And Brother It's Starting to Rain

by Jake Needham

  He wasn’t particularly hungry, but he had to do something until Billy Fang showed up, so he ate slowly and watched the hotel’s driveway for a red Mercedes. He didn’t see one, but the goose tasted better than it looked and he had finished most of it when the burner phone buzzed in his pocket.

  He pulled out the phone and looked at the screen.

  Spike says target checked in. Room 1121.

  What the hell?

  August was absolutely certain he couldn’t have missed Billy Fang entering the hotel, not unless he had gone in through some entrance other than the main one, and why would he have done that?

  He tapped out a response.

  You spot him?

  A pause.

  No. You?

  That didn’t make any sense.

  How could Billy Fang have ridden a hotel limo in from the airport and checked into the hotel without coming in through the main entrance or being seen by Claire and Woods at the front desk?

  For just a moment August thought back to the fat black guy in the purple dashiki, but he quickly dismissed the thought. That was ridiculous.

  He texted back.

  Meet me at Chan Kee Roasted Goose Company.

  That brought a pause.

  Where?

  August sighed and pushed at the telephone’s keys again.

  Across Reclamation Street from the hotel. Come out main entrance. You’ll see it.

  Another pause.

  OK. Got it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The dumpy Chinese woman didn’t look all that happy when Woods and Claire came in and sat down with him. August gathered that dealing with one foreigner a day was pretty much her limit.

  He held up his half-empty bottle of San Miguel and wiggled it at her, pointing first to Claire and then to Woods. The woman stared back expressionlessly for a moment, then shuffled away. Maybe she was bringing two more beers. Or maybe not.

  “Did you actually eat whatever that was?”

  Claire pointed to the white plastic plate on which August’s goose had been served. It was empty now, except for a thin coat of congealed grease that glistened yellow in the wan light.

  August just smiled.

  “Oh, man,” Claire said, “it’s a good thing I’m not hungry.”

  The Chinese woman reappeared carrying two bottles of San Miguel and banged them down in the middle of the table with perhaps a little more energy than was strictly speaking required. Claire took one and pushed the other over to Woods. She inspected the neck of the bottle with some suspicion and then pulled a tissue out of her pocket and wiped it carefully all the way around. Woods watched her without expression, gave August a look he couldn’t quite interpret, and took a long pull from his own bottle without even looking at it.

  “Okay,” August said, “let’s get to it. How did he get by you?”

  “How did he get by you, Bossman?”

  “He didn’t get by me. He didn’t come in through the main entrance. The only guy who arrived in a hotel car was a fellow in a purple dashiki who looked like an African.”

  “Maybe wearing a purple dashiki makes you look African.”

  “It wasn’t Billy Fang, Claire. This guy must have gone 250, 280 if he weighed a pound.”

  “Yeah, we saw him at the reception desk. He looked like a check-in. Had a pile of luggage. But Billy Fang didn’t come to the reception desk. You can take that to the bank.”

  “Maybe he didn’t check in. Maybe Spike made a mistake.”

  “No way.” Woods shook his head. “No fucking way.”

  “So, if he is checked in, and he didn’t come in through the main entry and he didn’t go to the reception desk—”

  “Someone else must have checked in for him,” Claire interrupted.

  “You see anybody who could have done that?”

  Claire hesitated, looked at Woods. He shrugged.

  “There were a lot of people at the reception desk,” Claire said. “It’s a busy hotel. It could have been anybody.”

  August drank some beer he didn’t particularly want and thought about that.

  “It seems pretty obvious Billy Fang must know he’s under surveillance,” he said after a moment. “He’s being careful.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know,” Claire said. “Maybe he’s just covering himself out of habit.”

  “Maybe,” August said, but there was a doubtful tone in his voice.

  “Or maybe it’s the Chinese being careful with him,” Claire went on. “If I were pulling in a defector as valuable as they claim this guy is, I’d sure as hell be careful about how I did it.”

  That made sense to August, but whatever the explanation it looked like getting to Fang would be more difficult than they thought. Who was he kidding? Getting to this guy was already impossible. How could it have become harder than impossible?

  August studied the table top, Claire looked out the window, and Woods seemed lost in picking at the label on his beer bottle.

  “Look,” August finally said, spreading his hands. “We can’t even be sure Fang is really in the hotel, much less what room he’s in. The room they have in his name might be just a decoy. If somebody else checked him in, he could be anywhere.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “All we even think we know for sure,” August went on, “is that the Chinese are picking him up tomorrow. That gives us twenty-four hours to figure all this out, maybe less. I’ve got to be honest with you. I’ve got nothing here, but I’m open for ideas.”

  Slowly, with obvious reluctance, Claire shook her head. “Nothing from me.”

  “I may have something,” Woods said, and both Claire and August looked at him.

  Woods pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket. He touched the screen, turned it around, and pushed it out into the middle of the table. August looked down, but all he saw was a column of eight-digit numbers that ran off the bottom of the screen.

