“We don’t know what kind of security he’s got on his office or who else is keeping watch on it. Getting into his apartment is our best bet.” Her bag vibrated. “I’m so sorry, please excuse me for a moment,” she said to Hugh in a louder voice, in French, accompanied by a dazzling smile. She pulled out a cell phone and flipped it open. She listened for a moment and then let loose with more and very rapid French. “No, it’s quite all right, Veronique, I’m only five minutes away. Offer him some tea, let him look over the closing papers, and tell him I’ll be there immediately.” She flipped the phone closed, shouldered her bag, and rose to her feet. She smiled down at Hugh, an infinitely kind smile, and, still in French, said in a soothing voice, “I’m so sorry our luncheon has been cut short, Mr. Reeve. As I was saying, I have several properties that I believe would interest you. Please call my assistant at this number”-Arlene handed Hugh a small square of stiff paper that later proved to be the business card of Arlene’s accountant-“to schedule showings. A bientot.”
With that, Arlene marched off, leaving Hugh seated at his table facing Noortman seated at his. Hugh’s beer came and he downed half of it at one go. He looked up to see Noortman smiling at him. There was definitely something about the smile, but he still couldn’t place it and he had other things to worry about.
Hugh could give a shit if men slept with each other so long as he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t care if they married and adopted seven kids and watched The Birdcage every night on the Bravo Channel. He himself was a flaming heterosexual. It wasn’t that he thought Arlene’s idea was bad, per se, it was just that he didn’t have the first clue how to go about picking up a man.
Noortman was still smiling at him. What the hell. For starters, he smiled back. He even went so far as to salute Noortman with his beer.
The next thing he knew they were seated at the same table, his or Noortman’s he could never remember, the hostess cooing at Noortman in Mandarin and Noortman kissing the back of her hand with his seductive sneer. Then Noortman was speaking to him in flawless French and he was replying, and they were having a stimulating and informative discussion on Hong Kong real estate, which moved on to globalization and from there to the films of Pierce Brosnan, for whom Noortman appeared to harbor an inordinate fondness.
Noortman mentioned that he dabbled in Hong Kong properties himself off and on. What precisely was Hugh looking for? Hugh replied that he was interested in warehouse space along the waterfront for his import-export business. He was presently looking at various properties with a broker.
Really, said Noortman, how very interesting. He was in the import export business himself and had extensive contacts with Hong Kong shipping firms. Now that he thought about it, he was convinced that just the other day someone had spoken of a very desirable property for sale, located conveniently near Central. He was sure he still had the listing. Would Hugh like to see it?
Of course Hugh would, who by this time was feeling much more relaxed. It turned out that picking up a guy wasn’t all that different from picking up a girl. He managed not to flinch when Noortman smiled deeply into his eyes, and by a superhuman effort didn’t jump when Noortman’s knee rubbed against his beneath the table. By superimposing a woman’s face over Noortman’s features-it didn’t matter that it was Sara’s face he saw, he told himself-he was even able to put what he hoped was a little heat into his own expression.
It must have worked, because shortly thereafter Hugh found himself walking down the sidewalk, following Noortman as the other man wove a sinuous path between the moving mass of humanity that was Hong Kong. A horn honked, a jackhammer sounded, and people talked loudly in Mandarin and ten other languages, a few of which Hugh didn’t recognize, which only added to his feeling of unreality.
Noortman turned down a side street, much quieter in volume and much tonier in appearance, with awnings out to the curb and uniformed doormen guarding brass-fitted doors. Noortman went into one, Hugh tagging along behind and doing his damnedest not to look around for Arlene.
An elevator whisked them up seventeen floors, and Noortman let them into a spacious apartment furnished with leather and teak and glass. There were intricate Afghan rugs scattered artfully across a maple floor waxed to a golden shine, and the crystal lined up over the bar looked fresh out of the vat at Baccarat.
“A drink?” Noortman said. “I have some very nice scotch.”
“Sounds good,” Hugh said.
