by Mark Burnell
It was raining in Kowloon. Torrential, vertical, deafening. People huddled beneath canopies and in doorways. Vehicles crawled along streets, their windscreen-wipers rendered redundant. Stephanie waited at Jordan station until the worst of it had passed, using the time to buy an Octopus card for the MTR.
Nearby she found a cheap place to stay on Nanking Street, just off the junction with Shanghai Street. Up two flights of stairs, the Majestic Guesthouse was fraudulently named. In a lobby the size of a suitcase she registered her details. The room was one floor up. A damp cube of heat with a bed that was barely a single: a narrow mattress on a metal frame with a sag at the centre, covered in a lemon bedspread. There was a sink in the corner, a toilet and shower in a cupboard just large enough to fit a coat-hanger, and a small TV bolted to a wall-bracket.
She opened the dirty window. Wires and cables snaked across the street at the upper levels. Hanging out of a fourth-floor window, a woman was retrieving sodden laundry from a neighbour's wall-mounted television aerial. To her left a cat tiptoed across a visor of corrugated iron, scratching through rotting rubbish. Below, the street was almost empty, soaked pedestrians congregating in the 7-Eleven, lighting cigarettes, making calls.
She left the window open, enjoying the sound of the rain, and hauled her rucksack onto the bed. Out came Claire Davies's clothes: cheap underwear, faded jeans, walking shoes, old T-shirts, a bulging wash-bag. The side pockets contained her passport and air ticket, the second leg of which was due to take her to Sydney in three weeks. In her wallet she had a Visa card, activated less than forty-eight hours earlier. It came complete with a five-year financial history. That had been Magenta House's touch, not Bradfield's.
The second passport – Eva Hartstein, a dental technician from Stuttgart – was housed in the foam comfort pad on the back of the rucksack, between the straps. Stephanie left it there. At the bottom of the main part of the rucksack was a new compact Sony Vaio, courtesy of an old acquaintance of Cyril Bradfield's. Less of a laptop, more of a knee-top, it was impregnated with a dormant virus. Stephanie had to go through a three step procedure in order to use the machine safely. It also contained a measure of last resort: Semtex ribbons beneath the keyboard, coated in a resin to avoid detection. The explosive could be set as a tamper device or switched to a timer, employing the computer as the countdown mechanism.
Stephanie had left Mark a number of the place where she'd told him she was staying, but the Zhuhai Hotel on Nathan Road was merely a figment of someone's imagination. If Mark tried the Kowloon number, he would get through to reception and then be put through to her room. But after a dozen rings the call would revert to the receptionist, who would conclude, in an English accent coloured by Cantonese, that Miss Schneider was out. It would be a conversation that occurred entirely in London.
Stephanie switched on the Siemens phone she'd bought from Ali Metin. She also switched on a Nokia. That was Petra's.
It was almost dark by the time she went out, neon flickering in compensation: slabs of red and yellow, blue dragons with twitching emerald tongues, winking arrows pointing to depressing nightclubs. From Nanking Street she looked up. Not far from her bedroom window there was an illuminated billboard with two young girls pouting at punters below, dressed in skimpy underwear, the name of a karaoke bar flashing above them.
She found a small restaurant on Canton Street. Nothing fancy. Hard plastic, blood red and butter yellow, with lots of bright light overhead. An ultra violet lamp zapped flies over a cooker, while a family of six at a table for four were shouting to make themselves heard over each other. She slid into a booth along one wall and ordered noodles and vegetables with chicken.
She looked at her watch. Eight minutes past six. The time of her life.
Despite two tablets of Melatonin, Stephanie slept poorly. The gossamer curtains were no defence against the neon outside and her mattress might as well have been stuffed with gravel. Now, naked, she went through an exercise regime that she'd devised with her namesake from Adelaide: a series of conventional stretches combined with elements of Pilates. By the time she'd finished, her skin was damp with perspiration. After a long, cool shower she dressed and left the Majestic. As she walked onto Nathan Road she called a memorized number.
