Pirate: A Thriller Read online

  The general, Hu Xu well knew, was obsessed with beauty in everything that surrounded him, and that obsession obviously extended to the human form. Everyone under his command, from his general staff to the busboys here at the Dragon, was a study in human perfection. There were exceptions for those with exceptional skills. A tattooed genius with a sketchy haircut, someone like himself, was tolerated. And even rewarded.

  “Good evening,” Madame Li said. “I’m meeting someone. I’m sure he’s expecting me. Major Tang?”

  “Ah,” the beautiful boy said, and the flicker in his eyes was imperceptible to anyone but him. But there was a new sincerity and deference there. He picked up one of the pearlescent vintage telephones arrayed before him and spoke softly into it, waiting for and getting an answer.

  “Certainly, madame,” Wu said, his voice now barely above a whisper. “The major is expecting you. You will be dining this evening up in the Typhoon Shelter Bar. Will you be so kind as to sign our guest register and follow me, please?”

  He signed and then followed the boy down a short roped-off corridor of gleaming and fragrant teakwood. At the far end was a small private elevator, the doors solid bronze and beautifully carved. Scenes, no doubt, of the farming village in the mountains where General Moon had been born and spent his idyllic childhood. Every carving, every painting, every work of art aboard depicted some aspect of General Moon’s glorious life story.

  Wu pressed the button and then clasped his white-gloved hands behind his back. This boy was just too pretty for his own good, Hu Xu decided, he needed some slight physical flaw in order to have some character. I can arrange that, he thought to himself as the doors slid open.

  “Please, madame,” Wu said, bowing and sweeping him into the elevator. “This will take you directly to the Typhoon Bar. I hope you have a lovely evening here with us.”

  “Oh, I shall,” he trilled.

  “And I hope to serve you again.”

  “Oh, you will, my child, you will indeed.”

  Alone in the elevator he threw his head back and roared with laughter.

  He was such a romantic old soul.

  The Typhoon Shelter Bar was on one of the uppermost decks, just below General Moon’s suite of private offices. The views of the harbor at night were spectacular. And so was the food. And so were the martinis. And, knowing Major Tony Tang as he did, so would be the company. He was the most charming man on General Moon’s staff. And one of Hu’s closest allies.

  He had dined with the major at the Dragon any number of times in other guises. On the main deck was a five-hundred-seat restaurant, the Dragon Court, decorated in classic Ming Dynasty style. The cuisine, if one could manage a reservation, was Cantonese and it was superb. Signature dishes included the White Shark’s Fin and Seafood Soup with Bamboo Fungus. But the most celebrated entree on the menu, and Madame Li’s personal favorite, was Chef Gong Li’s Lobster, served whole, the bright red fellow served seated bolt upright, steaming in his own gilded wicker chair.

  The Dragon proudly boasted onboard holding tanks containing live sharks and more than sixty kinds of sea creatures. There was even a UV light seawater sterilization system to ensure freshness and maintain hygiene. No expense had been spared. No detail had been overlooked. General Moon had seen to that. There was no reason a police station couldn’t return a handsome profit.

  The Golden Dragon was, in the tourist guides, or the eyes of thousands who passed through her portals each year, a glittering palace. But, there were many sections not open to the public. These included a number of private dining rooms and banquet halls on the uppermost levels, but they always seemed to be fully booked. In fact, these rooms were bustling Te-Wu communications centers, bristling with high-tech gear and busy twenty-four hours a day. One deck was reserved for the general’s private quarters.

  The Dragon had been Sun-yat Moon’s brainchild.

  Under General Moon’s direction, the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army of China, had begun the multimillion-dollar construction in a Tianjin shipyard three full years before Britain ceded Hong Kong back to China. Engineers had assured Moon that at least five years would be needed to complete such an undertaking. He gave them three. Mainland Chinese workers at the construction yard at Tianjin on the Gulf of Chihli were sworn to secrecy about the massive undertaking on pain of death.

  A great wall of secrecy immediately went up surrounding the project. All anyone in HM Government Hong Kong knew was that a very wealthy Chinese businessman was creating the most magnificent floating restaurant imaginable. The HK leadership was informed that at some point the great barge was to be towed from an unspecified location on the coast of mainland China and moored in Hong Kong Harbor. And that its arrival would coincide with the turnover.

