Chapter 19
The next day, a nondescript sedan pulled into LA's Chinatown and disappeared into a private parking structure. At the same time a surveillance, based on rumors passed on to the police by usually reliable informants, began on incoming flights from mainland China and Hong Kong. It was soon expanded to all points east of Los Angeles, as updated information filtered in from the street.
Meg Coburn spent the day sitting by the phone, or in this case, phones, her land line and her cellular.
Slowly going out of her mind.
Calls were received all day on the land line, forwarded electronically from the number she'd given out to Loco and his like in her two day trawl through the LA underground. The relay was filtered through a communication center where every call was taped and traced.
But the calls had been of little import--the usual street scum looking to align themselves with anyone on the scene who might wield some power and have money to spare.
As the day wore down to evening, she'd received periodic updates from Zedkov, who while not at the airport, relayed updates from his men on scene. Thus far the surveillance had been fruitless, no likely candidates for the mysterious triad figure had presented themselves at customs. The surveillance was scheduled to continue for the next several days.
Meg knew that she would not be able to sit idly by and wait for something to break.
She was going to have to be proactive.
Lau Ruong-Jie found himself in the middle of a frantic and confusing forty eight hours. After spending almost two days in relative inactivity, Meg Coburn was again on the move. He had puzzled over her itinerary which ranged from high profile banks to triad run gaming parlors, to high rent office buildings and luxury homes.
The limousine didn't make a repeat appearance, but the car she'd taken from John's loft home turned out to be a quietly elegant luxury model, that well suited the professionally dressed young woman who emerged from her apartment.
To her credit, she was not an easy subject to pursue, Lau found himself using all his skills
just to keep her in sight. He'd been on immediate alert for signs of danger at some of her more unsavory stops, but she had handled herself competently, with no need for his intervention.
It had slowly come to him that she was operating with a definite plan in mind. While he could not hope to fathom it, he had become convinced it had nothing whatsoever to do with document forging. Rather, it was almost as though she were setting up a new business, securing financing, opening accounts, looking for office space and living accommodations. Making business contacts.
That the contacts were in large in the underground gave him a niggling feeling of suspicion. He'd been very close to calling Jian to see if he could shed any light on her activities, but without solid evidence of what she was up to, he hesitated to do so. He could not follow her so close as to determine how much of what she did was genuine action and how much was for show. Her demeanor was forthright and goal oriented, and aside from her tendency to be surreptitious at the most unexpected times, he didn't doubt that she was carrying on business, though he couldn't guess its legitimacy.
But might that not be exactly the image she wished to project?
What if he and Jian and been deceived about how much she knew or suspected of the vague threat to Li Jian-Hui? What if she knew precisely as much as they did, and was launching on her own hunt for the mysterious nemesis?
What better way to bait a resurgent gang leader, than to present yourself as his rival?
Alarm bells went off in Ruong-Jie's head. He reached for his cell phone as he followed Meg back to John's loft.
John Lee paced the room, watching Ran Ji-Mu his mother's brother, speak into the telephone. Ran spoke Mandarin into the handset, paused, waiting for an answer.
John Lee chafed that he could not hear both sides of the conversation. he was fluent in the language, followed his uncle's words perfectly, but was impatient for the answers to the questions his relative was asking.
A moment later, his uncle disengaged the call, looked at John and spoke in Cantonese.
"It seems the brothers have been misinformed," the older man announced, his expression troubled. "Deliberately misled. There is no 'Dragon', no relative of Wei from Hong Kong triads."
"Your source?" John challenged.
"Unimpeachable. Highly placed. If anyone would know, it would be he. Above rumors. He deals only in facts."
John had waited over four days to receive the information, the route that his uncle must take to contact his informant, circuitous, clandestine. John did not know who the contact was, nor did he care to. But he trusted his uncle's faith in the man.
This breakthrough coincided with a conclusion to the business end of settling his mother and sister in the Seattle area. The contracts had been signed today, all that remained was for them to arrange to move into the condominium they had both fallen in love with.
"Who then is behind these fabrications? What is their game? We've not been followed here. There have been no threats. Lau Ruong-Jie is satisfied that no one follows Meg."
John's uncle was regarding him with sympathetic concern. Whoever this 'Meg'
was, she obviously had captured his nephew's heart. Jian had spoken of her but rarely, but intelligence gleaned from sister and niece informed him that she was the center of Jian-Hui's life. No wonder he'd seemed uneasy and aloof meeting family he'd not seen in decades. It was obvious that his heart and mind were in another place, his true focus far away.
