The unit was an Ericsson, the T230. It had a SIM card, meaning it was a GSM model, usable pretty much everywhere but Japan and Korea, which employ a unique cell phone standard. I examined it for transmitters and didn’t find any. I thought for a minute. Did the T230 incorporate emergency services location technology? I tend to read almost compulsively to stay on top of such developments, but even so things slip through the cracks. No, the T230 wasn’t that new a model. I was okay on that score, too.
Still, I knew that some intelligence services had refined their cell phone tracking capabilities to the point where they could place a live cell phone to within about twenty feet of its actual location. Any worries on that score? Probably not. Whoever was coming after me had limited local resources. I doubted they would have the contacts or expertise that tracking the phone would require.
Under the circumstances, I decided it would be worth hanging onto the unit, and leaving it powered on. It could be interesting to see who might call in.
I checked the stored numbers. The interface was in Arabic, but the functions were standardized and I was able to navigate it without a problem.
The call log was full-he hadn’t thought, or hadn’t had time, to purge it. I didn’t see any numbers I recognized. But the guy I’d taken it from had been talking to someone when I spotted him at Shun Tak station. Unless he’d made or received ten calls in the interim, there would be a record inside the phone of the numbers he’d dialed and of those that had dialed him. I had a feeling that some of those numbers would be important.
I drank my tea and left. I took out Kanezaki’s cell phone and called him from it, moving on foot as the call went through.
“Moshi moshi,” I heard him say.
“It’s me.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m concerned about something.”
“What?”
“Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong.”
“What?”
“Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong.”
“I heard you. Are you serious?”
I didn’t detect anything in his voice, but it was hard to tell over the phone. And he was smoother now than when I’d first met him.
“You think I make this shit up to amuse you?” I said.
There was a pause, then he asked, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Just concerned.”
“Are you in danger now?”
“Not from the three who were after me.”
“You mean-”
“They’re harmless now.”
Another pause. He said, “You’re concerned about how they found you.”
“Good for you.”
“It wasn’t me.”
I already half-believed that, I supposed. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have warned him by calling. Or I would have conceived of the call simply as a way to lull him, to set him up. I couldn’t imagine why he would have turned on me, but you never have the full picture on things like that. Circumstances change. People develop reasons where they had none before.
“Who else knew I was in Macau?” I asked. “They tracked me from there. One of them was waiting to pick me up when I arrived at Shun Tak in Hong Kong.”
“I don’t… Look, I have absolutely no reason to try to fuck you. No reason. I don’t know who they were or how they got to you. But I can try to find out.”
“Convince me,” I said.
“Give me what you’ve got. Let me see what I can do.”
I decided to give him a chance. I didn’t see any down-side. I also didn’t see a good alternative.
“They look Arab to me,” I said. “Maybe Saudi. They dress like they’ve got money. One of them was carrying a cell phone with an Arabic interface, and was using it to make or receive calls while they were following me. I’ll put all the numbers from the phone’s log on the bulletin board. You can run those down. They had at least one partner on Macau, probably more, and probably all of them transited Hong Kong recently. They were sloppy, they might all have arrived at the same time, maybe even on the same plane.”
“That’s a lot. I can work with that. You think there’s a connection with our friend?”
Belghazi. There were only a few Arabs in my life, and they were all recent arrivals. Although my thinking might not go down well with the antiprofiling crowd in the U.S., it was hard not to suspect that they were all connected.
But I didn’t see anything to be gained from speculating aloud. “You tell me,” I said.
“I’ll try.”
“You need to convince me,” I said again.
We’d known each other long enough for him to understand my meaning. “How do I contact you?” he asked.
“I’ll check the bulletin board.”
“It would be more efficient if you would just leave the cell phone on.”
“I’ll check the bulletin board.”
He sighed. “Okay. And you can always call me at this number. Give me twelve hours. Anything else?”
“The blonde?” I asked.
“Nothing. Still working on it.”
I hung up.
I found an Internet café, where I uploaded the information to the bulletin board. Then I sat for a minute, thinking.
The three guys who had come after me here in Hong Kong were obviously in touch with someone in Macau. In fact, I was pretty damn sure that the one with the cell phone, Sunglasses, had called his Macau contact to confirm that I had arrived. The guy in Macau would now be waiting for news of the operation. The bodies of his buddies had only been cooling for about an hour now. Chances were good that he wouldn’t have heard yet of their tragic demise. He certainly wouldn’t be expecting, and he wouldn’t be prepared, to see me in Macau without first getting a heads-up from Hong Kong. And, even if he had somehow heard about the way things had turned out here, the last thing he would expect me to do would be to head straight back to the place where the ambush had obviously initiated: the Macau Mandarin Oriental.
In either case, I realized I had an opportunity to surprise someone. Which is always a nice thing to be able to do.
I headed back to Shun Tak to catch the next ferry to Macau. I tried not to think too much about what I was about to do. Charging an ambush is counterinstinctive: when your lizard brain identifies the direction the threat is coming from, it wants you to run away.
But your lizard brain doesn’t always know best. It tends to focus on short-term considerations, and doesn’t always adequately account for the value of unpredictability, of deception, of surprise. Of taking a short-term risk for a longer-term gain.
The hour-long ferry ride felt long. Maintaining a razor-edge readiness is exhausting, and, once the mad minute is over, the body badly wants to rest and recuperate. I tried to clear my mind, to take myself down a few levels-enough to recover, but not so much that I would be less than ready for whatever I might encounter on Macau.
With about twenty minutes to go, the cell phone rang. I looked down at it and saw that the incoming number was the same as the one last dialed. Almost certainly the Macau contact, then, checking in, wanting to know what had happened. I ignored the call.
We arrived at the Macau Ferry Terminal and I walked out into the arrivals lobby. The lobby was too crowded for me to know whether I had a welcoming committee. That was okay, though. One of the advantages of Macau is that you can access the city from the first floor of the ferry terminal-either by foot on the sidewalks, or by taxi-or you can go to the second floor and use the extensive series of causeways. If you’re waiting for someone at the ferry terminal, therefore, you have to be just outside the arrivals area, ready to move out or up, depending on the route taken by your quarry. So even though I couldn’t spot a pursuer yet, it would be easy for me to flush him if he was there.
I took the escalator to the second floor, where I paused in front of one of the ATMs as though withdrawing some cash-a common enough maneuver for visitors heading for the casinos. I glanced back at the escalator I had just used, and saw an Arab coming up it. The big bastard, the bearded giant I’d noticed that morning. The shades and expensive jacket looked familiar at this point. Christ, they might as well have worn uniforms. Hi, my name’s Abdul, I’ll be your assassin today.