The Protector: A gripping, action-packed spy thriller

by Mike Lunnon-Wood

  “What does he want?”

  “Other than money? What everyone want. A passport. A real one,” he finished wistfully.

  Quayle thought about that. It was possible. “Who is he?”

  “Driver,” Steve said seriously, miming steering with his hands. He had never mastered the art and was in constant admiration of anyone who had.

  “Why is he prepared to betray his master?”

  “Family. His older brother was killed some years ago in a gang fight. Fung Wa’s people did it. He only find out when his father die six weeks ago. He want revenge.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “If it was money only, no, I think not. But the passport show he thinking about running anyway. I know the family. It all fit. But we take precautions. He betray us and his cousin’s sister never get over the wire. She in a boat people camp now, pretending she a Vietnamese. I said you could help there too.”

  Quayle nodded. This might be the break they were looking for.

  “Whose driver is he?”

  Steve smiled. It was a leery triumphant thing that said he had hit paydirt. “Fung Wa family!” he said gleefully.

  “Jesus!” said Quayle, almost disbelieving. “That is a stroke of luck.”

  “Fung choi,” Steve said happily. Fate was on their side.

  Half an hour later, fate arrived.

  They sat with the man for five hours, grilling him first on the motives for his act and then – when convinced he was genuine – on the routines and habits of the family: the time Fung Wa travelled to the office, and left for home, the security systems, the staff in the household, where the family ate, where the staff ate, everything they could think of, Quayle promoting Steve and keeping the two Chinese men to a rigid chronological pattern for a typical day. Now immersed in the concept, Steve would suddenly stop to offer Quayle good used Thompson machine guns or a bulk rate on tear gas by the crate, but Quayle tactfully refused each offer and brought them back onto the subject.

  The size of the task was becoming clear. Fung Wa had a low visibility security machine that was based round a few talented well-trained people, rather than hordes of men and fences. The triad wars over for some years, his security was residual and seemingly routine for an Asian millionaire: personal bodyguards for all members of the family supported by electronic measures – and the entire show overseen by supervisors from a security company that Fung Wa owned.

  The last servant of his gang days seemed to be his choice of major domo in the house, an old retainer who had a bulge under his armpit and frightened the servants. Aside from that, Fung Wa had shed the remainder of the old network to two trusted captains and now enjoyed the benefits of the rackets at a distance, while publicly deploring their existence.

  But Fung Wa had one other weakness…

  One of the privileges that he regularly indulged in was a call girl called Fay Ling. Fay was one of the ultra high priced string that the organisation ran and she made regular appearances at the office in the lunch hour, taking the private elevator to Fung Wa’s thirty-eighth floor office. Her speciality was anal sex and she sometimes brought other very young girls with her. The driver Quayle sat with had twice been asked to pick them up from the plush Peak apartment where she lived. He felt a sudden flash of fear for Holly. If they have touched you, just one hair on your head, he promised to himself, I will kill them all.

  Fay Ling was due in the office at 1pm, and that meant that Fung Wa would be lunching at his desk. With a plan formulated, Quayle gave Steve a list of things to do and headed back to the safe-house at Aberdeen Harbour. It would be after 8am by the time he got there. He needed a meeting with Cockburn and Alexi Kirov. There was much to do.

  They were in place by 10.40, Kirov and Quayle down near the big Causeway Bay department store, waiting in the back of a delivery truck parked away from the shop fronts. Sogo, the Japanese-owned shop, was forty meters down the street on a busy corner and Steve – who sat in the front of the truck – could see the main doors that led into the designer goods section on the ground floor. Here, Gucci and Dunhill vied for space with Louis Vitton and the perfume houses of France – and it was here that they would do the job. Cockburn was with McReady the Special Branch man, ready to run interference and Kurt Eicheman was supervising the fifty-eight foot pleasure boat as they moved it from its berth up to the typhoon barrier and the walkway. The crew who normally operated the charter vessel had been told to take the day off and now two of Kirov’s Spetznazt boat section men were aboard, one massaging the big twin throttles in the wheelhouse as the thrusters nudged the sharp bows round to the wall and the fuel pumps. Lastly, Quayle’s demonstration would be completed by three of the Spetznatz team, already on a boat and moving towards their target. It had all taken just two and a half hours.

