The Gift of the Dragon Read online

  After what seemed many hours, Alice could take no more of the swirling and the cold. She stroked toward some lights off to her right. She kept getting caught up in eddies in the current. It took all her effort to keep herself moving shoreward.

  Alice thrashed in the water, each stroke bringing her a few inches forward, until her hand finally touched wood. Feeling in the darkness and seeing what she could in the faint light from the half-moon peeking occasionally through wispy clouds, she guessed she had come to some sort of pier. She scrambled up from the cool water, barely conscious. Unable to walk at first, she crawled on her elbows, feeling dizzy and disoriented. Alice had a vision from a nature program of the first amphibian crawling up from the primordial sea to the land. Before that first one must have been another who tried and failed. She felt like that second salamander, slipping backward into the cold and wet.

  “Pay phone… collect call,” she whispered fiercely to herself. As she crawled up the pier, she found her legs starting to work. Trying to control her shaking, she got to her feet and stumbled up the wooden planks. She moved slowly but faster than a crawl. The pier ended at a gravel path that led through some trees. The gray stones of the path glimmered softly, reflecting more light than the grass and trees surrounding them. A railing ran along the trail, and she held onto it gratefully. Soon, the gravel ended at a paved road, where a lone streetlight struggled to illuminate a large parking lot. Alice saw a brown sign there that read “Steamboat Landing Park” and then listed some rules about camping and dogs.

  She might have been forgetting herself a bit more each minute, but at least now she knew where she was. “Find a pay phone!” She whispered fiercely to herself. Saying it helped her focus. Alice followed the brighter lights ahead, seeking a phone like an undead person in a zombie movie looking for uninfected flesh. She stumbled, bloody and stiff-legged, up the empty street leading from the park and several blocks into an industrial-looking part of some town. A few cars rushed by, but none stopped. That didn’t upset her, she didn’t want to explain her situation to a stranger anyway. Not with my bloody socks wrapped around my head!

  After the second intersection, she saw an orange-and-purple sign marking a convenience store, next to it the welcome blue shine of a pay phone booth, the old-fashioned kind with three walls. She stumbled up to it and managed to hit zero and then started on the number. She needed to check the holes in her shirt a few times to make sure she got it right. Three—then two—and then one. She felt thankful that the number consisted mostly of small digits. The big hole… is a nine! Her memories still seemed to be leaking out with the blood, flowing faster now as she warmed up. She grunted what she had to for the operator to connect her, almost stumped by her name.

  Finally, she heard a voice on the other end accepting the charges and saying, “Hello?”

  Alice blurted, “Help. Downriver from the dam, Washington side. Pay phone near a park named… Steamboat Landing. Not doing well. Shot in the head.”

  The phone asked something.

  “Don’t want to call anyone else. Please, you come. Shot! I’ll be in the bushes at the park. Near the brown sign. Hiding!” Stop jabbering at me, Jenny, a man is hunting me!

  The gentle voice on the phone went on, saying more reasonable things. Alice dropped it.

  Jenny would come, or she would not. I might make it back to those bushes. “If I go now!” She focused on the memory of the park sign and put one foot in front of the other.

  Chapter 3, A Fire in the Night

  Ian

  He looked with disdain at the men disembarking. Heading to an assault in a rented, retired school bus didn’t make him happy. However, in eastern Oregon, an old school bus full of hard-looking people is a common summer sight. The Oregon forests dry out in the summer, and by fall, heat lightning is frequent. By late September, fire crews fighting the blazes regularly used these vehicles to get to fires and to get back to camp when they are done. Or so his local contact assured him. Maybe he just liked seeing Ian McAlister riding around in an old school bus that still read “Grants Pass High School” on the side in faded letters.

  Ian sighed. It’s probably the best choice. After flying into Klamath Falls Airport from Oakland on a chartered Embraer EMB-120 turboprop, a twenty-person team didn’t have that many discreet ways to get from the airport out to the target warehouse. Being a passenger on the plane up from Oakland didn’t make Ian smile either. Though his favorite leisure activity was semi-pro kickboxing, he carried a competitive stunt pilot license.

