She shook her head. In agreement or disbelief, I couldn’t tell.
I wanted to go, but she needed to hear one more thing. “Keiko,” I said, looking at her closely, “in a few minutes, certainly in an hour, this conversation will start to seem unreal. You’ll convince yourself that I was making this all up, trying to get rid of you, something like that. You’ll be tempted to go back to the Mandarin to try to find me. I won’t be there. I can’t go back any more than you can. You seem like a smart girl and you’ve got a lot of good things ahead of you. Don’t be stupid today. This isn’t a game.”
I turned and left. I’d done all I could do. She would either act tactically or she wouldn’t.
I headed for the MTR subway’s Central Station. I didn’t know if they were armed, and the way they were configured around me I couldn’t be confident of dropping all three and getting away clean. Also, there were a number of uniformed policemen in the area. The police presence would likely inhibit my friends for the moment, as it was inhibiting me. I decided to take them sightseeing someplace, somewhere casual where we could all let our hair down.
This would be tricky. From the way they had been following us, my gut told me they were waiting for the right venue to act. Someplace unusually empty, or someplace extremely crowded. Someplace that would give them a chance to act and then get away without being stopped, or even remembered by witnesses. Until they found that place, I could expect them to continue to refrain. If they thought they were losing me, though, or if they sensed that I was playing with them in some way, they might decide the hell with it and do something precipitous.
I hoped I was right about them. It was hard to be sure. I was used to dealing with western intelligence services and yakuza, not potential fanatics spawned by the culture that had once invented arithmetic but whose most notable recent contribution to world civilization was the suicide bomber.
I took the escalator down to the MTR station, maintaining a brisk pace to make it harder for them to overtake me in case I had been wrong about where they might make their move. The station was filled with surveillance cameras, and for once I actually welcomed their presence. Unless Larry, Moe, and Achmed wanted whatever they had in mind to be captured on video, they would have to wait a little longer. And a little longer was all I needed.
That is, if they even noticed the cameras, of course. Assuming your enemy is intelligent can be as dangerous as assuming he’s stupid.
A Tsuen Wan-bound train pulled in and I got on it. My friends entered the same car on the other end. I’d been right, at least so far. They were hanging back, not yet wanting to get too close, not yet realizing that I’d already spotted them.
I decided to take them to Sham Shui Po, a colorful community in West Kowloon, one of the many areas I had spent some time getting to know while setting up for Belghazi, contingency planning for circumstances like the one at hand. On a more auspicious occasion, we might have been hoping to take in the two-thousand-year-old Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb or the century-old Tin Hau Temple. Or bargain hunting on Cheung Sha Wan Road, the area’s “Fashion Street,” where garment manufacturers sell directly to the public. Or hunting for secondhand electronic goods and pirated CDs and DVDs in the area’s outdoor flea markets. But today I wanted to offer them something a little more special.
I stepped off the train at Sham Shui Po station, moved through the turnstiles, and took the C1 exit to the street. The teeming scene in front of the station made familiar Tokyo look deserted by comparison. The street stretching out before me between rows of crumbling low-rises and slumped office buildings looked like a river of people gushing through a ravine. Cars jerked through congested intersections, pedestrians flowing around them like T-cells attacking a virus. Laundry and air-conditioning units hung from soot-colored windows, high-tension wires sagged across overhead. Signs in Chinese characters leered from buildings like lichens clinging to trees, their paint gone to rust, colors faded to gray. Here was an emaciated, shirtless man, asleep or unconscious in a lawn chair; there was a plumper specimen, leaning against a lamppost, clipping his fingernails with supreme nonchalance. An indistinct cacophony blanketed the area like fog: people shouting into cell phones, street stall hawkers exhorting potential customers, cars and horns and jackhammers. A couple of pigeons soared from one rooftop to another, flapping their wings in seeming amusement at the seething mass below.
My friends would be trying to take all this in, process it, decide what it meant for them and for their chances of getting away with what they were here to do. It would take them a few minutes to work all that out. They didn’t know that a few minutes was all they had left.
I browsed the open-air stalls and popped in and out of a few electronics stores, checking unobtrusively as I did so to ensure that my friends weren’t getting too close, that they hadn’t yet made up their minds. To them, it would look like I had left Keiko shopping for clothes while I indulged a taste for computer gadgets and pirated software. And I did make a couple of purchases as I browsed. A pair of athletic socks-thick, knee-length, light gray. A plain navy baseball cap. And a dozen Duracell look-alike D-cell batteries. All for about twenty Hong Kong dollars. I smiled at the bargains to be had in Sham Shui Po.
While we walked, I shoved the baseball cap in a back pocket. Then, working in front of my waist and mostly by feel to ensure that my pursuers wouldn’t see, I pushed my left hand into one of the socks and pulled the other sock over it, doubling them up. I slipped eight of the batteries inside, discarding the rest in a trashcan, and tied off the sock just above the batteries to make sure they would stay clumped together. I wrapped the open end of the sock around my right hand twice like a bandage, using three fingers to secure it and holding the weighted end between my thumb and forefinger. As I turned a corner, I released the weighted end. It dropped about twenty centimeters, stopping with a heavy bounce as the batteries reached the limit of the material’s extension. I looped the material around my right hand until the weighted end nestled into my palm, then hooked my thumbs into my front pockets as I walked, concealing the improvised flail from the men behind me.
I took them in a counterclockwise arc that ended at a three-story food market half a kilometer from the station entrance. I went inside, checking as I did so to make sure that they were still an appropriate distance behind me. I had no trouble picking them out of the crowd. They were the only non-Asians around.
Which was a problem for them, but not an insurmountable one. The market was so massively crowded and clamorous that, if they could get close, they could put a knife in a kidney or a silenced bullet through my spine without anyone noticing when it happened or remembering it afterward. If I were in their shoes, this was the place I’d make my move.
I moved up one of the alleys of food stalls toward the escalators I knew were at the other end. Meat hung from hooks around me, the air sharp with the smell of fresh blood. Butchered eels writhed on bamboo serving plates, their severed halves twitching independently. Mouths on disembodied fish heads slowly opened and closed, the gills behind them rippling, trying still to draw breath. Hawkers gestured and shouted and coaxed. Masses of shrimp and crabs and frogs twitched in wire baskets. A severed goat’s head twirled from a hook, its teeth clenched in final rictus, its dead eyes staring past the tumult at some bleak and final horizon.
I broke free of the thick crowd just before I reached the escalator. I took it two steps at a time, dodging past the stationary riders, knowing the men behind me would read my sudden acceleration as a sign that I’d made them and was trying to escape. As soon as they cleared the crowds as I had, they would pursue. And if they caught me, they wouldn’t take another chance. They would act.