Dead in Hong Kong (Nick Teffinger Thriller)

by Jagger, R. J.

  “So the person who got killed in my bedroom is Lily Yip?”

  “Correct.”

  It was.

  “I don’t know exactly why d’Asia didn’t finish the job when she was in Denver,” Fan Rae said. “As best as I can figure, she was going to kill you in your sleep. Then the attack happened. Then you wanted to call the local police department to report it. D’Asia didn’t want her name and fingerprints and photograph in a police report so she left and came back to Hong Kong to bide her time.”

  THEN TEFFINGER CAME TO HONG KONG and told the whole story to Fan Rae.

  “I recognized Lily Yip from the photos of her,” Fan Rae said. “But I couldn’t tell you anything because she was a direct link to Tanna, and if you started uncovering everything it would come to light that Tanna was still alive. So I had to deflect you from moment one.”

  “So you also knew who d’Asia was the whole time?”

  “I did,” Fan Rae said. “But I also knew she was a killer and tried to steer you away from her.”

  Then something bad happened.

  When Fan Rae told Tanna that Lily Yip had been killed by d’Asia in Denver, Tanna went nuts. She never liked d’Asia in the first place, since she was a hit woman. But when Lily got killed, that was it.

  “Tanna came to Hong Kong to kill d’Asia,” Fan Rae said. “I tried to talk her out of it but she was hell bent. She was going to do it tonight. She hooked up with some stranger named Kong who was going to help her. I came here tonight to keep Tanna safe from Kong, not to help her kill d’Asia.”

  THE BOAT WAS DANGEROUSLY LOW IN THE WATER.

  “Some of the windows will go under pretty soon,” Teffinger said. “When that happens, it’ll just be a mater of minutes.”

  Silence.

  “I love you,” Fan Rae said. “I want you to know that before we die.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I love you too. So know that, back.”

  SUDDENLY A VOICE CAME FROM BEHIND THEM.

  “Well, isn’t this cute.”

  The words came from d’Asia.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I’ve been sitting back there the whole time and I have to tell you, Teffinger, that Fan Rae got it all figured out correctly. I’m thoroughly impressed.”

  “D’Asia?”

  “Shut up,” she said. “Did you think I’d be dumb enough to just put you in a sinking boat and leave? Someone might notice it and come by to save you. So I just decided to let you sweat it out for a while. But Teffinger, you’re right, the water’s going to start coming in the windows pretty soon, meaning it’s time for me to leave.”

  She turned a flashlight on and pointed it into Teffinger’s eyes.

  He must have squinted because she said, “Bright, isn’t it?”

  She walked over.

  A long knife was in her right hand.

  “Before I leave, I want to make absolutely sure that you’re both dead,” she said. “I’m sure you understand my position. So here’s your choice. I’ll either slit your throat or stab you in the back of the skull. You have five seconds to decide.”

  Teffinger pulled at the ropes with all his might.

  They didn’t budge, not an inch, not half an inch.

  Chapter Ninety-Seven

  Day Eight—August 10

  Monday Night

  ______________

  PRARIE AND SEBASTIAN ended up at a house he was renting at the east end of the island, a short distance from where the Island Eastern Corridor ended. Sebastian had a computer and encouraged Prarie to log onto the net. She searched for the insurance company that Emmanuelle said she was working for. There was no such insurance company. Sebastian put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a comfort hug.

  “I’m sorry you got dragged into this mess.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Yeah, I know, but still—”

  Prarie’s phone rang repeatedly all evening.

  It was Emmanuelle calling.

  Prarie didn’t answer, not once.

  They were letting the woman cool her heels.

  Then, after dark, Sebastian used Prarie’s phone to call Emmanuelle. “Surprise, he said, it’s me. Prarie’s with me. She’s safe. She knows about your whole fake insurance company scam. She knows you’re just trying to get the paintings for yourself. She knows you killed her father. Get a pencil, because I’m going to tell you where we’re at.”

  He gave her directions.

  “Come over, right now,” he said. “We need to chat. It’s time to stop all this insanity before it gets even worse.”

  HE HUNG UP and put his arm around Prarie. “You need to go somewhere safe before she get’s here,” he said. “You’ve outlived your usefulness to her at this point. Does she have a gun?”

  No, she didn’t.

  “We had one and she wanted to keep it, but I threw it away,” Prarie said.

  “Smart move.”

  “Into the harbour,” she added.

  “Good place.”

  He cocked his head in thought.

  “You should probably wait somewhere down the street,” he said. “Take your cell phone with you. Don’t come back until and unless I call and say the coast is clear. Does that sound like a good plan?”

  It did.

  “I need to use the facilities first,” she said.

  She used them, then left.

  Chapter Ninety-Eight

  Day Eight—August 10

  Monday Night

  ______________

  PRARIE WOKE UP and realized she had been unconscious. She was on a bed. Her arms were stretched tight above her head, with her hands near the headboard. When she went to sit up, she realized she was tied. Next to her was another woman, stretched out and tied in the same position—Emmanuelle.

  “Are you conscious?” Emmanuelle said.

  Her voice was quiet, barely a whisper.

  “Yes.”