While Noortman busied himself at the elegant wet bar, Hugh admired the sweeping view of the mainland, the Star Ferries working the sea between it and Hong Kong Island. Even at this distance the ferries looked ready to sink beneath the weight of rush-hour traffic, which Hugh had decided in Hong Kong was probably twenty-four hours a day.
He wondered where the hell Arlene was. He wondered how long he could delay the inevitable before Noortman became suspicious. He wondered if this qualified as cheating on Sara. He wondered if the sweat pooling in his armpits was beginning to show.
He became aware of Noortman standing behind him. Deliberately relaxing his jaw, he turned.
“You’re so tall,” Noortman said in a soft voice. He reached a hand up to touch Hugh’s hair. “Your hair is beautiful. Is it real?”
“Am I a natural blond?” Hugh said. He tried to laugh and had to abandon the attempt when his voice cracked. “Yes.”
“And your eyes, so brown. It’s such a wonderful contrast.” Noortman took a sip of his drink. “People tell me I have a smile like- What is the name of that American singer? The one who shakes his hips?”
“Elvis!” Hugh said. “I knew you looked familiar.”
Noortman smiled, satisfied. He took another sip and set the glass down. He took Hugh’s glass and set it down, too. A foot shorter than Hugh, he let his hand slide up Hugh’s lapel to his neck, and pulled his head down.
A moment later there was a knock at the door. Noortman pulled back, swearing under his breath. “I’ll get rid of them. Don’t move.”
He went to the door, and Hugh, disobeying orders, followed behind on silent feet. Noortman opened the door and Arlene was there and already swinging her bag. It caught Noortman a hell of a thump on the left side of his head and he crumpled into Hugh’s arms.
“Where the hell were you?” Hugh hissed at Arlene, dragging Noortman into the dining room and sitting him down in one of the chairs. “I actually had to kiss the guy, for crissake.”
“Think of it as taking one for the team,” Arlene told him, and hauled out a roll of duct tape.
“Notice my self-control,” Hugh said. “You still live.” He took the duct tape from Arlene and wrapped it around Noortman’s torso and the chair back, Noortman’s wrists and the arms of the chair, and Noortman’s ankles and the legs of the chair.
“All right already,” Arlene said. “The idea is to immobilize him, not shroud him.”
“He’s a spurned lover,” Hugh said; “he’s not going to wake up happy.”
He added, “You tell anyone I kissed him and you’ll never work on this planet again.”
“It got the job done, didn’t it? Stop being such a big baby.”
Noortman groaned. After a moment his eyes opened and he stared at Hugh, at first bewildered, and then, as realization flooded back, hurt. Hugh felt ridiculously guilty.
“Mr. Noortman,” Arlene said.
His gaze shifted to her. His brows came together and his voice came out a raspy husk of its former mellifluous self. Everyone was speaking French. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“We have some questions for you, sir,” Arlene said formally. She reached into her bag and, before Hugh’s disbelieving and slightly affronted eyes, produced a large claw hammer. The wood of the handle was worn smooth and the metal of the head was rusty and flaking. “We have no wish to resort to violence, Mr. Noortman, but we mean to have the answers to our questions before we leave.”
After a moment Noortman got his jaw back into working order and said in a slightly shaky voice, “Q
uestions? What questions? I demand that you release me at once. There has been some terrible mistake.” He appealed to Hugh. “We were having such a good time. I don’t understand what is happening here. Please let me go, and let us talk about this, get things straightened out.”
“Jaap,” Hugh said gently.
Noortman’s eyes widened. “How do you know my given name? I didn’t tell you. I-”
Hugh knelt down next to Noortman’s chair and smiled. “Jaap Noortman, Junior. Born in Singapore in 1970, graduated from the University of Singapore in 1986. Worked a year for your father in the Department of Customs, until you were recruited by the pirate Fang Ho to help him identify and move the cargoes he hijacks in the South China Sea. How am I doing so far?”
Noortman swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was born in Singapore, yes, but I am a respectable businessman. I run a legitimate freight concern here in Hong Kong, you can ask anyone. There has been some mistake.” He tried to smile, first at Hugh and then at Arlene.
The now familiar sneer was missing in action. “Please, untie me, and I will verify my identity.”
