They would fake Fan’s assassination, thus keeping the U.S.’s involvement secret and saving Sir Donald Fitzroy.
Hell of a plan, Court thought. How, exactly, this would all come to pass was a bit murky, since the Agency had no idea who was helping Fan, where he was being held, what his disposition was, and so forth. Court was simply to get the answers the Agency needed to go forward, involve himself in the ruse by being on scene when the man was taken in by U.S. operatives, and then report back to Dai that the job had been done. If Dai wanted pictures, DNA, witnesses, or even one of Fan’s fingers to prove that Court had accomplished his mission, then the Agency could make that happen. If Colonel Dai wanted the body, then Court and CIA would devise a reason this was not possible. A sinking boat, a burning building, too many police to simply scoop up the body of an adult male and shuffle into a cab with him.
Yeah, when Court first read the op specs on the plane, he recognized that the details on how to placate the MSS were paper-thin, but he noticed something else from the wording and the orders.
Saving Don Fitzroy was secondary to nabbing Fan. Very secondary. In fact, the CIA had put significantly more emphasis on Court Gentry’s own personal security than on Fitzroy’s life, which should have made Court feel better, but for some reason it did not.
Court lay there on his bed, analyzing his situation. Don Fitzroy had been a high-level officer in MI5, British intelligence, so Fitz must have seen the peril of his situation. He had to have known there was a huge chance he would be killed at the end of this operation, regardless of how it turned out. But he seemed to have done nothing to save himself.
Court understood. Fitzroy knew the Chinese had global reach, so he had to give them an easy target. Otherwise there was always the chance they would go after someone else.
Sir Donald Fitzroy’s daughter and his twin granddaughters could have been used for leverage, and Fitzroy would die a thousand deaths before he let that happen. He’d sit there compliantly in Hong Kong, wait for the day the colonel came downstairs with his gun in his hand, and by doing this, he’d protect those he loved.
In that moment Court felt nothing but respect for the old man held in the twenty-million-dollar house on the hill a few miles to the south of him. Fitzroy would fight and die for his family, but Fitzroy had no one fighting for him. The CIA, the Chinese, his own security detail. Everyone had, apparently, bailed on the Englishman.
But Fitzroy had saved Court’s life once off the coast of Sudan. Court’s own sense of honor told him he could not let Fitzroy die alone without a friend in his corner. Court would be Sir Donald’s champion, and if CIA had a problem with that… then CIA could go fuck itself.
Court told himself there had to be a way to pull off the trifecta on this mission: nab Fan for CIA, get his own ass out of this in one piece, and get Fitz out of the clutches of the Chinese and back home safe.
It was doable, Court still told himself. Tough, to be sure, but doable.
To this end, Court’s first objective would be to find the exact location where Fitzroy was being held. The only way he could be confident that he could help his former handler, especially if something went wrong during the extraction of the Chinese computer hacker by the CIA, was if Court knew he could always hit the big house up on the hill, guns blazing, and attempt to rescue Fitz himself. It was a last-ditch option, but if he did not know the location of the house, it was no option at all.
He knew how to solve his problem. He’d gotten a perfect look out the back window of the property, and he’d examined his view of the skyline of Hong Kong. With this information stored in his brain’s memory, he could figure out the exact location of Dai’s safe house.
So now he scanned the Peak on Google Maps, using the relative positions of several buildings he’d noticed from Dai’s office as reference points. After a few minutes he recognized Dai’s safe house, zoomed into Street View, and found it at 1 Pollack’s Path Road. Typing this info into his search engine, he found the property on a real estate website and saw that it was available to rent for one month for sixty-five thousand U.S. dollars. Court wondered if Dai had paid this amount, or if the entire real estate concern was actually owned by mainland China’s defense or intelligence services. It didn’t really matter. What did matter was the fact that the real estate website had photos of the inside of the building.
Court had hit an operational-planning gold mine.
But only for his own personal operation. He would need this information if the CIA’s plan to ensure Fitzroy’s safety failed. If Dai and his people realized the Gray Man had deceived them and passed Fan Jiang off to the CIA, then he would need to engage in these desperate measures. He hoped like hell he wouldn’t have to come back, but if the shit hit the fan, it might be necessary.
Court nodded off, hoping to sleep through the night to shake off the last vestiges of jet lag. Tomorrow morning he would go full tilt after Fan Jiang, knowing now he could finally focus on the reason he’d been sent here in the first place.
CHAPTER
TEN
If Fan Jiang had known how hard this would be, if he had any clue how many people would be put in danger by his actions, how many would lose their life because of him, there was no way he would ever have gone through with any of it.
Fan was not a violent man, not a hard man, and he was most definitely the wrong man to be in this place, enduring all this. But he was here now, far past the point of no return, and there was no turning back. He was on the run, and he would live or he would die, but pondering the wisdom of his decision was a ship that had long since sailed.
He had a birthday coming up, and he hoped he lived to see it. He’d be twenty-seven in a month, which meant he was young to die, but at the rate things were going he felt the odds were stacked against his survival.
Fan Jiang was hot and cold at the same time. The hot, dank air in the little compartment all but cooked his lungs, but the cold metal floor he lay on stung the exposed skin on his arms. He’d spent almost four whole days in the bowels of this cargo ship, and for the last day he’d been rocking and rolling and vomiting as this ship had taken to the open sea.
He lay in a tiny dry storage room no larger than a hotel bathroom, just off the kitchen, with men looking in on him from time to time from a hallway outside. He wasn’t a prisoner here — he’d readily agreed to come on this voyage, after all — but he got the impression he could not simply get up from the cold vibrating floor and walk up on deck whenever he wanted.
He’d eaten rice soaked in some chicken broth the ship’s cook had brought to him in a bucket, and to relieve himself he’d been handed a second bucket — he hoped it was a second bucket — but otherwise he’d had little contact with the crew.
The rest of his human interactions — if you could call them that — were with the men in the halclass="underline" his bodyguards.
If you could call them that.
The five men in the hall were on his side, officially anyway, but they were also angry, and they were taking their anger out on him. Initially there had been eight of them, but three had died in the gunfight four days earlier, and one of the survivors now lay in Fan’s sight on the cold rusty vibrating floor of the hallway, a bandaged bullet wound high on his thigh and a face that stared blankly ahead and turned whiter by the hour.