by Jake Needham
While he drank his coffee and watched the Chinese families posing happily with the giant panda, August thought about Billy Fang. He wondered if Fang would be expecting surveillance here. The briefing material offered no indication Fang knew he had been outed but, if he thought he was safe, then why was he running? Surely, he didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that spending the rest of his life in Beijing would be cool. He must have had some indication, at the very least a suspicion, that he had been burned. If he had, he would be on his guard, or he might be on his guard anyway. After all, he was a former intelligence officer with experience in the field. Counter-surveillance was probably second nature to him.
August finished his coffee and strolled across the right-hand bridge back into the lobby of the hotel. The lobby was big and busy and had a lot of places to hang out. Maybe that was the answer. Woods and Claire could split time in the lobby and somehow find a way to take Fang when he was passing through.
He looked around the lobby again. Who was he kidding? He didn’t see a single face anywhere that wasn’t Chinese. Woods and Claire would be about as inconspicuous hanging around the lobby as a Rose Parade float in a Walmart parking lot. But if they couldn’t cut Billy Fang off in the lobby, and they couldn’t cover all the exits, how in the world would they manage to get close enough to him to kill him, even if they could find an inconspicuous way to do that?
August had no idea how he could possibly carry out the assignment to take Fang down before he defected. None at all. He was more convinced than ever that it couldn’t be done in the time they had been given to do it.
An elevator opened and August quickly jumped inside before it closed again. He was annoyed and tired and hungry. All he wanted now was to go upstairs to his room, order a burger and a beer from room service, and get to bed early. Surely everything would look better in the morning but, even if it didn’t, he figured it probably wouldn’t look any worse.
August had hoped to have an idea of some kind by the time Claire and Woods got to his room at ten the next morning. A lame one would do, even a dumb one would be a start, but he had nothing, so he ordered a fresh pot of coffee from room service and told them about his scouting trip around the area the night before. They asked him some questions about the exits and the sight lines around the hotel, but he could see their hearts weren’t in it. When the doorbell rang and he let the waiter in to serve coffee, everyone seemed glad of the interruption and fell silent until he was gone.
“Okay,” August said when the door clicked shut behind the waiter, “I officially open the floor for suggestions.”
Claire cleared her throat. “Maybe you’re right, Bossman. We don’t know enough about this guy to put together any kind of a plan, and we don’t have enough time to execute a plan even if we had one. We don’t even know for sure what he looks like. He may have changed his appearance since those photos were taken.”
“If we can find him, maybe we can take him in the hotel,” Woods said. “I brought the insulin kit.”
The insulin kit was a plastic case that held two hypodermics and two glass vials with labels proclaiming the contents of the vials to be insulin. The plan had always been for whoever was carrying it to explain that they were a diabetic should their possession of it ever be questioned by customs somewhere, but they had never had to put that little subterfuge to the test since no one had ever said a word about it. Customs was so lax almost everywhere in Asia that sometimes August thought he could walk into almost any country with a bazooka under one arm and no one would say a word.
“What did you put in it?”
“The usual. Sodium thiopental and pentobarbital.”
They saw what Woods was thinking, of course. If they could get into Billy Fang’s room and hit him with a heavy dose of sodium thiopental, he would be out cold in ten seconds. Then they would give him another injection of pentobarbital, tuck him up in bed, and put out the Do Not Disturb sign. It would probably be twelve hours before anyone got suspicious enough to check on him. Even then, they would find nothing disturbed in his room, no sign of violence. Billy Fang would just look exactly like he had died peacefully in his sleep.
When they did an autopsy and ran the lab work, they would figure out what really happened, of course, but how long would that take? A few days? Maybe even a few weeks? August and his crew would be safely back in Pattaya having a beer at Secrets long before anyone even knew Billy Fang was dead, let alone before they found out how he had gotten that way.
“You got a way to get us into his room in the middle of the night?” August asked.
Woods shrugged.
“You think maybe we can knock and he’ll just invite us in? Maybe he’d enjoy having a chat with three fellow Americans before he defects to China the next day.”
“Must be some way in.” Woods shrugged again. “Best idea I got.”
“Maybe we should have brought Spike,” Claire put in.
It would doubtless have been useful to have a Chinese face to help with the surveillance, but August needed Spike at his keyboard watching the airline arrivals and the hotel’s reservation system. He was far more valuable where he was than he would have been on the streets of Hong Kong.
“Regardless of everything else, the first thing we have to do is pick up Billy Fang when he checks in and make a positive ID. We’ve got to be absolutely sure we’ve got the right guy. I want the two of you together in the lobby somewhere you can see the front desk. A couple will be less suspicious than a lone male trying to hide behind a newspaper.”
“We could take a bag down. Look like we’d had to check out because of the hotel’s check out time and are waiting around to go to the airport.”
“Good idea. When Spike tells us the Cathay Pacific flight has landed, get in place about a half hour later. He can’t possibly get here any sooner than that, and I don’t want you hanging around the lobby any longer than you have to. I’m sure it’s all covered by cameras and you don’t want to attract unnecessary attention.”
