The Name Is Tong. James Tong. 008, Because Eight Is Prosperity And Bond Is a C-Minus Grade.James Tong is sixty-three. He reads as late forties. The fifteen-year discount is partly genetics, partly the collagen — bone broth, beef tendon, fish maw, the white cartilage off a pork rib — and partly the refusal to apologize. He has discarded his English name. He wears $5,000 tracksuits to eat spicy street noodles. He is the great-grandson of a Cantonese railroad coolie. He is the Sovereign Successor.
A Silicon Valley billionaire wants the seahorses. Not the seahorses in the aquarium. The ones in Beijing’s Hospital 503 — CRISPR-modified, regulated under triple seal, eight years of work no one outside the Politburo has put a number on. Devin Lao calls them immortality. James calls them the most expensive fish he has ever lifted. The fee is sixty-six million. Six-six. Liu liu shun. The smooth number.
James will run the job his way. Three exfil routes. Three identity papers. Three women who can plausibly explain why he was in their bedroom at three in the morning. The cunning rabbit keeps three warrens. He has been Year of the Water Rabbit since 1963 and the proverb has been right every time.
Then Misaki Tanaka walks into Bar Ishinohana. Thirty-four. Former B-movie star. CCP-sanctioned yoga instructor whose Hangzhou post-production team had to digitally edit a four-character tattoo out of every shoulder shot for thirty-six episodes. The tattoo, between her shoulder blades, says ware tada taru o shiru. I only know enough. It is the inscription on the basin at Ryoan-ji temple in Kyoto. James will see it for the first time over kaiseki in Ginza and he will not understand it. He will continue not to understand it for the rest of the book.
The seahorses leave Beijing on schedule. The general is James’s cousin. The Mac Mini M5 in the safehouse above Old Ma’s smoke is loaded with a $80,000 firmware exploit from a Mrs. Chen in Hong Kong. The Hui hawala moves the fee across nine cities on three continents through women who count receipts in Arabic and Chinese on the same notebook page. The job is clean.
And then James says the wrong thing, in Beijing, on the morning of the eve of eight. Just smile and look pretty for the camera, sweetheart. Misaki swaps the immortality seahorses for $5 pet shop goldfish. Theodore Kessler’s chartered Gulfstream carries the goldfish to Atherton. Devin Lao screams a scream only billionaires and toddlers are capable of. The fee clears anyway. The basin holds.
Year of the Seahorse is Book 1 of The 008 Series — a techno-caper cycle from M. Eigh and Red Lantern Press. Comedy specials shot in Macau penthouses. Hospital heists scored to bone-broth pseudoscience. A protagonist who wears the catchphrase and the tracksuit with equal unearned confidence. For readers of Don Winslow, Daniel Suarez, Joseph Finder, Lee Child, and Kevin Kwan.
