by Jake Needham
Woods put his backpack against the wall, pulled out the fiber-optic viewer, and began unrolling the snake.
“I’ll wait at the elevators,” Claire said. “If anyone gets out, I’ll push in and bump into them to give you time to cover yourselves.”
As Claire walked toward the elevators, Woods pushed the snake into the narrow gap between the hallway carpet and the bottom of the door. He moved it slowly back and forth with one hand and held the small screen of the viewer with the other. It was too close to Woods’ face for August to make out what it showed.
“Room’s completely dark,” Woods said. “Can’t see anything at all. What do you want to do?”
“Go ahead and pop the lock. I’ll take point.”
Woods withdrew the snake and put the viewer away in his backpack, then he pulled out his iPhone and a cable. He squatted down and ran his finger under the lock plate, looking for the USB port.
DING.
At the sound of the chime announcing the arrival of an elevator, August swiveled his head toward Claire. He saw her moving directly up in front of the doors of the elevator closest to them and blocking it with her body.
Woods found the port and plugged in the cable, then he opened Spike’s app.
“Oh, I’m so terribly sorry,” August heard Claire saying. “I’m not thinking clearly. Jet-lag I suppose. Are you okay? I really am so sorry. Can I help you up?”
CLICK.
“We’re in,” Woods announced and pushed the door open.
August went through the door in front of Woods, staying low. The backpack was looped over his left shoulder and his right hand was under his jacket resting on the butt of his Sig. Woods jerked the USB cable away with one hand, held the door open with the other, and slipped through right behind him.
The room was empty. Bed made, no luggage or personal items. Empty. Exactly as Spike had promised. Wonderful, August thought. He wouldn’t have to shoot two tourists from Cleveland after all.
He and Woods dumped their gear on the bed and August’s burner phone started to vibrate. He hit the button to answer the call.
“Everything cool?” Claire asked.
“As the proverbial cucumber.”
“I went back up to my floor when I got on the elevator, just to make it look good if anyone was watching. I’m on my way back down now.”
“Roger,” August said and disconnected the call.
He opened the drapes to let in the ambient light from the city and killed the room lights. Woods opened the inside connecting door and got down on his knees to examine the lock on the other door.
“The same,” he whispered. “No problem.”
Woods smoothed out the fiber-optic snake and slid it under the door very slowly. With his free hand, he flicked on the viewer.
“Some light, but no lights turned on. Drapes must be open a little.”
He slid the snake all the way to one side of the door and pushed it a little further into the room.
“I can’t really see up onto the bed, but it doesn’t look completely flat. Could be somebody under the comforter.”
August went down on one knee and looked over Woods’ shoulder at the screen of the viewer. The bed was too close to the door and the angle was too steep to make much out, but it looked like there was something in the bed. It was obvious enough that the surface was lumpy rather than flat and smooth. Still, it was impossible to tell for sure if there was anyone in it, let alone whether or not they were asleep.
“Maybe,” August said, “but who sleeps with the drapes open?”
There was a soft knock at the door and he walked over and let Claire in, which saved him from having to answer his own question.
They were all in place now and, as far as they could tell, the target was in the room next to them. All that was left for them to do was watch and listen to see if anything changed, wait until the early hours of the morning when the target was likely to be at his weakest, and then go in fast and hard.
August had spent most of his life waiting. School, army, the Agency. Hurry up and wait. He had gotten pretty good at it. Claire and Woods were almost as good. They just had a little less experience.
Woods leaned back against the headboard on one side of the room’s king-sized bed, turned on the reading lamp, and opened a paperback he pulled out of his backpack. Claire sat in the room’s easy chair, fiddled idly with her phone, and stared out the windows at the lights of Hong Kong. August stretched out on the bed next to Woods and closed his eyes. It was a soldier’s habit. Eat when you can, sleep when you can, and never pass up an opportunity to do either.
When his eyes opened, he looked at his watch. 1:40am.
He turned his head toward Woods who was still reading. “Hear anything?”
Woods didn’t look up from his book, but he shook his head.
August swung his feet to the floor, stood up, and stretched.
“Let’s take another look,” he said.
Woods closed his book, retrieved the viewer and the fiber-optic snake from his backpack, and went over to the connecting door. He looked back over his shoulder at August and pointed to the reading light he had been using. August flipped it off and the room went almost completely dark. Woods waited a minute or two for his eyes to adjust, then he opened the inside half of the connecting door.
After he extended the snake under the other side of the door and flipped on the viewer, August stood behind him and looked at the screen over his shoulder. Woods manipulated the snake, moving it slowly into the room and then sliding it side to side.
Nothing. No clear view of the target. No movement. Only the same dim, gray light and the same lump in the bed they had seen before. Woods looked back over his shoulder at August and raised his eyebrows in a silent question. When August nodded, Woods slowly withdrew the snake, stood up, and quietly closed the inside half of the connecting door.
“I don’t feel good about how little we know,” August said.