  “Talk quietly,” Emmanuelle said. “We need to come up with a plan.”

  “You killed my father,” Prarie said.

  “No I didn’t, he did,” Emmanuelle said.

  “Sebastian?”

  “His name’s not Sebastian,” she said. “It’s Jacques Girard.”

  “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “Understand this,” Emmanuelle said. “He’s going to find out everything we know about the paintings and then he’s going to kill us.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “He took you in the alley to draw me in,” Emmanuelle said. “I should have picked up some death stars before I came over.”

  TIME PASSED, then more time.

  “Where is he?” Prarie asked.

  “He’s making us sweat,” Emmanuelle said. “That way we’ll talk better. Let me tell you a few things.”

  Emmanuelle told Prarie that she had been romantically involved with Jacques Girard for two years. He was rich and nice when they met, but later got intense and irritable. He learned that Van Gogh’s “Self Portrait” was for sale on the black market. He had two reputable people authenticate it and then bought it for an insane amount of money. He later learned that he actually bought a fake. The two men who authenticated it said that what he had now wasn’t the same painting they were shown. He came to the conclusion that the original painting had been switched out at the last second by the broker, Vance Wu.

  Vance Wu, in turn, had dropped off the face of the earth.

  Girard then hired a P.I. by the name of Quinton Benabent to find Wu and figure out what was going on.

  Girard wanted the painting back.

  It wasn’t just the money.

  It was the fact that someone had played him for a fool.

  BENABENT WAS BEING PAID WELL.

  He dug deep and hard.

  He came up with a theory that Prarie’s father, Jean-Didier Dubois, had been involved in the initial theft of the paintings from Musee d’Orsay. Jean-Didier had since left the museum to become a cab driver. Benabent tr
ied to get information out of Jean-Didier, who confessed that five paintings had been stolen, but wouldn’t cooperate in giving up any information on the people involved—probably, because if he did, it would put Prarie in jeopardy.

  Benabent was a smart man.

  But he wasn’t violent.

  When Jean-Didier wouldn’t talk, that’s when Jacques Girard lost it.

  He went to interrogate Jean-Didier himself.

  When the man wouldn’t cooperate, Girard shot him in the back of the head in his own taxi and made it look like a robbery.

  “I knew everything that was going on,” Emmanuelle said. “When he killed Jean-Didier, that was too much for me. I couldn’t tell the police, first because he left no proof behind, but more importantly because I knew he’d kill me. I knew I had to get away from him and I did. By that point, though, I also knew that there were five original paintings out there in the world somewhere. I knew that Girard would go after you next. And I also knew that you could help me find the paintings. So I came up with a plan to pretend I was working with an insurance company and got you to help me. That was partly for me, but it was mostly for you. I wanted to get you out of Paris so Girard couldn’t get his claws into you. I knew he’d kill you if you didn’t cooperate.”

  Silence.

  “Somehow he tracked us to our hotel,” Emmanuelle said. “When the lady showed us the printout of his face, sure, I knew who he was, but what was I supposed to do? Stop and explain everything to you on the spot? I just wanted to get out of there. In hindsight, that lady must have tipped him off, and must have been paid to get us to head to the alley. When you came out alone, he figured that was good enough. All he needed to do was use you for bait to draw me in.”

  Prarie exhaled.

  “This is all so twisted,” she said.

  “Yes it is.”

  “So you never intended to return the paintings at all?” Prarie asked. “You intended to keep them for yourself?”

  “That part is true,” Emmanuelle said. “But I was going to give half of whatever we recovered to you. You could return your half if you wanted.” A pause, then, “By the way, there’s one more thing you should probably know.”

  Really?

  What?

  “YOU REMEMBER THAT I FORMED that alliance with Kong, after he took me to the dungeon, and I agreed to cut him in if we recovered anything, right?”

  Yes.

  Of course she remembered.

  “Well, he called me today,” Emmanuelle said. “He had information that one of the original paintings ended up with the artist, Guotin Pak.”

  “How did he know that?”

  “That’s a long story,” Emmanuelle said. “The short of it is that he told me to get over there, right that minute, and find it before some other people showed up. I never made it, though, because I’ve been looking for you all day. That painting is gone by now.”

  Ouch.

  “Kong called me again, about an hour later when he got a chance to talk in more detail, and he told me the whole background of how the paintings got stolen from Musee d’Orsay, and sold, and fakes got switched, and stuff like that. He got the entire story from a man named Jack Poon, who is behind the whole scheme. Anyway, the gist of all that is that Vance Wu ended up with one of the originals. Poon had already deployed his men to recover it. The other three originals were sold around the world, to buyers in Cairo, Rome and Madrid. What that means to us is that all five paintings are now gone.”

  “So we did all this for nothing,” Prarie said.

  “In hindsight, yes.”

  “And now we get to die for it.”

  Right.

  RUSTLING NOISES CAME FROM THE OTHER ROOM.

  “Here he comes,” Emmanuelle said.

  Prarie pulled at the ropes.

  They didn’t budge.

