by Alex Ryan
But his men knew the price of failure.
They would either find Foley or die trying, because the alternative was worse than death.
PART II
CHAPTER 15
Yue Ko Street at Shek Pai Wan Road
Aberdeen District, Hong Kong
1745 hours local
By willpower alone, Nick rose above the fatigue.
Like all covert operations, maintaining mental acuity was the number-one precursor to success. Stay alert to stay alive, he told himself. If the bullets started flying, his adrenaline would take over, and everything would get real simple real quick—shoot the asshole trying to shoot him, and run away. Fight and flight, Darwin’s governing principles. But he couldn’t let it get to that. He’d cheated death twice in as many days, and the last thing he wanted to do was press his luck. Right now he needed to be a countersurveillance machine—a CIA of one—and find a safe place to hole up and bed down.
God help me, he mumbled, looking south toward the Aberdeen Ferry Pier.
He pretended to be annoyed, checking his watch repeatedly to signal to any would-be observer that someone was keeping him waiting. He’d scouted this area extensively. He knew all the buildings by heart now. Behind him was the rundown hotel that catered to the workers from the nearby shipyards and the Wai Shing Plastic Tyre & Battery company down the road. The sign on the hotel’s neon marquee was written in Chinese only, so he couldn’t pronounce the name. This was the type of lodging he was looking for—a place where no sane American expat would dream of booking a room. A place the men hunting him might overlook.
After five minutes, it was time to move. He hadn’t spotted anyone surveilling him. As he wandered, he looped back endlessly on his route to clear his six. The city was wet from days of rain. Gutters ran murky brown, and the stench of food waste and wet cardboard filled the back alleys. He’d found his way to the bowels of Hong Kong, where tourists and businessmen alike rarely ventured. From the time he’d left Pier Five, he estimated he’d walked twelve miles in endless loops and back tracks, stopping at shops and vendors to check behind him, searching for faces and vehicles that might appear more than once, and then repeating the loops to shake any tails he might not see. During that time, he had slowly changed his appearance—buying a black ball cap from a street vendor; slipping into a public restroom, where he ditched his too-small sweat shirt; buying two new nondescript sweat shirts from another shop and then looping back; finding another restroom; and ditching the second sweat shirt and putting on the third. He found a backpack by a bus stop, empty with a broken strap, and flung it over his shoulder. In an alley, he transferred the contents from his original backpack into the dirty, broken one. He carried both for an hour or so. Then he walked through an alley, ditched the first backpack and the sweat shirt, mussed his hair, and tossed his cap. He emerged from the same alley and returned the way he came. Later—as a misting rain picked up—he bought a white plastic rain poncho from a street vendor and sat on a bus-stop bench, drinking a coffee and pretending to read a magazine for a half hour, resting his legs and his aching back. He covertly lifted a cell phone—with a twinge of guilt—from an old woman’s purse when she sat down beside him. When a bus stopped and burped out a throng of passengers, the elderly woman boarded. He followed her, acting as if he was going to board too, but at the last second, he changed directions and darted into a souvenir shop just as the bus pulled away. Pretending to search through the worthless plastic junk, he watched the street for any evidence of a tail chasing after the bus, but he saw nothing suspicious. He left his poncho beside a rack of plastic junk, bought a candy bar, and walked out, turning left and heading back the way he had come.
Tired of the drudgery and wet and weary from the rain, he decided he’d reached the point of diminishing marginal returns. He knew his limits, and it was time to stop before he became numb and sloppy. SERE school in the Teams had not prepared him for this environment—miles from any desert or jungle. He’d spent too long trying to be creative while worrying that the countersurveillance routine he was using might not be adequate against professional covert operatives. He needed to lie down before he fell down.
Nick completed one last loop around the block and made his way to the neon marquee of the local hotel, where he hoped to find a room that didn’t deplete his limited funds. He pulled the door handle, but it shuddered against a lock instead. He peered inside and made eye contact with an old man who eyed him suspiciously. Nick raised his eyebrows expectantly. With a scowl, the old man pushed a button, and Nick heard a metallic click. He pulled the handle, and the door swung open easily. The lobby was shabby and stank of human excrement. Nick tried to resist wrinkling his nose and hoped the offending odor was only indicative of a plumbing problem and not something more horrifying. Along the wall, two men sat on a bench and played dominoes on a square of cardboard they balanced between their two laps. The one closest to him shouted something, making Nick jump, but then laughed, his toothless partner joining in with a delighted howl. Neither man turned to look at him. Nick walked over to the old man behind a flip-up bar-style counter.
“Do you speak English?” he asked.
The man barked something over his shoulder loudly, and Nick fought the urge to bolt for the door, imagining a giant man with a baseball bat being summoned from the back room. Instead, a small boy appeared in the doorway, clad in a too-small T-shirt with Mickey Mouse smiling beneath a row of Chinese characters. The boy was barefoot, wearing threadbare acid-washed blue jeans and a Los Angeles Lakers hat off center on his head.
“Who you look for?” the boy demanded. “What you want?”
“I need a room,” Nick said. “Do you have any?”