Woods hesitated. “I could try it from out in the hallway,” he said. “I think we’d get a better look at the bed from there.”
“Yeah, but if somebody comes out—”
Claire jumped to her feet. “I’ll cover you with my elevator bit. It worked last time.”
“That won’t get it done if somebody comes out of another room.”
“It’s 1:30am,” Woods said. “The chances of somebody leaving their room now have got to be pretty small. I’ll be quick, boss. Let me give it a shot.”
August hesitated, mostly just making a show of it, then nodded his head.
Chapter Sixteen
When August opened the room’s front door and looked up and down the hallway, he saw no one. He stepped out and gestured to Woods and Claire to follow. Claire positioned herself in front of the elevators to intercept anyone who might emerge. By the time she was in place, Woods was already on his knees sliding the fiber-optic snake under the door of room 1121.
August bent down and looked at the monitor. He struggled to understand what he was seeing from the worm’s-eye perspective it gave him.
“I’m pretty sure I see someone in bed,” Woods said. “And the drapes are closed. The light we saw was just ambient light from out here seeping under the door.”
Woods adjusted the snake a little to one side and August saw the lumpy form under the duvet. It was probably a human being, and probably the target, but it could have just been a stack of pillows and it could have been somebody else entirely. Woods continued adjusting the snake trying to get them a better view, but nothing seemed to help. The angle was simply too steep to be certain of anything.
“Can you get us a better look at that?” August asked, touching the screen of the viewer where a dark lump stood a little off to one side between the door and the bed.
Woods pulled the snake back and turned it as far to the side as it would go.
“Looks to me like luggage,” he said.
August peered hard at the monitor, willing it to resolve the image wit
h greater clarity, but of course it ignored him. Still, he thought there was something weird about the dark lump. It seemed almost pyramid shaped and it looked like it was covered in some kind of recurring pattern of light and dark shapes. Could that really be a stack of luggage? Maybe. But if it wasn’t, he didn’t know what the hell it was.
“That it?” Woods asked.
“Yeah.”
He smoothly withdrew the snake and came quickly to his feet, looping the flat cable around his forearm. Claire had been watching them from in front of the elevators and immediately turned and walked back. A few seconds later they were all back in 1119 with the door closed.
“I didn’t see anything that bothered me,” August said. “It does appear there’s somebody asleep in the bed, but we’re not going to be able to identify who it is until we get inside. Let’s give it another couple of hours. Then I want Woods to check the room once more from the connecting door. If nothing has changed, we’ll go in.”
But August had seen something that worked at him. Something that wasn’t entirely right. He just couldn’t figure out what it was.
They all resumed their prior positions.
Woods went back to his book, Claire went back to staring out the window, and August stretched out again and closed his eyes.
A little over an hour later, August opened his eyes. When he did, he knew exactly what he had seen that bothered him.
“It’s the luggage,” August said, sitting up.
Woods and Claire looked at him.
“The shape we saw from the hallway. I think it’s a stack of luggage and the pattern on it is the Louis Vuitton logo.”
“So, it was Louis Vuitton luggage,” Claire said. “Why does that matter?”
“Remember I told you about the guy in the purple dashiki? He had a pile of Louis Vuitton luggage.”
“A lot of people have Louis Vuitton luggage.”
“A lot of people who checked in to this hotel at exactly the same time Billy Fang is supposed to have checked in?”
“What are you saying, Bossman?” Claire asked. “That Billy Fang was disguised as an African with a pile of Louis Vuitton luggage?”
“Probably not, but it looks likely the luggage our African pal brought into the hotel ended up in the room registered to Billy Fang. Maybe he checked Billy in and delivered some stuff he’s going to take with him to Beijing. Then, after that, Billy slipped in through another entrance so he wouldn’t have to go through the lobby.”
“That makes sense,” Claire said.
“I’m not so sure it does, but at least it’s one explanation.”
“Another explanation is that it’s a coincidence.”
“And a third is that there’s something happening here that we don’t understand and we’re about to walk right into it.”
They all thought about that for a moment.
“Then what do you want to do?” Claire eventually asked.
“What I want to do is go back to Pattaya and forget about all this. But what we’re going to do is check the room from the connecting door again in an hour and, unless we see something that’s out of line, we’ll go in.”
Woods nodded and went back to reading his book. Claire nodded and went back to looking out the window. August lay back down, but this time he didn’t close his eyes.
The hour crawled by. The waiting reminded August of Christmas mornings when he was a child, those mornings when he would wake very early and have to lie quietly and wait until his mother and father also woke up and let him go downstairs to see what Santa Claus had brought him. He figured this was pretty much the same thing, only he wouldn’t have his mother’s shoulder to cry on if it turned out that Santa had left him nothing but lumps of coal.
August was sure he looked at his watch every five minutes, but Claire and Woods were polite enough not to mention it. When the hands finally crept slowly past 3:45am he decided he’d had enough of waiting. It was time to get in there and open up whatever Santa Claus had for him.
