The Altman Code

by Robert Ludlum

  Except for the receptionist, the luxurious room was empty. She stared in awe.

  He frowned at her. “Where is he?”

  “Er, Mr. McDermid. I’m very sorry, sir, but Dr. St. Germain rushed downstairs to pick up his notebook at Donk & LaPierre. He’ll be right back.” She glanced at the clock. “Oh, my. He said he’d be gone just ten minutes, but it’s fifteen already. Should I call to see what happened?”

  “Yes. But ask only whether he’s there now or was there. That’s all. Don’t speak to him or have him sent up.” It was possible the man could have gone to Donk & LaPierre for some reason.

  She called, asked her questions, and ended the connection. She looked at McDermid in confusion. “They say he’s not there and never was. Not even earlier.”

  Behind McDermid, the elevator doors opened. As McDermid turned, Feng Dun stepped out. Feng held a 9mm Glock that looked small in his big hand.

  The receptionist’s eyes grew large and frightened as she took in his appearance. Her gaze froze on the Glock.

  Feng’s whispery voice asked, “Where is he?”

  “Gone,” McDermid said, disgusted. “He left fifteen minutes ago.”

  “He’s still in the building,” Feng said flatly. “We’ve been watching. He can’t leave. He’s trapped.”

  Jon was on edge, his shoulders tight, his muscles aching to fight. Still, he remained hidden behind the mezzanine pillar, studying the lobby below.

  After Feng Dun had instructed his three gunmen, he entered an elevator. The numbers above the door indicated it had shot straight up to the penthouse. Even though Jon had already guessed, he was still shaken: It looked increasingly probable that Ralph McDermid had stalled Jon upstairs so he could summon these killers. Which meant the chairman and CEO of the mighty Altman Group was likely not only a player in the Empress crisis but was intimately involved in the bloody aspects of it.

  Beneath Jon, the three hunters took up unobtrusive positions, where they could cover all exits. When Feng Dun returned, he did not so much stride from the elevator as appear as if by magic, suddenly there on the lobby floor. He made a subtle gesture close to his hip, and the four converged on a corner behind potted palms. As they conferred, they observed everyone who passed through. Feng glanced up at the mezzanine once and seemed to fix his gaze on where Jon stood in the shadow of the column.

  Jon stepped slowly back. He checked his disguise, from the Hawaiian shirt to his blue tennis shoes. He tugged the Panama hat lower over his forehead and slipped his Beretta into the small of his back under the seersucker jacket. As he headed for the staircase, he bent his knees a fraction of an inch and aimed his toes inward, giving him a faintly prissy walk.

  He did not look at the killers, although each glanced at him. He found himself stiffen with tension, waiting for one to decide he was worth stopping. As he passed them and closed in on the glass doors that opened onto the street and safety, he could feel someone’s gaze hot on his back. He pushed through the glass doors, waiting to be stopped.

  When he was not, he felt a moment of surprise, then relief. As he walked out of the building and crossed the street, the daylight seemed particularly bright and welcoming. He took up a position in the shadows and waited.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Two

  It was nearly dark when Ralph McDermid finally left the building through a side door, although Feng Dun and his hunters had emerged hours before, one at a time, and scattered as if on assignments. Because the Hong Kong crowds had swollen with the evening rush to go home, Jon did not hang back. During the afternoon, the humidity had broken, and the struggle through the mass of pedestrians was easier.

  Frustrated and worried, he hurried to keep the CEO in sight. McDermid walked only as far as the Central station of the M.T.R., the subway. Jon waited twenty seconds, bought a ticket, and followed. There were fewer people on the platform, and Jon paused, making certain no one else surveiled the CEO—either surreptitiously or as a hidden bodyguard.

  When the train came, McDermid entered a car, and Jon slipped on behind, through a second door. McDermid wove forward until he found a space he liked on one of the stainless steel benches. He sat and stared into space, making eye contact with none of his silent, weary fellow passengers and ignoring the colorful advertisements, all of which were in Chinese, very different from the days before the island returned to mainland China’s control and commercials appeared in English as well.