“Maybe,” the boy answered and then said something to his grandfather in Chinese. Then he turned back to Nick. “You pay money in up front. One hundred dollars US for the night.”
Nick suppressed a grin at the prospect of haggling with a child over a hotel room. “How old are you?” Nick asked.
“I’m nine,” the boy said and squinted at him. “How the hell old is you?”
Nick chuckled. “Older than that. How did you learn such good English?”
“Mickey Mouse,” the boy said and pointed to his shirt, but he didn’t smile. “You are wanting the room? You not have money, then you getting the hell out.”
“I have money,” Nick said with confidence while silently fretting over how long his money would actually last. “But a hundred dollars is too much. I’ll give you two hundred dollars for the week.”
The boy looked at the old man but didn’t pass on the offer yet.
“Three hundred dollars for you being here a week.”
“Tell you what,” Nick said, narrowing his eyes at the boy. “Two hundred for Grandfather, and fifty for you.”
The boy smiled and looked at him more carefully.
“You are American?”
“No, South African,” he said, figuring a nine-year-old native Chinese speaker would not recognize the difference in accents.
The boy spoke in quick, clipped Chinese to his grandfather and then nodded at Nick.
“Pay first.”
Nick reached into his right pocket, where he had put some of his American currency, and made a show of uncrumpling a bunch of small bills and counting them out. The last thing he needed in this neighborhood was word getting out that a foreigner with loads of cash had taken up residence in this dump. He handed the bills to the boy, who double-checked his count before handing the cash over to his grandfather.
“No funny business, or I’m throwing you on the street,” the boy said, eyeing him from under the bill of his ball cap.
Nick decided he liked the kid and suddenly wondered if the soul of some forty-year-old New York wheeler-dealer had gotten reborn in this kid’s body. “No funny business, I promise,” he said.
He followed the boy through an iron gate and then up two flights of stairs. The boy led him down a short hall, where Nick stepped over no
fewer than five large, wet stains on the carpet runner. Nick counted the doors and also the number of paces to each door. There was a black door with a push bar at the end of the hall that he noted must be a stairway exit. He made a mental note to check whether it led to a door that was accessible to the outside or padlocked, making even an emergency exit impossible.
The boy unlocked a door on the right and held it open for him. The room was disgusting but adequate. What was not adequate was the lack of a window.
“No good,” Nick said, shaking his head. “I need a window—a window near the fire escape I saw on the front of the building.”
“This is room for two hundred dollars.”
Nick shook his head again, emphatically this time. “For the fifty dollars I promised you, I need a room on the front, with a window, near the fire escape.”
The boy glared a moment but then suddenly smiled and laughed.
“Okay, you is dirty dog. Coming with me.” He gestured for Nick to follow him, and they trudged up two more flights of stairs.
The new room was nearly identical to the first, except for a single window on the opposite wall. A dirty mattress lay on the floor up against the left-hand wall. In the far right corner was a sink, the porcelain stained orange from iron in the hard water dripping audibly from the faucet. A cracked, rectangular wall mirror hung above it on a single nail. The “toilet” was nothing more than a wooden crate with a hole cut in the center over what he presumed was a hole in the floor leading to God only knew where; he refused to let his imagination wander. He sighed. This was exactly how he’d imagined Lankford’s off-the-grid CIA safe house would look.
“This will do,” Nick said. “Sheets for the bed?”
“Fifty dollars is for week.”
“I don’t have another fifty dollars.”
The boy shrugged. “You don’t be having sheets.”
Nick decided any sheets the boy provided would likely be as disgusting and infested as the mattress. He made a mental note to buy a couple bath towels and some soap when he went on his next countersurveillance run.
“Fine,” he said and handed five ten-dollar bills to the boy. “That’s for you. Thank you.”
The boy grinned at him with gray teeth. “Here the key. No funny business, got it?”
“Got it.”
The boy handed the key to Nick and then left, closing the door behind him. Nick dropped his go bag, and a cockroach scurried across the floor and disappeared under the wooden “toilet” crate.
“Jesus,” he mumbled. “I’d rather sleep in a dugout on the side of a mountain in Afghanistan than in this shithole.”
He collapsed cross-legged onto the floor beside the filthy mattress. He had absolutely no idea what to do next. Admitting that was both liberating and humiliating. He was a frigging Navy SEAL, one of the world’s most elite warriors, and yet here he was, crippled by uncertainty and self-doubt. He was completely alone. In the SEALs, he’d always been part of at least a three-man team. Even if he got separated, he was never really alone. But there were no teammates looking for him now. No QRF was on standby, ready to pop up over the horizon and hose the bad guys with fifty mike-mike and whisk him away. With Lankford gone, his umbilical cord to the CIA had been cut. He’d made Lankford promise to keep the CIA chain of command in the dark about his involvement. Assuming Lankford kept his part of the bargain, that meant there was no one at Langley who even knew that former Navy SEAL Nick Foley had gone black in Hong Kong and needed help. His shitty hotel room might as well be a prison.
