"Rain Storm aka Choke Point" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eisler Barry)5KEIKO AND I spent the next two days doing the things tourists do. We visited Coloane Village and Taipu. We went to the top of the Macau Tower. We toured Portuguese churches and national museums. We gambled in the Floating Casino. Keiko seemed to enjoy herself, although she was a pro and I couldn’t really know. For me, it all felt like waiting. I found myself wishing I didn’t need the cover Keiko provided. She was a sweet girl, but much as I enjoyed her body I had tired of her company. More important, I didn’t like that Belghazi and Delilah both knew that I was staying at the Mandarin. The risk was manageable, of course: Belghazi had no way of knowing that I presented a threat, and Delilah had reason to refrain from moving against me, at least for the time being. The risk was also necessary: if Belghazi somehow learned that I had checked out of the hotel but saw me again in Macau, it would look strange to him, suspicious. I knew he was attuned to such discrepancies. So I had to stay put, and simply stay extra alert to my surroundings. Twice we took the TurboJet ferry to Hong Kong. I gave Keiko money to indulge herself in the island’s many boutiques, a small salve for what I recognized as my recent remoteness. While she shopped, I wandered, observing, imitating, practicing the Hong Kong persona that helped me blend here and in Macau: the walk, the posture, the clothes, the expression. I bought a pair of nonprescription eyeglasses, a wireless, sleek-looking design that you see everywhere in Hong Kong and only rarely in Japan. I picked up one of the utilitarian briefcases that so many Hong Kong men seem to carry at all times, part of the local culture, I think, being comprised of a constant readiness to do business. I bought clothes in local stores. I was confident that, as long as I didn’t open my mouth, no one would make me as anything but part of the indigenous population. At the outset of the second of these Hong Kong excursions, I noticed an Arab standing in the lobby of the Macau Mandarin Oriental as we moved through it. He was new, not one of Belghazi’s bodyguards. I noted his presence and position, but of course gave no sign that he had even registered in my consciousness. He, however, was not similarly discreet. In the instant in which my gaze moved over his face, I saw that he was looking at me intently, almost in concentration. The way a guy might look, in a more innocent setting, at someone he thought but wasn’t entirely sure was a celebrity, so as not to appear foolish asking the wrong person for an autograph. In my world, this look is more commonly seen on the face of the “pedestrian” who peers through the windshield of a car driving through a known checkpoint, his brow furrowed, his eyes hard, his head now nodding slightly in unconscious reflection of the pleasure of recognition, who then radios his compatriots fifty meters beyond that it’s time to move in for the kidnapping, or to open up with their AKs, or to detonate the bomb they’ve placed along the road. But my gut wouldn’t buy that. And I don’t trust anything more than I trust that feeling in my gut. But they But I might have been missing something. I couldn’t be sure. Okay. Keiko and I kept moving, smiling and talking, just a couple of happy tourists, wandering around in a daze. I might have turned around and taken us out through the back entrance. But that would have interfered with the spotter’s sense that I was clueless, and that sense might offer some small advantage later. Besides, I didn’t think they’d move against me in a public place, if a move was what this was about. Macau is a peninsula, after all, and they’d want a venue that would enable them to slip away. So I stayed with the front entrance, where we caught a taxi for the brief ride to the Macau Ferry Terminal. We arrived and got out of the cab. I didn’t see anything in front of the building that set off my radar. The lobby of the first floor, likewise. But the place to pick someone up here would be the second floor, where passengers boarded. If you wanted to know whether someone was traveling to Hong Kong, the departure lounge would be the only real choke point in the complex. And that’s exactly where I saw the second guy, another Arab, this one a bearded giant with a linebacker’s physique. He was wearing an expensive-looking jacket and shades and standing off to the side of one of the ATMs in the lobby, the machine offering both cover for action and a clear view of the departure area. Again, I offered no sign that I had noticed anything out of the ordinary. The Arabs stuck out sufficiently to make me wonder for a moment whether they might have been deliberate distractions-decoys to mask the other, in this case Asian, players. Possible, I decided, but not likely. No one else was setting off my radar. And flying all these guys in from wherever would have been an expensive and time-consuming way to gain the marginal advantage of distraction they might offer. No, I sensed instead that the momentary problem I faced was probably no deeper than what was immediately apparent. Sure, these guys knew they stuck out. They just didn’t give me enough credit to understand that I would find their sticking out highly relevant, and to act appropriately. They didn’t grasp the critical fact of how I would interpret their relative conspicuousness. Shame on them. The ferry ride to Hong Kong lasted an hour. There were no Middle Eastern types on board, or anyone else who rubbed me the wrong way. We presented our passports to the customs authorities at the Shun Tak terminal in Hong Kong, then moved into the main lobby outside the arrivals gate. I spotted the third one immediately. Another Arab, long hair, mustache, navy suit, white shirt open at the collar, stylish-looking pair of shades. Unlike the majority of the people waiting here to greet passengers from Macau, who were standing right in front of the arrivals exit, he was leaning casually against the railing at the back of the open-air center of the lobby. Apparently, my new friend was afraid to get too close, afraid he’d get spotted. In trying to find a less conspicuous position, though, he’d only made himself stand out more. We took the down escalator at the front of the lobby. On the floor below, we had to walk around to the opposite side, then turn one hundred eighty degrees to catch the next escalator down. As we made the turn, I saw our pursuer, who I now thought of as Sunglasses, riding the escalator we had just used. I paused to take a look in the window of a cigar store before catching the second escalator down. I moved so that Keiko was facing me, her back to the window. “Keiko,” I said in Japanese, “do me a favor. Take a look behind us. Just glance around, okay? Don’t let your eyes linger on any one person. Tell me what you see.” She looked past me and shrugged. “I don’t know, lots of people. What am I supposed to be looking for?” “Do you see a foreigner? Arabic-looking guy? Don’t stare, just take a quick peek, then look at other people, look at the stores. You’re just bored waiting for me to finish window-shopping and you’re looking around, okay?” “What’s going on?” she asked, and I heard some concern in her voice. I shook my head and smiled. “Nothing to worry about.” I stepped into her field of vision to make her stop scoping the lobby, then placed my hand on her lower back and started moving her along with the pressure of my palm. “Okay, don’t look back. Just tell me what you saw.” “There was an Arab man in a suit.” “What was he doing?” “Talking on a cell phone. I think he was watching us, but he looked away when he saw me looking around. Do you know him?” “Sort of. It’s a little hard to explain.” What did Ian Fleming say? Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. And I don’t believe in waiting for even that much evidence. It was past time to act. We caught a cab on the ground floor. I held the door as Keiko got in. Out of my peripheral vision I saw our friend loitering in front of a 7-Eleven a few meters from the taxi stand. I knew that, as soon as I was in and the door had closed behind me, he would be getting a cab of his own. I used my dental mirror as we pulled away and saw that I had been right. Keiko watched me but didn’t say anything. I wondered what she was thinking. The driver didn’t seem to notice. He was absorbed in the variety show he had on the radio, the announcer’s voice frantic with artificial hilarity. I had the driver take us to the Citibank next to the Central MTR subway station. One of my alter egos keeps a savings account with Citi. I carry his ATM card whenever I go out. We went inside the bank, and Keiko waited while I withdrew fifty thousand Hong Kong dollars-about seven thousand U.S. The amount was over the ATM limit and I had to take care of it at the teller window. The clerk put the money in an envelope. I thanked him and walked over to Keiko. “How about some shopping?” I asked her, showing her the bulging envelope. We were surrounded by Hermès, Prada, Tiffany, Vuitton, and others that I knew she craved. “I’d like to buy you some new things, if you want.” She smiled and her eyes lit up. “ I walked us to the Marks amp; Spencer up the street, a destination that interested me less because of the store’s wares than because of its design. The front was all plate glass, and offered a clear view of the street outside. Keiko and I browsed among the silk and cashmere, and I watched Sunglasses and two recently arrived companions setting up outside, two in front of the HSBC bank, the other in front of a Folli Follie jewelry store. The way they were assembling, I was getting the feeling that they were no longer just in “following” mode. If they had been, they wouldn’t have positioned themselves so closely together-a configuration that tends to be counterproductive for surveillance, but has certain advantages for a hit. They were getting ready, ready to move, and they wanted their forces in place, concentrated, good to go when the moment was right. All right, time for me to head out. Alone. I walked over to Keiko and took her gently by the arm. “Keiko, listen to me carefully. Something bad is going on. I’ll tell you what you need to know to get out of it.” She shook her head slightly as if to clear it. “I’m sorry?” “There are some men following me. The Arab with the cell phone is one of them. They intend to do me harm. If you’re with me, they’ll harm you, too.” She gave me a hesitant smile, as though hoping I was going to smile back and tell her the whole thing was a joke. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t… I don’t understand.” The smile widened for a second, then faltered. “I know you don’t, and I don’t have time to explain. Here, take this.” I handed her the envelope. “There’s enough in there to get you back to Japan, and then some. You’ve got your passport. Get to the airport and go.” “Are you… is it that you’re not happy with me?” she asked, still thinking like a professional. But of her profession, not of mine. “I’ve been very happy with you. Look at me. What I’m telling you is the truth. You need to get away from here now if you don’t want to get hurt. It’s me they’re after. They don’t care about you.” Before she could ask any more questions, I added, “Here’s what you need to do. Stay put for ten minutes. I’m going to leave and those men will follow me. After ten minutes, you leave, too. Go into one of the women’s stores nearby. Tell them you’re being hassled by a guy and want to lose him. He’s following you, waiting for you outside. They’ll let you out the back, which the men won’t be expecting. If it doesn’t work at the first one, try another.” “I don’t-” “Just listen. Use cabs. Go into stores that men don’t visit-lingerie, things like that. That’ll make it harder to follow you because I don’t think these guys work with women. Go in the front and out the back. Take a lot of elevators. It’s hard to stay with someone in an elevator without getting spotted. Stay in public places.” She shook her head. “Why would… I don’t-” “I don’t think anyone will follow you. You don’t matter to them. But I want to make sure, all right? I don’t want to take chances. When you know you’re alone, get to the airport and leave Hong Kong on the first flight you can get. Then go to Japan. Go home. You’ll be safe there.” She shook her head again. “I have… I have things at the hotel. I can’t just go.” “If you go back to the hotel, they’ll pick you up again and follow you in the hope that you’ll lead them to me.” “But-” “Your things aren’t worth dying over, Keiko. Are they?” Her eyes widened. “Are they?” I asked, again. She shook her head. In agreement or disbelief, I couldn’t tell. I wanted to go, but she needed to hear one more thing. “Keiko,” I said, looking at her closely, “in a few minutes, certainly in an hour, this conversation will start to seem unreal. You’ll convince yourself that I was making this all up, trying to get rid of you, something like that. You’ll be tempted to go back to the Mandarin to try to find me. I won’t be there. I can’t go back any more than you can. You seem like a smart girl and you’ve got a lot of good things ahead of you. Don’t be stupid today. This isn’t a game.” I turned and left. I’d done all I could do. She would either act tactically or she wouldn’t. I headed for the MTR subway’s Central Station. I didn’t know if they were armed, and the way they were configured around me I couldn’t be confident of dropping all three and getting away clean. Also, there were a number of uniformed policemen in the area. The police presence would likely inhibit my friends for the moment, as it was inhibiting me. I decided to take them sightseeing someplace, somewhere casual where we could all let our hair down. This would be tricky. From the way they had been following us, my gut told me they were waiting for the right venue to act. Someplace unusually empty, or someplace extremely crowded. Someplace that would give them a chance to act and then get away without being stopped, or even remembered by witnesses. Until they found that place, I could expect them to continue to refrain. If they thought they were losing me, though, or if they sensed that I was playing with them in some way, they might decide the hell with it and do something precipitous. I hoped I was right about them. It was hard to be sure. I was used to dealing with western intelligence services and I took the escalator down to the MTR station, maintaining a brisk pace to make it harder for them to overtake me in case I had been wrong about where they might make their move. The station was filled with surveillance cameras, and for once I actually welcomed their presence. Unless Larry, Moe, and Achmed wanted whatever they had in mind to be captured on video, they would have to wait a little longer. And a little longer was all I needed. That is, if they even noticed the cameras, of course. Assuming your enemy is intelligent can be as dangerous as assuming he’s stupid. A Tsuen Wan-bound train pulled in and I got on it. My friends entered the same car on the other end. I’d been right, at least so far. They were hanging back, not yet wanting to get too close, not yet realizing that I’d already spotted them. I decided to take them to Sham Shui Po, a colorful community in West Kowloon, one of the many areas I had spent some time getting to know while setting up for Belghazi, contingency planning for circumstances like the one at hand. On a more auspicious occasion, we might have been hoping to take in the two-thousand-year-old Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb or the century-old Tin Hau Temple. Or bargain hunting on Cheung Sha Wan Road, the area’s “Fashion Street,” where garment manufacturers sell directly to the public. Or hunting for secondhand electronic goods and pirated CDs and DVDs in the area’s outdoor flea markets. But today I wanted to offer them something a little more special. I stepped off the train at Sham Shui Po station, moved through the turnstiles, and took the C1 exit to the street. The teeming scene in front of the station made familiar Tokyo look deserted by comparison. The street stretching out before me between rows of crumbling low-rises and slumped office buildings looked like a river of people gushing through a ravine. Cars jerked through congested intersections, pedestrians flowing around them like T-cells attacking a virus. Laundry and air-conditioning units hung from soot-colored windows, high-tension wires sagged across overhead. Signs in Chinese characters leered from buildings like lichens clinging to trees, their paint gone to rust, colors faded to gray. Here was an emaciated, shirtless man, asleep or unconscious in a lawn chair; there was a plumper specimen, leaning against a lamppost, clipping his fingernails with supreme nonchalance. An indistinct cacophony blanketed the area like fog: people shouting into cell phones, street stall hawkers exhorting potential customers, cars and horns and jackhammers. A couple of pigeons soared from one rooftop to another, flapping their wings in seeming amusement at the seething mass below. My friends would be trying to take all this in, process it, decide what it meant for them and for their chances of getting away with what they were here to do. It would take them a few minutes to work all that out. They didn’t know that a few minutes was all they had left. I browsed the open-air stalls and popped in and out of a few electronics stores, checking unobtrusively as I did so to ensure that my friends weren’t getting too close, that they hadn’t yet made up their minds. To them, it would look like I had left Keiko shopping for clothes while I indulged a taste for computer gadgets and pirated software. And I did make a couple of purchases as I browsed. A pair of athletic socks-thick, knee-length, light gray. A plain navy baseball cap. And a dozen Duracell look-alike D-cell batteries. All for about twenty Hong Kong dollars. I smiled at the bargains to be had in Sham Shui Po. While we walked, I