  “What is this supposed to be?”

  “It’s an app,” Woods said. “It’s for opening magnetic card key locks.”

  August just looked at him.

  “Yeah, really,” Woods nodded. “Spike has been playing with it for a while. He asked me to try it out around the hotel to test it for him.”

  “And it works?”

  “It worked on my door, but that’s the only one I’ve tried it on.”

  “Let me get this straight,” August said. “You mean you put your phone up against a door, use this app, and it opens the door?”

  Woods gave him a look. “You don’t think I’m serious, do you?”

  August made a rolling motion with one hand, leaned back in his chair, and folded his arms.

  “Most magnetic key locks have a USB port so the hotel can reset the lock in case there’s some kind of problem. I checked the lock on my door and found the port on the bottom of the lock plate.”

  August waited, but Woods appeared to be done.

  “Am I going to have to pull this out of you one sentence at a time?” he asked.

  Woods grunted. “I thought the rest would be obvious.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Look, you just use a USB cable to plug the phone into the port. It reads the code that’s been assigned to the lock, then sends the code and unlocks the door.”

  “And you tried this out on your door and it worked?”

  Woods nodded.

  “This I got to see,” August said.

  He stood up, dropped a couple of hundred Hong Kong dollars on the table, and pointed across the street to the hotel.

  Claire and August stood in the hallway in front of Woods’ room and watched him open the door with his phone. August still found it hard to believe it was that easy, so he asked Woods to do it again.

  Just like he had the first time, Woods plugged a short cable running from his phone into a USB port underneath the bottom edge of the brass plate that surrounded the handle and the lock. He selected the app and hit a key on the phone. A few seconds later everyone heard
a CLICK, Woods pushed down on the handle, and the door opened.

  A heavy-set Chinese woman wearing a maid’s uniform and large black eyeglasses emerged from a room three or four doors down and began gathering up fresh towels from a housekeeping cart. She took a long time doing it and August glanced over to see her watching them with a suspicious expression. He gave her a cheery wave, nudged Claire and Woods inside the room, and quickly closed the door behind them.

  “How long has Spike had this?” he asked when they were inside.

  “He’s been working on it for a while, but he didn’t want to say anything until he was sure it worked.”

  “And, apparently, it does.”

  Woods shrugged. “At least on my door.”

  “Before you get too carried away here,” Claire put in, “I don’t see what good this does us.”

  Woods and August both looked at her.

  “We don’t even know for sure that the target is in the room Spike says he checked into,” she said. “Right?”

  August nodded.

  “And even if he is in that room,” she went on, “I don’t see how it does us much good just to be able to open his door.”

  Claire walked back to the door that led into Woods’ room from the hallway and pointed up the short hallway, past the bathroom, and across the room to the desk that stood in front of the windows.

  “Assuming his room is pretty much like this one,” she said, “if he’s in the room at all, he’s going to be in one of three places. On the bed, sitting at this desk, or sitting in that easy chair.”

  “He might be on the toilet,” Woods said.

  Claire looked at Woods, but she went on as if he hadn’t spoken.

  “Now I make it at least twenty-five feet from here to any of those three spots. Wherever this guy is, he isn’t going to just hang around while the three of us stumble through the door to his room, rush across those twenty-five feet, and take him down. We already think he may be on alert and there’s no doubt he’s nervous.”

  “Yeah,” Woods began, “but—”

  “Either he’s going to be armed, in which case we’re fucked immediately, or he’s not going to be armed and he raises a ruckus, in which case we’re fucked later. The only thing getting through his door does for us is guarantee a mess.”

  “It might if we went in through his front door, but we’re not.”

  Claire and August both looked at Woods. He didn’t say anything. He just walked toward where Claire was standing by the door from the hallway, but he stopped before he reached the bathroom and pointed to his left.

  “We’re going to go through here.”

  “The connecting door,” August said.

  Claire was still skeptical. “How do you know the target’s room even has a connecting door?”

  “Spike checked. It does. And the room that connects to it is empty. He checked that, too.”

  Claire gestured at the connecting door. “Try it.”

  “I already have,” Woods said. “The connecting door is really two doors. The one on this side opens toward us. It isn’t locked from our side, only from the other side.”

  Woods swung the handle of the connecting door down and pulled it toward them. Sure enough, they were looking at the front of another door. Woods took the cable from his telephone and felt underneath the brass plate around the handle. When he found the USB port, he plugged the cable in and started the app. After a few seconds, the lock clicked. He pulled down on the handle and pushed the door open. The room beyond was dark and empty.

  “I already knew there was nobody in there,” Woods said. “I’m not just a pretty face.”

  Claire and Woods looked at August. He scratched at his ear and thought about it.

  “Okay,” he said, “it might work.”

  He walked over to the window and stood there for a moment looking down at the street.