" My informant suggests looking closer to home. Wei's old gang. There was some regrouping in San Francisco of the few not arrested or deported. They've kept a low profile for many months. Only this week has there been noticeable activity. "
Further conversation was interrupted by the chiming of a cell phone. Jian grimaced, reached into his pocket and fished out the device.
"Wai?....Ah Ruong!...."
It was Ran Ji Mu's turn to listen to a once sided phone call. He watched as Jian-Hui's demeanor changed from determined concentration to something akin to panic.
"I must return to Los Angeles," John announced abruptly deactivating the phone. He'd said it in English, eyes large in a pale face.
His uncle nodded.
Meg checked her wristwatch, counting the minutes until she could make her way back to her apartment. The loft grew more cavernous and haunted the more she came back to it, her mind playing tricks on her to fill the deathly stillness that surrounded her.
She thought she'd heard Lee Ma laugh in one of the upstairs bedrooms, Liu Shen call softly in Cantonese from the stairway. She'd turned around on the couch once, a smile on her face imagining that she'd heard the familiar sound of John's footfalls coming up behind her.
She was losing it, she knew. She hadn't slept decently since John had left, the problem compounded by her anxiety that her plan bear fruit before he returned.
As the days passed with no breakthroughs, her tension had grown. She wasn't sure how long she'd be able to keep it together at this rate. And her masquerade depended on having a calm demeanor and steady nerves.
She took a final look at her wristwatch and gathered her things to leave, instinctively patting the cell phone in her pocket. Without knowing, she accidentally deactivated the device.
Meg Coburn took a deep breath and entered the private elevator, her car keys in her hands.
Ruong picked up on her car as soon as it exited the parking structure, retreating to his own vehicle once he saw the private elevator from John's loft activated.
Li Jian-Hui was even now on his way to board a flight to Los Angeles. Hopefully, he was already talking to Meg on the cellphone, arranging for her to stay in her apartment until he arrived.
Ruong had the light at the first intersection beyond the Remington Building , his gaze fixed on Meg's taillights so intently that he did not see the car come at him from the right. He felt the impact and the car spin, then all went black.
Meg glanced in the rearview at sound of the collision, her eyes flicking back to the road ahead of her. Sadly, automobile accidents were no rarity in LA, not even in the better parts of town. She sent up a small prayer to whoever might be listening that no one had been hurt, and continued on her way, intent on her destination.
She was looking forward to getting home and to her nightly call to John. Maybe he'd have good news for her. Maybe he'd know when he was coming home.
But that would also mean she'd failed in her objectives over these last few days and that she might have a lot of explaining to do. While Zeedo could back up her story with John, reintroducing the two would present its own problems. And that still left the threat to be dealt with. Better for her plans, if worse for her heart, that he announce some delay in his return.
She was tired. She'd worry about all that later. After she'd talked to John.
The drive home was uneventful. She started taking deep breaths as she pulled into her parking garage, hoping to perk herself up a bit for the short walk from the parking garage to her apartment building. She knew she couldn't afford to let her guard drop, at least until she got into her apartment, locked the door and activated the alarm system.
Meg Coburn never knew where the anesthetic dart that pierced the skin of her neck was shot from, its soporific effect already coursing through her as she fell.
She found herself laying on the parking garage floor next to her car, her body nerveless, eyes staring upward at the visage of a man who, for all his scars, seemed vaguely familiar. As she lay there helpless looking up at him, he did something that made it all come back to her.
Steadying himself against her car, he brought down the cane on which he had been leaning across both of her knees.
In her apartment, Meg's phone had been ringing all day.
Zedkov had called her every fifteen minutes since she had dropped off his surveillance radar at some point mid morning. She had violated every precaution he had set in place this day. She hadn't checked in as she had promised to do, she'd removed the small tracking device he'd warned her to carry with her at all times. That she had left her apartment at all this day had been a violation of their agreement. She was supposed to be laying low and waiting for further instructions.
The surveillance at the airport had been a bust, every lead his network of informants had provided him turning up empty. He'd just shut the operation down, in fact, based on the latest information coming down the pike, which claimed that The Dragon was already in LA and had been for several days. A reordering of the investigation was in progress, the focus shifting to finding out as much about the mysterious figure's supposed whereabouts.
