Tao held up a finger. “No. Not men like us. It will be us, exactly. That’s why we should terminate the CIA man and—”
Wang waved a hand in the air. “I’ve been doing this longer than you, Tao. Get it out of your head. We’re here on a surveillance job for MSS, and then we will go back to being two more good little soldiers for Ministry of Defense. Nobody is killing anybody until we find Fan Jiang, or until someone gets in our way.”
Tao said, “Roger Hartley is in Dai’s way already. And Colonel Dai doesn’t mess around.”
CHAPTER
THREE
Court had spent almost all of the past nineteen hours in the air, and he’d worked through nearly all of the flight. He’d known nothing about his assignment when he boarded the Falcon, not even if he would accept it, but before the plane took to the sky he’d read his eyes-only orders and he was fully on board with the mission. And by the time the plane had reached its cruising altitude, Court had sketched out a mental to-do list for the long flight ahead of him.
The flight attendant, herself a CIA employee, had brought him dinner and offered him drinks, but he ate lightly and drank nothing but water and coffee, knowing he needed a plan of action to hit the ground running in HK more than he needed a buzz, a heavy stomach, and some shut-eye.
Now he knew that both jet lag and hunger would kick in before long, but he had more work to do. He opened his carry-on and his backpack and dumped everything out onto the bed. He went through each item slowly and carefully, because he’d not packed these bags himself and none of these belongings were his.
He’d already been through this gear on the plane, but he wanted to go over it again. In addition to clothing and toiletries, it had all manner of mission-specific items, from encrypted mobiles to infrared scopes masked as binoculars. He’d taken only a small portion of the equipment left for him on the Falcon, and now he decided to pare this down even more. Most anything could have a GPS tracker in it these days, and he didn’t want the CIA knowing his exact whereabouts, just in case someone in the CIA had passed on the tip about the plane’s identity and arrival here in the first place.
Now he sat on his bed and searched everything that came off the plane with him. He found nothing that raised an eyebrow, so he thought it likely that Brewer was right — the aircraft itself had been compromised.
He knew what he had to do to get back on track. Tonight he would lose his tail, and tomorrow, when no one knew he was the guy who got off that CIA aircraft, he would intentionally pick his tail back up again, because those were his orders from Langley.
This was going to be a weird op, of this he was certain.
He’d come to meet with a man who had been detained by the Chinese, and since he didn’t know where this man was, the only way to find him was to make the Chinese aware of who he was and who he was looking for.
But they could not know he was here on a mission for the CIA, or this whole operation would fall to pieces.
He grabbed a pillow from the bed, stepped into the closet, lay down on the carpet, and fell asleep while the hot Hong Kong day raged on outside.
Several hours later Court sat at the bar at the Felix, an ultra-chic Philippe Starck — designed restaurant on the top floor of the hotel. The view over the harbor was breathtaking; the lights of Hong Kong Island to the south looked like the Manhattan skyline as seen by a helicopter from just a few hundred yards away. In fact, in many ways it was more dramatic; HK was the world’s tallest urban agglomeration, with one building reaching 118 stories and 312 buildings here standing at least 150 yards high, many more than in New York City.
While Court ate a steak and drank a beer at the bar with his back to the windows, forty-four buildings on both sides of Victoria Harbor flashed colors synchronized to music in the nightly Symphony of Lights show. Well-dressed men and women stood at the windows of the Felix and marveled at the spectacle, even though it happened every evening.
Court didn’t turn and look at the lights, and neither did one other man in the room. Tao Man Koh sat at a table near the window high above the harbor and sipped a glass of wine. Through the reflection in the glass next to him he could see the back of the American, and he kept eyes out for anyone who might try to communicate with him in a clandestine fashion.
So far he’d not seen a thing that gave him any impression that Roger Hartley was anything other than a businessman here having a meal, but he continued his covert surveillance, careful not to give himself away.
While Tao watched the target, his partner Wang Ping Li stood in the middle of the hotel room of the man he knew as Roger Hartley, checking the area carefully one more time. He’d done this an hour earlier upon his arrival in the room, scanning for anything out of the ordinary, thinking that if Hartley was CIA, he might have prepped his room with hidden cameras or listening devices of his own, or he might have placed objects in specific ways so that he’d know immediately if anything had been tampered with. It was tradecraft 101, and while Wang worked these days as a direct-action operative for the Ministry of State Security, he’d been trained as a simple spook and he knew how to scan a room for telltales.
Wang had spent an additional half hour going through the man’s luggage, taking apart his laptop, and looking through the top dozen places someone might hide items in a hotel room. He took the drawer out of the desk, unscrewed heating ducts, searched below trash can liners, behind wall art, under the mattress, even in the toilet tank.
He didn’t find a single item of interest.
The phone buzzed in Wang’s pocket, and he checked it quickly; it was Tao.
Wang answered in a whisper. “He’s moving?”
“Negative. No movement. He ate dinner and he is just sitting and drinking a—”
“I don’t give a shit what he’s drinking. You are to inform me when he leaves.”
Tao asked, “Anything in his room?”
“Nothing. Unless he has something on him right now, he is clean. We might find ourselves following this son of a bitch for days waiting for him to meet someone.”
“Doubt it.”
Before Wang could respond, his phone told him another call was coming. “Shit. It’s Dai now.”
“Let me know what he—”
Wang hung up and rejected the new call. He wasn’t going to talk to Dai from his target’s room. Instead he left and went across the twenty-fifth-floor hallway to his own room, where he immediately hit redial.
Dai answered after several rings. “Still on your little errand for Beijing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you have to report?”
“Our target is sitting in the Felix bar at the top of the Peninsula.”
“What is he doing?”
“He had dinner, and now he’s drinking. Just sitting there. We think he may be waiting to meet someone, but perhaps he’s just jet-lagged and lingering over dinner. I have searched his room, but I’ve found nothing to indicate why he is here.”
“I didn’t bring you and Tao to Hong Kong to sit in a bar all night. Your real target here could be slipping out of the city at this very moment.”
“I understand, sir, but I saw no way to avoid my orders from the Ministry of State Security, which supersedes your command at the Ministry of Defense. I report first to—”
“Wang, let me ask you… when I snap your neck the next time I see you, will that supersede your orders from State Security?”
Wang just gazed at the floor of his hotel room. Finally he said, “What do you want me to do, sir?”
“Has MSS ordered you to move on the target?”