CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The cell phone in my pocket rang, and Hobart made a grab for his sidearm. Everyone’s nerves had been strained to the limit.

“It’s mine,” I said to the room, flipped the phone open and stepped into one of the darkened corners.

Hobart and his cohort, Pollard, eyeballed me with contempt, tried to plaster expressions of competence onto their faces.

“Mike, it’s Thel Mishow. I’ve got some more information on the Mandalay Plaza. Can you talk?”

I glanced at Phillip Lennox still seated in his overstuffed chair, fingers laced around a smoldering cigar, staring at me.

“Not so much,” I said.

“I understand,” Thel said, lowering his voice. “I’ll be brief. What we’ve found is that a number of the subsidiary corporations and partnerships in the ownership structure are of Chinese extraction.”

“Of which persuasion?” I asked, attempting to remain oblique to the roomful of ears now tuned-in to my side of the call.

There was a brief hesitation as Thel decoded what I meant.

“Ah, yes. Good question,” he said. “The answer is: both. The old Hong Kong capitalists, and the new, post-British variety. Odd though, if you ask me, having both the communists and the Hong Kong old guard in the same transaction together with Phillip Lennox.”

I worked to remain expressionless.

“Anything else?”

Thel cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Are you sure you can talk right now?”

“Is there anything else?” I repeated.

“As for more detail, I’d have to say there’s not much. Because of the Chinese incorporations, we haven’t been able to determine who the actual shareholders are yet, but we’re using every channel we have access to in an effort to find out for you.”

Hobart, Pollard and Lennox had all begun giving me the hard-eyes. It was time to ring off.

“I appreciate it.”

“I’ll call you when I have more,” he said. “By the way, Patricia Dunross told me you’d had some trouble. Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” I said.

“We were discussing another matter and she happened to mention it.”

Bullshit.

“No problem,” I said casually, a non sequitur. I was tired of being stared at, and I couldn’t tell how much of Thel’s side of the conversation they could actually hear.

“Call me later, Mike.”

“Soon,” I said, and cut the connection.

Hobart took three long strides across the room and glared at me. “Who was that?”

I faced him, our noses now inches apart.

“A friend of mine, Ray. You want to screen my calls?”

He fixed me with a touch of that third-world spook stare, thought better of it and broke it off before this went too far. I saw him file it away for later.

“Gentlemen, please try to relax,” Phillip Lennox said. “We’re all under pressure here.”

The crackle of fired tobacco was the only sound in the room. I watched arabesques of smoke dance toward the ceiling.

And more seconds ticked by.

The finger arrived in a tiny box.

The third man on Ray Hobart’s security team, Ted something, found it outside the door of Lennox’s suite, packed in dry ice and wrapped up in garish holiday paper. Ted had returned from following up on the purchase order for the delivery of the original ransom note, traced it all the way back to a phony business address supposedly located in a vacant lot in Pearl City. It was barely after one o’clock, scarcely an hour past the original deadline.

Phillip Lennox unwrapped the package himself, tearing through the paper and throwing the pieces to the floor.

“Goddamned smart-ass bastards.” His words caught in his throat when he lifted the top from the box.

J.R. took in his father’s expression and crossed the room in a single stride, and peered into the box that his father had dropped on the table. I was two steps behind J.R., arriving in time to support him when his knees began to buckle.

It was a pale piece of meat and bone lying on a bed of dry ice. The bloody end was ragged, and looked as though it had been masticated. The tiny finger had been severed neither swiftly nor cleanly.

The air in the room grew thick in the stunned silence. J.R. turned and vomited into a waste can.

“This is likely a ruse, Mr. Lennox,” Hobart said, and shot a glance at Ted. “Probably a fake. This is not Randall’s finger. They want to throw us—”

Lennox’s face was stone, his eyes luminous, manic.

“Shut up,” I said.

Hobart took an involuntary step backward. “What I’m saying is that—”

“Shut the fuck up, Ray,” I said again. Their strategy, such as it was, had gone to hell, and everybody in the room knew it. “Experience comes at a price. Randall just paid it.”