  Jon moved in the opposite direction and grabbed a pole, his back half turned, where he could catch McDermid in a window reflection. He found himself wondering why anyone of McDermid’s position and wealth was riding the subway. Not going far? Not wanting to use company cars or personnel in another man’s empire? Tired of the pandemonium and pressure of the streets? Cheap? Or, more likely, he wanted no one, not even a chauffeur or taxi driver, to know where he was going.

  The ride was remarkably quiet and smooth. McDermid never bothered to gaze around, apparently unconcerned that he might have picked up a tail. He got off a couple of stops later, at the Wanchai station. Jon waited until the last moment again, when the CEO was already some forty feet away, to squeeze out through the closing doors. He hurried out to Hennessy Road, where McDermid was ambling along, looking relaxed. McDermid led him through Wanchai, Hong Kong’s former red-light district. Once notorious for sex and drugs, the area had fallen on hard times. The result was that the city’s booming financial district had invaded. New high-rises clustered together, and the newest and best hotels asked and received more than three thousand dollars a night for rooms.

  Hands in his pockets, McDermid strolled down neon-lighted Lockhart Road, where most of the remaining sex trade was. Here, Wanchai still lived down to its tawdry reputation. Wanchai girls loitered at bar doors and gave a well-rehearsed pssst to any man who looked as if he could pay. There were gaudy hostess clubs, topless bars, discos, and raucous English and Irish pubs. The signs and the spielers, the neon and the come-ons were still loud and bright here, broadcasting the delights inside for the hungry and the lonely.

  But the beat was gone. Neither he nor McDermid gave more than a glance at the tarnished pleasure shacks, while Jon again wondered where McDermid was headed—and why.

  At last, the CEO turned into a side street and then into a brick office building in the shadow of a spanking new higher-and-shinier, glass-and-steel monolith of offices. The street was narrow. Vendors assembled their gear. A few stores offered peep shows and porn, tattoos and adult toys. At the same time, a steady stream of middle-class office workers and executive types left the brick building on their way home to the darkening hills and suburbs, a reflection of the cultural schizophrenia that Wanchai had become.

  His curiosity growing, Jon used the exiting stream as cover and slipped inside. In the marble-lined lobby, Ralph McDermid stood facing a row of filigreed elevators. When a car emptied a small river of people, he walked inside, the only passenger, since everyone else was leaving. Again Jon watched the numbers of the floors light up on the indicator above the door. McDermid’s car stopped on the tenth then returned down.

  Jon stepped into another car and pressed the button. At the eleventh floor, he rushed off and ran down the fire stairs two at a time. Finally on the tenth, he peered out into a twin of the empty, marble-lined corridor above. Where had McDermid gone?

  Jon jerked back when three women left one of the offices and headed toward the elevators, chattering in Chinese. Flattened against the stairwell, he listened, mystified, wishing he had learned the language.

  Before he could look out again, other footsteps clattered along the marble floor and stopped at the elevator, where the three women were still talking. More doors opened and closed, and the unseen corridor was silent again . . . except for a rustling that passed directly outside his door.

  Jon cracked it open and peered out. Dressed in the black pajamas and conical strawhat of a rural peasant, a Chinese woman disappeared through the door at the very end of the hall. But where wa
s McDermid? As he was about to go looking, he heard what he thought was the CEO’s voice from somewhere to the right, beyond the elevators. He gave a grim smile, pulled out his Beretta, and padded into the corridor.

  He listened at each door. All were identical—cheap and hollow-core, with steel mail slots and name plaques that announced the businesses housed inside, everything from accountants to start-up Web site companies, dentists to secretarial services. Muted voices sounded from behind several, and a radio station from one. He was beginning to worry that he had somehow lost McDermid when he heard him again.

  He slowed. The muffled tones were coming from the other side of a door that proclaimed in Chinese and English: DR. JAMES CHOU, ACUPUNCTURE & SHIATSU. It appeared that Ralph McDermid indulged in acupuncture or shiatsu massage or both. But why did he go to the trouble of taking the subway here and then the long walk? McDermid was a physically soft man. Or was he here for a different purpose? Perhaps this was a front for an old-fashioned “massage parlor.”

