24 Declassified 04 - Cat's Claw by John Whitman

Author:John Whitman [Whitman, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-02-22T11:05:09+00:00

* * *

3:29 P.M. PST

Consulate General of the People’s

Republic of China, Los Angeles

The Chinese Consulate was downtown, near Vermont and Wilshire and a stone’s throw from Lafayette Park. A run at breakneck speed along the cliffs of Mulholland Drive to avoid the riot area, a race down the curves of Laurel Canyon, and then a hard left turn along Third Street with little regard for red lights and less for anyone else’s right of way, all helped Nina Myers reach the building in under thirty minutes.

She was expected. The demure young woman in the gray dress suit took a cursory look at her credentials, then spoke softly into her tiny headset in Chinese before rising and escorting Nina to a side room with a short, wide table surrounded by thick leather chairs. Her shoes made almost no sound when she walked.

"Water?" was all she said. When Nina declined, she gave a short bow and vanished.

Richard Hong entered a moment later, as boisterous as the girl had been timid.

"Ms. Myers, how are you?" he said in a very American accent, shaking her hand vigorously and dropping down on the couch opposite her and crossing his legs. The table, made more for coffee than for meetings, came only to his raised foot, and he tapped it gently and thoughtlessly. "What can I do for you?"

Nina knew this game, and she didn’t want to play it. She cut through the layers of diplomacy, if for no other reason than she knew it was not the Chinese way. "You can tell me why the Chinese government never told us that Marcus Lee was really Nurmamet Tuman, and why he is giving money to ETIM."

Nina couldn’t have caught Hong more off guard if she’d jumped up on the table and slapped him in the face. The Chinese official straightened, and as he did, the diplomatic facade melted off his face. His black eyes gleamed. He looked at her, then quickly to the door, and then back, and in that moment Nina knew three things: the room was bugged; her accusations were serious enough that Hong thought men might burst into the room; and someone higher up than Hong had decided to let this all play out.

Hong tried to recover by reciting a memorized line. "There is no ETIM."

Nina started to protest, but Hong waved her off, recovering some of his former gallantry. "Oh, of course there are a few malcontents," he said. "But to call them a real organization would be like calling the Clippers a real basketball team, eh? Factual in the strictest sense, but meaningless in the practical world."

"Well, they are real enough to receive two million dollars. And Tuman is real enough to give it to them. He’s also apparently clever enough to change his dossier so that no one noticed that he changed his name, or that he grew up in the heart of the East Turkistan resistance in Urumchi."

Hong glared at her in a decidedly undiplomatic way. She wasn’t intimidated. Very few things intimidated her, and none of them were in this room.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.