Hong Kong Black: A Thriller (A Nick Foley Thriller)

by Alex Ryan

  He slowed and retrieved the key fob from his pocket, using the opportunity to glance behind him while pretending to look at the fob, and then began walking toward his car. As he closed the distance, he repeatedly pressed the unlock button on the fob. Ten meters away, his rental car chirped, and he thought he heard the doors unlock. The urge to look back over his shoulder was all consuming, but he resisted, listening instead for the sound of tires on pavement and a Mercedes engine growling.

  Five meters.

  Three meters.

  Two.

  One . . .

  A scream of tires and a throaty roar sent an electric surge of adrenaline through him. He whirled around to find the black Mercedes hurtling toward him on a collision course that would cut him in half. Somehow, the car had closed half the distance almost silently before the driver had punched the gas.

  Reflex took over.

  He crouched and, at the very last second, leapt vertically into the air like a cat. In his mind’s eye, he would land in a squat on the hood of the Mercedes after it crashed to a stop against his Geely. But physics ripped this plan to shit. There was a horrifying scream of metal obliterating metal as the hood of the Mercedes passed beneath him. On impact, both vehicles traveled farther than he expected, and so instead of landing as he had envisioned, the Mercedes’s windshield clipped his lower legs, cartwheeling him in the air. He came down hard, his left hip and rib cage hitting the roof. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs, and he tumbled off the roof, onto the pavement beside the passenger door.

  He gasped for oxygen like a fish out of water—puffing and suffocating despite being surrounded by an infinite supply of air. As a SEAL, he’d had the wind knocked out of him enough times that he knew not to panic. His breath would return, but his opportunity to take control of the situation would not. Hyperventilating, he kept low and crabbed across the pavement until he was squatting behind the rear bumper of his Geely. He heard angry shouting in Chinese from inside the other car.

  A second later, there was a sharp click to his right.

  Catching his first real breath, Nick peeked his head around the bumper and watched the right passenger door open. An expensive Italian dress shoe appeared below the sill, followed by a gray-suited pant leg.

  With all the fury he could muster, he exploded like a defensive lineman on the snap of the football—driving his shoulder into the door with all the power his heavily muscled, two-hundred-pound frame could offer.

  A faceless howl echoed behind the tinted glass window as the door-to-frame compression crushed the finely appointed tibia of his assailant with a horrifying crunch. Nick stepped back from the door and juked left. When he saw a hand reach for the torn pant leg, where blood was gushing from a compound fracture, he grabbed the wrist and heaved backward, using his weight to yank the man out of the car.

  He heard another crack as the man’s skull smacked the B-pillar, and then the killer tumbled facedown onto the pavement at his feet. Still controlling the wrist, Nick took a knee and fluidly rotated the arm until he felt it snap. The Chinese man howled again in agony and dropped something he had been clutching in his other hand. Nick’s gaze followed the clatter to the iconic, blocky muzzle of a Glock 43 nine-millimeter pistol lying on the pavement just in front of the left rear tire. Nick released the fallen hit man’s wrist and snatched the pistol. Crouching, he peeked inside the Mercedes through the still-open passenger door. The driver’s seat was empty, and the door was open. He caught a fleeting glimpse of gray suit tails moving left. Instead of charging to beat the driver to a face-to-face shootout at the rear of the Mercedes, Nick crouched low and bolted over the first thug. He moved toward the front of the car, which was buried a good twelve inches into his rental, and took cover behind the open passenger door. He raised the Glock, sighting between the open passenger door and the C-pillar.

  The driver rounded the rear of the Mercedes, crouched and leading with a pistol . . . just not crouched enough. The instant the driver’s head came into view, Nick squeezed the trigger. Twice. The first round pulled sparks in its wake as it skimmed the C-pillar and then laid open a deep gash in the man’s left cheek before evaporating his left ear in a pink puff. The second bullet hit the assailant in the forehead and then exploded the back of his head in a red geyser. The driver slumped out of view.

