Tempest Page 4

  Beatrix sucked on her teeth. That was a lot of money. It was unrealistic to think that it wouldn’t be enough to tempt someone to pass on Danny’s location.

  Danny gazed out over the water. “What a mess.”

  “Can you move the boat?” she asked.

  “I’ve already thought of that,” he said. “The engine needs an overhaul. It keeps overheating. I think it’s a problem with the flow to the cooling system, but I can’t fix it out here. It’s getting towed to dry dock next week.”

  He got up and started to pace the deck. Beatrix took another drink and thought about what she was going to have to do.

  “You need to get ashore and hide,” she said.

  “Tonight?”

  “I’ll stay with you tonight. Go tomorrow.”

  “And then?”

  “You need to fix it up with Michael.”

  “I told you—I can’t.” He turned away from her, and, for a moment, she thought he was going to cry. “I need to get out of here. I want to go home. Can’t you just get me a passport?”

  “Probably,” she said. “Let me think about it. First things first—do you still have a weapon?”

  “You think we need one?”

  “I’d rather have one and not need it, than need one and not have it. Don’t you have a revolver?”

  He went into his galley, opened the safe that he had installed beneath the banquette, and took out the old Smith & Wesson Model 10 that he kept there.

  She took it and looked it over with an air of disapproval. “Where’d you get this?”

  “I know someone who works in Stores Management for the police.”

  “This is a police firearm?”

  “It was. Is it okay?”

  “It’s an antique.”

  “It’s the best I can do.”

  He took out a box of .38 Specials and handed them to her. She dropped rounds into the cylinder and closed it up.

  He looked at her with concern on his face.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “We’ll be fine. Now—get some sleep.”

  8

  Beatrix lay in bed and stared up at the polished wood ceiling. Her mind drifted to Jimmy Wang and all the trouble that particular job had caused.

  It should have been easy. Yeung had learned that Wang was plotting against him and had turned to her to nip the problem in the bud. Beatrix had conducted the same research that she would have undertaken had she still been working for the Group. Wang was a low-level player, but he was ambitious and cunning. He was careful, too, always surrounded by loyalists, and when he wasn’t on the street, he was difficult to find. Yeung had struck out in discovering his location, so Beatrix had gone to her CIA contact at the United States Consulate and cashed in an old favour; the Legal Attaché’s office had intelligence on all of the local criminal players, and Beatrix had used that to build a picture of her target, his daily movements and vulnerabilities. She had filled in the blanks with what Yeung and Danny knew, and then added the rest with good, old-fashioned street work.

  She had found out that Wang was due to dine with one of his girlfriends at Tin Lung Heen on the one-hundred-and-second floor of the Ritz-Carlton. She’d assessed the information, checked it with her Agency contact and then conducted a dry run; everything had suggested that it was an opportunity with a strong prospect of success.

  Yeung had arranged for Beatrix to be taken on as a temporary member of the staff at the restaurant. The plan was simple: she would arrive in heavy disguise, observe Wang from across the room and then eliminate him during one of his regular trips to the bathroom to tend to his raging cocaine habit. She would leave through the kitchens and disappear onto the street, changing disguises before making her way back to Yeung’s club to be debriefed and to collect her payment.

  Easy.

  Except it hadn’t happened like that.

  Wang had arrived just as planned. He and his date were shown to a prime table by the deferential maître d’. Beatrix had observed as he sent the sommelier to the cellar for a thousand-dollar bottle of Domaine Ramonet Montrachet Grand Cru, watched as the main course of Iberico char siu was delivered to the table, and surveilled the rest of the room for any sign that she should abort. There was nothing: everything was just as she had expected.

  After a few minutes, Wang had got up and set off toward the bathroom on unsteady legs, and Beatrix had moved, too. She had crossed the room to Wang’s table, where his girlfriend had been occupied with her phone and didn’t look up as Beatrix had taken the bottle of Grand Cru to refill their glasses. Nor did she notice as Beatrix had held a twist of paper against the neck of the bottle. The fold of paper contained the remainder of the ricin that she had used to dispose of Jackie Chau, and she had tipped some of the powder into Wang’s glass as she poured.

  Beatrix had replaced the bottle in the ice bucket and made her way back to the edge of the room, where she could observe. Wang had returned to the table, wiping the edge of his hand against his nose as he retook his seat. He had said something to the girl, turned to look for a waiter, and then, as Beatrix held her breath, he had reached for the glass. She had used ricin before and knew what would happen to him: vomiting, diarrhoea, seizures, and then, within hours, death.

  Wang had not yet taken a drink when a man had come through the restaurant’s main entrance. She remembered him even now: late sixties, Western, a lined face, and a purposeful gait. The man had hurried across to Wang, spoken urgently to him, and then hustled him from the room to safety, leaving his girlfriend at the table.

  Beatrix had slipped back into the kitchen and made her departure.

  There was no other explanation save that Wang had been tipped off. But who was the man? Someone within Yeung’s inner circle? Someone at the consulate?

  It was impossible to say.

