High Time To Kill rbb-3

by Raymond Benson

COVERING TRACKS

  AT PRECISELY EIGHT-THIRTY A.M., the Belgian police removed Hendrik Lindenbeek from his cell in Police Headquarters and prepared to take him to the Palais de Justice for a preliminary hearing. It was standard operating procedure for the police to transfer all the prisoners who were arrested during the night to the massive ornate building dating from 1883.

  Bond had suggested that they transport Lindenbeek under cover, for the Union might very well attempt to assassinate him if they could get a clean shot. Inspector Opsomer, an efficient but impetuous officer, humored the British agent and assured him that they would take every precaution.

  Nevertheless, Opsomer was not present in the morning. He was called away on another matter and left the transfer of prisoners to his assistant, Sergeant Poelaert.

  Poelaert, who hadn’t been apprised of the seriousness of Lindenbeck’s crime and his importance to an ongoing investigation, put the doctor and two other prisoners in an ordinary police van. Under special circumstances, armored cars were used, but this didn’t seem necessary to Poelaert, as it would have required more time and manpower.

  Lindenbeek, handcuffed and in leg chains, was escorted to the garage by two gendarmes. The two other prisoners had been arrested for mugging a tourist and were already inside the olive green Mercedes van. Lindenbeek climbed in the back and sat down, nervous and frightened since his arrest. He wasn’t accustomed to this kind of treatment. He was a medical doctor! He had a respectable list of patients! He hoped that all this could be sorted out quickly and that he would be sent to a safe hiding place. His lawyer was confident that everything would turn out for the best, but Lindenbeek wondered if he would ever practice medicine again.

  Sergeant Poelaert locked the back of the van and got in the passenger side. He gave the signal to open the garage door.

  A small seventy-year-old chapel stood less than a half block away from the police station. A window in the steeple was conveniently placed so that anyone crouched inside could see the entire street.

  Dr. Steven Harding sat at the window, his eyes locked on police headquarters. He held a CSS 300 VHF/UHF radio transceiver to his face.

  “Stand by,” he said.

  The garage door opened.

  “Okay, they’re coming out,” he said. “Send in the bird.”

  “Roger that,” came a voice at the other end.

  The van pulled out of the garage to begin its ten-minute journey to the Justice Palace.

  “It’s a green van,” Harding reported. “Two men in the front. Looks like there are others in the back with Lindenbeek. I can’t tell how many.”

  “Does it matter?” came the other voice.

  Harding snickered. “Not at all. A prisoner is a prisoner, right?”

  The van inched along the narrow road in traffic. Aside from the normal rush hour congestion, the transfer was on schedule. Poelaert saw nothing out of the ordinary on the streets. It was going to be an easy delivery.

  As Brussels is a large metropolitan city, the presence of helicopters in the air is never a cause for alarm. The Soviet-made Mi-24 Hind assault chopper had been painted white so that it wouldn’t be conspicuous; in fact, it was completely ignored when it appeared in the sky over the heart of the city.

  The van turned down Rue des Minimes, a wider artery, and headed southwest toward the Palace.

  Harding said, “I see the bird. It’s all yours now. Over and out.” He pushed in the antenna and got up from his cramped position in the steeple. He quickly climbed down the steps and slipped out the back, where he had left a rented dark blue Mercedes 500 SEL. Lee Ming was in the passenger seat, his eyes closed.

  Harding got in the car and pulled away from the chapel. Lee woke up and asked, “How did it go?”

  “We’ll know in a few minutes. Let’s get out of here,” Harding said.

  The van progressed slowly down the large, crowded street. The helicopter hovered overhead. Armed with thirty-two 57mm projectiles in rocket pods located on the stub wings, the Hind is particu-larly adept at hitting small targets with precision.

  When the van stopped at a red light, the driver heard the chopper and looked out the window. He pointed it out to Poelaert. The sergeant peered at the sky, but the sun was in his eyes. All he could see was the silhouette of the helicopter and that it was white.

  “It’s from a TV news channel,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  The driver laughed. “ ‘Don’t worry about it’ is at the top of the list of best famous last words.”