shoved the baseball cap in a back pocket. Then, working in front of my waist and mostly by feel to ensure that my pursuers wouldn’t see, I pushed my left hand into one of the socks and pulled the other sock over it, doubling them up. I slipped eight of the batteries inside, discarding the rest in a trashcan, and tied off the sock just above the batteries to make sure they would stay clumped together. I wrapped the open end of the sock around my right hand twice like a bandage, using three fingers to secure it and holding the weighted end between my thumb and forefinger. As I turned a corner, I released the weighted end. It dropped about twenty centimeters, stopping with a heavy bounce as the batteries reached the limit of the material’s extension. I looped the material around my right hand until the weighted end nestled into my palm, then hooked my thumbs into my front pockets as I walked, concealing the improvised flail from the men behind me. I took them in a counterclockwise arc that ended at a three-story food market half a kilometer from the station entrance. I went inside, checking as I did so to make sure that they were still an appropriate distance behind me. I had no trouble picking them out of the crowd. They were the only non-Asians around. Which was a problem for them, but not an insurmountable one. The market was so massively crowded and clamorous that, if they could get close, they could put a knife in a kidney or a silenced bullet through my spine without anyone noticing when it happened or remembering it afterward. If I were in their shoes, this was the place I’d make my move. I moved up one of the alleys of food stalls toward the escalators I knew were at the other end. Meat hung from hooks around me, the air sharp with the smell of fresh blood. Butchered eels writhed on bamboo serving plates, their severed halves twitching independently. Mouths on disembodied fish heads slowly opened and closed, the gills behind them rippling, trying still to draw breath. Hawkers gestured and shouted and coaxed. Masses of shrimp and crabs and frogs twitched in wire baskets. A severed goat’s head twirled from a hook, its teeth clenched in final rictus, its dead eyes staring past the tumult at some bleak and final horizon. I broke free of the thick crowd just before I reached the escalator. I took it two steps at a time, dodging past the stationary riders, knowing the men behind me would read my sudden acceleration as a sign that I’d made them and was trying to escape. As soon as they cleared the crowds as I had, they would pursue. And if they caught me, they wouldn’t take another chance. They would act. At the top of the escalator, I looked back. There they were, at the bottom, trying to squeeze past the people in their way. Perfect. There was a double set of green doors just ahead and on the left. They were propped open; beyond them was a loading area in front of a freight elevator. At the top of the escalator I shot ahead, out of the field of vision of the men behind me, and ducked left into the loading area. I moved left again and hugged the wall, wedged partly behind one of the open doors, looking out through the gap at the hinged end. From here I would see them as they moved past. I tested the door and found it satisfyingly mobile and heavy. If they saw me and tried to move inside, I’d slam the door into them and attack with the flail as best I could. But it would be better if they went past me entirely. They did. I watched them moving through the gap in the door. When the last had gone by, I took three deep breaths, giving them another couple of seconds. I moved out. Adrenaline flowed through my gut and limbs. There they were, stopped where the corridor ended in a “T,” looking left and right, trying to make out which way I had gone among the thick crowds of shoppers to both sides. They were clustered up tight, the guy in the middle slightly ahead of the other two. Probably they thought proximity would afford them safety in numbers. In fact, they were turning themselves into a single target. When I was six meters away, the one in the center and slightly ahead of the other two started to turn. Maybe to consult; maybe, if he had any sense, to check his back. I increased my pace, hurrying now, needing to close the distance before he turned and saw that his understanding of who was hunting and who was hunted had become suddenly and fatally inaccurate. When I was four meters out, the lead guy completed his turn. He started to say something to one of his comrades. Then his eyes shifted to me. His head froze. His eyes widened. His mouth started to open. Three meters. I felt a fresh adrenaline dump in my torso, my limbs. His partners must have seen his face. Their shoulders tensed, their heads began to turn. Two meters. The guy to my right was closest. He was turning to his left, toward whatever had made his partner start to bug out. I saw the left side of his face as he came around, slowly, everything moving slowly through my adrenalized vision. One meter. I stepped in with my left foot, bringing my left arm up across my body, partly as defense, partly as counterbalance. I let my right hand drift back, the flail uncoiling on the way, then whipped my arm around, the palm side of my fist up, my elbow leading the way, my hips pivoting in as though I was doing a one-armed warm-up with a baseball bat. The weighted end sailed around and cracked into the back of his skull with a beautiful bass note thud. For a split instant, his body completely relaxed but he stayed upright-he was out on his feet. Then he started to slide down to the ground. The flail swung past him, my body coiling counterclockwise with the continued momentum of the blow, the flail wrapping itself halfway around my thigh. The guy to my left had now completed his turn. I saw him look at me, the universal expression for “oh shit” moving across his face, his right hand going for the inside of his jacket. Too late. I snapped my hips to the right and backhanded the flail around. He saw it coming, but was too focused on deploying his weapon and couldn’t concentrate on getting out of the way. It caught him in the side of the neck-not as solid a shot as his buddy had received but good enough for my purposes. I saw his eyes lose focus and knew I’d have at least a couple seconds before he was back in the game. The third guy was smarter, and had more time and space to react. While I was dealing with the other two, he had stepped back and gotten himself out of swinging range. He was groping inside his jacket now, his eyes wide, his movements frantic. The flail was passing between us, back to my right side. I saw him pulling something out of the jacket with his right hand. I let the flail’s momentum bring it around and under, releasing my grip at the last instant and sending the whole thing sailing toward him like a softball pitch aimed at the batter. He saw it coming and jerked partly out of the way, but it caught him in the shoulder. He stumbled and managed to get out a silenced pistol, a big one, trying at the same time to regain his balance. But his motor skills were suffering from a large and probably unfamiliar dose of adrenaline, and the long silencer made for an equally long draw. He bobbled the gun, and in that second I was on him. I caught the gun in my left hand and used my right foot to blast his legs out from under him in The second guy had now recovered enough to get a gun out. But, like his partner, he was adrenalized and having trouble with fine motor movements. His hand was shaking and he hesitated, perhaps realizing that if he pulled the trigger he might hit his partner, over whose torso my legs were crossed and whose ruined right arm was pulled tight across my chest. I straightened my right arm and focused on the front sight, placing it on the second guy’s torso, center mass. The gun was a Glock 21 in.45 caliber. Healthy stopping power. I willed myself to slow it down, make it count. The guy under me jerked and my aim wavered. The second guy moved the gun, trying to track me, the movements overlarge and shaking. Then, maybe because he saw the cool bead I was drawing on him, his nerve broke. He started shooting in a spray-and-pray pattern, his eyes closed, his body hunching forward involuntarily. I double-tapped the trigger. The first round caught him in the shoulder and spun him around. The second missed, going off into the wall near the ceiling. I compensated and fired again. This time I nailed him in the back near the spine and dropped him to the floor. I lurched to my feet and moved toward him. Around us, people were running from the scene, pushing up against the mass of other shoppers. The immediate area was suddenly empty. I walked up to the one I had just dropped. He was on his stomach, writhing, groaning something unintelligible. I shot him in the back of the head. The first one I’d hit with the flail was flat on his back, his legs splayed back under him, seemingly unconscious. I shot him in the forehead. I turned to the last one. He was on his ass, scrambling