At the fourth ring, a man answered. 'Nî hâo.'
'Wô xìng Petra.'
The man turned to English. 'Have we met?'
They never had. Stephanie said, 'In Seattle.'
'When?'
'August. Two years ago.'
'Where are you?'
'Kowloon.'
'Where do you want to meet?'
'I'll come to you. Where are you?'
'Windsor House, Causeway Bay.'
Stephanie walked to the tip of Tsim Sha Tsui and caught the Star Ferry to Central. She took a seat on the upper deck, reversing the wooden bench, leaning on the rail. Victoria Harbour was smothered by brown fog; pollution rolling in from the Chinese mainland. The heat and humidity were soaring, so it was a small pleasure to have ten minutes in the breeze of the open water.
She took a taxi from the ferry to Windsor House, a shopping mall as soulless as any other. Star Electronics sold computers like every outlet on the tenth and eleventh floors. There were about a dozen customers inside. A skinny boy in jeans approached her. His white T-shirt had Star Electronics emblazoned across the chest.
'Can I help?'
'I'm here to see Raymond.'
The boy vanished into the back office. The man who emerged, moments later, was barely five foot tall, almost as wide, dressed in a tight grey suit with an open-necked cherry silk shirt. His long, lank black hair had been pulled into an ill-advised pony-tail. Raymond Chen's office was smaller than her room at the Majestic and had no window. A black MDF desk partitioned the room. Chen was only just able to squeeze behind it. He was sweating despite the artificial chill. Petra tended to have that effect on men. Especially where her reputation preceded her.
'Nice business you've got here.'
'It's … it's … a sideline,' he stammered defensively. 'I'm here two – maybe three – mornings a week.'
'And what do you do with the rest of your time?'
It wasn't a question she expected him to answer honestly.
'A bit of this. A bit of that.'
'And a bit of the other?'
Chen was an American citizen, although it was now unlikely he would ever return there. He regarded himself as a refugee. Not from America, though, but from another nation entirely: the American intelligence community.
With a budget approaching twenty-five billion dollars, it employed more than a hundred thousand people around the world. It had spy satellites powerful enough to read the number off a credit card from space, but had failed to predict the attack on the World Trade Center. Just as it had failed to foresee the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or the collapse of the Berlin Wall. There were many reasons for these failures, but primary among them was an over-reliance on technical intelligence rather than human intelligence, or HUMINT.
Over a quarter of a century the CIA's decline had been particularly marked, some of it self-inflicted, some of it imposed. The constraints placed upon the agency hadn't helped. During the nineties the CIA had been prevented from recruiting anyone with a criminal record, or who had been found guilty of violating human rights. As Alexander had consistently pointed out, where would Magenta House have been without such people?
Chen had fallen foul of this requirement on two counts: first, for having a criminal record and, second, for illegally concealing it. It took internal security at the CIA seven years to catch up with him. When they did, he fled, ending up in Hong Kong. Which was when Alexander stepped in. Belief in Magenta House had never been a prerequisite for working for it. People were hired for their talent and kept in check by their history. Chen was ideal; gifted and tarnished in equal measure.
Multilingual, he was far happier in the far-flung corners of the world than behind a desk, which was another quality
that had set him apart. Too many of his former colleagues at the CIA had complacently believed that technology could reduce espionage to a desk job. That spies could become analysts without any drop in performance.
Stephanie had always been rather amused by this. If the most sophisticated listening devices in the world were monitoring your phone calls, you didn't use the phone. It was well known that Saddam Hussein had used motorbike couriers to distribute intelligence. The IRA passed information orally. If mobile phones were necessary, one used pay-as-you-go, like any drug dealer, or customized units, like the Siemens that Ali Metin had sold her. For the internet, as Petra had found out, Hotmail was perfect – the new one-time pad.
For all the technology in the world, there was no substitute for people on the ground. A good human asset took a second to axe but years to replace.
'You have something for me?'
Chen took a key from his pocket, unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and produced a CD in a cardboard sleeve.
'Is that it?'