  Still sighting over his pistol, Nick scanned the interior of the car through the passenger door one final time, bobbing up and down in case another thug lurked in the back seat. Finding the car empty, he scanned quickly in both directions for a second hit squad closing on his position. To his left, nothing. To his right, he saw cars backing up at the corner. He watched someone step out of a car, point, and then raise a mobile phone to his cheek.

  Damn you, Lankford.

  Nick took a knee beside the groaning hitman at his feet and tore back the man’s suit jacket. He pulled an extra magazine from the thug’s belt and then a long black leather wallet from the inside pocket of his coat. He slipped the extra mag into his left front pant pocket and the stolen wallet into his shirt’s breast pocket. Then he turned to assess his rental car. The driver’s side was completely caved in by the nose of the Mercedes.

  This piece of shit ain’t going anywhere.

  Using the butt of the Glock, he knocked out the remaining shattered glass of the driver’s side window, reached in, and grabbed his backpack from the front passenger seat. After slinging the bag over his shoulder, he tucked the Glock into his waistband at the small of his back, hiding it under his untucked shirt. He dodged right around the two mangled cars, moving quickly and with purpose, while fighting the mounting sensation that he needed to run. He cleared the parking lot and headed toward a cluster of buildings across the street. He ducked down a one-way street and then circled back around behind the complex, moving north and crossing a block and a half behind the stalled line of traffic at the intersection adjacent to the parking lot where the gun battle had just gone down. He could hear a cacophony of horns blaring as traffic piled up behind the gawkers. Head down and eyes up, Nick kept moving, putting as much distance as possible between him and the chaos behind. His ankle ached, and his left hip throbbed, but he forced himself not to limp.

  Another block down.

  Cold sweat streamed from his armpits.

  The sirens will start any minute now . . .

  He spied Xi’an Park ahead and hoped it would be crowded with tourists. As he walked, he unzipped his backpack and pulled out the spare collared sport shirt he always carried. Rare was the day he made it to five o’clock without having to change shirts. Today, he was thankful to be a sweaty bastard. He slipped the new black shirt over the teal one he was wearing. Then he calmly exchanged his personal mobile phone for the encrypted phone buried at the bottom of his backpack. He pushed and held the number one and then waited for the call to connect. After three rings, the line clicked, and his call went to voicemail.

  “Leave a message,” a woman’s voice said.

  “You need to come get me,” he panted. “Call me back immediately. I need EXFIL right fucking now. The shit hit the fan. Get me an extract point. Now.” The last word was louder than he’d meant it to be. He ended the call but kept the phone in his hand as he weaved deeper into the park. A moment later, the phone vibrated.

  “Status?” said Lankford’s cool but strained voice.

  “Intact and on the move. Someone put a contract on me. I evaded the first attempt, but I am not sticking around so they can try again. I killed a man, Lankford.”

  “When?”

  “Five minutes ago.”

  “Chinese national?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus, Foley. You were supposed to poke around, ask some questions, not go fucking Rambo in Xi’an.”

  “Tell that to the motherfuckers who just tried to run me over with a Mercedes. I need a rendezvous address and EXFIL ASAP.”

  “All right, I’m texting you the address to a safe house in Xi’an. It is about a mile and a half f
rom your target location. Are you near there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, I’ll text you the four-digit code for the lock. Once you’re inside, text me, and I’ll give you follow-up instructions.”

  “What about the EXFIL?” Nick huffed.

  “I’ll have you out of Xi’an by morning.”

  “And then what?”

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause, and then Lankford sighed.

  “I’m sorry you got pulled in, pal, but I see no choice here. You gotta go black until we get this sorted out.”

  Nick’s mind raged between the urgency of his situation and how pissed off he was that today was the end of his life and career in China. He thought about Dash, who had become an important part of the new life he was trying to build. Damn you, Lankford. Zhang had made it crystal clear after the chaos in Beijing a few months ago—any activity outside his NGO job and his ass would be on the first plane out of China. But he’d just killed a man, and that crime warranted punishment far more severe than eviction. Thanks to Lankford, he was probably going to spend the rest of his life rotting in a Chinese prison.

