King Con (47 page)

T
HEY TOOK HIM BY AMBULANCE PAST THE GATES OF
the Forbidden City. The gold tiles on the roofs of this ancient part of Beijing shone up defiantly at a three-quarter moon. They left the city on the Qianmen Dajie highway and finally arrived at a huge
lao gai
, or “reform through labor” camp. It was located in the Chinese countryside south of the capital. The camp was a mammoth windowless fortress of gray concrete. Dismal, even from the outside. The
lao gai
housed prisoners who had been arrested for political crimes. There was a hospital there for medical experiments. The
lao gai
was full of the very men and women that President Bill Clinton was claiming were victims of Chinese human rights violations.

Chen Boda walked to the operating room on the sixth floor where three of China’s best urological transplant surgeons had been rushed and were now awaiting him. It was four-fifteen in the morning.

“Is the donor here?” Chen Boda asked.

The doctor nodded and led the diminutive politician to an adjacent room where they looked through a window at a young student dissident strapped to a table. He looked back at them through the glass in wide-eyed fear.

The student was named Wan Jen Lam. He had been
arrested for distributing brochures proclaiming the New Democratic Front in Tiananmen Square during the uprising five years before. He had been held under “strict supervision” for his crime without ever being formally charged, let alone face trial.

“He’s a five out of six tissue type match to Mr. Wo Lap. A good donor,” the lead surgeon said.

“Are your ready to begin?” Chen Boda asked the doctors, and they all nodded.

“Then wheel the patient in here so he can witness our generosity on his behalf.”

A few minutes later, Wo Lap Ling was on a rolling hospital bed parked in front of the observation window where Wan Jen Lam was strapped down. They cranked up the bed. Once the ailing Triad leader was in a position to see, Chen Boda went into the operating theater and nodded to one of the doctors. The surgeon, a narrow-faced man whose eyes were hidden behind the gleaming circles of his thick glasses, stepped forward and picked up a scalpel from a tray of instruments. He approached the frightened student, who wriggled helplessly under his restraints.

“You have a great love for American democracy. It appears you think the Western moon is rounder than the Chinese moon,” Chen Boda said without preamble. “But it is time for you to make a contribution to the Motherland.”

“What are you going to do?” the terrified student asked.

“I am going to give you a chance to give valuable aid to your beloved country,” Chen Boda said, smiling at the terrified youth. His smile was surprisingly warm and gentle, his voice soothing. Despite the horrifying situation, it seemed to calm Wan Jen Lam.

“How will I contribute?” the young man finally asked.

“You will give to the Motherland something she desperately needs…”

The student was puzzled by this and furrowed his brow. Chen Boda motioned to the doctor, who advanced to the table, holding the scalpel as if it were a calligraphy brush: two fingers high on the outside of the handle, thumb in powerful opposition, his lower two fingers resting on the inside of the handle near the blade. It was a grip that permitted extraordinary strength and precision.

The blade flashed as he swung it down and buried it in the student’s heart. The student convulsed at once, exhaling a gust of air. Chen Boda watched impassively as the dissident quivered and shook; the scalpel protruding from his chest twitched like a small dark arrow as his nerves and synapses rioted within his skinny, undernourished body. Quickly and painfully, the young man died. Blood from the wound ran off the table and pooled on the floor. Then Chen Boda walked back into the adjoining room and faced Willy.

“I have done this for you, Wo Lap Ling. Do not forget that when you were about to drown, a good friend shielded you from the storm.” Then he turned and walked out of the room.

As the sun came up on Tiananmen Square, the three-man surgical team was already deep into it, removing Willy Wo Lap’s disease-shriveled kidneys and replacing them with Wan Jen Lam’s healthy ones.

Willy Wo Lap was wheeled into recovery at 9:35
A.M.
His vital signs were stable and he was about to begin a long journey of healing that would lead him back to power.

Wan Jen Lam was wheeled to an elimination chamber and disposed of quickly and efficiently, his body shredded and washed with harsh acid. Once liquefied, it was drained away without a trace.

If Bill Clinton wanted examples of human rights violations,
Chen Boda was only too happy to oblige.

