The Ambler Warning

“Please consider—” Wan started.

  “Feel free to continue your discussion,” the youthful president said, rising to his feet. “But if you’ll excuse me, I have a wife upstairs who is beginning to think she has been widowed by the People’s Republic of China. Or so she has recently hinted. At least in this particular, partial information shall suffice for action.” The laughter that followed was perfunctory, hardly leavening the atmosphere of anxiety.

  Perhaps the young president did not want to know the threats against him; he seemed to fear those threats less than he feared the consequences of political paranoia. The others could not afford to be as sanguine. What Liu Ang did not know could kill him.

  EIGHT

  ST. ANDREW’S PLAZA, LOWER MANHATTAN

  Ambler’s eyes felt sandy, inflamed; his muscles ached. He was seated on a bench upon a large concrete platform between three looming federal buildings, each stone-faced and gray. As in much of lower Manhattan, the giant structures were crowded together, like trees in a dense forest competing for light and air. In most cities in the world, any one of the buildings would have been regarded as a grand edifice indeed. In lower Manhattan, none left any individual impression at all. Ambler shifted again in his seat, not so much to get comfortable as to get less uncomfortable. The jack-hammer of a Con Ed street repair crew, somewhere nearby, was beginning to prompt a headache. He checked his watch; he had already read the New York Post from cover to cover. A vendor across the plaza was selling sugared nuts from his four-wheeled cart; Ambler was thinking about buying a bag, simply to give himself something to do, when he noticed a middle-aged man in a Yankees jacket emerging from the back of a black Town Car.

  The mark had arrived.

  The man was paunchy and sweating despite the cold. He looked around agitatedly as, unaccompanied, he climbed the steps that led from the sidewalk to the plaza. This was someone who knew himself to be acutely vulnerable and was filled with a sense of foreboding.

  Ambler stood up slowly. Now what? He had figured that he would play out Arkady’s scenario as long as he could—that something would come to him when it had to. It seemed entirely possible that the whole thing would prove a dry run.

  Walking toward Ambler rapidly was a woman in heels and a green vinyl raincoat. She had a full mane of tendrilly blond hair, full lips, gray-green eyes. The eyes put Ambler in mind of a cat, perhaps because, like a cat, she never seemed to blink. Incongruously, she was carrying a brown lunch sack. As she approached, her attention seemed distracted by the revolving door to the federal building on the north side of the plaza and she stumbled into him.

  “Aw, cripes, I’m sorry,” she murmured in a raspy voice.

  Ambler found that his hands were now clutching the paper sack, which, his fingers quickly confirmed, did not hold lunch.

  The man in the Yankees jacket had reached the plaza and was starting to walk toward the building. Perhaps twelve seconds remained.

  Ambler opened his tan raincoat—on every block of the city, one would see a dozen just like it—and pulled the weapon from the sack. It was a blued-steel Ruger .44, a Redhawk. More powerful than the job required and certainly too loud.

  He turned and saw that the blonde was seated at another bench, near the building. She had given herself a ringside view.

  Now what? Ambler’s heart was pounding. This was no dry run.

  This was madness.

  It was madness to have agreed to do this. It had been madness to have asked him in the first place.

  The mark stopped abruptly, looked around, and started to walk again. He was no more than thirty feet away from Ambler.

  An intuition glinted and then flared in Ambler’s mind, like the sun passing from under a cloud. Now he understood what he had previously only vaguely, subconsciously surmised. They never would have asked him.

  No doubt Arkady believed what he had been told, but sincerity was no guarantee of truth. In fact, the story made no sense: a risk-averse organization would never give someone of uncertain loyalties an assignment of this nature. He could have easily tipped off the authorities and ensured the mark’s safety. Ergo . . .

  Ergo the whole arrangement was a test. Ergo the gun was empty.

  The mark was twenty feet away, walking steadily to the building on the east side of the plaza. Now Ambler strode rapidly toward him, withdrew the Redhawk from his coat, and, aiming at the back of the man’s baseball jacket, squeezed the trigger.

