The two Campus operatives exited the MTR at Wan Chai Station, and by then Adam had tracked the taxi carrying the five men to a strip club called Club Stylish on Jaffe Road, just a few blocks away. Yao warned the two Hendley Associates men that the girlie bar was a known 14K hangout, and there would be, among the crowds of lonely businessmen and Filipino waitresses and strippers, some presence of heavily armed and heavily drinking 14K mobsters.

Jack and Ding suspected they had a different definition for "heavily armed" than did Adam Yao, but neither Jack nor Ding was carrying any weapons whatsoever, so they told themselves they would keep their heads on a swivel and do nothing to raise the ire of the locals in the establishment.

Jack and Ding found the entrance to Club Stylish to be just a narrow dark doorway at the street level of a high-rise ramshackle apartment building on a two-lane street one block over from Lockhart Road, the nicer and more touristy section of Wan Chai. Ryan pulled off his paper mask and entered first, passing a bored-looking bouncer, then descended a little staircase lit only by Christmas lights strung along the ceiling. The staircase seemed to go down at least two stories, and at the bottom he found a large basement nightclub with a high ceiling. On his right was a long bar along the wall, in front of him was the floor of the establishment, full of tables and lit by candles, and on the far wall was a raised stage made out of see-through plastic tiles over garish amber lighting that gave the entire room an odd golden glow. Above it, a large spinning disco ball created thousands of swirling white lights that painted the crowd.

Four stripper poles stood near the corners of the raised dance floor.

The establishment seemed to be running at about twenty percent capacity, and a strictly male audience sat around at the tables, in booths along the walls, and at the bar. Some talked to the bored-looking dancing girls who milled between them. Jack saw Zha and his group of four Triads sitting in a large booth in the corner of the far wall, to the right of the stage on the other side of the entrance to a darkened hallway that led out the back of the club. Jack assumed there would be restrooms back there, but he did not want to pass so close to Zha to get a better lay of the land. Instead, he saw a spiral staircase off to his left, and he climbed to find a little mezzanine over the back bar area. Here a few businessmen sat in groups and looked out over the paltry action. Ryan liked it up here-he could watch Zha while keeping a low profile with the dark and deep booths. He sat alone, and he ordered a beer from a passing cocktail waitress a few minutes later.

Within moments two young Filipino exotic dancers took the stage and went through the well-practiced motions of dancing seductively to loud, thumping Asian-influenced techno music.

Zha and his security detail remained in their booth stage left of the strippers. Jack saw that the young man remained more interested in his handheld computer than he was in the semi-naked women twenty feet away from him, and he barely glanced up at them as he typed furiously with his thumbs.

Jack thought about how much he'd love to get his hands on that handheld device. Not that he'd know what the hell to do with it, but Gavin Biery would likely have a field day cracking its secrets.

Domingo Chavez entered the club a few minutes later, and he sat back by the downstairs bar near the entrance. He had a good view of the stairwell up to street level and a decent view of the 14K entourage, but mostly his job was to back up Jack, the eye in the surveillance.

They communicated with Adam through their tiny earpieces. Yao was sitting out in the borrowed Mitsubishi, positioned in a back alley that ran between the rear of the high-rises on Jaffe and the high-rises on Gloucester, just blocks from the northern shore of Hong Kong Island. Here he parked in a small lot and had a view of the back exit of Club Stylish, which was good, but he was parked next to dozens of full garbage bins outside a seafood restaurant, meaning a foul rotten stench and the scuffling feet of rats were all he had to keep him company back there.

Adam informed the Hendley Associates men how lucky they were, via the conference call. Chavez sipped his first beer of the evening and regarded the women working for tips on the stage and the other dancers milling about the crowd.

He assured young Adam that he was not missing much.

The two mysterious Americans who had been on the ferry entered the club a few minutes later, confirming Jack's suspicions that they were, in fact, tailing Zha. Ding reported this to Ryan, and Jack saw them from his overwatch on the mezzanine when the men sat down in plush chairs in a dark corner, far from the stage. They bought Budweisers from a cocktail waitress and sipped them while rejecting advances from the strolling bar girls.

As Chavez turned and scanned the stairwell, two more Western men, both in blue blazers and ties, entered together.

There were a dozen other Westerners in the bar, Ding and Jack and the two younger guys from the ferry included, but these guys stood out to Ding. They looked like Feds, and Chavez could ID Feds easily, which wasn't saying much, because they had a way of standing out. The two men sat down just a few tables from the Triad entourage, positioning themselves awkwardly so that they had a better view of FastByte22 than they did of the stage.

"Looks like a damn weatherman convention in here," Chavez said softly, hiding his moving lips behind his beer bottle before taking a swig.

Adam Yao's voice came over the headset. "More Americans?"

"Two suits. Could be DOJ guys from the consulate, here trying to confirm Zha's presence."