“We know who you are,” Arlene said, and took the hammer. “Gag him,” she told Hugh.
Hugh hesitated, and then did as he was told. This man had conspired in too many deaths for Hugh to feel compunction now. Arlene was right. The Koreans had been on the loose too long, Fang and Noortman had been active in their cause for too long, too much had been set into motion and too much was at risk. There was no time now for subtle.
Hugh overlapped the duct tape at the back of Noortman’s head and stepped back. Arlene raised the hammer. Noortman’s eyes bulged but Arlene didn’t wait, she brought the head of the hammer down as hard as she could swing it on Noortman’s right knee.
Her grunt of effort was drowned out by Noortman’s muffled scream. The duct tape strained as he tried to double over. Tears streamed from his eyes, mucus from his nose. He made gagging sounds. Hugh kept his face impassive and reached out to rip the duct tape from Noortman’s face. He lost some hair as well as some skin. He screamed.
“Quiet,” Arlene said, looking as bored as she sounded, “or we’ll have to gag you again.
“What do you want?” Noortman said, his breath coming in sobs. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!” The blood had soaked through his pants and his knee was already beginning to swell into a misshapen lump, straining his pants leg.
“I want to know where your partner is, Jaap.”
Noortman shook his head, moaning. “I can’t, I can’t.”
“Gag him again,” Arlene said. Hugh, a little pale, stepped forward with the duct tape.
“No,” Noortman screamed. “I can’t tell you, I can’t, he’ll kill me!”
“Then answer,” Hugh said.
“We know you’re working for the two Koreans. What did they hire you to do? Where is Fang now?”
“I can’t! He’ll kill me, I tell you! He has killed others! He’ll kill me, too!”
“I know,” Arlene told him, “and I’m sorry about this, but I really am in a hurry.” She nodded at Hugh. A little pale, he tore off a length of duct tape and stepped forward.
Frantically, Noortman tried to jerk his head out of the way. Arlene grabbed a handful of his hair and held him still while Hugh taped his mouth again. Noortman screamed behind the gag, and kept screaming as the hammer came down again on the same knee.
This time Noortman threw up behind the gag, and when Hugh ripped it free he had to step back quickly to avoid being hit by the braised abalone in oyster sauce he had just watched Noortman eat. Arlene grabbed Noortman’s hair and yanked his head upright. “In October you met with two men from North Korea in a cafe in Pattaya Beach, Thailand. Who were they? What did they want?”
The bottom half of Noortman’s right leg was canted at a hideously awkward angle. Blood ran into his fashionable leather shoe and stained its gold buckle. “I can’t, I can’t,” he moaned.
Arlene raised the hammer, and this time she reversed it so that the claw side was down. Noortman saw it and screamed again.
AN HOUR LATER ARLENE and Hugh were in a cab on their way back to the airport. “Where the hell did you get that hammer?” Hugh said at random, trying not to think of the scene they had left behind in Noortman’s apartment.
“There were a bunch of construction guys doing a remodel on a shop. There was an open toolbox with the hammer sitting right on top.”
“Well done,” Hugh said, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“What’s wrong?” she said, unruffled, matter-of-fact. “We got what we needed.”
“Yeah,” Hugh said. “We did that.”
Her expression softened. “You’re not in the field a lot, are you, Hugh?”
He tried to smile. “Once a desk man, always a desk man.”
The things he had done in Noortman’s apartment would haunt him for the rest of his life. Noortman had broken so quickly and so completely, he had given them everything they had asked for and more, but Hugh could find no cause in that for self-congratulation, and definitely none for humor.
“What next?”
Hugh thought about it. “Home,” he said.
Arlene cleared her throat with delicacy. “Are you, ah, calling in first?”
“You mean the director?” Hugh thought about that for a while, too. He had a cell phone, but he always used a landline when he could. Cell phone signals were far too easy to tap into. “I’ll call him from the airport.”
“Will he believe you?”
Hugh took a deep breath and let it out. “Probably not. That’s why I’m going home.”
“Home,” she said. “You don’t mean D.C., do you.”
He didn’t answer. They rode for a few minutes in silence.
