by Lee Goldberg
Which was why the three of them were in the crosshairs of two snipers, both armed with lightweight Nemesis Vanquish rifles loaded with .308 Winchester cartridges and fitted with sound suppressors . . . and why four Ministry of State Security agents, two on either end of Graham Street, all of them armed with silenced Glock 17s and Ka-Bar tactical knives, were closing in on them, too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Classified Location, Kangbashi District, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. July 3. 6:42 p.m. China Standard Time.
“Does anybody have eyes on them?” Yat demanded. The replies from the ground team and snipers came over the speakers.
Ground Team 1: “Not yet.”
Ground Team 2: “I think I can see their backs.”
Sniper #1: “I have Fung’s head. No. Wait. I lost him. Reacquiring.”
Technically, the sniper’s report was redundant. Yat could see the sniper scope views if he wanted. But Yat couldn’t pay attention to every camera at once. Things were moving too fast.
“Sir,” Pang Bao said energetically. “I’ve activated the microphone on Fung’s phone.”
“Let’s hear it,” Yat said.
The live conversation played on the speakers.
Ian Ludlow: “Maybe President Xiao wants to use the dirt Wang has on the Politburo members to shore up his power.”
Warren Fung: “That’s certainly possible. But there’s more at work. My sources tell me that Wang recently discovered that his studio has wired large sums of money to nonexistent vendors in Turkey and Italy and opened a production office in Paris for a fake movie. Why? One day after Wang started asking questions about that, a reporter showed up at his penthouse for an interview. That was the same night Wang fell ill and was taken to Beijing.”
Ian Ludlow: “Money being embezzled from a movie studio isn’t as compelling to me as political intrigue.”
Warren Fung: “The reporter was posing as me.”
Ian Ludlow: “That’s creepy, but it’s still not grabbing me.”
Margo French: “How do you know all of this?”
Warren Fung: “Some of it came from one of Wang’s Australian bodyguards, a woman who was expelled from Hong Kong hours after the abduction. She got a photo of the guy impersonating me from the security camera footage, which was subsequently erased. She sent that photo to my phone . . . right before she was killed in a car accident in Sydney.”
Yat didn’t know what else Fung had to say but he knew he didn’t want Ludlow to hear it. “Ground teams, I want that phone. Does anybody have Fung in their crosshairs?”
Sniper #1: “I don’t have a clear shot.”
Sniper #2: “Negative.”
“Get one, damn it,” Yat said.
Graham Street Market, Hong Kong. July 3. 6:45 p.m. Hong Kong Time.
Warren stopped and took out his phone.
Ian’s gaze drifted to a nearby seafood vendor who had an astonishing assortment of fresh fish laid out on mountains of crushed ice and an array of buckets of water filled with live shrimp, lobster, crab, and other sea life. What the hell was in those buckets? Ian was leaning over for a closer look when Warren held out his phone to show them a photo.
“This is the guy,” Warren said.
It was a picture of a Chinese man about the same age and build as Fung, with similar but sharper facial features, standing at the security reception desk in the lobby of a building. It wasn’t nearly as interesting to Ian as whatever was swimming around in those buckets. Were those eels? Who brings home live eels for dinner? Are these people Chinese or Klingons?
“He’s even wearing clothes like mine,” Warren said.
Ian didn’t know why Warren was showing them the photo. It meant nothing to him. But he did notice the battery icon on the phone was near empty.
“You’ve only got ten percent of your battery left,” Ian said, just to be helpful.
Warren had something more to say and cast a wary eye at the fishmonger, who stood inside his stall at his cutting board, hacking at some huge fish with a cleaver. But it was obvious to Ian that the fishmonger wasn’t paying any attention to them and besides, the sound of the blade smacking against the cutting board would make it difficult for him to eavesdrop. But Warren gestured them closer in a conspiratorial huddle anyway.