  He had started flying years ago as a way to drive his frugal father mad as he spent thousands on lessons and then millions on ever faster and more maneuverable planes. But along the way, he found that he loved being alone in a cockpit where he could turn the radio off and scare the pants off everyone beneath him for a while. On a bus or plane, Ian just didn’t like being a rider. The seats in this bus were thinner and more uncomfortable than the seats sported by the Brazilian-made plane. To make things worse, getting to the top of this mostly barren hill—covered in stumps, small shaggy green trees, coyote brush, broom, and large sharp-edged stones—required a long, bumpy drive on a series of dirt and stone logging roads. Each new one worse than the last.

  Also, he itched. His father insisted that he cover his golden hair with a dark wig if he went on the mission and that he paste a fake scar on his face. He did look good this way, dangerous. And he didn’t look like himself, which was his father’s plan in the event Callan slipped out of the trap.

  “It is a contingency plan, Ian, in case things do not work out. If he sees you or questions one of your men, Callan will think you are Michel Thorn and blame Laird Northwin for the attack. I still may be able to get the tablet from him peaceably, but not if he thinks I am hunting him,” his father explained before Ian took off from Washington, D.C.

  Ian didn’t plan to fail, however. That’s one thing I am terrible at.

  Callan

  Nightfall came softly as the breeze changed with the setting sun. The noise of trucks and SUVs on the Dalles-California Highway occasionally broke the sigh of the wind over Klamath Lake. The wind wheezing over the water also brought the smell of rotting plants mixed with spoiled-egg diesel stench from the trucks.

  Callan Grant sat on the flat roof of a warehouse hard by the side of the road. A faded sign on the side of the building named it Blue Green Planet Farms. He lit a hand-rolled cigarette with a silver Zippo and sipped on a green drink made from the local produce. After falling on hard times—as the exhausted, over-irrigated desert sand produced less rice every year—Klamath Falls now lay in the throes of a new boom. The dying rice fields received large doses of fertilizer as their owners tried to extend their fertility a few more years. Much of the fertilizer eventually washed into the lake, stimulating great, floating mats of blue-green algae. By turning the algae into rank-smelling powder that sold for one hundred dollars per ounce in health food stores around the nation, industrious locals managed to ride the wave of baby boomers seeking magic cures.

  Life finds a way to continue, thought Callan, amazed that a lake dying from overuse of fertilizers made from mined bird dung could produce a crop so sought after in the cities that it could make people rich. As rich as a man can be and still live in this small, dusty town.

  Though only early evening, it was already late for the algae farmers who would awaken early to get the harvest off the lake and into industrial freeze dryers, where it slowly changed from near-black, slimy goo to a dark, dry powder. Except for the truckers hauling the harvest out on the deer-infested roads, most of the townspeople were either deeply asleep or on their way there by sunset.

  Callan had taken over this warehouse, buying it for a song after the former owner went deeply into dept. Though the algae brought prosperity to many, the blue-green gold rush didn’t work out for every prospector. Callan's operation here managed reshipping for merchandise bought with stolen credit card numbers, not blue-green muck.

  A once simple way to
generate cash from plastic involved purchasing expensive goods with stolen credit cards and then reselling them on classified advertisements websites like Markslist and Yodel. But online sellers grew wise to this scam and started being more careful about where they would ship. Few shipped to Nigeria anymore, for example.

  This led to the development of sophisticated reshipping scams like the one Callan ran here at Blue Green Planet Farms, where the merchandise got sent to a US address and then got picked up by one of Callan’s runners after it arrived. The runners brought the goods back to a warehouse, and from there they reshipped the merchandise out to Callan's people overseas.