  Chapter Ninety-Nine

  Day Eight—August 10

  Monday Afternoon

  ______________

  A FIGURE STEPPED INTO THE BEDROOM. Prarie turned her head. The figure wasn’t a man. It was a young Chinese woman, about twenty. She looked like she’d been through the war. She stepped back out, then returned a few moments later with a knife and cut them loose.

  She didn’t speak English or French but told them her name.

  It was Syling Wu.

  She led them into the basement. It was obvious that she had been a prisoner there for some time. Jacques Girard was on the floor, dead with a fork in his eye and a serious wound to the back of his head.

  Prarie and Emmanuelle hugged the woman.

  “I don’t know who you are or how you got the upper hand, but he had it coming,” Emmanuelle said. “He had every bit of it coming.”

  THEY CALLED THE POLICE, anonymously, but left before they showed up and headed to Guotin Pak’s house on the bluff. The place was trashed. Someone had beaten them there and tore the place apart. The walls were gutted. The ceiling was pulled down. The floor was pulled up.

  “We’re too late,” Emmanuelle said.

  “Oh, well, we had to try.”

  “Right.”

  The only thing left intact was the painting in progress, still sitting there in the middle of the room, worthless.

  They went outside and sat down on the steps.

  “Now what?” Prarie asked.

  Emmanuelle shrugged.

  “Now we get the hell out of Hong Kong while we’re still alive.”

  THEY GOT IN THE CAR.

  Emmanuelle cranked up the engine but didn’t take off. She just sat there behind the wheel.

  “What are you waiting for?” Prarie asked.

  Emmanuelle turned the engine off and got out.

  “I want check something,” she said.

  Inside, behind the work in progress, they found a second painting, tacked on the stretcher bars, protected with a plastic barrier.

  Claude Monet’s “Poppies.”

  The original.

  “I’ll be damned,” Prarie said. “He hid it in plain sight.”

  THEY CAREFULLY ROLLED IT UP and sealed it a cylindrical tube, set it in the backseat and drove into the storm, looking for a hotel. On the way, Emmanuelle said, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. With what we found out ourselves, combined with what Kong told me, we pretty much know the whole story of what happened. The other four paintings are beyond our reach. What we can do though, at this point, is send an anonymous email to Musee d’Orsay, the Hong Kong police and the Paris police, setting out the whole story, including the names of the people who have the other four paintings. We’d need to be careful to not say anything that will implicate us in an illegal activity, but that’s doable. Armed with that information, they should be able to recover the other four. Your father’s legacy and reputation will be restored, to the extent it can. That’s what you wanted, right?”

  Right, it was.

  “Except I was hoping to get all five back,” Prarie said.

  Emmanuelle chuckled.

  “That isn’t going to happen, girlfriend,” she said. “I’ve gone through too much brain damage to give up number five. It’s mine—ours, actually, half is yours. Plus Kong gets his cut.”

  “I don’t want my half,” Prarie said.

  “Okay, then, it’s mine,” Emmanuelle said. “I deserve something for all this, don’t you think?”

  Prarie considered it.

  The answer surprised her.

  “Yes. You do.”

  Chapter 100

  Day Eight—August 10

  Monday Night

  ______________

  D’ASIA PRESSED THE KNIFE against Teffinger’s throat. “I’m actually sort of sorry to see it end this way,” she said. “You did, after all, travel halfway around the world to help me. Then you get killed for all your troubles. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” Silence. “It’s nothing personal, Teffinger. It’s just a contract, and a contract is a contract. When I get them, I fill them. It’s called mai
ntaining my reputation. Do you have any last words? Do you want to say goodbye to Fan Rae one more time?”

  “No,” Teffinger said.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then.”

  “I do have one thing to say to you, though,” he said.

  She pushed the knife harder against his throat.

  “Go ahead, but I’ll warn you in advance not to piss me off.”

  He exhaled.

  “Can you scratch my nose?” he asked.

  She chuckled.

  “If you’re planning on some lamebrain sudden move, it’s not going to work,” she said. “Save your strength.”

  “Actually, it really does itch,” he said.

  She looked at him, then scratched his nose.

  He made no moves.

  “THANKS,” HE SAID. “That’s a lot better. Before you kill me, I want you to think about something. You’re killing me because you have a contract to do it. Has it occurred to you yet that the person who gave you that contract has fired you?”

  Silence.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is this,” he said. “The guy who just attacked you upstairs, the one I saved you from, where do you think he came from?”

  She chuckled.

  “He’s a friend of Tanna’s,” she said.

  “Yes and no,” Teffinger said. “Tanna’s picture was in the newspaper Sunday morning, in the entertainment section. Did you know that?”

  “No, and I don’t really care.”

  “Me and Fan Rae were partying with Yuki, the singer, at the Dragon-i,” he said. “Tanna was there too. So were the paparazzi. The next day, there were pictures in the newspaper. Tanna was in those pictures. She was sitting on a couch, in the background, but there was no mistaking it was her.”

  “So what?”

  “So here’s what I think happened,” Teffinger said. “The man who gave you the initial contract to kill her saw her in the paper. He then realized you lied, when you said you killed her and disposed of the body. He then put a contract out on you because you lied to him and couldn’t be trusted any longer. The guy upstairs was the hitman for that contract.”