Mark of Evil Page 5

  She was in the Wan Chai district. But she had made her way off the Hennessy Road area with the nice shops and gleaming skyscrapers, where the men dressed in silk business suits and rich ladies with designer purses strolled down the avenue. Rivka was now in a grimy alley in the red-light section, outside a bar with a flickering orange-and-yellow neon sign that buzzed loudly overhead, and where the trash barrels filled the back street with a steady stench. She was waiting for a man she had never met before, named Chow.

  After Rivka had waited nearly a half an hour, a young girl in a green satin dress slit way too high up her thighs walked out from the bar and into the alley. “You waiting for Chow?” she asked with a voice devoid of emotion, matching eyes that were listless and unfocused.

  Rivka nodded.

  “Wait here. He coming out.”

  The young girl turned to leave, but Rivka reached out and touched her skinny arm. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Do what?” the girl asked, half turning.

  “I know you are owned by the Triad. Working in the brothel. You don’t have to, you know.”

  “Who says?”

  “God says.”

  “Hmmm.” The girl shrugged. Rivka figured she was on drugs, though she didn’t see any needle marks. Probably one of the designer meth cocktails.

  Rivka stepped closer. “You can be free. Jesus came so that you can be free from sin, from drugs, from selling your body. All of it.”

  “Free?” the young girl said. And then she turned and disappeared through the back door. The sounds of the noisy bar inside could be heard for a second or two until the door closed.

  A few minutes later an extremely wide man who looked like he could have been a sumo wrestler sauntered out into the alley. He took a last drag from his cigarette, looked down both ends of the alley, then tossed it down on the ground.

  “What you want? You want work? I can give you work. Plenty. You’ve got a pretty face. Men would like you.”

  “No. I don’t want work. I need to talk to Jo Li.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ve been told that you know him.”

  “I don’t know nothing.”

  “I think you do.”

  “You’re making me angry. You don’t want to make me mad, little lady.” Chow strode up to Rivka until he was just inches away from her face. “I don’t like the way you disrespect me.”

  “I don’t want trouble, Chow. I just want to know what you know about Jo Li. About his underground financial system. Are you connected with him? Do you run your business through his barter exchange?”

  Chow leaned a little closer. “And if I did, why would I tell you?” Without warning, he brought his massive right hand up and wrapped his fingers around Rivka’s neck, squeezing.

  “Let go of me,” she said through gritted teeth. “Don’t want . . . trouble.”

  He squeezed tighter. “Too late. You’ve just found it. I am going to take you for myself right now,” he grunted. “After that, I’m putting you to work for me.”

  Rivka stared him in the eye. She’d had enough. She let loose with a furious right kick that dislocated his left leg at the hip. Then she brought her left knee up like a hammer into his groin. He let go and started falling backward, but before he hit the ground she let loose with another roundhouse kick to the side of the head. His immense bulk collapsed onto the concrete of the alley with a thud.

  Dropping down with the heel of her boot jammed onto Chow’s neck, Rivka tried again. “How do I get a hold of Jo Li?”

  He was seriously dazed. She slapped his face and he started to sharpen. “Englishman . . . ,” he grunted slowly, choking under her boot.

  “What Englishman?”

  “Lawyer . . . or something.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Hadley Brooking.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Here in Hong Kong . . . Office on Hennessy.” Chow’s face was turning purple “I’m choking . . .”

  Rivka lifted her boot off his neck. “I have just one more question. The young girl in the green dress—what is her name?”

  “Suzi.”

  “No,” Rivka said. “Her real name.”

  “Meifeng.”

  Rivka stepped back and watched as Chow rolled over onto his uninjured side like a beached walrus and slowly tried to get back up on one leg. He grabbed a drainpipe that ran down the building and groaned as he pulled himself to a semistanding position. By the time he looked around for Rivka, she had vanished.