  The light turned green and the van moved out into the intersection.

  Up above, the Union member with his hand on the trigger saw that the van was clear of most of the other traffic. The timing was perfect.

  Two rockets shot out from underneath the helicopter and zoomed down to the van so quickly that witnesses were not sure what had really happened. All they knew was that the van exploded with powerful force. Pedestrians screamed. Other vehicles skidded and slammed into each other in an effort to avoid the blast. For several minutes there was utter chaos on the street. When the smoke finally cleared, the only thing left of the van was a burning chassis with five charred corpses.

  The Hind pulled away and sped to the south. By the time the authorities determined that the van had been shot at from the sky, the helicopter was long gone.

  Meanwhile, the Mercedes SEL made it to “the Ring,” and headed toward the E19 exit.

  “How long to Paris?” Lee asked.

  “I don’t know,” Harding said. “Just sit back and enjoy the scenery. I’ll get you to your plane on time.”

  “My superiors are not happy with the change of plans.” Over the past couple of days, Harding had been holed up with the Chinese man and found him to be cantankerous and annoying.

  “Look, we can’t help it if Lindenbeek got caught. I had to see that he was eliminated. We couldn’t have him identifying us. The Union had to make last-minute changes, all right? The original plan with you flying out of Brussels to Beijing just wouldn’t have worked. They’ve probably got both of our faces plastered on every Immigration desk in Belgium. You would have been arrested before stepping on the plane.”

  Harding sounded more sure of himself than he felt. Ever since the encounter in the Métropole, he had been a nervous wreck. Everything had begun to fall apart. Basil had been hired to guard Lee, but instead had fouled up. The Chinese thought that Lee was going to be on a plane to Beijing, but that plan had to be changed at the last minute.

  “I would have you know,” Harding said, “that the Union fulfilled their end of the deal. We got the formula on a microdot, and we got that microdot inside of you. It was your problem to get back to China with it.”

  “No,” Lee said. “It was part of the Union’s bargain with my people that you would see me safely into China.”

  “We were going to do that, weren’t we? All right, so we changed the original plan. The new plan is more complicated and will take more time, but it will get you to China. Relax.”

  “I don’t particularly want to go to India,” Lee said.

  “I can’t do anything about it,” Harding said. “These are the orders from my superiors. I am to take you to the Paris airport, and there you’ll get on a flight to Delhi. You’ll be there only a short while. Then you’ll get on a plane to Kathmandu. That’s in Nepal.”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  Harding shrugged. “You will be contacted by someone in Kathmandu. They’ll find you at your hotel. All of that information is in the packet I gave you. Arrangements are being made to smuggle you across the border into Tibet. From there, you’re home free. But you’ll have to make your way to Beijing from Tibet.”

  “It sounds very tiresome. Don’t forget I just underwent surgery.”

  “You could be a little more grateful, you know,” Harding said. “The Union are going to all this trouble to get you to Tibet as a favor. We don’t have to do this. Like I said, our obligation stopped with getting you the formula. The Unio
n simply want our clients to be happy, so we’re taking this extra step to see that you get home safely. After all, we don’t get the other half of our money until you’re back in Beijing.”

  “What about you?” Lee asked. “You are a traitor to your country. Where will you go? How much of the fifty million dollars is your percentage?”

  “I can’t go back to England, that’s certain. Don’t worry about my percentage. I am being paid enough to make all this worthwhile. I have to leave my home, my country, my job . . . I plan on retiring on an island somewhere in the South Pacific.”

  “Stay away from the Philippines,” Lee said. “That place is no fun.”

  As they drove out of Belgium and into France, Harding worried about the next phase of the plan once Lee got to Nepal. At least he would be through with his end of the operation after he dropped Lee off at the Paris airport. What happened next was out of his hands, although he had helped plan it. If only that damned secret service agent hadn’t poked his nose into it. What was his name? Bond? That’s right . . . the golfer.

  Keeping track of him would be easy enough.