  As Jon thought that, he dropped low and peered in through the mail slot. The reception area was sparsely furnished, with cheap molded-plastic chairs and tables. The couch was overstuffed and had bamboo arms and braces. Magazines in both Chinese and English lay on the tables and couch. The waiting room was deserted. So where was the voice coming from? Had he been wrong?

  Weapon in hand, he turned the knob and crept inside. That was when he saw the second door. McDermid said something from the room on the other side of it.

  Jon had begun to smile to himself when suddenly there was complete silence. The talk had stopped in the inner office. Two people—McDermid and the doctor or the masseur—should make some sound . . .

  Jon’s chest tightened as a new answer occurred to him. There was another reason McDermid might take the subway and walk. McDermid could have expected to be followed. He could have expected Jon. The unpleasant truth was . . . McDermid could have lured him into an ambush.

  Jon spun, dove to the floor, and skidded behind the couch, his Beretta ready.

  The hall door flew open, latch and hinges ripping, and crashed to the floor in a shower of splinters. Two of his earlier tails slammed through the opening, pistols preceding them.

  Jon squeezed off two rounds. One of the men fell onto his face and slid across the linoleum floor, leaving a slash of red blood. The other flung himself backward out of harm’s way, into the hall again. Jon’s bullet had missed him.

  Jon snaked forward on his elbows. The second man darted into view again, gun aimed at the couch. Jon was halfway toward the door, where the gunman had not expected him to be. Jon fired once. This time there was a grunt of pain, a curse, and the man fell back.

  Warily, Jon reached the shattered doorway and positioned himself low but where he could rise to see along the hall toward the elevators and where anyone trying to enter the reception room through the second door would have to be fully inside before they could focus on him and shoot. Ahead in the hall, two men bent over a third, who sat against the wall. Blood pooled at his side, where Jon’s shot had connected. They glanced angrily back at the office where Jon hid and watched.

  Jon scrambled up, ran to the couch, laid it on its cloth side, and pushed it to the doorway. He positioned it to cover his flank and dropped to the floor again.

  He could hear the sounds of feet outside in the corridor, trying to be quiet. His hunters were moving in. He made himself stay down. He counted off ten seconds, raised up, and dropped one with a single shot as he burst in, low to the floor.

  As the cry of pain echoed against the marble walls, the office’s other door blasted open and shots slammed into the couch’s bamboo and stuffing. Jon fell flat, waiting. His heart ticked into his ears. Finally, a man jumped through the door and into the room, a tiny submachine gun in his hands. Jon fired off a bullet. The man catapulted back against a large window and crashed through, his scream receding as he dropped from sight.

  Jon raised above the couch again to check the hall. They were closing in—three this time. He fired twice, and they scurried back, but for how long? They would try again from the inner room, too. He had another clip, but eventually they would coordinate better, attack simultaneously from both doors, and that would end it. He would be killed or captured. He was unsure which they wanted.

  Sweat broke out on his forehead. On one knee, he waited for the next assault from the inner office. Without warning, they barreled through. There were two now. They moved faster and were cleverer, diving to either side, while he had to remain alert in case those in the hall attacked simultaneously. He emptied his gun, spraying the chairs, tables, walls. He slammed in his last clip—and they were gone.

  Or were they? Abruptly, more shots exploded, shook the walls. But from where? The hall or the inner office? And where were the bullets? Nothing hit the couch where he crouched, and nothing slammed into the waiting room. Should he drop or remain kneeling? As another fusillade erupted, he realized the noise came from out in the hall. Oddly, they were not shooting at him.

  He raised up and looked. There were four of them, including the two from the inner office. The fifth and sixth—both injured—lay in one of the elevators, the doors jammed open. The remaining four hunters were firing away from him, toward the opposite end of the corridor. Abruptly, one turned and shot back, trying to keep him pinned down.

  He returned fire, rising and dropping. Suddenly there was swearing, scrambling, and the slam of a door as heavy feet raced away. He listened. An elevator door closed. There was silence from both the corridor and the inner room. Were they really gone? Or was this another damn trick?

