"Report just in: Daniel Jang made contact with Robert Ryan at LaGuardia Airport."

"Hmm... Stirs up a storm in Hong Kong and then strolls into the country like nothing happened... Is he that gutsy, or just young enough to think the world's a pushover..."

Luke, leader of the CIA's Asia Intelligence Team 3, shook his head at his subordinate's report.

The guy had guts.

Daniel Jang—presumably on close terms with Robert Ryan, the hottest name on Wall Street.

Thanks to him, spies from every country had been on edge in Hong Kong not long ago.

That had been the day a powerful Chinese family married into a French noble house.

On the surface it was the wedding of the century; underneath, it was a deeply tangled deal.

Two of the houses that secretly carved up the world had been bound together by marriage.

Every intelligence service worth the name had flocked to Hong Kong.

And then, out of nowhere, Daniel Jang showed up.

The CIA had already had him on its watch list.

Anyone who made contact with Robert Ryan got top-priority attention.

And a Korean named Daniel Jang ranked high among them.

That Daniel Jang had shown up in Hong Kong and set off something big.

Suddenly Lee Zhangchang, the Chinese heavyweight based in Hong Kong, ordered a hit.

The details were impossible to pin down, but something serious had gone on between the two men behind the scenes.

Korean intelligence had apparently been involved, but in Hong Kong they couldn't stop it.

Most of the Korean agents were known to the Chinese side's operatives.

There was no room for them to step in.

A savage fight broke out.

Daniel Jang cleanly took out the hitmen Lee Zhangchang had sent.

He'd put on a one-man action movie in Hong Kong.

But that, surely, was the end of it.

The intelligence officers were sure he'd never make it home—that he'd be killed in a foreign country soon enough.

A man with no real protection couldn't survive in the backyard of a powerful Chinese family.

In a China ruled by the…