Gee Sin didn’t want to use the 49s, the say gow jai, the dog soldiers. They’d surely muck things up, spook the prey. They were good enough as street muscle, but lacked the sophistication to carry out a quiet search for the whore. Paper Fan had dispatched only the Grass Sandal ranks to conduct the search and pursuit. She can run, he mused, but she cannot hide forever.

“It is simply a function of time,” he said to Tsai. He didn’t think she was still in Mei Kwok, the United States, but Chinese communities in the various far-flung cities of the world were connected through the secret societies, and she’d surface sooner or later.

It was almost the period of Yuen Siu, the Lantern Festival, and soon the lanterns would be hung up at Wong Tai Sin Temple and a thousand lesser temples worldwide.

The cadre of Red Circle hunters would surely find her then.

He took another sip of the cognac, feeling safe in the luxury of his condo refuge, his fortress and lair, advising Grass Sandal over the secure digital cell-phone connection. He knew it was mid-morning in Tsai’s location in New York City and took pleasure in knowing that all the Red Circle’s investments in Manhattan properties had been successful, and prices of their real estate remained steady. He commended Tsai before terminating the call.

He poured more cognac and let his mind drift to the society’s successes. The Circle had refined forgery, fraudulent credit, and identity theft into an art and a science. He reflected again on the Thirty-six Strategies and how he’d added a twist to Number Seven: Create something out of nothing, to use false information effectively. The Grass Sandals were creating false identities, welding real account numbers to paper names, breeding phantoms who would bring millions to the Red Circle.

To steal the dragon and replace it with the phoenix meant stealing account numbers and matching them with new faces. They’d manufactured bogus driver’s licenses for picture identification. The fake licenses were computer-generated and virtually indistinguishable from the real deal. Any of the mobile mills, with portable laptops and rented laser printers, could turn out acceptable forged passports and visas as well.

He took another swallow from his glass of cognac, caught his breath, and closed his eyes. He had learned quickly from past operations in Canada. Instead of selling the cards to amateurs who would get caught and call attention to their operation, he’d decided to use selected Chinese people in order to impose control and improve communication. The idea of using storage locations and closed warehouses was his way of adding mobility and volume for the operators. They would fence the scam’s products through the triad’s legitimate businesses.

Gee Sin, the senior adviser, had taken advantage of the Americans’ holiday preoccupation with gift-giving, the annual buying frenzy that overwhelmed what was originally a religious holiday. Paper Fan had quickly realized how important these several weeks were to merchants hoping to rake in sales, which, in the crazed crush of business, made them careless and blind to credit-card fraud.

They’d focused on high-end electronics that the Red Circle could sell easily through its network of merchants, expensive items like video camcorders, digital cameras, and laptop computers. Diamond jewelry and expensive watches. They’d expected to steal tens of millions of dollars’ worth of merchan-dise over the holidays. The legitimate cardholder and the card-issuing company wouldn’t detect anything amiss until weeks after the holidays, when the monthly statements arrived in the mail. By then, Paper Fan and his operatives would be long gone, leaving only a trail of smoke and shadows.

His thoughts changed again as he felt a slow throbbing at his left wrist. Occasionally, he’d feel sharp pain there, but this occurred mostly in cold climates like Vancouver or Toronto.

Time to take it off, he thought.

The psychiatric member of the rehabilitation and physical therapy team at Kowloon had suggested to him the idea of residual pain, the severed nerves remembering the moment of the chop. “It’s all in the brain,” she’d said. “You think you feel pain so you do feel pain.” Mostly it was chafing, or too much pressure at the new joint, where scar-sealed bone and muscle bumped against the silicone-padded socket of the prosthesis.

He could remove the prosthesis to relieve the discomfort. Painkiller medication was prescribed if necessary.

Dew keuih, fuck, he cursed quietly. He knew it wasn’t the hand. After all, it fit well and he’d trained with it, had willed it to work well. It wasn’t the hand.

It was the attack that he remembered, hazy now but still horrific even after twenty-five years; the pain of a young man revived in the stump arm of an old man. The glint of light from his left. Raising his bow arm reflexively. It wasn’t the hand, marvelously sculpted and engineered. He’d been knocked down. When he braced to get up, he saw that he had no left hand. It was the memory.

And he had survived the attack. The chop had been intended for his neck.

Gee Sin detached the elastic and Velcro band that wrapped around his elbow and slipped the hand off. He imagined it as a weapon, nestled in the sling, its holster. He set it down on the black glass coffee table.

The throbbing in the stump ebbed.

Touch

Already five years old, the bionic hand was an ultralite model, a myoelectric prosthesis with articulate fingers, an opposable thumb, a rotating wrist. It was powered by batteries inside the fake limb. Sensors there detected when the arm muscles contracted, then converted the body’s electrical signal into electric power. This engaged the motor controlling the hand and wrist, its skeletal frame made of thermoplastics and titanium for extreme flexibility. The frame was covered by a skin of silicone that was resistant to heat and flame, and custom-colored with pigmentation to match the patient’s skin. The hand and fingers were sculpted with fingernails, knuckles, and creases. At a glance, it was indistinguishable from a real hand. The hand cost eighty thousand dollars in Hong Kong and the triad had paid without question.

Removing it from his forearm reminded him of the rehabilitation course at the Kowloon Clinic, where he’d trained to use his new artificial limb. He’d continued for a year until his control of hand and finger movements became so deft that he mastered eating with chopsticks and dealing a deck of cards. He could pluck a coin off the table.

He could pull the trigger of a gun.

Aaya, he sighed, finishing off the last of the cognac, letting his thoughts return to matters at hand. He was indifferent to the murder of Uncle Four; the Hip Ching leader had been arrogant and so had brought about his own demise with his whore. His foolishness, however, had cost the Red Circle a cache of gold Pandas and brilliant diamonds, the value of which, though small compared to the billions raked in by combined triad operations, had caused a loss of face. The Hakkanese drug couriers and their Chiu Chao financiers had leaked details of the rip-off.

The Red Circle had lost face, and the whore had to pay.

Death by a myriad of swords was too simple. They’d have to make an example of her, a warning to all others who thought they could steal from the Hung Huen brotherhood. They would videotape a gang rape of her, then pimp her off, before killing her, finally making a snuff film for the porno dogs to market, completing the revenge.

The throbbing came back, a slow steady beat. Normally, he’d take a Vicodin and allow it to pass, but tonight he had special pleasures in mind, the kind he didn’t want diminished by medication. It was the one thing aging men still clung to. Desire. He closed his eyes and pictured the siu jeer, “young ladies,” who would soon arrive at his condo door, and ignored the pulsing forearm stump.