  It was only seven hundred yards from Sogo’s to the marina, but driving meant risking the one way system and getting round the entrance to the harbour tunnel, so it would take five or six minutes. Quayle stretched in the back of the truck and looked across at Kirov. The Russian was altering his shoulder harness so that the big gun hung grip down, its barrel suspended by a thin piece of rubber. It was designed for one use only and, if it saw action today, it would be as a last resort. His prime weapon would be the nasty little KGB number wrapped round his fist: a reinforced Kevlar glove with a tiny CS canister in the grip that released a fine spray into the victim’s face as the punch connected. It would completely incapacitate the victim until their eyes were washed in a special solution by the casualty department of a hospital.

  For now, all they could do was wait. The 600 series stretch Mercedes would stop directly outside the doors as it always did – and Quayle wanted to move then, rather than wait until they came out laden with parcels and possibly separated.

  “The car comes,” Steve called through the small window to the back.

  “We’re on,” Quayle said to Kirov. “Ready?”

  The Russian nodded and together they jumped down from the truck, moving straight round to the front and onto the sidewalk as Steve’s brother eased the truck out onto the road in front of the traffic. They could already see the Mercedes, royal blue with tinted windows. Just four cars down, it had stopped short of Sogo’s doors.

  Kirov stepped off the pavement and tapped arrogantly on the passenger window. Knowing that the person couldn’t see the impatient gesture he was making, the bodyguard in the front seat slid the electric window down to tell him in no uncertain terms not to tap on his car, muttering in Cantonese about stupid pink-skinned tourists.

  As the window lowered, the driver – eagerly awaiting his chance of revenge on Fung Wa – slid his hand across the electric controls and unlocked all the doors. In that same instant, Kirov bent to look through the window at the thin faced Chinese in the front seat, then jabbed out with a punch that would have floored a professional, even without the CS spray.

  At that precise moment, Quayle came through the back right-hand door with a burst of power, the other bodyguard twisting to see what was happening in front. His hand reached for his weapon, but he was too late; Quayle delivered a sharp two-fingered jab at a point below his ear, and he collapsed across one of his charges, a stunning Eurasian woman in her late thirties. Bodies were bundled onto floors and, in three seconds, Quayle and Kirov were in the vehicle, guiding it forward as the truck across the street finally got on its way.

  Sitting where the guard had sat on the small fold-down seat against the front wall of the passenger compartment, Quayle put his foot on the bodyguard’s head and looked at the three people sitting stunned across the wide back seat. On the right was a young girl in her early teens, very like the Eurasian. The daughter, Quayle thought. The third was a woman in her forties, pretty but dressed plainly with her hair up in a bun and wide frightened eyes. Unknown. It had happened so fast that none of them had really understood what had taken place.

  It was time that he told them.

  “You are the wife of Fung Wa?” he asked th
e woman the bodyguard had fallen against.

  She nodded her head fiercely. “I am and you will not get away with this.”

  “I can and I will. I do apologise, but your husband has something of mine. We will swap within the next few hours. Until then, just co-operate and no harm will come to any of you.”

  “Why are you doing this?” the girl asked.

  “Ask your dad when you are a bit bigger,” Quayle answered with a reassuring smile.

  The mother put her hand across the girl’s lap and glared at Quayle.

  “And who are you?” he asked the third.

  “She speaks no English,” Mrs Wa replied. “She is my maid.”

  “I don’t think so.” He turned and tapped on the glass. “Who is she?” he demanded of the driver.

  “Wife big man from Canton. Communist,” he said.

  “So…” He turned back to face them. “A little shopping for a few capitalist luxuries. Very nice too. Tell her not to worry. She’ll be OK. What is her name?”

  “Noi Seng,” Mrs Wa replied, glaring at the back of the driver’s head. “Her husband is meeting my husband for lunch today. Top level discussions!”