“The Chinese government is hiding something big and Wang is connected somehow,” Warren said, powering off his phone and sticking it in his pocket. “We need to know what it is.”
“We do?” Ian said.
The sudden silence in the control room was almost as startling as Fung’s words, leaving them with a cliff-hanger.
“What happened?” Yat Fu said. “Where’s the audio?”
“Fung must have turned off his phone,” Pang said.
“Snipers!” Yat yelled, in case their attention had wandered. “Take Fung out the instant you can get a shot.”
Sniper #1: “Affirmative.”
Sniper #2: “Affirmative.”
Yat watched the sniper scope images on-screen as both of the assassins got up and moved to new positions farther down the street.
“You’ve met Wang’s daughter and tonight at the Big Wheel you’ll meet his wife. They won’t talk to me but they will talk to you,” Warren said. “Why was Wang taken? Was it because of the questions he was asking? Or because of what he knows? Why is the government so eager to silence him and why now?”
“I’m a novelist,” Ian said, “not an investigative reporter.”
Margo stepped aside to make room for some shoppers who were passing by. “But the answers to Warren’s questions could give you the inciting incident for Straker that you’ve been looking for to ignite your plot.”
Sniper #1 took position on a rooftop. He moved his crosshairs over a break in the overlapping awnings and saw Margo standing in front of a seafood stall. Her body obscured most of Fung, except for one leg and part of a shoulder. But if she stepped just an inch to the left, he’d have a clear shot at Fung’s head.
He steadied his aim and waited for his split second of opportunity.
Ian didn’t buy Margo’s argument. The reporter just wanted to use Ian to do his job for him. Screw that. Besides, what was Ian getting out of this? So far, Warren hadn’t given him anything, just some possible motivations for the bad guys. Ian had plenty of those. What he needed was something that would get Straker moving.
“I don’t feel comfortable talking to Mei about this,” Ian said. “She shut me down the first time I brought it up.”
“Because her bodyguards were there,” Margo said.
Ian gave her a look that he hoped conveyed shut up. Why was she arguing for the reporter? Couldn’t she tell that Ian was trying to find a polite way to say no?
Sniper #2 climbed up some bamboo scaffolding to a platform, hunkered down facing the street, steadied his rifle barrel on a horizontal pole, and peered through his sight at the back of Ludlow’s head. He could shoot through Ludlow’s skull to get to Fung’s head, but it wasn’t the optimal way to do it. All Ludlow had to do was take a half step to one side and he’d have a clear shot. Sniper #2 was good at waiting. Next to good aim, patience was a sniper’s most valuable skill.
“Those men aren’t there to protect her,” Warren said. “They are there to keep her under Beijing’s thumb. We’ll get answers once she’s free.”
Why does he keep saying we, Ian asked himself. We don’t work for him.
Warren looked urgently at Margo. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Now he’s giving Margo orders? Who does this guy think he is?
“Yes,” Margo said.
“Not so fast,” Ian held up his hands in a halting gesture. “I haven’t agreed to any of this.”
In that instant, three things happened at once:
Some creature flopped in a bucket next to Ian and he dipped his head to look at it.
Margo took a slight step aside to see what Ian was looking at.
Warren Fung’s head exploded like a watermel
on loaded with dynamite as two .308 Winchester slugs simultaneously blasted into his skull.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Nobody heard the two shots, but plenty of people saw Warren’s head explode, or felt the wet gore splatter them, or saw his headless body drop to the ground, blood pouring from his neck like a dropped carton of milk.
Ian was frozen in place, unable to absorb what he was seeing and hearing. But Margo reacted immediately, grabbing Ian and pulling him down under the seafood display as screaming people scrambled away in terror. The fishmonger dropped his cleaver and ran into the back of his stall.
Now that Ian was on the ground, staring at the headless corpse, he understood what happened. “Holy shit. He’s been shot.”