  James Bond and Gina Hollander sat in her office, staring at the computer monitor. Her spare laptop had been set up next to it so that they could work simultaneously. They had patched into Interpol’s database using Gina’s authorized password. The mug shots of Asians had been flashing on the screens for three hours and they had yet to make a match to Lee Ming.

  “They’re all too young,” Bond said. “Is there any way we can narrow our parameters?”

  “Not really,” she said. “Not from here. You ask for active Chinese agents, you get active Chinese agents.”

  “This is getting us nowhere. We must have looked at hundreds of faces, and frankly, they really are starting to look alike. I don’t mean that derogatorily.”

  “Perhaps he’s not a criminal. Maybe he’s an ordinary Chinese citizen. Maybe he’s not from China at all,” she suggested.

  “Look up inactive Chinese agents. He’s in his late fifties. He could be retired.”

  Gina typed on the keypad until a different set of screens appeared. As expected, the faces looked older, more seasoned.

  “This is more like it,” Bond said.

  She typed on the laptop and brought up the same database there. “I’ll take N through Z, all right?”

  They worked for the next hour.

  “At least there are not as many inactive agents,” she said.

  Bond was coming to the end of his half, when a face popped on the screen that looked familiar. He stopped and studied it closely. The man was identified as Ming Chow, a former member of China’s dreaded secret police. He had retired in 1988 due to a heart problem.

  “This is him,” Bond whispered.

  “Really?”

  The photo was twenty years old, so the man appeared much younger than Bond recalled. He clicked on the “details” button and more biographical information flashed onto the screen.

  Gina read aloud: “Ming Chow worked in counterintelligence through the seventies and later became an officer in the People’s External Security Force. He distinguished himself with the investigation and arrest of a British spy stationed in Shanghai. MI6 agent Martin Dudley was caught red-handed with Chinese military secrets being smuggled in antiquities. Before Dudley could stand trial, he was found dead in a jail cell. Ming Chow was promoted shortly afterward.”

  “Of course! Now I remember why this man looked so familiar. Martin Dudley was providing intelligence to MI6 for years when they finally caught up with him. There was quite a stink between Britain and China at the time. I was sent to China with a delegation of diplomats to testify at his trial. He was found dead the morning his trial was supposed to have begun. We were convinced he had been murdered, but the Chinese claimed he hanged himself. Ming Chow— how could I forget him?—he was the man in charge. When we suggested that perhaps Mr. Dudley had been killed, Ming Chow just grinned. ‘So sorry,’ he said, ‘accidents happen.’ I knew the bastard was lying. I could see it in his eyes.”

  Bond tapped the monitor with the back of his index finger. “He’s older now, but our Lee Ming is Ming Chow.”

  “So he’s not inactive at all?”

  “Not necessarily. He may not be officially working for China’s secret service. Many times, as you know, former agents hire themselves out for ‘freelance’ work.”

  “The Union, perhaps?”

  “I smell them in this, all right. Their fingerprints are all over this case.”

  “We had better get this mug shot out to all the Immigration stations in Belgium.”

  “We’ll do better than that. This fellow’s face is going out all over the world,” he said.

  Lee Ming, alias Ming Chow, had just checked in for his flight to Delhi when his mug shot was transmitted by Interpol to all Western immigration authorities. Unfortunately, he had already cleared Customs and Immigration and was waiting at the gate for boarding to begin. As it was, he probably would not have been caught. The Interpol information accompanying the photo of the Chinese man failed to mention that the man being sought was at least twenty years older than he was in the photo.

  A young British Airlines customer service representative named George Almond happened to be on break and was sitting with a sketch pad in a cafe across from Lee’s gate. George considered himself a fairly good artist, and he especially enjoyed drawing people.

  The Chinese man sitting across the way was a good subject. He had a lot of character and there was a timeless expression of world-weariness about him that George was determined to capture on paper.

  It wasn’t long before he had quite a decent drawing of Lee Ming.

  Thirty minutes later, as Lee Ming was flying toward Asia, George Almond went back to his post in customer service. One way that he amused himself between customers (who invariably wanted to complain about the airline’s food or lost luggage) was to look at Interpol’s broadcasts. He liked to get ideas for sketches by viewing the mug shots. The criminals always had character.

