They were assassins.
Wang didn’t like this morning’s pedestrian work, but he understood the situation. Airplanes operated by known CIA front companies landed at Hong Kong International Airport from time to time, but never this particular jet, so these two intelligence officers had been sent to check it out. It was a distraction, but orders were orders and they’d been ordered here.
That these were the only men close enough to respond to the request by the Ministry of State Security was unfortunate for them. Their real job here was for the Ministry of Defense; it was high-end wet work, and if it turned out getting an ID of the passengers of the Falcon took more than a couple of hours, their MOD control officer would hear they were off his job, and he’d ride them hard about it, their orders from Beijing be damned.
Because, in the viewpoint of these two men, MOD Control was fucking nuts, and getting crazier by the day.
Wang and Tao both had their long-range cameras out when the aircraft’s main hatch opened, and a black Mercedes S-Class pulled up in front of it. A rear door opened on the far side of the car, and both intelligence operatives focused their lenses there, assuming the Mercedes would disgorge a passenger. But the opposite happened. A man carrying his own luggage stepped down the jet’s stairs quickly and disappeared into the front passenger seat behind the smoked glass of the Mercedes.
“Shit! Did you get him?” Wang asked quietly.
“I’m not a photographer. If I had a sniper rifle, he’d be dead now.”
“Not what I asked.”
“I was focused on the back door of the Mercedes. I thought someone would come out. You?”
“I’ll check.” Wang looked back at the digital images on his camera. “I don’t have a clear image of the face; he’s shielding the sun with his hand. Dark hair, beard, gray suit, sunglasses. He’s Western, for certain. Gold wedding band on his left hand. Roll-aboard luggage and a backpack.”
“Whoever he is, he’ll be dead by sundown.”
Wang stowed his camera in his backpack. “Would you stop with that, already? Let’s get to the car.”
“That limo service is geotracked. We can see the movements of each car in their fleet from my laptop. Wherever the Mercedes takes him, we’ll know.”
“And if this man should get out along the route?”
The two walked quickly along the roof towards the stairs, their suits sticking to them with perspiration. Tao asked, “Why would he do that?”
Wang replied, “Because he is CIA and trained in countersurveillance.”
Tao felt some shame in not thinking the situation through. He made up for his humiliation by being the first to arrive at the stairs and the first to make it down to the black Toyota Aurion, an Australian-made vehicle that blended in well with the traffic here in the city of nearly eight million.
With Tao behind the wheel they fell in behind the black Mercedes as it left the front gate of the Hong Kong Business Aviation Center and entered the busy morning traffic of Chek Lap Kok Road.
While he drove, Tao said, “Colonel Dai is going to find out we’re off tailing some guy who has nothing to do with our assignment for MOD, and he’s going to order us to terminate him. Or else Dai will take it out on us, give us the crap jobs, a reprimand. The Americans have a saying.” He switched to English because both men spoke it well. “Shit runs downhill.”
Wang sniffed. “That’s not a saying. That’s physics.” And then he continued, “If anything, Colonel Dai will get us to rough him up, interrogate him, scare him out of town. This won’t go lethal.”
With that, Tao took his eyes off the road in front of him and looked to his passenger. “Disagree. Dai had us kill the man at the border, and he had Su and Lin kill the two Triads in Shek Kong. Fan Jiang’s bodyguards were executed the day after he ran in Shenzhen, and Dai gave that order, as well. The colonel is in a killing mood on this job, you must admit. I say Dai will have us terminate this CIA boy and dump his body in the harbor and then lie to Beijing about it.” Tao sniffed. “Dai is mad.”
“Stark raving,” Wang agreed. “But a dead CIA officer in Hong Kong will just make his operation more complicated, not less.”
Tao was unyielding in his opinion. “Complicated for us. Not for him. Colonel Dai doesn’t give a damn. Beijing has given Dai free rein, so that man in that Mercedes will be dead by midnight. There are no fucking rules for Dai in Hong Kong these days.” After a dry little chuckle in the back of his throat, he added, “The streets of this city will be running rivers of blood before this one’s over.”
CHAPTER
TWO
Courtland Gentry sat in the front passenger seat of the Mercedes, much to the confusion of his driver. Normally passengers sat in the back and their luggage rode in the trunk, but Court had hurried off the aircraft and into the front of the car to disrupt any potential surveillance at the FBO, and since the driver didn’t know anything about tradecraft, he thought this American to be some kind of a weirdo.
Court hadn’t seen the two men on the roof, but he saw them now, or at least he saw the black Aurion varying between six and ten car lengths behind his Mercedes, always there, despite the turnoffs, red lights, and off-and-on gridlocked traffic of a Hong Kong workday.
Court had picked up a tail and he hadn’t even been on the ground here in HK for ten fucking minutes.
Terrific.
He considered bailing out of the Mercedes somewhere en route to his destination to lose the surveillance detail, but he figured this driver was probably an informant for Chinese intelligence, and the man would just pass on the fact that his passenger had, with no warning, dived from his hired car and dashed up some alley.
Nope, that wouldn’t do. Court’s cover for status had to be maintained, which meant Court would just pretend like he didn’t see the black car lurking behind him.
He’d been here to HK before, but only once. To the extent he had a regular beat, East Asia certainly wasn’t it, so he did his best to push the tail car out of his mind and instead spend his time doing all he could to observe the fabric of life on the streets around him. He noted what the police cars looked like, where the street signs were located, the flow of traffic, and the manner of dress of the commuters. He made a mental note of the cardinal positions of several major buildings in view. He’d spent hours of his flight over from the States prepping for his op here, but he’d not had time to digest more than a thumbnail sketch of this area of operations and, as he had learned countless times in the past, not only was the map not the territory, but most preconceived notions about a place were dead wrong.
You really had to experience a location to know it at an operational level.
Court had a lot of work to do to get up to speed, but his assignment here was as time sensitive as they came, so he’d have to work out the atmospherics of this AO while on the job.
His car drove onto the Tsing Yi Bridge, and he glanced back in the passenger-side mirror to confirm that the black Aurion continued to follow. It was in a reasonable position for a tail car; Court gave these boys credit for knowing their stuff, but he had been either the tailer or the tailee thousands of times in his life, so sniffing out a car on his six was nothing to him.
Both vehicles left the bridge, continued south along the water, and finally entered the Hong Kong district of Tsim Sha Tsui, on the southern tip of Kowloon. The black sedan was still back there, which meant to Court this tail on him was a simple affair. There were no teams of vehicles in radio contact leapfrogging all around, which was what he would have expected if mainland China’s Ministry of State Security was working here and had ordered up a large surveillance package on him. Either the guys in the tail car were working for some group not tied to the Chinese intelligence services, or else Chinese intel found him more of a curiosity than a real concern, so they just sent a couple of men to see where he was heading and what he was up to.