Hungry Ghost

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Petal.’

  ‘Her Chinese name?’

  ‘I don’t know. I only knew her as Petal.’

  ‘You never asked for her surname?’

  ‘It never came up.’

  ‘She knew your name, though?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Both names?’

  ‘Both names,’ agreed Dugan.

  ‘Well, at least one of you knew what was going on,’ said Leigh, and he laughed. ‘Seriously Pat, how well did you know her?’

  Dugan noticed the slick way the older man had dropped in his first name, trying to make it a chat between rugby fans rather than an interrogation.

  ‘We were friends.’

  ‘Do you know where she worked?’

  ‘Bank of China. I called her there a couple of times.’

  ‘And you got through to her?’

  ‘Once or twice, yes.’

  ‘You went to see her in hospital?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘She said she’d been attacked by a gweilo.’

  ‘Did she tell you who her friends were?’

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘The two corpses in the room.’

  Dugan shook his head. ‘No sir, no, she didn’t.’

  ‘What else did you talk about?’

  ‘That was about it, sir. She seemed pretty much out of it, she was badly hurt and she didn’t make much sense.’

  ‘She wasn’t delirious?’

  ‘No, but she seemed confused. I don’t think she was sure what had happened.’ Dugan could feel himself gradually enveloping the truth in layers of lies, building protective walls around the secret that Petal had given him, that she had trusted him with.

  Leigh leant forward and put his arms on the desk. He adjusted his cuffs and studied Dugan.

  ‘We have a problem here, Pat. This girl was in the company of two men, one of whom has already been identified as an agent of the Chinese intelligence service who we have tentatively linked to at least three assassinations in Taiwan. A syringe was found in the hotel room containing a drug that would have given an elephant a heart attack and her fingerprints were on it. She was taken out of the hospital, badly hurt as you pointed out, by a group of spooks from Xinhua, the so-called New China News Agency. Now while the rest of the world fondly imagines that the New China News Agency does nothing but put out press releases on the latest grain harvest, you and I know better, Pat. You and I know that they are Peking’s official, and unofficial, representatives in Hong Kong. And we know that out of their offices in Happy Valley walk some of the meanest sons of bitches from China. And it is starting to look as if your friend is one of them.’

  Leigh paused, looking Dugan straight in the eye as if his gaze could pierce the layers of lies. Dugan could feel his hands start to shake and he put them on his knees to try to steady them.

  ‘So, what exactly did your friend tell you, Pat?’

  ‘Like I said, sir, nothing.’

  Leigh reached over and picked up a file from the left-hand side of his desk. He opened it and casually flicked through it.

  ‘This is your file, Pat. It’s not a bad record you’ve got. If it wasn’t for your brother-in-law there’s no doubt you’d have made chief inspector by now.’ He put the file back on the desk. ‘If there’s one thing worse than having a triad leader as a brother-in-law, it’s not being honest with your superiors, Pat. I would hate to see a career like yours come under any more pressure.’

  ‘It’s not as if I’m going anywhere now, is it?’ asked Dugan, feeling the resentment grow inside, burning like a flame. He tried to stay calm, knowing that Leigh was just trying to rile him, trying to get him to open up.

  ‘Believe me, it can get a lot worse. A lot worse. Now, what exactly did this Petal tell you?’

  The senior officer was smiling still, but it seemed to Dugan that the green eyes hardened and that the kindly lines on the face were a mask. This man was not a friend, not to be trusted, and probably wasn’t even a rugby fan. The rugby would be in Dugan’s file. Dugan owed this man nothing. Fuck it, he owed the police nothing. They had killed his career, now they wanted his help. Dugan knew for sure then that his loyalty was with Petal. He would protect her and help her. He would lie to this man, he would lie all he could and he would enjoy doing it.

  Dugan grinned sheepishly and rubbed his hand over his bald spot. ‘It’s a bit embarrassing, actually, sir.’

  Leigh raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She wanted money.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘For her hospital bills. She said she didn’t think she had enough.’

  ‘And why would she ask you for money, Pat?’

  Dugan fell silent, and tried his best to look guilty and embarrassed.

  ‘Why?’ pressed Leigh.

  ‘I’d given her money before, sir. She wasn’t what you’d call a regular girlfriend.’