Willy Lo Lap slept a peaceful sleep and dreamed of his father. The old fish factory worker had once sat in their crowded Kowloon apartment, with the sound of crying babies and electric saws ripping pig carcasses, and told him, “No feast lasts forever.”

Willy had been ten and listened while his ailing father spouted Confucian wisdom dictated by Chairman Mao. His last painful years had proven Confucius and the old fish factory worker right. Willy has suffered renal failure … and with it had come a loss of all his appetites. The feast of his life had ended. He no longer craved women, food or luxury. All he wanted was a few moments free of pain. Now he had been given a new chance. Once more, the crafty Chinese mobster had managed to stay on the vicious tiger’s backside. Once more, he could savage his enemies from a seat of power behind the beast’s shoulder blades. Willy was back.

A new feast was about to begin.

The locker room at the exclusive Westridge Country Club was Wheeler Cassidy’s “spot.” He arrived every morning around ten and flopped down on the tan leather sofa, then browsed the
LA. Times.
Of late he had just been scanning the front page, then going directly to sports, reading the racing results and ball scores. The rest of the paper failed to interest him. He used to read it cover to cover, but now the pointless articles on the metro page about police brutality or campaign finance abuses didn’t concern him anymore. He had been vaguely aware of the fact that his world had been narrowing but had managed to flush those thoughts with scotch shooters.

The beige couch was also good because it was in front of the picture window that overlooked the tennis courts,
which afforded him a prized spear-fishing spot. He could either tag up on a new member’s wife coming back from her tennis lesson or pick up a golf game with some middle-aged walk-over. By 1
P.M.,
he had usually moved from the comfortable On-Deck Circle to Home Plate, which was the last stool at the bar in the grill. From there, he would swing lazily at the slow curves that wandered past in sexy tennis skirts.

Wheeler was thirty-seven, tall and good-looking in a careless, bad boy sort of way that women of all ages seemed irresistibly drawn to. His curly black hair hung loosely on his forehead. His square jaw and white teeth were babe-magnets, although his once rock-hard abs were beginning to take on some extra padding and his hands were starting to shake at eleven each morning. Once he got his first scotch shooter—Blended Vat 69—they calmed down.

Wheeler had not turned out the way he was supposed to. He had not lived up to his father’s expectations. His first spectacular failure had been sixteen years ago when they’d thrown him out of the University of Southern California for being drunk and disorderly, and according to one university regent, an unredeemable scholastic project. The final incident that propelled his expulsion was a fistfight he’d gotten into at Julie’s Bar after the SC-Stanford game. He had endured three Bay area assholes for almost two hours before slipping his thousand dollar Cartier watch off his left wrist and putting the misplaced Stanford alumni in the USC trauma ward. Wheeler had a solid punch and, even drunk, he could still bang one off you. His left hook was lethal. He preferred talking to hitting but occasionally had to “step outside” with somebody. Fighting was a necessary skill when you were periscoping other people’s women.

Wheeler cassidy had been famous at USC. He was that guy everybody talked about… the tuna fisherman’s
tuna fisherman. The stunts he’d pulled were legendary, like jumping off the roof of the Tri-Delt House on a dare or driving his VW into the LA Coliseum at halftime during the UCLA game. On the side of his paint-brushed cardinal and gold VW rabbit he had written, “Have one on me, Bruins,” then he sprayed the UCLA rooting section with warm beer from a supercharged keg. He’d been arrested six times for various violations and pranks before finally being expelled. His exploits were written up in the
Cardinal and Gold
student paper at least once each month during his colorful three-year academic career, but that was a long time ago. Now he was what some people would call a country club bum. The Westridge Country Club in Bel Air, California, was his haunt.

WCC had all kinds of strict membership requirements: your family and ethnic background had to be acceptable; you needed to be well placed in society; and no members of the entertainment community were ever accepted. Wheeler got in on a junior membership when he turned twenty-one because his father, Wheeler Cassidy, Sr., had been a longtime member.