Yao said, "Okay, maybe we should think about backing off. By my count there are now six gweilos in there with eyes on Zha. That's too many."

Chavez said, "I hear you, Adam, but I've got another idea. Wait one." He reached into his jacket and pulled out his mobile phone, then opened a video camera feature. He put the conference call with Ryan and Adam on hold and called Gavin Biery at the Peninsula.

Gavin answered on the first ring. "Biery."

"Hey, Gavin. I'm sending you video transmission from my phone. Will you get on your laptop and check that you are receiving?"

"I'm already on. I'm picking it up." A few seconds later he said, "How 'bout you zoom in on that stage for me?"

Ding placed the phone on the table, propped it against a small glass candleholder, and turned it toward Zha's table.

Ding said, "I need you to focus on the target, not the dancing girls."

"Oh, all right. Zoom in a bit."

Chavez did so, and then recentered the image.

"Got it. What am I looking for?"

"Just keep tabs on them. You've got the eye. I'm pulling Ryan out, and I'm turning away from them. There is too much surveillance in this room already."

"Got it." He laughed. "I'm on a mission. Well . . . a virtual mission anyway. Hey, by the way, I'm sending you that cleaned-up image of the guy you photographed back at the Mong Kok Computer Centre. You should be able to see the man in the dark now with no problems."

Domingo brought Gavin into the conference call with the other two and then explained to Jack and Adam what he'd done. Jack left the club and went out front, crossed Jaffe and sat at a tiny noodle bar open to the street. From here he could see the stairway entrance to Club Stylish.

Yao, Chavez, and Ryan simultaneously received e-mails on their phones. They opened them to see a good picture of a quarter-shot of Zha's face and three-quarters of the back of his head, as he spoke to an older Chinese man in a white shirt and a light blue or gray tie. The older man's face was clear enough, but none of the three recognized him.

Chavez knew Biery had special facial-recognition software on his computer, and he would be trying to get a match right now.

Yao said, "He's not familiar to me, but you think he looked important, Ding?"

"Yes. I'd say you might be looking at the MFIC there."

Yao responded, "The what?"

"The Motherfucker in Charge."

Ryan and Yao just chuckled.

Gavin Biery's voice came back over the headsets of the team a minute later. "Domingo, pan the camera to your left." Chavez reached out and did so as he kept his eyes in the opposite direction, toward the bartenders.

"What do you see?"

"I noticed that the tough guys around Zha were all looking at something or somebody. I think it's those two white guys in blue blazers. One of the Triads just pulled out his phone and made a call."

"Shit," said Ding. "I'd be willing to wager that the consulate guys made it obvious they aren't here to watch the dancers. Adam, what do you think Fourteen-K is going to do?"

"My guess is they will bring in a few reinforcements. If they were really worried they would shuffle Zha out the back door, but all is quiet back here. Ryan, what's going on at the front?"

Jack noticed a group of three Chinese men entering the club. Two were young, early twenties or so, and the third was perhaps sixty. Jack thought nothing of it, people were coming and going with regularity.

"Just regular traffic out here."

"Okay," said Yao. "Be on the lookout for more Fourteen-K, though. If those guys just called in a potential threat, things might get tight in there."

- Our boy has visitors," Biery said a minute later, when the three newest patrons to the bar, the older Chinese man and his two friends, slid around Zha into the booth. "I'm sending a screen shot to your phones so you can see."

Adam waited for the picture to arrive, and looked at it closely. "Okay. The older guy is Mr. Han. He's a known smuggler of high-end computer equipment. He's the one I was tracking when I ran into Zha in the first place. I don't know what his relationship to Zha is. Not sure who the other two are, but they aren't Fourteen-K. They are too puny and bewildered-looking."

Gavin came over the call: "I'm running their faces through facial-recognition software against a database of known Chinese hackers."

No one responded to this for several seconds.

At the noodle shop, Ryan cursed to himself, and at the bar in the strip club, Chavez groaned inwardly. It was going to be a hard sell to Adam Yao that this database, which The Campus had pulled from a classified CIA database, would be something a financial management firm, even one hunting for a Chinese hacker, could just call up on a laptop.

Ryan and Chavez waited to hear what Yao said next.

"That's pretty handy, Gavin. Let us know." His voice was overtly sarcastic.

Gavin was clueless about what he had done, and it was clear he did not pick up on Yao's sarcasm. "I'll let you know. And by the way, I ran the other guy, the MFIC, too. No match at all," he said, a tinge of frustration in his voice.

Yao said, "Hey, Domingo. Any chance you could meet me around back of the club for a quick chat."

At the bar by the entrance to the strip club, Ding rolled his eyes now. This young NOC was about to take Ding to the woodshed, and he knew it.

And at the noodle shop, Jack Ryan put his face in his hands. As far as he was concerned, their cover was blown to the CIA man.

