“No,” Bianca said, opening her car door. “You cannot go with me. End of discussion.”
Doc looked at her across the roof of the car.
“I know where you’re going,” he said. “I broke the code. You don’t take me with you, I’ll just show up.”
Bianca froze, staring at him.
He said, “You want me to say it? Ma—”
“Stop.” There was no one around to hear, she was 99.9 percent certain. But it was that one-tenth of 1 percent that could get you killed. “Don’t say another word.”
“Hey, that’s what computers are for.” He sounded slightly uneasy. “I ran it through a program. Took about three minutes.”
A whole host of unpleasant thoughts rushed through Bianca’s head. The code was a seven-year-old’s means of communicating in secret with her father when he wasn’t around. It had never been designed to be unbreakable. The thought that Doc had done it was more annoying than frightening; his deed could only be accomplished by somebody more threatening than he was if they could find her eBay post, which hopefully they couldn’t. The question now became what to do: she couldn’t simply leave Doc behind, knowing what he knew...
“Is this one of those things where if I know what I know you’re going to have to kill me?” His eyes met hers, alarmed.
Well, yeah.
“Get in the damned car,” Bianca said through her teeth, and he did, tossing his duffel bag into the backseat.
“You have passports, driver’s licenses, credit cards, legends? In multiples? That’ll stand up to airport and border security?” She threw the questions at him as she drove through Savannah’s darkened streets at a controlled speed, instead of flooring it as her state of mind urged her to do. She was already busy trying to figure out how, in explaining this to Evie and Hay, she was supposed to add Doc to an ostensible emergency trip to visit her suddenly acutely ill father. “We’re going to be changing identities a lot.”
“I’ve traveled with you before, remember?” he said. “And just so you know, creating legends is what us legends do.”
That attempt at humor earned him a black look.
“Remember this when the bullets start flying,” she said, settling on the story that her father’s company needed a computer security check, and she was taking Doc with her because she’d decided to take care of that while she was there. “If you die, it’s on you.”
Bianca got her revenge for Doc’s insistence over the course of two arduous days of travel. The jetfoil trip across the strait was the icing on the cake. The boat was fast, the water was choppy and the combination meant that the passengers were bouncing around like bunnies on speed. Finally Doc lost his cookies (literally—he’d unwisely fortified himself for the boat ride with a bag of Oreo Minis) over the side. Since they ostensibly weren’t together, there wasn’t much she could do to help him. They didn’t speak until they’d passed through customs. By the time they walked—well, he tottered—out onto the open, paved pavilion that led to the street, she judged it safe enough to approach him.
“How you feeling?” she asked.
“Like I threw up all over the side of a multimillion-dollar boat.”
“What can I say? Karma sucks.”
But she bought him a Cherry Fizz—an icy combination of cherry juice and ginger ale—from a sidewalk vendor, and after a few sips he began to regain some of his color. As he leaned against a pillar and drank, she stood with her back against the wall in the shadow of a potted camphor tree and watched the new arrivals streaming out of the terminal. This was one of those rare situations when she would have given much to be carrying a gun. If ever there was a time when she needed to be packing heat this was it, when she was being ruthlessly hunted by no telling how many crackerjack government assassins and an equally unknown number of contract killers, and just about every computer-literate hit man in the civilized world would take her out if they spotted her. But guns and airline travel don’t mix, and here in Macau she would be visiting the casinos with their metal detectors and security searches at key checkpoints. Being caught with a gun would instantly put her on the radar of way too many law-enforcement types, and the word would spread. That would bring the very killers she was doing her best to avoid down on her like ducks on a June bug. Better to keep to her current strategy of staying undercover and waiting until she knew the identity of the target she needed to take out to regain her life before making like Rambo and arming herself to the teeth.
In the meantime, keeping her eye out for trouble was the name of the game. But if she was being followed, she was having no luck spotting the tail. Altair the Assassin’s Creed guy might be lurking among the tourists, but if so he could add master of disguise to his list of accomplishments.