Zedkov wondered if his quarry wasn't a product of someone's fertile imagination. He'd rounded up the snitch and suspected gun dealer Loco and brought him in for questioning, but so far he was keeping his mouth shut.
Zeedo swiveled in his desk chair as his partner Sammy Hunt, came up behind him, fingering a piece of paper.
"Coburn's been hanging out at a loft in the Remington Building, hasn't she?" he asked, frowning at the words he was reading.
"Yeah. Part of the window dressing. I already sent someone by earlier today and there wasn't anybody at home, according to the concierge, and neither of the two cars she's been using were in the parking garage there."
"Well, this could be nothing, but I just got this in about a traffic accident a block from that address."
"Coburn?" Zeedo stood up, his voice rising in a mixture of anger and alarm.
"No, hit and run. The victim is male. Shaken up, not hurt. Claims to be a Buddhist Monk on errands for the temple. But the officer on scene says he's dressed more like a cat burglar."
Zeedo was halfway out the door before Hunt gathered his wits to follow.
John Lee had made several calls just prior to boarding being announced for his flight to Los Angeles.
The first had been to Meg on the cell phone; the message that came back indicating that the unit was either turned off or out of the service area. The next had been to Ruong Jie, on the cellphone that he had provided to his old comrade at the airport before leaving for Seattle.
No answer there either. Curious, in that Ruong -Jie had promised never to turn his unit off.
He had then tried calling Meg's apartment, on the off chance that she was there. When that yielded no results, he took a stab at calling his loft, hoping beyond hope that she might have gone there, finally paying heed to his request to stay there.
Again no answer.
He had continued trying to establish contact with either one of them via the phone on the plane, not blinking at the stiff service charges that the newly introduced gadgets incurred.
He'd worry about the credit card balance later. If at all.
Now the lights of Los Angeles were crystalizing below the plane as it descended from the clouds, the city glowing in the darkness like a million jewels. Somewhere amid all that color was the light of his life. She was in danger, and he didn't know where she was.
If he'd had incense he would have burned it right there on the plane, praying for her safety, her health, her life. But since even smoking was no longer allowed on flights, and he'd not thought to pack any joss sticks, all he could do was worry and will the plane to land quickly.
end of chapter 19
The next day, a nondescript sedan pulled into LA's Chinatown and disappeared into a private parking structure. At the same time a surveillance, based on rumors passed on to the police by usually reliable informants, began on incoming flights from mainland China and Hong Kong. It was soon expanded to all points east of Los Angeles, as updated information filtered in from the street.
Meg Coburn spent the day sitting by the phone, or in this case, phones, her land line and her cellular.
Slowly going out of her mind.
Calls were received all day on the land line, forwarded electronically from the number she'd given out to Loco and his like in her two day trawl through the LA underground. The relay was filtered through a communication center where every call was taped and traced.
But the calls had been of little import--the usual street scum looking to align themselves with anyone on the scene who might wield some power and have money to spare.
As the day wore down to evening, she'd received periodic updates from Zedkov, who while not at the airport, relayed updates from his men on scene. Thus far the surveillance had been fruitless, no likely candidates for the mysterious triad figure had presented themselves at customs. The surveillance was scheduled to continue for the next several days.
Meg knew that she would not be able to sit idly by and wait for something to break.
She was going to have to be proactive.
Lau Ruong-Jie found himself in the middle of a frantic and confusing forty eight hours. After spending almost two days in relative inactivity, Meg Coburn was again on the move. He had puzzled over her itinerary which ranged from high profile banks to triad run gaming parlors, to high rent office buildings and luxury homes.
The limousine didn't make a repeat appearance, but the car she'd taken from John's loft home turned out to be a quietly elegant luxury model, that well suited the professionally dressed young woman who emerged from her apartment.
To her credit, she was not an easy subject to pursue, Lau found himself using all his skills
just to keep her in sight. He'd been on immediate alert for signs of danger at some of her more unsavory stops, but she had handled herself competently, with no need for his intervention.
It had slowly come to him that she was operating with a definite plan in mind. While he could not hope to fathom it, he had become convinced it had nothing whatsoever to do with document forging. Rather, it was almost as though she were setting up a new business, securing financing, opening accounts, looking for office space and living accommodations. Making business contacts.
