by Barry Eisler
Finally he tossed the towel into the basket under the sink.
If you comb your hair now, I thought, or examine your teeth, or adjust your tie, I will kill you.
But the man decided not to engage in any of these fatal activities. He simply walked out the door.
Delilah said, “You’re so nice. I’m sorry I was so forward just now.”
The guard said, “I’m used to forward women. I like them.”
“Really?” she asked. “Where are you from?”
“I need his back to me,” I said, emerging from the closet and heading toward the door. “Now.”
The guard said, “I’m Filipino.”
“It is,” Delilah said, without changing her tone at all.
And while the bodyguard was busy trying to process that non sequitur, I stepped out of the bathroom behind him and nailed him in the base of the skull with a hammer-fist, one end of the Surefire leading the way. He grunted and his body shivered, but he didn’t go down. Damn, this guy had a hell of a thick skull. I went to hit him again, but Delilah had already moved in, slapping him with the syringe on the side of the neck, over the carotid. He grunted again and started groping for something under his jacket. I caught his arm to stop him. He tried to turn toward me. Delilah reached in and smoothly retrieved what he had been going for—a Kimber Pro CDP II in a hip holster carry.
The guy managed to turn all the way around and face me. He reached out as though to grapple with me, but then his feet went out from under him, from the blow or the injection I wasn’t sure. He crashed into me and I caught him under the arms and around the back. I stumbled backward through the bathroom door, grunting with the effort. The guy must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. Delilah followed us through, closing the door behind us. I saw her eject the Kimber’s magazine, check its load, and pop it back in. She pulled back the slide a half inch, nodded as though she liked what she saw, and let the slide go.
“Brace the door,” I said, straining to support the dead weight in my arms. “Don’t want anyone coming in.”
She pressed her right toes against the door, her heel wedged to the floor, and took a long step back with her other leg. I dragged the guard into the closet and dumped him on top of his erstwhile client. I stepped over them both and closed the door behind me.
Someone tried the bathroom door. When it didn’t open, the person knocked. Delilah kept her foot in place and said, “We’re cleaning in here, sorry. Please use the restroom on thirteen.”
Cleaning, I thought. That’s one way to put it.
The knocking stopped.
I walked over and said, “Give me the gun.”
She shook her head. “Just go. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Come on, this isn’t what you do.”
“It’s what I have to do.”
“Let me finish what I started. With a gun, I can take care of them both.”
I thought that was what she would want to hear, but she shook her head again.
“Look,” I said, “where are you going to hide that cannon with what you’re wearing? It’s bigger than your purse.”
She took a deep breath and said, “You fulfilled your contract with Manny. You’ll be paid. Now just go.”
“Will you give me the fucking gun? I don’t know how much time we have.”
She looked at me, and for a second I thought I’d convinced her. But then she opened the door and walked out into the corridor to the stairway. I went out after her. She held the gun low along her right leg.
I heard Dox in my ear. “What’s the status there, ladies and gentlemen, your conversation is making me nervous.”
“I’ll handle the rest, Dox,” Delilah said, still heading for the stairs. “You should just go. Now would be a good opportunity.”
“Come on, Delilah,” he said, “we’re not just going to leave you. You can rely on my partner. I’ve seen his shooting, believe me, he hits things and they don’t get back up.”
We stopped on the landing between the stairs up to the fifteenth floor and down to the thirteenth. From here, we could only go up to fifteen, down to thirteen, or back along the corridor to the restrooms. For a moment, I thought of just grabbing her and trying to take the gun. But she was keeping her gun side away from me—keeping it away deliberately. I doubted I could disarm her without either harming her or getting shot myself. Neither was an attractive alternative.
I took her by the arm and started to say, “Damn it, Delilah . . .”
There was a sound at the top of the stairs above us. We both looked. It was Hilger and Al-Jib, descending toward us. Hilger was holding a gun in a two-handed grip, close to his body and pointing at the floor. He looked at me and I saw hard recognition in his eyes.
