by Dawson, Mark
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Details can be found at the end of DRAGON HEAD.
DRAGON HEAD
by Mark Dawson
CHAPTER ONE
JACKIE CHAU saw the three triads as he came back from the reception of the hotel. He had just stepped downstairs to get a can of diet soda from the vending machine. He had taken the stairs and the men must have taken the lift. He could only have missed them by a few seconds. That was fortunate.
The men were outside the door to room 225. They were dressed in cheap tracksuit tops, jeans and sneakers. Two were armed with pistols and the other held a meat cleaver. They were evidently nervous, the two subordinate men listening to whispered instructions from the man who was closest to the door.
Chau was partially obscured by the trolley bearing fresh towels and linen that had been parked in the corridor by the cleaners who were servicing room 223.
He froze.
He didn’t know what to do.
His little .32 Kel-Tec bulged in his pocket, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to use it to take down the three men before one of them, at least, was able to get a shot off at him.
What was his other option?
To flee.
But that would be a betrayal. Beatrix Rose had given him one task: to guard the young Chinese girl who was in that room. It was a simple task, elementary, and he had accepted it gladly. He had been trying to impress her since they had met, and here was a good opportunity to demonstrate that he could be trusted.
And he had failed.
He reached into his pocket, the tips of his fingers brushing up against the steel barrel of the pistol.
They hadn’t seen him.
Maybe…
The man at the front of the trio took a key card from his pocket, slid it into the reader, waited for the chunk of the lock as it released, and opened the door. He went inside, followed by one of the others. The third man stayed in the corridor. There was a moment of silence, a scream, and then the sound of the scream as it was muffled. There was the sound of a scuffle, with something heavy thudding against the floor.
Chau gritted his teeth.
Who was he kidding?
What was he going to do?
He was a failure.
Chau backed away, turning and walking as quickly as he could to the elevator lobby. He pushed open the door to the stairs and hurried down, taking them two at a time. He stopped at the bottom, opening the door a crack and looking out to ensure that there were no more of them in the reception and, satisfied that there were not, he pushed it all the way open and walked quickly through the dimly lit space and into the midmorning brightness outside. He walked for as long as he dared and, once he was twenty metres from the entrance, he broke into a trot and then into a flat sprint.
CHAPTER TWO
BEATRIX ROSE looked at her watch.
She had set the countdown timer fifteen minutes ago.
She had twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes to do what Ying wanted, or Grace would suffer the consequences.
Ying was a Dai Lo in the Wo Shun Wo. A senior triad. She had visited him in his Nine Dragons club, confident that she had the leverage to ensure that the girl would not be held responsible for the sins of her sister, Liling. Ying had sent one of his goons to find the older girl yesterday. When the man found that Liling wasn’t there, he had turned his attention to Grace.
A situation had developed.
The girl had stabbed him in the gut with a kitchen knife and then she had stumbled across the landing that separated her flat from Beatrix’s and begged for help.
She had been unable to say no.
She finished the man off and, with Chau’s help, disposed of his body.
More triads had been sent to find out what had happened to the first man. They had forced their way into Beatrix’s apartment and she had killed them all.
It had been easy to see why Ying was keen to locate Liling. He controlled the prostitution in the local area And Liling was a hooker, bringing clients back to the flat. Somehow, she had come into possession of video footage that showed her with a powerful and influential Chinese businessman. Chau had recognised the man: Zhào Gao.
The footage had been shot by the triads in order to control the man should he ever question the good sense of their continued working relationship. But Liling had tried to blackmail Gao. Her play for a big payday hadn’t worked out so well for her, and now she was either dead or in hiding.
The footage of the tryst had been left on a memory stick.
The triads wanted it.
Beatrix had it.
It should have been enough.
She had arranged the meeting with Ying. She had hoped to use it to secure the girl’s safe passage out of Hong Kong and the guarantee that she would not be bothered in the future. It should have been simple enough: the threat of the footage passed on to the authorities, and the resulting damage to the triad’s business, should have meant that he would do what she asked.
But Chau had fucked up.
He just had to look after Grace until she returned, but he couldn’t even do that.
He had failed her.
Ying had Grace, and any advantage that she might have enjoyed had just turned to dust.
Ying had the upper hand. He would not kill the girl—Beatrix could still release the footage, and he would know that she would come after him—but he had made it plain that he would make Grace’s life very unpleasant indeed. A life as a prostitute was the best that she would be able to hope for.
He had set out his terms.
Ying wanted his pound of flesh. Chau had been complicit in Beatrix’s scheme. She was Western, a gweilo, but Chau was Chinese.
He was the sacrifice that Ying had demanded.
If Beatrix wanted the girl, she had to find Chau and deliver him to the club.
