They communicated with Adam through their tiny earpieces. Yao was sitting out in the borrowed Mitsubishi, positioned in a back alley that ran between the rear of the high-rises on Jaffe and the high-rises on Gloucester, just blocks from the northern shore of Hong Kong Island. Here he parked in a small lot and had a view of the back exit of Club Stylish, which was good, but he was parked next to dozens of full garbage bins outside a seafood restaurant, meaning a foul rotten stench and the scuffling feet of rats were all he had to keep him company back there.
Adam informed the Hendley Associates men how lucky they were, via the conference call. Chavez sipped his first beer of the evening and regarded the women working for tips on the stage and the other dancers milling about the crowd.
He assured young Adam that he was not missing much.
The two mysterious Americans who had been on the ferry entered the club a few minutes later, confirming Jack’s suspicions that they were, in fact, tailing Zha. Ding reported this to Ryan, and Jack saw them from his overwatch on the mezzanine when the men sat down in plush chairs in a dark corner, far from the stage. They bought Budweisers from a cocktail waitress and sipped them while rejecting advances from the strolling bar girls.
As Chavez turned and scanned the stairwell, two more Western men, both in blue blazers and ties, entered together.
There were a dozen other Westerners in the bar, Ding and Jack and the two younger guys from the ferry included, but these guys stood out to Ding. They looked like Feds, and Chavez could ID Feds easily, which wasn’t saying much, because they had a way of standing out. The two men sat down just a few tables from the Triad entourage, positioning themselves awkwardly so that they had a better view of FastByte22 than they did of the stage.
“Looks like a damn weatherman convention in here,” Chavez said softly, hiding his moving lips behind his beer bottle before taking a swig.
Adam Yao’s voice came over the headset. “More Americans?”
“Two suits. Could be DOJ guys from the consulate, here trying to confirm Zha’s presence.”
Yao said, “Okay, maybe we should think about backing off. By my count there are now six gweilos in there with eyes on Zha. That’s too many.”
Chavez said, “I hear you, Adam, but I’ve got another idea. Wait one.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out his mobile phone, then opened a video camera feature. He put the conference call with Ryan and Adam on hold and called Gavin Biery at the Peninsula.
Gavin answered on the first ring. “Biery.”
“Hey, Gavin. I’m sending you video transmission from my phone. Will you get on your laptop and check that you are receiving?”
“I’m already on. I’m picking it up.” A few seconds later he said, “How ’bout you zoom in on that stage for me?”
Ding placed the phone on the table, propped it against a small glass candleholder, and turned it toward Zha’s table.
Ding said, “I need you to focus on the target, not the dancing girls.”
“Oh, all right. Zoom in a bit.”
Chavez did so, and then recentered the image.
“Got it. What am I looking for?”
“Just keep tabs on them. You’ve got the eye. I’m pulling Ryan out, and I’m turning away from them. There is too much surveillance in this room already.”
“Got it.” He laughed. “I’m on a mission. Well… a virtual mission anyway. Hey, by the way, I’m sending you that cleaned-up image of the guy you photographed back at the Mong Kok Computer Centre. You should be able to see the man in the dark now with no problems.”
Domingo brought Gavin into the conference call with the other two and then explained to Jack and Adam what he’d done. Jack left the club and went out front, crossed Jaffe and sat at a tiny noodle bar open to the street. From here he could see the stairway entrance to Club Stylish.
Yao, Chavez, and Ryan simultaneously received e-mails on their phones. They opened them to see a good picture of a quarter-shot of Zha’s face and three-quarters of the back of his head, as he spoke to an older Chinese man in a white shirt and a light blue or gray tie. The older man’s face was clear enough, but none of the three recognized him.
Chavez knew Biery had special facial-recognition software on his computer, and he would be trying to get a match right now.
Yao said, “He’s not familiar to me, but you think he looked important, Ding?”
“Yes. I’d say you might be looking at the MFIC there.”
Yao responded, “The what?”
“The Motherfucker in Charge.”
Ryan and Yao just chuckled.
Gavin Biery’s voice came back over the headsets of the team a minute later. “Domingo, pan the camera to your left.” Chavez reached out and did so as he kept his eyes in the opposite direction, toward the bartenders.
“What do you see?”
“I noticed that the tough guys around Zha were all looking at something or somebody. I think it’s those two white guys in blue blazers. One of the Triads just pulled out his phone and made a call.”
“Shit,” said Ding. “I’d be willing to wager that the consulate guys made it obvious they aren’t here to watch the dancers. Adam, what do you think Fourteen-K is going to do?”
“My guess is they will bring in a few reinforcements. If they were really worried they would shuffle Zha out the back door, but all is quiet back here. Ryan, what’s going on at the front?”
Jack noticed a group of three Chinese men entering the club. Two were young, early twenties or so, and the third was perhaps sixty. Jack thought nothing of it, people were coming and going with regularity.
“Just regular traffic out here.”
“Okay,” said Yao. “Be on the lookout for more Fourteen-K, though. If those guys just called in a potential threat, things might get tight in there.”
Our boy has visitors,” Biery said a minute later, when the three newest patrons to the bar, the older Chinese man and his two friends, slid around Zha into the booth. “I’m sending a screen shot to your phones so you can see.”
Adam waited for the picture to arrive, and looked at it closely. “Okay. The older guy is Mr. Han. He’s a known smuggler of high-end computer equipment. He’s the one I was tracking when I ran into Zha in the first place. I don’t know what his relationship to Zha is. Not sure who the other two are, but they aren’t Fourteen-K. They are too puny and bewildered-looking.”
Gavin came over the calclass="underline" “I’m running their faces through facial-recognition software against a database of known Chinese hackers.”
No one responded to this for several seconds.
At the noodle shop, Ryan cursed to himself, and at the bar in the strip club, Chavez groaned inwardly. It was going to be a hard sell to Adam Yao that this database, which The Campus had pulled from a classified CIA database, would be something a financial management firm, even one hunting for a Chinese hacker, could just call up on a laptop.
Ryan and Chavez waited to hear what Yao said next.
“That’s pretty handy, Gavin. Let us know.” His voice was overtly sarcastic.
Gavin was clueless about what he had done, and it was clear he did not pick up on Yao’s sarcasm. “I’ll let you know. And by the way, I ran the other guy, the MFIC, too. No match at all,” he said, a tinge of frustration in his voice.
Yao said, “Hey, Domingo. Any chance you could meet me around back of the club for a quick chat.”
At the bar by the entrance to the strip club, Ding rolled his eyes now. This young NOC was about to take Ding to the woodshed, and he knew it.
And at the noodle shop, Jack Ryan put his face in his hands. As far as he was concerned, their cover was blown to the CIA man.