* * *
The airfield was little more than a dirt strip beside a country road. There were a few old burnt out military planes and a couple of slightly more modern private aircraft, but it was dark and difficult to see much else. Whatever the case, this was no Chek Lap Kok. Air traffic control was no more than a guard at a windsock. Absent a set of stairs, Michael and Kate leapt the few feet down from the open cargo hold to the dirt runway below. Pulling the capsule out behind them, they carried it several paces in silence without drawing any attention, not even from the lone guard.
“Where are we?”
“Guanxi Province. Four hundred miles northwest of Shenzhen.”
Ahead was a ten by ten concrete block shed locked down by a beat-up metal roller door. An outdoor lamp buzzing with insects and the high hum of electricity provided the only illumination. There was a well-used payphone bolted to the side of the building, but little else; no people, no vehicles, not a single sign to remind Michael they were standing in the heart of the most populous country on Earth. A one yuan coin in hand, Kate lifted the receiver of the phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Dialing a cab.”
Michael placed a finger on the phone, cutting off the line, the open dial tone just audible above the buzz.
“I need to make a call first,” he said.
“Hold on,” Kate said. “We call a cab, we can get out of here. We start dialing across the country, it’s going to attract attention.”
“Like the attention you brought down on us?”
Kate was silent.
“No more lies, remember? They knew we were at Chen’s.”
“Okay. I put in a call to Six before we broke into his apartment. But my line was at least supposed to be secure. If that was the Ministry behind us, you don’t think they’ve got fifteen supercomputers filtering for our voice prints right now?”
“I’ll be quick,” Michael said, dropping Kate’s coin into the phone.
* * *
Ted Fairfield was anxious. His evening the night before had been everything he had expected under the circumstances and more. The police had rounded up and questioned everyone at the restaurant keeping him at the Yau Ma Tei police station well into the next morning. Ted was surprised by both the speed and zeal of the police response given that the incident had occurred at Chungking, but when he learned that a fully vested Triad member was also a victim, their interest made sense. Their concern was no doubt part of an ongoing investigation into the gang’s hierarchy rather than any sense of duty to maintain law and order in Chungking.
Ted’s anxiety, however, was not a manifestation of the previous evening’s events. He was worried about Michael. Prior to Michael’s arrival in Hong Kong, they had made a clear plan to meet at 9:00 p.m. the next night at the Forum hotel in Shenzhen. Besides being a favorite of Ted’s, it would allow Michael a gentle introduction to the People’s Republic. Ted was well aware that Michael had experienced adversity in the past. His experience had changed him, hardened him to the point that Ted was fairly certain that Michael was quite capable of looking after himself wherever he was. But Ted also knew that this was China. And China presented its own set of challenges.
So far, however, Michael hadn’t shown up and as things stood it didn’t look like he was going to. Ted’s rendezvous with Michael had been very specific. If he couldn’t make the meeting, he was to place a call to the payphone outside the barbershop adjacent to the hotel. That the barbershop was really a brothel disguising its trade with a cheap façade and a striped pole made little difference. It was nearly five hours later and there had still been no call. Ted was about to give up when the brothel’s wizened Madame, with whom he had been sharing the payphone, handed him the line.
“Where have you been?” Ted said.
“Seven-seven-seven,” Michael replied.
“Are you sure?”
“Seven-seven-seven.”
And the line went dead. Ted cursed to himself and handed the phone back to the tired Madame.
“Thank you,” he said in flawless Cantonese.
Seven-seven-seven. Screw the budget, Ted thought. Screw the backpackers too. He’d been seated ramrod straight in a cracked plastic chair listening to tired prostitutes squeal about how cheap their johns were for the last five hours. All things being equal, he intended to spend what was left of the night dead to the world on a clean firm mattress. Ted dragged his weary bones into the expansive lobby of the Forum hotel and within five minutes he was headed up the glass elevator to his room. He couldn’t be happier to be done for the evening.
* * *
Cool breeze in his hair, cab speeding through the night, Michael had to admit that life, for the moment at least, was good. They had been traveling along the same rutted road for over an hour now and though the taxi driver was short on conversation he apparently had a limitless supply of ice cold Tsingtao Lager. And though perhaps problematic in the way of safety, the beer was such a balm to Michael’s parched throat that he chose not to over think the matter. Outside, bicycle rickshaws pulled their massive loads, men played cards under lantern light, and whole families gathered around cooking fires, dark mountains looming in the distance above. Even the air out here in the country smelled sweeter, somehow more primal than Michael remembered it being just a few hours earlier.
“Pull?” Michael asked, offering Kate the tall bottle.
“Seven-seven-seven?”
Michael passed Kate the beer as he pulled the Lonely Planet Guide from the top flap of his backpack. He turned to page 777, reading from the page, “Yangshuo, ninety minutes south of Guilin. That’s where we’re headed, right?”
“Right.”
“So Ted kind of feels responsible for me over here. I promised I’d keep him in the loop.”
“Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Good.”
Less than ten minutes later, the cab turned in front of a group of structures built at an intersection in the road. A few hundred yards more and they came to a stop before a timber frame building identifying itself as the Whispering Bamboo Backpacker’s Hostel.
* * *
Four time zones away, Hayakawa stared down from his walnut paneled boardroom into the early morning streets of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district below. A second phone call had arrived. It indicated that a Chinese cargo plane had deviated from its prescribed flight path, landing in Guanxi Province. The deviation was recorded and per procedure, the MSS was notified. Twenty-six minutes later two individuals meeting the profile boarded a taxi bound for Yangshuo. Hayakawa had not thanked the caller. He had simply replaced the phone in its cradle and considered the content of the call.
This time, Hayakawa thought, there was a real chance that the object would be found. And that was not something he could allow to happen. Not now that they were so close to their goal. Hayakawa exhaled slowly, reminding himself that he was more than simply the CEO of one of Japan’s leading heavy industries. He was the leader of an even older consortium. His father before him had also been leader of this consortium. And his ancestors before that had been samurai. And so, like all good samurai, Hayakawa reflected that rising stakes served only to make the victory sweeter. Preparations had been made. The course had been set. All that was left now was to follow through.