We came to a maintenance corridor. “Here,” I said. “Turn right.”
He did. We walked a few meters in. “Stop,” I said. “Face the wall.”
He gave me a long-suffering sigh, but did as I asked. I patted him down. No weapons. I took his cell phone, turned it off, and pocketed it.
“Will you give that back when school’s over?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “If you’re good. Now head out.”
I looked back the way we had come from. Nothing set off my radar. So far, so good.
I took him through a provocative series of maneuvers that would have forced a pursuit team into the open. If I’d seen anything, I would have taken him past the knife and ended the bullshit then and there. But he was alone.
I took him to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant deep in Pok Fu Lam, far enough from the island’s tourist areas to draw only the most intrepid sightseers. The area was arguably a slum, but I liked it. In some ways, I found its crumbling four-story buildings, their paint faded and peeling from decades of subtropical moisture, their ornate balconies and carved balustrades by contrast strangely proud, even defiant, to be more pleasing than the trademark wealth and power of the districts east. Dox, enormous, bearded, and, most of all, Caucasian, looked decidedly out of place among the other diners, but he didn’t seem to mind. The menu was entirely in Chinese, but I knew the characters and was able to point to what I wanted.
“What is this?” Dox asked, after the soup had arrived and we had begun to eat. “It’s tasty.”
“Good for you, too,” I said. “A Chinese Olympic running coach used to feed it to his star athletes.”
“Yeah? What’s in it?”
“The usual stuff. Spring water. Mountain vegetables. Turtle blood and caterpillar fungus.”
He paused, the spoon halfway to his lips. “You serious?”
“Well, that’s what it said on the menu.”
He nodded as though considering. “Those Chinese runners are quick. If it’s good enough for them, I guess I can have some, too.” He slurped the rest down with a smile.
I wasn’t surprised. I’d seen Dox dine on equally unusual fare in the field in Afghanistan. Always with relish.
When we were done with the soup, I asked him to tell me what was going on.
“Well now,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “You wouldn’t believe the things they’ve trained me on. Forging ID, hacking computer networks, locks and picks, flaps and seals… And not just the training, they give me the toys! I’ve got a twenty-five-thousand-dollar color laser copier, special paper, inks, hologram kits, magnetic stripe encoders, shoot, buddy, I can whip up fake ID that’d make your hair stand up! You want something, you just let me know.”
“You didn’t come here just to make a sales pitch for fake ID, did you?” I asked.
He seemed to brighten at that, and I wondered if Dox had come to the conclusion that my occasional barbed remarks were actually terms of endearment. That would be perverse.
“I had a weird meeting with a guy the other day,” he said, grinning. “Came all the way to see me in Bangkok, where I was relaxing and revivifying at the time. Told me his name was Johnson. But his real name is Crawley. Charles Crawley. The Third. Imagine, a family that would want to perpetuate a silly name like that when they could have named him something imaginative like Dox.”
“How’d you get his real name?”
The grin widened. “Shit, I could smell lies all over that boy. So I pretended to get a call on my cell phone while we were talking. I used the phone to take his picture.”
He must have had one of the units with a built-in digital camera. In these matters it used to be that you only had to worry about the odd amateur who happened to be carrying a camcorder, like Zapruder or that guy who caught the police working over Rodney King. Now it was anyone with a damn cell phone.
I pulled out the unit I had confiscated from him. “This phone?” I asked.
He nodded. “Go ahead, take a look.”
I hit the “on” button and waited for a moment while the phone powered up. Yeah, it was an Ericsson P900, new and slick, with a built-in camera and a lot more. I handed it to Dox. He worked the buttons for a moment, then gave it back to me. I saw a surprisingly sharp image of a fine-boned, thirty-something-year-old Caucasian with curly wheat-blond hair, blue eyes, a thin nose, and thinner lips. The picture had been taken from an odd, and apparently surreptitious, angle.
“Weaselly-looking little fuck, ain’t he. I got a few more if you want to take a look. Just press that advance key there.”
I did as he indicated and scrolled through, getting a better sense of what Crawley looked like. Photos aren’t always good likenesses. If you see more than one, you increase your chances of being able to recognize the subject in person. Which I was beginning to think I might want to do.
When I was done, I turned the phone off and handed it back to Dox. He was still smiling. “If you want, I can forward the photos directly to your cell phone,” he said. “Or to an e-mail account. Hell, if you feel like having fun, we can post old Crawley’s face on any bulletin board you’d like! Dumbass didn’t even know what I was doing. Shame on him for failing to keep up with the ever-advancing march of technology.”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Well, his résumé says he’s with the Consular Affairs section of the State Department.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Looks like Consular Affairs has a pretty wide-ranging brief these days.”
He smiled back. “They certainly do.”
“How’d you find this out?” I asked.
“Come on, buddy, I can’t tell you all my sources and methods! You know magicians don’t like to show how they do their tricks.”
I looked at him and said nothing.
“All right, all right, just having a little fun with you. No need to get so serious on me with those scary eyes and all. I ran the photos through a new Agency database. The database compiles images from electronic media-online versions of newspapers and magazines, video, whatever. You feed in your photo, the system goes out and tries to find a match using something called XML-entensible markup language, something like that. It’s like Google, but with pictures instead of words. I think they stole it from some start-up company.”
“It worked?” I said, thinking, Christ, what are they going to come up with next?
“Well, sure, it worked. Gave me a couple thousand false positives, though. The Agency has a little way to go before Google has any reason to panic, I’ll tell you that. But you know me, I like to party, but I can be patient, too. I went through all the hits until I came across the unforgettable face of Mr. Crawley.” He reached into his pocket and took out a piece of paper, unfolded it, and handed it to me. “See there? That’s him, standing next to the Ambassador to Jordan at a press conference the Ambassador was giving in Amman. Doesn’t he look important?”
“Very. What did he want?”
He leaned forward. “Well, here’s where it gets interesting. He told me he represented very, very, senior interests in the U.S. government. But that, for national security reasons, these interests had to maintain good old ‘plausible deniability’ about certain courses of action and couldn’t meet with me personally as a result, much as they of course would otherwise like to. Yeah, ‘certain courses of action,’ I think that was how he put it. I think he liked hearing himself talk. Anyway, he told me that there was this former undercover operative who’d gone rogue and killed a bunch of friendlies in Hong Kong and Macau, and who needed to be ‘removed,’ is what he said. I said, ‘Removed?’ Having fun with the guy now, you understand. And he nods and says, with his voice serious, the way I guess he imagines Really Important Government representatives should talk about these things, ‘We want his actions terminated.’ Lord help me, I couldn’t stop myself, I said to him, with my eyes all wide now, ‘With Extreme Prejudice?’ And he just nods once, like he was afraid if his head had gone up and down more than that it could get him into trouble.”