John watched him for a moment, the pieces of the puzzle slowly falling into place. It was all starting to make sense.
“Where is Peter now?”
Joseph looked up. “How the fuck would I know? The bastard left me when those Nepali fuckers attacked me.”
John looked at Ronald who was still leaning forward on his cane, frowning at Joseph.
Ronald spoke up, his voice quiet but firm. “I want you to give my men a list of all your contacts, all your dealers, all your corrupt colleagues on the force.”
“No way… I’ll be finished.”
Ronald glanced at the man standing to Joseph’s left, and he stepped forward. He held a two-foot length of bamboo in his hand. He raised it high above his head with both hands before bringing it down hard with a resounding crack on Joseph’s left thigh. Joseph screamed in pain, and the man stepped back to his previous position. Joseph’s screams turned to sobs, his whole body shuddering.
Ronald watched him, his face devoid of expression as the sobs subsided to whimpers. Joseph looked up at Ronald and pleaded.
“They will kill me. I have a wife, a daughter.”
“Then I suggest you cooperate, Inspector Wong. Only then can we help you.” Ronald nodded at his man, and he stepped forward raising the bamboo pole above his head.
“Okay, okay,” Joseph protested, trying to make himself smaller. The man stepped back, and Joseph’s head dropped down again, his body shaking in silent sobs.
Ronald pushed himself to his feet and turned to John.
“I think we have heard enough.” He nodded to his men, then turned toward the door. John followed him out, and just before he exited the door, he looked back at Joseph, slumped in the chair, surrounded by Ronald’s men who stared back at him, their faces blank and expressionless. John didn’t like the guy, but seeing a fellow human being reduced to a bruised and bloody lump of flesh made him sick. He didn’t see much promise in Inspector Joseph Wong’s future. Still, Joseph would have killed him, so John supposed he deserved it. He steeled himself, turned and walked out.
He slid into the Rolls Royce beside Ronald, and the car glided away down the ramp to ground level. As it pulled out into daylight and accelerated gently up the road, John cleared his throat and asked the question he didn’t actually want to know the answer to.
“What will happen to him?”
Ronald didn’t answer immediately, just looked out the front window, his eyes focused on something far away. John thought he hadn’t heard him and was about to ask again when Ronald answered.
“He threatened my family, John. No one does that.” He turned to look at John. “You need not worry about him anymore. Let’s just say, he will be providing one of our new buildings a lot of support at ground level.”
John swallowed, closed his eyes, and tried to think of something else.
40
John was tired and fed up. He cricked his head left to right and rolled his shoulders, first forward, then back, leaning back in the leather seat of the black Toyota Alphard. Two of Ronald’s men sat in the front, Tejpal sat next to him in the middle row, and Thapa reclined in the back. They had been there on the side of the road for two hours, and John just wanted to get out. One of the men in the front kept farting, and the air in the car was stale, rank, and stuffy.
John had been faced with a choice. Walk away from the situation with the money in his account and the knowledge he wouldn’t be troubled by Joseph Wong anymore or find Peter and get some form of closure. He had been undecided, and Ronald had left the choice up to him. It was only when he had accessed the voice recordings stored in the cloud from the listening device he had planted in the saloon on the Pegasus, that his mind was made up.
With Ronald, he had listened to them in the car on the way back from the warehouse, and the evidence had been damning. Once they had fast forwarded the lunch conversations between Peter and David, they heard Peter discussing with Joseph how they would kill John and place his body in the saloon in such a way, it would look like he had been killed attempting to murder Peter. When they discussed what to do with David, Ronald sat forward and listened intently, a small twitch in the corner of his mouth the only clue as to his anger. Peter and Joseph had finally decided to kill David too and dispose of his body at sea while making sure all evidence pointed to his involvement in the attempted murder of Peter. After all, a dead man can’t deny the evidence stacked against him.
Ronald sat back in his seat and regarded John with an intensity he hadn’t experienced before.