“Get the viewer, Woods. Let’s take one more look.”
Woods pulled out the fiber-optic viewer and they looked under the connecting door again. Nothing had changed. There was still just that glimmer of gray light from the hallway, a lump on the bed that could be Billy Fang, and nothing else.
“Okay,” August said when Woods had pulled the snake back and closed the connecting door on their side, “that’s enough of this bullshit. Here’s how this is going to go. Woods will pop the door and push it open. It opens inward and to the left covering the bed. I’ll take a pillow in with me and go in first when the door swings open. Then I’ll use the pillow to press Fang’s head down on the bed and muffle any noise he makes as he wakes up.”
August looked first at Woods and then at Claire, and they both nodded.
“Woods will come in right behind me, go right to clear the bathroom and closet, then help me by securing the target’s feet against the bed. Claire will come in third with the insulin kit. Woods and I will have the target’s head and feet pinned so he ought to be fairly still. Claire grabs whichever arm is easiest for her to access and injects him with the sodium thiopental. When he goes under and stops moving entirely, which shouldn’t be more than ten seconds, I’ll take the pillow off his face and make certain it’s really Billy Fang we’ve got.”
More nods.
“Assuming it is, Claire will inject him with the phenobarbital and we’ll tuck him up in bed, then straighten up the room. We’ll grab our gear, and close and secure both halves of the connecting door. Then we’ll leave through the hallway door and put out the Do Not Disturb sign.”
“What if it isn’t Billy Fang?” Claire asked.
“Then we leave whoever the poor bastard is right there, grab our gear, and get the fuck out of Dodge. We’ll have forty-five minutes to an hour before he comes out of the sodium thiopental. That ought to give us plenty of time to be well on our way to the airport before he can wake up and make enough sense out of what happened to him to tell anyone.”
August looked from Claire to Woods and back again.
“Any questions?”
No one said anything.
“Okay, then. Weapons check.”
All three of them took out their handguns, screwed the suppressers onto the muzzles, and worked the slides to chamber a round.
“No shooting unless I shoot first,” August said. “No matter what happens. Got it?”
“Got it,” Claire said.
Woods nodded.
August pulled a pillow off the bed and held it against his chest with one hand.
“Somebody kill the lights.”
Woods hit the master switch next to the bed and the room went dark. The glow of the city out beyond the open drapes provided enough light for them to move around without bumping into things. They all stood in silence, letting their eyes adjust to the near darkness.
“Okay,” August said after a minute or two. “Let’s do this.”
Woods pulled open the connecting door on their side and squatted down with his face close to the lock of the other room’s connecting door. August moved in behind Woods and felt rather than saw Claire falling in behind him.
Woods ran his fingers along the base of the lock plate until he found the USB port, plugged in the cable, and touched the icon on his iPhone for the app Spike had built. When the phone’s screen suddenly lit up, it looked like a searchlight in the dark room. Woods paused as their eyes adjusted to the additional light, then activated the app.
August watched over his shoulder as columns of numbers rolled up the phone’s screen. After no more than twenty seconds, the numbers stopped, the lock gave a whirring sound, and there was a soft clunk as it snapped open. The connecting door drifted open about an inch. All three of them stared at the narrow crack that had opened between the door and the frame and felt the same relief that no light showed through it. The target’s room was at least in darkness. It was a start.
Woods pulled the USB cord loose and rose
to his feet. He placed his right palm against the door and pressed it gently back. When it was open almost far enough for August to slip through, something that seemed to be a sound came to them and everyone froze. It was so faint that they weren’t absolutely certain they had really heard anything at all. August and Claire watched Woods carefully as he rotated his head slowly side to side, listening. It made August think of a dog sniffing the air for danger when he can’t figure out what the danger is or where it is coming from or even if it is really there at all.
Woods leaned forward very slowly and poked his head a few inches into the target’s room. When he did, the sound came again, and this time they all heard it clearly.
Click.
Woods instantly stood up straight and pushed back against August.
“Exfil! Exfil! Exfil!” he bellowed. “Move!”
Neither August nor Claire asked any questions. They moved.
Quickly and smoothly both of them turned away from the connecting door, scooped up their backpacks from where they had left them against the wall near the room’s entrance, opened the door, and walked into the hall. Behind them, they heard Woods slam first the inner connecting door, then the outer connecting door. They had started for the elevators when he bolted into the hallway just behind them.
“No,” Woods barked when he saw where they were going. He pointed down the hallway in the opposite direction. “Stairs.”
He jogged about twenty feet down the hallway and pushed open a black metal door marked Emergency Exit in red letters. August and Claire followed him and found themselves in a concrete fire stair with emergency lighting fixtures bolted to the wall at one-floor intervals.
Woods jogged down the stairs and they broke into a trot behind him, following blindly without understanding why he was leading them as quickly as he could away from the room where Billy Fang was supposed to be.
Then they did understand.
They had made it down only two flights when they felt more than heard the massive explosion rip through the floors above them.
