by Lee Goldberg
“That must have killed the sedan chair business.”
“It had already been dead for thirty years when the escalators were built in the 1990s. The Mid-Level escalators are the boundary between Central and the Western District, where all the best clubs and restaurants are.” Margo put a coin into a telescope, peered through it for a moment, searched around for something, then offered it to Ian. “A lot of the apartment towers have pools and tennis courts on top. Take a look.”
Ian leaned forward and peered into the telescope, which Margo had pointed at an apartment tower with an infinity pool on the roof. The pool had a transparent bottom that was cantilevered over the edge of the building so anybody in the water would have the sensation of swimming in midair.
He panned the telescope to other buildings and then out to the harbor, which was a freeway of ferries, ocean liners, fishing boats, barges, Chinese junks, cargo freighters, and yachts going in all directions. It amazed him that there weren’t multiple collisions and sinkings each day. It was an exhilarating and inspiring view.
Ian leaned back from the telescope, took in the sight for a few moments with his naked eye, and began visualizing a scene, seeing it play out in front of him.
“You know what would be exciting? A paraglider chase and gunfight between Straker and triad assassins that starts right here and then goes on amid those towers. Straker narrowly avoids smacking into the buildings but a few of his pursuers aren’t so lucky. It could end with him over the harbor, landing on one of those floating restaurants, sauntering casually up to the bar, and ordering a martini.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Margo said. “Why would they be up here on paragliders?”
“I don’t know but I guarantee you that I’ll think of something.”
“Why can’t you just enjoy the view without cheapening it with an idiotic action scene?”
“Because I’m writing books, not movies. You can’t see a view in a book.”
“You could describe it. Isn’t that what writers are supposed to do?”
“Writers tell stories. To translate this to the page,” Ian swept his arm out at the vista in front of them, “I need to get my characters and the reader into the view so they experience it rather than see it. Action is how I do that.”
“In other words, you want to make it visceral,” she said. “You’re just like P. J.”
Holy shit, he thought, she’s right.
Margo saw the realization on his face, smiled to herself, and gave him a reassuring rub on the back. “It’s not so bad. Look at the bright side. At least now you know he’s the perfect director for Straker. I’m also learning something from this.”
“That I’m blind to my own staggering hypocrisy?”
“Everybody knows that. I’m beginning to think that maybe there’s more to what you do than sitting in your underwear, eating Doritos, and fantasizing.”
“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” Ian said.
As Margo and Ian walked away, they ducked under another selfie stick, but the camera on the end wasn’t focused on the young couple striking a pose against the backdrop of Hong Kong. It was focused on Ian.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Classified Location, Kangbashi District, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. July 3. 4:50 p.m. China Standard Time.
Yat stood in the control center and watched Ian and Margo leaving the Sky Terrace observation deck from the point of view of the fake tourist couple’s phone and the numerous security cameras mounted throughout the facility. It was an event covered from more angles than the Super Bowl and yet there was nothing to see.
“Why did they come here?” Yat asked.
It was a rhetorical question, but Pang offered an answer anyway. “Maybe it was for the view.”
“They aren’t here on holiday,” Yat said, each word dripping with disdain at Pang’s stupid comment. “They came here to make contact with someone, or to retrieve a message, or to leave a message behind. Everything Ludlow is doing is for a covert purpose.”
“We haven’t seen any interactions with individuals or any opportunities for an exchange,” Pang said, undeterred by the disdain. “The only thing they touched was the telescope and there’s no place on the device to leave a message.”
Yat was about to chastise Pang but stopped himself. Something clicked in his mind and he chastised himself instead.
It had become a reflex to dismiss Pang’s comments, but now Yat realized, in a moment of stunning clarity, that it was wrong to do so. There was wisdom in some of Pang’s observations, even if the underling didn’t realize it himself.
“You’re right,” Yat said. “Ludlow went there for the view.”
Pang turned in his seat to study his superior. When he decided that Yat wasn’t being sarcastic, he said, “What did he go there to see?”
“Now you’re using your head.”
“Was he checking the location of his next meet to see if it was secure?”
“I don’t think so. I believe there was a message posted out there in the city somewhere, perhaps in a window or on the rooftop of one of those apartment buildings, and he needed the telescope to see it. The message told him where to go to meet someone or to make an exchange.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know for sure. But we will soon find out,” Yat said. “Don’t lose Ludlow. I want eyes and crosshairs on him at all times.”
Hong Kong. July 3. 6:07 p.m. Hong Kong Time.
Ian and Margo took the Peak Tram down to Central, then walked to Lan Kwai Fong, where the narrow streets and alleys were packed with bars and restaurants that catered to the young, rich, and bored. Most of the places opened wide to the sidewalk, and people spilled out into the streets every night, creating the carnival atmosphere that was the neighborhood’s main attraction.
But now, in the hour or so before dark, the customers were mostly tired office workers, freed from their cubicles in the nearby towers and unwinding (or perhaps fortifying themselves) with a beer before making the trek up the streets, staircases, or Mid-Level escalators back home.