“John, it is up to you what you decide to do from here onward, but I will not rest until this man is brought to justice for what he has tried to do.”
John nodded. He didn’t reply immediately and watched the world pass by the window of the Rolls Royce. He didn’t want to ask what “justice” Ronald had in mind, but he too wanted closure. He turned back to Ronald.
“I’m in.”
Ronald’s men had been watching Peter’s house all evening, but there had been no sign of the man. Another man was on the boat and another outside Peter’s office. Ronald had more men at the airport at Chek Lap Kok, but Peter was nowhere to be seen. They assumed he would come home at some stage. Even if he was planning to flee the country, he would need cash and his passport. John had the keys to the house, but there were two problems. Imelda and the other housemaid were in the house, and John assumed there would be an alarm for which he didn’t know the code. Ronald didn’t have a solution either but offered his men as manpower. All John could do was wait and pounce when an opportunity presented itself. He closed his eyes and tried to rest. The strain of the previous week had been exhausting, and he just wanted to go somewhere quiet and sleep for days.
He thought back to the last time he had been sitting in a car waiting, back in India, when he had hunted down the men who had harmed his wife. Even now, the thought stirred anger in his stomach. Anger and a rekindling of the grief he always felt when he remembered Charlotte. She had meant everything to him, and his life would never be the same now she was gone. What had he done to deserve a life like this? He had come to Hong Kong to escape the stress and bad memories, only for bad luck to follow him and throw him into a life and death situation where his moral compass was tested once again.
At around nine p.m., the men in front stiffened, and the driver reached back and nudged John. The gate at Peter’s house was sliding open.
“Thapa, Mr. Rai,” John whispered and felt them stir. Five pairs of eyes stared at the main gate, watching to see who would emerge. Imelda and the other Filipina, whose name John had never learned, stepped out and headed down the road toward the bus stop as the gate slid shut behind them. Sunday was the traditional day off for domestic staff, most of them gathering in their thousands in the streets of Central, and Imelda and her colleague were obviously going to make the most of it, leaving home the night before.
The men relaxed and settled back down again to wait. Once the house staff had been gone for an hour, and the street was dark and quiet, they decided to move. They were all dressed in black, but just before they opened the doors, Tejpal turned to John.
“You will need some of this. It's left over from my army days. I knew it would come in useful.” He dipped his fingers into a small plastic container of black cream and smeared it liberally on John’s face. “It’s a full moon tonight, and your pale skin will show up in the moonlight.” He made sure it covered John’s neck and the backs of his hands before sitting back and examining his handiwork. “Good.”
“What about you and Thapa?”
“Look at our color,” Tejpal laughed. “We have natural camouflage.”
Ronald’s men looked back and grinned, the first time John had seen them smile.
John, Thapa, and Tejpal slid open the side door and climbed out, leaving Ronald’s men inside the Alphard to watch the street. They looked both ways, then jogged across the road and headed toward Peter’s house. They spied a section of the boundary wall that abutted a lar
ge banyan tree, its branches spreading wide over the road and over the wall into Peter’s property. John boosted Thapa up the trunk, who then climbed until he reached a branch that spread out over Peter’s compound. Thapa made himself secure and reached down to pull up Tejpal. Both then reached down and hoisted John up into the branches from where they dropped down into the garden at the rear of the triple garage. The three men crouched and listened for a moment, but the house was silent. The muffled sound of a passing car carried from the road outside, and from deep inside the storm-water drain, a couple of bullfrogs croaked, their booming calls amplified in the confined space.