Normally there was a bulging envelope, printed pages, poorly developed photographs. Chen nodded. 'It's all there, but you can call me any time if there's something else you need. I'm available twenty-four hours a day.'
Stephanie took the disk from the sleeve and examined both sides. 'I can't believe it. Alexander's finally joining the late twentieth century.' She put the disk back. 'Just after everyone else has left it.'
I break the seal on a large bottle of water, drink a quarter of it, then sit down cross-legged on my bed. I switch on the Vaio and insert the disk.
Milan Savic, Lars Andersen and now Martin Dassler. Dassler has no address in Hong Kong but he's been here nine times in the past fifteen months. S3 had concluded he was either using another identity for hotels or staying with contacts. But the person who compiled this disk knows better: Dassler has access to a corporate apartment at the Dragon Centre, a skyscraper in Central.
The Dragon Centre is an astonishing piece of architecture. A reflective glass skin housed within a polished steel endoskeleton, it doesn't look like one building. Misleadingly, it appears to be three, all different in circumference and height. There's an aerial shot, peering directly down. To me it looks like three sections of a honeycomb. I zoom in on one of the sections the second highest. Within a protective fence, the roof is a tiled terrace with tended flowerbeds, manicured trees and a swimming pool. I check the notes. It belongs to a corporate apartment, registered to a company called Golden Harvest Property Services, based in a one-room office on the ninth floor of a run-down block in Wan Chai. There are three other businesses at the same address: another property company, a limousine service and a firm of flower importers.
Dassler's false passport details are provided. German, born in Rostock, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, in 1958. I scroll down the page to see if there's a home address. There's a rented flat in Moscow, another in Berlin, neither of them current. For a while he was living with a girlfriend in Hamburg, a Slovakian lap-dancer named Krystyna. There's a picture of her: lots of dyed blonde hair, green eyes set against ruby lips, a fabulous body.
Dassler's involved with three nightclubs in Kowloon: Gold Cat and Kiss Kiss, a pair of cheap dives in Mong Kok, and Club 151 in East Tsim Sha Tsui, one of Hong Kong's most expensive nightspots. The in-house girls at the clubs in Mong Kok are all local, the ones at 151 tend to be imported, mostly from Europe. I wonder if Krystyna from Slovakia ever made it as far as East Tsim Sha Tsui.
It's not clear what role he plays regarding the clubs, which are owned by a company called Victoria Entertainment International. His other business interests include two restaurants, a travel agency, a container leasing company, two flower shops, several bureaux de change and a haulage firm in the New Territories. The balance of the portfolio strikes me as peculiar.
There's a file listing Savic's known Hong Kong associates. These include Tony Parker, a former British soldier, who now fronts a security consultancy. In his world that's the equivalent of a non-executive directorship. For more than twenty years Parker was a mercenary, mostly in Africa. I recognize the name of the Jahari brothers, Indian diamond merchants, and Mikhail Andreyev, a Russian: once a lowly clerk for Intourist in Vladivostok, now a hotelier worth three hundred million dollars. Andreyev was in the early running for the Macao gambling licence that eventually went to Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino king. The other names in the file are Chinese and mean nothing to me.
I look for lingering traces of Milan Savic's early links with this part of the world but there aren't any left. Just as Hong Kong itself has, he's left behind his reputation for being a cheap television trader. Along with his name, his nationality, his homes and Krystyna from Slovakia. They all belong to a different era. Like me, Savic seems to be a man who's spent much of his life getting a divorce from himself.
Claire Davies was ideal for footwork. A tourist doing the sights, some on the backpacker's beat, some not, but a tourist nevertheless. A knapsack, sunscreen and sunglasses, the obligatory bottle of mineral water. Perfect fodder for the Indians along the lower reaches of Nathan Road, trying to flog cheap suits and fake Rolexes.
It was early afternoon when she walked up Shanghai Street to Mong Kok. Kiss Kiss was on Fife Street. Gold Cat was on Portland Street, just off Mong Kok Road, barely a couple of hundred yards from one to the other and not much to choose between them. In the daylight their exteriors were depressingly dreary.
