“That’s a weird way to refer to sleeping together,” Millie said.
“The woman who died may not have been the woman you thought you were protecting, but someone still died, and it’s still my job to find out what happened to her. Plus, finding out who she is might help you with whatever it is you’ve been sent here to work on.”
“That’s a fair point.”
“I should have known better than to appeal to you on a personal level in the first place,” Quentin said jokingly. “Appealing to your work instincts is always a better path to your heart.”
Millie didn’t want to go back to the hotel where she’d been staying. She needed more room to spread out her investigation materials than the tiny economy room the government paid for offered, and frankly she didn’t want to be under the watchful eye of the government delegation, either. Quentin’s bosses hadn’t planned on him being in town long enough to book a room, so she made a few calls and opened up one of the CIA safe houses in the city and told Quentin he could join her if he didn’t mind sharing jurisdiction.
“It sounds so dirty when you say it like that,” he said.
“Wait until you hear me talk about legal attachés.”
“That just sounds like boring briefcase shopping.”
The safe house was on the far edge of Coloane Village in a rural family-centric area near the beach. Millie and Quentin had both spent too much time recently in the gloom of D.C., so even though the temperature was on the cold side, they took two chairs from the safe house and dragged them out to the beach for a couple hours. When they felt they’d achieved sufficient UV-ray exposure, they ventured back inside looking for food and technology.
Quentin worked on food and dinner, while Millie worked on finding out how capable the technology was in the safe house. By the time they reconvened in the dining room an hour later, Quentin had managed to put together a meal of stewed pork and shrimp paste with egg tarts for dessert, and Millie had connected her laptop through the house’s secure network to the CIA and FBI internal databases.
“It’s really amazing how far you’ve come with the Agency,” Quentin said as she showed off her handiwork. “I forget sometimes that you don’t need me as much as you used to.”
She looked up and smiled at Quentin with an edge that she hoped conveyed her interest in friendly conversation as long as it wasn’t about her future with the CIA. He took the cue and they got through dinner pleasantly enough. Then they took their egg tarts to the office to start digging up what they could find on the Li Feng decoy.
“These taste a lot like the custard tarts my roommate used to get when I studied in London,” Millie said.
She nibbled on her tart and smiled broadly. It was nice to have someone to eat with and talk with who understood, to a certain degree, what her life was like.
“I have a confession,” Quentin said.
Millie expected him to offer up details about his own life experiences that she wasn’t disinterested in, but she wasn’t ready for the intimacy that sharing things like that always seemed to bring. But he subverted her expectations and didn’t share any such thing.
“I didn’t make the tarts myself. There was a box of them in the pantry and I just toasted them in the oven.”
Millie couldn’t hold back her laugh and wrapped her arms around him in a hug that was the closest human contact she’d had in a while. She pulled away just as quickly and started signing into the databases.
A quick check on the woman’s fingerprints brought up her name as Lilly Dang and a home address in Los Angeles. It also brought up a fairly substantial rap sheet for drug and prostitution charges. While Millie finished her egg tart, Quentin took the laptop and plugged in the addresses of the woman’s last few arrests.
“Seems like she spent a lot of time getting arrested near Arrow Donaldson’s basketball arena,” he said.
“It’s probably not a stretch to assume she got in trouble once or twice with a player on Arrow Donaldson’s basketball team.”
“So maybe he makes some of her charges go away to keep his guy out of trouble, but then she owes Arrow a favor.”
“And he asks her to come to Macau with him and stay in a luxury penthouse and live the high life for a bit while pretending to be some big-shot Chinese government witness.”
“But why?” Quentin asked. “He already had his witness in Macau. Why did he need a decoy?”
“He wants to keep the real Li Feng away from us for some reason. Probably because she knows things she shouldn’t, and he doesn’t want her to accidentally let anything slip.”
“What kinds of things would she know?”
Millie looked up and gave Quentin the most genuine smile she could offer and said, “That’s what I’m in Macau to find out.”
Her phone buzzed with an incoming alert. She pushed her laptop back to Quentin while she looked at her phone. Arrow Donaldson was on his way to Hong Kong. She took her phone into the bedroom and called a man she knew very little about and said, “Arrow Donaldson is on his way to Hong Kong a day early.”
36
Teddy Fay hung up with Millie Martindale and poured himself another glass of water from the hotel suite’s bar. Normally he wouldn’t have cared at all when or where Arrow Donaldson traveled, but something rotten was happening in Macau and it seemed to center on Arrow Donaldson and his resort. If Donaldson was going to Hong Kong and the CIA saw that as enough of a flag to contact him, then Teddy knew where he needed to be: Hong Kong.
First, he wanted to talk to Sonny Ma. Li Feng was a moving target with too many layers of political nonsense around her to be useful for Teddy. Teddy had no interest in what she was doing for the CIA or Arrow Donaldson; all he wanted was to find out who had tried to frame and blackmail Ben and Peter. After he’d made the perpetrators pay for their wrongdoing, he could get back to L.A. in time to take a few days rest before starting his next project.
Someone was going to a lot of trouble to make it look like Sonny Ma was the one behind it, but a man like Sonny Ma would have made a lot of enemies during the course of his criminal career. Maybe the man would have an idea about who was trying to set him up. Teddy didn’t know where to find Sonny Ma, but he didn’t think it would be too hard for a man with his skills and experience. So far Teddy had tried to stay away from the film festival part of the business as much as possible, so that Peter and Ben’s good work wouldn’t be tainted by Teddy’s unorthodox methods. But now that they were back in the U.S. and someone had burned down their production offices in Macau, he was already down the rabbit hole.
So instead of running around Macau trying to track down friends and family of Sonny Ma and hoping to get lucky, Teddy went to the organizing offices of the film festival where someone certainly would know how to reach the man who was the shining star of the closing night showing and benefit.
The concierge looked as if she were straight out of central casting. Teddy matched her confident and friendly smile with his own as he approached and handed her one of his Centurion Studios business cards.
“I’m Billy Barnett and I have a meeting with the film festival people here, but I can’t for the life of me remember where I’m supposed to go.”
“We’re so excited to have all of you in our wonderful establishment for the festival,” she said in clear English.
“I’m excited myself to meet Sonny Ma,” Teddy said. “Is he with the rest of the organization’s quarters or is he—”
“Seventeenth floor,” she said, her tone turning brusque. “They have the whole floor.”