This was how he’d felt in quarantine in the Artux People’s Hospital in Kizilsu two months ago. No . . . this was worse. At least during that operation, he’d always had the option to walk away. It had never been about him. This was all about him. Somewhere out there, someone wanted him dead, and the only people who had any insight into the matter were already dead.
He pulled his mind away from his worthless pining and self-doubt. He made a quick security survey of the room for defense, countersurveillance, and emergency egress. The fire escape was accessible from the window, which made a reasonable emergency exit but also made for an increased risk—the exit might well serve as an entrance for someone else. Nick rose and walked to the window, scanning the street from a safe distance back before approaching. He saw nothing on the street nor in the windows of the low building across the street. He twisted the lock at the top of the window, and it spun off in his hand and clattered to the floor. Nick closed his eyes and laughed, shaking his head. He would need some sort of stick—or better yet, a metal bar—to properly secure the window. He banged along the joint with the top window, frozen from paint and swollen wood, and then muscled the window up. It made it halfway and stuck beyond even his strength. No matter—in a real emergency, the window would shatter with little effort. He stuck his head out and measured the distance to the fire escape as less than two feet—an easy distance for him in a hurry but equally as simple for someone else coming in.
He slid the mattress to the corner to the right of the window—out of any sight line of the fire escape. Then he pulled the light bulb out of the rusty socket over the sink—it didn’t light up anyway, he found—and leaned far enough out the window to toss it onto the fire escape without breaking it. It settled in the rails at the top of the last black metal step. In the dark, it would be invisible, and a boot would crush it easily—and make a noise he would easily hear. Hardly foolproof, but this was all about belt and suspenders—even if he felt he was wearing no fucking pants.
The door was about as hard to breach as a sheet hung in a doorway, but again, he would have to deal with it. He placed puffed rice cereal on his mental list for the store on his next outing. He would sprinkle it all over the dirty carpet in both directions from his door, giving him some warning before the door was breached.
Nick sat back down and sighed, bone weary and suddenly barely able to keep his eyes open. He needed rest. Right now, the weapons he most lacked were rest and a clear head. He lay back, his head against his bag instead of the filthy mattress. He would let his mind run the checklists that it would run without or without his permission—the years in the Teams were something you could never scrub from your DNA. Unfamiliar emotions—from both fatigue and the realization that he was far out of his element—surged to the front of his mind.
I’m such an idiot. All I had to do was say no. When Lankford asked me to go to Xi’an, I should have just fucking said no.
A wave of anger suddenly washed over him. He was angry with himself for jeopardizing what he had built in Beijing—professionally with the NGO and personally with Dash. Why had he caved in to Lankford? To fulfill some juvenile desire to get back in the game? To live up to the ethos—no man left behind—of the Team he had decisively left for a new life? Or was it something else, something deeper, a flaw inherent to his character? For as long as he could remember, he’d always had trouble saying no—doubly so to someone asking for help. He was a fixer—a mender of broken bodies, a rebuilder of broken things, and a solver of people’s problems. Those who knew him casually would say it was his greatest strength; those who knew him intimately might argue it was his greatest liability. Lankford had recognized it and had played him like a fiddle.
Spook bastard.
“Last laugh’s on you, buddy,” he shouted. “Because you’re dead, and I’m . . . I’m still fucking here.”
He choked down an upswelling of emotion—guilt, regret, and sadness all swirling together. Over the past two months, Lankford had become a friend. Hell, the man had taken a bullet in the Underground City for him and Dash when they barely knew each other, but the stakes had demanded it. Memories of Lankford barging into his apartment uninvited and making wisecracks played like a movie in his mind. He felt his eyes rim with tears, and yet he couldn’t help but smile at the spook’s larger-than-life personality. He wanted to be angry at the CIA man and blame him for all of this, but in his heart, he couldn’t. Lankford was looking out for one of his agents;
Lankford had been doing the right thing by asking Nick to help investigate Peter Yu’s disappearance.
He took a deep breath and exhaled, trying to center himself.
All roads lead back to Peter Yu . . .
Leave it alone, he told himself. Digging deeper will only make things worse.
But he couldn’t leave it alone. His thoughts gravitated to Dash. Who better than a brilliant CDC investigator, whom he trusted implicitly, to look into the shady activities of Nèiyè Biologic? Together, they could piece it all together, just like they’d done with Chen and his secret biological weapons program. Together, they could ferret out who was trying to kill him. He got to his feet and started pacing and arguing with himself:
You’re doing it again. By involving Dash, you’re no different than Lankford. She’ll say yes, and then you’ll be putting her life at risk.
She works for the Chinese government. She has resources, and she has access to Zhang.
Zhang won’t help you. He doesn’t even like you.
But there’s camaraderie between us. He’s a Snow Leopard; I’m a Navy SEAL—we’re cut from the same mold, brothers-in-arms in the War on Terror.
He shook his head. How far would that camaraderie get him with the Snow Leopard Commander after Zhang found out he’d broken his promise and had started working with Lankford? Zhang’s warning had been clear: get caught working with the CIA, and his visa would be revoked.