away from me on his feet and good arm. His face was green with pain and terror. I shot him in the chest and he collapsed to the ground, his legs still kicking. I took three long steps forward and shot him again, in the forehead. His head rocketed back and he was still. I looked around. Pandemonium now. Screams and shouting and panic. I needed to get the hell out. But I also needed information. Under other circumstances, I would have tried to keep one of them alive for questioning, but in a public place like this that course was impossible. I scooped up the flail and shoved it into one of the outer pockets of the navy blazer I was wearing. I was glad I’d thought to tie the thing off-if I hadn’t, the batteries might have rolled all over the place after I’d thrown it, with my fingerprints on them. I walked over to the last guy I’d shot and opened his jacket. Cashmere. The label under the breast pocket proclaimed Brioni. This guy was wearing three or four thousand bucks on his back. The shirt, admittedly not shown to its best advantage soaked in blood, looked similarly fine. His neck was adorned with a nice gold chain. His pockets, though, were empty. Nothing but a wad of Hong Kong dollars and a packet of fucking breath mints. Smart, not carrying ID. If they get pinched, they dummy up, call the embassy, maybe, get bailed out. But which embassy? Whose? I went to the next guy, knowing this was taking too long, hating the risk. Another Brioni jacket, along with a gold Jaeger-LeCoultre watch. But that was all. The third guy had a cell phone clipped to his belt. Yeah, that was him, the one Keiko and I had passed at Shun Tak terminal. Sunglasses. I pulled the phone free and opened his jacket. More Brioni. More empty pockets, save for the shades from which he had derived his short-lived nickname. The pants pockets were empty, too. I looked up, then behind me. The corridors were packed with fleeing people. A stampede panic tends to feed on itself long after the originating cause is gone. Probably most of these people didn’t even know what they were running from, hadn’t seen or heard anything. My escape routes weren’t going to open up anytime soon. I pulled the baseball cap out of my pocket and jammed it down onto my head. I pocketed the cell phone, slid the gun into my waistband, and shrugged off the blazer, exposing the white shirt underneath. In the immediate aftermath, witnesses would remember only gross details-color of the clothes, presence of a necktie, that sort of thing. The new hat and disappeared jacket would be enough to get me out of here. I pulled out the shirttails and let them fall over the gun. The elevator doors opened. It was calmer down here, but there was an unusual agitation in the crowd and it was clear that something had happened. I moved down one of the corridors, easing past shoppers who were looking behind me, searching to see what was going on back there. My pace was deliberate but not attention-getting. I kept my face down and didn’t meet anyone’s eyes. By the time I had reached the entrance where we had first come in, the collective rhythm of the people around me was normal, just food shoppers absorbed in the serious business of picking out the freshest fish or the most delectable cut of meat. I moved past them and into the street. I folded the jacket and slipped the gun inside it, wiping it down as I walked, making sure I covered all the surfaces. I did it by feel. Barrel. Trigger guard. Trigger. Butt. Fingerprints were only part of the problem, of course. When you’re stressed, you sweat. Sweat contains DNA. Likewise for microscopic dead skin cells, which, like sweat, can adhere to metal. If you’re unlucky enough to get picked up as a suspect, it’s inconvenient to have to explain why your DNA is all over the murder weapon. The dead men’s clothes, which I had touched while searching them, were less of a problem. They wouldn’t take prints, and I probably hadn’t handled them sufficiently to leave a material amount of sweat or skin cells behind. I turned into an alley choked with overflowing plastic garbage containers. An aluminum leader ran down the side of one of the alley walls and into an open drain beneath. I moved the leader out of the way and dropped the gun into the drain, seeing a satisfying splash as I did so. I checked behind me-all clear. I committed the batteries to the same final resting place, wiping each with the socks as I did so, then moved the leader back into position and walked on. Unlikely that the gun or batteries would ever be discovered where I had left them. Even if they were found, the water would probably wash away any trace DNA. And even if DNA were present, they’d need me in custody as a suspect to get a match. A good, layered defense. There was still a potential problem with witnesses, of course. I didn’t stick out here the way the Arabs had, but I didn’t exactly fit in, either. It’s hard to explain the clues, but they would be enough for the Sham Shui Po locals to spot, and perhaps to remember. My clothes were wrong, for one thing. I had been dressed for a day of lunch and shopping in Central, not for the hivelike back alleys of my current environs. The locals here were dressed more casually. And what they were wearing fit differently, usually not that well. Like the area itself, the colors on their clothes were slightly dulled. These people weren’t getting their delicates dry cleaned, starched, and returned on hangers. They weren’t laundering their things in Tide with Bleach and Extra Stain Removing Agents and Advanced Whiteners, or drying them on the gentle cycle in microprocessor-controlled driers. They hung their things on lines, where they would evaporate into the polluted air around. These and other differences would tell. Whether witnesses would be able to articulate them, I couldn’t say. So I needed to take every possible measure to ensure that it wouldn’t matter if they could. I turned a corner, balled up the jacket, and stuffed it deep into a ripe pile of refuse in a metal container. I unbuttoned the shirt I was wearing and gave it a similar burial. I was now wearing only pants and a tee-shirt, and looked a little more at home. I made a few aggressive moves to ensure that I wasn’t being followed, then took the MTR to Mong Kok, where I found a drugstore. I bought soap, rubbing alcohol, hair gel, and a comb. Next stop, a public restroom, reeking of what might have been decades-old urine, where I shit-canned the baseball cap and changed my appearance a little more by slicking my hair. I used the alcohol and soap to remove any traces of gunpowder residue that could show up on my hands under UV light. By the time I walked out of the lavatory, I was starting to feel like I had things reasonably well covered. I bought a cheap shirt from a street vendor, then found a coffee shop where I could spend a few minutes collecting myself. I ordered a tapioca tea and took a seat at an empty table. My first reaction, as always, was a giddy elation. I might have died, but didn’t, I was still here. Even if you’ve been through numerous deadly encounters, in the aftermath you want to laugh out loud, or jump around, shout, do Three down. That was good. Whoever was coming after me, I had just significantly degraded their forces, degraded their ability and perhaps also their will to fight. The paymasters must not have had ready access to local resources. If they had, they wouldn’t have sent a bunch of obvious out-of-towners. Now, when word got back that the last three guys who signed up for this particular mission had all wound up extremely dead as a result, they might have a harder time recruiting new volunteers. My satisfaction wasn’t solely professional, of course. The fuckers had been trying to kill me. I took out the cell phone. Christ, I’d forgotten to turn it off while I moved. Shame on me. Getting sloppy. All right, let’s see if I’d just created a problem for myself. The unit was an Ericsson, the T230. It had a SIM card, meaning it was a GSM model, usable pretty much everywhere but Japan and Korea, which employ a unique cell phone standard. I examined it for transmitters and didn’t find any. I thought for a minute. Did the T230 incorporate emergency services location technology? I tend to read almost compulsively to stay on top of such developments, but even so things slip through the cracks. No, the T230 wasn’t that new a model. I was okay on that score, too. Still, I knew that some intelligence services had refined their cell phone tracking capabilities to the point where they could place a live cell phone to within about twenty feet of its actual location. Any worries on that score? Probably not. Whoever was coming after me had limited local resources. I doubted they would have the contacts or expertise that tracking the phone would require. Under the circumstances, I decided it would be worth hanging onto the unit, and leaving it powered on. It could be interesting to see who might call in. I checked the stored numbers. The interface was in Arabic, but the functions were standardized and I was able to navigate it without a problem. The call log was full-he hadn’t thought, or hadn’t had time, to purge it. I didn’t see any numbers I recognized. But the guy I’d taken it from had been talking to someone when I spotted him at Shun Tak station. Unless he’d made or received ten calls in the interim, there would be a record inside the phone of the numbers he’d dialed and of those that had dialed him. I had a feeling that some of those numbers would be important. I drank my tea and left. I took out Kanezaki’s cell phone and called him from it, moving on foot as the call went through. “ “It’s me.” “What’s going on?” “I’m concerned about something.” “What?” “Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong.” “What?” “Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong.” “I heard you. Are you serious?” I didn’t detect anything in his voice, but it was hard to tell over the phone. And he was smoother now than when I’d first met him. “You think I make this shit up to amuse you?” I said. There was a pause, then he asked, “Are you all right?” “I’m fine. Just concerned.” “Are you in danger now?” “Not from the three who were after me.” “You mean-” “They’re harmless now.” Another pause. He said, “You’re concerned about how they found you.” “Good for you.” “It wasn’t me.” I already half-believed that, I supposed. