Kowloon, Hong Kong
FLASHBACKS. IF YOU SWIM in dangerous seas, Luke reflected, then flashbacks come with the territory. A near-death experience at the hands of a sadistic narco-gang in Colombia, a fight to the death in an Armenian cave, a narrow miss from an attempted assassination in a Lithuanian back-street. In the few intense years he had spent on the payroll at MI6 Luke reckoned he had already had more than his fair share of brushes with an untimely death. Hell, there were people he’d met in that Thameside building who had probably never risked so much as a traffic fine. And now here he was, stepping out onto the night-time streets of Kowloon in hostile territory, his only visible cover as a ‘tourist’ a folded street map he’d picked up when they’d passed through the airport.
But Security Section back at Vauxhall Cross had been nothing if not thorough. Given the sudden disappearance of Hannah Slade and the unpredictable nature of this mission, certain precautions had been taken on Luke’s behalf. Hence ‘the package’ he was now about to collect. Following their instructions to the letter, he walked 150 metres down the busy, brightly lit pavement of Argyle Street then turned right, into the air-conditioned interior of the shopping mall. He realized then that he hadn’t eaten anything since the plane so he stopped to buy a packet of crisps from a kiosk, popped one into his mouth, then checked his bearings.
The luggage lock-up was on the first floor, up an escalator that moved painfully slowly. Luke had memorized the number of the locker and the combination to get into it, but he avoided the temptation to walk straight up to it. Instead, he positioned himself some way off, mingling with the evening shoppers, the families with prams and the teenagers taking selfies. He was watching the bank of metal cupboards to see if anyone else was observing them. Perhaps Jenny was right. Maybe the object he was about to retrieve was more of a liability than an asset. This could go either way, he thought, and for a while Luke contemplated ignoring this ‘precaution’ that Security Section had advised him to take. But no, he concluded, he had to trust them. Their job was to keep the Service’s case officers and agents safe, in the field and in their daily lives. They wouldn’t be sending him down this path if they didn’t think it was necessary.
When Luke was satisfied that no one else was watching he walked up to one of the metal cupboards, keyed in the number, waited for the click, then reached in to retrieve its contents: a Tupperware lunchbox that appeared to contain nothing more sinister than dried noodles. He made one last quick check to make sure no one was looking, then closed the locker and carried the Tupperware box to the nearby toilets. He spent a long time at the washbasin, rinsing his hands as he waited for the only person in there to flush the loo and be gone. The moment the room was empty he ducked inside a cubicle and locked it. Then he prised open the lid of the Tupperware box, his fingers probing through the top layer of dried noodles until they touched a familiar outline.
The 3D laser-printed weapon in his hand looked and felt like a pretty good approximation of a Glock 19 pistol, if somewhat lighter. This thing was made of plastic, not metal. Would it still work? He had been assured it would, but Luke still found it extraordinary that he was holding something that had been created remotely, following a digital sequence of noughts and ones, instead of being tooled in a factory.
For a few seconds he rested the 3D Glock in his palm, running the finger of his other hand along its off-white surface and the square, angular lines of the trigger guard. Shorter and stubbier than its military cousin, the Glock 17, this was the weapon of choice for many covert operatives. It carried fewer 9mm rounds in its magazine – just fifteen as opposed to seventeen – but that was a compromise Luke was more than happy to live with. As long as it worked. It still felt like a plastic toy to him but instinctively he went through the drills, emptying the magazine, counting the rounds then replacing them one by one, taking aim at the ceiling with nothing in the chamber, squeezing off a dry shot then re-inserting the mag. Luke liked the Glock. Unlike its British Army predecessor, the 9mm Browning, it had none of the safety delays and now made for a quick draw in a tight spot.
It was time to go. He flushed the toilet once more, for appearance’s sake, opened the cubicle door into the empty washroom and dropped the Tupperware lunchbox into the chrome waste bin, concealing it with several sheets of crumpled-up paper towels from the dispenser. So now he was armed, but he was also breaking the law. His ‘tourist’ cover was not going to hold up for one second if he was lifted by the Hong Kong Police and there was no diplomatic cover to hide behind. To his frustration, they had neglected to provide him with a holster. Perhaps that was just too difficult to conceal in a box of dried noodles. Luke would have to make do. He tucked the pistol into the inside left-hand pocket of his loose-fitting jacket and walked back into the shopping mall. It was time to meet the contact.
Outside Luke’s nostrils registered a heady mix of warm, humid air, street kiosk cooking, petrol fumes and unfamiliar exotic and overripe fruit. His pulse quickened as he crossed the street, heading for the prearranged location he’d been given. After the overnight flight from London and the long ride into the city it felt good to be stretching his legs and getting stuck into this mission. He was ‘at reach and at risk’, as his mates in Special Forces would say, and that was exactly where he liked to be. He and Jenny had agreed on how they would split their time, she staying put in the hotel to work on the signals intelligence with Cheltenham while he pursued the physical trail. The final pre-operation briefing he’d had from Vauxhall on the evening they left had not been encouraging. Hong Kong station, MI6’s outpost lodged within the everyday bureaucracy of the British Consulate General on Supreme Court Road, was struggling to come up with any clues as to Hannah Slade’s disappearance. There was some pushback from them, Angela admitted to him, as to why Hong Kong station had been left out of the loop in the first place but, still, every source had been tapped for information on Hannah’s potential whereabouts. And they had all come up blank. There had been a brief unconfirmed sighting of a middle-aged Western woman vaguely matching her description somewhere up in the New Territories, close to the old border with mainland China. But this had turned out to be a reclusive watercolour artist from Bangor.
In desperation, the Service was turning to its underworld contacts, but there had been a hitch. The man they most needed to talk to had refused to meet anyone from Hong Kong station. It had to be a gweilo, a ‘white ghost’, a foreigner from the other side of the world. Luke Carlton was to be that white ghost.