Springboard Read Free Page B

whom she did not know, of course. Mayli’s watcher would eventually have one of his own, too.
    Wu was not a man to trust anyone blindly.
    Once Shing was gone, Wu walked back to the window again, to stare through the rain at the neon lights in the distance. Great plans took time, but this one was nearer the end than the beginning. Destiny was not that far in the distance.
    Wu smiled.
    He returned to his desk, and touched the intercom button.
    “Locke?”
    “Here.”
    “Join me.”
     
    “What did you think?” Wu asked. He now spoke in Yao, with bits of Sho thrown in, dialects Jack Locke had learned in Hong Kong while running with the street gangs. There were a lot of southern boys in the gangs, and Yao was a favorite dialect. Locke was also fluent in Cantonese, Putonghua, Guoyu, English, and a little Spanish. He was working on German.
    Locke, sitting in that same chair in front of Wu’s desk, shook his head. “The boy is an idiot savant. He has the touch with computers and can make them sing and dance, but outside that . . .” He shrugged.
    General Wu nodded. He leaned back in his chair, and steepled his fingers. “And our plans?”
    “On target. If Shing does half what he claims he can do.”
    “You foresee no problems.”
    Locke laughed. “Oh, I foresee problems. Scores, hundreds, thousands of problems, crouched and hidden like hungry tigers, waiting for us to stumble. A misstep, and we’ll be eaten, our gnawed bones left to bleach in the sun. But I’ll deal with those.” He paused. The general was a fan of Sun Tzu and of the Japanese swordsman, Musashi, and Locke had made it his business to learn their work. He said, “What is it Musashi says? When faced with the ten thousand . . . ?”
    “Fight them the same way as one,” Wu finished. He smiled slightly. “I am trusting you with a great deal,” he said.
    “Comrade General, you don’t trust me any farther than you can see me,” Locke said. “Instead, you recognize that our interests lie on the same path, and you trust me to travel that way until we achieve our common goal.”
    Wu smiled again, but did not speak.
    It was a slight risk, tweaking the general’s nose this way, but Locke also knew that the man respected ability, and Locke would not be sitting here if Wu didn’t believe he had the skill and talent to do what the general wanted. Plus, toadies were easy to come by—to impress a general, you needed to show some starch.
    Jack Locke was aware of the file on Shing in Wu’s desk. And he was certain there was a file on him somewhere—Wu never chose to be sightless when there was any way he could see.
    Locke also had a pretty good idea what was in Wu’s secret file on him, and what was not. He knew he was not a particularly impressive or handsome man, at least not as he understood the words. Too many angles and planes in his face, nose a little too long, lips too thin, and almost-black eyes that, to him, seemed a bit bug-eyed from within deep sockets. His hair was black, with a sharp widow’s peak, and while he was in excellent shape from swimming and lifting weights, he was only average height, and not so muscular or broad in the shoulders as to draw attention. Most men looking at a crowd would pass over Locke without a second glance, just another Eurasian face, nothing to mark him out of the ordinary.
    Most women, however, saw something there. He had tried to get them to explain it to him, but no two answers were ever quite the same, and there was a vagueness about them when pressed. The most consistent comment women offered was that he looked “interesting.” And that part of that look included a hint of cruelty.
    Women were ever attracted to bad boys.
    Wu would know all this, and more.
    Born in Hong Kong, Locke was a mongrel foundling who had been dropped off at a British orphanage forty years ago. He had some Chinese in him, some European—probably English, given where he turned up. He had run away from there at sixteen, and they