  I’ll bet, Quayle thought. Like who’s going to give it to Fay first. He tapped on the glass again. “Let me out here,” he said – and, as the car pulled over, he fished in the bodyguard’s pocket, took the gun out and handed it through to Kirov.

  “Just do as you’re told and you’ll be home for dinner. But first: give me your purse.”

  She glared at him like he was a common thief but noticed, for the first time, the resolute determination in his tired eyes. There was nothing else to do. Believing him when he said that they would come to no harm, she felt the first thrust of real fear – not for herself, but for her husband. Producing her purse, she thrust it out to him with one long elegantly bejewelled hand, her eyes now betraying her thoughts. “Please…” she began.

  “There is nothing you can do,” he replied. “It’s up to him.”

  He had two hours until Fay was due to arrive at the man’s office. He could either give the boat an hour to clear the harbour and go straight in and get it over with, or wait and catch Fung Wa literally with his pants down. The initiative would be his. Choosing the latter, he made his way down the street past the hotel he was still checked into, towards the new towers that graced the waterfront. The private elevator could only be entered in the basement.

  Security would be a problem if he tried to penetrate in daylight, so the only viable course of action was to take the direct option. Striding brazenly through the front doors of the building, he began to peruse the tenants board. By the look of it, Fung Wa’s companies had the entire building and, already, he could feel the cameras on him. Somewhere in a control room people were watching him.

  Sauntering to the lifts with Fung Wa’s wife’s purse in his hands, he waited for a car to arrive, whistling a sad little tune to himself like a man bored with nowhere else to go. Above him, somewhere, he knew they would be scurrying like rats. This was the last place they would have expected him to walk in so boldly.

  A bell pinged in the roofing tiles above him and a little arrow began to flash over one of the lift doors.

  He stepped towards it and, as he did so, Teddy Morton’s beloved Newbolt flashed into his mind again, this time lines from Clifton Chapel: ‘to honour when you strike him down, the foe that comes with fearless eyes’. Quayle couldn’t stop himself smiling at the irony as he remembered words that came later in the same piece: ‘Qui procul hinc, the legends writ, the frontiers grave is far away, Qui ante deim perit, Sed miles sed pro patria’. My eyes don’t feel fearless, he thought, and I won’t die for my country. So will you Fung Wa? Will you die for yours?

  Stepping into the lift, he pressed the button for the thirty-eighth floor. The doors hissed shut and the car began to move, the floor numbers lighting up above the doors as the car rocketed upwards.

  When the doors opened, he had a reception committee.

  There, evenly spaced across the wine coloured carpet and silhouetted against the floor to ceiling glass of the windows, four men in identical grey suits waited. Reptilian eyes set in expressionless faces awaited an order from somewhere. Behind them, at a huge reception desk, a pretty Chinese girl sat in fear, her face pale. The silence was palpable and lasted for three or four seconds before one of a pair of matched carved doors swung back and a man walked through. Tall and dressed elegantly in an expensive charcoal grey cashmere suit, his hair was combed back above a wide intelligent forehead and the tortoiseshell glasses gave him the look of a young banker. Nevertheless, the streaks of grey in his hair betrayed his age – and the eyes behind the lenses were not those of a banker. They were the eyes of a predator.

  As he walked closer, Quayle could feel the power and the energy in the man. He oozed confidence like a man used to winning, like a man who thinks he has just won again. Fung Wa. It had to be.

  “Mr Quayle. How considerate of you to visit us. You have saved me the trouble of finding you.”

  “For you the trouble has just begun. Tell your gorillas to back off.” Quayle’s voice was loaded with menace.

  Fung Wa laughed softly. “How amusing! You walk into my offices and make demands? And what if I don’t?” Putting his hands behind his back, he nodded to one of the four suits and the man stepped forward with a wolfish grin.

  Quayle shook his head at the arrogance. You never knew who you were dealing with. Without taking his eyes of Fung Wa for more than a millisecond, his foot flashed up and took the approaching individual hard under the chin, his head snapping back viciously. It was a full contact blow and the man fell to the floor, his neck broken.