Margo took him up a narrow staircase in an alley between two tall buildings to Wyndham Street. It was a busy street lined mostly with new skyscrapers or gentrified older buildings. If you took the Chinese signs away, Ian thought, central Hong Kong wasn’t really any different than any big, modern city. He could be standing in Seattle, London, Frankfurt, or Sydney.
But he only held that opinion for half a block. That’s when he came to a skyscraper that was under construction and surrounded by bamboo scaffolding that was tied together without nails or screws. It was such an antiquated way to build scaffolding that it seemed utterly out of place in the construction of new, cutting-edge architecture.
Margo read his baffled expression and explained: “Bamboo is faster to put up than steel and withstands typhoons better. It’s also a cultural thing.”
Ian was sure he’d use the bamboo scaffolding in a book. It was too weird not to. He took a few pictures and they continued along the street to the Mid-Level escalators, a covered, pedestrian overpass that was inclined uphill, or downhill depending on your perspective.
They took a staircase up to the pedestrian bridge. Inside, there was a moving walkway going uphill that was beside a walkway that was graduated every few feet with four-step stairs.
“The escalators go downhill in the morning and uphill the rest of the time,” Margo said as she led him down the graduated walkway. “There are three moving walkway stretches like this and the rest is made up of twenty escalators.”
Ian looked over the bridge railing at the traffic below and across the rooftops of some small buildings. He could envision Straker in a foot chase that took him across the rooftops, onto the Mid-Level escalators, and into the traffic below.
They only walked a block or so on the Mid-Level escalators, just enough for Ian to get a feel for it, before Margo led him down a staircase to Gage Street, which was packed with flower and fruit vendors, their
produce displayed on tables and open crates on the sidewalks. The vendors were wedged between fast-food stands, spice markets, and other stores, their street signs arching over the roadway. Aging, dirt-caked, water-stained buildings with rusted air conditioners in every window were shoulder to shoulder with sleek, gleaming skyscrapers.
“I like this neighborhood,” Ian said. “It’s a clash between old and new, but the new seems to be winning.”
“I thought you’d like it, but that’s not why I brought you here,” Margo said and then did a strange thing. She took a Wall Street Journal out of her shoulder bag and stuck it under her arm as they walked. “There’s someone I want you to meet. He’s a reporter who’s been covering politics and business here for the last five years.”
That explained the newspaper under her arm. It was so he’d recognize them. “You’ve lined up an expert to give me background and some local color.”
“It wasn’t easy for me to get him to talk to you.”
“So I shouldn’t ask him what would be the best guns to use in a paraglider gunfight.”
“Don’t be an ass,” she said, scanning the crowd.
“If that’s how you talk to your employers,” Ian said, “it’s no wonder you can’t hold a job.”
She spotted someone. Ian followed her gaze and saw a Chinese man with a Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm standing at the corner of Gage by an outdoor market that ran down Graham Street, a glorified alley that was closed to traffic.
The man was in his thirties, dressed in a jacket, tie, and slacks, like one of the office workers they’d just seen nursing beers in Lan Kwai Fong. He acknowledged them with a slight nod and crossed the street to meet them.
Margo offered him her hand. “Mr. Fung, thank you for meeting us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Classified Location, Kangbashi District, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. July 3. 6:16 p.m. China Standard Time.
Yat shifted his gaze from the big screen and multiple angles of Warren Fung to Pang Bao, sitting at a console beside him. “I suppose it’s coincidental that Ludlow is talking to the reporter that our operative impersonated to abduct Wang Kang.”
“I agree that it’s a troubling development,” Pang said.
It sure the hell is, Yat thought, then addressed everybody in the room: “Everyone stop what you are doing and listen to me.”
The two dozen data-mining experts in the room swiveled in their seats to face him and sat as rigid and expressionless as mannequins.
“Your priority now is Warren Fung. Hack his computer, his email, his bank accounts, everything. Do a global data search using all of our bots,” Yat said. “I want to know what he knows and who he has been talking to since he emerged from his mother’s womb.”
They nodded, almost in unison, swiveled back to their terminals, and began typing furiously at their keyboards.
Yat looked at Pang. “Where are our operatives?”
“We have two on foot and two in cars on Wellington. Two more are on the Mid-Level escalators at Wyndham. Two more are in cars on Gage and on Peel,” Pang said. “We have two snipers, one on Gage, another on Wellington, waiting to see where Ludlow goes.”
“Ludlow won’t go far now,” Yat said. “Tell the snipers to find good firing positions and be prepared to execute my kill order.”
“Thank you for meeting us, Mr. Fung,” Margo said. “I’m Margo and this is Ian Ludlow.”
Ian shook the reporter’s hand. “I appreciate it.”
“Call me Warren.” The reporter looked around anxiously. “Officially, I’m interviewing you for the Journal about your new movie and what it means for the globalization of the Hong Kong film industry.”
“Sounds like a good story to me,” Ian said. “I’m glad to answer your questions if you’ll answer a few of mine.”
