I exploded up and out and launched him into the air over the railing. His arms flailed and he shrieked as he went airborne, a high, atavistic sound of sheer animal panic, and I felt a spasm of terror rip through his body as I let him go. The cigarette tumbled out of his mouth. His limbs swam crazily, uselessly, against the air around him. Then he was gone, below my field of vision. The shriek continued, cut off a second later by the sound of a resounding, dull thud twenty feet below. Tires screeched. Another thud. Crunching sounds. More screeching tires. Then silence.
I continued on my way to the New Yaohan department store. As the causeway curved right, the accident scene became visible. Traffic was stopped, and a number of people were clustered around something on the ground. Really, they ought to make those guardrails higher. It’s dangerous.
Two people, Chinese civilians, were heading toward me. Shit. I averted my eyes and changed my posture, dropping my shoulders, adopting a more rolling gait, giving them a persona to remember, a persona that wasn’t mine. I felt them looking at me closely as I passed. They might have seen what had happened; if they had, they would be in mild denial about it and trying to come up with some other explanation for the evidence of their senses, what the psychologists call “cognitive dissonance” and “reality testing.”
I briefly considered heading straight back to the terminal and returning to Hong Kong. Two bodies, two potential witnesses… the police might not be happy. But I decided to take the chance. The bodies were of foreigners, and so unlikely to produce undue domestic alarm. And Macau was no stranger to gangland killings, killings that the authorities had worked hard to downplay lest they inhibit the lucrative gambling tourism trade. If they could quickly rule these deaths “accidental” or otherwise act to minimize fallout, I expected they would.
I kept walking. From here I could take a variety of routes, and if anyone else was following me they’d have to be set up close by. I saw no one. I’d still watch my back, make the appropriate evasive moves to be certain, but, for a few precious minutes, I was reasonably sure that I wasn’t being followed. If there was anyone left that I might ambush, they would likely be at the hotel.
Keeping my head down and my pace brisk but not attention-getting, I cut through the New Yaohan, moved down the causeway to the street, and walked the ten minutes to the Mandarin Oriental. As I reached the back entrance, the cell phone buzzed. I looked at the display, and saw one of the numbers I had seen in the phone’s call log. Shit, five down, but someone was still left, checking in, wanting an update, or instructions, or just the sound of a familiar voice in an unfamiliar country.
I went inside. If they had someone else in position it would be here, the other place where they could reasonably expect to pick me up. Maybe another Arab, sitting in the spacious lobby, calling from a cell phone, waiting for a friend to show up.
I used the back entrance, checking the hot spots along the way. So far, so good.
I walked in through the café entrance. Because I hadn’t seen anyone in back, I knew they weren’t covering the entrances. That meant the next choke point would be the elevators. And there was only one spot where you could wait without drawing attention and watch the elevators: at the end of the café closest to the lobby. As I moved inside, that was the first spot I checked.
Delilah was sitting there, wearing a black skirt and a cream-colored silk blouse, a pot of tea and an open book on the table in front of her.
Son of a bitch, I thought. I was right. My first reaction, when spotting the Arab surveillance in the lobby earlier that day, had been to suspect her. I had tried to talk myself out of that. Now I realized I should have just accepted it. You don’t give people the benefit of the doubt. Not in this line of work.
She glanced over and saw me coming before I’d reached her.
“I’ve been waiting for you all day, damn it,” she said.
That brought me up short. “I’ll bet you have,” I said, looking around.
“Yes, I have. To tell you not to go to your room. There’s someone in there.”
I looked at her closely. “Yeah?”
She looked back. “You don’t believe me?”
I was suddenly unsure again. Which was frustrating. Ordinarily, I know exactly what to do, and I do it.
“Maybe I do,” I said. “Let me see your cell phone.”
Her eyes narrowed a fraction. Then she shrugged. She reached into her purse and pulled out a Nokia 8910, the sleek titanium model.
I popped open the sliding keypad and the screen lit up. The service provider was Orange, a French company, and the interface was in French. I checked the call log. No entries-she’d purged it. No surprise there. She was smart. I turned the unit off, then back on. As it powered back up, the phone number appeared on the screen. I didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t one of the ones I’d seen on the unit I’d taken from the guy at Sham Shui Po.
The exercise proved nothing, though. She might have had another phone with her. I could ask for her purse, rifle through it. But then, when I didn’t find anything, I’d wonder if she hadn’t just left the other phone in her room, or hidden it somewhere, or whatever. I knew she was in the habit of thinking several moves ahead.
I handed the unit back to her. “Who’s in my room?”
“I’m not sure. My guess is it has something to do with your reasons for being in Macau.”
“If you’re not sure-”
“I overheard him in the lobby of the hotel this morning. He was speaking in Arabic, so he assumed no one around could understand him.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You speak Arabic?”
By way of answering, she said something suitably incomprehensible. It sounded Arabic to me.
“All right,” I said. “Tell me what you overheard.”
“He said he would wait in your room in case you returned unexpectedly from Hong Kong. He didn’t use names, but I don’t know who else they could be talking about.”
I considered. It’s not all that hard to get into a hotel room if you have some imagination and know what you’re doing. I would have known he was in there before I entered, of course. That morning, while Keiko waited for me in the lobby, I’d taped a hair across the bottom of the doorjamb, as I do whenever possible before leaving a place where I’m staying. I’d hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door to make sure the maids didn’t spoil the setup. If the hair was broken when I returned, I’d know that someone had been in the room, and might still be there.
“Why are you warning me, then?” I asked.
She looked away for a long moment, then back at me. “I think your cover is blown,” she said. “Forget about this job. Leave Macau.”
A contrivance? A way to get me out of her hair? Maybe. But if she really did have a confederate in there, warning me could easily get him killed, which your standard confederate ordinarily won’t appreciate. And if the room was empty, I’d be sure to find out when I checked it, and I’d know the whole thing had been a ruse.
“It would serve your interests if I walked away from this,” I said. “So you’ll have to forgive me if I doubt your motives.”
“I don’t care what you think about my motives. I could have let you go into your room. Then you wouldn’t walk away, you’d be carried out. My interests would be served in either case. So do what you want. I have to go.”
She stood up and started walking toward the elevators.
“Wait a second,” I said, moving with her.
She ignored me, then stopped in front of the elevators. “I don’t want to be seen with you,” she said. “Just go.”