9

Martin Ha did not like gunfire. In the first place, most people weren’t very good at it, especially when excited, and having bullets miscellaneously in the air meant no one was safe anywhere. In the second place, it made it more difficult to interrogate people afterward, since they tended either to be distracted by wounds or dead. In the third place, it tended to create a terrible mess, hard to conduct an investigation in and nasty to clean up. There were more places, but those would do.

And they were why Ha continued to speak reasonably through the chain-link gate at the Xian Bing Shu construction site even when he was convinced that the two hard-hatted crew members inside the gate were merely stalling for time, and time was the one thing he simply could not give them.

Ha had arrived here five minutes ago with a sizable force, three police cars and a police bus, for a total of twenty-three men, with more on the way. (Tony Fairchild was also on the way, with his group, but Ha was sure Tony was professional enough to keep the civilians well away from the operation.)

The site looked perfectly ordinary from the outside, half a city block enclosed in a high chain-link fence supplemented by board fence here and there, with a deep excavation within and a shrouded building armature starting upward. Work was clearly going on despite the hour, but this wouldn’t be the first time in Hong Kong that construction worked three shifts, the owners as anxious to get into their new building as, ten or fifteen years from now, they would be to tear it down again.

Ha had arrived, had left his force at the curb, and had proceeded alone to the gate, where he’d been met by these two mulish workmen refusing to open up. Since then, he had repeatedly explained the situation, calmly and reasonably. That he was a police officer, that they came within his jurisdiction, and that they were required by law to do what he ordered them to do, which at this moment was to open the gate.

They responded, sullenly and doggedly, that they’d been ordered by their boss not to open the gate at night for anybody at all, and they had no intention of risking their jobs for somebody they didn’t know; people in the office were trying to call the boss right now, that’s what they claimed, but their lack of urgency was as palpable as Ha’s sense of urgency.

Still, he hadn’t contented himself with nothing but talk. He’d already ordered the armored personnel carrier from the police garage, and when it got here, they’d do what they had to do. In the meantime, he continued to try to convince these people that the results of their actions, if they interfered with the police in the performance of their duty, would be much worse than the potential of making their boss angry.

Sergeant Noh called from the curb. He stood beside the car he and Ha had arrived in, and now he called, “Inspector!” and when Ha turned to look at him he made a quick beckoning gesture. He looked worried.

“I’ll be right back,” Ha promised the workmen, and went over to Noh, who said, “The Cathay Bank building has just lost power.”

That was two blocks west of here. “They’ve started,” Ha said, and here came the personnel carrier, rumbling down the street. “Sergeant, move the vehicles out of the way.”

“Sir!”

He went out to the street, to talk with the driver of the personnel carrier, which was a beefed-up panel truck with bullet-resistant metal sides and a reinforced grill that made it a fine battering ram. The driver, a young uniformed police officer, saluted and Ha said, “I’ll tell those people one last time we’re coming in whether they like it or not. If I signal to you, go through the gate.”

“Yes, sir.” The driver smiled, looking forward to it.

When Ha approached the gate again, the two workmen had been supplemented by at least a dozen more, all of them looking tough and ready for anything. He kept his attention on the first two, saying, “Have you reached your boss yet?”

“No.”

“Well, we’re coming in.”

A large bulldozer started up the slope of the excavation, moving rapidly this way. To block the gate?

One of the new men said, “We got our orders. We won’t let you through the gate.”

“I’m afraid you will,” Ha said, and turned to signal the driver of the personnel carrier. As he lifted his hand, the windshield of the personnel carrier starred and crazed and went opaque, and a sudden loud report boomed from behind him.

He turned back, astonished, thinking this was not an occasion that called for gunfire, didn’t they realize that, and the rifleman shifted aim to shoot Ha in the chest. As he staggered back, seeing the rifleman aim at the personnel carrier again, half a dozen of the workmen produced pistols and started firing.

Ha was dead before he hit the ground.