And Brother It's Starting to Rain

by Jake Needham

  Suddenly the road was engulfed in a dense grove of palm trees and crossed a muddy river on a narrow bridge that rattled underneath the Norton. On the opposite bank a Thai temple, bathed in light, loomed white against the black sky. It glittered like fire from red and yellow glass embedded in its masonry.

  Then the temple was gone as abruptly as it had appeared and August was in darkness again, riding through the swampy, featureless scrubland.

  A little further along the concrete skeleton of a huge building appeared out of the night. It was completely dark, unfinished and abandoned, and it rose thirty or forty floors over absolutely nowhere at all. Beyond it were yards filled with wrecked cars and huge metal warehouses with signs in Thai script. Two old cargo airplanes in fading camouflage paint appeared like ghostly apparitions in an empty field just past the abandoned building. And around them a handful of scrawny cows grazed silently.

  A half hour or so later a bridge lifted the road in a long hump over a spider web of creeks and canals and at the crest the lights of Bangkok rose out of the distant blackness. Bangkok was like most cities. The further you got from it, the better it looked, and floating in the darkness twenty miles away it looked to August like a beguiling hallucination. The city sprawled from horizon to horizon, an open-legged trollop beckoning him forward.

  A million lights glittered triumphantly from a thousand soaring towers and for a moment August could almost forget the despair hiding in the valleys of darkness between those buildings. There were people who passed their lives in that darkness, millions of them, and they were people who lived on little more than perseverance. They were like the boy sitting on the rock at the side of the road who had waved at August when he passed. They took life as it came, a moment at a time, and they simply got on with it.

  There was dignity in that, August thought, even a little hope for the rest of us, if we were willing to see it.

  There were times when, God help him, August loved Thailand. Riding up from Pattaya, the Norton slashing the heavy air like a straight razor as the lights of Bangkok reached out of the darkness to embrace him, was one of those times.

  Chapter Eleven

  When August got to Hong Kong, he took a taxi to the Cordis Hotel in Mongkok where a slightly chubby Chinese woman greeted him from behind the reception desk. She was wearing a gray suit and black glasses that were far too large for her face, and her shiny black hair was pulled back so tightly into a bun that it very nearly constituted a do-it-yourself face lift.

  With a smile that made August think of a night nurse preparing to take a rectal temperature reading, she asked for his passport and a credit card. Her English had a pronounced Australian accent, which worked out well for August since he was now Lawrence Silver from Sydney. Her smile warmed up considerably when she saw the Australian passport Claire had used to book the hotel. She even upgraded him to an executive suite.

  The suite was L-shaped and occupied the whole northeast corner of the the forty-first floor. The living room had a couch upholstered in white canvas and two dark brown leather chairs grouped around a glass coffee table. The king-size bed was tucked away behind a blond wood half-wall on both sides of which hung extremely large flat screen televisions.

  But the suite’s most striking feature was its view. Both exterior walls were floor-to-ceiling glass curtains. From the living room, August had an unobstructed view over the hundreds of wooden junks tied up in the Yau Ma Tei typhoon shelter and all the way out to the immense modern container port at Stonecutters Island through which passed a considerable portion of the manufacturing output of China. From the bedroom he looked out over the teeming jumble of Mongkok and north into the New Territories. Deep in the haze he could see the low range of hills that marked the beginning of mainland China, once a land as closed and mysterious as any on earth, but now the seat of a manufacturing empire threatening to submerge the whole world under the flood tide of goods pouring out of its factories.

  He was still staring off to the north and contemplating the future when the doorbell rang. It was Woods.

  “How did you find me so fast?” August asked him.

  “Spike hacked into the hotel’s reservation system. He called me as soon as you checked in.”

  “I should have guessed.”

  “He’s into the Cathay Pacific system, too. Billy Fang is on Cathay Pacific 238 which is scheduled into Hong Kong tomorrow at 12:55pm, and he’s booked a hotel limousine to bring him straight here from the airport.”