And she had less than twenty-four hours to do it.
#
BEATRIX PUSHED her way through the bustle of Wan Chai. First things first. She had rented a post office box in Tsim Sha Tsui earlier, before she had gone to meet Ying. She knew that she would not be able to take her pistol with her to the meeting, so she had put it in a jiffy bag and left it in her box. She went into the building, collected the envelope and took it outside with her. She found a quiet spot in a nearby park, took the Baby Glock from the envelope and pushed it into the waistband of her jeans. She had an extra magazine, too, and she stuffed it into her pocket.
She set off again for the Internet café that she normally used. She paid for an hour and took her usual spot in the corner, where it would be difficult for her to be observed.
First things first.
She opened Facebook and navigated to a specific page dedicated to model boats. She and Chau used it whenever either of them needed to send the other a message. It was the equivalent of a dead drop and was almost impossible to detect. They had a series of prearranged codes that would indicate where and when a meeting was to take place. She used the message that would tell Chau that she wanted to meet him at the Tian Tan Buddha statue on Lantau Island at 3 p.m.
She closed the window and opened another. She navigated to Google and typed in the name of the businessman who had appeared in the footage that Ying wanted so much.
Zhào Gao.<
br />
Several hundred results were returned. The first was a profile from Forbes. She opened it and read.
Gao was born in 1946 in Wuxi, Jiangsu province. His father was the founder and president of Mandarin International Trust and Investment Corporation, China’s largest investment company. He formed MITIC to attract the foreign capital and skills needed to expand China’s business interests and to modernize its ageing industries. The corporation operated like a capitalist enterprise: it ran a bank in competition with government banks, arranged loans, sold bonds in overseas markets, invested in and imported equipment for Chinese businesses, and owned businesses in other countries.
When his father died five years previously, Gao had succeeded him.
Further searches suggested that Gao was suspected to have links with triad associations in Hong Kong and China. Allegations of criminal involvement had been ruthlessly suppressed by cadres of highly paid lawyers. He was said to be the most litigious man in China. Eventually, editors decided that the scoops they might get could never be worth the financial headaches that would result by getting them. He browbeat them into submission.
She quickly navigated to Dropbox and satisfied herself that the footage of the tryst had been successfully uploaded to her account. She cleared the cache, purging the browser’s history, and logged off.
She set off for the harbour.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FERRY to Lantau, otherwise known as Mui Wo, operated from Central Pier Six, next to the Star Ferry Pier on Hong Kong Island. Beatrix paid for a return ticket and embarked.
She checked her watch. It was a quarter past one. If Chau was going to come, it was unlikely that he would have had time to catch this particular ferry. That suited Beatrix. She wanted to be at the rendezvous in plenty of time. Arriving late to a meeting was rude and, more relevant, it reduced the odds that you would be the one to walk away afterwards. She would get there first, scout the locale, and set up in plenty of time to make sure that, if he arrived, he was not being trailed. She had given him a simple task to perform and he had let her down. She would leave nothing to chance.
She walked to the front of the ship. Chau was not aboard. She found a space at the rail where she would have a good view of the trip across the harbour. It was a fast crossing, scheduled for an hour, and Beatrix tried to relax a little. She had an idea what she was going to have to do, but she needed Chau’s help to put the plan into effect.
#
THE FERRY nudged up against the dock at Mui Wo. She disembarked and took Bus No. 1 to Tai O, changing to Bus No. 21 to Ngong Ping. A cable car transported visitors from here into the hilly interior of the island. Beatrix paid, waited in line, and then took a space inside a cramped car. She was confident that she was not being followed herself, but that did not absolve her from the responsibility of checking.
The Tian Tan Buddha was one of Hong Kong’s main tourist attractions. It was perched high in the hills and stood over thirty feet high. Its prodigious size lent it the name by which it was more well known: the Big Buddha. It was part of the Po Lin Monastery and, as Beatrix read on an inscription placed on the trail that led up to the base, at 250 tons it was the biggest seated bronze Buddha in the world. The trail from the Ngong Ping village to the Buddha was flanked on both sides by smaller statues of the Twelve Divine Generals, each symbolising an animal from the Chinese Zodiac, armed with distinctive weapons.
There were several hundred people gathered around the base of the statue. They were served by a number of street vendors, and the smell of the food reminded Beatrix that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She bought fried noodles and fish balls served in a Styrofoam cup and ate quickly, washing them down with a bottle of extortionately expensive water.
A long flight of steps led up from the base and Beatrix climbed them to thin out the crowds a little and to offer herself a better vantage to ensure that Chau was not followed. She passed a set of six Bodhisattva statues, the saints who gave up their palace in heaven so that mortals might find places themselves. It took five minutes to reach the top, but from there she was offered a majestic view over the lush greenery of Lantau Island, the shimmering South China Sea and the flights gliding in and out of Hong Kong Airport.
