Travers said, “Negative, no joy. Say again, no joy. I have the phone in room 310, and it’s got a note with it, wrapped around it with a rubber band.”
Jenner and his two men began walking the prisoners to the hotel’s staircase to the roof for extraction.
When he heard there was a note left with the phone, Jenner let out a little sigh. “That dickhead Gentry is always playing games. What’s it say?”
Travers’s voice crackled through the headset. “‘Hi, boys. Thanks for dropping in. The gray-haired Brit missing his fingers is to be handled gently. Any Chinese nationals you find are hostile. Keep an eye out for Colonel Dai Longhai. He is the center of the opposition. Sorry I couldn’t make your night with a personal appearance, but if you are reading this, then you probably just kicked some ass, so it was worth gearing up. Get out of here before the local po-po shows up to take you someplace where you’ll have to eat fish head soup for the next twenty years.’” Travers added, “He signed it ‘Sierra Six.’”
Sierra Six had been Gentry’s call sign when he served in CIA’s Ground Branch, five years earlier.
Jenner spit on the floor in the stairwell in anger. He could hear the helos getting in position for the extraction. “Fucker,” he said into his mic.
Travers said, “I don’t know, boss. He’s a pain, but you kinda have to appreciate the man’s style.”
Jenner ignored the comment and looked at Fitzroy. “Which one of these guys is Dai?”
Fitzroy struggled up the stairs with his hands behind his back. “He’s not here. The man you shot was Major Xi, second-in-command. The other three are men who work for Dai.”
Jenner and the entourage reached the roof a minute later. Sirens approached the hotel from all directions.
The first helo lifted off with half the unit, and the second came in, but slower than Jenner wanted. He called the pilot through his radio to encourage him on. “Delta One to Kilo Alpha One Two; hurry up the exfil, bro. None of us down here want to eat fish head soup for the next twenty years.”
Travers was already in the other helo, but he actuated his mic just to laugh into it.
CHAPTER
SIXTY
Three days after Sir Donald Fitzroy was extracted by the CIA, he sat on his bed in his suite at the Mandarin Oriental Singapore and looked down at his injured hand. One of the best orthopedists in Asia had spent an hour with him yesterday, and there would be a surgery at some point to properly address the savage wound, but for now there was no emergency medical treatment necessary, so Sir Donald just treated himself with scotch, luxury, and solitude.
To that end, he sipped a twenty-five-year-old single malt that wasn’t half-bad.
He was feeling better now, and the turnaround began with the first thing he did when he left the care of the Americans: he called his daughter in the UK, spoke to her and his granddaughters, and laughed and joked and made funny sounds, and through it all he fought tears, because he could not remember ever being so thankful or happy for anything in his entire life as that damn phone call.
After he arrived he’d had clothes and food and booze all brought to his room, and he’d spent the last forty-eight hours or so looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the skyline, and while he wrapped himself in the splendor of comfort and riches and safety, he continuously checked a satellite phone he’d had purchased and delivered the moment he arrived.
He’d left a message with his secretary back at his office in London that she might get a call from a man reticent to give much information about himself. It wasn’t much to go on, but his secretary had been with him for years, and she remembered Gentry, his soft American voice, and she knew that he alone was to get Sir Donald’s satellite number.
It was noon on the third day when his mobile phone rang. He all but leapt across the expansive suite to get to it, but he answered it warily. “Yes?”
“The boys treated you okay?” It was Court.
“The men in black? Yes, of course. Quiet professionals, all.”
“Did they get Dai?”
“No. He was close by, watching the whole thing fall apart in front of him. I considered telling your paramilitaries that he was near, but that would have kept them on the ground longer than I wanted to stick around, and he probably would have run anyway.”
Court said, “Fair enough.”
Fitz said, “I owe you, lad. I owe you bigger than I can pay.”
There was a long hesitation, and then Court said, “You know people in Taiwanese intelligence?”
“Of course I do.”
“Good. Fan wants to go to Taiwan. I’d like to make it happen. Of course, the Taiwanese might decline to take him if he refuses to give them information, but he’ll probably agree to help them if they agree to let him live on Taiwanese soil. Taiwan intelligence can share his product with America if they want to.”
“I’d be happy to set up a handover.”
They talked about specifics for a few minutes. Court had a plan in mind; Don just had to connect Fan directly with someone at Taiwan intelligence and then step away, so it was nothing to the well-connected Englishman at all.
When that was organized, Don asked, “Anything else you need?”
“No thanks. I’m thinking about going dark again for a while.”
Fitzroy said, “That’s what I’m doing at the moment. Or my version of it, anyway. I’m at the Mandarin Oriental in Singapore. Come here, let’s get drunk together. Bring your girlfriend. The one you called a spider monkey.”
Court said, “CIA has her. It’s the best thing for her.”
“But not for you. She was good for you. You need friends.”
There was an extra long pause, and then Court said, “I wonder, when this is all over, if I end up finding out that you were the one who lied the least.”
Fitzroy looked down at his three-fingered hand. “That’s a bloody sad measure to use in appraising your friendships.”
Court sniffed. “It’s not about friendships. That train left the station a long time ago. It’s about alliances. It’s about making a pact with whoever can help me get through the day.”
Fitzroy shook his head. “Bollocks, Court. That’s not you. With you it’s about doing the right thing, come what may. You’ll do it with an ally, you’ll do it with an enemy, or you’ll do it alone. You’ll die before you go against what you believe in. It makes you the one good man in all this.”
“It makes me exploitable, and expendable.”
“Too true. No argument there, lad.”
Court changed the subject. “You are in Singapore? I figured you’d want to get back to the UK.”
“Heavens, no. I’ve got my own trust issues now that I have to deal with. MI6 used me for a job, the job went sideways, and they went home.” He smiled. “I am a bit of a man without a country myself after all this.”
“Welcome to my world.” After a moment he added, “We’ll see each other again someday, if it’s in the cards.”
Fitzroy smiled into the phone. “I’d wager that we will. Good luck to you, lad.”
“You, too, Fitz.”
Two days later Court Gentry and Fan Jiang stood in the doorway of a hangar at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, and they looked out together at the dull and cloudy morning. An Airbus A330-200 landed on the runway in the distance, taxied in their direction, then rolled to a stop on the tarmac just one hundred yards away. It wore the markings of EVA Air, a Taiwanese national and international carrier, and Court had followed its flight path on the Internet as it took off this morning from Taipei and flew straight here.