Shit. They must have gotten suspicious about Manny taking so long, and emerged to investigate.
“Step out of the way, John,” Hilger said. “We just want to leave. There’s no need for anyone to get killed here.”
Delilah was holding the Kimber, but it was clear to me that Hilger had the advantage. His weapon was more at the ready, for one thing. He had the high ground, for another. Also, presumably the gun he was holding was familiar to him, was presumably the very gun he trained with, whereas Delilah was relying on someone else’s weapon, a four-inch-barrel .45 that was probably too big for her. Delilah must have recognized all this, too, or she would already have tried for a shot.
But then why hadn’t Hilger already dropped us? I’d seen his combat shooting skills in front of Kwai Chung and knew he was formidable. And then I realized: He’s known here. This is part of his cover. He doesn’t want to shoot.
Al-Jib didn’t say anything. He looked scared. This was Hilger’s show.
“No problem,” I said, showing my hands. “Our business wasn’t with you. We’re finished.”
At a minimum, I had to get us onto level ground. Better yet, let them go down the stairs past us. Then the high ground would be ours. They’d be struggling to keep us covered and descend the stairs backward at the same time.
Hilger frowned. “Manny?”
“Manny’s done. You and I are quits.”
His eyes narrowed. “We’re not quits.”
Well, so much for lulling him.
Delilah said, “You can go. But not your friend.”
“Sorry, we’re both going to leave,” Hilger said. “Around you or through you, your choice.”
“I don’t have a problem with around,” I said, thinking, Goddamnit, Delilah, follow my lead.
I heard Dox in my ear. “I know what’s going on, folks, but I can’t help you while they’re above you on the stairs. You’ve got to let ’em down past fourteen.”
“Let’s just do as he says,” I said to Delilah, referring, of course, to Dox.
There was a long pause. I supposed she just instinctively didn’t want to take herself from between Al-Jib and an escape path.
But she was tactical, she must have understood the situation. Our position relative to Hilger and Al-Jib was untenable. It was as though she was just trying to delay things, slow Al-Jib down. But why would she . . .
A stair creaked on one of the risers below. I don’t know if it was intuition, or a sixth sense, or what, but I ducked. I heard the pfffft of a suppressed pistol and a round cracked into the wall behind me.
I sprang to my right, down the corridor toward the bathroom. As I did so I saw Gil, moving toward us from below, his gun out. I heard Delilah scream, “No!” A second later, gunfire erupted from the stairs above us.
I blasted open the bathroom door and stumbled inside. “Get out of the bar!” I said to Dox through the lapel mike. I ran for the closet, opened the door, and got inside. “Gil’s here. Delilah must have called him. They’re on the stairs. We’re blown. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Yeah, sounds like a shooting gallery out there,” he said. “The patrons here are all freaking out, can you hear them?”
I heard shouting and other sounds of panic in the back
ground. Dox, characteristically, sounded almost soporifically calm. I pulled out the Surefire and twisted it on. The attaché was where I’d left it. I grabbed it and headed back to the freight elevator. I pressed the button on the wall and waited.
“If you can get to the closet where I was hiding,” I said, “there’s freight elevator access. Otherwise, your only way down is on thirteen.”
“Already thought of all that. But I can’t get to either with the OK Corral in between.”
Goddamn, he was cool under pressure. For a second I loved him for it.
“I know. But you can’t just stay in the bar, either. If Gil and Delilah drop Hilger and Al-Jib, they might come for you.”
“I don’t think Delilah . . .”
“Delilah called Gil, damn it. What do you think, she said, ‘Promise not to hurt them,’ and he said, ‘Sure, honey, whatever you say’?”
Come on, where the hell was the elevator. Delilah would know I would come this way. If Gil managed to drop Hilger and Al-Jib, this would be his next stop.
Dox said, “Okay, I hear what you’re saying. I’ll just find some more hospitable place to wait this out.”