The three men spread out, Thapa to the corner of the garage where he could observe the gate, and Tejpal headed down the slope and underneath the cantilevered pool deck where he settled into the undergrowth. From there he could watch for any approach from the lower part of the hillside. It would be unlikely as the slope was precipitously steep, but they needed to cover all angles of approach, and Tejpal needed to use all his mountaineering skills gleaned from a childhood in Nepal to avoid slipping and falling below. John skirted close to the house, crouching low to stay below the windows and slid up next to the front entrance. He peered into the darkened interior through the glass panel at the side of the door. Ronald’s men had been watching the house all day, so they were confident now the maids had left, there was no-one else at home. The telltale blinking of a red LED on a control panel on the entrance wall gave away the presence of an alarm, so John would have to use Plan B. He had the set of keys he had taken from Peter’s jacket on the boat in his pocket but with the alarm on didn’t want to risk unlocking the door. He would wait. In a crouching run, he dashed across to the far side of the compound and crawled inside a bed of canna lilies, wedging himself against the boundary wall where he could remain unobserved but keep an eye on the front door as well as the side door which opened into the kitchen. He settled down to wait, confident no-one would spot them in their dark clothing.
The time went slowly, John glad of the fact it wasn’t raining but wished the temperature was a bit cooler. Even at night, the humidity levels were high, and amongst the garden foliage, there was no breeze to move the air around. His clothes clung to his body and sweat mingled with the cam cream and ran into his eyes. He wiped his eyes with his shirt sleeve, taking care to move slowly. He wondered how the other two were coping. He didn’t need to worry about Tejpal, he had a lot of experience patrolling the border between Hong Kong and China before the 1997 handover. But Thapa had been raised in the city with little experience of waiting quietly in the undergrowth for an enemy to appear. However, John was confident in the resilience of his Nepali friends. They had an inherent toughness, and he was sure they would cope with whatever came his way.
John stole a look at his G-Shock. He had been there for two hours, but there was still no sign of Peter. He had to return to the house at some stage—the question was when. Another hour passed, and John was giving up hope. There was only so much time he could sit in a tropical garden. He hoped there were no snakes, and so far, there had been only cockroaches roaming through the undergrowth and crawling across his feet. He had given up fighting off the mosquitoes, allowing them to suck freely on his exposed skin. He wished he had remembered mosquito repellent when they were making their plan.
He felt the telltale buzz of his cell phone vibrating in his pocket. He reached in and pulled it out, shielding the phone with his shirt so the glow of the screen couldn’t be seen. “He’s come.” John had set up a WhatsApp group for all the watchers so they could receive the message at the same time. He stiffened and peered through the foliage as the front gate slid open. A dark shape slipped inside and paused by the wall, waiting for the gate to slide shut again. John couldn’t make out his face yet and waited until the figure crossed the parking area and headed toward the front door. It was Peter. John typed a message and pressed send.
“I see him. Leave him to me. Wait for my message.”
He watched as Peter unlocked the front door and stepped inside. John saw him pause by the alarm control panel, then close the door behind him. Time for John to move. He slowly rose to his feet and pushed his way through the foliage until he was out of the garden and crouching on the driveway. He crawled across to the wall of the house where he wouldn’t be observed from inside and stood up. He shook the stiffness out of his legs and rolled his shoulders. He seemed to spend too much of his life hiding in wait for people.
He looked across to the garage and spotted Thapa crouched by the corner of the garage, watching him. He gave him a thumbs up and saw the white of Thapa’s teeth as he grinned.
John took a deep breath, then crept toward the front door, glancing inside through the glass side panel. Peter couldn’t be seen, but the LED on the alarm was now blinking green. John peered at the door lock, then removed the keys from his pocket, selected the key most likely to fit, and unlocked the door.
