by Mary Moylum
Suddenly her attacker gave a yelp of pain, letting go of her as he tried to shake Buzby’s claws off his back. Buzby hissed again, and sank his claws deeper into BJ’s back. Quickly, Grace brought her legs up to her stomach and kicked him hard in the groin. He rolled off her, howling in pain and obscenities.
“Fucking cunt! You and that cat of yours are dead!”
Adrenaline coursing through her body, she pushed herself onto her feet and pitched herself down the stairs. Buzby was fighting him but her cat was no match for a madman with a knife. If she was going to die, she would die fighting. She dived for her bag, and the gun.
Take a deep breath. Relax. Damn it! Try again. Remove the safety catch. Her nerves were screaming. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want Buzby to die. Where was her cat? Had Buzby died trying to save her?
Cock the hammer.
Her assailant moved towards her, his face disfigured with rage and hatred. Holding the gun with both hands to steady herself, she fired just as his enormous hands reached out to her with the serrated edge of steel. She fired again.
Those few minutes would be her nightmare forever. She would always remember how his dead eyes opened in shock as he dropped his weight on top of her. And the gurgling sounds that escaped from his throat. There was blood everywhere. She was bleeding. He was bleeding.
After that, her mind went blank. She had no recollection of the policemen bursting through the front door and hauling the dead man off her, of the cruisers, the ambulance, of falling into Dubois’s arms, or of the chaos of sirens racing through the city that night.
chapter thirty-one
The plane landed at 10:17 a.m., Hong Kong time. Waving his Immigration identification, he zipped through customs and Hong Kong immigration in a matter of minutes. As he went through the revolving doors he left the artificially cool atmosphere of the airport terminal building, and was greeted by a warm blast of monsoon humidity and smog. By the time he climbed into a limo, his clothes were already clinging to his body. Obviously not the best time of year to come.
The last time Nick had audited the Hong Kong mission was the year Jon Keiler had taken up the post. That was before the handover to China. A lot had happened since the Beijing bosses had taken over Hong Kong, and it was at least three years since he’d been here. The uniforms of the soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese flags were everywhere. Even his limo driver flew the flag on his dashboard.
The taxi was a Mercedes. Nick leaned back against the seat and enjoyed the smooth ride. Hong Kong might be a cosmopolitan city, but you wouldn’t know it from the neighbourhood they were passing through. One in every four persons was dressed in pyjamas. Maybe he was missing something from the fashion magazines. Maybe this was the year of the floppy drawstring pants.
At the hotel, he took a shower. He was jetlagged up the ying-yang. Lying naked on the bed, he tried to get some shut eye. Lately his nights had been filled with frustration and longing. He willed himself not to think about her. Focus on the country he was in. And what he needed to do. An hour later, borrowing an umbrella from the hotel front desk, he braved the torrents of rain washing down from the sky and headed for the Canadian embassy.
At the embassy gate, he stood directly in front of the security cameras, and the doors were beeped open. He flashed his ID and allowed himself to be frisked and searched. After that, the staffers inside kow-towed to him. Membership had its privileges.
The ambassador remembered him from another posting and greeted him warmly. For the next fifty minutes he was corralled in a spacious office with a fantastic view of the harbour, being grilled for news on the home front. He was only released when the phone on the side desk rang with a call from the British high commission. The ambassador waved goodbye to Nick then gave his utmost attention to the caller on the other end.
Jon Keiler was on the phone when he walked into his office. He was stunned at the sight of Nick standing in front of his door.
“I’ll call you back,” he said, quickly cradling the receiver.
“You get a failing grade for follow through with orders. That stuff you were to put in the diplomatic bag, what happened to it?”
“Nick, I’m sorry, never even got to it. I’ve been swamped with work. We’ve all been up to our necks. Can I just get through this before we talk? Or even leave it till tomorrow instead?”
Keiler’s opening gave him bad vibes.
