"Those old guys? As you say,
style
is what they're all about. Tongs don't mean much anymore. Tongs were little family-run businesses. Big Crime is what it's all about today. Big Crime has intergalactic scope, diplomatic immunity, a line of T-shirts. I need the bodyguards because, would you believe it, my ex-wives like to hassle me. Every last one of them would rejoice to see my head dripping on a sharp-pointed stake."
He was watching Bertie again with a covetous smile, as if he hadn't learned any lessons about women. The air-conditioning was on so low it felt chilly where they were, but Danny Cheng was perspiring. He also seemed to be getting the shakes. Sherard noticed an old man with a freckled yellow head that looked as fragile as papier-mâché. He had come quietly into the display room. He wore red carpet slippers, wrinkled black kung fu pants, a gi with a black sash and the emblems of a highly advanced martial artist. He looked serene, unassuming, knowledgeable about deathblows.
Danny Cheng seemed to be aware of the old man's presence before he turned around.
"May I present my father, Chien-Chi?" he said, his hands trembling as he reached for a pocket handkerchief.
Sherard introduced himself. Chien-Chi glanced at Bertie, who came promptly to him. They bowed to each other. Bertie had a black belt of her own. She addressed Chien-Chi as "Master." He made a steeple of fingers that resembled chickens' feet.
"It is an honor to welcome someone so gifted as yourself into our home," Chien-Chi said to Bertie, his voice faint.
Danny Cheng pushed his dark glasses up on his forehead and blotted perspiration from around his weak-looking eyes. Sherard glanced at him.
"This? It's nothing. A bug I picked up in Thailand, comes and goes at inconvenient times. I call it the three-minute ague." He dropped the glasses back onto the wet flat bridge of his nose. Bertie had grasped the prayerful hands of Chien-Chi, whose head remained bowed. They were like that for a few moments. Bertie then said something to him in Mandarin, and slowly, with a thoughtful look in her eyes, released him. Sherard wondered what was going on.
Danny Cheng clenched and unclenched his hands. "What I could use right now is a drink. Tom?"
"Danny, we're both grateful for the hospitality you've shown us tonight, but I thinkâ"
Bertie looked at him. "It's all right, Tom. It isn't late yet. And I'd like to spend more time with Chien-Chi. That's why I'm here. It's important to him."
D
anny Cheng's study, in the east wing of the renovated and expanded house, had a view of the Marina district and the bay beyond. It was a large room with minimal furnishings and decoration, a
feng shui
creation that was gracefully impressive. There were two lacquered benches with red saddle leather seats facing each other across a rectangular pearl-gray carpet that took up a third of the flame-finished, dark gray granite floor. A pleasing black oval table lacquered to a mirror finish was at the head of the carpet, eight feet from the unadorned bay windows. Cheng used the table as a desk. There was nothing on it but a laptop computer, a small lamp, and a pale yellow wooden bowl filled with river rocks.
He seated Chien-Chi close to him, with Bertie beside the old man and Sherard on the bench seat opposite. Cheng sat down behind the table. A Chinese girl with a serpentine braid down the middle of her back wheeled in a drinks cart. There were several small carafes filled with pale liqueurs on the cart, a fifth of Glenfiddich, and ginger ale for Bertie. The girl served Chien-Chi from one of the carafes, pouring a few precious drams into a thimble-size glass.
"Snake semen liqueur," Chien-Chi said to Bertie. "It restores the vigor of old men like myself."
Danny Cheng was looking at the screen of his laptop, tapping damp fingers on the table.
"Potent stuff. It's from the five-step snake. Chinese rattler. They call it that because after you're bitten, you take five steps and croak."
"How old are you?" Bertie asked Chien-Chi.
"I don't know. They kept no birth records in the district where I was born. And my mother was too poor to pay an astrologer to draw up my horoscope as soon as I came into this life. But old is old. I know I'm near the end of my last earthly cycle." He took a tiny sip of the snake semen liqueur. "I have had three wives and fourteen children. Danny is the son from my third wife, who was part Hawaiian. She was a doozy."
