by Jake Needham
“Really? You’ve never refused one before.”
Then Claire realized what else August had just said. She leaned forward and lowered her voice.
“Her? The messenger wasn’t Lawrence of Princeton?”
August shook his head and looked around again. He knew no one but Claire could hear anything he said, but he still felt uncomfortable having a public conversation about an assignment.
“Maybe we’d better take this upstairs,” he said.
“Who was she?” Claire asked.
August was sitting exactly where he had been with the messenger a half hour or so before and Claire was sitting exactly where the messenger had been. He knew it didn’t matter, but there was something about it that bothered him anyway.
“No idea. Never seen her before.”
“Then how can you be sure—”
“She had the correct recognition phrase. Everything else fit. I have no reason to doubt she was who she said she was.”
“Okay, so what was the assignment and why did you turn it down?”
“I’m going to call down and ask Woods to bring me a beer,” he said. “How about one for you?”
When Claire nodded, he walked over to the desk, picked up the telephone, and told Woods to bring up a couple of Beerlao’s. He put the phone down, but almost immediately picked it up again.
“Make that three, Woods, and get somebody to cover the bar for you. You need to hear this, too.”
After Woods passed the beers around, he pulled a chair over and sat down. He and Claire looked at August and waited.
“The problem with the assignment,” August said, “is that it’s in Hong Kong and has to be completed in less than forty-eight hours. There’s simply not enough time to get where we need to be, develop a plan, and implement it without taking unacceptable risks. I’m not going to do that.”
“Who’s the target?” Claire asked.
August pointed to the envelope lying on the table between Claire and Woods, and picked up his beer. “It’s all in there,” he said. “Knock yourself out.”
Claire slid the pages from the envelope. Everyone sipped their beers in silence while she examined the photos, passed them to Woods, and then read the notes that were in the envelope with them. She passed those to Woods as well and then looked at August, waiting for the rest.
“He’s a former CIA employee who has been under investigation by the FBI,” he said. “They think he’s been leaking the identities of American assets in China to the Chinese, but they don’t have enough to charge him or arrest him. They also think he’s about to defect. He leaves London tomorrow on a flight to Hong Kong that arrives on Saturday morning, and their information is that the Chinese are picking him up there in Hong Kong on Sunday. You see the problem.”
“The Conductor is giving us forty-eight hours to find this guy, scout out the location, develop a plan, and implement it?”
August nodded at Claire. “In a nutshell.”
“Wow,” she said.
“Exactly.”
The three of them drank their beers quietly for a few minutes and thought about that. Nobody said anything. August figured that was because there really wasn’t anything to say. He was just about to declare the meeting closed when, to his surprise, Woods spoke up.
“How much damage could this guy do if he makes it to China?”
“All I know is what the messenger said. And she said it could cause a lot.”
“Do you know about the American assets in China who’ve been executed over the last year or so?”
August nodded.
“There’ve been five or six that I know of. They even shot one of them right in the middle of the office where he was working as a lesson to everyone else there.”
August nodded again.
“Was this guy responsible?”
“That’s what the messenger said.”
“And you believe her?”
“I have no reason not to.”
Woods took that in while he finished his beer. He thought about it some more, and then suddenly rapped the bottom of the empty bottle sharply against the table.
“Well, fuck,” he said. “That’s a big goddamn deal. I think we ought to at least check this out.”
“That’s what I think, too,” Claire quickly added.
“Whoa,” August said. He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “This isn’t exactly a democracy, you know. We don’t take a vote on this stuff.”
“Maybe not, Bossman,” Claire said, “but Woods has a good point. We’re just asking you to take another look at this.”
“You can’t seriously believe that we have enough time to find this guy and put together a feasible plan before he takes the big leap, do you?”
“Do you know where he’s staying?” she asked.
“The Cordis in Mongkok.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It used to be called—”
“I remember now,” Claire interrupted. “Langham Place. That’s that big hotel they built in Mongkok a few years ago thinking it would revive the neighborhood.”
August nodded.
“Mongkok’s a good choice as a place to stash him if the Chinese are going to pull him out. Every street mobbed with locals and not a tourist in sight.” Claire tapped her forefinger on the stack of photographs that Woods had dropped back on the table while he read the brief. “With a face like his he’s not going to stand out in Mongkok, and there’s not much chance of him running into anyone he knows around there.”
“Look, all I’m saying,” Woods jumped in, “is that we ought to go to Hong Kong and look around. My guess is it will turn out you’re right. There’s simply not enough time for us to get it done.”
“Then why go at all?” August asked.
“Well, who knows? Funny shit happens all the time. Maybe we’ll find ourselves standing behind this guy on Nathan Road and just push him in front of a bus. There’s a lot at stake here. I think we ought to at least take a look.”
August had known Woods for over a decade and that was the longest speech he had ever heard him make. He might have used up his quota of words for at least the next six months, but he had gotten August’s attention by doing it. Just as he no doubt expected to.
August looked at Claire. “And that’s what you think, too?”