Chavez said, "I'll be right out, Adam. Ryan, why don't you come on back in and take the eye up on the mezzanine? Keep a soft surveillance. Just make sure nobody joins the entourage without getting a look at them."

"Got it," said Jack.

- It took a few minutes to get Jack into position and Chavez back out the front, up the block, and back around into the small street behind the nightclub and high-rise apartment buildings, but finally Ding climbed into the passenger door of the Mitsubishi.

He just looked at Adam and said, "You wanted to talk?"

Yao said, "I know you are ex-Agency, and I checked you out. You retain your TS security clearance."

Chavez smiled. The sooner they got this charade over with, the better.

"You've done your homework."

Yao was not smiling. "You have friends at the Agency, friends all over. And I am going to go out on a limb here and say that you know good and damn well that I am Agency, too."

Ding nodded slowly. "I'm not going to lie to you, kid. I am aware that you wear two hats."

"Are you going to tell me the real reason you guys are here?"

"No mystery to that. We're here to find out who the hell Zha is. He is trying to get into our network."

"Trying to? He has not succeeded?"

"Not that we know of." They had lied to Yao about that. "Sorry, kid. We needed your help, and we wanted to help you. I fed you a little bullshit along the way."

"Fed me a little bullshit? So you came all the way to Hong Kong to tail a hacker who is trying to hack your network? It sounds like you have me on a steady diet of bullshit."

Chavez sighed. "That's part of the reason. We are also aware he is a person of interest in the UAV attack. We see our interests, and America's interests, dovetailing nicely here, and we wanted to support you in your investigation."

"How do you know he was involved in the UAV attack?"

Chavez just shook his head. "Word gets around."

Yao did not seem satisfied by this answer, but he moved on. "What is Jack Junior's role in this?"

"He's an analyst at Hendley Associates. Simple as that."

Yao nodded. He didn't know what to make of Hendley Associates, but he knew Domingo Chavez had as much or more credibility than anyone who had ever worked in the U.S. intelligence community. Chavez and company were providing him with the assets he needed to tail and, he hoped, identify some of the people working with Zha. He needed these guys, despite the fact they weren't exactly part of his team.

"The Agency is not buying into the fact that Zha is part of the UAV attack. They think it was a state actor of some sort, maybe China, maybe Iran, and since Zha clearly isn't working for either of them over here, they figure he's not involved."

"We figure differently, and, apparently, so do you."

"I do."

Just then Gavin Biery called Chavez, and Ding turned on his speakerphone so Yao could hear. "Bingo. We have a match on one of the young men, the guy in the black shirt. His name is Chen Ma Long. It says he lives in Shaoxing, on the mainland. He was a known member of an organization called the Tong Dynasty."

"The Tong Dynasty?" Yao said with surprise.

"What's that?" asked Chavez.

"That's an unofficial name the NSA gave to an organization that was around from about 2005 to 2010. It was run by Dr. K. K. Tong, sort of the father of China's offensive cyberwar systems. He used tens of thousands of civilian hackers, developed them into a kind of army. This kid must have been part of that group."

"Where is Tong now?"

"He was thrown in prison in China for corruption but escaped. No one has heard from him in a couple of years. Word is the Chicoms want him dead."

"Interesting. Thanks, Gavin," said Chavez. He ended the call with Biery and then turned his attention back to Yao.

"We aren't going to learn anything more than what we already know about whatever the hell is going on over here, because it's not going to take any time at all for the Triads to pick up on the fact that Zha has grown a really long tail. Once they see these guys following Zha, Zha is going to disappear."

"I know."

"You need to check with Langley one more time. If they want him, they better take him right fucking now, because he will either run to the mainland, in which case you'll never find him, or else the Marshals Service is going to arrest him, in which case he'll enter the justice system. If he does that he'll get a lawyer, a pat on the ass, and three hots and a cot. The Agency won't learn a damn thing about who he's working with."

Adam nodded. Chavez could tell the prospect of losing Zha Shu Hai was eating the young NOC up.

"I already talked to Langley. They said they didn't think Zha was involved, but they would kick it over to the Pentagon, since it was their system that got hacked," said Adam.

"And what did the Pentagon say?"

"I have no idea. I try and communicate with Langley as little as possible."

"Why is that?"

"Pretty much everybody knows that there is a leak at Beijing Station. The Pentagon is aware CIA is compromised in its affairs in China, too, so I doubt they would let us know if they were interested in Zha."

"A leak?"

"I have been living with that reality for a while. Too many Agency initiatives involving China have foundered in ways that we can only figure were due to inside information about our activities. I try to keep most of my activity very low-profile. I don't like letting Langley know what I'm up to, in case the Chicoms do something to stop me. Even though HK isn't the mainland, per se, there are Chinese spies all over."

Chavez said, "Maybe that leak is the reason Fourteen-K doubled their guard on Zha and started doing SDRs every couple of hours."