However, Wheeler Jr. was currently up before the WC disciplinary committee. They were trying to decide whether to kick him out for a one-nighter he’d had with the beautiful but restless wife of a senior member, who was also, unfortunately, head of the club’s rules committee. The affair had resulted in the couple’s messy divorce. It was the memory of Wheeler’s late father that so far had stayed the ax, but this time it looked like expulsion from the club was inevitable.

Wheeler Sr., an investment broker and portfolio analyst who had made it big, eventually opening his own brokerage firm, had died last year, taking with him Wheeler Jr.’s sole reason for being. There was something exhilarating about being the bad seed of a domineering,
humorless father that lost its thrill when Dear Ol’ Dad hit Boot Hill. Now all of Wheeler’s pranks seemed more desperate than funny. His father’s anger had always been the rimshot that saved the joke.

Wheeler started drinking more after his father died and now, in the morning when he got up, his head was as dull as racial humor, eyes were filled with grain, and his stomach was always on the edge of revolt. He was approaching middle age, and apart from three years at USC and another two in the marines, he’d never accomplished anything.

He’d only joined the marine corps to fend off his father’s threat that he would lose his inheritance for being chucked out of college. Then, just when it looked like he’d straightened out, being accepted for Elite Special Forces training, he’d been dishonorably discharged from his unit for fornicating with his commanding officer’s wife. Since then, he had never finished anything except hundreds upon hundreds of bottles of blended scotch. He’d read once about an old eccentric in the desert who had built a house out of empty beer bottles. If Wheeler had any architectural ambition, his empties could have built a small city.

It was twelve-thirty and Wheeler’s hands were beginning to tremble. It was still a little early, but he moved down the narrow hallway toward the grill and his first shooter of the day. On the way he passed framed pictures of club pros and famous golfing celebrities who had achieved recognition or glory on the WCC links. As he walked he glanced through the glass doors of the private dining room that catered lunches for members and saw his younger brother, Prescott, gathered with five or six businessmen. All of them had yellow pads in front of them, their finished meals pushed off to the side, making
notes while Pres lectured. Pres’s secretary, Angie Wong, spotted Wheeler, tapped Prescott’s shoulder and whispered. Pres glanced up. His narrow face and intense expression darkened at the sight of his brother. His shook his head slightly as if to say,
Don’t come in.

Geez, Pres, I’m not a typhoid carrier
, Wheeler thought. But he was ashamed of his younger brother’s reaction to him. Wheeler knew he’d been an embarrassment to his dead father. He knew his mother was long ago tired of making excuses for him, and now Pres seemed afraid his older brother might stumble in, vomit on the table and ruin his business meeting. Before moving on, Wheeler waved at his brother and smiled an apology through the glass door. Then, unexpectedly, Prescott’s face softened and, for a moment, Wheeler saw on his brother’s narrow features the same look of awe Pres had always given him during their childhood… a look of envy and respect that Wheeler hadn’t seen in almost sixteen years.

Back then, Pres had thought his big brother could do anything. Wheeler had been Pres’s God, his idol. It was a time when, if Wheeler had told his little brother to run through fire and jump off the Santa Monica cliffs, Pres would have ended up on the beach with his hair burning. Now things were different. Wheeler was a gravy stain on Pres’s huge success. Prescott Cassidy was the family superstar now. At thirty-four, he was arguably among the most important lawyers in Los Angeles. One of the biggest names in the local political spectrum and a huge Democratic party fund-raiser and power broker, Prescott handled legal problems and political deals, while Wheeler honked down shooters in the WCC grill.
Oh, well, shit happens.

That look of envy that Wheeler thought he saw on his brother’s face must have been a weird reflection in the glass or bad lighting. Even still, it made him stop…
made him wonder why things had turned out this way.

He was eating alone in the beautiful dining room that overlooked the third fairway when Pres and Angie Wong walked out of the club. Angie was a small, thin, Chinese woman in her late forties who never seemed to smile but had laser intensity and a personality as tough as federal taxes.

Angie looked at him—or through him—and didn’t react. Pres never slowed as he moved on with the rest of his party. Pres was always in a hurry, always late to a very important appointment.

Wheeler was staring out the window, his mind far away when he suddenly heard Pres’s voice.