41
John slipped inside and pushed the door closed softly behind him. He paused for a moment, listening to the sounds of the house. It was silent, but as he listened, he heard the muffled sound of someone moving around inside. John reached behind him and pulled the Glock from his waistband and held it out in front of him—he hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. Slowly, very slowly, he stepped forward, grateful for the marble floors—no creaking floorboards to give him away. He remembered the layout of the house from his previous visit, and the moonlight coming in through the full-height windows provided enough light for him to find his way around. He crept forward, through the entrance hall. To the right, he remembered a door opened onto a study. Moving toward it, he paused with his ear close to the door. There was no sound from inside, so with his left hand, he gently eased the door handle down and opened it. The room was dark inside, obviously no-one there. He closed the door again and turned to his left. He crept forward and peered through the doorway into the large living room. He scanned it quickly, but again, there was no-one there. Keeping close to the rear wall of the living room, away from the windows, he moved swiftly toward the dining room and peered inside. Empty. He tried the kitchen next. The recessed lights under the overhead cupboards were on, providing a soft glow and a quick look sufficed to show there was no one inside. John heard more noise. Peter was downstairs. As if to confirm this, John’s phone buzzed again. With his left hand, he removed it from his pocket to view the message from Tejpal.
“I can see him moving around in the bedroom. He’s packing an overnight bag.”
John thought quickly. The top floor was the only way out of the building. He would wait for him up here. He crept back into the living room and looked around. Selecting an armchair in a darkened rear corner, out of immediate sight of the stairway, John sat down to wait.
He placed the Glock on his lap and thought about what to do next. He had an idea. From his other pocket, he removed the phone he had found in Peter’s jacket on the boat. The phone was locked, but John had studied it closely, and the screen, viewed from an angle, showed a pattern of fingerprints. It had taken eight attempts and almost an hour—the phone locking him out for a period after several failed attempts—before he had miraculously unlocked the phone. Once he was in, he changed the pin code and on impulse, went to the messaging app history. There was only one number—his. He opened the messages and found the final proof he had been looking for. A complete record of the texts that were sent from this phone to his. It was the final nail in Peter’s coffin. Whether that expression remained a metaphor, John hadn’t decided.
After five minutes, he heard someone climbing the stairs. He stiffened, picked up the Glock, and readied himself. Peter hurried into the living room, carrying an overnight bag in his left hand and a pouch in his right. John waited until he was halfway through the living room on his way to the front door, then pressed send on the phone.
Immediately, an alert sounded from Peter’s pocket. He stopped, set the bag down and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He looked at the screen an
d swore. Despite himself, John grinned. He knew what the screen said. Peter had just received a text from a hidden number.
“Going somewhere?”
“Turn around.” John flicked on the lamp beside his chair and stood up as Peter whirled around, a look of shock on his face. He raised his hands and backed away as he caught sight of John pointing the Glock at him.
“Stay where you are, Peter, this one is actually loaded.”
“John? Is that you? What’s that on your face?”
Peter tried a smile, but his eyes darted around the room, looking for a way out, an avenue of escape.
“Don’t even think about it, Peter. I’ve used one of these before, and I won’t hesitate to use it again.” He gestured with the Glock toward an armchair. “Sit down over there.”
Peter moved to the armchair and sat down, his initial shock replaced with an expression of calculation—his business mind already computing the risk/reward ratios and looking for an exit strategy.
“I can explain everything, John. Please put the gun down.”
“Yes, why don’t you, Peter. And you can forget about me putting the gun down. It’s staying pointed at your head.”
Peter sighed. “I can pay you, John. I’m rich. I’ll give you whatever you want.”
“Really?” John moved closer and perched his butt on the arm of the sofa. “From what I hear, you are no longer as rich as you say you are.”
“Ha,” Peter scoffed. “Look around you. Do I look poor to you?”
“G.B.L.”
“What?” Peter’s arrogant expression slipped.
“You know what I mean, Peter. G.B.L. As in gamma-Butyrolactone.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Peter blustered, his arrogance now gone.
“Don’t lie, Peter. I have a gun pointed at your head. I know what you’ve been up to. You’ve spread the company’s finances too thin. You’re struggling to make payments, and on top of that, your wife is leaving you. That will be expensive.” John paused, studying Peter’s face for a reaction, but he wasn’t giving much away.
A Million Reasons Page 13