“At some point, you’re going to get a crowd from the fifteenth-floor private dining rooms and the restaurant on fourteen stampeding for the exits,” I said. “Let them carry you with them.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I had in mind. What about you?”
“I’m waiting for the freight elevator right now. But once the doors close and it goes down, we’ll lose contact. The range of this gear is too short.”
“Well, what the hell are you waiting for? Go on, git. We’ll hook up at the bug-out point.”
The elevator arrived. I stepped inside and held the “door open” button. I glanced up—no dome camera. That was only for the passenger units.
“It’s here,” I said. “I can hold it for you.”
“Don’t be stupid, man. Just take it down, then send it back up when you get off. I don’t even know if I’m going out that way. I’ll probably just drift out with the crowd once Hilger and the rest have finished killing each other.”
I didn’t want to leave him, but what he said made sense. “Good luck,” I said, and pressed the button for the lobby. The doors closed and the elevator started down.
Damn it, I hated to let Hilger go. We’d been so close to having this whole thing wrapped up. I thought for a moment.
The dumpster opposite the entrance. If I hid behind it, and Hilger made it out, an opportunity might present itself. A long shot, true, but there wasn’t much downside.
Thirty seconds later, the doors opened on the lobby level. The security guard I had seen earlier was right in front of them. He had a gun drawn, a .38 Special, and was holding it too far in front of his body. He barely glanced at me as he charged inside.
He yelled something at me in Chinese—“Get out,” probably. Before he even had a chance to think about what was happening, I dropped the attaché, grabbed the outstretched gun in both hands, pivoted, and twisted it away from him. He cried out in shock and fear. Then he backed up against the elevator wall and started yelling in Chinese again. This time I assumed it was something like “Oh, shit!” or perhaps the time-honored “Don’t shoot!”
I picked up the attaché, stepped out of the elevator, and glanced around. All clear. I reached inside and pressed the button for thirteen. The doors closed, and the bug-eyed guard disappeared behind them, getting him out of my hair and preventing him from seeing what I was going to do next. Hopefully Dox already would be waiting for the guy when he arrived on thirteen. He could just haul him out and ride the elevator straight back down.
I walked across the street to the dumpster and examined my options. Good cover and concealment from both sides. But it was a little far from the elevator bank for my tastes. If Hilger hit the ground running and went immediately left or right from the elevators, I might lose him. If I could find the right spot, better to be waiting right there as he emerged.
I walked back over. The guard’s desk. That would do. I started to duck down behind it.
The stairwell door blew open to my left, ricocheting off the wall. Al-Jib dashed out. I brought the gun up and tried to track him, but he had already gone around the corner.
The door blew open again. I spun back toward it. This time it was Delilah. She stuck her head out and checked left and right, the Kimber in a two-handed grip just below her chin. She saw me and said, “Where did he go? Which way?”
“Where’s Hilger?” I said.
“Upstairs! Goddamn you, where is Al-Jib!”
I cocked my head to the left. She took off without another word.
I turned and took two steps toward the guard’s desk. I stopped. I took one more step. Then I said, “Fuck!” I turned and ran after Delilah, heaving the attaché in the direction of the dumpster en route.
I saw her head into Statue Square park and sprinted after her. She raced past one of the fountains inside, the couples sitting around it turning their heads to watch as she blew by them. I sprinted after her, dodging pedestrians. We crossed the square, then weaved through the thick traffic on Chater Road. I could see Al-Jib, about fifteen meters ahead of Delilah. He was running flat out but she was gaining. Damn, she was fast.
He bolted across Connaught without slowing at all. A taxi screeched to a halt in front of him, the driver laying on the horn. Al-Jib knocked down a pedestrian but kept going. Someone yelled something. The cab started to move forward again and then Delilah cut in front of it. The driver laid on the horn again. I flew past him a few paces behind Delilah.