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have warned him by calling. Or I would have conceived of the call simply as a way to lull him, to set him up. I couldn’t imagine why he would have turned on me, but you never have the full picture on things like that. Circumstances change. People develop reasons where they had none before. “Who else knew I was in Macau?” I asked. “They tracked me from there. One of them was waiting to pick me up when I arrived at Shun Tak in Hong Kong.” “I don’t… Look, I have absolutely no reason to try to fuck you. No reason. I don’t know who they were or how they got to you. But I can try to find out.” “Convince me,” I said. “Give me what you’ve got. Let me see what I can do.” I decided to give him a chance. I didn’t see any down-side. I also didn’t see a good alternative. “They look Arab to me,” I said. “Maybe Saudi. They dress like they’ve got money. One of them was carrying a cell phone with an Arabic interface, and was using it to make or receive calls while they were following me. I’ll put all the numbers from the phone’s log on the bulletin board. You can run those down. They had at least one partner on Macau, probably more, and probably all of them transited Hong Kong recently. They were sloppy, they might all have arrived at the same time, maybe even on the same plane.” “That’s a lot. I can work with that. You think there’s a connection with our friend?” Belghazi. There were only a few Arabs in my life, and they were all recent arrivals. Although my thinking might not go down well with the antiprofiling crowd in the U.S., it was hard not to suspect that they were all connected. But I didn’t see anything to be gained from speculating aloud. “You tell me,” I said. “I’ll try.” “You need to convince me,” I said again. We’d known each other long enough for him to understand my meaning. “How do I contact you?” he asked. “I’ll check the bulletin board.” “It would be more efficient if you would just leave the cell phone on.” “I’ll check the bulletin board.” He sighed. “Okay. And you can always call me at this number. Give me twelve hours. Anything else?” “The blonde?” I asked. “Nothing. Still working on it.” I hung up. I found an Internet café, where I uploaded the information to the bulletin board. Then I sat for a minute, thinking. The three guys who had come after me here in Hong Kong were obviously in touch with someone in Macau. In fact, I was pretty damn sure that the one with the cell phone, Sunglasses, had called his Macau contact to confirm that I had arrived. The guy in Macau would now be waiting for news of the operation. The bodies of his buddies had only been cooling for about an hour now. Chances were good that he wouldn’t have heard yet of their tragic demise. He certainly wouldn’t be expecting, and he wouldn’t be prepared, to see me in Macau without first getting a heads-up from Hong Kong. And, even if he had somehow heard about the way things had turned out here, the last thing he would expect me to do would be to head straight back to the place where the ambush had obviously initiated: the Macau Mandarin Oriental. In either case, I realized I had an opportunity to surprise someone. Which is always a nice thing to be able to do. I headed back to Shun Tak to catch the next ferry to Macau. I tried not to think too much about what I was about to do. Charging an ambush is counterinstinctive: when your lizard brain identifies the direction the threat is coming from, it wants you to run away. But your lizard brain doesn’t always know best. It tends to focus on short-term considerations, and doesn’t always adequately account for the value of unpredictability, of deception, of surprise. Of taking a short-term risk for a longer-term gain. The hour-long ferry ride felt long. Maintaining a razor-edge readiness is exhausting, and, once the mad minute is over, the body badly wants to rest and recuperate. I tried to clear my mind, to take myself down a few levels-enough to recover, but not so much that I would be less than ready for whatever I might encounter on Macau. With about twenty minutes to go, the cell phone rang. I looked down at it and saw that the incoming number was the same as the one last dialed. Almost certainly the Macau contact, then, checking in, wanting to know what had happened. I ignored the call. We arrived at the Macau Ferry Terminal and I walked out into the arrivals lobby. The lobby was too crowded for me to know whether I had a welcoming committee. That was okay, though. One of the advantages of Macau is that you can access the city from the first floor of the ferry terminal-either by foot on the sidewalks, or by taxi-or you can go to the second floor and use the extensive series of causeways. If you’re waiting for someone at the ferry terminal, therefore, you have to be just outside the arrivals area, ready to move out or up, depending on the route taken by your quarry. So even though I couldn’t spot a pursuer yet, it would be easy for me to flush him if he was there. I took the escalator to the second floor, where I paused in front of one of the ATMs as though withdrawing some cash-a common enough maneuver for visitors heading for the casinos. I glanced back at the escalator I had just used, and saw an Arab coming up it. The big bastard, the bearded giant I’d noticed that morning. The shades and expensive jacket looked familiar at this point. Christ, they might as well have worn uniforms. Hi, my name’s Abdul, I’ll be your assassin today. They must have gotten nervous when the Hong Kong team had failed to check in, and put this guy back in position to be on the safe side. That, or he’d been waiting here all day. It didn’t matter. He’d seen me. His next move would be to telephone his Macau partners, if he hadn’t already. Which would be the end of the surprise I wanted to share with them all. I would have to improvise. If he was surprised to see me, and I imagined he was, he didn’t show it. He looked around, his demeanor casual, a simple tourist just arrived in Macau and taking in the wonders of the ferry terminal. I walked out onto the open-air plaza in front of the entrance to the second floor and walked a few meters toward the causeway. Then I stopped and looked behind me. He had just come through the doors on the right side of the plaza and was starting to raise his cell phone to his face when I turned back. When he saw me, he lowered the cell phone and stopped as though suddenly interested in the nonexistent view. I nodded my head at him and gave a small wave of acknowledgment, the gesture communicating, His head turtled in a fraction and his body tensed in the internationally approved reaction to being spotted on surveillance. It’s hard to describe, but it looks a little like what a gowned patient does when the doctor picks up a long instrument and advises, I walked straight up to him and said in a low voice, “Good, you’re here. They told me you’d be waiting on the first floor, by arrivals, but I didn’t see you.” He shook his head. His lips twitched, but no sound came out. “There’s been a mistake,” I said. “I’m not the guy you want.” His lips twitched some more. “You speak English, right?” I said. “They told me we could use English.” “Yes, yes,” he stammered. “I speak English.” I glanced quickly left and right as though suddenly nervous, then back at him, my eyes narrowed in sudden concern. “You’re the right guy, right? They told me someone would be waiting for me.” “Yes, yes,” he said again. “I am the right guy.” So many “yeses” in a row. We’d established the proper momentum. A group of three Hong Kong Chinese emerged from the terminal. I watched them walk past us as though I was concerned that they might hear us, then said, “Let’s