  She had known that there would be repercussions, and now Danny had confirmed that her fears were well founded. But if the failure meant that Yeung didn’t trust her, that he now preferred to rely on local contractors, then that would also mean that he wouldn’t be prepared to help her find Isabella. Yeung had always made it plain that his help was contingent upon her working for him. If she wasn’t working for him, why would he do her a favour?

  Beatrix would be all the way back at the start: lost in a foreign country, friendless, with no way of finding her daughter.

  The hope that she had carefully shepherded started to dissipate, like the air leaking out of a punctured balloon.

  She felt the pain gathering again. She had promised Danny that she would stay tonight, but, as her mind started to race—to whisper that her life was over, that there was no chance that she would ever see Isabella again—she doubted that she would be able to resist the siren call of the flower-smoke room for long.

  9

  William Logan was in the departures lounge at Dulles within two hours of receiving the data from Miller. He had contacted Tracy Butcher en route, explaining that they had finally made a breakthrough. The IG had other assets watching Lincoln, and they had noticed that Navarro was missing. Unfortunately, as was usually the case when Navarro went into the field, it had been impossible to get a fix on where he was, and they couldn’t press too hard without revealing themselves.

  They knew that Navarro was the man upon whom Lincoln relied to deal with his dirty laundry; the two of them went back decades, and a lot of laundry had been dealt with in that time. He was a problem-solver par excellence; they needed to know what problem he had been sent to solve this time, and they still did not.

  But they had made progress tonight. Logan had listened to the conversation between Lincoln and Navarro that the ballpoint microphone had picked up. Navarro had mentioned that he was in Hong Kong. They had finally got a break. They knew where he was. Logan had booked a seat on United 566 from Dulles to Hong Kong, a twenty-hour journey with a stopover at O’Hare.

  He sat down on a vacant seat, took out his tablet, plugged in his headphones and played the recording back again. A name had b
een discussed on the call between Lincoln and Navarro: Nakamura. There had also been reference made to Dak Son. The latter had been simple enough to identify; Lincoln and Navarro had both been in Dak Son during Vietnam. Who was Nakamura? Had to be another soldier, given that Lincoln had suggested that this Nakamura was worried about being court-martialled. Logan took all the information and compiled it: they were looking for a man with the surname of Nakamura, most likely between the ages of sixty and seventy-five, who had served in Vietnam at Dak Son, who was likely wanted for desertion, and who was likely located somewhere on the Hong Kong waterfront.

  Logan composed an email to Phillips, one of the analysts who worked for the IG, and told her to pull anything that she could find from the archive and send it over to him. He pressed send.

  He played back the recording again and noted something new that he hadn’t registered before. Navarro had referred to two things that he and Lincoln knew: that Nakamura had a daughter and that he wanted a passport so that he could go home to see her. Logan composed a second email to Phillips, asking her to run a check on the National Passport Center’s database to see whether a passport application had been received from anyone with that name.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the flight attendant at the gate said into the microphone, “United flight five-six-six to Chicago O’Hare is closing its doors in five minutes. Passengers on this flight, please make your way to gate seventeen immediately.”

  Logan slipped the tablet into his carry-on, fetched his boarding pass from his pocket, and made his way to join the stragglers at the gate.

  10

  Danny had been asleep when he awoke to the sound of something that, at first, he thought must have been in his dreams.

  Bump, bump, bump.

  He looked at his watch, turning his wrist so that the luminous hands caught the moonlight that leaked in through the porthole window. It was four in the morning.

  Bump, bump, bump.

  It was something outside, knocking against the hull.

  He lay still for a moment, wondering whether he had imagined it, but then he heard footsteps.

  Somebody was moving around up on deck.

  Beatrix?

  He snapped awake and rolled out of bed. He climbed up the ladder and, slowly, poked his head through the hatch.

  It wasn’t Beatrix. He saw a shadow on the aft deck, silhouetted against the brightly lit skyscrapers on the far shore. It looked like a man. He was bent over the rail, gesturing to someone below. Someone in a boat. The man was working with a rope. He was going to pull someone else on board.

  Danny didn’t know what to do. He looked back down to Beatrix’s cabin and saw that the door was closed. He could go down and wake her up, but, by the time he did that, there would be at least two men aboard with them. It had to be Wang’s men, and, if that was right, they would be armed. It might be too late to fight them off by then.

  But now? The first man was distracted, his back to Danny, his attention fixed on helping his partner to climb the rope and board.

  Maybe he had a chance.

  Danny looked out of the hatch again and saw that one of his canvas chairs had been left out. It hadn’t been there when they’d turned in; he guessed that Beatrix must have put it there. Perhaps she had been unable to sleep? He stared at the chair and saw the old police revolver resting on the fabric seat.

  He ascended the rest of the way and lifted his foot over the lip of the hatch. The only sound as he emerged was a quiet squeak from the soles of his counterfeit Top-Siders as they rubbed up against the polished teak deck. There were only a few yards between him and the chair, but it felt like miles. Danny took the revolver, held it in a double-handed grip and slipped his finger through the guard. He aimed it high and pulled back on the trigger.