  “Not much traffic on a Saturday. Even allowing for clearing Immigration at the airport, that would put him here somewhere around 2:00pm if the flight is on time.”

  Woods nodded.

  “Spike is going to keep us posted?”

  Woods nodded again.

  Spike was a Chinese guy who served for a decade in the famed Snow Leopards anti-terrorism unit of the People’s Armed Police in Beijing, but they made the mistake of sending him to Hong Kong on special assignment and he quickly decided Hong Kong was a lot cooler than Beijing. He promptly resigned from his unit, informally of course, and disappeared into the mass of the Chinese population in Hong Kong. Eventually he met a guy who knew a guy who knew another guy who sent him to August. That’s how things usually worked in Hong Kong. There was always a guy who knew a guy who knew somebody else. Because of the skills Spike had developed working for the Chinese police as a computer hacker, August promptly signed him on, sent him to Pattaya, and set him up with all the gear he could think of.

  Spike’s real name was Dong Shui, which is probably why he chose a nickname for himself. When everyone was speaking English, who the hell wants to be called Dong? He claimed to have come up with Spike as a nickname from watching American cartoons to improve his English. August had no trouble believing that since when Spike spoke English he sounded a little like Scooby-Doo, although August didn’t really care how Spike sounded. He was an artist with a laptop. Spike had yet to meet a computer system he couldn’t access. With Spike back in Pattaya using his keyboard to tap into the known universe, and for all August knew maybe parts of the unknown one too, August felt like he had a direct line to the Almighty.

  “Why don’t you check the minibar?” August said to Woods as he closed the door behind him. “We both could use a beer.”

  Woods dropped the small leather duffel bag he was carrying on the coffee table and rooted around in the minibar until he found two bottles of Tsingtao which he regarded doubtfully. Tsingtao claimed to be the best-selling beer in the world. If it really was, Woods figured that had to be just because there were a couple of billion Chinese without all that many choices as to what beer they drank.

  Woods found an opener, popped the caps on both bottles, and brought them back to the coffee table. He and August clicked bottles, each of them took a long pull, and then Woods put his bottle down and unzipped the little leather duffle he had brought with him. He took out two Samsung Galaxy S4’s and set them on the table in front of August.

  “I went to Sin Tat Plaza as soon as I got here and bought six phones. All the same model. Decent batteries and good screens. The camera’s okay, too, but I guess that doesn’t matter. I’ve loaded all six phones with prepaid SIMs that have enough air time for all the talking and texting we’re going to want to do in thirty-six hours.”

  Mongkok was notorious as a market for fake and hot goods, and Sin Tat Plaza on Argyle Street was where you went if you were looking for cell phones that might still be slightly warm. Picking up a stash of local burner phones was the starting point for every operation, and recently stolen phones were the Dom Pérignon of burners.

  Woods reached out and turned the two phones over. On the back of one was a piece of tape with the numeral 1 written on it, and on the back of the other another piece of tape that said 2.

  “We use the set marked 1 for communications and save the set marked 2 as a backup if we have to ditch the first set for any reason. I’ve programmed all the numbers for each set into the other two phones in that se
t.”

  August pulled up the directory for the phone with the numeral 1 on it. Sure enough, there were only two entries: one for Woods and one for Claire, labeled as W and C respectively. An impenetrable cypher if he had ever seen one.

  “You got any ideas how we can do this yet, boss?”

  “Not a fucking clue.”

  The doorbell rang and that took August off the hook from having to expand on his pronouncement, which he couldn’t have anyway. Woods got up and let Claire in.

  “That looks good,” Claire said, flopping down in a chair and pointing at one of the half-empty bottles of Tsingtao on the coffee table. “I’ll have one, too.”

  August looked at Woods. He gave a little shrug.

  “You’re kidding me,” Claire said, looking back and forth between August and Woods. “You drank all the beer?”

  “There were only two,” Woods said. “Have something else.”