  There was the quiet, dry click of an empty gun, a sound largely swallowed by the traffic noises and the jackhammering of the Con Ed crew. Feigning dismay, he squeezed again and again, until all six chambers had been hammered.

  He was sure that the blond woman had seen the cylinder rotate, the firing pin twitch without effect.

  Detecting sudden movement in his peripheral vision, Ambler turned his head. A security guard across the plaza had seen him! The guard pulled out his own gun from his short navy coat and crouched in a two-handed firing position.

  The guard’s gun, of course, was loaded. Ambler heard the hard, popping sound of a .38 pistol and the higher-pitched twang as a bullet zinged by his ear. The guard was either lucky or skilled; Ambler could well be killed before he decided which.

  Even as Ambler started to run toward the stairway on the south side of the plaza, he noticed another sudden movement; the vendor, as if panicked, had pushed his wheeled cart into the guard, knocking him over. Ambler heard a pained grunt from the fallen guard and the metallic skittering of the pistol that had been knocked from his hand.

  Yet what had just happened made no sense: no mere bystander would ever move toward gunfire. The man posing as a vendor was surely part of a team.

  Ambler heard the roar of the motorcycle before he saw it, seconds later: a powerful black Ducati Monster, seemingly emerging from nowhere, the face of its driver hidden behind his helmet’s visor. Friend or foe?

  “Jump on!” the driver bellowed at him, slowing down without coming to a full stop.

  Ambler threw himself on the large rear section of the motorcycle’s seat, and the Ducati roared off again. There had been no time to reason through the odds; he had had to follow his instinct. He could feel the power of the engine thrumming against his thighs.

  “Hold on tight!” the driver bellowed again. Moments later, the motorcycle was bounding down the steps at the opposite side of the plaza, the back half-torquing upward wildly.

  Pedestrians on the sidewalk had already scattered in dismay. The driver knew what he was doing, however, and soon the bike had zipped into traffic, maneuvering around a dump truck, a taxicab, a UPS van. The driver seemed to be monitoring the double rearview mirrors for any sign of police. Two blocks north, he turned onto Duane Street and pulled over, beside a standing limousine.

  The limousine was a burgundy-colored Bentley; its driver, Ambler noticed, was attired in olive-drab livery. The passenger door opened for Ambler, and he got inside, settling back on the light tan leather seat. The Bentley was beautifully soundproofed; when the rear door was closed with a solid thunk, the city noises disappeared. The rear cabin was spacious; it was also carefully recessed away from the sight lines of pedestrians or other motorists.

  Despite the immediate sense of seclusion, Ambler was not alone. Another man was already seated in the back, and now he opened a window in the glass partition and spoke to the driver in a soft guttural tongue: “Ndiq hartën. Mos ki frikë. Paç fat të mbarë. Falemnderit.”

  Ambler took another look at the driver: dirty blond hair, a face that was all angles and planes. Now the driver sent the limousine off gently into the city traffic. Ambler’s fellow passenger then turned and greeted him with a cheerful “Hello.”

  Ambler felt a jolt of recognition. He knew this man. It was the man Arkady had promised Ambler he would meet. He’s someone you know. Someone who has worked beside you. A man he had known only as Osiris and who had known him only as Tarquin.

  Osiris was a large man in his sixties, bald save for a fringe of red hair aro
und his ears and nape. He had been soft around the middle when they’d worked together in the Political Stabilization Unit but was always surprisingly fast on his feet. Especially considering his other incapacity.

  “It’s been a while,” Ambler said.

  Osiris moved his head slightly as Ambler spoke, and smiled, his blue, filmy eyes almost but not quite meeting Ambler’s eyes. “Long time no see,” he agreed. Osiris was skilled at making people forget that he was blind, had been since birth.

