His life had changed drastically in the past couple of weeks. He had not used his credit cards, and he had thrown his cell phone in a dumpster in Kowloon. He’d sold a few personal items for cash on the street, and he spent a few days with no cash, but he was not too worried about money. Adam’s “day job,” his SinoShield cover company, had put him in contact with all sorts of local crooks, smugglers, counterfeiters, and other profiteers, and he had cordial dealings with many of them. Occasionally he had to make friends in low places in order to do his job, and he had called in a few markers with some of these friends. He knew he could find temporary work on a dock or in a counterfeit basement handbag shop or any number of other shitty jobs, that, even though they were shitty jobs, were a hell of a lot better than getting burned to a crisp like his poor friend Robert Kam.
He waited two weeks; he wanted the people after him to think someone else had gotten him or that he’d gotten away, and he wanted anyone from the CIA to stop looking for him as well. Adam knew it would be a big deal at Langley that a NOC had disappeared, especially under the circumstances following the SEAL mission, but he knew CIA assets in the area were just about nonexistent, and, anyway, Langley had bigger fish to fry these days.
Once two weeks had passed, Adam returned to Kowloon, now wearing a full beard and mustache. Within twenty-four hours he owned new dark sunglasses, a new mobile phone, and a new suit and accessories. His suit was impeccable; everyone in Hong Kong who so desired wore a great suit, as Hong Kong tailors had a reputation that rivaled Savile Row, and were known for making beautifully bespoke suits for one-fourth the cost of their London counterparts.
Adam knew he could have left Hong Kong and returned to the States. It would be safe there, certainly from the Triads and almost certainly from the PRC.
But he was not leaving HK until he found out more about the shadowy hacker group that he’d stumbled onto, leading to the deaths of God knows how many. The Americans had Zha, this was true, but this Center character Gavin Biery had spoken of must surely still be in operation.
Adam wasn’t going anywhere till he found Center.
The MFIC.
With a few deep breaths and some whispered self-affirmations, Adam then walked into the Mong Kok Computer Centre like he owned the place, asked to speak to the leasing manager of the building, and told the woman he was looking to rent a large space to house a new call center for a Singapore-based bank.
He handed her his business card, and that was all the ID he needed to convince her of his cover for action.
The leasing manager told him, much to her delight, that two floors had just been vacated two weeks earlier, and he asked to take a look. She led him through the carpeted rooms and hallways, and he inspected them carefully, taking pictures and asking questions.
He also asked her questions about herself, which was not his original plan, but going out to dinner with the woman and getting information on the company that just left was to Adam Yao much preferable to his original plan, which was dumpster-diving, hoping against hope to find a scrap of paper that might be a clue about the big group Zha had been a part of.
That evening at dinner the woman spoke freely about Commercial Services Ltd., the large computer company that had just left, mostly about how they were a 14K-owned business and they used an insane amount of electrical power and installed an alarming number of very unattractive antennas on the roof of the building, some of which they did not have the decency to remove when they left in the middle of the night, led away in trucks by armed men who seemed to be security police.
Adam took in all the information, and it made his head spin.
“That was very nice of the Fourteen-K to move all their equipment for them.”
She shook her head. “No. The people who worked in the offices packed up their own things, and then a shipping service came and took it away.”
“Interesting. I’ll need someone who can work quickly to deliver my computers from Singapore. Would you remember the name of the shipping service?”
She did, and Adam committed it to memory and then spent the rest of the evening enjoying his time with the leasing agent.
The next morning he walked through the doors of Service Cargo Freight Forwarders, at the Kwai Tak Industrial Centre in Kwai Chung, in the New Territories north of Hong Kong. It was a small outfit, only one clerk was present, and Adam Yao presented the man with a beautifully professional business card claiming him to be the leasing manager of the Mong Kok Computer Centre building.
The clerk seemed to believe the cover, though he was hardly impressed. He barely looked up from his television.
Yao said, “The day after your company picked up the Commercial Services Limited equipment from our building, two pallets of tablet computers that had been delayed in customs arrived for them. The shipment is in our warehouse right now. I checked the packing list and it was listed as a complete shipment, but someone screwed up and didn’t realize these two pallets had not yet been delivered. Someone is going to be very unhappy if those goods don’t sail with the rest of the shipment.”
The clerk could not possibly have looked less interested. “That’s not my problem.”
Yao was undaunted. “No, it will be my problem, except for the fact you guys signed off on the incorrect manifest. If they come to me looking for the three hundred sixty units that you signed for, I could just tell them the shipper must have lost them.”
The clerk eyed Yao with annoyance.
Adam smiled. “Look, man, I just want to do what’s right.”
“Leave the pallets here. We’ll get them to the client as soon as they note the discrepancy.”
“I hope I don’t look that stupid. I’m not giving you one million HK dollars’ worth of product that’s already been legally imported from China. You could just sell it yourselves on the street and then tell the customer I never delivered it.
“I want to keep our client happy, and you should, too. We made a little screwup, these things happen, and I am just trying to rectify it quietly. If you can do me the personal favor of telling me the port of disembarkation and the name of the person who signed for the goods, I can go directly to them without involving the customer in this at all.”
Adam most often got what he wanted with the incredible social-engineering skills that most good spies possessed. He presented himself professionally, he was polite, and he carried himself with a calm air of self-assuredness. It was hard for anyone to tell him no. But occasionally Adam achieved success in social engineering more from the fact that he could be annoyingly persistent.
This was such a time. The shipping clerk determined, after several minutes of “No,” that his own laziness and strict adherence to company policy was not going to be enough to get rid of the bothersome young man in the nice suit.
The clerk slid over to his computer, making a show of how much trouble it was to do so. He clicked through a few screens, then settled on one, used his pen to look down at the data. “Okay. It sailed on the eighteenth. Right now it is one day out of Tokyo.” The man kept looking at the computer.
“Where is it heading?”
“USA next, then Mexico.”
“The cargo. Where will the fourteen pallets disembark?”
The man cocked his head to the side. “It’s already off the vessel. It was offloaded on the nineteenth, in Guangzhou.”
“Guangzhou?”
“Yeah. That makes no sense. You said this stuff was imported from the mainland, which means all the duties, taxes, tariffs, were paid. And then they turn it around and send it back to China? Who the hell does that?”
No one does that, Adam knew. But it told him where Center had moved his organization.