  An hour later, in the lobby of a small office furnished with cheap knockoffs of English and Oriental artifacts, Rivka sat looking at Meifeng, who had sunk back into the two-seater sofa with her eyes almost closed. “It will take a day or two for your body to get rid of the drugs,” Rivka said, trying to be reassuring.

  Meifeng blinked slowly. Rivka asked, “Do you understand?”

  “Sure, sure,” Meifeng replied drearily. “Know English a lot. Lot of my man customers speak English. America. Canada. England. Australia . . .”

  Rivka shook her head and wondered at this sad, lost girl. Good heavens. “Are you afraid of running away from Chow?”

  “Maybe.”

  Rivka grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “With God’s help, I’ll protect you.”

  A tall, thin man with fair skin walked into the lobby. He had a mop of silver hair that looked like it needed a good trim and was wearing a rumpled linen suit and an ascot. “May I help you?” he asked.

  Rivka stood. “Mr. Hadley Brooking?”

  “At your service,” he said and reached out to shake her hand. She noticed his initials—HJB—monogrammed on his French cuffs, but the ends of the cuffs were a bit frayed. This English lawyer had seen better days.

  Brooking glanced over at Meifeng. “Would she like an Orangey water?”

  Meifeng shook her head no.

  “Very well, then . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Rivka asked to see him privately in his office, and the two of them stepped into an adjacent room filled with Oriental vases and framed reproductions of English landscapes. Brooking sat down behind his mahogany desk and smiled. Rivka noticed that the varnish on the aged desk was peeling.

  Rivka started. “Are you a lawyer?”

  “Of sorts. Used to be a solicitor in the U.K. But nowadays I engage in other pursuits.”

  “Your sign on the door says Consultations—Imports/Exports. Perhaps you can explain that.”

  “Perhaps you can explain what it is that you need help with, Miss . . .”

  “Call me Rivka. I need advice about markets, buying and selling.”

  “Not currency, of course,” he said. “Now that the whole world ditched the paper CReDO and went electronic—skin transactions, I call them—currency exchanges don’t exist. But you know that, I’m sure.”

  “Yes. But what if someone doesn’t want to engage in those kinds of electronic transactions?”

  “Well then,” he said, “you’re not going to get very far. Bit of a jam, that.” After taking the time to size her up, he continued, “You don’t have a laser tag ID, do you? No BIDTag?”

  She smiled.

  “Are you one of those . . . Jesus followers? The Remnant?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, I hear things.”

  “I want to find out about Jo Li’s underground barter system,” she said.

  “He’s a popular fellow.”

  “Oh?”

  “Another Jesus person apparently wants to meet him too. Some kind of rebel leader of the Remnant group has made inquiries. You know, those chaps seem to be popping up everywhere lately. Can’t remember his name, though.”

  “No matter,” Rivka said. She kept her face placid, but she knew he was talking about Ethan March, and she had an idea why he would want to come to Hong Kong. She struggled not to smile. There was a history between them in Israel. For a while, when Ethan became a Jesus follower after the Rapture and then she did a little later, their p
aths had seemed to follow an identical trajectory. Getting closer and closer. She’d been falling for him hard and fast. But then, somehow, things started getting in the way and it all disintegrated between them. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the stress of survival in a world that had gone from dangerous to insanely brutal. Maybe it was because they were both type A personalities, mission driven. Both of them demanding and perhaps a bit controlling? Yes, that too. They found themselves rushing into the fray, helping fellow Remnant members, fighting the good fight, but growing further apart as they did.

  When Rivka looked over at Hadley Brooking, he seemed to be drifting in his own thoughts. He stared into space and muttered, “Strange times, these.” Then he paused, patting the desk lightly with both hands, and went on. “Back in the U.K., I was raised in the Church of England. Pretty ‘stiff upper lip’ and formal, and all that. Oh yes, it had some meaning for me, but . . . well, I had my own questions. I rather sensed that something was out there. But nothing like what’s going on now. Those mass disappearances. And what has followed. By the way, I was here in Hong Kong as a young solicitor way back in 1997 when Britain gave the island back to China. I was so impressed with it all, thought the whole thing was a thoroughly revolutionary state of affairs. But since then, well, the world seems to have become even more confusing. And more dangerous. And yet the same questions are still there. It can cause a man to think.”