“Hong Kong’s a cool place,” she said. “We go, spend a couple of days, have some good Cantonese food, and come home if an opportunity to deal with the target doesn’t come up. Come on, Bossman. In and out, quick and clean. No footprints. What have we got to lose?”
August looked from Claire to Woods and back again.
“You guys seriously want to check this out? Really?”
Claire and Woods both nodded.
“Well, shit,” August sighed.
Chapter Ten
August hadn’t changed his mind about whether they could do it, but Claire and Woods were right about one thing. There was a lot at stake and it was at least worth taking a look.
There was almost certainly no way they could develop and execute a plan in the time available to them without being downright reckless. Strange things did occasionally happen, however. Maybe there was only one chance in a hundred they would stumble over some way to get to the target within the very small window they had, but it was a short trip up to Hong Kong and just taking a look didn’t really create any risks, did it?
At least that’s what August told himself at the time.
Later, looking back, he wished he had told himself something else.
August and his team generally moved around the region using a charter company that flew a couple of Dassault Falcons and a Gulfstream out of Manila. Red River Consultants paid all the bills, of course, but the lunatic German who ran the charter company thought he had figured out that they were really CIA so he never argued with any strange requests they might have and gave them priority service in getting aircraft where they were needed. August liked that. He figured it made them the only op
erators in the entire world who used the Central Intelligence Agency for a cover.
But, if they were going to do this, they needed to keep a far lower profile than flying into Hong Kong on a sixty-five-million-dollar private jet would afford them. They needed to slip quietly into town, take a look around, confirm what he already thought — that the assignment was impossible — then slip quietly right back out of town again. No muss, no fuss. Like they were never even there.
“I want to keep this strictly low profile,” August told Claire and Woods. “Just the three of us. We travel separately on three different commercial flights and use different credit cards to keep the reservations from being linked together.”
“If we do all three bookings at once and anyone checks the booking times,” Claire said, “the connection will still be obvious.”
“If anyone goes to that much trouble, it’ll probably be because we’re already screwed anyway.”
Claire moved over to August’s desk, woke up his laptop, and checked the Friday flights from Bangkok to Hong Kong. The early morning flights were all full, but there were seats available on a Thai Airways flight at 12:30pm, a Cathay Pacific flight at 1:30pm, and another Thai Airways flight at 2:00pm. August might be willing to take a little punishment every now and then for his country, but flying Thai Airways was beyond his tolerance for pain. He told Claire to book the 1:30pm Cathay Pacific flight for him and she and Woods could divide themselves up on the two Thai flights. That would get him to Hong Kong on Friday at about 5:00pm local time, with one of the others arriving just before him and the other just after.
“What identities do you want to use?” Claire asked.
“Mix them up. Maybe one Canadian, one Australian, and one Brit. Pick some identities we haven’t used in a while. Other than that, surprise me.”
Claire nodded and bent back to the laptop’s keyboard.
“One other thing,” August said. “Get us rooms at the Cordis so we can stick close to this guy. And we’ll all use public taxis to get to the hotel from the airport. No hotel cars. Too conspicuous and easy to keep track of.”
“You don’t want to stay at the safe house?”
The Band kept an apartment in a big building high in the Mid-Levels above Hong Kong Harbor. It was a nice apartment and August liked it, but it was a long slog from the Mid-Levels across the harbor and all the way up the Kowloon Peninsula to Mongkok. Even using the MTR and doing most of the trip underground, it would take them close to forty-five minutes every time they went back and forth, longer during busy periods, and Hong Kong had a lot of busy periods.
“If the information they’re giving us is good, we’ll probably have thirty-six hours between the time this guy gets to Hong Kong and the Chinese pick him up. I don’t want to use up most of that traveling from the Mid-Levels to Mongkok and back.”
“You sound like you’re changing your mind about whether we can do this, Bossman.”
He did sound like that, it occurred to August. Force of habit, he supposed. When you work an assignment, you think about handling it, not reasons you can’t do it. He had looked at assignments like that for a long time. It was hard to think about them any other way.
“What do you want to do about gear?” Woods asked.
That was a good question. The safe house had a cache of weapons and other gear that was difficult to carry when they traveled and it wouldn’t take too much time for one person to make a single quick trip to the safe house to grab some of it, but what would they need? Since August had no plan, and not the slightest idea there was even any way they could do this much less how they might be able to do it, he had no idea what gear they might need. None.
When August hesitated, Woods said, “Never mind. I’ll take care of it. I’ll just use my imagination and surprise you.”
August nodded. Normally the way they geared up would be his call, but this wasn’t really going to happen anyway, was it? So why should he care what gear they had? He quietly congratulated himself on his indifference and saw that as solid proof that his feet remained planted firmly on a road that would take them on to reality.
August told Woods and Claire he would see them in Hong Kong. Later that night, he rode the Norton up to Bangkok.
Bangkok has two airports, but the primary one used by most international flights is called Suvarnabhumi. The construction of Suvarnabhumi began in 1973 in an unpromising marshy area south of Bangkok that most people called the Cobra Swamp, but the airport didn’t actually open until the end of 2006. If you can figure out how it took the Thais thirty-three years to build a new airport, you will understand exactly how the entire country works.
