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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Kill Buddha
>> Waikiki
Waiting did not come any easier for Fon Du than it did for anyone else with half a brain. Unfortunately it was part of working for any secret service.
His mentors at Te-Wu headquarters in Beijing had given specific advice on how to deal with it: Just deal with it. It did little good to second-guess an on-going operation, especially if you'd planned well. Better to mentally review all of the options for the next phase, and be prepared to move at a moment's notice.
So it was that he waited in the luxury Waikiki hotel room his colleague Zip Lok had rented with fake ID and matching credit card. Posing as a devotee of the Dalai Lama's, Zip asked to be on the same floor as the Tibetan holy man, was told the Dalai Lama was not staying with them, but the young Hawaiian lama who was making his homecoming was a guest in the King's Suite, however no other rooms on that floor were available.
"Ah, too bad," he'd replied, and taken an oceanview room on the eighth floor. It was there that Doo Wop and Zu Lu changed into the room service uniforms that yet another colleague had stolen from the laundry, while Zip prepared the poison tea and platters of fruits and pastries.
All in all, Fon Du would have much preferred to be posing as a room-service waiter instead of waiting, and he wondered if the waiting had been as difficult for his captain when Fon Du, then a young agent serving in Lhasa, helped poison the 10th Panchen Lama. That was the way of this service, as so many -- the leaders planned, hoped and waited, the young men went to war.
Doo Wop and Zu Lu's instructions were clear: Serve the young lama the poison "gifts from the hotel staff" and if for some reason he declined, they were to kill the lama and his retinue by whatever means necessary. They carried Chinese Tokarev pistols and knives, and white waiter's gloves would preclude finger prints being left behind.
Barely 20 minutes after he'd sent them off -- that's all?! -- Doo Wop and Zu Lu returned, and he could see something was not right. "Well?"
"The young lama," Doo Wop said as if coming out of a trance, "thanked us for the gifts and asked us to convey his compassion for all the staff, but he declined to sample them just then and ..."
"And, uh," Zu Lu stammered, "we left."
Fon Du swore, pounded fist into open palm with a loud thwack! "Damn these Tibetans and their sorcery!"
Leaving the hotel, Fon Du focused not on failure, but on other opportunities to strike the young lama tomorrow. The sorcery, of course, was that the real lama was then en route to Kaneohe.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com
