He desperately wanted to check his phone to see what the hell was going on back at the building behind him, but the chaotic street ahead of him required all his attention. He whipped around the scooters and cars moving in the same direction but at slower speeds, fought his way through cross traffic at intersections, and narrowly avoided pedestrians who used the low speed of vehicles here to make their way across the street far away from any crosswalks.
He had just accelerated around a man with a pushcart when he saw a garbage man changing out a metal can on the side of the road right in front of him. Court couldn’t believe this idiot was calmly standing in the far right traffic lane to do this, but he didn’t mull it over for long, because he had to bounce his rented Suzuki up onto the sidewalk to avoid him.
Doing this put him right in the middle of an open-air market along the side of the street, and with the sedan continuing through the intersection, he had no alternative but to race through the milling crowd as he drove along the sidewalk.
Court found himself puttering along among the foot traffic, stuck on the sidewalk because of the long impenetrable wall of plastic-tarp-covered portable kiosks lining the side of the road. He shouted to move people out of his way, slowed down significantly when the elderly or those pushing strollers forced him to do so, then sped up to a dangerous pace when a pair of cops in loose-fitting green uniforms blew whistles and swung batons in the air as he passed.
He raced through a group of young locals, forcing them to dive to safety in all directions, then saw a tight opportunity on his left to squeeze back on the road. He jacked the handlebars, began racing towards an intersection, then almost immediately saw the black BMW parked there, stuck in traffic, just on his left.
Court had no choice but to whip back to the right, almost flipping over his bike as he did so to avoid detection by his target, and then continue on down the sidewalk for another block before coming to a stop. Seventy-five feet behind him four local police ran through the crowd in his direction, voices shrieking and batons swinging in the air, but Court just waited, watching the intersection ahead, looking for the black BMW.
The traffic wasn’t quite bumper-to-bumper, but it was moving along at only ten to fifteen miles an hour, so the wait for the vehicle he was tailing felt interminable.
When the cops were just twenty-five feet behind him the BMW rolled by, directly in front of a green and white city bus. As soon as he was flush with the rear of the bus he throttled hard, sending his bike out into the street and spraying the police with rainwater off his back tire.
For almost a minute as he drove Court was blocked by the bus in front of him; he had no eyes on the BMW so all he could do was drive on and swivel his head to the left and right, checking the connecting roads to make sure his target had not turned off. Finally the bus turned to the right and Court saw the 7 Series, five car lengths ahead, just as it made a left a few blocks short of the airport road.
Court followed suit, and soon his target merged onto an on-ramp for a six-lane street. Court stayed behind, and while he steered he carefully adjusted the screen on his GPS unit, backing out the scale so he could try to get some idea of where they were going.
As both vehicles sped up on the new road, Court’s GPS unit on his handlebars indicated they were heading due west now, and it looked as if they were leaving the city altogether.
Court stayed farther back than he would have liked considering the congestion because he realized the person or persons in the vehicle ahead might be worried about being tailed right now, since they’d just raced away from an attack. He didn’t want to lose them — he really had no fallback plan if he did — but he knew riding their bumper would mean immediate exposure.
Suddenly Court hit his brakes hard, shimmying a little on the wet pavement. Up ahead, three Ho Chi Minh City police motorcycles came out of a side street and seemed to link up with the BMW, which had moved into the right lane. The black car did not stop, but the driver rolled his window down and communicated with one of the cops; then the window went back up and the three motorcycles formed a triangle around the BMW, two in front and one behind. Court noticed the rear biker looking back over his shoulder a couple of times, but Court did nothing to stand out. He just rolled along with dozens and dozens of others heading northwest on the highway.
This was all good news to the American on the motorcycle fifty yards behind. The BMW would be easier to tail if it ran in a motorcade, and the possibility that someone important was inside the car, while already high, was now a sure bet.
For fifteen minutes they continued on, until the cement and bustle of the city began to give way to a configuration of leafy palm-lined suburban areas, broken up by some small cultivated plots of land.
Court had backed off further with the arrival of the cops, and he just managed to make out the black car and the three motorcycles surrounding it all taking a left across heavy traffic. From this distance the turn of the target vehicle would have been hard to detect on its own, but he was greatly helped out by the fact that the motorcycle policemen stopped the oncoming flow like they were running a legitimate motorcade, and the resulting jam wasn’t hard to see, even from several hundred yards back.
Court immediately crossed traffic himself, bumped back onto the crowded sidewalk, and accelerated until he, too, made it to the intersection, and he steered to the left.
The BMW was ahead of him once again, still with People’s Police motorcycles forming a triangle around it, and Court knew he had just dodged a bullet.
He could barely take his eyes off the four vehicles moving together because there were so many turnoff opportunities for them. It would take only one moment of reduced vigilance for Court to lose the entire entourage if they left this road and pulled into a parking garage or raced down a side street.
So Court kept his eyes on them, but as he did so, he carefully placed a call on his mobile and listened to the ringing in his headset.
Suzanne Brewer answered quickly; Court struggled through the challenge-response protocol, then said, “The Chinese hit the building. They didn’t tell me they were coming.”
“Shit! And Fan?”
“I’m tailing a vehicle that squirted.” He added, “I don’t know if Fan’s in it. I don’t know if Fan is back at the building. I don’t know much of anything, but I’m making some educated guesses, and I think I’m doing the right thing here.”
“What do you need from me?”
“I need you to tell me where I’m going.”
“How the hell do I know where you are going?”
“I’m following what I believe to be senior Wild Tiger leadership to the west. We must be leaving the city because I can see rice paddies in front of me. I’ve had to back off several hundred yards, and I’ll probably lose him if he turns off.”
Brewer said, “I’ll ask again. How am I going to know their destination? Do you think I have a satellite tracking you?”
“For once in my life that would be terrific.”
“No sat, no drone.” She added, “You were the one who demanded a low-profile approach to this, remember?”
Court said, “Last time I looked, this town was crawling with Agency hacks. Now I need some help and you’re telling me I’m all by myself?”
Brewer replied, “Bet you wish we didn’t call off the two case officers you ran into an hour ago.”
Court said nothing. He didn’t think Ken and Barbie would be any help to him now, but he’d sure made it easy for Brewer to use that against him.
“Whatever,” he mumbled. “I’ll just try to tail a car all the way across the country by myself.”
She said, “Calm down. What do you want me to do?”