  “We’ll wait until three or four in the morning,” he said when he turned back around. “If the target is going to be asleep at all, he’ll be asleep then. Coming in from the hallway would probably wake him up since there wouldn’t be anything we could do about the hallway lights. But if we keep the connecting room dark and open the connecting door very quietly, we ought to be able to slip in without spooking him.”

  August walked through the connecting door and looked around the other room.

  “It’s no more than ten feet from the connecting door to the bed. If the target’s room is like this one, we should have no trouble getting control of him before he wakes up. We hit him with some sodium thiopental, then when he’s out we give him the phenobarbital and tuck him up in bed. We close the connecting doors, exit through his door into the hallway, and put out the Do Not Disturb sign. By the time anybody gets suspicious enough to check on him, we’ll be back in Pattaya.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Woods said. “Want me to go to the safe house and bring back weapons just in case everything goes to shit?”

  “Three handguns with suppressors,” August said. “One spare magazine for each. But that’s it. Nothing bigger. We’re not going to shoot our way out of Hong Kong.”

  August looked from Woods to Claire and back again.

  “Are both of you okay with this?”

  Woods nodded quickly. Claire took a little longer, but eventually she nodded, too.

  “Okay,” he said. “Woods, head over to the safe house now and get the handguns. While you’re there, see if we have a fiber-optic snake that will fit under the connecting door. I’d like to see what we’re getting into before we go in.”

  Woods nodded again.

  “You talk to Spike, Claire, and get him to keep an eye on… what room is it?”

  “The target is in 1121,” Woods said. “The connecting room is 1119.”

  “Then tell Spike to keep an eye on the hotel system and make sure no one checks into 1119. I don’t want to walk in there in the middle of the night and have to shoot a couple of tourists from Cleveland.”

  “Maybe Spike can find a way to block up the room in the hotel’s inventory,” Claire said. “Log it as having a maintenance problem or something.”

  “Good idea. Tell him to try that.”

  August looked back and forth between Claire and Woods.

  “We’ll meet back here at midnight, run through everything again, and go down to 1119. Unless we see a reason not to, we’ll go into 1121 about four. Get some sleep. You’ll probably need it. Any questions?”

  Nobody had any.

  “One other thing,” he added. “Bring your passports and your gear just in case we have to make a fast exit. Don’t leave anything behind. If this all goes to shit, I don’t want to be standing around with my dick in my hand while you two get your stuff. Got that?”

  This time both Claire and Woods nodded in almost perfect synchronization.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Just before midnight, they all regrouped in August’s room and Woods handed August the fiber-optic snake he brought from the safe house.

  “I thought we had one there,” August said. “Have you checked that it’s functioning right?”

  Woods nodded.

  “And you’ve tried it under the connecting door?”

  Woods nodded again. “Fits fine.”

  August handed the snake back and Woods tucked it away in his backpack.

  “Spike put a maintenance block on 1119,” Claire said. “But he’s watching the hotel system just to be sure nothing gets changed.”

  “We’re sure that 1119 is still unoccupied?”

  “Positive.”

  “And Billy Fang is still in 1121?”

  “He is according to the hotel inventory system,” Claire said, “but Spike says no charges have been posted to the account other than the room charge. No telephone calls, no room service, no movie charges.”

  “So now at least we know he’s not in there drinking and watching porno?”

  Nobody bothered to respond. August didn’t blame them.

  He looked
at Woods. “The insulin kit?”

  Woods nodded and patted his backpack.

  “Both syringes filled?”

  Woods nodded again.

  “Okay, let’s gear up.”

  August picked up one of the Sig Sauer 9mm’s that Woods had laid out on the coffee table and Claire and Woods collected the other two. August ejected the magazine from his, checked the action, then reseated the magazine. He holstered the Sig and slid the paddle holster onto his belt at the four o’clock position so that his lightweight blazer would cover it. The extra magazine and the suppressor went into his backpack along with his passport, the burner phones, his own iPhone, and the few other things he had brought with him.

  “Okay, then. Everybody ready?”

  “Let’s go, Bossman.”

  When they left the elevator on the eleventh floor, the corridor was quiet and empty. August figured the odds favored that after midnight, of course, but you never know. Murphy’s Law had taken over operations more often than he wanted to remember. He wouldn’t have been all that surprised to discover the Texas A&M Marching Band doing drills in the hallway right outside of 1119.

  August looked both ways, checking for cameras. Other than two that covered the elevators, he didn’t see any. That didn’t mean there weren’t any, of course, but it seemed unlikely the cameras covering the elevators would be left visible and hidden cameras installed in the corridors. He had checked his own floor and Woods’ floor earlier and the set-up was the same so he was reasonably sure they weren’t being watched by some rent-a-cop slurping noodles in the basement. Regardless, by reflex he was still checking for cameras when they stopped in front of 1119.

  “Let’s use the viewer before you pop the lock,” August said to Woods. “Just to be on the safe side.”