Al-Jib raced up Edinburgh, toward the Star Ferry. If his timing was bad, he was about to meet a dead end, in the form of the southern end of Victoria Harbor. If his timing was good, though, he might just catch a departing ferry. The Star Ferry route between Central and Tsim Sha Tsui has been a major commuting line between Hong Kong and Kowloon for over a century, and the enormous, two-deck, open-air pedestrian ferries, some seemingly as old as the inception of the service, depart every seven minutes, each usually jammed with hundreds of passengers.
Al-Jib ran into the ferry terminal. Delilah followed him. I got inside a few seconds later and looked around. There were crowds of people and for a second I looked around wildly, not seeing her. Then I spotted a disturbance in the crowd on one of the stairwells—there she was, heading up the stairs. A woman was getting up from the floor and was yelling. Delilah must have lost Al-Jib for a moment, then figured out he had knocked over the woman tearing up the stairs. I followed, just a few lengths behind now. A crowd of passengers was heading down the stairs to our left. Shit, a ferry had come in a minute or two earlier—that meant it would already be leaving. We got to the concourse level and I saw Al-Jib, far ahead now. He seemed to recognize his desperate opportunity. He sprinted faster, vaulting over the turnstiles to the departure pier. He knocked a table over as he leaped and coins spilled to the concrete floor. The attendant bellowed something in Chinese.
We went over the turnstiles after him. The pier was empty—the passengers had already boarded the ferry. A worker stood along the gunwale on the lower deck, using a pole to push the lumbering craft from the pier. Al-Jib sprinted straight toward the boat, leaped, and fell across the guardrail, nearly knocking the worker over in the process. Delilah followed two meters behind him. I saw her leap onto the guardrail and pull herself over. The worker shouted something but didn’t try to stop the boat. It kept moving forward. Its stern was about to pull clear of the end of the pier.
I shoved the .38 into the back of my pants and kept running. Come on, come on . . .
Even as I launched myself through the air, I saw that I wasn’t going to make it. I slammed into one of the old tires strung up just below the deck to cushion the boat while it was docking. The tire might have been adequate for watercraft, but seemed to offer considerably less padding for a human torso, and I had the wind partially knocked out of me. But I was able to haul myself up to the guardr
ail. I scrambled over it onto the deck and rolled to my feet.
Delilah and Al-Jib had disappeared into the mass of passengers, but there was a path of sorts, slightly less packed with people than the areas around it, that told me where to look. I pulled the pistol and set off into the crowd. I was glad there were no security people on board to complicate things. The Star Ferry is about as secure as a sidewalk.
But after just a few meters, the path I’d been following closed up. There were scores of people down here, maybe hundreds, and I couldn’t pick up any vibe in the crowd that might have indicated where Delilah and Al-Jib had headed. In less than seven minutes, we’d be landing in Kowloon. It would be hard to stop him from leaping onto the pier there as we were docking and taking off into the crowd. We had to contain him here.
I moved toward the stern, beyond the rows of wooden seats, but couldn’t see through the mass of people who hadn’t gotten seats and were standing. “Delilah?” I called out. “Delilah!”
“Here,” I heard her say, from somewhere in front of me. “I . . .”
Something cut her off. I heard the report of a big gun. There were screams. Suddenly the crowd was shoving back toward me. The people ahead were trying to get away from the shooting.
I pushed forward. All at once, the crowd was behind me like a receding tide. And then I saw.
Somehow Al-Jib had gotten behind Delilah and managed to wrest the Kimber from her. He was standing behind her, one arm around her neck, the other holding the barrel of the gun to her temple.
I stopped, pulled the .38, and pointed it at him with a two-handed grip. They were eight meters away. I was still winded from the chase, and the deck of the ferry was rolling with the harbor’s currents. And Al-Jib was holding her like a shield, with only part of his head exposed. I was too far to risk the shot.
“Drop the gun!” he screamed. “Drop it or by Allah I will put her brains on the floor!”
“Don’t,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Because then I’ll have to put your brains on the floor, too.”
“Drop it! Drop it!” he screamed again.