“Where are you going to be, Bossman?”
“I’m going to try to find a way to cover the hotel’s entrance from outside. Billy Fang is supposed to be coming in from the airport in a hotel limousine which means he’ll be brought straight to the main entrance. How many people could possibly be arriving by limo in the time frame we have? Six or eight? A dozen? I ought to be able to pick him up easily enough. When I do, I’ll give you a heads-up by telephone and follow him inside.”
“Maybe I can get close enough to take a selfie with my phone and get him in the picture behind me.”
“Don’t do anything to spook him, Claire. A picture would be nice, but it’s not worth blowing everything to have it. Unless we’re not certain about the ID, we don’t really need it.”
Claire nodded, but she said nothing.
“Okay,” August said, standing up. “Anybody got anything else?”
He looked from Claire to Woods and they both shook their heads.
“Okay, text me when you hear from Spike. And be careful out there.”
Chapter Thirteen
August thought surveillance operations were one time when you could claim that smoking offered real benefits. People just standing in the same place doing nothing look suspicious as hell, but people with cigarettes in their hands can loiter as long as they like staring off into space and nobody gives them a second thought.
In most big cities these days, crowds of smokers gather around doorways on every block and we walk past them without a glance. That was especially true in Mongkok. Half the men on the sidewalks had cigarettes dangling from their lips. Join them and nobody sees you anymore, even if you’re a foreigner.
A cell phone up against the ear isn’t bad, but most people talking on cell phones seem to be striding along at a purposeful clip, which doesn’t work very well for surveillance. A cigarette is the perfect beard. Cigarettes smokers dawdle, they meander, mostly they just stand and look at nothing, and nobody cares.
T
he burner phone that Woods gave August buzzed at 12:45pm and he checked the text message.
Flight at gate.
Billy Fang was slightly early, but August still didn’t see any way he could make it through immigration, get to the hotel limo, and be driven in from the airport to Mongkok before 2:00pm at the earliest. More like 2:30pm probably or a little after, even allowing for a little less traffic congestion than normal since it was a Saturday afternoon. But August was down on Reclamation Street outside the hotel’s main entrance by a little after 1:00pm anyway, just in case.
It was hot on the sidewalk. It was hot in Hong Kong most of the time. Not the heavy, intense, unyielding heat of Thailand perhaps, but in some ways the heat felt more brutal there.
There was almost no vegetation anywhere in the city. Parks didn’t make money so there were few of them in Hong Kong. The unchanging landscape of concrete, glass, and steel sucked in the heat like a vacuum, bounced it around, and amplified it until the entire city became a gigantic convection oven and people braving the sidewalk became the dry-roast.
August lit up a Camel and dawdled near another smoker who had also taken up a post there on the sidewalk to satisfy his nicotine cravings. He looked like a Frenchman to August. He had a long, thin face and was wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and a blue tie that looked expensive. They didn’t speak, but they exchanged those nods of mutual recognition and sympathy that smokers exiled to sidewalks exchange the world over.
The hotel’s main entrance faced onto a wide driveway that was actually a two-lane road paved in brown brick that ran through an open portico underneath the building. It went from where August stood on the sidewalk along Reclamation Street all the way through to Shanghai Street on the other side. The whole thing was more attractive than it sounded, interestingly designed and adorned with bright orange awnings on both ends. Two of the hotel’s limos were waiting for passengers in a parking area at the right side of the driveway, and August smiled. They were both stretched Mercedes sedans painted bright red. Billy Fang couldn’t be any more conspicuous if he arrived riding on the back of a fire truck.
The one-way street system in the area meant there was only one direction in which Fang’s limo could approach the hotel: north up Reclamation Street. When August finished his cigarette, he stubbed it out in a standing ashtray the hotel had thoughtfully provided for its guests and strolled slowly up Reclamation Street in the direction from which Fang would approach. He was looking for a Starbucks or some other similar place where he could settle down for a while and watch the hotel without being obvious about it, but he didn’t see anything that worked.
This was Mongkok, after all. Instead of a Starbucks, August passed the Shing Wai Electrical Supplies Company, two open storefronts selling power tools, one space mounded high with piles of truck tires, something called Yen Fung Electric, and the Nam Sam Hardware and Machinery Company. None of those places held much promise as a location for setting up an inconspicuous surveillance post so he turned and walked slowly back up the street to his previous post outside the hotel’s entrance.
His smoking companion had moved on and August was left to smoke his second cigarette all alone. Right after he lit it, he saw a red, stretched Mercedes approaching the hotel up Reclamation Street. Sure enough, it turned into the driveway and the gray-suited driver jumped out and opened the rear passenger door. August took a quick glance at his watch. Not even 1:30pm. Couldn’t be Billy Fang.
And, unless Billy Fang was cleverly disguised as a very fat, very black man wearing a purple dashiki, it wasn’t.
