“Roger.”
“Ding, I’m en route to pick you up. We’ll take the tunnel to the other side and be there waiting when they get off the boat.”
The old Star Ferry boat bobbed and swayed in the choppy Victoria Harbour as it crossed between thick harbor traffic on its eight-minute journey to Hong Kong Island. Jack sat well behind the 14K men and the computer hacker as they rode at the front of the covered deck.
He was confident he had not been spotted by the opposition, and he was also confident they were not meeting anyone on the boat, as no one had approached.
But something else caught Jack’s eye about midway through the crossing.
Two men entered the passenger cabin and walked right past Jack’s position. They sat down several rows behind Zha. They were fit men in their late twenties or early thirties; one had a red polo and jeans, and on his right forearm was a tattoo that said “Cowboy Up.” The other wore an untucked button-down and cargo shorts.
They looked — to Jack, anyway — like Americans, and both men had their eyes trained on the back of Zha’s head.
“We may have a problem,” Ryan said softly as he looked out the window in the opposite direction of the Triad group.
“What’s up?” asked Chavez.
“I think there are two more guys, two American guys, who are watching the target.”
“Shit,” said Yao.
“Who are they, Adam?” asked Chavez.
“I don’t know. They could be U.S. marshals. Zha is a wanted man in the USA. If so, they won’t know their way around HK. They won’t know how to blend. They won’t know that Zha and the Fourteen-K are watching for a tail. They will get burned.”
Ryan said, “They are a little too close, but otherwise they aren’t being obvious just yet.”
Yao countered, “Yeah, but if there are two on him now, there will be a half-dozen on him soon enough. There’s only so many wide-eyed Americans you can stick in one place over here without the Triads figuring out their protectee has grown a tail.”
The ferry docked on Hong Kong Island a few minutes later, and Ryan was the first off, well ahead of Zha and his crew. He walked down a long ramp into the Central neighborhood, then disappeared down an elevator to the MTR without ever regarding his targets.
He did not need to. Chavez was positioned at the exit to the ferry, and he followed Zha and company as they climbed into a taxi van. They headed off to the south.
Adam had seen this from the Mitsubishi minivan. He announced over the conference call, “I’ll tail them. Ding, get down in the MTR with Jack and take a train to Wan Chai Station. I’d bet money that’s where they are going. You can be there ahead of them if you hustle, and I’ll guide you to wherever they are.”
“En route,” said Ding, and he disconnected from the conference call and ran down to the MTR entrance to meet Jack.
As Chavez and Ryan rode in the long subway car, Jack disconnected his phone from Adam and leaned into his superior’s ear. “If the marshals get too close, Zha’s going to bolt. If he does that, then we’ll never know about Center and the Istanbul Drive.”
Chavez had been thinking the same thing. “Yep.”
But he had not been thinking anything along the lines of what Ryan said next: “We need to grab him.”
“How, Jack? He’s got a significant security detail.”
“Manageable,” declared Ryan. “We can orchestrate something quick and nasty. Look how big the stakes are. If FastByte Twenty-two did the UAV hack, then he’s got blood on his hands. I’m not going to lose sleep over wasting a couple of his henchmen.”
“Then what, kid? We’re going to take FastByte back to the Peninsula and interrogate him over room service?”
“Of course not. We slip him out on the Gulfstream.”
Ding shook his head. “We stick with Adam Yao for now. If an opportunity arises that looks good, we consider taking him, but right now the best thing we can do is support the Agency guy who knows his way around.”
Jack sighed. He understood but worried they would miss their opportunity to bag FastByte and learn who he was working for.
THIRTY-NINE
The two Campus operatives exited the MTR at Wan Chai Station, and by then Adam had tracked the taxi carrying the five men to a strip club called Club Stylish on Jaffe Road, just a few blocks away. Yao warned the two Hendley Associates men that the girlie bar was a known 14K hangout, and there would be, among the crowds of lonely businessmen and Filipino waitresses and strippers, some presence of heavily armed and heavily drinking 14K mobsters.
Jack and Ding suspected they had a different definition for “heavily armed” than did Adam Yao, but neither Jack nor Ding was carrying any weapons whatsoever, so they told themselves they would keep their heads on a swivel and do nothing to raise the ire of the locals in the establishment.
Jack and Ding found the entrance to Club Stylish to be just a narrow dark doorway at the street level of a high-rise ramshackle apartment building on a two-lane street one block over from Lockhart Road, the nicer and more touristy section of Wan Chai. Ryan pulled off his paper mask and entered first, passing a bored-looking bouncer, then descended a little staircase lit only by Christmas lights strung along the ceiling. The staircase seemed to go down at least two stories, and at the bottom he found a large basement nightclub with a high ceiling. On his right was a long bar along the wall, in front of him was the floor of the establishment, full of tables and lit by candles, and on the far wall was a raised stage made out of see-through plastic tiles over garish amber lighting that gave the entire room an odd golden glow. Above it, a large spinning disco ball created thousands of swirling white lights that painted the crowd.
Four stripper poles stood near the corners of the raised dance floor.
The establishment seemed to be running at about twenty percent capacity, and a strictly male audience sat around at the tables, in booths along the walls, and at the bar. Some talked to the bored-looking dancing girls who milled between them. Jack saw Zha and his group of four Triads sitting in a large booth in the corner of the far wall, to the right of the stage on the other side of the entrance to a darkened hallway that led out the back of the club. Jack assumed there would be restrooms back there, but he did not want to pass so close to Zha to get a better lay of the land. Instead, he saw a spiral staircase off to his left, and he climbed to find a little mezzanine over the back bar area. Here a few businessmen sat in groups and looked out over the paltry action. Ryan liked it up here — he could watch Zha while keeping a low profile with the dark and deep booths. He sat alone, and he ordered a beer from a passing cocktail waitress a few minutes later.
Within moments two young Filipino exotic dancers took the stage and went through the well-practiced motions of dancing seductively to loud, thumping Asian-influenced techno music.
Zha and his security detail remained in their booth stage left of the strippers. Jack saw that the young man remained more interested in his handheld computer than he was in the semi-naked women twenty feet away from him, and he barely glanced up at them as he typed furiously with his thumbs.
Jack thought about how much he’d love to get his hands on that handheld device. Not that he’d know what the hell to do with it, but Gavin Biery would likely have a field day cracking its secrets.
Domingo Chavez entered the club a few minutes later, and he sat back by the downstairs bar near the entrance. He had a good view of the stairwell up to street level and a decent view of the 14K entourage, but mostly his job was to back up Jack, the eye in the surveillance.