Margo grabbed Warren’s body by the feet and dragged him into the fish market. As she did, bullets hit the fish, kicking up ice. Why was somebody still shooting at them?
“Forget about him,” Ian said. “He’s beyond saving. We have to get out of here.”
“Get his phone.”
“Why?”
“Just do it!” she said with such ferocity that it startled him into complying. He couldn’t think, so her decisiveness filled the void.
He reached into Warren’s coat pocket for the phone and tried not to look at the soup of gore burbling from the man’s neck. But he looked anyway. He vomited and yanked his arm away from the body, the phone in his hand.
Ian was still heaving when he saw Margo reach up and take the cleaver from the cutting board. She flattened Warren’s right hand on the pavement, raised the cleaver above her head, and brought it down hard, chopping off its thumb.
“What the fuck!” Ian said.
She ignored him, yanked a plastic bag from a nearby dispenser, dropped the amputated thumb into it, and started filling the baggie with handfuls of crushed ice.
“You need to take this bag—” she began.
“The fuck I will,” he said.
“—and run to the escalators.” She tied the bag and held it out to him. “I’ll catch up.”
“Are you insane?” Ian said, but he took the bag.
Margo stood, grabbed a carp by the tail in each hand, and stepped into the street to confront two men who ran up, guns held at their sides.
Before they could raise their weapons, Margo beat the men with her fish in a whirlwind display of martial arts prowess. The men were taken down, and their weapons kicked out of their reach, in four seconds. It was something Clint Straker would do.
Ian didn’t move, unable to believe what he was seeing.
She tossed the fish aside and looked angrily at Ian. “What are you still doing here? Run!”
Ian stuffed Warren Fung’s thumb and his phone into his bag, scrambled to his feet, and dashed into the seafood stall, through a tiled room full of fish, sinks, and ice boxes, and out an open back door into a dark alley. Night had fallen while they were in the market.
Faced with a choice of which direction to run, Ian ran to his left because it was downhill and easier for a guy whose idea of exercise was lifting a full spoon of Chunky Monkey ice cream to his mouth.
He tore down the alley and barreled out onto Wellington Street beside a hardware store with rolls of bubble wrap, PVC elbow fittings, brooms, plastic planters, and buckets hanging over the open doorway. The display made no sense. Nothing made any sense anymore.
A roll of bubble wrap blew apart beside him with a loud pop that sounded like firecrackers, and Ian realized it had been hit with a bullet. He looked to his left and saw a man with a gun running up the street toward him.
Shit!
Ian bolted to his right and up the single lane of traffic toward the Mid-Level escalators, which passed over the street only a few yards away. He ran up the two flights of stairs to the bridge, crossed to the moving walkway heading uphill, and continued running, pushing past the pedestrians in his way and leaping over a wailing baby in a carriage.
At the Gage Street landing, he nearly lost his footing as he exited the moving walkway. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath and looked over his shoulder. The shooter was coming after him on the moving walkway at a fast march and with the relentless determination of a Terminator.
Ian darted onto the next inclined section of moving walkway, but it was even steeper than the one before. This was the most running Ian had done since the last time he was chased by killers. He’d be out of breath very soon and then the Terminator would be on him. He thought of Warren Fung’s head exploding and got a second wind, picking up more speed.
And then Ian’s chances of survival got worse.
As he neared the next landing, he saw two men running toward him down the graduated pathway alongside the next stretch of moving walkway. The men were staring at him with fierce intensity. They would all reach the landing at about the same time and it wouldn’t be for a group hug.
He looked over his shoulder. The Terminator was getting closer. Ian’s only chance was to get to the landing first, run down the stairs to the street, and hope to lose them in the crowd.