  The gun boomed.

  The intruder swivelled, lost his balance, and, with the weight of the man on the other end of the rope pulling him down, he pitched backward and toppled over the rail. Danny heard the splash as he hit the water. There came a thud next to the hull down by the waterline, followed by a grunt of pain and cursing in Cantonese. It must have been the man at the other end of the rope; he had been halfway up the side, and now he had been deposited back in his own boat again.

  Danny hurried forward and aimed the gun over the side. There was a speedboat down there, with two men visible: one was struggling in the water, and the other was at the wheel of the boat.

  Danny pointed the gun down at them. “And don’t come back!” he said, more bravely than he felt.

  He fired again, the bullet throwing up a plume of spray as it struck the water. The man in the water struggled onto the speedboat and, a moment later, the engine fired up. The speedboat curved away from the junk, churning up water behind it. Danny watched them retreat and saw them more clearly as they passed through the running lights of the next junk over: two guys, both young.

  The boat sped toward the far shore.

  Danny took a breath.

  Wang had found out where he was and had sent two of his maa jais after him.

  Danny rested his hands on the rail and watched the speedboat race away.

  Beatrix.

  Where is she?

  He went down to the spare berth and knocked.

  Nothing.

  He opened the door.

  The bed was empty.

  11

  Beatrix had quit opium several times in the twelve months since she had first tried it. It had usually been just a temporary respite while she took care of business; she had some professional pride left, after all, and her death wish was not yet so complete that she would undertake dangerous work while under the influence, no matter what Michael Yeung might have said. Her growing need was much more difficult to ignore during those fallow weeks where Yeung had no work for her. It was then that her ghosts took over. Sometimes she had been strong enough to last a day or two. On one occasion, she had managed to stay away for a week. Most times, though, she made it only until sunset, when the tourists retreated to their hotels and the night dwellers reclaimed the streets and the voices in her head told her that Lucas was dead and that she would never see Isabella again.

  The driver flicked the indicator and pulled over to the side of the road. They were in Lo Lung Hang, near the park. Beatrix paid him, told him to keep the change, and got out. It was already warming quickly, the promise of another stiflingly hot day.

  She had only ever smoked pot before she had arrived in Hong Kong, and that had been when she was much younger. She had been tempted back to it by the need to put her troubles out of her mind; it had worked for a while, but, in the end, she had needed something stronger to smother her memories. Her first time had been on the train from Tianjin after she had delivered a young girl to safety away from the triads; the dealer who supplied her dope had given her a sample of opium, and she had smoked it in her cabin. She had returned to the man for more, and he had taken her to a fetid alley behind the warehouses that abounded around Kowloon Harbour. She had been back many times since then. She knew the twists and turns of the alleys and the worn steps that led down to the flower-smoke room. She no longer needed to think about the route now; she just followed the same path, putting one foot in front of the other until she arrived at her destination.

  She stood at the top of the steps. A dim yellow bulb flickered above the door below her. She sat with her back against the side of the building, tracing the toe of her boot over the smooth depressions that had been worn into the concrete steps by thousands of footsteps, some of them her own.

  She tried to reason with herself.

  The doubts came.

  She didn’t want to do this.

  She should get up, turn around, and walk away.

  It didn’t work.

  Who was she kidding?

  She knew what she would see behind the door: men and women stretched out on the floor or reclining against the walls. The Indian would be hunched in front of his brazier, tending to the fire and preparing th
eir pipes. Beatrix had no friends here, but she knew she might recognise others: the two young black guys who sat in the middle of the floor, their muscles contorted and their eyes glassy, holding hands even as the stupor took them into dark sleep; the blonde woman slumped against the far wall near the Indian, still wearing her business suit, mumbling some broken conversation about her day in the city.

  She would find the sweet, brown opium smoke that made her life bearable.

  All she had to do was go down the steps and knock.

  12

  Danny stood out on deck and watched as the sun rose over the spectacular skyline that bristled the island around Central and Wan Chai. The neon from the floating restaurants that coloured the water at night was gone, replaced by a vivid orange as the sun reached over the horizon and chased the gloom away. The sky was clear; indigo at the top of the vault, lightening through pearl-grey and then fading to a pale blue framing the skyscrapers. It was going to be another hot day.

  He looked down at the message that Beatrix had left for him. It was scrawled in her barely legible hand on the back of the receipt that the kid had brought with the groceries.

  Fix it with Michael. Pride will get you killed.

  If only life were as simple as that. He balled up the paper and tossed it overboard, took out his phone and called a water taxi. He went down into his cabin, grabbed his duffel and packed it with the few things that he’d need. He took his laptop and cellphone and stowed them on top of the only two pairs of jeans he owned. The T-shirt, socks and hoodie that he was wearing had come out of his dirty laundry, but they would have to do.

  The water taxi arrived alongside within ten minutes. Danny handed his duffel to the pilot, then climbed down the ladder and dropped aboard. He resisted the urge to look back at his boat one last time. He doubted that he would ever sleep aboard her again; there had been an offer to sell it, and he would look to see whether it was still open.