“The oaths still apply to me, though,” she said. “And I was taking just as much of a risk with regard to the law in Hong Kong.”
She stood up and started pacing the cell. “I can’t tell you how I hate myself, James! I was their goddamned whore! I sold my body to put money in their pockets!”
“Sunni,” he said, “you did it because you believed in them. I understand. You believed they would get you out of Hong Kong. You believed they were your brothers and sisters. You believed they would take care of you.”
She sat down again. “Well, in many ways they did take care of me. I couldn’t have afforded that flat otherwise. They paid for most of it. They gave me a social life, such as it was.”
“Sunni, you know that if you hadn’t received an American education, that if you had grown up entirely as a Hong Kong Chinese, then you would be thinking quite differently. You would have killed me the other day. You would have been loyal to the Triad. Your cultural background would have prevented you from even considering associating with a gweilo. ”
“Oh, I still have a strong Chinese cultural heritage,” she said. “I just happen to speak like an American.” She used an exaggerated accent on the last word, then pouted. “You’re right, though. It’s surprising that they even allowed me into the Triad with my westernized habits.”
“You had other assets that they deemed valuable.”
“And what might those be?”
“You’re beautiful and you’re intelligent.”
She smirked. “Oh, right, I’m the perfect hostess. I can go with Chinese, American, Japanese, German, English … you name it.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said.
The sound of keys in the door interrupted them. It opened and two Triads stepped in. They gestured for Bond to come with them. Sunni stood up, too, but one of the men roughly pushed her back on to the bed.
Bond shoved the thug against the wall. The other man brutally delivered a spear-handed chop between Bond’s shoulder blades, sending him to his knees. The blow had hit the nerve centre below his neck, and for a moment Bond saw nothing but stars. The man shouted at Bond in Chinese, then kicked him. 007 got weakly to his feet and followed the men out of the room.
He was brought upstairs, down a hall, and up another flight of stairs. He was finally able to take in more of his surroundings as he walked. The building was a modern business office. It might have been the corporate headquarters of a small real-estate or insurance company. They passed open offices containing new, expensive-looking black and white leather furniture. In many ways, the place reminded him of the way the new M had refurnished SIS headquarters.
He was finally led into a large, plush office and left alone. It was decorated in the same fashion as the other rooms he had seen, but with a distinctive Chinese flavour. Along with the high-tech, modern furniture, there was a bamboo screen against the wall, brightly painted with a scene of Chinese fishermen snaring a dragon. A small Buddhist altar stood in a corner, with an idol of the god Kwan Ti, or Mo, on it. Bond remembered that not only was Mo the god of policemen, he was also the favoured deity of the underworld. There was nothing else in the room that would suggest that the office belonged to the Dragon Head of a Triad. It was clearly Li Xu Nan’s legitimate office.
Before Bond could sit down, Li entered the room and shut the door behind him. They were alone.
“We meet again, Mr. Bond,” Li said in Cantonese. “I am sorry that it is under unfortunate circumstances.”
“You can’t hold me, Mr. Li,” Bond said. “I’m a British citizen. My newspaper will be trying to find me when they’ve realized I’ve gone missing.” His Cantonese had improved since arriving in Hong Kong.
“Oh, dispense with your crap, Mr. Bond,” he said. “You are no journalist. I know who you are.”
“I work for the Daily Gleaner …”
“Please, Mr. Bond! I am no fool!” Li walked to his large oak desk and took a cigarette out of a gun metal case not unlike Bond’s own. He lit it without offering one to his captive. “You are James Bond, an agent with the British Secret Service. It was not difficult to ascertain this. You see, I know Mr. T.Y. Woo and what he does. I have known for years that his shop on Cat Street is a front for your station here in Hong Kong. You were followed from Miss Pei’s flat the other day. When we saw Mr. Woo’s private taxi pick you up, it all fell into place.”
“Then it was you who killed J.J. Woo? It was you who ransacked the place?”
Li shrugged. “We wanted the girl. She is a traitor. We deal with traitors most severely. We only messed up the place to leave a message. The elder Woo attempted to stop us. He was an obstacle that we had to overcome. It was not personal.”
“Where are T.Y. and his son?”
Li said, “I honestly do not know. They were not there when we raided the building.”
“Don’t you see that he knows who you are and what you do? He can have the Hong Kong Police down on you at any minute.”
“He cannot prove a thing. You’re the only one who has witnessed anything,” Li said. “Let me make this perfectly clear, Mr. Bond. You are a gweilo. We don’t like you. You are not welcome here. Our ceremonies are sacred and secret. You have seen something no other gweilo has ever seen. You are a dead man, Mr. Bond. If I had not stopped them, my brothers would have already killed you.”
“Why did you stop them, then?”
Li paused a moment, walked to the drinks cupboard, and removed a couple of glasses. “Drink, Mr. Bond?”
He wanted to refuse, but a drink would actually do him a lot of good. “All right. Bourbon, straight.”
Li filled the glasses and handed one to Bond. “Do you remember the other day when you ‘interviewed’ me? I told you that you were in my debt.”
“I remember.”
“The time has come for you to repay the debt.”
“Why should I?”
“Hear me out, Mr. Bond. You have no other choice.”
Bond settled on the sofa. “All right, Li, I’ll listen.”
“I’ll have to tell you a story,” he said, sitting opposite Bond in a leather armchair. “A little bedtime story. It involves someone else you know … Mr. Guy Thackeray.”
Bond interrupted Li. “Did you kill him?”
Li paused a moment and shook his head. “No. We had nothing to do with that. Let me tell you something: I hated Guy Thackeray. He and I were mortal enemies. But I wanted him alive. I needed him alive. And the story I’m about to tell you will explain why. No, he was killed by General Wong, a lunatic up in Guangzhou. You have heard of him?”
Bond nodded. “Are you sure? Why would he do that?”
Li held out his hands tolerantly. “Patience, Mr. Bond. Hear me out. And then you will understand.”
The Dragon Head paused a moment, then spoke evenly and calmly. “The year was 1836. A twenty-six-year-old man named James Thackeray had sailed from his home in Britain two years earlier to the Pearl River Delta in southern China. He had heard a fortune could be made trading goods to the Chinese, but it was a difficult time and place to make a living. Gweilo were not welcome in southern China. You see, Mr. Bond, China needed nothing from the West, but was quick to perceive that the West needed China’s tea, among other commodities. Therefore, the government grudgingly allowed the “white devils” to trade on the outer fringes of her empire.”
Bond interjected, “It seems to me that each side treated the other as inferior.”
“Yes,” Li said. “Anyway … James Thackeray had originally attempted to trade manufactured goods and had made a meagre living from silver, but it wasn’t enough to feed his wife and young son, neither of whom was allowed into Guangzhou, or Canton, as it was called then. Other British traders were in the same predicament, and it appeared for a while that trade with China would be a failure.