carefully, convince Ng that there were no more witnesses to hurt them, that Ng’s cyber-intelligence unit could not be tied to anything that had happened. Xu had, after all, brought them a great prize, the latest American Stuxnet research, or a good part of it. Who could fault him if he’d had to dirty his hands, so long as they were all safe? In the end they would do as they wished, of course, but he hoped they would find him too useful to waste.

After eight long months, things had finally turned around for him, and he no longer needed to stay. After he picked up his luggage at the Fairmont, he and his Audi would make the six-hour trek to LAX. No way was he going near SFO airport. He momentarily pictured himself waving good-bye from thirty-three thousand feet on his way to Honolulu to the idiot FBI agents still looking for him.

Xu was whistling when he reached his Audi ten minutes later. He fobbed open the door and slid in. He paused for a moment, staring out the windshield. The sun had peeked out from behind the clouds, full and hot. He loved this beautiful city, with its swirling pristine fog that rolled in through the Golden Gate and left again. No one should live in Beijing with the lung-rotting pollution and its sandstorms blowing in from the Gobi Desert that turned the sky brown, choking its people even through the masks they wore. Crowds of people, endless millions of them scrabbling to survive in a city where buildings seemed to go up every second, so poorly constructed they began to fall apart around you the next day—that is, if some unscrupulous local officials didn’t evict you first.

As he drove north toward the city, he thought back to his college days at Berkeley, where he’d protested with all the vigor and ignorance of youth against the cause du jour, usually a variation of the theme of America as a decadent wasteland. He smiled now at how he’d lapped it up, with Joyce’s help, both of them ardent young Communists. Except Joyce had been more, so much more. He hadn’t realized until he’d lived in Beijing that the Chinese government at all levels could give the bozos here in America lessons in corruption. His idealism had died there, drowned in all the bureaucratic inanities and the fraud that permeated everything. He’d watched groups protest, watched them shout their pitiful truths, watched them get the Chinese government’s boot on their necks. How could you continue to believe in a society in which you couldn’t even trust the food you ate, or the air you breathed? The only people you could trust in China were your own family, and he had no family left.