Paul darted to the side, hiding in the crowds and watching. The target waited a bit for others to finish, then collected a pair of stones, tossing them on the ground. He didn’t spend any time in reflection, not even caring how they turned up, tossing them two more times and then moving to a rack of drawers that looked like an old-school Dewey Decimal System library card catalog. He pulled out the drawer two from the top, retrieved a roll of paper, and Paul knew it wasn’t for his fortune.
The ritual for retrieving such scrolls was intricate, involving multiple throws of the stones, then shaking a batch of sticks in a drum to tell one which drawer to pull for his fate, all reflecting the religion of the temple. The man had done none of that, which meant he was faking the throw just to get to the drawer. Because something was in it that he needed, and he wanted to camouflage why he was opening it.
And it became clear. Someone’s passing information through the temple.
The suit left, and Paul ran over to the rack of drawers, elbowing people out of the way to get to the one he’d seen the target use. He opened it, sifted through the papers, and saw nothing but the usual mystical answers to the prayers given—none of them really providing any insight without paying a mystic at the back of the temple to interpret. Just a collection of phrases that one could find salvation within, like a scrap of paper broken from a fortune cookie—and in fact the temple ritual was the genesis of that pastime.
Paul stood back, ashamed of his aggressive actions, the people around him glaring. He turned to leave, and recognized the Snow Leopard across the courtyard of the temple. He backed up, unsure if he was mistaken, staring hard. It was him. Chao Zheng, the Snow Leopard, in front of a Tao deity, bowing as if in prayer.
The recognition shook Paul to his core. The man was here for a reason. That area was exactly where the suit had been.
He was torn between following the unknown or staying on the Snow Leopard. He hesitated for a moment, saw the Leopard move to a different cubicle with a different deity and begin praying again. Paul wavered a minute, then left the temple at a trot, trying to find the suit.
He ran up the street, seeing nothing, and was aggravated that he’d left the one link he had, thinking about going back to the temple. He didn’t. He kept walking, moving rapidly. He stopped at a crossing and was amazed to find the suit at the same stop. Waiting on the light along with thirty other people.
Why would a man like that still be walking? Why not Uber or a taxi?
He faded back, and then followed him for another ten blocks, the man continuing to walk in the heat. They passed the giant memorial park for Chiang Kai-Shek, skirting the memorial itself, and entered the government section of Taipei.
Why walk this far?
And it became clear—the man didn’t want a record of his actions. Nothing that said he had been picked up at the temple—much less the snake market—and dropped off here.
Paul was now sure he was on to something, but had no idea of what. He followed the man past the parks and gardens surrounding the memorial, toward the presidential palace. He stayed far enough behind to keep from being spotted, his anxiety growing greater, and saw him leave the street, bounding up the steps of one of the ubiquitous government buildings in the area.
Paul watched the man disappear inside and saw a sign for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
This is it. That man is the link.
But he had no idea what that link meant or who the man was.
Chapter 34
Chao Zheng—the Snow Leopard—watched his new contact leave the Lungshan Temple, darting through the crowd like he was escaping a police cordon. It made him smile. The man was clearly not used to dealing with the likes of the Snow Leopard, but that was the truth for about ninety percent of the people Chao extorted. The life of the PRC elite was not the same as his life, even as they used him for their own ends.
They hadn’t even cared about his existence until he’d proven useful. Proven he could affect the views of the local population in Taiwan. Then they took notice. They looked at him as a lever to jam into the crack of Taiwan society, breaking open the schism of the old world versus the new, and he was more than willing to be that tool. As long as he was paid in the end.
He knew they wanted to sow discord in Taiwan, but even as a Taiwanese national he didn’t care. His world was singular in its goals: money. Pure and simple. He wasn’t driven one whit by the politics of China or Taiwan. He cared about money, and he’d found a way to make it.
The People’s Republic of China wanted more than anything to infiltrate the island nation of Taiwan with its propaganda and other active measures, and he’d proven he could do that. He’d worked for more than two years inside a political party he had created, leveraging Taiwan’s nascent democracy to use every bit of the PRC’s assets against Taiwan, and in so doing had become intertwined in the success of the endeavor, so much so that he was now vested in the outcome. Even as he didn’t know what that outcome ultimately would be.
Pretending to pray alongside the others in the temple, he waited until his contact had been gone for ten minutes, and then left, walking back to his little fiefdom of Snake Alley. He entered through the intricate arch of the market, seeing the people go out of their way to ignore him. Wherever he looked, women sweeping, men pushing dollies, they all glanced away, not wanting to incur his wrath.
As the leader of the Bamboo Triad, he owned this section of Taiwan, and they knew it. If you aggravated him, you might find the rent doubled because you had to pay to ensure your establishment didn’t burn to the ground. Or worse.
He went to the end of the market, took a right down an alley so narrow he had to move sideways to get past trash bins, then entered a nondescript doorway with a camera the size of a lipstick tube affixed to the jamb. Inside a small anteroom was the same man who had helped drown the informant at the falls, his face hard to read because of the tattoos covering it. He sat behind a chipped wooden desk, a Pentium desktop computer on top old enough to have a slot for a Zip drive. Leaning against the wall were two women both past their prime, heavy makeup on their faces and dressed in what might have been charitably called sultry in 1980. Now it just looked sad and worn out.
The women jumped to attention at Chao’s arrival. The man smiled, but knew better than to ask how the meeting had gone in front of a couple of whores.
Chao asked, “Is the WiFi working?”
The man nodded and Chao waved his hand, saying, “Leave me. All of you.”
When the small room had cleared out Chao pulled up his smartphone, turned on airplane mode, then connected to the WiFi network of his office. Once he was online, he opened an app called Telegram and dialed a contact. He waited until someone answered, then read off a series of four emojis: “Monkey, tent, pile of shit, smiley face.”
The man who answered said, “Same. Stand by.”
Telegram was an end-to-end encrypted messaging application used the world over for journalists with confidential sources and resistance groups in totalitarian countries—along with other, not so savory individuals with something to hide, like the Snow Leopard.
The emoji on his screen ensured his call was encrypted end-to-end. If the four emojis on his phone were the same as those for the person answering, he was secure. And as he’d turned off all cell activity from the phone, working solely through his WiFi network, he was essentially invisible, even if someone knew where to look.