“Elvis!” Hugh said. “I knew you looked familiar.”
Noortman smiled, satisfied. He took another sip and set the glass down. He took Hugh’s glass and set it down, too. A foot shorter than Hugh, he let his hand slide up Hugh’s lapel to his neck, and pulled his head down.
A moment later there was a knock at the door. Noortman pulled back, swearing under his breath. “I’ll get rid of them. Don’t move.”
He went to the door, and Hugh, disobeying orders, followed behind on silent feet. Noortman opened the door and Arlene was there and already swinging her bag. It caught Noortman a hell of a thump on the left side of his head and he crumpled into Hugh’s arms.
“Where the hell were you?” Hugh hissed at Arlene, dragging Noortman into the dining room and sitting him down in one of the chairs. “I actually had to kiss the guy, for crissake.”
“Think of it as taking one for the team,” Arlene told him, and hauled out a roll of duct tape.
“Notice my self-control,” Hugh said. “You still live.” He took the duct tape from Arlene and wrapped it around Noortman’s torso and the chair back, Noortman’s wrists and the arms of the chair, and Noortman’s ankles and the legs of the chair.
“All right already,” Arlene said. “The idea is to immobilize him, not shroud him.”
“He’s a spurned lover,” Hugh said; “he’s not going to wake up happy.”
He added, “You tell anyone I kissed him and you’ll never work on this planet again.”
“It got the job done, didn’t it? Stop being such a big baby.”
Noortman groaned. After a moment his eyes opened and he stared at Hugh, at first bewildered, and then, as realization flooded back, hurt. Hugh felt ridiculously guilty.
“Mr. Noortman,” Arlene said.
His gaze shifted to her. His brows came together and his voice came out a raspy husk of its former mellifluous self. Everyone was speaking French. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“We have some questions for you, sir,” Arlene said formally. She reached into her bag and, before Hugh’s disbelieving and slightly affronted eyes, produced a large claw hammer. The wood of the handle was worn smooth and the metal of the head was rusty and flaking. “We have no wish to resort to violence, Mr. Noortman, but we mean to have the answers to our questions before we leave.”
After a moment Noortman got his jaw back into working order and said in a slightly shaky voice, “Questions? What questions? I demand that you release me at once. There has been some terrible mistake.” He appealed to Hugh. “We were having such a good time. I don’t understand what is happening here. Please let me go, and let us talk about this, get things straightened out.”
“Jaap,” Hugh said gently.
Noortman’s eyes widened. “How do you know my given name? I didn’t tell you. I-”
Hugh knelt down next to Noortman’s chair and smiled. “Jaap Noortman, Junior. Born in Singapore in 1970, graduated from the University of Singapore in 1986. Worked a year for your father in the Department of Customs, until you were recruited by the pirate Fang Ho to help him identify and move the cargoes he hijacks in the South China Sea. How am I doing so far?”
Noortman swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was born in Singapore, yes, but I am a respectable businessman. I run a legitimate freight concern here in Hong Kong, you can ask anyone. There has been some mistake.” He tried to smile, first at Hugh and then at Arlene.
The now familiar sneer was missing in action. “Please, untie me, and I will verify my identity.”
“We know who you are,” Arlene said, and took the hammer. “Gag him,” she told Hugh.
Hugh hesitated, and then did as he was told. This man had conspired in too many deaths for Hugh to feel compunction now. Arlene was right. The Koreans had been on the loose too long, Fang and Noortman had been active in their cause for too long, too much had been set into motion and too much was at risk. There was no time now for subtle.
Hugh overlapped the duct tape at the back of Noortman’s head and stepped back. Arlene raised the hammer. Noortman’s eyes bulged but Arlene didn’t wait, she brought the head of the hammer down as hard as she could swing it on Noortman’s right knee.
Her grunt of effort was drowned out by Noortman’s muffled scream. The duct tape strained as he tried to double over. Tears streamed from his eyes, mucus from his nose. He made gagging sounds. Hugh kept his face impassive and reached out to rip the duct tape from Noortman’s face. He lost some hair as well as some skin. He screamed.
“Quiet,” Arlene said, looking as bored as she sounded, “or we’ll have to gag you again.
“What do you want?” Noortman said, his breath coming in sobs. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!” The blood had soaked through his pants and his knee was already beginning to swell into a misshapen lump, straining his pants leg.
“I want to know where your partner is, Jaap.”
Noortman shook his head, moaning. “I can’t, I can’t.”
“Gag him again,” Arlene said. Hugh, a little pale, stepped forward with the duct tape.
“No,” Noortman screamed. “I can’t tell you, I can’t, he’ll kill me!”
“Then answer,” Hugh said.
“We know you’re working for the two Koreans. What did they hire you to do? Where is Fang now?”
“I can’t! He’ll kill me, I tell you! He has killed others! He’ll kill me, too!”
“I know,” Arlene told him, “and I’m sorry about this, but I really am in a hurry.” She nodded at Hugh. A little pale, he tore off a length of duct tape and stepped forward.
Frantically, Noortman tried to jerk his head out of the way. Arlene grabbed a handful of his hair and held him still while Hugh taped his mouth again. Noortman screamed behind the gag, and kept screaming as the hammer came down again on the same knee.
This time Noortman threw up behind the gag, and when Hugh ripped it free he had to step back quickly to avoid being hit by the braised abalone in oyster sauce he had just watched Noortman eat. Arlene grabbed Noortman’s hair and yanked his head upright. “In October you met with two men from North Korea in a cafe in Pattaya Beach, Thailand. Who were they? What did they want?”
The bottom half of Noortman’s right leg was canted at a hideously awkward angle. Blood ran into his fashionable leather shoe and stained its gold buckle. “I can’t, I can’t,” he moaned.
Arlene raised the hammer, and this time she reversed it so that the claw side was down. Noortman saw it and screamed again.
AN HOUR LATER ARLENE and Hugh were in a cab on their way back to the airport. “Where the hell did you get that hammer?” Hugh said at random, trying not to think of the scene they had left behind in Noortman’s apartment.
“There were a bunch of construction guys doing a remodel on a shop. There was an open toolbox with the hammer sitting right on top.”
“Well done,” Hugh said, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“What’s wrong?” she said, unruffled, matter-of-fact. “We got what we needed.”
“Yeah,” Hugh said. “We did that.”
Her expression softened. “You’re not in the field a lot, are you, Hugh?”
He tried to smile. “Once a desk man, always a desk man.”
The things he had done in Noortman’s apartment would haunt him for the rest of his life. Noortman had broken so quickly and so completely, he had given them everything they had asked for and more, but Hugh could find no cause in that for self-congratulation, and definitely none for humor.
“What next?”
Hugh thought about it. “Home,” he said.
Arlene cleared her throat with delicacy. “Are you, ah, calling in first?”
“You mean the director?” Hugh thought about that for a while, too. He had a cell phone, but he always used a landline when he could. Cell phone signals were far too easy to tap into. “I’ll call him from the airport.”
“Will he believe you?”
Hugh took a deep breath and let it out. “Probably not. That’s why I’m going home.”