back into the Late Gothic Hall, where he shook Brognola’s hand before heading back to his SUV. He pulled out of the parking lot, merging with the freeway traffic back into the city. After five minutes of travel, Bolan plugged the USB drive into an adapter on his cell and hit the hands-free function, speed-dialing a number that would connect him to the Farm.
“Speak to me.”
“This is Striker.”
“How’s Hal?”
“All right.” Bolan filled Tokaido in on the general parameters of the task, leaving names out of it. “I’ll square it with Aaron. You’re my man till we see this through. I’m sending you files on the ship and the perpetrators. Start isolating general traffic in the area, satellite passes, law enforcement bulletins, whatever you can find.” “Aaron” was Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, head of the Farm’s cyberteam.
“Okay. You do realize that this’ll be like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack?”
“More like one ship out of a few thousand, but I’m sure you’re the guy to do it. Any word from Calvin on our subject?”
“He’s in the middle of the session now, using that new scopolamine derivative he stumbled across. Probably have a report ready for you by the time you get back.”
“And how’s your infiltration coming?”
Bolan heard a deep breath on the other end of the line. “As far as I know, we’re in. I just got the code of the account to wire the other half of the money. The event starts in four days.”
“Good work, Akira. Ask Aaron to contact Charlie and have him prep the jet. I want to be wheels-up as soon as I hit the airport.”
“You got it.”
“Striker out.”
With the balls in motion, Bolan disconnected, his mind turned to the logistics of such a personal mission, and how to execute it against the framework of a larger one.
CHAPTER SIX
Ninety minutes later, Bolan leaned back in his white leather chair of the Gulfstream G650 that Brognola had arranged to ferry him to New York City and back, grimacing in frustration.
Although there were plenty of crimes going on in the South China Sea—smuggling of drugs, knock-off merchandise and humans, illegal fishing, sweatshops—there didn’t seem to be anything on Stony Man’s radar that would necessitate actually going to the region. Even the fringe Japanese terrorist groups had been lying low recently. It was almost...
Too quiet, Bolan thought. The all-too-apparent lack of activity ironically seemed to point at something going on.
A chime from his combat laptop signaled an incoming videophone message. Bolan opened a window to answer it, and saw Tokaido’s smiling face.
Bolan didn’t mince words. “I assume you’ve got something for me?”
“Yeah. Whoever pulled that file together included every possible scrap of information about the yacht they could find, even down to service records, so my job wasn’t too difficult.”
“And?”
Tokaido tapped keys, and another window opened on Bolan’s screen, showing the lines of a yacht out at sea through the powerful camera of a spy satellite hundreds of miles overhead. The ship’s coordinates were in the upper right corner of the window, roughly 160 nautical miles northwest of the Philippines. As he watched, a speedboat raced in from the north, pulling up to the rear of the large pleasure craft. The detail from the picture was enough to show a dark-haired woman getting off the speedboat, dressed in business attire and carrying a small briefcase.
“Who’s that, and why is a businesswoman meeting with what are supposed to be pirates?” Bolan asked
“The pirates are very real. We found a satellite in the area two days earlier that caught the takeover on the periphery of its camera. They’re definitely hijackers, although they haven’t followed the usual pattern of either stripping and sinking the boat or modifying and selling it. Instead, they’ve stayed on board for the past two days. And now the woman comes aboard, a very unusual piece to this puzzle. We ran her picture through our database and found this.”
A newspaper article from the Hong Kong Standard appeared next to a blow-up and enhancement of the woman’s face. In the picture accompanying the article, an older gentleman was accepting some kind of honor from another suited businessman, the two shaking hands and smiling for the cameras. “The man on the right is Hu Ji Han, a noted businessman and philanthropist in Hong Kong. The man he’s shaking hands with is the chief executive of the city. The woman—” the newspaper photo magnified to reveal her sitting in the first row of the assembled visitors’ area “—is his personal secretary.”
The back of Bolan’s neck tingled with the distinct feeling he got when his instincts told him something much bigger was going on. “Why do I get the feeling that she’s not shopping for a discount watercraft.”
“Hardly. Mr. Hu could buy half the Chinese navy if he wanted, with enough money left over to raise another few skyscrapers in downtown Hong Kong.”
“What do you have on him?”
“Chinese national, sixty-four years old. Rose from nothing to create his business, which specializes in disaster recovery and infrastructure rebuilding. It’s one of the top companies in the nation, notwithstanding the rumors that Mr. Hu overextended himself during the building spree before the Olympics. However, he doubled down on ailing U.S. banks and national companies, such as Ford, Citibank, et cetera, during the fallout from the loan disaster in the U.S., and emerged even richer than before.”
Bolan’s mouth quirked in what might have been the beginning of a smile. “Well, then, I doubt he’s planning to branch out into actual crime. Legal theft is so much more profitable, as everyone saw recently. Still, this is the highest of high society meeting with the lowest of the low. There’s a bigger picture going on here, and we need to find out more than just this little bit.”
Tokaido smiled. “I figured you might say that. What’d you have in mind?”
Here came the tricky part. While Bolan had investigated the death or abduction of relatives of high-powered Washington players before, he didn’t intend to run a revenge mission to satisfy Brognola’s vendetta. However, if the opportunity arose to eliminate these people while they were committing another, even more serious crime, that could work just as well. But he needed a handpicked member with extensive time in Asia to handle this. Bolan knew exactly whom he could call upon for this mission.
“Get me our contact information on John Trent. My plan’s still to stop off in Africa to investigate the Sale in the Sands. Hopefully Trent will be able to take a bit of a vacation and take a look into whatever is going on in Southeast Asia, not to mention the infiltration of this pirate group.” Bolan’s gaze went back to the open video window, where the woman was leaving, reaching down with one hand to enter the boat, her other hand outstretched to keep her balance.
Her empty left hand.
“She left the briefcase behind.” He peered more closely at the picture, but it faded into static as the satellite passed out of range. His head snapped up, his ice-blue eyes staring back at his computer
