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house.
    An elderly man in his seventies was standing by a large tank of marine fish, crushing flakes and dropping them into the tank. He stopped as the young man entered the room, brushed his hands, and studied the tattoo for several moments before nodding his approval. ‘Another work of art,’ he said.
    He bowed his thanks to the old tattooist, who responded in kind and left. The old man was head of a powerful Chinese clan known as the White Palms, which controlled the Chiu Chao triads, the fourteen most powerful underworld gangs in the world. But a stroke had left him lame and shaken his memory a bit, so he had decided to step down. The young man, whose name was Tollie Fong, would on that night become the new san wong, the hill chief, as the leader of the triad was known.
    ‘It is quite a day,’ the old man said, tending his fish. ‘Your father would be very proud of you, as I am. I can think of no one who deserves to become san wong of the White Palm Triad more than you.’
    They were standing beside a saltwater aquarium, a big one, a hundred gallons. The old man crumbled brine shrimp in his fingers, and sprinkled it in the tank. ‘Now I can spend my time playing with my fish.’
    Beautiful rainbow-colored fish drifted in and out of the coral on the bottom. The most dominant was a cobalt-blue angel, about the size of a dollar pancake, with a long snout.
    ‘For fifty years we have been the most feared of the triads. Now it is more important than ever to be undisputed,’ the old man went on.
    As the shrimp pieces sank, the other fish swarmed around them. The blue angel attacked them, ramming and dispersing them and then swooping and darting about the tank, gobbling up the small bits as they sank toward the tank floor. The angel cleared the area and circled lazily, snapping up the bits of shrimp floating down through the tank,
    ‘Never show weakness to anyone —, The old man sprinkled some fish food in his hand and held it down into the tank. The angel circled cautiously for a moment and then darted in, grabbed a bit of food and backed off. Through the water, Tollie Fong could see the tattoo on the old san wong’s forearm. It was identical with his own, put there, in fact, by the same artist when they both were much younger men.
    ‘— not to your family, your wife, your brother, not to me
    — but most of all, never to your enemies. Well, enough of that. While the old man was performing his magic on your arm, your man in Bangkok called. I took the liberty of accepting the message, since you could not be disturbed.’
    ‘Ah, good. What did he say?’ Fong said eagerly.
    ‘He said the garden is planted. The harvest will be tonight.’
    Twenty miles east of Kangar near Padang Besar, the railroad crossing from Thailand into Malaysia, Father Kilhanney drove the pickup truck cautiously along the crumbling back road. He was only a mile or so from the border station and the rain had cone suddenly, as it always did in southern Thailand. Lightning streaked the sky, and palm fronds, urged by the wind, snatched at the windshield. Kilhanney felt sorry for the women in the back. There was no tarp covering the bed, and the eighteen laborers were huddled together against the storm. Ki l hanney wasn’t sure exactly what was going on and he didn’t want to know. His job was to meet a private plane at Songkhla and drive eighteen laborers to the Thai-Malaysia border.
    The road wound down past the guard station, coursed back through the jungle for thirty miles to the main road, then north up the Thai peninsula to Bangkok. The border station was little more than a customs house with two guards.
    Before dawn, eighteen women, twelve carrying their babies in slings on their back, would walk across the invisible line that divided Thailand and Malaysia. With their work permits they would earn ten dollars a day as laborers on the rubber plantations or as domestic help for the moneyed aristocracy. Across the isolated border another truck