"Say again."
"Operation Orion is in the process of being closed down by American agents."
"This is not welcome news," replied the voice on the other end.
"I regret we could not have remained in business until Operation Iberville was completed."
"Were the prisoners terminated so they could not talk?"
"No, the raid was conducted with astonishing speed."
"Our chairman will be most displeased to hear of your failure."
"I accept all blame for my mismanagement."
"Can you make good your escape?"
"No, it is too late," said Lo Han solemnly.
"You cannot be arrested, Bamboo VI. You know that. Nor your subordinates. There can be no trail for the Americans to follow."
"Those who were aware of our association are dead. My security guards are merely mercenaries who were hired to do a job, nothing more. They are ignorant of who paid them."
"Then you are the only link," said the voice without inflection.
"I have lost face and must pay the price."
"This, then, is our final communication."
"I have one final act to perform," Lo Han said quietly.
"Do not fail," the voice demanded coldly.
"Good-bye, Lotus II."
"Good-bye, Bamboo VI."
Lo Han watched the monitors as they revealed a group of men rushing toward the mobile security vehicle. They were attacking the locked door when he removed a small, nickel-plated revolver from the drawer of his desk. He placed the barrel inside his mouth pointing upward. His finger was tightening on the trigger when the first INS agent burst through the doorway. The blast stopped the agent dead in his tracks, his gun leveled, a look of surprise in his eyes as Lo Han jerked back in his chair, then fell forward, head and shoulders falling on the desk as the revolver dropped from his hand onto the floor.
PART IITHE LASTOF THE GREYHOUNDS12
April 20, 2000 Hong Kong, China
QlN SHANG DID NOT HAVE the appearance of a corrupt and depraved sociopath who had indiscriminately murdered untold thousands of innocent people. He did not have serpent's fangs, vertical slit eyes, nor a forked tongue that flicked in and out. There was no aura of evil about him. Sitting at a desk in his palatial four-level penthouse atop the fifty-story mirrored tower of Qin Shang Maritime Limited, he looked no different than any other Chinese businessman working in the financial hub of Hong Kong. Like most mass murderers throughout history, Qin Shang went unobtrusive and unnoticed whenever he strolled down the street.
Tall for most Asian men at five feet, eleven inches, he was heavy around the waist, weighing in at 210 pounds, not solid but what you might call chubby, the aftereffects of a taste and appetite for good Chinese cooking. The black hair was thick and cut short, with a part down the middle. The head and face were not round but narrow and almost feline, and matched the long and slender hands. The mouth, oddly and deceptively, seemed fixed in a permanent smile. Outwardly, Qin Shang seemed as threatening as a shoe salesman.
No one who met him could forget his eyes. They were the color of the purest green jade and revealed a black depth that belied a good-tempered man. They burned with a frightening degree of malevolence and were so penetrating that
men who knew him swore he could look through your skull and read the latest stock market quotes. The inward man behind the eyes was a different story. Qin Shang was as sadistic and unscrupulous as a Serengeti hyena. He thrived on manipulation so long as it led to spiraling wealth and power. As an orphan begging on the streets of Kowloon across Victoria Harbor from the island of Hong Kong, he developed an uncanny talent for exploiting people for their money. By the age of ten, he had saved enough to buy a sampan and used it to ferry people and transport whatever cargo he could talk merchants into letting him carry.
In two years, he had a fleet of ten sampans. Before he was eighteen, he sold his thriving little fleet and bought an ancient intercoastal tramp steamer. This tired old rust bucket became the foundation for Qin Shang's shipping empire. The freight line flourished during the next decade because Qin Shang's competitors in the freight trade strangely fell by the wayside when many of their ships mysteriously disappeared at sea without a trace with all hands aboard. Finding their profit margins dropping into the red, the owners of the doomed ships always seemed to find a ready buyer for their remaining vessels and dwindling assets. Operating out of Japan, the company that did the buying was known as Yokohama Ship Sales & Scrap Corporation. In reality it was a front whose parental ties stretched across the China Sea to Qin Shang Maritime Limited.
In time, Qin Shang took a different course from his business peers in Hong Kong, who established alliances with European financial institutions and Western exporters and importers. In a shrewd move, he turned his focus on the People's Republic of China, creating friendships with high government officials in preparation for the day when they would take control of Hong Kong from the British. He conducted behind-the-scenes negotiations with Yin Tsang, chief director of the People's Republic's Ministry of Internal Affairs, an obscure department of the government that was involved with everything from foreign espionage of scientific technology to the international smuggling of immigrants to relieve the country's overcrowded population. In return for his services Qin Shang was allowed to register his ships in China without the usual exorbitant fees.
The partnership proved incredibly profitable to Qin Shang. The clandestine transportation and trade in undocumented aliens, in concert with the legitimate hauling of Chinese goods and oil exclusively by Qin Shang's freighters and tankers, brought hundreds of millions of dollars over several years into the company's many hidden bank accounts around the world.
Qin Shang soon amassed more money than he could spend in a thousand lifetimes. Yet there was a fixed determination in his sinister brain to amass even more wealth, more power. Once he had built one of the largest cargo and passenger fleets in the world, the challenge was gone and the moral and legitimate end of the business began to bore him. But there was excitement in the covert side of his operation. The rush of adrenaline and the intoxication of taking risks excited him like a steep slope of moguls in front of an expert skier. Little did his fellow conspirators in the People's Republic know he was also smuggling drugs and guns along with the illegal immigrants. It was a very lucrative sideline, and he used the profits to develop his landmark port facility in Louisiana. Playing the ends against the middle gave him glorious hours of exhilaration.