“Hugh, is this the smart thing to do?”
Hugh gave Arlene one incredulous look, and laughed out loud.
NOORTMAN LAY ON THE exquisite Afghan carpet where he had fallen from the chair when they’d cut him free of the duct tape. He didn’t know how much time had passed. The bleeding had stopped, and so long as he remained absolutely motionless his leg didn’t hurt.
Of course, if he so much as twitched, the pain was agonizing and all-encompassing, subsuming every other sense. At some point, he would have to crawl to the phone and call for help, which he planned to do as soon as he summoned up the necessary strength.
The color of blood was no longer pleasing to him. He would never again be able to tuck a red silk handkerchief into a pocket and think of his father. Instead he would think of himself, broken, bleeding, lying in his own filth, a victim of strangers who had invaded his own home.
The police, yes. He should call the police. As soon as he gathered a little more energy.
They would want to know what had happened. He had invited a stranger into his home and had been attacked, that was what he would say. Of course, his description of his assailant would be suitably vague. He wouldn’t want Reeve interrogated, something that could cause untold complications. As a foreign national residing in Hong Kong, he had to be careful not to make a fuss. If he did, the notoriously parochial local police would find a way to invite him to leave.
He had never been a very good liar, so it was going to take some thinking out before he made the call, and he hurt very much and he was very tired.
And yet, and yet, he knew a tiny spark of triumph growing deep inside him.
He had told them, yes, told them enough for them to stop hurting him.
But not everything.
The fibers of the carpet pressing into his cheek, he smiled.
JANUARY
PETROPAVLOVSK
FANG WAS SWEATING IN spite of the below-zero temperatures and the brisk onshore wind that dropped the chill factor into the minus double digits. It didn’t help that it was three o’clock on a January morning six thousand miles north of his usual area of operations.
The immense, untidy yard was a mass of rectangular containers imprinted with the
names and logos of shipping firms from all over the world, Maersk Sealand, Cosco, Pan Ocean Shipping, Teco Ocean Shipping, even Czech Ocean Shipping and a host of other names of maritime freight firms too small or specialized to be immediately recognizable. The containers were lined up in rows forming aisles just wide enough for the tractors and lifts to maneuver between them.
The yard was brightly lit with halogen lamps mounted on fifty-foot poles, but the containers were stacked three high and cast deep, dark shadows, providing a wind tunnel effect to consolidate every passing breath of air into what felt to Fang like a gale-force draft. He shivered again, the nervous sweat congealing on his spine. The zip of his parka was already up as high as it would go, but he tugged at it anyway, and cursed involuntarily when the teeth caught at the flesh beneath his jaw.
Smith’s head whipped around. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. An unaccustomed flush flooded up into Fang’s cheekbones. He set his teeth and looked down to fiddle unnecessarily with the chest strap of his pack. Like the parka, it was the very best U.S. military surplus issue.
They were crouched next to a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire, just outside the reach of the lights, which were directed inward at the yard and the containers. Armed guards roamed the perimeter, but on a night like this they were spending more time in the guard shack down at the gate that faced the docks than they were on patrol. The shack was a hundred feet away, but every time the shack’s door opened Fang could hear a burst of Russian music and loud laughter. Sons of bitches were probably knocking back the vodka with a fine and free hand. All the better for this operation.
They had gathered together in a group for the first time that afternoon, Smith and Jones and their twenty men, Fang and his ten. The building was a small warehouse with a loft holding up a hoist. There was a small area in back of the hoist where their equipment and supplies had been stacked in wooden crates stenciled with the logo of the United Nations and the notation printed matter on the sides.
Another of Noortman’s little jokes. If he’d called for the crates to be anything other than books, foodstuffs, say, or hand tools, no bribe would have been big enough to keep the Russian customs officials from helping themselves to a bonus and discovering the true contents of the crates. The UN logo, even Fang was pushed grudgingly to admit, was a mark of genius. Not only were they books, an observer would conclude, they were most likely tracts on crop rotation or home health care or English as a second language. Also, books were heavy, which would account for the weight.
Blindfold Game Page 9