Set in glass display cases, one on either side of the entrance, Gold Cat had photographs of girls in bikinis. Time had bleached most of the colour from the shots; sultry pouts, bad make-up, eighties hair. Kiss Kiss had a huge set of neon lips above the entrance. With the sign switched off, the lips were grey with grime. Club 151, in East Tsim Sha Tsui, was set back from the street in the basement of a prestigious commercial building with uniformed security, valet parking and CCTV.
Back at the Majestic, Stephanie returned to the disk that Chen had given her. Savic didn't seem like a nervous man. He had no permanent protection, although he was sometimes accompanied by Sun Tai, nominal head of security for Victoria Entertainment International. There was a poor photograph of Sun. Obese, shaven-headed and tattooed, Stephanie knew the breed; slovenly and slow, with only a scowl for impact. Savic also had a driver, a Macanese named Figueiredo.
The following morning she returned to Hong Kong and headed for Central and the Dragon Centre. She'd identified the building from the Star Ferry, but it was even more impressive close up. The tallest of the three sections rose seventy-eight seamless floors within the endoskeleton. The mirrored glass had been put in place so precisely it was impossible to see the joins between the sheets; three smooth cylinders forming one glittering building. There was a vast atrium, six storeys high, with hundreds of halogen spots lowered on barely visible threads so that, in the evening, one could look up from the polished granite of the lobby and see the night sky perfectly replicated inside the building.
Set into the stone of one wall was a digital screen. Stephanie touched the directory and brought down a list of the companies renting space in the skyscraper. Then she went to the Central Government Offices on Queensway, where the Registrar of Companies oversaw the Companies Registry, and where a member of the public was able to examine the statutory information about any company on the list. Providing one had details of an identity card or a passport, it was also possible to conduct a search to see if a named director was on the board of any other company. Stephanie was armed with Martin Dassler's passport details and a copy of a document allegedly used by Lars Andersen.
Using Victoria Entertainment International as a starting point, Stephanie instigated a search to see how many companies were operating under the Dassler flag of convenience. Three, it turned out, all of them questionable. All had six directors, and in each case Savic was the only non-local. Not a sure sign of a front company but a fairly reliable indicator. Apart from Dassler, there was one man common to all three. Tsang Siu-chung. And it was this name, half an
hour later, that stopped her in her tracks.
Among many business interests in the SAR, Tsang Siu-chung was also a director of a company called Primorye Air Transport. Based in Vladivostok, with a subsidiary office on Sakhalin, but registered in Hong Kong, there were five directors, four of them Chinese. And one Russian.
Konstantin Komarov. Kostya.
A coincidence, Stephanie told herself. Nothing more. Besides, she knew Kostya as well as anyone. Or had, at any rate. A man with connections everywhere. Moscow, New York, London, so why not Hong Kong? He knew the Russian Far East too, if being left to languish in its grotesque prisons could constitute regional knowledge. And yet she still couldn't quite believe it. In Petra's world, what was a coincidence? Alexander would say that it was an oversight.
In her room at the guesthouse there were two pieces of e-mail for her. The first was for Stephanie Schneider at AOL. There was no text, just an attachment. She opened it, a familiar face forming on the screen: Cameron Diaz looking radiant, smiling for the camera at some film premiere. Beneath the picture, the message:
> Dear Stephanie, My hip flexor feels a lot better now. Please thank Mark for all his love and attention. It only took him a night or two. He's soooo good. Your grateful new best friend, Cameron, xxx.
Stephanie sent Mark a reply.
> Dear Cameron, Think nothing of it. If you happen to see Mark before I get back, please tell him that his hip flexor's going to feel a lot worse than yours. And it won't take me a night or two, either. In brutal anticipation, Stephanie, x.
The second message was from Stern. He had a name for her. Not Komarov, but another Russian. Another coincidence? It didn't feel like it. And when she saw who it was, she was sure he wouldn't feel it was a coincidence either. She tapped the keyboard back to Stern.