“I’m here to talk about the other half of the Sun Sui file. This won’t take long. Half an hour at most. In fact, show me where it is and I’ll sit quietly somewhere and go through it myself.”
“Yes, I looked for that, but it’s archived in another location and I haven’t been able to get over there. I’ve got too many deadlines coming up this week. Let me try to rearrange some priorities, clear some of this shit off my desk.”
Nick dropped into a chair and watched him shuffle files around his desk. “Fair enough. In the meantime, let’s see what’s left in the system.”
“Okay, but I’ll lose half an hour, maybe more, if you need to use this screen. The whole system is slow.”
“Jon, do I have to remind you who you work for?”
“You want to put it that way, fine,” said Keiler, throwing a harassed look at Nick. “Gimme the spelling.”
Nick watched Keiler enter Sun’s name into the database. There was a lengthy silence as they waited.
“There’s nothing to pull up. It’s not there,” said Keiler.
“Let me try something,” said Nick. He typed in a few letters and waited for the screen to change. It came back blank. He frowned. “Explain that to me,” he demanded, looking at Keiler.
Keiler’s face was so nervous it twitched. “What can I say, Nick? We must have overlooked him in running security checks.”
“Are you telling me that security checks were never done?”
“Nick, since the budget cutbacks, I don’t have the staff. We run the regular background checks, but others get postponed. What can I say?”
“In other words, you’re not doing due diligence. You’re not complying with my specific instructions.”
“Shit, Nick, it’s not like that at all.” Keiler’s voice rose defensively. “With our limited resources, we only do it if we’re not sure about something. Like their language skills, or something that catches our attention in their application.”
“Funny, when I read his file bright red flags came up all over the place. You mean to tell me nothing caught your attention?”
“This is a different class of people. These people have all got wealth without signs of traditional work.”
“And what does that tell you, Keiler? Because it sure tells me that maybe a tiny percentage of them have an uncanny knack of making lots of money. The rest have got links to organized crime.”
“Come on, Nick. Not all of them. That’s a racist attitude. We once thought the same thing of Italians. We thought they were all cousins of the Mob, remember?”
Silence. Nick had thought of Jon Keiler as a friend, someone he could rely on. He made no effort to conceal his disappointment. He reached into his briefcase. “Okay, Jon. Look what I brought with me. This is what we have on Sun Sui at our end.” He flipped through the file. “We don’t have much, but listen to this: ’Hong Kong police failed to uncover any legitimate sources of income prior to the establishment of the nightclub.’ And he’s never filed a tax return. And here, right here, it says he’s bringing three mil into Canada. You didn’t think that was odd for a refugee fleeing Communist China to make that kind of dough in only four or so years of living in Hong Kong?”
Keiler refused to make eye contact with Nick. “I guessed I fucked up a few of the files.”
Nick kept his voice soft, but he didn’t mince words. “Jon, you fucked up big time. You barely followed the goddamn processing guidelines I had implemented for all of you SIOs in the field to follow. You of all people should have known better.”
“You don’t understand!” Kei
ler was almost shouting now. “I do know better. But I can’t do better, because theory is different from real life. And Hong Kong’s a whole different planet. What works everywhere doesn’t work here. Here we got the richest people in the world and the lowest income tax system. We got the best free market economy and the worst government corruption. Most of these rich bastards in the Territory are either in bed with the Communist Party boys or, as you say, they’re international crooks. And I don’t mean the ones with criminal records. There’s no way to tell an honest man from a crook by the records. That’s why I didn’t bother running him through security. His file would most likely come back clean.”
“That’s no reason not to run security checks.” Nick glared at Keiler.
“Just about everybody in Hong Kong belongs to some kind of secret society. The whole goddamn place is disreputable, from company presidents to the top guns that run this colony. I agree that I made a few wrong judgement calls. I’m sorry.”
Nick pulled another stack of documents from his briefcase. “Jon, these are some of your approved applications that I pulled out of the system. Look at this one. Here’s someone who claimed to be a taxi driver but he’s recorded net assets of $2.1 million. Alarm bells aren’t going off inside your head?”