Danny Cheng looked up. "You shouldn't talk about Mom like that."
"Is that an offensive word? Her unique character is not easily described in any language. No disrespect was intended, even though she left me for a younger man who had a Buick dealership." He turned to Bertie. "I also had a daughter from my third marriage. Did you see her when we touched hands?"
"Yes. She ... she's lovely. And very much on your mind."
Chien-Chi acknowledged her hesitation with a slight sad nod.
"What did you see about me?" Danny Cheng said with a fretful grin, mopping his face.
"Your father," Bertie said, "finds you trustworthy and dutiful."
"I was wondering," Sherard said, "if there was any bad information on Bertie and me in that file you've been consulting."
"Appears to be straight biography," Danny Cheng said with another glance at the laptop screen. "You were married to Gillian Bellaver. We both know why she was killed, no need to go into that." He paused, tapping a key. "You flew to San Fran today on United listed as G. W. Hunter. Same name on the hotel registry. What does the G. W. stand for, Great White?"
"I make these little jokes."
"Complete with quality fake ID and important credit cards. We do travel in the same circles after all. But if you're here on the q.t., you picked the wrong traveling companion. One of the great beauties of our time. I would have stopped the sweats already if Bertie Nkambe wasn't in the room with me. Wearing motocross leather. A high, high Michael Kors turtleneck that cradles those fantastic cheekbones. I just had to say it. I'm not coming on to you, Bertie."
"What do you know about my aunt Gillian?"
"He doesn't know anything," Sherard said. "Let it lie there."
"I'll take that challenge. There's a certain top cop who is as paranoid about psychics as Hoover was about the NAACP. Did you get that far with it yet?"
Sherard looked at Danny Cheng. Cheng reached for the cut-glass tumbler of scotch that the girl had placed on the table near him, but his hand was trembling and he didn't pick it up.
"No," Sherard said.
"Consider that information part of the hospitality package. In exchange for whichâ" On a second attempt Cheng was able to get the scotch to his lips without spilling any. He swallowed and put the glass down and joined his hands tightly. "In exchange I want something from Bertie."
Bertie cocked her head and said, mildly amused, "In front of your father?"
Chien-Chi looked at Bertie and they laughed together.
"That sly wink of yours. A megaton turn-on. But Danny Cheng is all business tonight. All I'm asking is for you to put your Gift to work and dish some info. My honorable father and I would then be in your debt for a hundred lifetimes to come."
Sherard said, "Why don't you use that peeper selling watercolors in Chinatown?"
"Lu Ping. My niece. Having your own psychic is more than a status symbol nowadays. Time's coming when you won't be able to conduct business, or protect your business, without one. Computers? What's a machine to minds that can stop a clock? That's what you might call an ironic paradox. I was fortunate to find another psi-active in the family. Lu Ping is definitely a talent, but not an operational talent. Did you actually kill a lion with your bare hands?"
"No, that was Tarzan."
"Apocryphal, huh?"
"Bertie's not an operational talent either," Sherard said. "She's not in the Game, and she's not going to be."
"Just let me delete this information about the lion. Bad information has a way of driving out the good. Usually because it's more colorful."
Sherard wished the bench he was sitting on had a back to it. He stretched his left leg out slowly with a tired wince and sipped his own scotch, looking at Bertie and Chien-Chi. They were conversing quietly, earnestly, in Mandarin. Sherard felt uneasy.
"Let me put your mind at ease about something," Danny Cheng said, tapping on the laptop keys.
"Rather too late for that, Danny."