  Across the desk, Rivka saw a man who was searching. But she was there with her own questions and she needed answers, and she needed them quick. So she pressed. “Is Jo Li’s barter system mixed in with the Triad here in Hong Kong? The brothels and drug trade? That’s what I’m worried about. Or is there a legitimate way to buy and sell, underground, without worrying about being part of all that dirty money?”

  Brooking studied her closely. “In the old days, when someone gave you a dollar or a pound note or some other currency, did you ever have any assurance that the last person who used that currency before him wasn’t a criminal? I don’t know you very well, Rivka. For a stranger, you’re asking some very intriguing questions.” Then he added, “From everything that I’ve heard, Jo Li is an economic genius. And a pure capitalist. I know plenty of people, good solid people, who say his system works—and it avoids the unpleasantness of knowing that all your transactions are being watched by Big Brother.”

  Rivka thought Brooking was playing it coy, giving her the “from what I’ve heard” line. He could be an insider in Jo Li’s underground economy; when she’d had her boot at Chow’s throat, he’d confirmed Brooking might know something.

  “Is there any downside to Jo Li’s system?” Rivka said. “For us ‘Jesus people,’ as you refer to us?”

  Brooking looked as if he was still sizing her up. Rivka could see that something was at play, something about Hadley Brooking that remained hidden under the surface. “Let’s talk more about this soon,” Brooking said as he slid his card across the desk. “Call me. We’ll talk. I would like to help you. If I’m able, that is.”

  NINE

  MAVERICK COUNTY, TEXAS

  The two border patrol agents lay flat on their stomachs, hidden in a grove of sand sage and yucca, each of them peering through binoculars.

  The junior agent said, “I hate doing this on my belly. I’ve heard about the coral snakes.”

  “Maybe,” the senior agent replied, “but at least those are easy to spot, the colors being what they are. Rattlers are more likely around here.” He tensed as he saw something off in the distance through his binoculars. “Speaking of snakes. Down there, coming up over the ridge. See them?”

  The other border patrol agent shifted his focus and saw what his senior partner was looking at: three blue Humvees mounted with machine guns coming over a slight ridge. They were flying blue-and-white Global Alliance flags. He cussed loudly. “Okay, now what?”

  “We report back, then get out of here.”

  “That means they’re now fifteen miles inside the borders of the United States. We need to do something—”

  “Just report back,” the other agent spit out. “Nothing more.”

  “I say we request authority to use force.”

  “Right. We’re going to fire our Smith & Wessons at that armored convoy? Think again.”

  “Man, oh man. First the Mexican kidnappers and the drug cartels. Now this.”

  “Let’s go,” the senior agent said. They both raised themselves slightly off the ground and half duckwalked, hunched over, through the brush until they neared their white vehicle with the diagonal green stripe. The patrol vehicle was on top of the ridge about fifty feet away, but in an area clear of underbrush or cover.

  The senior agent said, “We’d better make this fast. Once we climb into our ride, I’ll call it in to HQ and then we can bug out of here.”

  They were still hunched over as they scuffled through the dirt toward the patrol Hummer. Then the junior agent stopped and half turned around. “Did you see that? A puff of smoke! Couple of feet behind me, coming off the ground. They just took a sniper shot at me!”

  “Keep heading to the Hummer,” the senior agent growled.

  As he continued toward the patrol vehicle, the other agent raised his profile a bit, unholstered his Smith & Wesson, and aimed it at one of the Global Alliance vehicles.

  “Drop your weapon!” the senior agent yelled. “Don’t give them—”

  But it was too late. Smoke rose from the machine guns on top of two of the Alliance vehicles in the distance, and then a millisecond later the sound of ratta-tat. The junior agent’s chest exploded as several rounds ripped through him and he dropped to the ground screaming in pain. The senior agent dropped to his side and cradled him, covering his bloody body, but no more shots came. The agent dragged his partner over the sandy ground to the Hummer, lifted him into the back, and then leaped into the driver’s seat and jabbed his finger onto the fingerprint tab of the emergency satphone.

