I ran into the room and found that Paul could, in fact, fight. The second man was unconscious on the floor.
I said, “Grab your stuff. The car down below isn’t going to be happy.”
He started packing, and Jennifer came across the balcony, saying, “There’s another set of guys outside the door.”
I went to the peephole and saw two buzz-cut Chinese guys, neither looking like the tattooed young men we’d just taken out.
I said, “We have two more coming. Hurry up.”
He shouldered a bag, went to the peephole, and said, “Oh my God.”
He turned back and said, “We can’t fight these two. They’re deadly.”
I saw real fear on his face. I heard a knock on the door. I whispered, “Who are they?”
“MSS assassins. They tried to kill me in Tainan. If they’re here, the place is blanketed.”
Jennifer said, “Over the balcony. We can climb down.”
I said, “Not anymore. I just dropped a body over it. The Triad in the car will be waiting.”
Astounded, she said, “You did what?”
They started banging on the door, no longer politely knocking. I said, “Back to our room.”
We ran outside and scrambled over the railing to our balcony, hearing the Triad guys in the parking lot shouting at us. I heard the crack of a round, and the wooden railing splintered.
We raced inside our room and I pulled out my phone to call Knuckles, saying, “Well, this is a shit sandwich.”
Paul went to the door, saw my phone, and said, “Don’t call anyone. Don’t do it. I promise they’ll have more firepower than those two men. If we get in a fight here, we’re dead.”
I said, “Well, what do you want to do, die right here?”
He put his eye to the peephole and said, “No. Let them get in. There’s one good thing about this hotel you’ve chosen.”
“What’s that?”
He turned back to me and said, “We can’t go out the front, we can’t go out the back, and we can’t go out the balcony because I know for a fact they’ll have all of that covered. But we can get out.”
“How?”
He held a hand up, looking through the peephole. He whispered, “Stand by. They’re working the lock.”
He turned back and said, “They’re in. Let’s go.”
“Go where? You just said we couldn’t go anywhere.”
He exited into the hallway, walking past the door to his room. Jennifer and I followed. I heard the men from the parking lot start shooting at the two who’d entered.
I said, “So they aren’t working together. That’s good news.”
Paul began jogging down the hallway, saying, “Not that good. I promise they both have teams here.”
He took a left into a narrow hallway, away from the main one leading to the elevators, and I said, “Where are we going?”
“Believe it or not, Chiang Kai-Shek built this place with an escape tunnel. He was petrified about getting caught and killed.”
I looked at Jennifer and she said, “I read about it, but I didn’t think we’d be using them. There’s one on each wing of the hotel.”
We reached a stairwell, went bounding down them two at a time, passing through to a basement level, then entered another narrow hallway, this one with no decorations on the walls, the paint a dull green with a steel door at the end. He said, “That’s it.”
The door had a large two-pronged handle on it like something from a Navy ship. I grabbed both ends, unlocked the mechanism, and swung it open, seeing a narrow concrete staircase leading down into the darkness, and to the left of it what looked like a kids’ playground slide following the staircase into the blackness.
Paul said, “Close the door behind us.”
Jennifer did so, and he jumped onto the top of the slide, put his pack in his lap, said, “Follow me,” and slid away, disappearing into the darkness.
I helped Jennifer up onto the slide, put her pack on her lap, and pushed her, saying, “Have fun.”
I clambered up, placed my pack in my lap, put on a Petzl headlamp, and pushed off with my hands. Initially, I was barely sliding, and then I hit a drop-off like a tube at a water park. I picked up speed, everything completely black except for my headlamp strobing against the walls like a horror movie, and I tucked my arms around my pack, protecting my head.
Twenty seconds later I flew off the end, plowing into Jennifer and knocking her to the ground.
I rolled over, stood up, grabbed her hand, and said, “Holy shit. Sorry about that. You okay?”
She stood and said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m good. Paul apparently knew to get clear of the landing. I couldn’t see anything.”
I shined my headlamp deeper and saw Paul eight feet away picking a padlock on a chain for another steel door.
He got it open and said, “Let’s go. This is the side entrance to the palace grounds. We have to cross a parking lot to get there, but once inside, we’re good.”
He disappeared through the door. I turned my headlamp to Jennifer, seeing her hold her hand against her nose. I saw blood in the harsh glow of my light. Embarrassed, I said, “Did I do that?”
She grimaced at me, saying, “That’s another karat on the ring.”
Chapter 82
Jake Shu heard his name called and sat up on the small cot, rubbing his eyes. He’d worked twenty-four hours straight since he’d arrived in Taiwan, using a small computer room to interface with an American called Jerry Tribble in Beijing. He’d dearly wanted to ask who that man was, but one look in Zhi’s eyes and he knew it wouldn’t have been smart. Not if he wanted to avoid her nail.
They’d locked him into a small room with a single desktop computer and a secure VPN. The next thing he knew, Jerry Tribble was contacting him from Beijing. He’d had his doubts that Jerry would be any help—other than an interface for computing power—but he’d turned out to be almost as good as Jake with the coding. They’d worked on the problem set straight through, manipulating the algorithm and building a back door to access the program. Eventually, upon completion, he’d been allowed to rest, but only in the small office.
He heard his name again, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, and saw Chen Ju-Long in the doorway. Chen said, “Get up. It’s time. Ocelot will be here soon.”
He swung his feet over the small cot and said, “Who is Ocelot?”
“The man that’s going to get you into the systems to implant what you’ve worked so hard on.”
Jake began putting on his shoes, saying, “You haven’t even told me what this is all about. Where are we going?”
“Ocelot will tell you.”
Jake stopped tying his shoes. “That’s not good enough anymore.”
Chen entered the small room and shut the door. “I don’t know what you thought was going to happen, but you’re going to do this. After it’s complete, you can fly home. If it’s not complete, I’ll kill you.”
Jake saw the death in his eyes and felt the fear, causing him to cave in yet again. More worried about his own miserable life than the damage he was causing, he held up his hands and said, “Okay, okay. I’m in.”