“Got more in the godown, you want to wait,” the vendor told Leticia as she turned the used phone over and popped the lid off to examine inside.
“No,” she said. “This will work. Charger?”
He handed over a plug and cable. “You want SIM?”
“What do you have?”
“I got jetso for you.”
“You got what?”
“Discount.”
“Just tell me what you have, okay?”
The Temple Street Night Market was full of the noise of Hong Kong hagglers and the heavy aroma of fish frying. Her eyes ached from the intensity of the fluorescent stall lights. Above her head red globe lamps shone down on crowds hunting for cheap electronics.
This was the third vendor she’d talked to, having walked away from the first two, and her head was starting to hurt from all the haggling. But she knew the routine, even if her Cantonese wasn’t good enough to catch all the nuances. She was hungry, too. The little rat-infested dump she’d found in Wan Chai had no kitchen, but that was the trade-off for fifty dollars a night and no record of your visit.
The vendor ducked behind his table and came up with an international SIM in plastic packaging. “Coverage?” she asked.
“Excellent.”
“I bet,” she said, and turned the package over to read the networks it used. “Tell me about your jetso.”
She assembled the phone while waiting in line to order a plate of shumai, wondering where she would go next. Hong Kong was just a pit stop to get her bearings before she found a better place to hole up; she wouldn’t stay long enough to have to bother with the stress of black-market gun shopping. Tomorrow, then, she would move on to Phnom Penh, or she could stay in Kowloon with an old lover, if he hadn’t broken down and gotten himself married.
Her second concern—no less important than the first, but slightly less imperative—was who the hell her shadows were working for. She had ideas, more ideas than she could wish for, but if she didn’t narrow it down, she would never figure out how to neutralize the threat.
The only things she really knew about them were their legends, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Young of London. While it turned out they weren’t working for Milo Weaver, they worked for someone, and that someone had been tasked with keeping an eye on her.
Had that been their aim? Just keep tabs on Leticia Jones? Or had they been waiting for a chance to do something to her? Age and wear might have dulled her wits, but at least she’d been smart enough to not hang around and find out.
A pretty girl in a chef’s hat passed her a steaming paper plate and throwaway chopsticks, and she slowly ate the pork dumplings as she walked back through the market, eyeing stalls for other items that might make her travels a little easier.
This had become her life in the last year, wandering cities at night, picking up things she’d left behind. A disposable life was how she described her existence when the dark mood came over her, usually after midnight in some dead-end motel where her grasp of the language was tenuous. For a while, she’d fought the darkness by drinking herself to sleep, and it usually helped, at least until the dawn showed up. It had gotten bad in Tromsø, Norway, in January, when she’d been following up a lead, and the polar night meant that the dawn never came. That was when she’d been visited by the woman who called herself Joan, who’d sat across from her at the Bastard Bar and told her she was wasting her life. Leticia had drunk a lot by then, and at certain points she wondered if Joan was a mirage, an echo of her old job wrapped in the cloak of Joan of Arc, her childhood hero. That blend of faith and stupid bravery had been the only thing young Leticia Jones had been able to look up to.
Might Mr. and Mrs. Gary Young have been sent by Joan to keep tabs on the ex-Tourist who didn’t want to come home? Maybe, though it seemed like a lot of expense just to know where Leticia was. More likely, they were from some country that she’d pissed off over the years.
And how had they found her? The same way Milo had, through the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, where people weren’t known for their ability to keep secrets? Or had she exposed herself while working her personal project, the job no one was going to pay her for? Had they caught her tracking payments to Boko Haram via the global banking world? Were bankers on her tail?
No, it was something old. That was the problem with living so long. All you ever did was add to the army of enemies who were pissed off at you. Jesus, she was past forty, having collected fifteen years’ worth of enemies—it could be anybody.
She passed through the market gate, and the crowd, now relegated to the narrow sidewalk, grew claustrophobic along Jordan Road. She’d done it again, been distracted by too many thoughts, and had headed the wrong direction. She ate her last dumpling and turned abruptly around to work her way back against the press of locals and tourists and …
Oh, shit.
There, maybe thirty feet ahead of her, was Mr. Gary Young himself. Dark skin, blunt North African features. Their eyes met, and though he turned to look away in a fluid motion, betraying no surprise at all, they both knew the ruse was over now.
