Bucked (The Invincibles 6)

“Please call me Stella, Mr. Burns…err…Butler,” she stammered, shaking his outstretched hand.

Burns put his other hand on top of hers. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, lass,” he said before turning to me.

“I’m Buck,” I said, shaking his hand like Stella had.

“I’ve heard promising things about you, young man.” There was the slightest Scottish lilt to his voice.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Shall we go inside?” said Stella, motioning toward the door before leading us up the porch steps. “May I bring you some tea?” she asked once we were in the living room.

“A glass of water if you wouldn’t mind.”

I motioned for Stella to sit on the sofa while I got both her and Burns a glass and poured water in a pitcher.

“Please join us,” Burns said when I set the water in front of them before heading back to the kitchen.

I grabbed another glass and had just taken a seat when I heard my laptop ping with the sound of an incoming video chat. “That would be Decker.”

I grabbed the computer and hit the connect button. “I was just about to call you.”

“Sure, you were, young Buck. Hey, Burns,” he said when I set the computer on the coffee table where all three of us could see him.

“Decker, what an unexpected pleasure.” Burns raised his glass of water toward the screen and winked at Stella.

“What have you got for us?” Deck asked.

Burns set the glass down and leaned forward. “As Decker may have told you, I’d heard of Operation Argead several years ago but only in passing.”

“I also told them you had an idea who burned the op.”

Burns nodded slowly. “There are certain signatures, you see. They’re hidden, of course. Meant to serve as a tip of the hat, if you will. In this case, I immediately recognized it to be the work of Ming Shen-Lin.”

The name sounded familiar to me. “Is that the same Ming who disappeared a couple of years ago?”

When Burns turned to me, I saw a hint of a smile. “One and the same.”

Ming was rumored to have been arrested by the Chinese, accused of being a double agent with ties to the Hong Kong triad.

“This, then, would be the Beijing connection,” I heard Stella murmur.

“One of them,” said Burns, pulling an envelope from the leather bag he’d had slung over his shoulder when he came in and that now sat near his feet on the floor. He handed it to Stella. While she opened and looked through its contents, I saw Burns motion with his finger at Decker, who smiled and looked away from the laptop’s camera.

Stella raised her head, and her eyes met mine. “May I?” she asked Burns.

“By all means.”

She handed the envelope to me.

“I’ll be damned,” Decker muttered at the same time I read the list of aliases for the current secretary-general of Interpol.

Kim Ha-joon was only one of a handful used by Chen Wang-Su, whose father had worked in Chinese intelligence for many years with Ming Shen-Lin.

“Not South Korean,” I mumbled.

“That is correct,” murmured Burns.

As one of the few countries in the world with a long-standing alliance with China as well as critical strategic ties to the United States, South Korea held a unique, albeit tenuous, position in global politics. That China had maneuvered one of their own spies into Interpol’s executive committee didn’t come as a surprise. The only thing that did was that Kim hadn’t yet been discovered.