by Graham Brown
He transferred half the money to an account of his own. The rest would wait; that was the deal. Then he logged out of the site, closed the browser, and shut the laptop.
Glancing at the note he’d been given at the front desk, he stood and walked to the picture window of his seventeenth-floor room. Moving his face up against the glass, he exhaled, creating a slight fog on the window-pane.
A small arrow appeared in the condensation, drawn with fingers and the subtle oils that resided on them. From Hawker’s point of view, it led directly to a moped rental kiosk on the opposite side of the street far below.
He reached out with his hand and wiped the window clean. He would meet his contact there in the morning.
CHAPTER 10
Danielle stood in the darkness, the filth in the air surrounding her. Hearing more movement, she stepped back in a defensive posture, waiting for something or someone to attack her.
“Show yourself,” she demanded.
A voice called out to her. “You disturbed our rest. So why don’t you show yourself.”
An oil lantern was lit, lending a fraction of light to the room. As her eyes adjusted Danielle saw a figure moving forward: an older Asian man, with a scraggly beard and mustache. Four or five bodies lay on the floor around him, covered with filthy blankets. She guessed they were sleeping. Beyond them were more stone walls and the remnants of cast-iron bars rusted and flaking.
“What is this place?”
“This is the brig,” the older man said. “You cross Kang, there is no court of law. Just this place or worse.”
“Stop talking, old man,” a stronger voice demanded.
Danielle looked and saw another prisoner, younger and larger. He studied her in return and she felt certain that his intentions were anything but pure.
“Who are you?” she asked bluntly. “And why the hell should he do anything you say?”
The younger man seemed insulted by the directness of her questions, but that was the point, to establish dominance or at least a position of strength.
He stood up, throwing off his blanket. He was at least a foot taller than she was, and probably seventy pounds heavier. In comparison to the others, he looked well fed. She guessed that he stole their food. That made him the head rat in the cage.
“You call me Mister Zhou,” he demanded. “You’re going to be here with us a long time. Better you learn right now, how things are.”
He stepped toward her and Danielle prepared for the fight.
“Stop,” the old man said. “No fight, not now.” He pointed toward the far wall. Through thin slits that might have once been gunports, the blackness beyond had turned a shade of blue. The day would be breaking soon.
“They feed us now,” he said. “No food, if we fight.”
Danielle stole a quick glance at the old man. He was skin and bones. She turned back to Zhou, and with her eyes locked on his, she stepped backward toward one of the stone bunks.
Zhou sat back down, waking another man and pointing Danielle out to him.
A few minutes later, as thin slivers of light crept across the stone wall, the rest of the prisoners began to wake. It seemed she had six cell mates: the old man, Zhou and his friend, an Indian woman who did not speak or make eye contact with anyone, and two others, who appeared to be Caucasian: a male child who looked about ten to twelve years of age and a man in his early sixties. He was short but stocky with broad shoulders.
He did not rise or look particularly well. In fact, he seemed to be dying.
CHAPTER 11
Hawker stood in line at the rental kiosk as the morning sun filtered through the skyscrapers. The streets were already clogged with a mad rush of cars, trucks, and people. Bicycles and pedestrians cut between the vehicles, seemingly unconcerned with the thought of a collision. Double-decker buses swerved around other traffic, changing lanes as if guided by Formula One drivers in training. Horns were almost omnipresent and brakes squealed at every intersection.
Renting a moped to enter that madness seemed about as smart as charging into a stampede with an umbrella for protection. But based on the line of people at the desk, both Chinese and foreign, it must have been a preferred means of transportation.
The clerk looked down the line and waved Hawker up. “Come, come,” he said. “Your bike is ready.”
Hawker stepped around a line of jealous customers and followed the clerk through the shop. He hadn’t ordered a bike of any kind, and assumed the man had recognized him.
“This way, this way.”
Hawker followed him out through the back, where a line of forty mopeds waited. As he stepped through the doorway he spotted a group of four Chinese men with weapons on display. The clerk threw up his hands as if to say he knew nothing about it and hurried back into the shop.
This was not the start he had intended.
One of the men waved Hawker toward a workbench. He was forced to sit and was then searched.
Nothing unusual was found. He sat quietly. Perhaps he’d been wrong to think Kang’s people were all he had to worry about. Looking at these men he guessed they were either the secret police or members of the Ministry for State Security, the Chinese equivalent of the FBI. Still, he was surprised to be targeted so soon, since he’d yet to do anything wrong.
Hawker’s passport was pulled and thrown over his head to someone behind him. He heard the smack of it being caught and then the pages rustling and finally a voice. “What are you doing in Hong Kong, Mr…. Francis?”
“I’m here on business,” Hawker said. “I thought I’d do some sightseeing first.”
“You must have a taste for danger,” the voice said. “Businessmen don’t rent these contraptions; they hire cars.”
The passport was dropped on the workbench beside him and a boot stepped onto the frame. He heard the slide of a gun racking behind his head.
“So what kind of danger are you looking for?” the man asked.