  ‘She was a hooker?’

  Dugan kept his eyes looking at the floor. ‘Yes, sir. I met her at one of the bars the guys go to. I picked her up. At first I didn’t realize she was on the game, it was only afterwards that she asked for money.’

  ‘But you said she worked at the Bank of China?’

  ‘That’s what I told everyone, sir. I didn’t want to admit that I’d had to pay for it. The guys would never have let me forget it.’

  ‘And that’s why you never knew her full name,’ said Leigh.

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Dugan. ‘That’s why I can’t understand why you think she’s working with Chinese agents. She wasn’t the brightest of girls, sir. A great body, but not a lot between her ears.’

  Leigh nodded. ‘I see,’ he mused. ‘I see.’

  Dugan looked Leigh straight in the eyes, trying to keep his gaze even and his breathing steady. He kept his hands firmly on his knees, fingers rock-solid, trying to keep all the tension down below the level of the desk, out of sight.

  Eventually Leigh seemed to reach a decision. ‘OK, Pat, that’s all for the moment. Let’s call it a day. I’ll give you a call if we need anything more from you.’

  He didn’t offer to shake hands when they parted, but stayed put in his seat and watched Dugan leave and close the door behind him. Leigh drummed the fingers of his right hand on Dugan’s file.

  ‘Senior Inspector Patrick Dugan, I don’t believe a fucking word you told me,’ he said quietly.

  Thomas Ng was standing outside the house, looking at the harbour below when he heard the phone ring and then stop as Master Cheng answered it. Cheng had arranged for a large desk to be brought down from one of the bedrooms upstairs and placed in the main lounge. On it he had put the old-fashioned black Bakelite phone and a stack of typing paper, a series of large scale maps of Hong Kong and a couple of felt-tipped pens. Now he sat in a chair taken from the set around the circular table answering the phone which had been ringing non-stop since first light. The maps had come from a property developer who owed the triad a favour, several favours to be exact, and included every single structure in the territory. As each tower block, hotel or house was visited and the doormen questioned the searchers rang back to inform Master Cheng. Cheng noted down the building, the names of the men who had visited it, and the time, which he took from a gold pocket watch he kept by the side of the phone. Sitting by his side was a young Red Pole who had formerly worked in a large estate agents and was helping the old man identify the properties.

  The search had started early in the morning, and had been going on for almost eight hours, and Cheng had insisted on answering every call himself, pausing only to drink cups of chrysanthemum tea, and once he ate a small bowl of plain white rice. Ng would insist that he rest soon. This was only the first wave; every building was to be visited three times to speak to all the doormen who usually worked eight-hour shifts. There was no point in just speaking to the men on the morning shift when the gweilo might have been seen late at night. A half-hearted search was worse than no search a
t all.

  He heard footsteps behind him and then Cheng was at his shoulder, face grave.

  ‘They have found him?’ said Ng.

  ‘They have found your brother. He is dead, Kin-ming.’

  Ng had expected as much but the news still hit him hard. He tightened his hands into fists and slammed them against his thighs, cursing in English. Cheng put his hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Where?’ asked Ng.

  ‘Hebe Haven,’ said Cheng. ‘He had been chained to the anchor of one of the yachts there.’

  ‘He drowned?’

  ‘Yes. And his wrist had been cut. It seems as if your brother tried to escape in the only way he could. He tried to cut off his own hand.’

  ‘Oh no,’ muttered Ng. ‘No, no, no. Who found him?’

  ‘The owner of the yacht, about half an hour ago. In a way it was fortunate, not many take their boats out during the week. At least we know that he is dead.’

  Ng nodded. ‘Fortunate is a strange term to use, but I know what you mean, Master Cheng. Can we keep this a secret?’

  ‘I am afraid not, the police are there now. Our men at Sai Kung say they have stopped checking the boats, for a while at least. There are police everywhere and it would not be wise for our men to attract attention to themselves. I told them to withdraw, they can continue again tomorrow.’

  ‘You are right, of course,’ said Ng. ‘Besides, the gweilo is unlikely to be keeping Sophie so close to where he killed my brother.’

  The two men stood together, looking at the mist-shrouded hills of Kowloon. To their left a peacock shrieked as if in pain.

