Mac had lost interest and was about to head up to the suite when the high-speed tape showed two men walk past the door to 305 — Mac and Tranh’s suite — and then walk back to it.
‘Here — right here,’ said Mac, clicking his fingers at the screen as he sat upright.
It slowed to real time and Mac read the time code: 21.14 — quarter past nine.
The two men wore black baseball caps pulled low and shirt collars flipped up. Mac identified them immediately: one was Red Shirt, and the other the injured speedboat driver. They crowded the door and then they were inside.
‘Fuck,’ said Mac.
It was brazen — they were either taking the piss or they were desperate for something. In general, if you operated covertly and a gunfight had brought you into the open, you didn’t double back into enemy territory such as a hotel room or house. You stayed hidden, surveyed subsequent movements and decided whether you were blown or if you could proceed.
Making himself breathe in and out slowly as he watched the men disappear into the room, Mac watched the time code. At 21.15, they emerged again and headed away from the camera, walked past the elevator and exited through the fire door.
Mac had performed more covert nosey-pokes than most people had had sex. And he knew there was only one way you could make a search in under a minute: you had to know what you were looking for, and exactly where to find it.
Chapter 28
‘You know those people?’ said Poh, pointing at the screen.
‘No,’ said Mac.
‘I’m coming up with you.’ Poh stood and grabbed a cop’s flashlight and a ring of master keys. He was out the door before Mac could argue.
They pushed through the fire door marked ‘3’ and walked up the hallway to 305. Poh drew his Beretta 9mm and gave the key to Mac, nodded at it as he took a shooting stance.
This was not turning out the way he wanted it — the last thing he needed was to be storming a room with a rentacop when there could be Mossad-trained professionals inside. Mac didn’t like drawing civilians into the world he inhabited, his basic rule being that anyone in civvie shoes got the benefit of the doubt; anyone in boots was a warrior. Poh wore manager’s shoes, but Mac also needed to check that room and grab his case. So, turning the key, he pushed the door back with his arm, allowing Poh to walk inside with the gun held in front of him with two hands.
Mac saw why the search had been so fast. His backpack was sitting on the dining table, where he’d left it. Exactly. If someone was ransacking the entire suite, the pack would have been left open, contents on the table.
Carefully unzipping it, Mac went through the layers and the pockets, looking for the trail. The contents — right down to pieces of paper and airline tickets — had been systematically unfolded and searched before being put back where they came from. It was something professionals were trained to do but which professionals like Mac could also pick up very quickly.
Poh went into one of the bedrooms and made a show of searching it.
‘This was the room they wanted,’ he yelled and Mac padded over to the door of Tranh’s room. Someone had made a big production of trashing the room and Tranh’s bag, and Mac wasn’t even going to look at it. It was a veil for the search of Mac’s pack — one of the Israelis would have searched his bag and replaced everything, while the other trashed Tranh’s stuff.
If it was supposed to distract Mac, it merely focused him. As he returned to his pack, he wondered what they were looking for, and he assumed from the speed of their search that they’d found it.
Turning the pack on its side and trying some of the pockets, Mac heard Poh go into the kitchen area and then the other bedroom.
Standing the bag upright, Mac noticed something wrong with the outside pocket. He always brought both zips together at the top of that pocket, giving him one-handed access when he needed something in an airport or for a hotel check-in.
Now the pocket had been zipped over so both zippers were jammed together on the far left-hand side. As he slowly opened the pocket he remembered what he’d put in there.
Then there was movement across the living area of the suite and Poh was standing in the doorway of the bathroom.
‘Not much to search in here, right, Mr Richard?’ said Poh, loving being part of something more important than telling Aussie backpackers to stop having sex in the pool.
Mac opened his mouth to scream ‘No!’, but just like in the worst dreams, no sound came out.
Poh hit the lights and the bathroom remained dark for one second. Then the room flashed white and bellowed, throwing Poh across the living area and launching him through the curtains. Millions of porcelain chips and a cloud of plasterboard dust surged out of the bathroom, stripping an armchair, buckling the ceiling and pushing the entire window assembly out of the wall and into the night.
Diving behind a sofa, Mac put his hands over his ears and tucked up as the blast of debris waved through the suite and then receded, leaving the fire alarms repeating the honking ‘evacuate’ sound. The lights had blown out in the explosion, and as Mac raised his head into the cloud of dust he saw the ceiling outside the bathroom hanging by a thread, the wiring sparking and a flood of water spreading into the living area, the faucets obviously sheared by the blast.
Standing, Mac grabbed his bag and moved to the door, thankful for the clean air as he emerged from the maelstrom of dust and debris, his inner ears screaming.
The exit lights flashed as Mac made for the fire stairs, joining the other guests as they chattered about the bang and the shaking of the building. Mac nodded and smiled at a New Zealand couple as they moved down the stairs, only hearing every third word.
Spilling out into the parking lot, Mac could hear sirens and decided to be absent when the police made their appearance. He found the Mazda, removed Sam and Phil’s backpacks and pulled out the Hertz rental papers and Samuel Chan’s driver’s licence. He was going to leave the cell phone tracker, but then decided it could be useful and he grabbed that too.
Finding the van they’d brought from Saigon, Mac threw the bags inside and drove out of the Cambodiana, past the crowd standing around Poh, who lay amid the building debris, looking like a man who’d fallen asleep in a tornado.
His watch said 10.26, which gave him an hour and a half before he made the Red Fallback with Lance and got him to safety. Mac was scared and uncertain of what he’d got himself into but his main worry was what Lance might do. When you went up against a foreign intelligence crew, and they wanted you dead, you only had a very small margin of error to work within, and Mac prayed that Lance didn’t get too nervous and make a phone call he shouldn’t.
Parking in the guest area of the Holiday International Hotel, just around the corner from Calmette Hospital, Mac changed his clothes and walked to reception. He made the transaction a very simple Indochinese settlement: he booked a room in the name of Sam Chan, put a pile of US dollars on the counter and then put the California licence beside the money. He allowed the night clerk to count the money himself and then took the registration form and filled it out, using the Mazda’s rego in the ‘vehicle’ section. The clerk handed over the room card and didn’t even look at the registration.
Standing against the wall of his room in the darkness, Mac looked through the window at the entry driveway. He stood that way for eleven minutes before moving away from the window and sitting in the dark beside a power point.