  Finally, on the historic day of the turnover to China, the Dragon miraculously appeared in the middle of Kowloon Harbor. Shrouded in canvas and secrecy, she had been towed into place by three tugs the night before. The harbor police looked the other way and patrol boats were mysteriously absent that night. The insidious power of the Te-Wu was already spreading its tendrils throughout the great city.

  So, bright and early the next morning, the Golden Dragon, gleaming in the sun, was surrounded by sampans and private yachts, all hooting to celebrate her surprise arrival. Amidst a flurry of water-borne celebration, she was surrounded by fireboats that aimed great jets of water over her roofs and pagodas, sirens wailing. After sundown that night, a great fireworks display erupted from barges nearby.

  The magic kingdom of General Sun-yat Moon was officially open to the public. And, unofficially, the new secret seat of power in Hong Kong was now open to the eager masters from Beijing.

  The dreaded Te-Wu now had its long-coveted nest in the former Western stronghold.

  “Welcome to the Typhoon Shelter Bar,” another pretty boy said as the elevator doors parted to reveal the dazzling sight of Hong Kong at night.

  “I believe Major Tang is expecting me?”

  “Indeed he is. Right this way, madame.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Cotswolds

  HAWKESMOOR HAD PASSED DOWN TO ALEX WHEN HIS grandfather died at age ninety-one. The old Cotswolds pile, with countless chimneys and sweeping Corinthian south loggia by Robert Adam, stood against a backdrop of rolling green parklands in the heart of Gloucestershire. It was an idyllic setting for the somewhat terrifying tale now being told to Hawke by the director of the CIA. A black Bell Jet Ranger helicopter with no markings had swooped in and deposited Brick Kelly on a wide lawn, surrounded by lakes, streams, and temples de l’amour.

  Two days had passed since Hawke’s rescue of Harry Brock in the South of France. Hawke was shaving in his upstairs dressing room when he heard the big helo blades batting the air. He looked out his window and smiled. Summer days were always full of promise when a big black helicopter arrived on the lawn. He had dressed hurriedly and run downstairs to greet his old friend Brick.

  At six o’clock that evening, Alex and Brick Kelly were seated in a library smelling richly of old leather and tobacco and countless decades of furniture wax. The ancient plane trees standing sentry outside the tall windows were black against a pale yellow sky. Pelham had laid a fire against the damp chill of the twilight hour. Hawke was sipping his customary Goslings rum, neat, while Kelly nursed a short whisky and soda.

  The two men had just returned from a long afternoon’s walk. The gorse and bramble on the hillside had been still damp from the morning rain. They’d carried a brace of twenty-bore Purdeys to the field but the birds weren’t flying. Too wet. In their rambles they had covered, both literally and figuratively, a lot of ground.

  “What else can I tell you, Alex?” Kelly said, settling deeper into the pale rose damask of the fireside sofa.

  “A lot. Tell me more about this new French Foreign Trade minister Bonaparte,” Hawke replied. “With every passing year he acquires a more Hitleresque persona.”

  Hawke, like everyone else, had long been reading
newspaper and magazine accounts of Luca Bonaparte’s miraculous ascent to power in France. His fiery speeches, his vision of a “New France,” his visits with Castro and Chavez in Venezuela. His rumored secret ties to Beijing. But now Hawke wanted to hear the director’s personal impressions.

  The lanky red-haired Virginia gentleman laced his hands behind his head and stretched his long legs out nearer the fire.

  “Luca Bonaparte,” Brick said with a sigh, “is a goddamn time bomb. Your Hitler allusion is not that wide of the mark. The Foreign Trade minister’s climb to power in the last few years has been nothing short of supernatural. He’s got a magic name. He’s good-looking, charismatic. But he’s also had a lot of outside help. Our long-held suspicions on that have been confirmed. According to Harry Brock, he’s getting it from the Chinese.”

  “Assassinations, rumor has it.”