“Come on, Nick! He met the criteria to enter Canada as an entrepreneur!”
“A taxi driver is an entrepreneur? Maybe in Hong Kong. Not in Canada. When I get back home, I’m going to reassign you.”
“Nick, please …” Keiler turned white.
He looked frightened, Nick thought, and began to feel a little sorry for him. “You’ve been in the job too long. You’ve lost your judgement. It happens to everybody. Look, let’s meet later and talk about reassignment. We’ll work something out.”
Keiler seemed abjectly grateful. “Nick, thank you. Thank you for that. Can we meet at my place? There’s a restaurant around the corner where we can talk privately. I don’t want my staff eavesdropping on my problems.”
“Fine.”
Keiler jotted down his address and handed it to him. “You know how to find it?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll see you later.”
Walking back to the hotel, Nick tried to make sense of what Keiler had told him. But it didn’t add up.
What did he know about Jon Keiler when he had hired him? Keiler was already on the civil service track, and had been trying to get into the foreign service for years but couldn’t pass the interviews. Because there was a manpower shortage at the time, Nick had personally brought him on board and posted him to Egypt. After that he had been shuttled to Kenya. Two hardship postings later, he’d been rewarded with the cushy posting of Hong Kong. In his last performance evaluation, he had been written up as a conscientious worker.
But he wasn’t popular with other diplomatic staff. According to the charge d’affaires, Keiler was the kind of guy who attended a high level function and asked the kitchen help for a doggie bag. The charge had also heard that the expatriate women’s network had written Keiler’s wife off as a member of the polyester and acrylic crowd. She’d showed up at cocktail parties and other diplomatic functions in track suits. That kind of meanspirited gossip didn’t really make Nick like the guy less, but it sure meant he didn’t fit in.
Unfashionable and unhip, Keiler didn’t come from money. He was the son of a Hydro linesman from a small town out west. Cattle and farming country. His wife probably had a similar background. So what? Nick had judged him to be honest and intelligent.
But now his suspicions refused to die a quiet death. Could Keiler be on the take? Was he accepting bribes from members of organized crime so he could look the other way, and not run security checks? Was it possible?
Nick didn’t know. But he would confront him tonight.
In his hotel room, he phoned Grace and left a message, then tried again to catch some shut-eye. When he finally fell asleep with the remote in his hand, the Hong Kong stock markets were closing for the day, spitting out the last of the numbers.
He roused himself from his nap a little past seven in the evening. Rain still drummed against the window. Monsoon weather.
After lacing up his running shoes, he grabbed the umbrella the hotel had courteously left him. At the front desk, he asked for directions to Keiler’s house. A front desk clerk passed him a map with a line of arrows showing him the route to take. He strolled through a neighbourhood of East meets West. Golden arches, waiters on roller blades, DKNY stores alongside Chinese temples and gardens.
He took an almost empty ferry across the harbour. On the other side, he decided to walk instead of hailing a taxi. After the park, he found Keiler’s address. Even in the dark, he could see it was a large house. The expensive area, the size of the house, and its attractiveness only deepened his suspicions of Keiler.
He walked through a well of darkness between the elms and the dividing wall. Was Keiler cheap? Why couldn’t he turn on the patio and outside lights?
He rang the doorbell and waited. Nothing. He rang it again. He was growing angry. Keiler was avoiding him. He badly wanted to give one of his officers the benefit of the doubt. As he was about to walk away, he heard a sound like furniture falling. Keiler was there, all right. Maybe he’d just changed his mind about meeting Nick.
Since the front door was locked, Nick went around the side and tried the patio door. It was open. He was in luck. He entered, calling Keiler’s name. “Keiler. It’s me. Nick. I hope you don’t mind that I came around the back.”
No answer.
The house was in darkness. Something was not right.
