Macau had once been, in M’s language, a tiny Portuguese possession only forty miles from Hong Kong, the last stronghold of feudal luxury in the British Empire. Hong Kong had offered the old Double O the finest golf course in the East, Shantung silk suits tailored in twenty-four hours, and a morning massage with a view through French windows of a big orchid tree covered in deep-pink blossoms, touched off by a confiding butterfly that would alight on a man’s wrist while he wolfed down scrambled eggs and bacon.
By contrast, Macau—a ferry ride over the Deep Bay, paved with a hundreds-strong fleet of junks and sampans—was announced by rotting godowns with sun-faded lettering and crumbling façades of once grandiose villas. Macau was then chiefly famous for the largest “house of ill fame” in the world. At nine stories, Hotel Central had counted as a skyscraper. The higher up you went, the more beautiful the hostesses, the higher the stakes, the better the music. On the ground floor, a local laborer might talk to a girl from the neighborhood while gambling for pennies by lowering his bet on a fishing rod through a hole in the floor to the basement tables. Those with longer pockets progressed upward until they reached the earthly paradise on the sixth floor: the croupiers all women, reigning with an unimpeachable air of authority over the décor of a once-expensive French café now on its way downhill. A British spy might try his hand at fan-tan and hi-lo and read the palm of a hostess who called herself Garbo. Above the sixth floor were the bedrooms, but you would live up to your reputation as the perfect English gentleman and decline the offer, showering Garbo in a minor snowstorm of twenty-dollar notes and protestations of undying love before leaving on a wave of virtue and euphoria—this last delivered with a wink—all in the name of charming actionable intelligence from some aggrieved gangster about the workings of floors eight and nine.
If Joseph Dryden got out of this mess, he’d report back to M that the Venetian hotel in Macau had thirty-nine stories, making it three times the size of the biggest casino in Vegas. In fact, everything here was bigger than Vegas. Macau offered the only legal gambling in China, and after Portugal’s exit in 1999, American business was ushered in. Macau’s casino revenue was now five times that of the Vegas strip. The hotel even had an indoor canal system with gondola rides beneath a painted sky. If you ever escaped the hotel, you’d probably miss the dilapidated ferro-concrete housing of the Street of Happiness, where cooks and cleaners lived on one meal a day, overshadowed by the City of Dreams, a new identity raised from mud flats using enough sand to rebuild the pyramids. That is if you made it out alive. To Dryden, that was feeling less and less likely. He wouldn’t want to bet on it, walking in lockstep with Luke past the gondola pilots belting out arias.
He wanted to turn his hearing implant down, but couldn’t afford to dull his senses, even if it was no longer transmitting back to London. That was just what the City of Dreams wanted. It wanted him to believe he was walking through a piazza on a beautiful sunny day with a gorgeous man on his arm. It wanted him to believe it was day when it was night. It wanted him to believe he could afford to gamble everything, when he knew he could afford to lose nothing at all. He’d already lost too much. Dryden wasn’t sure what Paradise had told Luke about his identity, or his implant. But somewhere between Star City and the City of Dreams, Luke had stopped meeting his gaze, becoming askew, the off-kilter energy of an addict who’s just used and believes he can keep it a secret.
Sir Bertram was in high spirits, exchanging rapid bets with St. John and Ahmed. Dryden dug his hand into his pocket. They were here—ostensibly—to speak with the Macau government about the new Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge, the world’s longest sea-crossing bridge, which connected Hong Kong to Macau. Eighteen workers had died during its construction. But that wasn’t Paradise’s concern. He was here to raise the impact of the bridge on the critically rare Chinese white dolphin, whose numbers were plummeting. Dryden didn’t need Paradise’s publicist to tell him, in a place of the world’s biggest buildings and tallest bridges, this was the world’s most transparent lie. Sir Bertram was here for the same reason actors and royalty and politicians were here. The Venetian was hosting the Murder in Macau!—exclamation mark guaranteed, murder hopefully less so. King versus Chao. The heavyweight championship was on the line. So was Macau’s reputation. They’d lined up a night of fights featuring Olympic winners and foreign nobodies, hoping to persuade the Chinese television-watching public that boxing was the new national sport. It was the mother of all gambles. It could save boxing, dogged in the States by accusations of corruption and falling ticket sales. It could make Macau, once and for all.