  Osiris spoke in visual terms, alert to the sun, to the texture of someone’s jacket, and continually translated tactile or auditory information into its visual counterpart. But then, translation was always his forte. Consular Operations had had no more brilliant linguist. It was not just that he could speak and understand all the major languages; he was expert at creoles, minor dialects, regional accents—the languages people actually spoke, not the idealized versions of them taught at language schools. He knew whether a German came from Dresden or Leipzig, Hessen or Thuringen; he could tell the vowels of one Hanseatic province from another, could differentiate thirty strains of “street” Arabic. In third-world regions where multiple languages were found in a single neighborhood—in Nigeria, say, where Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, and strange creoles and pidgins of English and Arabic might be spoken within one extended household—Osiris’s skills could be invaluable. He could listen to recordings that would cause experts at the State Department’s Africa Desk to throw up their hands or ask for a three-month study period, and provide an instantaneous rendition of the rapid-fire palaver.

  “Our driver doesn’t have any English, I’m afraid,” the man known as Osiris told Ambler. “But he speaks Albanian like a prince. In fact, I’m sure most of his fellow expats find him a bit prissy.” He pressed a button and a drinks compartment slid out from the partition; his hands betrayed almost no trace of groping as he removed a bottle of water and poured some into two glasses. He waited for Ambler to take one before he took the other. A man alleviating the natural suspicions of another man.

  “Apologies for all the monkey business,” Osiris went on. “I’m sure you’ve figured out the score. My employers needed to confirm that you weren’t a saw-buck on a string. And it wasn’t as if they could exactly check references.”

  Ambler nodded. It was as he had thought. The setup at the plaza had been a means to verify his bona fides: they had just watched him pull the trigger at a man he had been told was a government agent. Had he still been in the employ of the United States, he would never have done so.

  “What happens to the mark? The guy in the Yankees jacket?”

  “Who knows? Nothing to do with us, really. Apparently, the Feds launched an investigation into price fixing in the construction industry, and that guy got flipped, turned state’s evidence. If you sensed he was running scared, you were right. Lots of scary people would like to see him go down. Just not us.”

  “But Arkady didn’t know.”

  “What Arkady told you is what we told him. He thought he was on the level, because he didn’t know we put him on the slant.” Osiris laughed. “I lied to him, he lied to you, but it got purified in the pass-along, because he believed what he was saying.”

  “A useful reminder,” Ambler said. “How do I know you haven’t been lied to as well—about other things?” He glanced up at the driver’s rearview mirror, experienced a surge of vertigo: the fleshy, balding Osiris was seated next to another man, someone Ambler could not immediately place. Short brown hair, blue eyes, and a face—

  —a face that was symmetrical, almost cruelly handsome. A face it took Ambler a moment to recognize.

  A face that was and was not his own. A face that he had seen for the first time in a Motel 6 and that still had the power to chill his blood.

  “The premise of the question would negate my ability to answer it,” Osiris said, in a deliberative tone. His filmy blue eyes stared sightlessly at Ambler. “So trust your instincts. Isn’t that what you always do?”

  Ambler swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and turned toward the blind operative. “A pop quiz, then. Do you know my name?”

  “How many jobs did we work on together? Three, four? After having known you for all these years, you’d think I would have picked up a thing or two. Tarquin. Real name Henry Nyberg—”

  “Nyberg’s another cover name,” Ambler interrupted. “Used a few times and discarded. What’s my name?”

  “Now you sound like a Ninth Avenue pimp,” Osiris drawled, trying to maintain a jocular tone. “What’s my name?’ ‘Who’s your daddy?’ Look, I understood you’d have questions. But I’m not the information desk. I may have some answers. I don’t have all the answers.”

  “And why is that?”

  Osiris’s opaque blue eyes looked curiously alert beneath his faint, almost porcine eyebrows. “Because some answers are, well, above my pay grade.”

  “I’ll take what I can get.”

  “A little learning is a dangerous thing, my friend. Words to take to heart. You may not want to know what you think you want to know.”

  “Try me.”

  Osiris’s sightless eyes fixed him with a long, considering look. “I know a better place to talk,” he said.

  NINE

  BEIJING

  Though President Liu Ang had retired to his private quarters in another wing of the compound, the conversation continued.

  “What of the photographic evidence you mentioned?” the soft-spoken MSS veteran prompted, turning to Chao.