talk over there.” I gestured to the external wall of the terminal, where we could stand without being seen from inside the building. I walked the few steps over and waited. A moment later, he followed. Damn, if I could maneuver him just a little more, get him to a slightly quieter place, I might even manage to interrogate him. That would be ideal, but also far riskier than the relatively straightforward approach I had in mind. I considered for a moment, then decided it wouldn’t be worth it. “From the look on your face,” I said, “I’m getting the feeling that you haven’t heard.” “Heard what? I’m sorry, I’m not understanding you.” The Hong Kong group was now out of earshot and still walking away. The plaza was momentarily empty. “Yes, I can see that,” I said. “All right, let’s just go back to the hotel. We’ll straighten everything out there.” That sounded harmless enough. His compatriots would be positioned at the hotel. They could explain to him what the hell was going on. Besides, he was half a head taller than me, and probably outweighed me by forty or fifty pounds. What did he have to worry about? He nodded. “Okay, let’s go,” I said. I moved as though to walk off toward the causeway, then turned back to him. “Good God, is that bird shit on your shoulder?” I asked, staring as though in disbelief. “Hmm?” he said, his gaze automatically going to the spot I had indicated. That’s the trouble with wearing four-thousand-dollar cashmere jackets. You panic at the littlest things. As he turned his face back toward me, I shot my left hand behind his neck and snapped his head forward and down. At the same instant, I swept my right arm past his neck and around it, encircling it clockwise, bringing my right forearm under his chin and catching it with my left hand. The back of his head was now pinned against my chest. I tried to arch back, but the bastard was so big and strong that I couldn’t get the leverage I needed. I felt his hands on my waist, groping, trying frantically to push me away. All the muscles of his neck had popped into sharp and cablelike relief. We struggled like that for a long couple of seconds. Twice I tried to shoot in with my hips, but that was exactly the movement he was in mortal fear of at the moment and I couldn’t get past his massive arms. I twisted to my right and he hit the concrete past me and to the side with a thud that felt like a small earthquake. I let go and scrambled to my feet. He was on his back, his head canted crazily to one side, his tongue protruding, the limbs twitching from some last, random surge of electrical signals to the muscles. This time I didn’t bother checking the pockets. I had a feeling I wouldn’t find anything more useful than what I had already, and didn’t want to take a chance on being seen with or even near the corpse. I moved off, across the plaza and down the causeway, my heart slamming bass notes through my torso and down to my hands and feet. I breathed deeply through my nose, trying not to let my internal agitation break through to the surface, where it might be noticed and draw attention. Someone was leaning over the railing up ahead, smoking a cigarette. As I got closer I saw who it was: the spotter from the Mandarin Oriental lobby, the one who’d gone all squinty-eyed on me that morning. He was looking past me, maybe trying to figure out what had happened to his buddy, who should have been trailing in my wake. As I got closer he turned his head back to center, just a guy hanging out on the causeway, enjoying a cigarette, taking in the scenery, watching the traffic cruising up and down the four-lane street beneath him. Thinking his biggest problem right then was finding a way to avoid having me spot him for what he was. Thinking wrong. I kept my head down as I approached him, acting distracted, oblivious to his existence. I’d been moving quickly and did nothing now to alter my pace. My heart was still hammering and I felt a fresh adrenaline dump moving in like rolling thunder. When I was about a meter away from him and beyond the range of his peripheral vision, I took a deep step in, dropped into a squat just behind him, and wrapped my arms tourniquet-tight around his legs just above the knees. I felt his body go rigid, heard him suck in a breath. In my adrenalized, slow-motion vision, I logged every detail: the height of the guardrail; rust marks on the metal; chewing gum ground black into the cement tiles from which his feet were about to fatally separate. I exploded up and out and launched him into the air over the railing. His arms flailed and he shrieked as he went airborne, a high, atavistic sound of sheer animal panic, and I felt a spasm of terror rip through his body as I let him go. The cigarette tumbled out of his mouth. His limbs swam crazily, uselessly, against the air around him. Then he was gone, below my field of vision. The shriek continued, cut off a second later by the sound of a resounding, dull thud twenty feet below. Tires screeched. Another thud. Crunching sounds. More screeching tires. Then silence. I continued on my way to the New Yaohan department store. As the causeway curved right, the accident scene became visible. Traffic was stopped, and a number of people were clustered around something on the ground. Really, they ought to make those guardrails higher. It’s dangerous. Two people, Chinese civilians, were heading toward me. Shit. I averted my eyes and changed my posture, dropping my shoulders, adopting a more rolling gait, giving them a persona to remember, a persona that wasn’t mine. I felt them looking at me closely as I passed. They might have seen what had happened; if they had, they would be in mild denial about it and trying to come up with some other explanation for the evidence of their senses, what the psychologists call “cognitive dissonance” and “reality testing.” I briefly considered heading straight back to the terminal and returning to Hong Kong. Two bodies, two potential witnesses… the police might not be happy. But I decided to take the chance. The bodies were of foreigners, and so unlikely to produce undue domestic alarm. And Macau was no stranger to gangland killings, killings that the authorities had worked hard to downplay lest they inhibit the lucrative gambling tourism trade. If they could quickly rule these deaths “accidental” or otherwise act to minimize fallout, I expected they would. I kept walking. From here I could take a variety of routes, and if anyone else was following me they’d have to be set up close by. I saw no one. I’d still watch my back, make the appropriate evasive moves to be certain, but, for a few precious minutes, I was reasonably sure that I wasn’t being followed. If there was anyone left that I might ambush, they would likely be at the hotel. Keeping my head down and my pace brisk but not attention-getting, I cut through the New Yaohan, moved down the causeway to the street, and walked the ten minutes to the Mandarin Oriental. As I reached the back entrance, the cell phone buzzed. I looked at the display, and saw one of the numbers I had seen in the phone’s call log. Shit, five down, but someone was still left, checking in, wanting an update, or instructions, or just the sound of a familiar voice in an unfamiliar country. I went inside. If they had someone else in position it would be here, the other place where they could reasonably expect to pick me up. Maybe another Arab, sitting in the spacious lobby, calling from a cell phone, waiting for a friend to show up. I used the back entrance, checking the hot spots along the way. So far, so good. I walked in through the café entrance. Because I hadn’t seen anyone in back, I knew they weren’t covering the entrances. That meant the next choke point would be the elevators. And there was only one spot where you could wait without drawing attention and watch the elevators: at the end of the café closest to the lobby. As I moved inside, that was the first spot I checked. Delilah was sitting there, wearing a black skirt and a cream-colored silk blouse, a pot of tea and an open book on the table in front of her. She glanced over and saw me coming before I’d reached her. “I’ve been waiting for you all day, damn it,” she said. That brought me up short. “I’ll bet you have,” I said, looking around. “Yes, I have. To tell you not to go to your room. There’s someone in there.” I looked at her closely. “Yeah?” She looked back. “You don’t believe me?” I was suddenly unsure again. Which was frustrating. Ordinarily, I know exactly what to do, and I do it. “Maybe I do,” I said. “Let me see your cell phone.” Her eyes narrowed a fraction. Then she shrugged. She reached into her purse and pulled out a Nokia 8910, the sleek titanium model. I popped open the sliding keypad and the screen lit up. The service provider was Orange, a French company, and the interface was in French. I checked the call log. No entries-she’d purged it. No surprise there. She was smart. I turned the unit off, then back on. As it powered back up, the phone number appeared on the screen. I didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t one of the ones I’d seen on the unit I’d taken from the guy at Sham Shui Po. The exercise proved nothing, though. She might have had another phone with her. I could ask for her purse, rifle through it. But then, when I didn’t find anything, I’d wonder if she hadn’t just left the other phone in her room, or hidden it somewhere, or whatever. I knew she was in the habit of thinking several moves ahead. I handed the unit back to her. “Who’s in my room?” “I’m not sure. My guess is it has something to do with your reasons for being in Macau.” “If you’re not sure-” “I overheard him in the lobby of the hotel this morning. He was speaking in Arabic, so he assumed no one around could understand him.” I raised my eyebrows. “You speak Arabic?” By way of answering, she said something suitably incomprehensible. It sounded Arabic to me. “All right,” I said. “Tell me what you overheard.” “He said he would wait in your room in case you returned unexpectedly from Hong Kong. He didn’t use names, but I don’t know who else they could be talking about.” I considered. It’s not all that hard to get into a hotel room if you have some imagination and know what you’re doing. I would have known he was in there before I entered, of course. That morning, while Keiko waited for me in the lobby, I’d taped a hair across the bottom of the doorjamb, as I do whenever possible before leaving a place where I’m staying. I’d hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door to make sure the maids didn’t spoil the setup. If the hair was broken when I returned, I’d know that someone had been in the room, and might still be there. “Why are you warning me, then?” I asked. She looked away for a long moment, then back at me. “I think your cover is blown,” she said. “Forget about this job. Leave Macau.” A contrivance? A way to get me out of her hair? Maybe. But if she really did have a confederate in there, warning me could easily get him killed, which your standard confederate ordinarily won’t appreciate. And if the room was empty, I’d be sure to find out when I checked it, and I’d know the whole thing had been a ruse. “It would serve your interests if I walked away from this,” I said. “So you’ll have to forgive me if I doubt your motives.” “I don’t care what you think about my motives. I could have let you go into your room. Then you wouldn’t walk away, you’d be carried out. My interests would be served in either case. So do what you want. I have to go.” She stood up and started walking toward the elevators. “Wait a second,” I said, moving with her. She ignored me, then stopped in front of the elevators. “I don’t want to be seen with you,” she said. “Just go.” “Look,” I started to say. I heard the ping of an arriving elevator and we both glanced over. The doors opened. Another Arab started to come out. He saw us. He looked at my face, then to Delilah. He froze. His mouth dropped open. He’d clearly recognized me. He’d also clearly seen that I’d been chatting with Delilah. The way he’d looked from me to her-he was connecting us. He started to step back into the elevator. His hand reached out for the buttons. It happened fast. I didn’t think about it, didn’t think about the risk. I leaped into the elevator and bodychecked him into the wall. His head slammed against the wood paneling and bounced off. He got his arms up on the rebound and grabbed at me. I returned the favor, catching his shoulders with an inside grip and shooting a knee into his balls. He doubled over with a loud grunt. I stepped behind him and slipped my left arm around his neck in Delilah had stepped into the elevator with us. The doors were closing-she must have pressed the button. “Five,” I said. “Hit five.” She did as I asked. But had she moved inside to help this guy, then hesitated when she saw that it was impossible? I wasn’t sure. As soon as the doors closed, I released the choke and hoisted his limp body onto my shoulder. If we were seen now and we played it right, someone might think I was just carrying a friend who’d passed out from too much drinking. Not an ideal scenario, but less problematic than being seen dragging the guy by his ankles with his face blue and contorted. “That’s him,” she said. “The one I overhead in the lobby.” I nodded. Maybe it was true. Maybe he’d gotten antsy when no one was checking in or returning his calls, and had decided to move on. Second floor. Third. Fourth. No stops along the way. The doors opened on five and we filed out and started walking down the hallway. Still all clear. I felt the guy’s limbs begin to move in what I recognized as a series of myotonic twitches. It happens sometimes when someone emerges from an unconsciousness induced by blood flow interruption. I’d seen it many times training judo at the Kodokan and recognized the signs. He was waking up. I leaned forward and dumped him on the ground. His arms and legs were jerking now, his eyes starting to blink. I stood behind him and sat him up. Then I leaned over his left side until we were almost chest to chest, wrapped my right arm around his neck from front to back, grabbed my right wrist with the other hand, and arched up and back. His arms flew up, then spasmed and flopped to his sides as the cervical vertebrae separated and his neck broke. I took hold of one of his jacket lapels and stepped in front of him. Lifting and hauling back on the lapel, I went to my knees, snaked my head under his armpit, then stood, shrugging him up by degrees until I had him up in a fireman’s carry. I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out my room key. “Here,” I said, flipping it to Delilah. “Five-oh-four. Open the door.” She caught it smoothly and headed off down the hallway. I stayed with her. I wanted to see whether that hair had been disturbed. I stopped her outside the door and squinted down to see. The hair was broken. Which didn’t prove anything more than her cleared cell phone had; it simply failed to prove that she had been lying about someone being in my room. My next thought, of course, was Delilah must have been thinking the same thing. That, or she was doing a good job acting. She was running her fingers lightly along the doorjamb, tracking closely with her eyes. I didn’t think a device, if there was one, would be triggered to the door. First, you’d need sophistication to pull it off: mercury switches, vibration switches, a way of arming the device electronically afterward for safety. Simpler means would require time spent outside the door, where the technician could be seen. In all events, working with the door would likely mean less time and less privacy than would be offered by the many other possibilities inside. Still, it paid to check. Triggering a device to the door would ordinarily leave some evidence in the jamb, where the bomb maker would have placed something that would close a circuit when the door was opened. Delilah stopped, apparently satisfied, and put the key in the lock. She pushed open the door wide enough to move inside-no wider than someone who had, say, taped a mercury switch vertically to the floor behind the door would have opened it to leave. She paused for a moment, then opened it wider. We went in, looking for trip wires along the way. The door closed behind us. I set the body down next to it and we each quickly examined the room. Mercury switches, pressure release switches, photocell switches… there are a lot of ways to rig a room. The main thing is to look for anything unusual, anything out of place. We checked the desk chair, the edges of every drawer, the closet doors, the minibar cabinet, the underside of the bed, the drapes, the television. Neither of us spoke. The sweep took about ten minutes. I stopped a moment before she did. She was bending forward, her back to me, running her fingers along the edge of the bedstand drawer. The black skirt was pulled taut across her ass, the exposed back of her legs deliciously white by contrast. She stood up and looked at me. Her brow was covered with a light sheen of perspiration. The silk of her blouse shimmered and clung in all the right places. “That was too close,” she said, shaking her head. “This has to stop.” I nodded, looking at her. I couldn’t tell if the thumping in my chest was from the exertion of killing, hoisting, and carrying Elevator Boy, or from something else. My awareness of her shape, of her skin, made me think maybe it was option #2. Horniness is a common reaction of the postcombat psyche, Eros reasserting over Thanatos. If I didn’t change my lifestyle soon, I might not live long. But I’d never have to worry about Viagra, either. “No one saw us,” I said, pulling myself back from the direction my body and the reptile portions of my brain wanted to go in, focusing on the situation. “And there are no cameras in the elevators or hallways.” “I know that,” she said. “All right. Tell me what you know about this.” “Nothing more than what I just told you.” She inclined her head toward the figure slumped on the floor by the door. “Saudi. I could tell by