  “Man down, man down!” he yelled. “Verify that you have our coordinates. We’ve taken shots from an Alliance convoy. We need a medivac chopper stat! Do you read? Over.”

  OVAL OFFICE OF THE WHITE HOUSE

  Washington, D.C.

  There was a moment, just then, when President Hank Hewbright wondered whether he had made a mistake. Whether he should have convened this meeting in the soundproof, surveillance-immune confines of the Situation Room. Too late now, he thought as he eyed the four cabinet-level appointees and two White House advisors seated around him. But then there would also have been a risk with a meeting even in that hyper-secured location. The word would have leaked out to the rest of the staff that a Situation Room meeting was in progress and they would wonder why. Rumors would fly. At this point Hewbright didn’t really know whom he could trust. And he couldn’t afford to risk a leak to the international community that America was at a Level Red over this newest outrage. He had to keep them guessing.

  The president finished reading the two-page briefing memo on the incident and felt a combination of rage and nausea at the report. He leaned back in the embroidered white couch that sat just a few feet from the outer rim of the seal of the United States of America embossed in the carpet. “Two border agents were shot at. One killed?” he asked with a shake of the head.

  Elizabeth Tanner, Homeland Security director, nodded from her position directly across the large coffee table from the president. “Regrettably, the junior agent suffered massive chest wounds and expired before the medivac helicopter arrived on the scene.”

  George Caulfield, the White House Chief of Staff sitting next to her, interjected, “The Command Center of the Global Alliance has already released a public statement. Their story is that one of the U.S. border agents had ‘threatened deadly force against the Alliance convoy with his weapon,’ and they fired on him in self-defense.”

  President Hewbright turned to William Tatter, his director of the CIA. “And your assessment of these movements along the Mexican border?”

  “
They are definitely coordinated,” Tatter said. “The Alliance has been making the encroachments along our entire southern border almost daily—ever since the vote in the Senate to ratify the Charter of Global Alliance. It seems clear they believe that the action of Congress makes the United States part of Global Region One, eradicating our borders with Mexico in the south and with Canada to the north.”

  The president turned to Terrance Tyler, his secretary of state. “What’s your take on the most recent incursion, Terry?”

  Tyler was leaning back in the upholstered swivel chair, moving it slightly back and forth. “I would say, Mr. President, that this is a deliberate course of provocation. Alexander Colliquin and his compatriots at the Alliance’s Iraq headquarters know we are very vulnerable right now. We are facing a constitutional crisis—”

  Curt Levin, the clearly frustrated White House counsel, broke in. “Your use of the word crisis implies there is a reasonable legal debate over the effect of the Senate vote. But there simply isn’t! The Senate is empowered to ratify treaties. But the Global Alliance isn’t a treaty. It is a wholesale usurpation of the U.S. Constitution, making our nation and its laws and our three branches of government all ultimately subservient to a unified world governmental body with ten international regions and with veto power over every significant decision by the United States government.”

  “Curt, I know your legal position on this,” President Hewbright responded. “And you know that I share your viewpoint. This Global Alliance initiative is tantamount to an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

  “Exactly, Mr. President,” Levin shot back. “Which can only be accomplished under Article V of our Constitution in two ways. Either two-thirds of the states call for a constitutional convention—and that’s never happened in American history since the adoption of our federal constitution. Or two-thirds of the Senate and two-thirds of the House approve the proposed amendment and send it to the states for ratification by three-fourths of the states. Sure, the Senate achieved one minor part of that process, but barely, by just one vote, to reach the two-thirds threshold. But the House has been stalled on a procedural vote for approval of the Global Alliance idea as a constitutional amendment. So this so-called ‘treaty’ has only passed first base so far. No further.”