Mong Kok, Hong Kong
MACAU … MACAU … Luke voiced the word over and over in his head as he closed the door behind him to the Win Ho Academy for Martial Arts. He wasn’t particularly rattled by Mr Lim’s sinister parting words: people had been saying the same sort of thing to him all his adult life. If he took every warning like that to heart he would never have passed Selection for Special Forces, or gone to half the places his adrenaline-fuelled career had taken him to. But Macau had him puzzled. Why there? Why take the risk of smuggling Hannah Slade across the Pearl River into Macau when whoever had taken her could simply make her ‘disappear’ right here in the back-streets of Kowloon?
Luke had only a sketchy notion of what went on in Macau. He knew that this once dilapidated outpost of Portugal’s past imperial power had today become a byword for high-end vice, underworld crime and big-time gamblers. A good place to hide someone, he supposed, if you wanted them to disappear off the grid. But who would want to take Hannah there? If China’s Ministry of State Security had her in their clutches, why not house her in some faceless government building in Hong Kong Central? Or whisk her north across the old pre-1997 border to Shenzhen or even Beijing? No, this was starting to smell like a non-state job and that could mean Hannah was in a whole different world of trouble.
Right. Priorities. He needed to get word of this to Jenny back at the hotel and to the office in London. Luke glanced up and down the street and chose the first place he liked the look of. A basic late-night noodle bar, cheap and anonymous. Squeezing past the plastic chairs, he made his way to the counter where an old man in shorts sat on a stool reading a newspaper through thick pebble glasses. A fan turned slowly above him, slicing through a small squadron of flies, and while his grease-stained vest might have started out white, those days were now long behind it.
‘That one, please.’ Luke pointed at a steaming cauldron of noodles on a stove.
‘I bring it to you,’ said the man, waving him to a table.
With his back to the counter and an eye on the door, Luke whipped out his phone, coded in, and sent an encrypted text to Angela Scott at Vauxhall Cross and Jenny. It mentioned Macau, Rodrigues, the venue and the suggested time, and he requested clearance to go ahead. He liked working with Jenny and Angela. They would know exactly what to do with cross-checking the information Mr Lim had just divulged. It was the thing that had most unnerved him when he left the forces: after twelve years operating as part of a close-knit team in the Royal Marines, knowing he could depend on everyone around him not to screw up, would he ever find a profession with the same degree of loyalty and trust? So far, he had been pleasantly surprised by the people he’d worked with at Vauxhall, although, to be fair, he had also encountered a fair few ‘biffers’ in Whitehall – by-the-book types with a passion for process, acronyms and precious little imagination. And then there was the legion of in-house lawyers stalking the corridors of Vauxhall Cross, not something his uncle had had to contend with in his day when he’d worked for the Service. Nowadays every operation had to be legalled from the get-go. Nobody wanted another Libya fiasco with court cases, toe-curling headlines, eye-watering pay-outs or humbling public apologies from the Attorney General.
It must have been as the endorphins were hitting his brain from all those glutinous noodles he was wolfing down that Luke momentarily failed to notice what was on the other side of the shop window. A man in blue overalls was standing just outside the circle of light that spilled onto the pavement. He took a long drag on his cigarette as he watched Luke intently, never taking his eyes off him for a second. Then he spoke quietly into his mobile phone and was gone. It was the cleaner from the Win Ho Academy for Martial Arts.
Luke took his time, savouring each mouthful, spooning up the salty broth that swilled around at the bottom of his bowl. He needed this and not just to cleanse his palate from the lingering taste of plover’s egg. He was loath to admit it but that sparring session with Mr Lim had taken it out of him. He suddenly felt a lot older than his forty years. Luke got up, paid the old man, who was still reading a crumpled copy of a Chinese newspaper, and walked out. A quick routine check, left and right, up and down the street, no danger signs, and he was walking towards Argyle Street, retracing his route from the hotel.
It was the young, thickset man with the buzz cut who came up to him, innocuously asking him for the time, who triggered the internal alarm bells. Seriously? Who comes up to a stranger on a darkened street after eleven o’clock at night and asks for the time? A random mugging? In Hong Kong? Unlikely. The thought flashed through Luke’s mind like a thunderbolt: I’ve been made. Someone’s ID’d me. He was on the point of giving Buzzcut the shove-off when he felt something pressing into his right side and slightly to the rear, just about where his kidney would be. It felt suspiciously like the barrel of a handgun. A second man. How had he missed him? He felt a hand pressing firmly into the small of his back, trying to propel him down the alleyway that opened up to their right. Luke complied but now his mind was going into overdrive. Who these people were and what they wanted from him was of secondary importance. All that mattered was extracting himself from this situation, with the minimum of fuss. Silently, he blessed the team in Security Section back in Vauxhall Cross. Blessed them for making him pick up the Glock.
Even in the dim light of the back-street he could see there were three of them. All young, all looking like they’d spent an excessive amount of time in the gym. Hired muscle, working for someone higher up the food chain. And not too smart either. They had failed to pat him down in the briefest of body searches. They walked him past a row of dustbins overflowing with rubbish, where cats were fighting each other for scraps. There was no one else in sight, the back-street was deserted. This was bad. Luke knew he probably had only seconds to act – it was a window of opportunity and he had to jump through it.
His hands were still free, they’d made another mistake there, and now he spotted his opportunity. A black cat, thin and scrawny, shot out in the space between his feet and the man who had come up to ask him the time. The two precious seconds of distraction were all he needed. Luke’s right hand darted into the inside left pocket of his jacket and whipped out the Glock. In a split second he had it cocked, stepped back a pace and had all three covered in an arc before they realized what was happening. Even after all these years, the training had a way of just taking over.
For several seconds there was silence. A standoff. Luke was quite prepared to pull the trigger if he needed to, aiming a non-lethal shot at their legs or arms, but he knew that was a last resort. He was also uncomfortably aware that he had had no chance to test-fire the weapon. Hell, this was just a piece of yellow plastic in his hand. It still didn’t feel like a proper firearm. What if he pulled the trigger and nothing happened? He was going to have to bluff this one out.
‘You can all fuck off now,’ he said quietly, pointedly aiming the Glock at the man with the pistol.
Buzzcut spat on the ground between them and swore in Cantonese. He said something to the others and then, as one, they turned their backs and vanished down the alleyway. Luke’s breathing was coming in short, controlled gasps as he let the tension flow out of his body. The Glock had done its work but now he needed to dump it. Word would soon get out that there was an armed gweilo, a Westerner, on the loose in Kowloon and the police would be swarming all over this place in no time. Luke bent down and picked up a filthy rag from next to the dustbins. Carefully, keeping an eye open to make sure no one was coming, he wiped the weapon clean of his prints. Then he walked fifty metres down the road and, without breaking step, lobbed it over a wall into someone’s garden.
So he had survived the encounter. Great. But someone here was on to him and he had no idea who.