Donovans 02 - Jade Island

there’s not enough evidence to hold her. What’s in it for us?”
    “A chance to make China happy and Farmer look like a fool,” Kyle said.
    In a heartbeat April went from casual to full alert. “The jade burial suit?”
    Kyle nodded. “Interested?”
    “Yes.”
    “Lianne has to be able to move freely. Drop the charges.”
    “You think Farmer has smuggled the damned shroud out of the States?” April asked quickly. “We know he took it to his island, but we didn’t think he managed to get it over the border. Shit. That’s all we need, piling theCanadian bureaucracy on top of everything else. What a Charlie Fox-trot.”
    Kyle didn’t translate “Charlie Fox-trot” for Lianne. He was too busy switching over to plan B, the one where the jade suit wasn’t in Seattle. It wasn’t his preferred plan. But then, nobody had asked him to approve.
    “Shit,” April said again, with emphasis. She looked at Lianne, who had gone back to unwrapping jades. Then she glared at Kyle. “If you were anybody else’s brother, I’d kick your tight butt out the door right now.”
    “I’ll tell Archer you care.”
    April ignored him. She was sorting through possibilities with the speed of the well-trained, intelligent agent she was. It didn’t take long to get to the bottom line.
    None of the possibilities particularly appealed to her, and only one of them might lead to a fast solution. Speed was critical. The longer the standoff between Farmer and China went on, the greater the chance that China would unzip decades of zigzag economic progress in a rush to preserve national pride.
    China’s leaders wouldn’t suffer in an economic downturn. They would still have their Western toys and Eastern aesthetics. Dick Farmer wouldn’t suffer. There were other world markets to make another billion bucks in. The people who suffered would be the hundreds of millions of Chinese who would survive more gracefully in the twenty-first century, with all its drawbacks, than in the modern Bronze Age of rural China, where life was so brutally hard it stunted children in the womb.
    With a mixture of bitterness and acceptance, April watched the last of the jades being unwrapped…the cream of a culture’s artistic aspirations worked in stone that was as hard as a despot’s heart. Even as she wondered how many millions had lived and died in poverty to support such an expensive, labor-intensive art, the pragmatic part of her knew it didn’t matter. That was the past. The present was a jade artifact so important to China that herleaders were willing to kick off a trade war and self-destruct their own economy over it.
    “What’s your plan?” April asked.
    “You don’t want to know,” Kyle said.
    She stared at him without expression, but she was thinking of Archer Donovan. He had a legendary ability to drag the hottest chestnuts out of the fire and not burn down anybody’s house in the process. “Slick, you better be as good as you think you are.”
    “I hear you.”
    “What do you need from us?” April said after another tense pause.
    While Lianne listened to exactly what Kyle wanted from Uncle, she unwrapped the last jade. Very quickly, Bride Dreaming lay in her hands, as elemental and ethereal as her memories.
    “Three rebreathers?” April asked. “You want the Navy SEALs to go with them? They’d love the exercise.”
    “If I need them, you’ll be the first to know.”
    “What’s a rebreather?” Lianne asked Kyle.
    “Scuba gear that doesn’t leave a trail of bubbles.”
    “Is one of those rebreathers for me?”
    “No.”
    “Make it four,” Lianne told April.
    “Four it is.”
    Kyle started to argue, then shrugged. It wouldn’t hurt to have an extra unit on hand in case something was defective in the first three. But if Lianne thought she was coming along, she was dead wrong.
    “Anything else?” April asked.
    “Get Farmer to agree to an expert appraisal of his burial shroud,” Lianne said.
    “He already has.”
    “Damn it. I’d like to have been there.”
    “It hasn’t happened yet. China is sending its own expert.” April gave Lianne her full attention. “Do you really think Farmer’s shroud is fake?”
    “I really think I’d like a close look at it,” Lianne said smoothly. “But wouldn’t it be nice if it was fake?”
    “Only if China’s expert agreed,” April said. “If we had that, we wouldn’t need to screw around with you two.”
    “Who is Uncle’s expert?” Kyle asked.
    “Me,”