The medicinal scent of the camphor joined with the sulfuric combination of smog and car exhaust to form a smell that was distinct to Macau. Half a dozen languages assaulted her ears at the same time—the native Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, Portuguese, Tagalog, English. She caught a phrase here, a sentence there, but nothing stood out.
The problem was, assassins tended not to wear signs saying I’m an Assassin. All she could do was look for tells: a head swiveling as the would-be assailant tried to establish her whereabouts, a too-long glance cast her way, an alteration in someone’s path or stride as they saw her, a hand reaching inside a coat or a bag—there were many, and most were subtle and easy to miss. Especially given the sheer number of people.
It didn’t help that she’d been in an acute state of vigilance for so long now that she was afraid her senses might be beginning to dull.
She and Doc had traveled the last two legs of the journey, from Rome to Athens to Hong Kong for him, from Rome to Istanbul to Hong Kong for her, separately, then met up at the ferry terminal, as a matter of good tradecraft. For the sake of Doc’s safety, she hadn’t wanted to risk having them linked together as they arrived in Hong Kong in case something should go wrong and she should be recognized.
But Macau was safer. Macau was everything people expected clean, business-centric Hong Kong to be, but it wasn’t. Macau was the Far Eastern version of the Wild West. As the new gambling capital of the world, it was bigger, louder, flashier, more over the top even than Las Vegas. A Portuguese territory until 1990 and now a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, Macau was a garish mix of clashing cultures. It teemed with people: tourists from everywhere in the world, high-rolling gamblers, hookers of all descriptions and in all price ranges, Triad gang members, workers from the Chinese mainland brought in to do the menial jobs that no one else wanted, and the western expatriates and Macau citizens who lived there year-round. Small helicopters were as ubiquitous as mosquitoes in the sky. The streets were packed with everything from the latest, most expensive Rolls-Royces to battered Mini Coopers to overflowing buses to rattling trishaws, a tricycle-rickshaw combo, with drivers that thought nothing of weaving in and out of the frequently stopped traffic. Taxis crowded the terminal area. There were so many people, such a mix of nationalities, that her fear of being spotted declined even as the crowds swirled around her. Finally she pushed away from the wall, corralled Doc, pitched what was left of his drink and bundled him into a black and white taxi.
“The Grand Lisboa,” she said to the driver in English. Her cover for the journey to Macau was Sarah Bowman, an accountant from Florida. Doc was Tony Gatti, a restaurant manager from the Bronx. They were casual acquaintances, having met in the ferry terminal in Hong Kong.
She’d chosen the Grand Lisboa because it was the tallest, most distinctive hotel-casino in Macau. The forty-seven-story building was shaped like a lotus blossom, and even among the extravagant follies of the other casino complexes it stood out. It was exactly the kind of place where wide-eyed tourists Sarah and Tony would stay.
The taxi honked and dodged its way onto the Cotai Strip, past the newest megacasinos and attractions, inc
luding the Venetian Macau, with its scaled-down version of the Piazza San Marco complete with a canal featuring real gondolas under a star-studded faux sky, and the Parisian, with its half-size Eiffel Tower. The taxi finally swerved off the Avenida do Aeroporto into the semicircular drive leading to the Grand Lisboa’s lobby. Handing over the required amount of patacas, they got out, checked in and went to their rooms.
Two hours later, their appearances drastically changed along with their identities, they were checking into a different, more modest hotel, the MGM Cotai, without having checked out of the Grand Lisboa. For all intents and purposes, Sarah and Tony were still staying at the Grand Lisboa, and would spend two nights there. Ann Brabourne, a Canadian artist, and David Cohen, a car salesman from Detroit, were staying at the MGM. As Ann, Bianca artlessly admired the large, built-in aquariums that were part of the undersea theme of the lobby to the clerk at reception as she signed her (Ann’s) name.
