Lethal Circuit Read Online Free PDF Page B

number, or a telephone number, or even a code. It was much simpler than that. It was a simple GPS waypoint—coordinates that designated a precise latitude and longitude and one look at Kate had told him that she knew exactly what it was as well, however well she might have tried to hide it.
    It wasn’t an accident that his father would send him a message like this. Some of Michael’s fondest childhood memories were of times spent hiking with his father in the back country of the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Range. They’d hike in the mountains for days, sometimes even venturing up to the Coast Range in Canada, always excited about what the new day would hold and always carrying a GPS receiver en route. They’d never needed to rely on it per se, but it was nice to know that absent a map, there would always be a way back.
    Now, a sixteen digit number was telling Michael that there was a way back to his father. According to the Suunto GPS capable watch he wore on his wrist, the coordinates were just over the mainland Chinese border, about fifteen miles east of the city of Shenzhen. That revelation had been enough for Michael to leave Kate behind and forge ahead.
    Michael steeled his nerve as the train crawled toward the Chinese border at Lo Wu station. When the train’s doors finally opened, he slung his backpack over his shoulder and continued onto the platform and down a crowded set of stairs into the bowels of passport control. Despite his well-masked anxiety, neither he nor his passport attracted undo scrutiny, and after a slow but methodical pass through two congested immigration checkpoints, one to leave Hong Kong, and another to enter China proper, he found himself on a bridge, crossing a barbed wire enclosed drainage ditch toward the early morning lights of the city of Shenzhen, Hong Kong’s nearest neighbor and arch rival.
    Michael wasn’t halfway across the pedestrian bridge before the automatic doors on the other side of it opened, revealing a shopping arcade filled with everything China had to offer. Electric dusters competed for space with scooters and robots and gift-boxed chopsticks. As he strode through the arcade, the sheer mass of product threatening to overwhelm his senses, Michael kept his eyes on a second set of deeply tinted automatic doors at the far end of the corridor. Those doors were his goal. The reason he was there. Five paces out, the deeply tinted panes slid smoothly open revealing the largest outdoor square that Michael had ever seen. It was then that it hit him. The border he had just crossed was much more than a simple line on a map. It was a line in the sand. A division between East and West, and as Michael contemplated that fact, he realized that here, alone in this vast square, far from home, the search for his father was about to truly begin. And so, Michael crossed not only his fingers, but the threshold of everything he had ever known, and entered the East.

6

    L I T UNG DIDN ’ T like to travel. If you were to ask him why, he would probably say that he was old now and preferred the comforts of home, but the truth was, he had never much liked it. It was a fact he had, out of necessity, gone many places in his youth, but now, in his golden years, his once thick black hair a mottled snow gray, Li preferred to stay close to the quiet home he had created for himself atop Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak. He still had to go down the hill occasionally, if only to let his underlings know that he was still very much in charge, but he rarely ventured farther afield than Kowloon, and never beyond the borders of Hong Kong’s Special Administrative Region. Life was, after all, short and Li intended to employ what few years he had left, the way he liked, at home, in his garden, having the world come to him.
    Today, however, was different. Li was preparing for, of all things, a trip. The very thought of it made him anxious, so anxious in fact that if there had been any other way, he would not have