  The Second Bureau chief, Chao Tang, nodded and removed a dossier from his black portfolio. He spread several photographs across the middle of the table. “Of course, I have already shown this to Ang, with predictable results, which is to say none at all. I have asked him at least to cancel his foreign appearances for the sake of security. He refuses. But the rest of you should see.”

  He tapped one of the photographs: a crowd before a wooden platform.

  “Taken a few minutes before the assassination in Changhua,” said the spymaster Chao. “You’ll recall the event. It was a little more than two years ago. Please notice the Caucasian in the crowd.”

  He distributed another photograph, a digitally enhanced close-up of the same man.

  “The assassin. The man whose bloody handiwork this is. In other photographs, you’ll see him at the location of other killings. A monster indeed. Our spies have learned a thing or two about him.”

  “What’s the monster’s name?” the elderly Li Pei demanded, in his harsh country accent.

  Chao looked distressed by Li Pei’s question. “We have only a field alias,” Chao admitted. “Tarquin.”

  “Tarquin,” Pei repeated, his dewlaps quivering like an old sharpei’s. “An American?”

  “We believe so, though we are not certain who controls him. It has been difficult to filter signal from noise. Yet we have reason to think he may be a capstone actor in the plot against Liu Ang.”

  “Then he must be eliminated,” said the white-haired man, slapping the table. Indeed wily, Chao thought, but indeed a peasant, too.

  “We think alike,” the spymaster said. “Sometimes I worry that Liu Ang is too good for this world.” He paused. “Fortunately, I am not.”

  There were grim nods around the table.

  “In the event, precautions have already been taken. We’ve had a team from the Second Bureau’s signals intelligence unit working the matter. Yesterday, when we gained credible information about his possible whereabouts, we were able to take immediate action. Trust me, the finest this country has to offer is on the case.”

  It sounded like empty rhetoric, Chao reflected, yet in a strictly technical sense he believed it to be true. Chao had found Joe Li when he was still in his adolescence and had taken first prize in a regional shooting competition, run by the local branch of the People’s Liberation Army. Test scores indicated that the boy, despite his rural background, had unusual aptitudes. Chao was always alert for the hidden prodigy; he believed that Chi
na’s ultimate asset was to be found in its numbers—and not merely the brute muscle of cheap labor but the occasional prodigy that sheer numbers were bound to yield. If you shucked a billion oysters, you would find more than a handful of pearls, Comrade Chao liked to say. He had been convinced that young Joe Li was such a pearl and took it upon himself to see that he was prepared for an extraordinary career. Intensive language training began early. Joe Li would become adept not only in the major Western languages but also in the folkways of the Western nations; he would have a mastery of what was common knowledge there. He would also receive extensive training in weaponry, camouflage, Western-style hand-to-hand combat, and Shaolin-style martial arts.

  Joe Li had never disappointed Chao. He had not become a large man, and yet his small size proved an advantage; it made him especially unthreatening and inconspicuous, his extraordinary skills concealed by a carapace of the commonplace. He was, Chao had once told him, a battleship disguised as a skiff.

  There was more to him, however. Though Joe Li did his work with professional dispatch and dispassion, his personal loyalty to his country and to Chao himself was beyond question. Chao had made sure of it. Partly for reasons of security, partly because Chao was mindful of the constant squabbling for resources at the highest levels of government, he had kept Joe Li’s operational controls strictly sequestered. Not to put too fine a point on it, China’s most formidable operative reported to Chao and to no one else.

  “But this Tarquin—he is dead?” asked the economist Tsai, drumming his fingers on the black lacquered table.

  “Not yet,” Chao said. “But soon.”

  “How soon?” Tsai pressed.

  “An operation of this sort on foreign soil is always delicate,” Chao cautioned. “But as I have assured you, we have our very best in place. This is a man who has never failed me yet, and we are supplying him with a steady stream of real-time intelligence. Death and life have their determined appointments, as the great sage has it. Suffice it to say that Tarquin’s appointment is coming up momentarily.”