That the contacts were in large in the underground gave him a niggling feeling of suspicion. He'd been very close to calling Jian to see if he could shed any light on her activities, but without solid evidence of what she was up to, he hesitated to do so. He could not follow her so close as to determine how much of what she did was genuine action and how much was for show. Her demeanor was forthright and goal oriented, and aside from her tendency to be surreptitious at the most unexpected times, he didn't doubt that she was carrying on business, though he couldn't guess its legitimacy.
But might that not be exactly the image she wished to project?
What if he and Jian and been deceived about how much she knew or suspected of the vague threat to Li Jian-Hui? What if she knew precisely as much as they did, and was launching on her own hunt for the mysterious nemesis?
What better way to bait a resurgent gang leader, than to present yourself as his rival?
Alarm bells went off in Ruong-Jie's head. He reached for his cell phone as he followed Meg back to John's loft.
John Lee paced the room, watching Ran Ji-Mu his mother's brother, speak into the telephone. Ran spoke Mandarin into the handset, paused, waiting for an answer.
John Lee chafed that he could not hear both sides of the conversation. he was fluent in the language, followed his uncle's words perfectly, but was impatient for the answers to the questions his relative was asking.
A moment later, his uncle disengaged the call, looked at John and spoke in Cantonese.
"It seems the brothers have been misinformed," the older man announced, his expression troubled. "Deliberately misled. There is no 'Dragon', no relative of Wei from Hong Kong triads."
"Your source?" John challenged.
"Unimpeachable. Highly placed. If anyone would know, it would be he. Above rumors. He deals only in facts."
John had waited over four days to receive the information, the route that his uncle must take to contact his informant, circuitous, clandestine. John did not know who the contact was, nor did he care to. But he trusted his uncle's faith in the man.
This breakthrough coincided with a conclusion to the business end of settling his mother and sister in the Seattle area. The contracts had been signed today, all that remained was for them to arrange to move into the condominium they had both fallen in love with.
"Who then is behind these fabrications? What is their game? We've not been followed here. There have been no threats. Lau Ruong-Jie is satisfied that no one follows Meg."
John's uncle was regarding him with sympathetic concern. Whoever this 'Meg'
was, she obviously had captured his nephew's heart. Jian had spoken of her but rarely, but intelligence gleaned from sister and niece informed him that she was the center of Jian-Hui's life. No wonder he'd seemed uneasy and aloof meeting family he'd not seen in decades. It was obvious that his heart and mind were in another place, his true focus far away.
" My informant suggests looking closer to home. Wei's old gang. There was some regrouping in San Francisco of the few not arrested or deported. They've kept a low profile for many months. Only this week has there been noticeable activity. "
Further conversation was interrupted by the chiming of a cell phone. Jian grimaced, reached into his pocket and fished out the device.
"Wai?....Ah Ruong!...."
It was Ran Ji Mu's turn to listen to a once sided phone call. He watched as Jian-Hui's demeanor changed from determined concentration to something akin to panic.
"I must return to Los Angeles," John announced abruptly deactivating the phone. He'd said it in English, eyes large in a pale face.
His uncle nodded.
Meg checked her wristwatch, counting the minutes until she could make her way back to her apartment. The loft grew more cavernous and haunted the more she came back to it, her mind playing tricks on her to fill the deathly stillness that surrounded her.
She thought she'd heard Lee Ma laugh in one of the upstairs bedrooms, Liu Shen call softly in Cantonese from the stairway. She'd turned around on the couch once, a smile on her face imagining that she'd heard the familiar sound of John's footfalls coming up behind her.
She was losing it, she knew. She hadn't slept decently since John had left, the problem compounded by her anxiety that her plan bear fruit before he returned.
As the days passed with no breakthroughs, her tension had grown. She wasn't sure how long she'd be able to keep it together at this rate. And her masquerade depended on having a calm demeanor and steady nerves.
She took a final look at her wristwatch and gathered her things to leave, instinctively patting the cell phone in her pocket. Without knowing, she accidentally deactivated the device.
Meg Coburn took a deep breath and entered the private elevator, her car keys in her hands.
Ruong picked up on her car as soon as it exited the parking structure, retreating to his own vehicle once he saw the private elevator from John's loft activated.
Li Jian-Hui was even now on his way to board a flight to Los Angeles. Hopefully, he was already talking to Meg on the cellphone, arranging for her to stay in her apartment until he arrived.
Ruong had the light at the first intersection beyond the Remington Building , his gaze fixed on Meg's taillights so intently that he did not see the car come at him from the right. He felt the impact and the car spin, then all went black.