Over the space of the next second, Leticia debated which way to go. Turn back around and run? Where to? If they’d found her here, they certainly knew about the Maai Fei Fat Inn. Mrs. Gary Young might already be there, discovering that Leticia hadn’t left anything in her room, because she’d learned her lesson in Wakkanai. Move forward, and see if Gary ran away? Maybe, but what if he didn’t? Was Leticia ready to deal with whatever he was packing?
As the second ended, she turned back and pushed ahead toward Shanghai Street, where she would head left, across the street, and work her way toward China Ferry Terminal to find out what bus or boat could take her where.
It was a plan, and not a terrible one—a doable one—but it quickly fell apart when she saw Mrs. Gary Young not ten feet ahead of her, wearing a baggy jacket, the kind women wear to hide curves or small armaments.
Leticia spun left and threw herself into the six-lane road, a wail of horns and bumpers bearing down on her as she sprinted toward the other side. A truck nicked her left heel, but she let the force of it spin her 360 degrees and just kept going, hopping over the potted plants in the median and galloping through gridlock on the other side.
A quick glance back told her that the surprise of her escape hadn’t done much to help her. The missus was jumping down from the median, while her old man was halfway across the far lane.
No worries. She pounded down the sidewalk, around the corner 7-Eleven, and went at full speed, swerving into the road to avoid the slow-moving crowds. Bookstores and clothing outlets and aromatic restaurants and parked scooters flashed by, and when she eventually turned right on Austin Road her lungs were on fire. At the next corner she snuck another glance and saw that both of them were still there, maybe five stores back. And they didn’t look like they were hurting. She was only halfway to the terminal. She wasn’t going to beat them to it.
So she ran past three narrow storefronts and leapt into the alleyway next to the brick façade of Park Tower. She threw her back against the filthy wall and swallowed air. When they emerged onto Austin, in her direction, they would be faced with two possible routes—one down Austin, passing her alley, the other across the street and up Scout Path. They would have to either make a decision or split up. This was her Hail Mary pass.
She still held the crumpled paper plate and chopsticks; she dropped the plate and gripped the sticks in her fist, watching the alley’s opening, waiting.
How much time passed? She didn’t know. Just as she had fit an entire argument into one second of panic outside the Temple Street Market, the adrenaline that sustained her warped time, and it seemed as if she stared at the alley’s opening forever, the sticks gripped in her sweating, trembling fist, watching locals saunter by, the tangle of their Cantonese like unsettling music to her ears.
Then Mrs. Gary Young, one hand beneath her oversized jacket, stepped into the opening and looked to the right, directly into her face. Leticia’s fist was already swinging sharply toward the woman’s throat, and it was a testament to her training that the woman parried Leticia with her wrist at the same moment she removed a small automatic from her jacket. As it rose—time, again, was so damned slow—Leticia kicked high at the gun arm, hitting the woman’s elbow hard; the elbow cracked, but the woman’s face didn’t betray any pain. The missus couldn’t, however, seem to point her gun anymore, and she looked surprised by this fact. She tried to grab the gun with her other hand, but Leticia was already back: One hand caught the woman’s free hand while the other swung the chopsticks at her neck.
Then three things happened at once: Leticia’s chopsticks struck the underside of the woman’s chin, knocking her head back and piercing deep into the soft flesh; Leticia pulled Mrs. Young’s wrist up and back, knocking her against the wall; and the woman’s gun hand twitched, pulling the trigger and firing once, wildly, into the alley. At the sound of the shot, people jumped and ran. The woman, now run through, perhaps to her brain, slid down the wall. Blood was everywhere, pumping out of her neck. Someone screamed. Leticia removed the pistol from the limp hand and patted at the jacket until she found something hard. Inside pocket: a phone and a clip of cash and credit card. She pocketed it all and peered out to Austin Road. Gary himself was running toward her at full speed, pistol in his fist, veering around cars, eyes full of malice.
Without thinking any further than the next moment, Leticia rose and pointed the pistol at him. Instantly, he threw himself to the side, behind a slow-moving car, and Leticia turned and ran up the alley. The sight of her pistol terrified shoppers, who crouched against the wall and put their arms over their heads, waiting for her to pass. When she heard the gunshot, it sounded like it was very far away. But the bright, burning pain in her left arm was right there, right on her. She nearly dropped the gun, but quickly caught it with her other hand and took the next corner.
Keep moving, baby, she told herself.