Hawker didn’t answer, not because he wasn’t ready to, but because he’d suddenly noticed something about the man’s accent. The English words were heavily accented, but the pronunciation wasn’t Cantonese or Mandarin, or any other Asian form, for that matter.
The man standing behind him, the man pointing the gun at him, was Russian.
CHAPTER 12
In the depths of the stone brig, Danielle watched as the food was brought to them by armed guards. It was an almost Dickensian scene, with dirty bowls of some rancid, salty broth and some hard, stale bread. Seven servings for seven prisoners, but no one moved toward the food until the guards had locked the iron gate and re-entered the elevator.
Zhou stepped forward first, taking the largest bowl of soup and gathering all the bread for himself. As he did the boy jumped down and snatched a heel.
Zhou grabbed for him, but the child was too quick. He raced back to his shelf.
“I cut your hand off for that,” Zhou said.
The boy didn’t respond. He was trying to feed the bread to the dying Caucasian man.
Zhou stormed toward the child. “Give me the bread!”
Danielle stepped in front of him. “Just let him have it,” she said.
Zhou pushed past her and snatched the bread from the child’s hand, then slapped the child across the side of the head. The young boy screamed and began to cry.
As the others cowered, Danielle stared Zhou in the face, an act he correctly viewed as a challenge. He did not back down.
“You must be something nice, I think.” He let his eyes fall across her hair and down the length of her body. “Otherwise Kang would have killed you.”
She stared back at him, now fully engaged in the test of wills.
Zhou seemed to enjoy it. “Concubine or whore,” he said, curling his lip. “I’m going to find out just what it is that you do.”
Zhou had leaned in toward Danielle, staring down at her in an obvious attempt to intimidate her, but the move had left him vulnerable, his legs straight, his body off balance.
Danielle sat down on the shelf of a bed, sliding back and creating some space between them, as if she’d been cowed by his threat. From her sitting position, she watched him smile disgustingly. She smiled back and in the blink of an eye pivoted and thrust her right leg out, slamming her heel into Zhou’s knee. The joint snapped with an ugly sound, like a firecracker going off. Zhou crumbled backward, howling in pain.
As he fell, he swung at her, but she dodged his fist and stood. With Zhou on the ground, she slammed a second kick into his face and his nose exploded in a spray of blood.
Zhou’s friend leaped from his bunk, charging toward her. He tried to tackle Danielle, grabbing for her throat, but she blocked his hands and using his own momentum against him, flung him into the wall.
Even as he crashed into the stone she held his arm, twisting it around backward and dropping a hammer blow onto his elbow. The man’s arm folded in the wrong direction and he screamed in agony. She slung him onto the floor next to Zhou, his face a bloody mask of shock.
She glared down at him. “That’s what I do, you son of a bitch.”
Zhou slid himself backward along the floor. His friend crawled alongside, and they dragged themselves to a deeper, darker part of the brig.
Around the room, the others looked on, approvingly it seemed. The old man was laughing, giggling at the entertainment. He moved forward, taking back the bread and proceeding to eat.
“Take it all,” he said to the others. “Don’t save any for them.” He was giddy. “With no teeth, they will not be needing food today.”
The young boy jumped down and took the largest bowl of soup, bringing it back to the dying man and trying to feed him.
“You eat it, Yuri,” the man said. “You need it.”
His voice was Eastern European, maybe Russian. She wondered what he and the child had done to Kang to warrant such treatment. Certainly he did not look like much of a threat. With great effort, he got to a sitting position.
“They will try to kill you now,” he told her. “They will want revenge.”
She thought back to the words of one instructor. If you move, make sure you do enough to prevent any countermove. She felt quite certain she’d done that.
“With those injuries, they’ll be immobile for weeks, maybe months without proper care.”
“Be careful when you sleep,” the Caucasian said. “They will come for you.” He pointed to the boy he’d called Yuri. “He can watch for you at night. He never sleeps,” the man said.
Danielle looked at the boy, perched on the shelf like a little bird.
“Is he your son?” Danielle asked.
“No,” the man said. “I kidnapped him, to sell him to Kang.”
Danielle found this revelation hard to fathom. The man seemed to have great affection for the child. “Kidnapped him?”
“I took him from the people he knew, though they were not his family. I took him from the only place he has ever known, though it was not a home.”
“He’s Russian, like you,” she guessed.
The man nodded. “He was under the care of the Science Directorate. They did experiments on him.”
The hair went up on the back of her neck. “Experiments?”
The man began to answer but went into a minor coughing fit first. “I wish I could say we were trying to save him, but that is not the whole truth. Kang wanted him. He promised us his safety and his fair treatment. But we did it for money.”
“What happened? How did you end up down here?”
The man coughed harshly once again, fighting to control it. “Things went wrong on our voyage. The navigation system, the radios, everything failed us, and my vessel lost its way in the Arctic. My crew thought we had been cursed. And maybe they were right.”
“I don’t understand,” Danielle said.