August watched as the doorman gathered three matching Louis Vuitton suitcases from the truck of the Mercedes, piled them onto a gold-colored luggage cart, and followed Mr. Purple Dashiki inside.
When August finished his second cigarette, things got awkward. He had no other smokers to stand with to make himself less conspicuous while he waited for Billy Fang, and he couldn’t find a place to drink a cup of unwanted coffee. August shook out another Camel and put it in his mouth without lighting it, but after a few minutes he felt so silly that he put it back in the pack.
He let his eyes track the other side of Reclamation Street north of the hotel. He would rather stay to the south since that would be the direction from which Billy Fang would arrive, but he had to go somewhere.
That was when he spotted the Chan Kee Roasted Goose Company. It was a little beyond the turn-in to the hotel’s entrance, but it had a big window in front and he could see a couple of empty tables just beyond the glass. August doubted he could see the main entrance doors from there, but he could see at least the first twenty feet or so of the driveway and a bright red stretched Mercedes turning into it would be hard to miss.
He glanced at his watch. Just before 1:45pm. Surely it would take Billy Fang at least another half hour to get there, perhaps even longer. There was nothing remotely appealing to August right then about a plate of roast goose, but the only alternative seemed to be pacing around on the sidewalk smoking Camels and becoming more and more conspicuous. Not a good alternative.
The Chan Kee Roasted Goose Company was slightly scruffy in the same way that a lot of neighborhood restaurants in Hong Kong are. Black plastic chairs pushed randomly here and there, cracked Formica tables cleaned only in the most general sense of the word, and a jar of colored plastic chopsticks in the middle of every table for diners to help themselves.
August walked in and looked around. The place wasn’t very crowded. It was late for lunch in Hong Kong and, besides, a local restaurant in Mongkok wasn’t a place people went for a leisurely meal or to hang out with their friends. In Hong Kong, people went to local restaurants to eat. They ate and they left. They didn’t hang around late into the afternoon chatting with their friends, and that suited August just fine. He took the table next to the front window that gave him the best angle to the front of the hotel without waiting for it to be offered to him.
His was the only white face in the place, of course. Mongkok isn’t a place where round-eyes eat lunch in local restaurants. A dumpy Chinese woman of indeterminate age wearing a shapeless green dress shuffled over, dropped a stained plastic menu in front of him and shuffled away again without speaking a word. Keeping one eye on the hotel driveway, August opened the menu and glanced at it. It was entirely in Chinese. Wonderful.
After he had gone through the entire menu and found not a word of English, he looked up. The woman apparently thought that meant he was ready to order and she shuffled back over.
August pointed at the menu. “English?”
The woman shook her head and stood there looking at him.
“Do you speak English?”
This time the woman didn’t even bother to shake her head.
August shot a quick glance back out at the driveway.
Nothing happening.
He knew he had to order something to justify occupying the table, and the menu obviously wasn’t going to be of any help, so he glanced around the restaurant while the woman stood there and waited him out.
Finally, as much to get rid of her as anything, he pointed to a table across the room where two Chinese men faced each other over a pink plastic plate that had some green stuff and some brown stuff on it. They were energetically shoveling whatever it was into their mouths with chopsticks and neither appeared seriously ill so August took that as the best recommendation he was likely to get. The woman looked where he was pointing, then she turned and walked away without a word.
August wondered if he had ordered goose. He wondered if the restaurant even sold anything other than goose. Surely it did. The menu was four pages long even if he couldn’t read a word of it. There couldn’t possibly be that many different ways to prepare goose, could there?
Looking back out the window he saw a white panel van turn into the hotel driveway, but there was no sign of another stretched red Mercedes.
In a few minutes the woman shuffled back to the table and placed a blue plastic bowl containing a heap of rice in
front of August.
“Do you have beer?” he asked her.
She didn’t answer, but after a bit she returned with a bottle of San Miguel. Apparently, the word beer worked equally well in both English and Chinese. Good to know.
August sat looking out the window, sipping his beer, listening to the other half dozen or so customers in the place all shouting at once. Chinese isn’t a spoken language, someone had once told him, it’s a screamed language. Over the noise of plastic plates banging on the Formica tables and the legs of chairs scratching on the concrete floor, he listened as several different Chinese dialects went to war with each other.
About ten minutes later, the woman returned with whatever it was he had ordered. Thick slices of something he took to be goose were arrayed with large chunks of bok choy on a white plastic plate. The crispy brown skin of the goose glistened with fat. After another quick glance out the window, he pulled a pair of plastic chopsticks out of the jar in the middle of the table, picked up the pink bowl with the rice in it, and placed a slice of goose that looked a little less fatty than the others on top of the rice.
Hong Kong people eat by holding their rice bowl in the palm of one hand, putting morsels from the table on top of the rice, and then lifting the bowl and shoveling both the food and the rice into their mouths using energetic scooping motions of their chopsticks. August had learned to eat Chinese food that way himself a long time back. It was a little indelicate perhaps, and it certainly fell far short of western norms of what most people considered good table manners, but he had come to admire the technique for its sheer efficiency.