Fat chance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Yat Fu had watched the drama unfold with mounting frustration. He’d seen Fung go down and get dragged out of sight by the woman. But then his snipers lost sight of the targets and all he heard was heavy breathing as his agents ran toward the seafood stall to retrieve the reporter’s phone and take his body away. Then he’d heard a few moist thwacks, followed by people shrieking and general pandemonium. He’d ordered his snipers to get out of there and told Pang to search nearby security cameras for any sign of Ludlow. The American spy showed up on camera seconds later running down an alley and Yat sent his men after him.
Now, Ludlow was out in the open on the Mid-Level escalators, pinned between Yat’s men with nowhere to go. Soon they would have him and this farce would be over.
“Where is ground team one?” Yat asked Pang, who was now coordinating the teams along with the other operatives in the room. There were too many moving pieces for Yat to do it alone.
Pang held a finger to his earpiece, listening to a report. “Team three has arrived at the seafood stand. They say team one was attacked by the woman and she took their guns.”
“Tell me they weren’t beaten with another sex toy.”
“Two carp,” Pang said. “She’s gone and so is Fung’s phone.”
Yat rubbed his temples. “Ludlow must have it. Get Fung’s body out of there and bring Ludlow and the phone to me.”
There was no point in running, Ian concluded. The two men in front of him and the one behind him all had guns. He was unarmed and boxed in. So Ian stopped running and let the moving walkway carry him the last few feet to the landing and his fate.
One of the two men coming toward him smiled and said, “You’re coming with us, Ludlow.”
Who were these people? How did they know his name?
He started to raise his hands in surrender when he heard four muffled pops in rapid succession. The two guys went down, shot in the knees.
Ian whirled around to see Margo crouched in the Gage Street staircase in a firing stance with a silenced Glock in her hands. She winked at Ian, turned slightly, and shot the man behind Ian in the knees, taking him down, too. The pedestrians on the walkway began screaming and running in all directions, creating an atmosphere of general chaos on the elevated escalators.
Margo held the gun to her side, dashed over to Ian, and glanced over her shoulder. Two more men were charging toward them from the Wellington landing but their progress was slowed by the panicked pedestrians trying to run in the opposite direction on the moving ramp.
“Don’t just stand there gaping,” Margo said. “Run!”
Margo rushed past him onto the moving walkway and Ian hurried after her.
They were over Hollywood Road when Margo stopped abruptly, though the moving walkway still carried them along. People were still scrambling and screaming everywhere. The two pursuers were catching up and not far ahead two more men were
rushing toward them.
Margo peered over the railing and looked at Ian. “We have to jump.”
Ian glanced down at the traffic. A big bus was just emerging from under the bridge. “It’s suicide.”
“Possibly,” she said. “But we’re definitely dead if we stay here.”
A bullet hit the pillar beside Ian’s head and that made the decision for him. Margo and Ian looked at each other and, in unison, jumped up and vaulted over the railing.
Ian’s scream was cut short as he landed hard on the bus. He slid across the slick metal surface toward the side, unable to get a handhold on anything, certain he’d fall into the street and get run over by the cars behind. But his hand caught a protruding vent and he stopped his fall, his legs dangling over the side.
Margo landed on her back and immediately began firing her silenced Glock up at the bridge, forcing the gunmen at the railing to take cover until the bus turned a corner, out of their sight.
This was an unmitigated disaster. Yat knew it and so did everybody in the room. They’d just killed a man and started a gunfight on the streets of Hong Kong, a semiautonomous region of China where the Ministry of State Security didn’t have jurisdiction and wasn’t supposed to be operating.
“Hong Kong police are converging on the scene,” Pang said. “The corpse has been removed and we are evacuating our injured men.”
Yat addressed the entire room. “I want a full cleanse. Erase all the security camera footage from the Mid-Level escalators and any public or private surveillance systems. Monitor social media and delete any photos or videos that capture the operation or any of the participants. Identify cell phones that were active in the area, access their activity, and wipe them.”
The operatives in the room had engaged in this same swift, all-encompassing electronic cleansing of evidence many times before when the government’s suppression of public dissent had turned excessively violent.