  “I don’t want something else. I want a beer.”

  Woods shrugged again.

  “Why don’t you look in the minibar?” August said, pointing toward it. “Maybe there’s another brand.”

  Claire walked over and opened the door. August glanced at Woods and saw him frown slightly. August was still trying to figure out what that meant when Claire stood up and turned around. She was holding up a bottle of Miller Lite.

  “A couple of real gentlemen, aren’t you? You leave nothing for me but cat piss.”

  “First come first served,” August shrugged. “Sexual equality is our guiding credo here.”

  “One for all and all for one,” Woods contributed.

  “Well, fuck you both very much, too.”

  Claire opened the Miller Lite anyway, and then walked over and sat down with August and Woods.

  Woods dipped into his leather bag, pulled out two more Samsung phones, and went through the same explanation with Claire that he had with August. Claire did exactly the same thing August had done. She picked up the phone marked 1 and checked the directory.

  “Brilliant code,” she said. “Fucking brilliant.”

  She put the phone back on the table, drank some Miller Lite, and made a face.

  “So now what?” she asked.

  “I got no idea,” August said. “None. Billy Fang is getting here about two tomorrow and we’re being told the Chinese are going to pick him up sometime the following day. That leaves us less than twenty-four hours either to take him or forget it. I still just can’t see it.”

  “We got to try, Bossman. If he goes over to the Chinese, he’ll take enough with him to get a lot of people killed.”

  “I understand that, Claire, but it doesn’t change what we’re looking at here. I don’t care if he’s turning over all our stealth fighter technology, we’ve still got less than twenty-four hours to take him.”

  “So, we just shoot the bastard. That won’t take twenty-four hours.”

  “Here’s the thing. In order to do this and get ourselves out of Hong Kong, we’ve got to make it look enough like either an accident or natural causes to buy us at least twelve hours. We’re surrounded by China here, and under the circumstances I’m sure you will agree that crossing the border into China is a truly shitty idea. There are only two ways out of Hong Kong for us. One is by sea and the other is by air, and they are both pretty damned conspicuous.”

  “What’s the big deal?” Claire asked. “We shoot him and then we go to the airport and fly home. End of story.”

  “Not quite. There’s only one airport here. If the Hong Kong police know this guy has been killed and they have anything to go on at all, they’ll flood the airport looking for us before we can even get there.”

  “Then we’re just going to give up?”

  “Give me a break here. I’m not giving up. I’m just telling you that I don’t see how we can do it. In order to pull this off and get out of Hong Kong, we need to find a way to make it look either natural or accidental long enough for us to get on an airplane and back to Thailand, and I don’t see how we can do that in the time we have available.”

  A small silence fell after that. They each drank their beer and peered off into the distance as if they were thinking through possible courses of action, but mostly they were all just feeling frustrated.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Claire said after a while.

  “Yeah,” August said, “maybe he’ll be hit by a bus out on Shanghai Street before he can get inside. That would do it.”

  Claire finished her Miller Lite and plunked the bottle down on the coffee table. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going downstairs and look for a bar that has real beer. Anybody coming with me?”

  “You two go ahead,” August said. “I’m going to go out and walk the area. Maybe I’ll get a bright idea.”

  “You want us to come with you?” Woods asked.

  “No, I just need to think. You two find some decent beer and have a good dinner.” He scooped up one of the phones Woods had distributed and wiggled it. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

  “So where and when do you want us next?” Claire asked.

  “Right here. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. That will give us four hours before the target gets to the hotel. If we can’t be brilliant in four hours, we’re not going to be brilliant at all.”

  Chapter Twelve

  August liked Hong Kong. He liked the way the city throbbed with energy. No matter who you are or how old you might be, some of that energy seeps into you and makes the world feel more intense there. The colors are brighter, the sounds louder, and the odors more powerful. Usually that’s a good thing, but not always. Particularly that part about the odors. Hong Kong stinks of a mix of carbon monoxide, raw sewage, rotting garbage, and duck mess. It smells like no other place on earth.

