But Court remained disciplined. He didn’t want to let on that he’d picked up the subtle tell.
“No. She doesn’t work at night. We get a rough crowd. Just booze. No food.”
Court pulled out another five hundred HK dollars. “All right, mate, here’s the deal. I was on holiday with these three blokes from London, renting a flat in the Mid-Levels. Two bloody weeks. The fuckers ran out on me a day before we had to pay the balance. They owe me a lot of money, and I’d quite like to have a chat with them about that.”
The American had designed his explanation to calm the bartender, to give a credible reason why a man might offer up over a hundred U.S. dollars’ worth of local currency to find three other men. But the bartender didn’t seem to relax at all; if anything, Court felt like the man’s defenses rose even more. He stopped squirming but became ramrod still. His body and his hands seemed to clench a little.
Court knew what this was. The man had told his lie, and now he realized his lie wasn’t believed. Liars often go on guard to defend themselves, and sometimes they give out physical cues about this change in tactic.
But while the man’s body remained still, his eyes flicked a third time out to the bay.
Court thought he understood now. A boat. The bartender was thinking back to Sunday night subconsciously. He had seen Fitzroy’s men, and they’d had some involvement with a boat, right out there.
But if the bartender had watched the three Brits take a tender out to a boat, why wouldn’t he just take the money and give up the information? What was he hiding?
The bartender showed his nerves now. “I told you, man. I didn’t see anybody.”
Just as Court was about to press once more, on his left one of the hippie girls from the table by the railing leaned against the bar and caught the bartender’s eye. Court saw that the man was relieved to be rescued. While the girl with the big sunglasses and the headband ordered another beer for herself and her companion in Scottish-accented English, Court sat patiently, waiting for another crack at the bartender.
He took the opportunity to fake a slow neck roll, and to use the movement to look out to the spot the man kept eyeing. A few fishing boats lulled around in other areas in the calm water, but that part, out past the mouth of the bay, was empty. Whatever boat this man was picturing in his mind’s eye was long gone now.
The girl returned to her table with her beers, and the bartender went out of his way to disappear from the American holding the two five-hundred-HK-dollar bills. He moved back into the little kitchen accessible from behind the bar, threw some noodles into a large fryer, and began turning them over and over with a strainer.
Court slipped the money back in his pocket and continued drinking his beer.
He decided he’d wait a few minutes, but then he’d take off. As far as Court was concerned, the bartender had told him plenty without saying much of anything. Fitzroy’s men had been at this bar, they’d gone out to a boat in the bay, and there was some reason the bartender didn’t want to talk about it.
Over Court’s left shoulder the Scottish girl looked out at the water while her tablemate gulped her fresh beer and talked on and on in English, but in a heavy German accent. The brunette with the braids and the leather headband pretended to listen to the blonde from Hanover for a few minutes more while she glanced out to the bay, then back to the man at the bar who’d spoken with a British accent. She’d heard a slight twanging of his a’s when he said the words “have” and “that” to the bartender, and to her that sounded like American English. The girl knew languages, accents, and dialects, so she looked at the man again and decided after a time that he was, in fact, American.
Her head turned back to the water.
Now, the blond German began wondering aloud how hard it would be to score some Ecstasy back at her youth hostel, and the Scottish brunette across the little table just ignored her, shifting her eyes up to the green and brown hills of Po Toi Island.
What the hell is going on? she asked herself.
The Scottish brunette wasn’t really Scottish, and the blonde wasn’t really her friend. The blonde was just like the braids, the tie-dyed T-shirt, and the headband: part of the brunette’s disguise. The two had met on the ferry when the brunette had sat down next to the blonde and introduced herself as Lilly, then struck up a conversation with Katrin from Hanover about the Buddhist temple on Po Toi. Since they both said they were vagabonding alone around Asia, they decided they’d go see the temple together once they got off the ferry.
But on the walk around the bay, Lilly offered to buy beers at the less expensive-looking of two bars on the path to the temple. Katrin had to make her money last for this trip, so just about any time anyone offered to buy her a drink she was up for it, and this was no exception. Plus, Lilly had cool hair and cool sandals so, Katrin figured, she was probably a cool chick.
Now Katrin talked recreational drugs while the Scottish girl who wasn’t really Scottish looked back to the British man at the bar who wasn’t really British, wondering how long he’d been sitting there before she’d noticed him and, even more importantly, how the fuck the Central Intelligence Agency had learned that the Triads had delivered Fan Jiang to the cargo ship here at Po Toi Island.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The woman at the railing with her eyes on the man at the bar didn’t think he looked much like a CIA officer, but he was American, he was here shaking down the bartender for information, and the bartender was having none of it. She knew this place was a Wo Shing Wo hangout, so either Fan Jiang had been here at the bar, or one of the Triad men who’d been involved with moving Fan Jiang had talked. Either way, the American had to be Agency; the coincidences were too many for any other explanation.
The woman calling herself Lilly and pretending to be Scottish struggled to maintain a calm countenance. She smiled and nodded at something Katrin said, but on the inside her guts were turning into knots.
The last thing she needed on this op was for the fucking CIA to start snooping around the target area on the very day of her hit.
Just as Lilly wasn’t really Scottish, her name wasn’t really Lilly; it was Zoya. Zoya Feodorovich Zakharova was about as far from a hippie Scottish vagabond as she could be. She was an operative in the SVR — Russian foreign intelligence; she was in her early thirties but easily passed for ten years younger. She was here in HK operating with a clandestine SVR paramilitary unit. She and her task force had been ordered to bring Fan Jiang back alive to Moscow so that her intelligence service could learn everything possible about Unit 61398, including how to infiltrate both China’s and America’s most secure military and intelligence computer networks.
Zoya was the officer in charge of the task force, which meant in theory she shouldn’t be out here like this, running low-level surveillance. But she found herself doing most of the footwork on this op herself because the men working with her were ex-soldiers first and foremost, and while they could shoot and scoot with the best of them, they weren’t the slickest bunch when it came to blending into their surroundings. No, low profile was Zakharova’s specialty, along with language, intelligence collection, surveillance, and countersurveillance, so she was here, playing a role that allowed her to sit in one of only two bars with a view of the bay, to attempt to get a tactical picture of the area so her direct-action team of snakeeaters would be ready to board the ship when it returned this evening.