A shadow staggered put from behind one of the closed doors. It stumbled toward him. Nick groped for a light switch and flicked the light on. The forty-watt bulb cast a pale light on Keiler’s face as he lurched forward. Was he drunk? And why was he so filthy looking?
Keiler fell into his arms, then slid down on the floor at his feet, Nick bent down to grab his hand. God! It wasn’t dirt. It was blood.
He felt the stickiness on his hand, between his fingers. Keiler was covered in blood. He made soft gurgling sounds as blood poured out of his mouth, from his slit throat. It pooled in a deep red puddle at his feet, staining the rug underneath. Nick tried to staunch the flow of blood but he knew it was useless. Another gurgle. Nick tried to make out the words, but couldn’t. With one last Herculean effort, Keiler directed Nick’s hand to his pant pocket where Nick could make out the outline of a computer diskette. He strained to understand the choked syllables Keiler was trying to utter, but then they stopped. Reaching, Nick pulled the disk out of Keiler’s pocket and tucked it into his own.
He never looked back. He ran like the devil from there. But he wasn’t fast enough. He heard the gunshots behind him, felt a bullet whiz past his head. With no place to hide, he tried to zigzag along the sea wall. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder. And another in his back. Something tore through his body. Then his legs went out from under him. The last thing he remembered before he blacked out was jackknifing into the cold, inky darkness of the sea.
His breathing slowed. Then it stopped. The twenty-four-hour duty nurse monitoring his vital signs sounded the alarm. She called for the crash cart.
The sky opened. He was being lifted upwards. Then the light burst into a rainbow of colours. He opened his eyes and saw his body from a distance. He listened to the emotional voices around him.
“His pulse is weak. Very erratic. Prep him for surgery now!”
As a spectator, he watched the medical team rushing him into the operating theatre. He watched himself being prepped for surgery.
He saw a vision of Grace.
He saw the haggard faces of the doctors and nurses as they worked on him. He was hooked up to all sorts of machines. He watched from afar, as the medical team tried to revive him. Then the thread of consciousness snapped.
epilogue
At nine-thirty the following evening, Grace finally opened her eyes. She was greeted by the sight of Ellen sleepi
ng upright by her bedside, in a hospital room filled with flowers and secured by a police guard. The first question she asked was, where’s Buzby? Ellen told her that her cat had been stabbed trying to save her, and was recovering nicely at the animal hospital.
Then she was given the message from Hong Kong. Nick had been shot, but he would be all right, and he sent her his love.
In the days that followed she learned that Cadeux was facing multiple charges of corruption, fraud, and breach of trust. Ellen told her that the RCMP operation on the illegal campaign contributions had captured Cadeux on camera on several occasions in the company of Wa Sing.
Working with Ellen, Kappolis and the local police force, Dubois gave up jurisdictional turf to assist in uncovering the identity of Grace’s assailant. They learned that his name was BJ Carmody, and that he had already served time in the penitentiary for murder and manslaughter. In his dingy basement apartment, they found ample evidence that he had intended to kill her. Ballistics was able to match his gun with the bullet taken from Mark Crosby’s body.
As a favour to Nick, Dubois downplayed the weapon Grace used to kill her attacker. Her handgun was quietly tagged and bagged in the evidence room. After the case was consigned to dust, the handgun was quietly returned to her where it made its way back into the safety deposit box.
Nick languished in the critical care ward of a Hong Kong hospital, hovering between life and death. He had almost died from a massive loss of blood. Afterward his body had gone into anaphylactic shock, causing his heart to stop from one of the transfusion drugs. An emergency team was assembled for around-the-clock care. As well, a certain Dr. Quang and his prayer warriors had been called by the pastor when it was feared that the patient would not make it through the night. They had chanted by his bed until the early hours of the morning when the emergency team pronounced that the patient had pulled through the worst. His recovery made the front page of the South China Morning Post, and within the span of forty-eight hours, he inadvertently became the poster boy for the prayer warriors.