I let her lead pass for now. “I take it this is an unscheduled flight?” I’d worked the knife back up into its chamois case inside my sleeve. I reached for my wallet and found it still there, much to my surprise, in my coat pocket. Good. They’d have accepted the ID inside, which identified me as Peter Cowles, a staff assistant to the senior senator from a state not far from Washington. That would have jibed nicely with the story she’d given them about me. The senator in question was one of the more loud-mouthed supporters of the war in Vietnam. He’d have been approachable, perhaps through his obliging, and grateful, staff assistant.
“Unscheduled?” she replied. “I... I’m sure it is. He... they had to bribe a lot of people to get permission to take off. Why?”
“Unscheduled takeoff means unscheduled landing,” I said getting to my knees. She gave me a hand up, but even with the help it wasn’t fun standing all the way up. “They’ll have to radio ahead to Hong Kong and try to get an okay on coming in. The terminal at Kai Tak will try to fit them in somewhere — particularly when they find out who he is. Anyhow, the negotiations should keep them busy coming in. And from the sudden change in our altitude I’d say that wasn’t a long way off.”
“What are you... what do you think you will do?” she said. One tiny hand stole into mine.
“Give them the shake,” I said. “Fold my tents and steal silently away. Did you think I’d be setting up in business with the bastard in Cameron Road somewhere? And you are coming, of course. Right?”
“I... oh, no, Mr. Carter.” The hand in mine was moist and shaky. “I... I’ve thought about it. I... I gave my promise. I must...”
“You don’t want to work for a shark like that, do you? Particularly knowing his plans for you?” I felt her hand; no, she didn’t. What was bringing this on? “Hey,” I said, “what’s the matter?”
“Oh, Mr. Carter, you don’t understand. I... I have enemies now. Enemies who knew I was with Walter. Now... now there’ll be no protection from them. None at all. Unless... unless I go with him. No one would dare...”
“The hell they wouldn’t,” I said in a flat voice. “This isn’t going to be Saigon. The big cheese isn’t going to be so big once we’ve landed. There’s the British government to get around, you know. There’s...”
“Mr. Carter.” Both hands gripped mine. “Walter always said that in Hong Kong the power resides in the Jockey Club, Jardine-Matheson, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, and Her Majesty’s Government, in that order. He... he has on deposit over one million pounds sterling in the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. He is transporting an almost equal sum in the present flight. One can buy quite a bit of protection with that kind of money.”
I whistled; the sound almost wasn’t there under the still-deafening roar of the big engines. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Suit yourself. But do me a favor.”
“What?”
“Get up front just before we touch down... and keep the three of them distracted. I’m going to ditch this thing while we’re still on the runway.”
“No! No, you’ll be killed...”
“I don’t think so. Anyhow, I’m not sticking around. If you can keep everybody busy during that last couple of minutes, I’ll just crack that door over there and ease out. I ought to be able to hit and roll and do okay for myself if they’re on a remote enough airstrip and I think with the usual congestion at Kai Tak, and with everybody knowing how easy it is to land a DC-3 on anything from a skateboard to a cow patty, we’ll probably get shunted to something nice and rustic. I’ll take my chances.”
“Goodness.” Both the little hands held mine hard. “Mr. Carter. I suppose... I suppose it wouldn’t do much good to wish that things had gone differently, would it?”
“How?” I said. I stood and checked the side door. “You mean if Walter had killed me back at the Grand-Bretagne? It...”
Her head melted into my shoulder again. I could feel those soft breasts pressing against me, all aroused again under the thin cloth. “Oh, no. No. If only... years before Walter came along... before he came along...” Then she straightened herself up, reached up to kiss me on the chin, and squeezed my arm hard in one little fist. “But no. What is past is past. One must live with the present...” The words trailed off. We were coming down fast, then choking down; the flaps were down; I held her hard for a moment, then she pulled free. “I... I have business up front,” she said. “No, it’s ‘forward,’ isn’t it? Well, never mind. Goodbye, Mr... ah... goodbye, Nick. I will... never forget you...” She rose on tiptoe to kiss me again; then she slipped through the open door and pulled it tight behind her. I looked after her in the dark for a moment; then I sighed and worked the door open. When I did, a blast of cold, foggy air hit me and, just for a moment, I had second thoughts about taking a nosedive out onto that dark ground from a moving ship, even if — as I’d suspected — we’d come down on a landing strip that antedated the invention of the bulldozer; then I bit hard on that imaginary bullet again and stuck my head out of the door once more. When the roar of the engines dropped and the plane slowed to taxi around a 90-degree turn I slipped out; rolled; and narrowly missed getting run over by that pesky third wheel...
I got up with no new broken bones — but I looked like hell and felt worse. This wasn’t Kai Tak; it was up north somewhere, and there’d been a predawn rain so I was covered with mud. That put a crimp in all my brave plans to get working as soon as I got to town, trying to find out what was going on. After taking a nosedive in that sticky goop I’d have to dump virtually everything I owned into the cleaners before I did much of anything. And, on second thought and sober reflection, I decided that would work out just fine; I could use forty winks. I was so damned tired, I thought, that I might even be able to get off to sleep despite the dull ache in the ribs.
As luck would have it the second car I flagged stopped for me, and it turned out to be a licensed cabbie, coming back from dumping a fare way up in the New Territories halfway to Canton. My stolid Oriental chauffeur didn’t so much as bother to waste a glance on me as I settled back on the leather seats, croaked “Peninsula Hotel,” and passed out cold. I slept soundly; I had some favors piled up at the Pen’s front desk, and folks would take care of me there...
It worked even better than I’d expected. Matter of fact, somebody not only hauled me out of the cab, booked me, and lugged me up to an elegant third-floor room, but undressed me, put me in a big double bed, and sent every stitch I’d been wearing out to be cleaned. When I woke up, everything was hanging, impeccably cleaned and pressed, on the door.
I sat up quickly — and then wished I hadn’t. It was a relief to see the harnesses of my three lethal little friends Hugo, Wilhelmina (empty, I saw) and Pierre laid neatly on the bedside table. I took note of another fact: someone had changed the bandage on my ribs.
The Pen thought of everything.
It was already late afternoon. I was famished, but it was too early for Peking Duck at the Princess Garden and too late for lunch anywhere, and without a day’s notice there was no sense in looking forward to beggars’ chicken at the Tien Hong Lau. I sent out for coffee and settled down to the telephone.
I placed the call, put the phone down, and began the wait. The coffee came; I got a cup and a half down before I finished dressing, thinking all the while about what had happened, and, worse, about how I’d go about explaining it all to David Hawk. I could imagine it all pretty easily, but nothing I could imagine was very reassuring.
Yes, sir, you see, Corbin got himself shot by this one-eyed, one-armed guy after he’d wiped the floor up with me. But, in the meantime, somebody had picked him clean. And I went to the last guy who could have seen him alive, and he was dead too. And then I’d explain, nice and cleverly, how I came to be alive and breathing and sitting up on a big bed in a posh hotel in Kowloon without that little roll of film Hawk wanted.