“We were tracking south through the night, following the compass. But when dawn came we realized we had been going the wrong way. Akula, orca, they followed us as if they knew we would soon fall into the sea. They pushed us onto the ice, slamming into our boat over and over again. Three and four at a time. The crew made it to the escape raft, but they were attacked and killed. And as the boat went down, I escaped to the ice floe with Yuri.”
Danielle looked him over. He smelled of decay. He had a stump wrapped in rags where his foot should have been and his hands, nose, and other parts of his face were black with gangrene. The child didn’t appear to have suffered the same way.
“How come he’s not frostbitten?”
“I used my knife, I dug us a small cave, and I surrounded him as best I could,” Petrov answered. “We were there for three days. Days almost without sun. I was certain we would be dead on the fourth, but a helicopter came. Kang’s people found us.”
“Why did he put you down here?”
“We were so far off course, he believed we meant to betray him.”
Danielle looked at Yuri. “All this for a child?” she said. “Why? Who is he?”
“He’s no one. He has no family that I know of, but he is unusual,” the dying man said. “He was born with a degenerative neurological disorder. His parents could not care for him and he was given to the Science Directorate. They use him in experiments, and somehow they stopped the progression of his disease. But there was a strange result, a side effect. They say he senses things, sees them.”
The man spoke in a wavering voice and she wasn’t sure the information was any more firm than the voice. Certainly it sounded odd.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Like a psychic?”
The man shook his head. “No. Physical things. Magnetic anomalies, electromagnetic disturbances. They say he can see beyond the normal human spectrum.”
“Can he really do this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” the man said, coughing badly. “Kang thought he could.”
“Then why is he down here?” Danielle said, realizing he’d used the past tense. “Does he not think so now?”
The man shook his head. “Yuri would do nothing he asked,” he said. “No matter the beating or incentive. No matter the threat. He only talks to himself or sings. And he would not leave my side. So Kang sent us down here. His men told Yuri that he would see me die and then he would have only his new master to cling to.”
Danielle looked at the young boy, slurping up the soup broth. “Does he even understand what Kang is asking?”
“I think so,” Petrov said. “He just doesn’t respond.”
Suddenly the boy looked up. His eyes darted toward the elevator door. Nothing happened, no sound could be heard, but seconds later the car slid into place at the bottom of the shaft and the doors opened.
The guards stepped out with their Tasers in hand.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Petrov,” he said. “Alexander Petrov.”
He went into another coughing fit, his body racked with spasms for twenty long seconds, and this time when he pulled the rag from his face, it was covered in blood.
CHAPTER 13
When Hawker didn’t respond to the man who questioned him, one of the thugs raised a gun and aimed it at his eye.
“You really won’t get much out of me if I’m dead,” he told them.
The thug was unmoved but the man behind him laughed. “Bring him with us,” he said.
Hawker was blindfolded and dragged into a waiting van. From there it was a short trip to the waterfront and a forced walk onto a waiting vessel, a diesel-powered junk.
As they rumbled out into the harbor, Hawker tried to guess their direction or speed.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked after a minute or two.
“I’ll gladly answer that, once you tell me what you’re doing here,” the Russian voice said back to him.
Hawker gave no answer. He was still trying to figure out the dynamics of the situation. Why should he, an American, have to explain to a Russian what he was doing in Hong Kong?
The motor beneath the deck cut back
to idle and then died away. Soon the boat’s momentum ceased and the vessel began to rock back and forth in the chop of the waves.
“Stand up,” the man said.
Hawker stood, holding the rail, as one of the man’s guards pulled the blindfold away. He began to turn.
“Eyes forward!”
A rifle jabbed him in the back.
Hawker did as he was ordered. They were a mile out into Victoria Harbour, looking back at the skyscrapers of Hong Kong.
“You are a man without a home, or so I hear. A man with debts to pay, who is wanted even by his own country.”
Hawker did not respond.
“You go by the name Hawker,” the Russian said. “An interesting metaphor this word. Where I come from, it means a seller in the marketplace, a shill, offering goods or services.”
The name had come to him as a code, one he’d kept for his own reasons. He didn’t try to explain.
“At any rate, you are here plying your trades, both gross and fine, only in this case, it is at the behest of your own nation’s security apparatus. Care to tell us why?”
Hawker held the rail. He guessed that the man already knew the answer, or some version of it. He remained quiet.
“Come now,” the Russian said. “You’re among friends here. To prove it, I’ll answer for you. You’re here to do something that might infuriate the Chinese. Something the people who hired you don’t want to be known for. Murder?”
“I’m not a killer,” Hawker said.
“You are a killer,” the man replied, emphatically. “But not a murderer, perhaps. What then?”
Hawker thought of leaping over the rail, but guessed he’d be riddled with bullets before he hit the water.
“It’s not so complicated,” the man said. “In fact, the answer is right in front of you.”
Hawker looked across the water, staring straight ahead. The boat had been lined up with Kang’s Tower Pinnacle, its white marble façade gleaming in the morning sun.