Cobra Swamp lies just off the main highway between Pattaya and Bangkok. It’s normally about an hour north of Pattaya, or maybe twice that if the traffic is awful, and it can be reached from most parts of Bangkok in about the same amount of time. August didn’t really need to go up to Bangkok the night before they left in order to make his flight. He just wanted to.
August had a bolt hole apartment in Bangkok in a building just off Soi Thonglor that was on the south side of the city. The location gave him easy access from Pattaya without having to cross the city and endure its internationally famous traffic jams. No one else knew about his apartment and he had gone to considerable lengths to keep it that way. The Conductor didn’t know about it. Even Claire and Woods didn’t know about it. August’s guess was that Claire and Woods had bolt holes of their own that he didn’t know about either.
It wasn’t that you didn’t trust the people you worked with, although he supposed sometimes you probably didn’t, but you still needed a place to go to ground where you were absolutely positive no one could find you for at least a few days. There were too many ways they could all end up in the shit. There had to be a safe place where you could go to clean up and regroup and figure a way forward.
August’s apartment was in an older building in a quiet area off the main road. It wasn’t the sort of flashy new building that had sprung up recently all over Bangkok to attract foreigners who were too dumb to know the prices real estate developers were asking them were outrageously inflated. There were a couple of Japanese tenants in the building and some Indians, but no westerners he had ever seen. Certainly, no Americans. August habitually avoided other Americans in Thailand and most Europeans as well. There was an Australian girl in Bangkok who worked at the embassy whom he slept with occasionally. He'd had her checked out, of course, but she came up clean. If you had to take a risk with somebody, he thought Australians were generally a good choice because no one believed Australians were important enough to bother to compromise them. New Zealanders were okay, too, but then they were almost the same as Australians anyway.
The staff at his building knew him as Francis X. Bushman, which he thought was rather droll. Bushman was presumably a Canadian investor who lived somewhere in North America and only used his apartment in Bangkok occasionally. August wasn’t certain how showing up on a lovingly restored 1971 Norton Commando fit the image of a Canadian investor looking for business opportunities in Southeast Asia, but he didn’t worry about it. His guess was that the Thais just shrugged off his bike as nothing more than one more piece of evidence of something they already knew perfectly well: all white guys really were nuts.
For a foreigner, life in Thailand can be pretty good. It’s a little like being in a kindergarten class where the teacher doesn’t bother to show up very often.
That was one of the reasons August particularly liked riding the Norton at night. The Norton had a reputation as one of the fastest production bikes ever built and August thought it was only right to let it strut its stuff every now and again. There was no better time to do that than a late-night ride from Pattaya up to Bangkok.
Bikes weren’t allowed on the motorway, so when August flew by on the Norton at ninety miles an hour any cop who wasn’t asleep or drunk would quickly look the other way. Thai policemen instinctively understand that no good can possibly come from messing wi
th a foreigner doing ninety on a big, expensive bike and riding on a road where he isn’t allowed. Anybody with the balls to do that had some serious juice. The foreigner knew somebody, he had to, and the somebody he knew would be a long way above a traffic cop in status and authority. There’s an old saying about pilots. There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. The same could be said of Thai cops. There were no old, bold Thai coppers. Not a one.
The other reason August liked riding the Norton at night was that the tropics only truly come alive in darkness. An elevated expressway runs most of the way from Pattaya to Bangkok, but there is also an older highway a bit to the east and that was the route he usually took. That road ran through some of the flattest and most unpromising countryside August had ever ridden in anywhere, but it also cut a swath through the reality of life in Thailand. The sights, the sounds, and the smells of it were all right there on the surface. When you’re sealed up in an air-conditioned car, you encounter little or nothing of them. But when you’re on a bike, you don’t just encounter them, you become part of them.
Yellow vapor lights on tall aluminum poles dotted both sides of the road in locations so random that their layout defied rational analysis, their lamps throwing sulfurous-looking stripes across the highway. Near Pattaya, the roadside was crowded with street vendors, their metal cooking carts strung with fluorescent tubes and their charcoal fires painting the air with a streaky haze. A barefoot boy in dark shorts and a T-shirt who looked to be not much more than ten sat on a rock next to one of the carts eating some kind of meat off a wooden stick and following August’s bike with his eyes. When he saw August looking at him, he broke into a grin and waved. August waved back.
A little further on, the vendors thinned out and a few scattered, doll-sized houses appeared. They were built largely of concrete blocks and most of the windows and doors were cut directly into the blocks causing the lights inside to give them the look of giant jack-o-lanterns. Wide porches sheltered motorbikes propped against front walls, but there were no driveways and no cars. Patches of scrawny brush and thin clumps of unidentifiable vegetation freckled the sandy ground between the houses. Occasionally the blue-white glow of a television flickered from a window, but you only felt rather than saw people moving in the darkness. It was as bleak as any place August could ever remember seeing.