  The operation depended on a steady stream of greedy fools, known as “drops,” who signed up for “make wads of cash working from home” job advertisements. The “job” consisted of claiming that they didn’t order the goods or that the packages never arrived. In most cases, the online sellers accepted the loss of the merchandise as the goods were cheaper to write off than to try to track down. In all but the best neighborhoods, the police were too busy with major crimes and issuing revenue-generating tickets to spend much time investigating packages lost in shipping. Since the cards were also stolen, it made for an almost victimless crime as the original card owners didn’t have to pay the fraudulent charges. Both the credit card companies and the merchants charged the losses against their corporate income taxes, so the only one who really lost money was the US government. And they just print more.

  Callan's operation in Klamath Falls was one of his reshipping coordination centers, where his people collected the merchandise and repackaged it for resale. Back when Callan had set all this up, he had visited most of his drops—to check them out and make sure they were not the type to try to steal the stolen goods.

  Of the few who had tried, none had lived to tell the story. His people were good at creating a few more bodies to add to the thirty-three thousand dead Americans marked down as suicides every year. His people were also good at explaining the rules of the game so that faking a person’s self-destruction didn’t need to happen too often.

  Most of the drops worked for only a month—and then received no further communication just before their first paycheck was due. The police did visit some, but all the information the drops knew was fake, so the investigators never had a trail they could follow very far.

  Callan kept the algae production business of Blue Green Planet Farms going to provide cover. The city of Klamath Falls sat well off the beaten path, but the new local prosperity created good cover for his operation as the boom conditions meant that a few more trucks going back and forth with Callan's wares were not noticed among the herd carrying superfood to the superstores.

  From the roof, he could see up and down Route 97, a road that runs board-flat along the lakeshore, and behind him the scrubland rose steeply into the Winema National Forest. All around the warehouse stooped the low, boxy shapes of the freeze dryers used for preparing the product, giving him a 360-degree view of the dry, flat land to the north and south, the rocky hills to the east, and the lake to the west. At night the grounds were brightly lit as the algae factory ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  Ever since the hit on Peter Moore, Callan had been waiting for Franklin McAlister’s response. McAlister had paid in advance for the job, but Callan had not completed it. Not really. He had taken something from Moore, something McAlister wanted. Callan hoped to find out how badly. Knowledge worth waiting for.

  Satisfied that this night would be a quiet one, he stamped out his half-smoked cigarette and went back into the building and down to the third floor where the computers and people running the profitable part of this operation were clicking and clacking along.

  Ian

  The well-lit warehouse sat about a tenth of a mile down the hill. Through his night-vision binoculars, Ian could see workers moving about, doing whatever needed to be done at oh-dark-thirty with their godforsaken harvest in this armpit of a place. He didn’t have his first choice of a strike team. At least a few good men were here with Ian on this mission. Joaquin, the Argentine. Former Special Forces. Not a man he had worked with before, but Ian could tell a great deal about a man by watching him. Alvarez, the ex-marine. The rest of the men were hired guns Ian had never partied with before. No time to put together a better team. His wily little brother, Trevor, had discovered Grant’s location. The idiot had planned to have Laird Northwin send in a Guardian Security team to bring Grant in. Guardian Security was part of the Apple Creek conglomerate, of course, but of the part controlled by Northwin and CEO Robert Brandon, and could not be trusted to maintain secrecy regarding things that affected the McAlisters.

  Ian’s father, Franklin McAlister, had managed to abort Trevor’s plan before it caused any trouble, but Ian had said that if little Trevor had located Grant, then Northwin would also have known his location soon, and Franklin had agreed with Ian. So then he called Alvarez and had him round up a crew of wet-work specialists. His father had not wanted Ian to go on the mission at all; however, when he realized how determined Ian was to go, he had laid down one condition. To everyone on the team other than Alvarez, Ian would be Michel Thorn, Northwin’s right-hand man.