"I don't have anything to do with MORG. I've never been a joiner. Other than that, I just don't like the bastards. My sister may have been on the plane that crashed today up in Innisfall. It was a MORG paramilitary unit that hit the psi underground's cloister on Maui at one-thirty this morning. They were after Kelane. They got her. My information is good up to that point. Good information is cool and shapely, it breathes on its own. Good information makes my nipples stand up. There's some other stuff I don't quite trust yet. Bits and pieces are still coming in. I'm trusting you all the way here, Great White Hunter. Rona Harvester, code name Zephyr, was on one of those black helicopters, overseeing the entire operation."
"Or it could've been Tarzan."
Danny Cheng went back to his laptop, fingers skimming over the keys.
"No, wait, it fits. Rona Harvester was in Hawaii yesterday and today. Little-known fact: Rona has been guarded by a detail of MORG agents instead of the Secret Service since the President had his stroke."
"They didn't do much of a job guarding her this afternoon."
He smiled in a sensual way. "I have information about that too. The best. It's shapely, it swings its ass, it blows in my ear, it gives me a hand job."
Bertie pursed her lips in a soundless whistle and looked up at the ceiling. Chien-Chi appeared to have dozed off.
"The black helicopter that hit the motorcade belonged to MORG. An HPD helicopter that was in the vicinity pursued it until the pilot was ordered to break off and return to base. Who gave that order? Unknown, but it had plenty of swinging dick behind it. There was no other pursuit. No Air Force or Marine jets were scrambled, although they were only a few miles away. The black helicopter was last seen flying at treetop level toward a supposedly inactive military airfield at Waimanalo Bay, on the north shore of Oahu."
"TV reports had two of the MORG agents in the motorcade detail on the critical list. You're telling me MORG would hit their own people?"
"If that's what Rona Harvester wanted them to do. She came out of it looking like Joan of fuckin' Arc. A hell of a lot more presidential than that baby-faced weenie Dunbar. I think the hit on the motorcade was planned by Harvester and staged by some of the same ops in MORG's Elite Force who raided Maui and took my sister."
"Took her where?"
"The original flight plan of TRANSPAC 1850 had Plenty Coups, Montana, as its destination. You know about Plenty Coups, of course."
Sherard nodded.
"But the plane's course was changed in midflight. They'd have had Kelane doped to the gills, but still she could have done it. Interfered with the controls somehow. I don't know anything about DC-10s. This isn't hard information. It's all speculation. But my father and I believe Kelane is dead."
Chien-Chi opened his eyes. Bertie reached over and took his hand. "She had psychotronic ability?" Sherard asked.
"Her mind had an affinity for machines, but there was more to Kelane than that. Professionally she was a neurosurgeon, although she hadn't been able to practice for the last couple of years. She spent most of that time on the run. MORG wanted her. They wanted her bad."
"For what?"
"That's what I'd like to know."
"Did Kelane know why they were after her?"
Danny Cheng looked at his father. "I think so. She wouldn't come to us. Too dangerous. We both knew MORG was watching me, watching this house."
"Thanks for bringing us here," Sherard said in exasperation.
"You don't have anything to worry about. MORG broke off its surveillance of Danny Cheng a week ago. I should've realized then that they finally had a lock on her."
"Were you able to tell your sister? Or didn't you know where she was until today?"
"It was best that I didn't know. Kelane communicated with me by E-mail. No return address. I heard from her last two days ago. She said she loved us. By the tone of her letter she was depressed. She said, 'I can't stop thinking about Portland. I never believed they would do it. All because of me. And I'm afraid there will be another Portland soon, if I don't give in to them. I'm afraid. I'm afraid.' "
The mention of Portland invited silence and gloom. Portland was wreckage still faintly glowing from nuclear heat dumped into their midst, disturbing the masterful harmonies of the room. Unthinkable that, there could be another Portland in the American landscape. Another medium-sized partly emptied city with a crater of sea-green trianite where the bus station had stood. Ten years from now when the crater had cooled down there would be a memorial park around it. Schoolchildren would raise money to plant dogwoods. Bertie rubbed one side of her face as if something had bitten her. She looked hazily around the room.
"'They' being MORG?" Sherard said to Danny Cheng.