  When he saw Lee Ming’s photo, his heart started to pound. He opened his sketchbook to the drawing he had done less than an hour earlier and compared the two faces.

  “My God,” he said aloud, then picked up the phone to call security.

  The scratchy substance he had used to age and wrinkle the skin on his face had worked beautifully. Steven Harding looked at himself in the mirror and was pleased. He now had crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes and droopy bags beneath them.

  For the second time, he applied spirit gum to the false mustache. He hated the smell of the stuff, and it was awfully tacky. His first attempt to disguise himself with it had failed miserably. He had used too much and it got all over his fingers. It took him a half hour to clean them with nail polish remover.

  He nervously looked at the clock. He had a little less than an hour before he had to go to the Paris airport and catch his own flight.

  Harding carefully pressed the mustache on his upper lip. He held it in place with the dry sponge for thirty seconds, then examined his handiwork. The mustache was straight, symmetrical, and looked great. He was pleased. Now the hair.

  It was an ingenious device that the Union had given him. It looked like a small harmonica, but in reality it was hair whitener. By removing the metal comb hidden inside and running it through one’s hair a few times, a person could age himself considerably. Harding did as he had been instructed to do, and within minutes he was a graying man of sixty.

  After Bond and Gina had found Lee’s face, both the Chinese man’s and Steven Harding’s mug shots were broadcast simultaneously to law enforcement agencies all over the world once again.

  When the gray-haired man with a mustache and glasses approached Immigration and presented a British passport, the officer had no reason to connect him with any of the most-wanted faces that continually flashed across his screen.

  “May I see your ticket, please?” the man asked. Harding complied. “Moro
cco, eh? It will be hot there.”

  “It’s good for my asthma,” Harding said.

  “Be careful with the water.” The officer, who had no idea that the passenger was wanted for international espionage, stamped the passport and handed everything back.

  No one paid further attention to the small man who breezed through security, checked in at the gate with no problems, and then boarded a flight to Casablanca.

  TEN

  FIGHT INTO OBLIVION

  “IT’S OUT OF YOUR HANDS, DOUBLE-O SEVEN,” M SAID SHARPLY.

  “All I need to do is catch a flight to Delhi and—”

  “That is all, Double-O Seven.” The finality in her voice shut him up.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Bond said after a pause.

  They stood in her office at the end of the day. He had just returned from Belgium and made his report. The meeting did not go well. Steven Harding was missing, presumably out of Europe. Lee Ming, thanks to the astute airline representative in Paris, was traced to Delhi and then Nepal.

  Bill Tanner had received a report from the Delhi authorities saying that Lee Ming had come through the airport and had boarded a flight to Kathmandu. As requested, the Immigration officers in Delhi had stopped Lee before he got on the plane. They had orders to search him, but due to some unforseen bureaucratic foul-up, they had no idea what they were looking for. They searched Lee’s luggage and forced him to strip anyway, hoping they would find something incriminating. They failed. Noting that the Chinese gentleman had a recent implant scar, they became confused. Had they grabbed the wrong man? He certainly seemed perfectly innocent. What should they do now?

  They had let him go. Lee got on the flight and was now somewhere in Nepal. It had never occurred to the Indian authorities to hold Lee until they received further instructions.

  Tanner had said, “You can’t win them all, James,” but it hadn’t helped. Now Bond felt frustrated and angry that Steven Harding had slipped through his fingers. He was particularly sensitive about traitors. Bond had encountered his fair share of betrayal in his lifetime.

  “Station I is in charge now,” M said. “By the time you could get to Nepal, Lee Ming or Ming Chow—whatever the hell his name is— would be in China. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that Station I is successful in stopping him from leaving Nepal. As I understand it, they’ve traced him to a hotel in Kathmandu. We’ve been told that an arrest is imminent. You’re to go back to regular duty until further notice. Of much further concern, I think, is the leak from our office here. There’s been a breach of security at home, and I don’t like that. I don’t like it one bit, do I make myself clear?”