  Tourists absolutely love Hong Kong. They ride the Star Ferry back and forth across the harbor, shop at the designer boutiques in Central, and take the tram up to the Peak to gape at the city spread out below them. And there is much to gape at. Between Victoria Island and the Kowloon Peninsula lies one of the most perfect natural harbors in the world. On the green slopes that surround it, glittering skyscrapers are crammed like toy buildings flung around by an unruly child. It is a lot to absorb. It is a spectacle of splendor and wealth. Hong Kong, the tourists tell each other, is truly the future.

  Mongkok is just a few stops north up the Kowloon Peninsula on Hong Kong’s ferociously efficient Mass Transit Railway, a couple of miles away from all that. Tourists don’t come to Mongkok. There is no splendor there, no spectacular harbor, no green clad hills, no designer boutiques. What is there instead is organized crime, the sex trade, and a couple of centuries’ accumulation of people who are hanging on to life by their fingernails.

  Block after block of grimy concrete buildings line the streets, cracked and pitted by the bad air, and rusted air-conditioner compressors dribble yet more dirty water down their walls. Black, Rorschach-like stains are smeared over walls that probably once, a very long time ago, were white.

  And then there are the people, more people than you have ever seen anywhere before. They say Mongkok is the most densely populated urban area in the world, and after a few minutes on the streets you can believe it. The crowds are so great that they have spilled off the sidewalks and taken over the roadways. There isn’t very much motorized traffic in Mongkok. There is no room left in the streets for it to drive.

  The Cordis hotel is in Langham Place which sits smack in the middle of it all. Two soaring towers of green glass house the hotel, a massive shopping mall, and a whole lot of offices. The two sleek skyscrapers rising out of all that cracked and dirty concrete look like a mirage, as if two gigantic rocket ships had arrived from outer space and somehow unaccountably picked Mongkok as the best place to land.

  August liked Mongkok at night, when the darkness smoothed away the sharp edges and softened the misery. Some of the streets turned into night markets then and the business of living sat very close to the surface. Old men
, some shirtless in the sticky heat, gathered in knots at the foot of greasy staircases, smoked foul-smelling Chinese cigarettes, and shouted to each other about the wrongs they had suffered that day, some imaginary, but others achingly real.

  August left the hotel through the main entrance, turned left on Shanghai Street, and strolled north between the tower housing the hotel and the one containing the shopping mall. At Argyle Street, the main artery through the heart of Mongkok, he turned right and shouldered his way through the crowds as far as Nathan Road, then he turned right again and circled back around the two towers until he had made a full circuit of them. Nothing he saw was encouraging.

  The towers were connected by two glassed-in walkways over Shanghai Street through which hotel guests could access the shopping mall. The hotel had half a dozen entrances and exits. Cross over to the shopping mall and there were a dozen more. It would take an army to keep a target in the hotel under surveillance. Three people had no chance at all other than blind luck, which he had never figured for a winning strategy.

  August entered the mall from Portland Street and took an escalator up to the second level. At the top he saw a Starbucks on a raised platform in the middle of a gigantic domed space where half a dozen major walkways intersected. He bought a coffee and sat down for a while to watch and think.

  The crowds surging back and forth around him made him feel like he was drinking coffee on a pier over the ocean and watching the surf wash in and out. Directly in front of him, right between the entrances to the two glass bridges that crossed over Shanghai Street to the hotel, stood a huge paper mache statue of a black and white panda bear. The thing must have been fifteen feet tall and it was surrounded by at least a dozen low tables on which rested red Chinese lanterns with bright lights inside. August couldn’t really see what the significance of the panda was, but nevertheless a couple of dozen Chinese families were lined up before it, each group stepping forward and organizing a photograph in front of the panda when their turn came. Perhaps, August thought to himself, some mysterious Chinese holiday was approaching that he had never heard of.