It slowly occurred to Court that there was a possibility, perhaps a strong possibility, that everyone in the bar belonged to the same group.
He wondered if he’d wandered into a Triad meeting.
If that turned out to be the case, Court told himself he’d rip into Colonel Dai. Dai had given him a list of known Wo Shing Wo hangouts, and this wasn’t on it.
Court noticed a big group of men in the middle of the room, taking up the largest portion of the dockside floor. They had pulled several small plastic tables together, and they sat around it drinking and talking. Court had just looked over at this group of men when another five men appeared up the stairs from the floating dock and began greeting the large group. These men were clearly not Chinese. Court thought they looked Vietnamese, Laotian, or Cambodian.
They shook hands and bowed to a group of Chinese at the near end of the row of tables, but on the far end, Court noticed several others who appeared to be of the same nationality as the newcomers. Since the five of them had just arrived from the water and he’d seen no new vessels in the bay for hours other than the Tai Chin VI, Court wondered if these ten or so men could be from the cargo ship.
Soon a good twenty men were seated together, Chinese and foreigners alike, drinking and smoking and talking, right in the middle of the dive bar.
Court took a full minute to scan his surroundings thoroughly. He decided that in any emergency, the galley kitchen, accessed from behind the bar, looked like the best possible avenue for escape, because he assumed it had a door to the outside. The only way to the kitchen from his side of the bar, however, was to go over the bar, so he’d have a damn hard time slipping away in any low-profile manner.
He watched while the bartender, the same man as earlier in the day, cleaned up a double shot of whiskey that had been knocked over by a man sitting at a stool and gesticulating to friends. The booze had been spilled over the warped wood bar top, and the man behind the bar sopped it up with a hand towel, then threw the towel on a shelf behind him, all the while grumbling at the patron for his clumsiness.
Court glanced down to his phone, held below the bar in his lap, and looked at the screen, which showed him a real-time view of the cargo ship from the camera placed on the hill. Using the infrared camera he saw a couple of men on deck but no other movement.
Court looked up just in time to see the bartender lighting a cigarette, tossing the lighter back on the bar, then stepping over to him. He looked at Court a long time, unease on full display as he recognized him as the man who had come earlier in the day and asked about the missing Brits.
Court was unaccustomed to being recognized, but he cut himself some slack. He’d made this guy nervous earlier, and he’d probably been the only Western male in the establishment since then.
Court smiled and faked his British accent. “Hi again. Can I get a Tsingtao?”
Without taking his eyes off Court, the man reached down in front of him, pulled a cold beer from a large metal ice bucket, then popped the top off the glass bottle and placed it down in front of his new customer.
Court smiled again. “Thanks very much, indeed.”
The bartender didn’t say a word; he just turned away and walked off with an expression that Court took for astonishment.
As Court drank his beer he kept his head low, but his eyes flicked up often enough to see that the bartender had moved down to the opposite end of the bar. He blatantly ignored one man reaching out asking for a drink and sought out a man in the crowd standing there near the entrance to the dive.
The bartender leaned into the group and began talking to the man there. The man listened intently, nodded, then glanced down the length of the bar at Court.
The man turned away from the bar and stepped over to a larger, younger individual, standing next to the group of men seated in the middle of the room.
Like a game of telephone, Court was able to watch the news of his arrival and the fact that he’d been asking about the three Brits from Sunday night make its way around the room.
Yep, Court realized, everybody in this place, other than himself, was part of one big group.
He was pretty sure he’d stumbled into a Wo Shing Wo get-together.
His plan to instigate a reaction from the patrons had worked, but he needed to learn something from their reaction, and so far he’d picked up nothing except that they didn’t like strangers in their midst.
He took a long, slow, calming breath. He was here to gather intel, not to get into a bar fight. If something bad happened, he told himself, he sure as hell was not going to be the one to start it. He’d sit here, as cool and confident as possible, and if he was confronted, he’d talk his way through it.
Court feigned ignorance of the bad juju growing in the room around him, and he glanced back down to his phone one more time. He used controls on his touch screen to adjust the view on the camera, backing out some to look around at other fishing boats, then tightening back up on the cargo ship at the mouth of the bay.
But Court didn’t keep his head down long. He had one foot on the floor and wrapped around his bag, the other tucked into the legs of the bar stool, ready to kick it out or hoist it up so he could use it to defend himself. He knew he needed to keep his own personal security in the forefront of his mind at all times.
He would have loved to leave the bar now, to just find a quiet copse of trees somewhere on the island and to sit there alone so he could concentrate on his camera, but he didn’t have that luxury. He was very aware of the fact that men from that boat out there were sitting here with him in this bar, and he had more opportunity to glean intelligence from them here than to pick up something on the boat on his night vision equipment.
Just as he forcefully reminded himself to keep one eye up and on the room around him, both eyes instead locked on to the screen of his phone.
“What… the… hell?”
Quickly Court switched from his low-light vision to his infrared and zoomed in from three-power to ten-power.
White-hot dots moved on the water’s surface, right against the hull of the cargo ship at the stern. They were human-sized, clearly divers emerging from below the surface of the bay. He counted four close together, then two more up near the bow.
The figures at the bow grew, then rose from the water, seeming to float in midair away from the ship.
Court’s mouth opened a little as he understood what he was looking at. Two men were climbing the anchor chain together, with four more at the stern, using a rope or a hooked ladder to ascend.
Right now, right out there in the darkness beyond the edge of the lights from the deck bar, just at the far edges of this little bay, the cargo hauler anchored right where he’d expected to find a ship related to the disappearance of Fitzroy’s men searching for Fan Jiang was being boarded by some sort of raiding party.
Court looked up to check the men around him — they seemed to be more overtly looking in his direction now — while he quickly dialed a number on his phone. This meant he lost the image of the ship for a moment so he could use the number keys, but as soon as the line began to ring, he put his wired earpiece in his ear and switched back to his infrared screen.
Colonel Dai answered on the first ring. “Way, ni hao?” Yes, hello?
Court’s voice was hurried and hushed. “Do you have an operation going on right now?”
“Of course. My men are all over Hong Kong looking for—”
Court interrupted. “I’m talking about a ship! Do you have men boarding a ship searching for Fan? Now. I mean… right now.”
Dai seemed genuinely confused by the question. “No. No one has reported any sightings or investigations of that nature. What ship? Where are you? I hear talking in the background. What do you see?”