  Although impersonating a lesser being rankled Ian, he could see his father’s wisdom. Grant’s skillset did chalk up to a close second to Ian’s own capabilities, and with Ian stuck with this bush-league team, Grant might well escape. Unless Ian could find him first.

  That would be a glorious fight!

  Ian gave the signal to begin, and the men moved down the hill like a silent river, flowing from one rock to another. Trees got a little wider—then narrow again—as the men stopped behind them for cover. The desert night sang with the sound of crickets, concentrated near the life-giving lake. Getting in position, the four-man sniper team shouldered their Russian Vintorez silenced rifles. Ian touched his earpiece and clicked the send button twice. He counted as he got single clicks in return. When he heard twenty all-ready signals, he sent three clicks, the command to go. The snipers’ guns made soft clacking sounds as they picked off anything moving down below. Joaquin moved off to the side, his assignment being to disable the vehicles parked in the roadside lot along the lake and then to head out to the docks to disable the boats. Ian didn’t want anyone escaping from this place. He would happily kill everyone, including Grant, if he could recover what had been stolen.

  He thought of his family and what might happen to them if the tablet’s lock were cracked or the key turned up. That must not happen. He looked up as a long cloud blocked the three-quarter moon. The silent snipers had taken out everyone moving so far. They had also shot out a few lights by accident, risking alerting those in the warehouse. Third string team. Ian stood up, stooping to keep from being silhouetted against the sky, and glided with the rest of his men down the hill.

  Music inspired Ian, and he had a soundtrack for most events in his life. His song for tonight was Garbage’s “The World Is Not Enough.” He mouthed the words as he silently moved down toward the lights below.

  Callan

  The people working on the computers and phones were very valuable. They made new connections and burned the old connections every month. That kept the operation running and the funds coming in. Callan had first taken this operation, along with a few of the techs, from a man named Miguel Lescano. Lescano had met an unfortunate end when he tried to stiff Callan in a gun deal. Afterwards, Callan worked the lists and plans of Lescano and did even better with them. It had been easy to offer the field people and techs a few more points. It had amazed Callan that, with an operation pulling in a ninety-percent profit, Lescano took most of it and paid his techs and field men a pitiful percentage. Callan found it easy to co-opt these experts, being happy to scale back his profit margin to a respectable fifty percent, and share the rest of the wealth with the people who did the hardest part of the work.

  One of his techs, Marko, typed furiously. The sign of a mark on the hook. Often, they used Intern
et chat software to answer questions from new mules and get them into the program.

  Callan only paid half his mind to the busy techs in the bullpen. His reshipping scam and gun-running operations were making him a few comfortable millions every year, yet he lived for the high risk–high reward of assassination. He made as much in a week as he did in months of managing scams and import/export shipments. He took on only very high-value targets. Targets like Peter Moore.

  Callan turned over the small tablet computer, a customized Pixel Qi Rugged Tablet that he had taken from Moore’s dead body. The “Rugged” in the name meant waterproof, with rubber sides, shock resistant. He remembered the instructions of his client, Franklin McAlister.

  There is a tablet. Kill Moore. Get the tablet. Also, there is a necklace shaped like a dragon. Get the tablet and the dragon necklace, and give them both to me.

  Callan had found the tablet with Moore but not the necklace. He had not managed to get Moore to tell him anything about the tablet, but searching Moore’s cell phone and office, he had discovered text messages and ticket receipts. He had deduced from these that Moore’s daughter ran off with the necklace, heading for the West Coast.

  Callan stopped himself from thinking of Sara Moore. He needed to be in a different place to do that. He had known Sara before he had taken the job. I thought I knew her well.

  Callan turned on the tablet and swiped the unlock button. In the dark room, a pale, gray glow from the small screen lit his face. He put out his clove cigarette and looked over the files on the device for the hundredth time. The encrypted file still sat there, and he still could not open it. His technical team owned some very good decryption tools, but this file had resisted them all. After seventy-two hours running a decryption program on a copy of the file, it had opened, but the copy had contained only gibberish.