Again, it was a matter of good tradecraft. Switching hotels and identities made finding them that much harder.
For the same reason, as well as for ensuring Doc’s safety and her own freedom of movement, they had separate rooms on separate floors. Before leaving Doc for the night, Bianca passed him a burner phone.
“You need me, hit speed dial one,” she told him. They stood just inside his room, which was large and comfortable and looked out over the roof of One Central, a high-end shopping mall.
“What if you need me?” He juggled his key card, a large soda and a bag of burgers and fries from the McDonald’s across the street. She’d made him buzz his head during their brief stop at the Grand Lisboa, because a three-hundred-pound American with a Bronx accent and shoulder-length black curly hair, whether man-bunned or ponytailed or loose, was just too distinctive.
“I look like a sumo wrestler,” had been Doc’s glum verdict after the deed was done.
He did, sort of, but it helped him blend in.
“Own it,” was her advice.
He’d done his best, looking as badass as it was possible for a cherub-faced guy to look, even swaggering a little as he’d walked into the MGM. But now his shoulders slumped and he just looked tired. He made her think of a human Po, the sweet, clumsy main character in Kung Fu Panda. Not that she meant to tell him so.
She also didn’t have the heart to burst his bubble: the chances that she would need him at this point were so negligible as to be practically nonexistent. His expertise was in computers, not combat or weaponry, and unless she happened to be carrying a laptop in front of a vital spot when the bullet with her name on it was fired, she didn’t think computers could help her now. He was with her in Macau because he’d insisted on coming, and, truth be told, she was glad of his company. Having him with her was comforting, like holding on to a little piece of home. But after her meeting with Mason, she and Doc were going to go their separate ways, although he didn’t know it yet. She meant to tell Doc that she’d accomplished what she’d come to Macau to accomplish, the kill contract was in the process of being withdrawn and now they could go back to Savannah. She would put him on a plane (well, a series of planes) bound for home, promise to meet him there, and then go do what she had to do to make this nightmare go away. She would live and return to Savannah and her life, or she would die. But she would send him home to safety either way.
If her heart clutched a little at the idea that after she put him on that plane for Savannah she might never again see him or any of the other people who made up home for her, well, too bad.
“If I need you, I hit speed dial one on my phone, too,” she said.
She went to her room, two floors above, and immediately did a security sweep. First she checked the closet, the bathroom, behind the curtains—her window had a partial water view, very nice with all the neon reflecting off the smooth black surface of Lago Nam Van—and under the bed. Then she pressed a finger to the mirror above the credenza opposite the bed, looking for a miniscule gap between her fingertip and its reflection that might indicate the presence of a two-way mirror, and did the same to the bathroom mirror: nothing. She scanned for hidden cameras: nothing. Because modern TVs were notorious for being used to both watch and listen to people, she draped her clothes over the flat-screen on the credenza as she undressed instead of hanging them in the closet. Finally she secured the door with a door jammer portable lock and went to take a shower.
By that time she was so tired that she barely had the energy to eat the dried meat and fruit kabob she’d picked up from a vendor on the way into the hotel. Halfway through, she abandoned the effort.
What she needed most was sleep.
She took the extra pillows from the closet and made a human-shaped form in the bed, pulling the bedspread over it so that if someone should manage to breach her defenses and get inside the room, it would look like she was sleeping there.
Gathering up another pillow and a couple of blankets, she turned out the light.
Except for the faint glow from the open-all-night casinos that sifted in around the edges of the curtains—the room was now totally dark. One last quick scan of the room for a telltale pinprick of light that might indicate the presence of a hidden camera yielded nothing. Faint sounds of music and laughter, vehicular traffic and the occasional boom of fireworks—the Strip was big on fireworks—drifted through the walls.
Bianca went to the closet, opened it and made herself a pallet on the floor.
Then she stepped into the closet, closed the door and rolled up in the small bed she’d made.