  “They’re not rumors. Brock is saying Chinese agents killed at least two of the ministers who stood between Bonaparte and his race to the top. We can’t prove it, yet, but we will. That’s today’s real news flash. The French and the Chinese are not only in bed together, they’re screwing each other’s brains out.”

  “I’m not sure I can handle that image,” Hawke said.

  “No choice. You landed smack in the middle of this unholy romance when you grabbed Brock without asking permission. The Chinese are going to be gunning for you soon enough. Bonaparte already is.”

  “What’s in it for the Chinese?”

  “Oil. We think France, now that she’s going it alone, is going to make some kind of move in the Gulf. China will back her. If the alliance proves successful there, Bonaparte will run France at China’s pleasure. That’s President McAtee’s view, and most folks in Washington share it.”

  “The Chinese get a toehold in the Gulf and the French people get a direct descendant of their glorious emperor. It makes perverse sense.”

  “You bet. The name Bonaparte translates to priceless political cachet with the populace of France. France is sick to death of being marginalized politically. The last half of the twentieth century wasn’t kind to them. The French people, and Bonaparte, despise being lumped in with ‘Old Europe,’ as the press now calls them. That’s why they voted against the EU constitution.”

  “So the new France is really the old France.”

  “Exactly. Believe me when I tell you that Bonaparte uses this current nostalgia for past glory to full advantage. The man generates enormous excitement wherever he speaks. Verging on hysteria at times. Even the ancien noblesse seem to go all giddy about him. Aristocrats, farmers, academia. The whole country seems to see him as the second coming.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s got brains, too.”

  Brick nodded. “Brilliant politician. Great student of global military and naval history. Solves solitary chess problems every second he gets alone. That type. I wouldn’t hesitate to use the word ‘genius,’ Alex. And you know I never use that word. I also believe he’s batty as a bedbug.”

  Hawke said nothing, and continued to look at the photograph Brick had handed him, studying the man’s face carefully. He had the same handsome cast of expression, the same hooded and dark almond eyes, as Napoleon. The eyes, that was the thing. They looked as if they could ignite the paper they were printed on. A dangerous opponent by any standard.

  “Is he short, too?” Hawke asked, dropping the paper to the carpet as if it had singed his fingertips.

  “No, but he acts like it.”

  “Napoleonic complex,” Hawke said, grinning. “I didn’t know Napoleon had any children, Brick.”

  “Not with Josephine. That’s where most people get it wrong. The two of them couldn’t bear children together. Her problem, not his, apparently. He strayed from the marital bed. When his mistress, Princess Maria Louisa of Austria, became pregnant with his son and heir, Boney dumped Josephine and married the princess.”

  “And she delivered?”

  “Indeed, she did. Just what Boney wanted. A son. The kid was dubbed Napoleon François-Joseph Charles, heir to the French Empire and the king of Rome.”

  “You’ve done your homework. I remember now that there was a child with the second wife. But I thought the boy died young.”

  “Did indeed. Napoleon’s son died of consumption at age twenty-one.” Brick took another sip of his whisky. He was gradually warming the cold out of his bones.

  “Twenty-one,” Hawke said. “So, this Napoleon the Second would certainly have been old enough to have children of his own.”

  “Exactly. Never married, however. He liked to romp with the sporting ladies who frequented the arcades near the Ecole Militaire. His only known consorts were courtesans and hookers. One of them could easily have given birth to a boy and been paid to keep quiet about it.”

  “What do you think, Brick? Personally. Is this guy going all the way to the top?”

  “He could. He’s a star, Alex. You’ve seen his press. The country idolizes him, schoolchildren make up songs about him, and the current regime in Paris is terrified of him. And, rightly so. President Bocquet and his prime minister, Honfleur, were just reelected by a very slim margin. They’ve already got the long knives out for him.”

  “How so?”

  “The Elysée Palace insiders aligned with Bocquet and Honfleur and their cronies in the mainstream French media now claim the golden boy, Luca Bonaparte, is a fraud. Worse yet, a Corsican. Sacrebleu! Dangerous. Unstable. Naturally they would say that. He’s a clear and present danger to their tenuous grip on power. They’ve already taken to calling him ‘Phony-Boney’ in the right-wing press.”