  The others dropped into various stances, two drawing firearms, bulbous nosed silencers pointed at Quayle.

  “We don’t get to talk and it’s bye bye to mummy Fung and baby Fung,” Quayle answered, his eyes glittering, holding up the purse, “and the wife of your visitor. Now, call off the fucking dogs.”

  Fung Wa’s voice snapped a command but his tone was hesitant. He was thinking. Calculating the odds.

  Quayle pushed his advantage. “Blue stretch Merc. I took them myself an hour ago outside Sogo’s. Your daughter is wearing jade green silk.” He paused. “Make your mind up! Do we deal or do you just let your mainland visitor give Fay Ling a quickie up the arse while you think about it?”

  That threw Fung Wa. His eyes narrowed and he snapped another instruction in Cantonese. The three remaining men came up out of their stances, the two with the pistols slowly holstering their guns.

  “My office is this way,” he said in English.

  Quayle followed him through the big carved doors, the three remaining bodyguards between him and their master, the fourth left lying on the rug where he fell.

  The office was big. Teak cabinets dominated one wall, the alcoves filled with prized pieces of carved jade. An antique table was surrounded by Louis XIV chairs and the remaining pieces of furniture were from the same period. The only evidence of the Twentieth Century was the bank of five telephones and the matched pair of facsimile machines beside a computer terminal on a smaller table.

  “So, what is your proposition?”

  “Easy. You give me back Holly Morton, unharmed, and you get your people back.”

  Fung Wa studied him for a moment. “How naive you are. Do you really think it that simple?”

  Quayle stepped forward a pace, his eyes narrowing.

  “It’s people like you who complicate it. Now watch my lips. You have taken something of mine. I want it back. If I don’t get it back, your wife, and daughter and the woman from Canton, will just be the start. Your world, as you know it, will cease to exist.” His voice dropped lower until it was barely a whisper. “And you will die as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow. Understand me now.”

  Fung Wa studied him for a moment. He was a man who respected courage.

  “Come now. Let’s discuss this. I have a large organisation and I al
ways have room for a… consultant like yourself. What do they pay you? Is it the woman? Come and work for me. You can have her back…” He waved his hand as if it were of no consequence.

  “I am not employed by any government. I have no rules but my own. Just return to me what is mine.”

  “Think about it. You can become part of something spectacular.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” Quayle asked him, wearied. “Some Ghengis Khan? You’re no more than a petty hoodlum turned politician who thinks he can pervert the course of history. Now, you may not give a fuck about your wife and kid – but I will bet you need the safe return of the other woman. You wouldn’t want a senior man from the Peoples Republic pissed of at you now, would you?”

  Fung Wa’s eyes widened.

  “Yes, I know about that. So do my associates. If I don’t get Holly back, your deal with Beijing is over. You will have no family, no business, no future. But that won’t matter because I will get you too. Believe me. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Fung Wa? This is not a negotiable issue.”

  Quayle stepped back a pace without, giving the Chinese tycoon time to think, and took a pointed look at his watch.

  “Have Holly ready to hand over to me by 5pm today. I will tell you where at 2pm.” Quayle walked to the big plate glass windows. “Nice view of the harbour. You went public a couple of years ago, didn’t you? Shares nice and stable? That’s one of your ships, isn’t it? I believe you insure your own vessels. Well, come and have a look. I’ve arranged a little demonstration. That bulk carrier down there? Nice boat. A cargo of rice from Shezou, I believe. What’s it worth? A couple of million? Maybe three?” He paused. “Say bye bye, Fung Wa. It’s about to sink. Just like your stocks. Things have only just begun.”

  He turned and walked to the doors. “5pm… or you’re fucked.”

  After Quayle was gone, Fung Wa walked back to the window and watched in white seething anger as his ship began visibly settling in the water right before his eyes, the work boats and barges backing away, the sea boiling under their transoms as propellers thrashed to gain purchase and a police launch turned towards her, the thin wail of her siren reaching upward.