  ‘You must tell your father, Kin-ming.’

  ‘I know, Master Cheng, I know. I will also go and tell Jill. She will not take it well.’

  ‘Neither of them will take it well. Your father is at your mother’s grave,’ said Cheng, and walked back into the house. The phone rang again.

  Ng slowly climbed the eighty-eight steps up to where his father was, his hands dead at his side. The old man was sitting on one of the stools under the pagoda where they had sat together the previous day. This time, however, he had his back to the harbour and his eyes were on the stone dome. He turned to look at Ng as he reached the top and stood there, breathing heavily and not just because of the climb. Their eyes met and the old man knew at once.

  ‘He is dead?’ he said quietly.

  ‘He is dead,’ repeated Ng, tears stinging his eyes. ‘Father, we must get the man who did it. We must, we must, we must.’ The words degenerated into a series of sobs as the tears spilled down his cheeks.

  ‘We will, Kin-ming. I promise you we will. Come and sit with me.’ His voice was unsteady and he held out his hand towards Ng, palm upward like a beggar pleading for change.

  ‘At least the budget runs to separate rooms,’ said Edmunds. He was standing in Feinberg’s room in the Victoria Hotel watching a hydrofoil set out for Macau.

  ‘Too right – sleeping with you would cramp my style a bit,’ said Feinberg as he flicked through the television channels. ‘You hungry?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘We might as well hit one of the hotel restaurants. It’s what, four o’clock now? I say we shower, eat, and then hit the bars. We’d better change our money here, and for God’s sake keep the receipts. Hamilton said he’d reimburse us but it’s not to be done through official channels. And we’re not to make contact with the local office.’

  ‘No back up? No support? And our handler eight thousand miles away? It doesn’t feel right, Rick.’

  ‘Piece of cake,’ said Feinberg. ‘And Greg Hamilton is a good guy to keep in with. He’s on the fast track and I could go a long way with him.’

  Edmunds noticed how the young agent had slipped from the plural into the singular but he was past the stage of being annoyed by petty politics. If Feinberg wanted to jump a few rungs on his career ladder that was up to him. As for Edmunds, he’d long ago resigned himself to not going any higher within the CIA. He hadn’t kissed the right arses and he’d been involved in too many dirty operations to ever be allowed a high-powered administrative position. In fact, during his more morose moods he sometimes worried about exactly what would happen to him, whether or not the CIA would actually allow him to retire and collect his pension. He knew where too many bodies were buried. He’d started taking precautions about five years earlier and compiled a diary of some of the murkier episodes of his career on a Macintosh computer and given three floppy disks to his younger brother in Chicago and sworn him to secrecy. Edmunds wasn’t sure if it would do him any good, or if it was paranoia in the first place, but it made him feel a little more secure. He knew plenty of CIA operatives who’d taken early retirement and joined private detective agencies or joined law firms or even just opened a bar, but he was also aware of a few who had disappeared on missions that were, as Feinberg would have described them, pieces of cake. Edmunds had only three years to go before he could retire on full pension and spend more time with his wife and he was determined to make it. Like the short-timers in Vietnam he was starting to count the days before he would be back in The World, and that, he knew, made him vulnerable.

  Feinberg sat on the bed and opened the telephone book. ‘Police,’ he said in reply to his partner’s raised eyebrows.

  Feinberg identified himself as a reporter with the International Herald Tribune and asked for the duty officer, eventually got through to someone who could speak English and again said he was a reporter.

  ‘Anything new on the double murder at the Hilton?’ he asked and was told there wasn’t. ‘What about the Brit who was shot? Has he turned up yet?’ Again he was told no. Feinberg thanked the officer and hung up.

  ‘Power of the Press,’ he said. ‘Howells is still on the loose. If he was in hospital they’d have him now. I feel lucky about this. Which side of the harbour do you want, Kowloon or Wan Chai?’

  Edmunds shrugged. ‘I’m easy.’

  ‘OK, I’ll take Kowloon. It’s been a few years since I’ve been to Red Lips and Bottoms Up.’ He passed the faxed picture of Howells over to Edmunds and said: ‘Can you get a decent photocopy of that? It’s pretty sharp so it should reproduce OK. I’m going to take a shower; I’ll meet you downstairs in the lobby in half an hour.’