“Let’s walk and talk.” Warren tipped his head to Graham Street, which was a packed outdoor market filled with butchers, fishmongers, spice sellers, and scores of fruit and vegetable stands. Shoppers and tourists clogged the center of the narrow roadway, which was closed off to vehicular traffic. The entire street was covered with a ragged patchwork of awnings, tarps, and umbrellas that sheltered the vendors and their customers from the elements.
Warren walked into the market and Ian and Margo joined him. The air was redolent with the clashing aromas of dead fish, blooming flowers, fresh vegetables, spices, and incense, all infused with the strong scents of cleanser and rot from the constant stream of foul water that ran down the street from the market’s melting ice, leaking buckets, and washed-out stalls.
“Why are we meeting in a busy outdoor market and not your office”—Ian raised his voice to be heard over a butcher they passed who was hacking away at a slab of meat with a cleaver—“or someplace more private and quiet?”
Warren walked slowly. He was in no hurry to leave the tight, noisy, smelly, sheltered confines of the market for this conversation. He also spoke softly, just loud enough for him to be heard by Ian and Margo.
“My office is bugged and meeting somewhere private would only make it easier for something bad to happen to us. It’s safer for us to be in a crowded, public place.”
That didn’t make any sense to Ian. “I didn’t know it was dangerous for a Wall Street Journal reporter to talk with a novelist about his book.”
“It is when the subject is China’s abductions of billionaire businessmen like Wang Kang.”
“That’s only one small aspect of my research. I might not even use that in the book.”
“You don’t know the whole story.”
Yat couldn’t see Ludlow, Fung, or the woman anymore. There were only a few surveillance cameras on Graham Street and they were positioned above the awnings and umbrellas that covered the vendors. But even when the cameras could get a clear view of the street, Ludlow and Fung were frequently obscured by signage and the crush of people.
“We’re losing them,” Yat said, frustrated. “Get our people on foot into the market. I want eyes on Ludlow and Fung.”
“Understood.” It was one of the many control room operatives who’d spoken, but all Yat could see from his vantage point were the backs of everybody’s heads, so it was a disembodied voice.
Yat looked at Pang. “Where are we with the hack?”
“Fung’s email accounts, his files at the Wall Street Journal, and the files on his home computer are encrypted. They can be breached but not quickly. So I’m trying an alternative strategy that will yield immediate benefits,” Pang said. “His iPhone was manufactured in Zhengzhou. I’m accessing our back door to get control of his microphone and camera.”
Pang was showing some initiative under pressure. Yat liked that. But decisive old-school methods might be necessary here.
“Where are our snipers?” Yat demanded of the room.
“On either side of Graham Street, sir,” another disembodied voice said. “I’m putting their sniper scope views on screen. You will see what they see and you are now in direct audio communication.”
A video screen on the big wall now showed a rooftop sniper-scope feed that was labeled SNIPER #1. His crosshairs and laser-targeting beam moved over the sea of tarps and awnings to the occasional openings over the center of Graham Street, where a river of people moved. It was difficult for Yat to make out any distinct individuals. For an instant, Ludlow briefly appeared, then he disappeared again. Sniper #1’s voice came over the control room speakers.
Sniper #1: “I can’t get a clear shot on any of them.”
The video feed from Sniper #2’s scope appeared on another monitor. He was positioned in the window of an office that also overlooked Graham. His view wasn’t any better than Sniper #1’s.
Sniper #2: “I can’t get a clear shot, either.”
“Don’t try to target all of them,” Yat Fu said. “Concentrate on the reporter.”
On the screen, Sniper #2’s crosshairs found the top of Warren Fung’s head.
Sniper #2: “Wait. I got him.”
But the words were barely out of his mouth when Fung stepped under another awning and was safe again.
The threesome stopped briefly in front of a vendor selling salted duck eggs, quail eggs, chestnuts, and blocks of tofu that looked like gelatinous concrete. Warren pretended to browse the selection and spoke softly to Ian and Margo.
“The Communist Party congress is being held this fall and that’s when key members of the ruling Politburo are selected. President Xiao Guangchang wants to consolidate his power before that happens,” Warren said, then continued his stroll. “Xiao can’t risk any political or economic instability, so he’s abducted business executives suspected of corruption or of supporting the Hong Kong democracy movement.”
“But Wang Kang doesn’t fit that profile,” Ian said. “He’s not corrupt and he’s been loyal to the government.”
“He’s done something worse,” Warren said. “He went on a spending spree in the West, taking on enormous debt that has leveraged against his majority stakes in Chinese banks and financial institutions. He’s just one bad decision away from crashing the Chinese stock market and crippling the economy. But even that shouldn’t have led to his abduction.”
“That’s not enough?” Margo said, stopping briefly in front of a vendor selling all kinds of egg and rice noodles.
“Wang owns banks, so he knows how much money the Politburo and Central Committee members have, where it came from, and where it’s hidden. That sensitive knowledge should have made him untouchable,” Warren said. “But it didn’t. That means something else is going on besides Xiao consolidating his power, something with enormous stakes for China.”