And Paradise was betting against. As security and ingratiating executives steered them through the din of the crowd pressing into Cotai Arena, the Venetian’s own Madison Square Garden, Dryden could hear Paradise’s shrill laugh at St. John’s plaintive whine: “What do you know, Bertie?” What Bertie knew—and Dryden would love to beat out of him exactly how he knew—was that Chao was going down in the third, and he was telling the bookies to take note. The Venetian staff led them through the barriers to the changing rooms, a network of halls with all the usual backstage props: trolleys of shampoos and toilet roll parked in corners, raised voices in other languages behind cupboard doors, where cleaners would most likely be sitting on upturned buckets placing their own bets. Dryden wanted to give them a knock and tell them to put it all on King in the third. God had seen something.
The hallway between the two boxers’ changing rooms was flooded with bouncers and hangers-on and people who didn’t need to be there. Sweat and polish spiced the air. Dryden drummed his fingers on his empty holster. Poulain, the head merc, had locked up the weapons on the plane, and Luke had said nothing.
Sir Bertram’s braying voice left Dryden stiff as he was now urged in front of King, his longtime hero. He grew stiffer still as Lucky Luke ran his mouth, telling King he and Dryden were boxing champions in the army. King’s warm smile pierced Dryden’s heart. Wrong place, wrong time, City of Dreams.
Chao bowed to Paradise, unfailingly polite as he told Paradise he owed his rise to the great country of China, thank you very much. Luke forced a handshake on him with a goofy, ignorant grin, which Dryden didn’t recognize and despised. He watched Luke’s palm slide away. Nothing seemed to have changed hands. Could Chao be planning to take a dive? And was King in on it? Or could Paradise arrange their fates without them even knowing?
Dryden leaned into Luke, buffeted by the men behind. “You got a phone on you, man? I’ll take a picture with you and the champ.”
Luke only laughed. “You know better than that. No phones around Sir Bertram.”
“Right.” Dryden turned to a member of staff, hoping that either Luke didn’t know the full extent of his presence here, or did know and was conflicted enough to play blind. “You got a phone I can borrow? For a picture?”
“Certainly, sir—”
But Luke cut him off with a raised arm. Dryden glanced over the heads of the crowd. Some of them were holding phones in tight grips. Nothing lay unattended. There was no pay phone on the wall. After all this time when talking to himself meant talking to Q, he’d forgotten what it was like to be cut off, to be truly alone.
Standing with Luke’s arm around him, Dryden almost sagged into his old fighting buddy, almost said to him—Help me, I’m alone for the first time in my life. Because even when his brain got scrambled after Afghanistan, there was Luke to pull him out. But when Dryden searched Luke’s expression now, he could find nothing there but fixed blankness, hard and unforgiving.
He had to find a way to communicate with Moneypenny. He’d turned up no method on the private flight from Kazakhstan—where Luke had taken the passports and Dryden’s own wallet for “safekeeping” without an extra word—or dinner on the Ark, Sir Bertram’s yacht equipped with the cloud-seeding device, now harbored in Hong Kong. Dryden searched the hall again, settling on a man with sweat on his brow balancing two clipboards and two phones. The clatter of photographers filled the room. Dryden murmured, “Excuse me,” and edged out of the way.
Luke’s hand landed on his shoulder. “Time for Murder in Macau!”
They were ushered into Cotai Arena, where dazzling lights and the roar of fifteen thousand people made Dryden’s jugular pound. He was following Luke’s climb toward the best seats in the house. Dryden fought the yanking feeling of abandonment, of shipwreck. He tapped his watch again. No signal. The lines that ran from him to Q had been well and truly cut and somehow Aisha and Ibrahim knew nothing about it. No alarms were sounding—it must be that they wouldn’t sound until the hearing implant broke completely, leaving Dryden deaf in his right ear, with his left unable to access his language center, beset by din and confusion.
Sir Bertram was crowing to a retired basketball player: “Down in three!”
Luke bounced on up the stairs, in the grip of some new mania. “Come on!”
“Aren’t we watching from the Royal Box?” asked Dryden.
Luke grabbed him around the shoulders. “Nah, mate!” His eyes were gleaming. Just like they had when Luke took substances he shouldn’t in Afghanistan, after they’d lost men, or done things they shouldn’t, not because they were against orders, but because the orders made no sense, and they should have known better. “The real fight ain’t here! We’re leaving!”
Dryden ground his teeth. “So where is the real fight, Lucky Luke?”
“Hotel Central!”
“That’s a ruin these days.”
Luke raised his fists, jabbing the air with a one-two. “Let’s see if we can’t knock it down!”