his accent.” “You speak Arabic well enough to recognize regional accents?” She shook her head at the question. “We can talk about that another time. The only thing we need to talk about now is getting you off Macau. I’ve had enough of you fucking up my operation.” I felt some blood drain from my face. “I’m fucking up “I was almost just seen with you,” she said, her hands on her hips, her eyes hot and angry, “by someone who until I can be convinced otherwise I will assume is working for Belghazi. Do you understand what will happen to me if he comes to suspect me?” “Look, I didn’t ask you to-” “Yes, you’re right, I should have just let you walk into that man’s ambush. I should have, too. You would be gone, and that’s what I need.” “Why, then?” I said, thinking that maybe I’d have more luck finishing my sentences if I kept them short. She looked at me, saying nothing. “Why did you warn me?” Her nostrils flared and her face flushed. “It’s none of your business why I do or don’t do something. I made a mistake, all right? I should have just stood aside! If I could do it over and do it differently, I would!” She stopped herself, probably realizing that she had been raising her voice. “I want you to leave Macau,” she said, more quietly. I wondered for a moment whether her outburst had been born of frustration. Frustration that whatever she had just set up to get rid of me had failed to get the job done. “I know how you feel,” I said. “Because I want the same thing from you.” She shook her head once, quickly, and grimaced, as though what I had said was ridiculous. “We both understand the situation. We’ve already discussed it. Even if our positions were symmetrical before, they’re not any longer. He’s on to you. Even if I were to leave, and I won’t, you can’t finish what you came here to do.” “I don’t know that.” “My God, what more proof do you need?” I stopped for a moment and thought. She was probably right, of course. But I still hadn’t heard back from Kanezaki. I might learn more from him. And maybe from her, too, if I could find a way to get her to tell me. She wanted me to be gone. Wanted it so much that whatever had happened in the elevator might have been a bungled attempt to make it happen. Regardless, a minute ago the issue had caused her to lose some of her considerable cool. Which created a bargaining chip. I decided to play it. “Meet me later,” I said. “I’m going to check on a few things in the meantime, and then we’ll fill each other in. If I’m convinced at that point that I’ve got no chance of finishing this properly, I’ll walk away.” “I’m not meeting you again. It’s too dangerous.” “Not if we do it right.” There was a pause, then she said, “Tell me what you have in mind.” “Where’s Belghazi right now?” “He’s off Macau.” “Where?” “He has meetings in the region. I’m not supposed to know where.” Not being supposed to know and not knowing were quite different things. She was afraid that, if she told me, I might try to go after him. Not an unreasonable concern. “When will he be back?” I asked. “He wasn’t sure. A day, maybe two.” “All right. Take a trip to Hong Kong. Tonight. There are lots of Caucasians there and it’s much bigger than this place. You’ll have an easier time blending in. If he asks, you tell him Macau started to feel small, you got bored, you wanted to do some shopping, take in the sights.” There was a long pause. Then she said, “Where do I find you?” “I haven’t decided that yet. Give me your cell phone number and I’ll call you from a pay phone. Ten o’clock tonight. I’ll tell you where then.” She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. I grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper from next to the telephone and wrote down the number she gave me, in code, as always, so that she wouldn’t be compromised if I were ever found with the paper. She walked to the door. I watched her glance down at the body as she stepped over it. She checked through the peephole, opened the door a crack, looked through it, and moved out into the corridor. The door closed quietly behind her. I had to be careful now. I knew there were only two possible reasons that she’d agreed to meet me. One, because she was afraid that, if she didn’t, I might go after Belghazi again and screw things up for her. In this sense, I was coercing her, and I was aware that coercion is an inherently dangerous way to gain someone’s cooperation. Two, she wanted another shot at using a little coercion herself. I realized that she hadn’t even asked what I was going to do about the dead guy. I decided to take that as a compliment: she knew I would handle it and hadn’t felt the need to inquire. In the end, it took me the rest of the afternoon to make Elevator Boy disappear as he needed to. I could have simply left him in the room, but doing so would have undone all my efforts to disconnect myself from the other dead Arabs. Hmm, the police would be saying, three dead Saudis in Hong Kong, another two near the Macau Ferry Terminal, and now this one, in a hotel room? Dumping him in one of the Oriental’s stairwells would have been a marginal improvement, but it would still mean the police would focus on the hotel where I had been staying. I didn’t want that kind of attention. Sure, I’d checked in under an appropriate alias and could have just evaporated, counting on the alias to break the connection between the perpetrator and the crimes, but I decided that the risk of bringing that much heat down on the alias was greater than the risk of cleaning up the mess and avoiding the heat entirely. Of course, the “cleaning up the mess” option involved a bit more than just tidying up after a dinner party. I had to shop for proper luggage, in this case a Tumi fifty-six-inch wardrobe, billed as “The Goliath of Garment Bags”; sheet plastic to prevent contamination of the interior of the bag during transportation; and plenty of towels to absorb any leakage. As for the packing itself, suffice to say that Elevator Boy, although not a particularly large man, wasn’t just a couple of suit jackets, either, and I had to make a few unpleasant adjustments to get the desired fit. The Goliath worked as advertised, though, and I was able to wheel it and its unusually heavy load out of the hotel, eschewing offers of assistance from two bellhops along the way. Under the causeway a kilometer or so from the hotel, I ducked behind a pillar and unloaded the Goliath’s contents, then continued on my way, wheeling the bag along behind me with considerably less effort than before. I left it far from the body and the hotel, at the other end of the causeway, where I knew someone would quickly and happily “steal” it, marveling at his good luck in acquiring such expensive, high-quality luggage, and saying nothing to anyone about where it had come from. Back at the room, I took an extremely long, extremely hot shower. I changed, packed my things, and headed down to the lobby. At the hotel checkout counter, I told them that my plans had changed suddenly, that I needed to check out earlier than planned. They told me they would still have to charge me for that evening. I told them I of course understood their policy. I took a cab to the ferry terminal. I saw no police barricades, technicians sniffing for evidence, or other evidence of official interest in what had happened here earlier. On the contrary, in fact: it seemed that things had been quickly cleaned up and returned to normal. I had been right about law enforcement priorities on Macau. I went to the TurboJet counter to buy a ticket. The ticket clerk informed me that only first-class seats were available on the next departing ferry. I told her first class would be wonderful. Once aboard, I settled into my first-class seat and watched the lights of Macau fade into the distance. I felt myself beginning to relax. Yeah, there were problems. There had been a breach in the security I depend on to do my work and get away alive afterward. And, although the evidence was so far circumstantial, it looked like Belghazi was on to me, which would make it a hell of a lot harder to get close to him and finish what I had started. The thing in the elevator had been a close call, too. But it had turned out all right. Maybe that was an omen. Nothing like a little luck to give you that wonderful sense of well-being. That, and having killed and survived someone trying to do the same to you. I smiled. Maybe I would write a self-help book. Live off the proceeds. I would worry about the problems later. There was nothing I could do about them on the ferry. My relaxation deepened, and I actually indulged a light snooze on the ride over. I woke up refreshed. The Hong Kong skyline was already looming before me, its proud towers eclipsing the silhouetted hills behind them, dense crystals of light that seemed to have erupted out of the earth to embrace the sky and dominate the harbor. The City of Life, the local tourist board liked to call it. It seemed a fair description to me. At least for the moment. |
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