Macau, China
IT WAS AN oval room, devoid of soft furnishings. With the door behind them now bolted, Luke took in the scene before them. Large, ornate mirrors on the walls, a couple of chandeliers dangling from the ceiling. A dozen round tables, spaced well apart, each with a single customer sitting at it, drinking morosely from a bottle of Johnnie Walker whisky. And smoking. People were smoking cigarettes. They looked like businessmen. No one was talking; this was clearly not a place for conversation. Rather, everyone’s attention was focused on the raised stage, where a naked girl was dancing to a Rihanna song playing from unseen speakers. Her body glistened with baby oil, or was it sweat? He couldn’t tell. But he noticed that every few seconds she would make eye contact with one of the seated men. It was then that he saw every table had what looked like an iPad. The men were raising their hands, nodding and tapping at the screens.
‘Oh my God, I don’t believe it,’ said Jenny. ‘I think they’re bidding for her.’
They turned to face Miss Xinyi, who had led them to this joyless fleshpot.
‘Well?’ Luke said. ‘That,’ he added, pointing up at the stage, ‘is not our missing friend.’
‘I know, I know. Of course not. Please. Wait here a moment.’
They watched her walk towards a darkened corner of the room and disappear through yet another door. Luke was now feeling not just nauseous but also distinctly uneasy. They were already on the wrong side of a bolted door, and he did not for one minute imagine that Hannah Slade was about to appear miraculously through the other darkened doorway. Instead, he was starting to worry that something bad was about to emerge from it. He found himself wishing he still had the 3D-printed Glock under his jacket. He wondered if it had been found yet, nestling in that damp clump of bamboo where he had thrown it over a wall into a Hong Kong garden. He turned to say something to Jenny but now he could see Miss Xinyi waving to them to join her.
Stepping through the doorway ahead of Jenny, his whole body was braced for trouble, his nerves on edge, his eyes darting to left and right. Luke felt as if he was descending through the seven circles of Hell. Standing next to Miss Xinyi, he found himself facing a long narrow corridor, flanked by curtained booths on either side. It was almost like a stable for horses, he thought, or a row of giant kennels, except that its occupants were human. Wan faces peered out at him from behind the curtains, curled fingers beckoned at him to venture within.
‘Jesus, Jen,’ he said, under his breath. ‘This is a brothel.’ Jenny pursed her lips and nodded grimly. Given what they already knew of Rodrigues, he supposed it shouldn’t have come as a massive surprise to find themselves there, yet it was still a shock, for anyone with half a conscience, to see what they were confronted with now. Luke did not consider himself a prude. In his younger days, as a junior officer in the Royal Marines, he had accompanied some of his troop on a night out in Hamburg after a NATO exercise in Germany. There were things that had gone on in those clubs on an infamous street called the Reeperbahn that he would never forget. Yet that all seemed tame compared to this horror show in Macau. He was pretty certain these women were prisoners, sex slaves, pure and simple.
He turned once more to address Miss Xinyi but now she was calling someone’s name. A large man appeared from the shadows. Shaven skull, a skin-tight black T-shirt accentuating his biceps and a rash of tattoos crawling up his neck. Luke could hardly believe that this man had, attached to his belt, a Taser. He looked across at Jenny and wondered if she was thinking what he was thinking: this guy’s job is to stop these women escaping. With the added persuasion of fifty thousand volts.
Miss Xinyi was speaking to him in Cantonese and Luke could see Jenny straining to follow what was being said. ‘Are you catching any of this?’ he asked quietly.
‘Some of it,’ she replied. ‘My Cantonese is pretty rusty. She’s asking him for something and he doesn’t sound happy about it.’
A moment later they saw the man shrug his shoulders and walk quickly up to the first booth. He made a great show of whipping back the curtain to reveal a young Asian woman, in her early twenties, Luke guessed, wearing a scarlet bikini. She was sitting on the edge of a mattress, her knees drawn up under her chin, her face lit by the solitary purple bulb above her. She looked expectantly from Luke to Jenny and back to Luke.
Enough of this, Luke thought. It was time to confront Miss Xinyi, if that was even her real name. He walked over to her, ignoring the bouncer but keeping an eye on the Taser.
‘OK,’ he said, trying hard to keep the irritation out of his voice. ‘Are you suggesting that our friend is in here? In this place? That’s not possible! She’s a respected academic from a top university in London.’
This time it was Miss Xinyi who shrugged. ‘You can check,’ she said, holding out her hand towards the row of booths that stretched all the way down the corridor. ‘I’ll wait for you here.’
‘Thanks. We’ll do just that,’ said Jenny. ‘Come on, Luke. We have to do this.’
Together, they began the grim business before them, moving past the girl in the scarlet bikini and approaching each booth in turn. In some, the occupant was already peering out from behind a curtain, watching them with curiosity. Never, Luke thought, had he imagined when he applied to work for the Service that he would end up doing a face-to-face search through a row of windowless booths in a Macau brothel. The girls, he suspected, were all from South East Asia, no doubt tricked and trafficked. The whole thing was depressing on every level. By the time they reached the final booth he had already made up his mind: Rodrigues must definitely be wasting their time, which also made him question why Mr Lim back in Hong Kong had bothered to send him here. Because this was quite clearly the last place on earth where they were going to find the collector, the missing Hannah Slade.
‘Well?’ said Miss Xinyi, when they returned to find her standing with her arms folded, evidently bored.
It occurred to Luke that she looked quite out of place in this dingy downmarket corridor of a brothel with her designer dress and diamond necklace. But, more importantly, he was relieved to see that Taser Man had vanished back into his lair. ‘She isn’t here,’ Luke replied flatly. He had decided it was time to end this charade. ‘And I think you probably knew that, didn’t you?’
‘We are just trying to help you,’ Miss Xinyi answered defensively, flicking a hand into the air. It was only now that he noticed what very long fingers she had, and the bright scarlet nail varnish that adorned them.
‘Right,’ Luke said. ‘Well, we don’t seem to be getting anywhere, do we? Can we just cut the BS and get straight to the point?’ He spoke slowly, carefully enunciating each syllable. ‘Do you know where our friend Hannah Slade is? Is she even here in Macau?’
What Miss Xinyi did next surprised him. She took a step closer to Luke, looking up into his face from only centimetres away, invading his personal space. ‘You want to cut the BS?’ she replied, her voice lower and deeper than before. ‘OK, sure, let’s do that. We can start by ending this pretence that you two are “a pair of travel agents on holiday”.’
Luke was momentarily taken aback by her directness and it took him a moment to recover. The taciturn assistant to Senhor Rodrigues had just spoken more words than she had all evening, and he didn’t like where this was going.
‘Excuse me?’ Jenny cut in. ‘We are exactly what we said we are. We both work for Pathways in London. You can check that out if you don’t believe us.’ She had her hands on her hips and her chin thrust out, her expression one of righteous indignation.
‘I don’t need to do that,’ retorted Miss Xinyi, calmly. ‘Because all three of us know full well that Pathways account is run by your Secret Intelligence Service. And they booked you on the Cathay flight that brought you into Hong Kong. It was the …’ She glanced up at the low, peeling ceiling as she recalled a detail. ‘… yes, it was the CX254, I believe. Isn’t that right … Mr Carlton? Ms Li?’