The weapons she’d brought with her were close at hand.
Even a well-defended hotel room was subject to breach.
She was ready.
Two things she’d been trained in from birth were how to hide and how to survive.
15
“That’s awesome.” Doc watched the Chinese Dragon dance through the square across from the Wynn Macau with wide-eyed appreciation. It was nineteen minutes until midnight on Wednesday. The night was cool and overcast. The sky was a thick black soufflé of clouds. The square would have been as dark as pitch except for the brilliant neon colors of the casinos towering above it and the paper lanterns strung like dozens of miniature moons between the trees.
“Totally,” Bianca replied, but Doc missed the teasing note—really, he’d sounded like a teenage girl, so she’d replied in kind—because he wasn’t listening.
They were on their way inside the Wynn, and she’d paused across the street to case the entrance for possible trouble when a gong had sounded. The giant silk dragon had appeared to the accompaniment of clashing cymbals and singsong chants. It was a brilliant hot pink, with red, black and gold accents. Its fearsome head and snake-like body whirled and twirled through the obstacle course of food stalls, souvenir hawkers, fireworks carts, fortune tellers and tourists. Thin streams of smoke that smelled like incense belched at intervals from its nostrils. The dozen young men and women in red shirts and black shorts who gripped the sticks that worked it held them high overhead as they bobbed and dipped and ran in well-practiced unison, making the dragon appear alive. Keeping pace alongside, drummers beat out a rhythm that was a perfect accompaniment for the music that presaged the Wynn’s famous dancing water show, which would commence in another four minutes and send fountains of water shooting skyward in front of the hotel’s curved facade.
It had been more than a year since she’d visited Macau, and she’d been out earlier in the day to get the lay of the land. In case of emergency, knowing the terrain was important. Macau was a jumbled warren of one-way streets. If the need for a quick getaway should arise, relying on what you thought you knew was a good way to wind up dead. There were changes: a light rail system was under construction, blocking a couple of streets; a new hotel down by the lake blocked a few more. One dock had closed down. Selfie-stick wielding tourists everywhere were a menace, but she kept her head down, a big grin on her face, and
a baseball cap pulled low over her forehead. As Ann, she wore sunglasses, a blue button-up camp shirt and black polyester pants: just one tourist among many. No one had noticed her, and she’d made it back to the hotel without incident.
Now, as Doc watched the dragon, Bianca was reminded that except for his abbreviated travels with her not-father’s gang, he hadn’t been outside the US. As far as providing cover went, his wonderstruck tourist reaction was perfect.
“Come on. We need to go.” Bianca had to touch his arm to get his attention. She wasn’t comfortable in the square. Since coming out tonight, she’d felt antsy, uneasy, as if she were being observed by unseen eyes, which really shouldn’t have been a surprise, considering that any of the thousands of people thronging the Strip might have been there to hunt and kill her. But despite putting her best antisurveillance practices into play she’d seen no sign that she was actually being watched or followed, and that usually meant she wasn’t being watched or followed.
Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling, and it was getting to her. Ordinarily in times of crisis she grew cooler and steadier. Tonight, though, her pulse was heightened and her skin prickled. She was anxious to get out of the open. There were too many people crowded into too small a space. Too many who were too physically near to her. The darkness helped to conceal her, true, and the dragon and its noise were a potent distraction that should serve to keep her from being noticed. But the darkness that concealed her could also conceal any sudden moves by an assassin, and the noise and distraction of the dragon could cover a quick knife thrust by an assailant, or the sound of a shot.
She’d protected herself against that to a certain extent, but Bianca fought back a shiver anyway: one thing she’d learned during the course of this debacle was that she really, truly didn’t want to die.
“You got to find out—how did he do that? You and me, we both saw him burn.” Doc frowned. He was referring to Mason, she knew. They were moving again, heading toward the Wynn. “Or at least, I thought we did. Guess not.”
The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller Page 15