  He forced the nightmare from his head and focused on his current objective—survival.

  “How the hell can I go black in Beijing? People know me. Where will I hide?”

  “Not Beijing,” Lankford said. “You’re going Hong Kong black.”

  The line went dead.

  Nick walked deeper into the park. The encrypted phone vibrated with the arrival of a new text message.

  He read the message, deleted it, and slipped the phone into his pocket. Forcing himself to walk even slower, more casually, he corrected his heading to the east. As he walked, he passed an elderly couple strolling hand in hand. He smiled and nodded; the old woman smiled back, showing off a mouth in desperate need of reconstructive dentistry. Nick glanced at his watch. He would be secure in the safe house in half an hour or so.

  Provided that no one else tried to kill him.

  And that the Chinese authorities didn’t arrest him.

  Thank you very much, Chet fucking Lankford.

  If only Dash had come to dinner . . .

  CHAPTER 7

  Gun Club Hill Barracks and Military Hospital

  Kowloon, Hong Kong

  0900 hours local—Day 3

  T hirty-eight.

  Thirty-eight was the final tally of mutilated corpses that had washed up on Tung Wan Beach and had been transferred to the Gun Club Hill Barracks Military Hospital for examination. Yesterday, Dash had presided over the autopsies of the first eighteen victims in the hospital’s immaculate autopsy suite, and today she would have to do it again. She was neither a coroner nor a forensic pathologist, but lately she was beginning to feel like one. Nightmarish memories of the investigative autopsy she’d conducted on her best friend—former CIA agent Jamie Lin—tormented her still. She hated autopsies, and now she could add this fresh batch of grotesqueries to haunt her dreams.

  When she had entered medical school, she had done so despite a deep-seated aversion to blood and gore. From the beginning, her interest in medicine had been academic, not clinical. She’d had no interest in being a practitioner. Her dream was to immerse herself in the universe of the microscopic—a place where cells rallied to defeat pathogenic invaders in an ever-waging war invisible to the human eye. But to become a specialist in infectious disease, she first had had to complete all the requisite training of her profession, and that had meant gaining proficiency in evaluation, diagnosis, dissection, surgery, and patient care. It was not until she had completed her residency that she finally was able to spend her time doing what interested her—looking through a microscope. That was why she had joined the CDC, to conduct epidemiological research on emerging infectious disease, but within eighteen months of being hired, she found herself pulled out of the lab yet again, this time treating Ebola patients in Liberia.

  “Where did you go to medical school?” Major Li asked from across the autopsy table, breaking her train of thought.

  “Fudan University,” she said.

  Li grunted an acknowledgment. She couldn’t tell if it was grudging respect or disdain for her alma mater.

  “What specialty did you pursue in residency?”

  “Internal Medicine,” she said, probing a kidney. “This kidney shows early signs of necrosis. The other is missing.” She glanced at the young Army nurse, who was acting as her scribe. “Make a note of this.”

  The young woman nodded and dutifully typed an entry into the log.

  “And after that, you studied in America?” Li continued.

  “Yes. I was accepted to Johns Hopkins, where I completed a fellowship in Infectious Disease and also earned my masters in epidemiology and biostatistics.”

  Qualified enough for you now, Major?

  Li said nothing.

  She glanced up at him.

  She couldn’t see the smug smile on his face because of the antimicrobial surgical mask he wore, but she knew it was there—baiting her to defend her qualifications to be on the Quick Reaction Task Force. The irony was that Li knew her credentials inside and out. He knew everything about her, and he had used every possible weakness he could exploit as grounds for her removal from the Task Force. After the events in Beijing two months ago, his vendetta against her didn’t surprise her. In the final hours of the crisis, she’d asked for his help in exchange for a promise and had then deceived him. But what other option had fate offered her? If given the choice between helping Li advance his career and impeding development of the world’s most lethal and covert biological weapon, she’d pick the latter every time. Li, however, didn’t see it that way. He was bent on quid pro quo, and he would not stop until he succeeded in derailing her career and sullying her reputation. Thank God for Commander Zhang and for her boss, CDC Director Wong. Together, they’d thwarted Li’s efforts in Beijing—an embarrassing loss for the Major that only stoked the fire of contempt burning inside the man.