  “The right wing doesn’t like him because he’s a Mao-style Communist. And the left doesn’t like him because he doesn’t play by the rules. I need to know which side I’m on in this goddamn fight,” Hawke said, and Kelly smiled.

  “You’re on my side. Anyway, Boney actually is a bona-fide Corsican and everybody at Langley who has looked into it says, short of a DNA confirmation, he’s probably a legitimate descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte.”

  “You must be digging up some real dirt on this guy, Brick. Knowing you the way I do.”

  “Yeah. And if we could prove it, we’d shovel it right to Honfleur and Bocquet. Let them do all the work. One of the stories we’re checking is based on a rumor Brock paid a lot of money for while running down General Moon in China. The gist of it is that when Bonaparte was a kid in Corsica he was an assassin for the left wing of the Union Corse. Something called the Brigade Rouge. At fifteen, the kid supposedly murdered his own father. Shot him in front of Napoleon’s Tomb, if you can believe that. Then hung him from the dome of the cathedral for good measure and left him there. Swinging in the breeze right above Napoleon’s sarcophagus.”

  “Good God. Why?”

  “Who knows? The way Brock heard it, his father got sideways with someone. One theory is his father was too right wing for his son’s leftist sensibilities, so the kid popped him. The other is the old man had murdered an American capo from Brooklyn. In those days, the Mob and the Corse were eating at the same table. Sharp elbows. Luca’s father crossed some line, and Luca took him out. He’s definitely got a purge mentality.”

  “Sounds like he can’t decide if he’s Napoleon or Joe Stalin.”

  “Close enough. As you say, Luca Bonaparte, though he would never admit this publicly, is not the moderate left-wing French politician we’ve all grown to know and love. He’s an old-style Stalinist Commie, Alex, with a dash of Chairman Mao thrown in for flavor. If he gets in power, watch out. We think this psychotic French fruit-cake is hellbent on world domination and will gladly kill anyone who gets in his way.”

  Hawke looked at Kelly and said, “I know the world has passed me by when I hear ‘French’ and ‘world domination’ in the same sentence.”

  “It’s not funny and it’s not that far-fetched, Alex. Think about it. We now know for certain that Bonaparte is backed by the boys from Beijing. Beijing happens to possess one of the world’s largest
nuclear arsenals. We have absolutely no reason to believe they won’t use it if we go to the brink.”

  “Why on earth would they ever go to the brink?”

  “Oil. That’s the imperative. They have to have it and they’ll do absolutely whatever is necessary to get it.”

  “Risk nuclear annihilation?”

  “China could lose a number roughly the size of the entire U.S. population in an all-out exchange and still have a billion or so souls to soldier on under the red banner. They are ascendant, the most powerful Communist dictatorship on earth, and the greatest threat we face in this century. Now they’ve got an ally in the heart of old Europe that wants to go along for the ride.”

  “Christ. Teetering on the edge again, aren’t we, old Brick? If the Manchurian Candidate ever wakes up, we’ll have to ask him for advice on how we go about stopping all this.”

  “While he’s wired to a polygraph, obviously.”

  “Can we talk about this over food, Brick? I’m starved, and I think Pelham has our supper ready.”

  “Just one more thing. We think our guy is homicidal, maybe psychopathic. A lot of this kid’s bodies are buried on Corsica. Even more family members, so rumor has it. And no doubt in remote corners of France, too, where his political rise has been a wee bit too meteoric.”

  “Can you actually pin anything on him?”

  “Not yet. Boney’s record has been scrubbed squeaky clean. Nobody’s ever even tried to pin his father’s murder on him, by the way. To this day, it’s booked on the gendarmes’ records as an unsolved homicide. They’ve still got it penciled in as a probable U.S. Mob hit.”

  “Patricide. At fifteen years old. That’s fairly staggering.”

  “Yeah. If he actually pulled the trigger. Some of the New York families had deep roots within the Union Corse in those days. I’ve got an FBI file on my desk an inch thick. Maybe Luca somehow coordinated the hit on his old man with the Mob and then laid it off on them to keep his record shiny and new. He’s had his eye on the throne for a long, long time.”