The Russians knew much of what was going on here in Hong Kong because of a highly placed source in the HK Triads. They’d even known that this particular hole-in-the-wall was frequented in the evenings by Wo Shing Wo men who smuggled heroin into the city from Vietnam, but Zoya had not known that the CIA was aware of Fan Jiang’s existence, much less his escape from mainland China.
This was decidedly bad news.
The blonde from Hanover kept talking; now it was a story about buying bad pills in Korea the previous month, so Zoya looked up at her and smiled with an understanding nod. She realized the German girl had no idea the American had even entered the bar, and it occurred to Zoya she hadn’t noticed the man enter herself, and this bothered her. She wondered how a man could have slipped into a nearly empty room without being picked up by someone with her skills of perception.
A few minutes ago she had been wondering if the time was right to slip away from the vapid blond German and probe the Chinese bartender for information. When she’d glanced up she’d seen the agitated, nervous look on the bartender’s face. Only then had she noticed the man sitting at the bar talking to him.
It was as if the white man had just materialized on the bar stool.
Zoya then stepped up quietly to the bar, under the ruse of ordering another round, in an attempt to listen in, but she’d only heard that the man was looking for some “mates”; his British accent, while extremely good, didn’t pass muster to a world-class linguist like herself.
She never really got a perfect look at the man. She thought about a little flirting, using her typical modus operandi and playing the female traveler engaging another tourist in idle conversation, but something held her back. She sensed a darkness there, a sense of danger to the man. She felt it without even looking into his eyes.
He was a serious player in this game; she knew this without a doubt.
She didn’t want to engage, to risk blowing her cover, so she’d grabbed her beers from the bartender and returned to her table to think things over.
And now as she looked at the American from behind, only seeing flashes of the side of his face as he glanced around, she realized she wasn’t certain she would recognize him if she saw him again.
This son of a bitch was that good.
Court Gentry decided the bartender was going to stand around in the back and fry noodles until the annoying customer at the bar left his establishment, so Court obliged. He threw a couple of bills on the bar top, leaving a tip for the asshole that he most assuredly did not deserve, because as bad as this man was as an intelligence source, he was even worse as a bartender.
Court then slipped off his stool and headed for the exit.
Zoya had not noticed the man when he entered, but she did watch him leave through the front door. She’d been careful to track him with her peripheral vision until the very last second he was in sight, and only when the door closed did she look back to her tablemate.
Katrin had noticed her new drinking partner looking towards the door, and she followed the gaze. Seeing nothing but a closing door, she turned back to the woman she knew only as Lilly.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Zoya Zakharova wouldn’t attempt to follow the man. She wasn’t here to tail CIA officers; she was here to nab Fan Jiang, and in this endeavor she would stay as far away from the Central Intelligence Agency as possible.
Katrin finished the last of her beer now, then spoke in her heavy accent. “Are you ready to visit the temple?”
Zoya sipped her own bottle. “You know, I think I’ve changed my mind. I like this island; I’m going to skip the temple and go find a hostel or a room for rent. I’ll spend the night here, and check out the temple later.”
Katrin took the comment with a look of shock on her face. “There is nothing going on here. I want to see the temple and then take the two p.m. ferry to get back to civilization. Discos, bars, the fun stuff. I thought you said you wanted to party.”
“I’ll catch up with you back in Kowloon tomorrow. I need a night of taking it easy to get ready.”
Katrin smiled, proud that she was more of a party animal than the cool chick from Scotland.
The two girls hefted their backpacks and left the little pub, exchanged e-mails, and shook hands at the front door — even young Europeans tend to be more formal than Americans with casual or newly formed acquaintances — then walked off in opposite directions.
Katrin thought the two of them might become good friends, perhaps even travel together here in Southeast Asia.
Zoya, in contrast, didn’t think anything about Katrin; her mind was on her mission, and it certainly didn’t include ever laying eyes on the hippie stoner from Germany again.
Forty-five minutes later Zoya Zakharova stood at the top of a hill overlooking the bay. Directly below her was a steep decline that led down to a boulder-strewn beach at the water’s edge; a hundred meters beyond that was the public pier, and two hundred meters farther was the far side of the bay and the little dive bar she’d just left.
She unslung her backpack and laid it on the dirt, sat on a flat granite rock next to her pack, and pulled out a water bottle. Two beers wasn’t anything for her, but she knew enough about her body to know that two beers, followed by a fifteen-minute walk and then a half-hour steep climb on a rocky trail in direct sunlight and high heat and humidity, would dehydrate her if she didn’t replenish soon.
As she took a few sips of the tepid water and looked off over the placid bay, she heard a voice behind her, close but muted, as if coming from deep in the waist-high foliage she’d passed before sitting down.
“You’ve got a fucking phone, Koshka.” The language was Russian, the voice was male, and the tone was derisive. “Koshka” meant “female cat,” and it wasn’t Zoya’s real code name, but the men she worked with had taken to calling her that a long time ago.
If there had ever been any real reason why, she’d forgotten it.
Zoya gulped more water down, ignoring the man a moment more. Then she said, “America is here. Just one man, but I think he’s Agency.”
After a significant pause, she heard another voice from the bushes. “Der’mo.” Shit.
“Da. Couldn’t get pictures or hear much conversation, but he’s asking around, something about three British men. Sounds like they might be missing.”
There was a rustling in the brush now; Zoya drank more water from her bottle and, after pulling her binos out of her bag, began scanning the buildings in sight around the bay, a futile attempt to see if she could get eyes on the American somewhere on one of the little roads down there.
Next to her a man appeared, head to toe in brown camouflage, his own binoculars in his hands. Zoya knew Ruslan had a suppressed sniper rifle, a VSS Vintorez, on a bipod somewhere back there in the brush. Through the high-powered optic on the rail of the weapon, and not through the binos in his hands, he’d been watching Zoya throughout her visit here to the island.
“I didn’t see you talking to anyone but the blond girl and the bartender.”
“I didn’t talk to him; I heard him talking to the bartender.”
“I never saw him.”