She turned and, as she looked back down the stairs, she saw Chau. He was wearing one of his ridiculously garish Hawaiian shirts, the print standing out among the more sensible garb of the tourists around him. He looked horribly flustered, looking back over his shoulder every few paces. His weathered face bore the unmistakeable signs of fear. She knew that he was perpetually on the edge of fright, but the events of the last few hours had toppled him over the boundary and right into the middle of it.
She concentrated on the people around him. Most were tourists, with some locals spread among them. She had taught him to make regular stops to make it easier to discern a tail, but her lessons went unheeded, and he hurried on regardless. That made it very difficult for Beatrix to be sure that he was alone. He passed the final pair of Divine Generals and then, thankfully, he did stop. Beatrix scoured the people behind him. None of them stood out. Of course, if he was being followed by more than one person, it would be easy enough for one of them to hand him off to another, but she had seen nothing to suggest that the triads were that sophisticated when it came to tradecraft. Still, she reminded herself, there were so many of them…if they wanted to follow him, it would be difficult for her to know.
Nothing else for it.
She needed to talk to him.
He set off again, climbing the 260 stairs to the top of the monument.
She hurried down to the middle tier, waiting out of sight and letting him continue up the stairs. She waited, saw that no one was following, and then ascended again herself.
He reached the final tier. He was out of breath, his ragged breath audible even when she was twenty feet away. She came up behind him, placed her open palm in the small of his back, and with a quiet, “Walk,” impelled him onwards.
“Beatrix…” he started.
“Walk, Chau.”
“I am sorry!”
“Walk.”
She knew that he had always been attracted to her, and that the attraction was underscored by a healthy fear once he had realised her capabilities and her willingness to implement them. She had never tried to reassure him on that front. It was useful that he was frightened of her. It was particularly useful now. She had no time for his bad puns and innuendos. This was all business.
She led him to a quieter space at the rear of the Buddha. The day was clear and there was a vast view out across the island to the South China Sea beyond. She nudged him over to the rail that guarded the drop from the dais to the jungle below.
“What happened?” she hissed at him.
“I am sorry,” he repeated pitifully.
“Tell me.”
“I was gone for five minutes. There was no minibar. Girl said she was thirsty. You told me not to call anyone, so I go down to get drink from reception.”
“I told you not to leave her.”
“It was five minutes, that is all.”
She bit her tongue to forestall the denunciation. “And then?”
“I came back. There were three men outside room.”
“And?”
“And?”
“What did you do, Chau?”
“There was nothing I could do,” he said plaintively.
“You had your gun?”
“Yes.”
“I remember you shooting three men before.”
“That was different,” he protested.
It was different, she allowed. She had disabled two of those men already. But then she remembered afresh what had happened on the night they had met. She had saved him from being disfigured by Donnie Qi’s goons and he, in return, had saved her after she had been lazy and one of them had stabbed her in the side. He could have abandoned her then, before or after, and he had not. He was a fool, but he did not deserve her ire.
�
��I am sorry,” he said again. “I am very, very sorry.”
She took a breath, trying not to think about the knot of tension and frustration that sat in her gut like a fist of ice.
“Beatrix? Please, talk to me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said at last. “I shouldn’t have left you. Either of you. I didn’t think they would be able to find you.”
“Someone at hotel,” he offered. “A white woman and a Chinese girl. It would be unusual. The little horses are everywhere. Ying asks and someone tells him.”
She wanted to snap at him, to tell him that she knew that it was her fault for being so stupid, and that she knew that she was stupid to assume that they would be able to move through the city unobserved. The little horses were the most junior triads. They were the kids on the street, the drunks and the drugged, anyone who might offer a little information in anticipation of the reward that might come his or her way. She had been stupid for leaving Grace under Chau’s protection, but there was no profit in dwelling on what she had done and what she should have done. She couldn’t change any of it now. She had to move forward. The circumstances were laid out clearly enough. Ying had made his move, and now it was her turn to make hers.
“I need your help.”
“Anything,” he said, although the nervousness in his voice was difficult to miss.
“The man on the video.”
“Zhào Gao?”
“I need you to find out where he is.”
He frowned. “How could I do that?”
“I don’t know,” she said, with a flash of irritation. “You said you had a contact in the police?”
“Yes. But—”
“I’ve started you off. Gao is in Hong Kong this week. He’s closing a deal. Make some calls. Find out where he’s staying.”
He looked dubious. “I will try.”
“This is important, Chau. We have to move quickly. Ying gave me twenty-four hours.”
“For what?”
