A spy is born

» Waikiki

Back in Beijing, Lu Wi had wanted to be a Te-Wu agent.

He never had a chance. It wasn't that he wasn't qualified. Brains-wise, he was smarter than the agent Wing Ding. His problem was that his father was not well connected in the Communist Party, as Fon Du's father was. And he was not as cold-blooded as the agent known as Devil Snake. So the best Lu Wi's father could do was get his son a job as a Te-Wu cook and house boy.

Honolulu wasn't a bad place to be stationed, and the beautiful oceanfront estate they rented under the cover of the Bank of Lhasa beat the heck out of actually living in the Tibetan capital or other outposts.

Lu Wi was quiet, a listener, and when they were home he heard plenty about what the Chinese secret police were doing to spy on Hawaii's military bases, universities and corporations. He thought he could make a good intelligence analyst, connecting dots that nobody else could. But he never got the chance. So he kept his mouth shut.

But now he had a chance to prove himself, get promoted and be a spy.

He'd been asked to tail the second Lama Jey Tsong Khapa's limo for a few blocks on his mo-ped. Later he was hanging around the front of the hotel where the lama was staying, him and his mo-ped parked on the side, watching the bustle of tourists coming and going.

It was the car he noticed at first, a teal BMW convertible sedan. Nice. So was the lady driving it. She stopped, got a ticket from the valet, and it was then Lu Wi noted that this was an odd mix of people, even by Hawaii standards, where the races mixed as if by Waring blender.

There was the driver, late 20s, multi-ethnic, beautiful, smartly dressed. In the passenger seat rode a teenager with sun-bleached surfer-boy hair, wearing surf shorts and a T-shirt. In the back seat was what appeared to be a Filipina, late 20s also, with a little girl, 8 or 9.

Well, he'd seen stranger pairings.

Waiting, watching the limos, cabs and buses come and go, it occurred to Lu Wi that there was something odd about the young man and the girl. Something different. He couldn't put his finger on it, but ...

And then, no more than 20 minutes later, the three females returned without the young man.

This time Lu Wi could tell what made the girl different.

She was starting to glow. Just a bit, but there was definitely some internal lighting.

Either she'd just been nuked or was a living Buddha.

When the three females got back into the teal BMW and pulled away from the port cochere, Lu Wi followed on his mo-ped.