  And so here she was, stuck in an autopsy room, dissecting mutilated corpses with the man who hated her most in the world . . . while the man who adored her most was back in Beijing, wondering why she’d stood him up on a romantic dinner date. She sighed. A part of her wished that she had been fired from the Task Force, because that would have meant more time in the lab conducting research, more time with her beloved microscopes, which never engaged in petty politics, and more time with Nick.

  “Why the sudden interest in my education?” she said at last, breaking the silence.

  “Just curious,” he said. “Your proficiency at autopsy surprises me, given your specialty.”

  “Thank you,” she said, shifting her focus from Li to the cadaver’s pancreas.

  “It was not meant to be a compliment,” he said. “Just an observation.”

  “Instead of making observations about my CV, Major, maybe you should focus your attention on the mutilated woman on the exam table and make observations that might be helpful to this investigation.”

  Before Li could respond, the steel door to the autopsy suite swung open, and Commander Zhang strode into the room.

  “Mask, Commander,” Li barked, glaring at Zhang.

  With a wry smile, Zhang pulled a crumpled surgical mask from his pants pocket. He slipped it over his nose and mouth without breaking stride. “It smells terrible in here,” he said.

  “What did you expect?” Li came back. “Roses?”

  “I don’t know how you can stand it,” Zhang said, eyeing them both.

  Zhang was right; the room reeked. Although she’d acclimated to the smell, she knew the stench of the decay in the room was nauseating. The amount of decomposition had been exacerbated by the time the bodies had spent in the sea.

  “What have you got, Dr. Chen?” Zhang asked, taking a place by her side at the table.

  Dash felt an upsurge in both confidence and energy with Zhang’s arrival. She’d been stuck most of yesterday with Li, and his ceaseless scrutiny and unmitigated de
risiveness leeched her qi.

  “First, the good news,” she said. “None of these people appear to have been infected with a biological agent, nor do I find any evidence of the nanobot bioweapon we encountered in Kizilsu. We’re still waiting on final confirmation from tissue samples sent to the lab yesterday, but in my professional opinion, these deaths were not caused by a bioterrorism event. Pending receipt of the laboratory results, I recommend lifting the quarantine at Tung Wan Beach.”

  Zhang exhaled his relief audibly. “That’s very good news.”

  “And grounds for us to stand down the task force,” Major Li interjected.

  “Let’s not rush handing this off to the Hong Kong Police just yet. Especially while we’re still waiting on laboratory confirmation,” Zhang said, shutting Li down. He turned back to Dash. “Please, go on, Dr. Chen.”

  “All the victims are mutilated, but I propose we divide them into two categories: Category A are individuals who are missing organs, and Category B are individuals who have been tattooed and mutilated. It is difficult to ascertain times of death because the bodies have been in the ocean, but I can say with ninety percent confidence that all these people died within the past two weeks.”

  “How long were the bodies in the water?” Zhang asked.

  “Based on the amount of degradation, I’d guess less than forty-eight hours,” she said.

  Zhang nodded. “That matches well with my theory.”

  “What theory is that?” asked Li.

  “That these bodies were either dumped or lost at sea during the recent storms. Two days ago, the harbor control suspended ferry transit due to high sea state and typhoon-strength winds, but merchant traffic continued. Yesterday, I tasked the Coast Guard with conducting a sonar sweep of the waters around Cheung Chau Island.”

  “A sonar sweep? Looking for what?” said Li, dubious.

  “Floating bodies, an unreported shipwreck, or anything else unusual. It’s not uncommon for merchant vessels to lose unsecured cargo overboard in violent weather.”