A car passed by and Fong slid down in his seat. The car turned the far corner of the market and sped away. Fong sat up in his seat. Is it possible that the two Beijing keepers were in that car? No. It’s just all this waiting. It’s made him jumpy, given him way too much time to think.
And there was lots to think about. Why was the commissioner so quiet in all this? Why was Li Chou at least seemingly being cooperative? Why was there no diplomatic pressure from the Canadians to solve this murder? Or did they think it was a suicide? Had no one even raised the possibility with them that Geoff’s death was a murder?”
The PalmPilot beeped. Slowly the street map overlay began to move. He nudged Chen who awoke with a start, as if he had just had a guilty dream. “What time is it, sir?”
“Just before dawn, Captain Chen.”
As Fong turned on the ignition and put the car in gear, a phone call was placed. “They’re moving, sir,” was all the voice said. The elderly Beijing man stretched. The younger Beijing man was surprised how fresh his elderly companion was.
In the predawn cool, Fong and Chen moved carefully through the outdoor street market while the merchants set up for the day. The blip generated by the bug in the cell phone had moved then stopped here in the market. It had been still for a full half-hour. As Fong and Chen moved slowly south through the market toward the blip, others were moving too – toward them.
At the height of the market’s morning rush, a peasant woman with a shabby bundle on her back and an awful haircut approached Xi Luan Tu’s barrel of grub pupae.
“They’re for birds,” he said, “not humans.”
“Do you think I am such a fool as to eat grubs?” she barked back.
He noticed her southern accent and the exact use of the complex idiom such a fool. Then he saw her hands. Dirt-encrusted palms, ragged fingernails – but soft fingers. Not a callus to be seen. Not workers’ hands. He shallowed his breathing, ready.
“Are you of the second wave?” he asked.
“I bring the storm,” she responded.
“Ah,” he said and handed her a large paper sack and began to ladle grub pupae into it.
As she had been instructed, she yelled for him to stop. No one really took note – just another woman trying in vain to get a good bargain at the market.
She unslung her pack, knelt down and opened it. He knelt down beside her with the bag of grubs between them.
In her mind, she’d reviewed the scenario she’d read on yesterday’s Internet contact several times. She took a deep breath to clear her head then reached into the grub-filled bag and pulled out a handful of the nascent things. She was surprised they were so slimy but it was their movement inside their casings that almost drew a cry from her throat.
“These are the finest . . . ” he began to protest.
She harrumphed and threw her handful of the squirming things at the side of the barrel. He squacked a protest, turned to the barrel while still making a racket and grabbed for the grub pupae. As he did, she shoved the open bag of grubs into her bundle and pulled out another brown paper bag containing the $25,000 in US currency, the passports and the four sets of identification papers that she’d taken from her bundle. He whirled back on her and shouted obscenities, grabbed the bag as if he were taking back his precious grub pupae and told her to get out of his sight.
No one paid them any mind. Joan shouted a particularly colourful obscenity and then stomped away. She felt relieved that the switch had gone so smoothly although mildly disconcerted to think of the hundreds of grub pupae now perhaps loose in her pack.
She moved quickly, looking for the way out – back to her life in Hong Kong.
She passed out of the grub-seller section of the market and turned the corner. Immediately she was assailed by the sound of thousands of birds. Everywhere she looked, wrens, finches, canaries and kingfishers perched in bamboo cages that were piled by the walls of the buildings – sometimes four or five stories high.
She leaned back to get a better look and felt something hard and cold against her neck. A voice she thought she recognized said, “Don’t make a fuss. We don’t want to hurt you.”
Chen was surprised when Fong put his gun to the nape of the neck of the peasant woman with the bad haircut, who had done nothing but try to buy some grub pupae. But he wasn’t surprised to see, out of the corner of his eye, the two Beijing men running, followed by a dozen federal cops all heading right for the tall middle-aged man standing behind the barrel of live grub pupae.
Xi Luan Tu saw it all happen before him and executed the escape plan he’d worked out months ago. He grabbed the brown paper bag with the money, ID and passports, patted his pocket once to assure himself he still had the cell phone, kicked over his barrel of grub pupae then charged around the corner and threw himself right at the mountain of fragile bamboo birdcages. Instantly, hundreds of the delicately balanced things crashed to the ground and split open – freeing their tiny captives. Amidst the screams of their owners, the birds moved as one living thing, claimed their freedom then headed directly for the mass of grub pupae on the ground. The shouts of anger and the hundreds of dive-bombing birds gave Xi Luan Tu enough cover to head toward the warrens.
A volley of gunshots cut through the mayhem. A window shattered. An old man screamed in pain. Xi Luan Tu sped down the alleyway that accessed the warrens. As he made the last turn, he slipped and crashed to the pavement. He heard the skip of bullets off pavement all around him. When he regained his feet, a sharp pain on the outside of his left thigh almost threw him back to the ground. Then he heard a bullet splat into the alley wall beside his head and he forgot about the pain in his thigh or the blood that was flowing freely down his leg and pooling in his sock. He summoned all his strength and raced toward the safety of the warrens.
On the first gunshot, Fong grabbed the peasant woman with the bundle and shoved her into the safety of a doorway. More shots. Birds screeched, people screamed.
“Do you know who I am?” Fong hissed.
Joan nodded.
For a moment, Fong didn’t know what to do then he said, “Do you trust me?”
Joan didn’t move.
“Well, here are your choices. You trust me and help me or I hand you over to the federal officers who will arrest you for treason.”
Joan looked at Fong. “If you put it that way . . . ”
The Beijing men stood behind a stall that sold polished driftwood about halfway between Fong and the alley entrance to the warrens. The younger Beijing man barked orders to the local militia he had stationed strategically in the Old City. He paced as they began evacuating buildings and then entered the warrens from four different access points. The older Beijing man stood patiently to one side and allowed his fingers to trace the pleasing curve of one of the polished pieces . . . and he watched. He assumed Xi Luan Tu had a fifty-fifty chance of avoiding the troops in the warrens. But the Dalong Fada leader had no chance of avoiding Fong because of the bug in the cell phone – so the older Beijing man waited for Fong, his uncomely Captain Chen and the peasant woman with the awful haircut to make their move. Their move would betray Xi Tuan Lu’s whereabouts. His finger snagged as a splinter of wood entered a full two inches into his right ring finger. He didn’t wince but rather slowly backed his finger off the splinter. A thin line of blood dripped down his finger and pooled in his palm.