Meg glanced in the rearview at sound of the collision, her eyes flicking back to the road ahead of her. Sadly, automobile accidents were no rarity in LA, not even in the better parts of town. She sent up a small prayer to whoever might be listening that no one had been hurt, and continued on her way, intent on her destination.
She was looking forward to getting home and to her nightly call to John. Maybe he'd have good news for her. Maybe he'd know when he was coming home.
But that would also mean she'd failed in her objectives over these last few days and that she might have a lot of explaining to do. While Zeedo could back up her story with John, reintroducing the two would present its own problems. And that still left the threat to be dealt with. Better for her plans, if worse for her heart, that he announce some delay in his return.
She was tired. She'd worry about all that later. After she'd talked to John.
The drive home was uneventful. She started taking deep breaths as she pulled into her parking garage, hoping to perk herself up a bit for the short walk from the parking garage to her apartment building. She knew she couldn't afford to let her guard drop, at least until she got into her apartment, locked the door and activated the alarm system.
Meg Coburn never knew where the anesthetic dart that pierced the skin of her neck was shot from, its soporific effect already coursing through her as she fell.
She found herself laying on the parking garage floor next to her car, her body nerveless, eyes staring upward at the visage of a man who, for all his scars, seemed vaguely familiar. As she lay there helpless looking up at him, he did something that made it all come back to her.
Steadying himself against her car, he brought down the cane on which he had been leaning across both of her knees.
In her apartment, Meg's phone had been ringing all day.
Zedkov had called her every fifteen minutes since she had dropped off his surveillance radar at some point mid morning. She had violated every precaution he had set in place this day. She hadn't checked in as she had promised to do, she'd removed the small tracking device he'd warned her to carry with her at all times. That she had left her apartment at all this day had been a violation of their agreement. She was supposed to be laying low and waiting for further instructions.
The surveillance at the airport had been a bust, every lead his network of informants had provided him turning up empty. He'd just shut the operation down, in fact, based on the latest information coming down the pike, which claimed that The Dragon was already in LA and had been for several days. A reordering of the investigation was in progress, the focus shifting to finding out as much about the mysterious figure's supposed whereabouts.
Zedkov wondered if his quarry wasn't a product of someone's fertile imagination. He'd rounded up the snitch and suspected gun dealer Loco and brought him in for questioning, but so far he was keeping his mouth shut.
Zeedo swiveled in his desk chair as his partner Sammy Hunt, came up behind him, fingering a piece of paper.
"Coburn's been hanging out at a loft in the Remington Building, hasn't she?" he asked, frowning at the words he was reading.
"Yeah. Part of the window dressing. I already sent someone by earlier today and there wasn't anybody at home, according to the concierge, and neither of the two cars she's been using were in the parking garage there."
"Well, this could be nothing, but I just got this in about a traffic accident a block from that address."
"Coburn?" Zeedo stood up, his voice rising in a mixture of anger and alarm.
"No, hit and run. The victim is male. Shaken up, not hurt. Claims to be a Buddhist Monk on errands for the temple. But the officer on scene says he's dressed more like a cat burglar."
Zeedo was halfway out the door before Hunt gathered his wits to follow.
John Lee had made several calls just prior to boarding being announced for his flight to Los Angeles.
The first had been to Meg on the cell phone; the message that came back indicating that the unit was either turned off or out of the service area. The next had been to Ruong Jie, on the cellphone that he had provided to his old comrade at the airport before leaving for Seattle.
No answer there either. Curious, in that Ruong -Jie had promised never to turn his unit off.
He had then tried calling Meg's apartment, on the off chance that she was there. When that yielded no results, he took a stab at calling his loft, hoping beyond hope that she might have gone there, finally paying heed to his request to stay there.
Again no answer.
He had continued trying to establish contact with either one of them via the phone on the plane, not blinking at the stiff service charges that the newly introduced gadgets incurred.
He'd worry about the credit card balance later. If at all.
Now the lights of Los Angeles were crystalizing below the plane as it descended from the clouds, the city glowing in the darkness like a million jewels. Somewhere amid all that color was the light of his life. She was in danger, and he didn't know where she was.
If he'd had incense he would have burned it right there on the plane, praying for her safety, her health, her life. But since even smoking was no longer allowed on flights, and he'd not thought to pack any joss sticks, all he could do was worry and will the plane to land quickly.
end of chapter 19