  Cautiously, he leaned out to look. The hall was empty in both directions. The old building creaked. Somewhere on another floor, a toilet flushed. Jon inhaled. He wiped his sleeve across his forehead as he studied the motionless man he had shot, who still lay sprawled on the floor of the waiting room. He crab-walked to him. The man was dead, and his pockets carried nothing that would identify him.

  Disappointed, Jon jumped up and sped into the inner office. There was a massage table, a cabinet, a chair, and a portable radio-and-CD player. Everything had been riddled with gunfire. Wind whistled through the broken window through which one of the men he had shot had crashed. Below, sirens screamed. The Hong Kong police were on their way.

  There was a second door in here, too. It stood open into the hall. He sprinted toward it and gazed carefully out. The corridor was still deserted, blood and bullet casings making a trail to the elevator. Beretta in both hands, he moved toward the elevators, too, swinging the pistol front and back, covering the passageway, as he continued past and reached the last door in the hall, the only other one that was open. It faced the length of the corridor.

  Beretta up, he rolled around the doorjamb and pointed. In his sights was the Chinese peasant woman he had seen earlier from his hiding place in the stairwell. Still dressed in her black pajamas and conical straw hat, she sat cross-legged on the floor, her back against a rolltop desk. There was a cell phone at her side. Both hands aimed a thoroughly nonpeasant 9mm Glock at him.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  Still keeping her Glock aimed at him, her voice was irritated as she said in perfect American English, “So this is the answer. Your goal in life is to screw up my operations. Your timing stinks.” But she smiled.

  “Randi?”

  “Hi, soldier.” She lowered her weapon.

  He stared as he put his away. “Unbelievable. The CIA just keeps getting better at their disguises.” So this was where the other gunfire had originated. Randi had created the diversion that had saved him.

  She uncoiled from the floor and rose to her feet in a single motion. “Do I hear sirens?”

  “You do. We’d better get the hell out of here.”

  Beijing

  The scent of camellias floated in from the lush garden at Zhongnanhai as Niu Jianxing—the Owl—leaned back, listening angrily to the discussion at tonight’s special Standing Committee meetin
g. All of his intellect was being required to keep his program on track in the face of the Empress crisis. He could not allow his bad temper to show.

  “First the American spy, who has, it seems, been allowed to escape,” Wei Gaofan complained. His fierce, temple-dog scowl made his usually unsmiling face seem almost kindly. “Now this American warship—what is it? the John Crowe?—invading our rights on the high seas! It’s an outrage!” It was the hawk party line.

  “Exactly how did Colonel Smith escape?” Song Riuyu, one of the younger members of the Standing Committee, asked.

  Niu said calmly, “That is being investigated as we speak.”

  “How is it being investigated?” Wei Gaofan demanded. “Are you forming one of those endless, pointless committees like the Europeans do?”

  Niu’s voice was suddenly sharp. “Are you volunteering for that committee? If so, I can certainly form one and would be honored to add your name . . .”

  “You have the confidence of us all, Jianxing,” corpulent Shi Jingnu purred in his smooth, silk-merchant’s voice.

  The general secretary intervened: “These matters concern all of us. I, for one, need answers to both questions. Are the Americans just waving the Roosevelt big stick, or are they actually sharpening their Kennedy swords?”

  “A full report on the escape of Colonel Smith will be in your hands tomorrow,” Niu promised.

  “And their frigate shadowing our cargo ship?” The secretary glanced down at the papers before him on the long table. “The Dowager Empress, is it?”

  Niu nodded. “That’s her name. She’s owned by Flying Dragon Enterprises.”

  He cast a swift glance toward Wei Gaofan, because the son-in-law of one of his closest protégés was the president of Flying Dragon. Still, Wei showed no particular interest—or even a reaction—to Niu’s statement.

  Niu continued, “She’s registered in Hong Kong. I have completed an investigation of Flying Dragon and learned it’s operated by one Yu Yongfu in Shanghai, and that the Empress is en route to Basra, Iraq.” There was still no reaction from Wei. At the least, he should be offering his observations if not the information that he knew Yu Yongfu.