  Edmunds agreed, though he was far from happy.

  Dugan grabbed at the door handle of the taxi a second before the leather-jacketed Chinese youth who had raced across the road in an attempt to beat him to it. When Dugan pulled the door open the guy tried to slip into the back seat but Dugan sidestepped to block his way.

  ‘Fuck your mother, gweilo pig,’ the man cursed in Cantonese.

  Dugan grinned at him as he got into the cab. ‘Your mother was too ugly but your sister screwed like a rabbit,’ Dugan shouted back in Chinese and slammed the door shut.

  ‘Wah! Good Cantonese,’ said the driver in admiration as he slammed the taxi into gear and drove off. ‘Where to?’

  When Dugan told him that they were going to the New Territories the driver began to whine. The tunnel traffic was too heavy at this time of night, it’d take almost an hour to get across the harbour and then he’d have to come back and he was supposed to be finishing his shift soon and had to hand the cab over to his replacement in Tin Hau. Please would the honourable gentleman mind switching over to a Kowloon taxi?

  Dugan was too tired to argue, and it was such a long trip there was no point in going with an unenthusiastic driver. There were several unofficial ranks on the island where taxis from Kowloon waited to pick up passengers who wanted to cross the harbour. The driver took Dugan to a petrol station opposite the Excelsior Hotel where there were three taxis waiting, their roof lights on but with red cards covering the meter flags bearing the two Chinese characters Gow Lung, meaning Nine Dragons, the Cantonese name for the area which the British had transliterated to Kowloon.

  The driver thanked Dugan profusely and drove off into the dusk. Dugan got into one of the Kowloon taxis and this time he met with no r
esistance when he said he wanted to go to the New Territories. They pulled out of the garage forecourt and forced their way into the queue of traffic edging its way to the tunnel entrance.

  Dugan sat back and closed his eyes, massaging his temples with the palms of his hands. During the course of the afternoon he’d tried several times to get through to Jill, but without success, and he’d decided that the only way to find out for sure what was going on was to go round in person. It was a bitch of a taxi journey but the MTR didn’t go anywhere near Ng’s house and Dugan’s salary barely covered his mortgage payments, never mind a car. They crawled along for the best part of half an hour before Dugan saw the tunnel mouth. They picked up speed once they were under the bright fluorescent lights and the tyres were singing on the road surface. The cars erupted from the end of the tunnel like water from a shower head, spraying out to pay their tolls at the line of booths where the money collectors were wearing white surgical masks to filter out the worst of the exhaust fumes, and then accelerating again, the harbour at their backs.

  Dugan still wasn’t sure what he’d say to Jill, or to Simon Ng if he was there. He would protect Petal, of that he was certain, but he would have to warn his brother-in-law that his life was in danger. He could tell them about the gweilo who had been attacked in the Hilton Hotel and tell Ng that the police had learnt that the man had been planning to attack him. He’d just have to be vague about the whys and wherefores and hope that the fact that the family would be on guard would keep them immune from harm. Assuming that is that they hadn’t been harmed already. What was it Petal had said? She was to be the back-up, the second line of attack if the first failed, and that she thought that maybe the man Howells was the real assassin. He could tell them about Howells, but Petal’s involvement would remain a secret.

  He was so busy rehearsing in his mind what he was going to say that he missed the turn-off to the Ng compound and he leant forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder.

  ‘We have to go back,’ he said, and gestured the way they’d come.

  ‘OK, OK,’ said the driver, and he slowed the taxi and did a reasonable approximation of a three-point turn. Dugan pointed at the side-road which angled off into the woods and the driver headed up it, switching his headlights on for the first time. He drove at full pelt up the track and had to slam on the brakes when he saw the barrier and its warning sign. The tyres squealed angrily and two men came out of the gatehouse before the car had even stopped. Dugan didn’t recognize them but they were typical Red Pole thugs, wide shoulders, casual clothes and expensive jewellery; they were chewing gum and their hands swung at their sides as they walked. One of them approached Dugan’s window and he wound it down, allowing the hot evening air to balloon into the cab. He could feel beads of sweat forming on his forehead almost immediately.