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  Both men were relieved to see that the intelligence reports about the arrival of the plane had been accurate. The aircraft from America was right on time, and this meant the duo wouldn’t have to stand around up here on the hot roof all damn day.

  While the man with the optics watched carefully, the aircraft taxied to the customs ramp, then over to the tarmac in front of Hong Kong Business Aviation Center, a fixed-base operator popular with high-end corporate jets visiting the city. Both Chinese nationals lowered their bodies to low squats to decrease any faint chance they could be detected from a cabin window. They didn’t expect to be spotted, because they did this sort of thing all the time and were confident in their skills, but the target today was likely to be someone adept in surveillance detection and countersurveillance measures, so they took no chances.

  As intelligence officers with China’s Ministry of State Security, Wang Ping Li and Tao Man Koh were, by law anyway, precluded from working here without notifying the authorities in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong of the People’s Republic of China. The mainland had its rules, and HK, officially speaking, followed a different set of rules when it came to security matters. But these men were spies, and spies rarely followed the rules, and these two even less so, because they weren’t just any spies.

  Their real mission in Hong Kong, the reason Tao and Wang and two dozen other men like them were here in the first place, meant they wouldn’t be checking in with the local authorities. They were ghosts, smoke.

  They were assassins.

  Wang didn’t like this morning’s pedestrian work, but he understood the situation. Airplanes operated by known CIA front companies landed at Hong Kong International Airport from time to time, but never this particular jet, so these two intelligence officers had been sent to check it out. It was a distraction, but orders were orders and they’d been ordered here.

  That these were the only men close enough to respond to the request by the Ministry of State Security was unfortunate for them. Their real job here was for the Ministry of Defense; it was high-end wet work, and if it turned out getting an ID of the passengers of the Falcon took more than a couple of hours, their MOD control officer would hear they were off his job, and he’d ride them hard about it, their orders from Beijing be damned.

  Because, in the viewpoint of these two men, MOD Control was fucking nuts, and getting crazier by the day.

  Wang and Tao both had their long-range cameras out when the aircraft’s main hatch opened, and a black Mercedes S-Class pulled up in front of it. A rear door opened on the far side of the car, and both intelligence operatives focused their lenses there, assuming the Mercedes would disgorge a passenger. But the opposite happened. A man carrying his own luggage stepped down the jet’s stairs quickly and disappeared into the front passenger seat behind the smoked glass of the Mercedes.

  “Shit! Did you get him?” Wang asked quietly.

  “I’m not a photographer. If I had a sniper rifle, he’d be dead now.”

  “Not what I asked.”

  “I was focused on the back door of the Mercedes. I thought someone would come out. You?”

  “I’ll check.” Wang looked back at the digital images on his camera. “I don’t have a clear image of the face; he’s shielding the sun with his hand. Dark hair, beard, gray suit, sunglasses. He’s Western, for certain. Gold wedding band on his left hand. Roll-aboard luggage and a backpack.”

  “Whoever he is, he’ll be dead by sundown.”

  Wang stowed his camera in his backpack. “Would you stop with that, already? Let’s get to the car.”

  “That limo service is geotracked. We can see the movements of each car in their fleet from my laptop. Wherever the Mercedes takes him, we’ll know.”

  “And if this man should get out along the route?”

  The two walked quickly along the roof towards the stairs, their suits sticking to them with perspiration. Tao asked, “Why would he do that?”

  Wang replied, “Because he is CIA and trained in countersurveillance.”

  Tao felt some shame in not thinking the situation through. He made up for his humiliation by being the first to arrive at the stairs and the first to make it down to the black Toyota Aurion, an Australian-made vehicle that blended in well with the traffic here in the city of nearly eight million.

  With Tao behind the wheel they fell in behind the black Mercedes as it left the front gate of the Hong Kong Business Aviation Center and entered the busy morning traffic of Chek Lap Kok Road.

  While he drove, Tao said, “Colonel Dai is going to find out we’re off tailing some guy who has nothing to do with our assignment for MOD, and he’s going to order us to terminate him. Or else Dai will take it out on us, give us the crap jobs, a reprimand. The Americans have a saying.” He switched to English because both men spoke it well. “Shit runs downhill.”

  Wang sniffed. “That’s not a saying. That’s physics.” And then he continued, “If anything, Colonel Dai will get us to rough him up, interrogate him, scare him out of town. This won’t go lethal.”

  With that, Tao took his eyes off the road in front of him and looked to his passenger. “Disagree. Dai had us kill the man at the border, and he had Su and Lin kill the two Triads in Shek Kong. Fan Jiang’s bodyguards were executed the day after he ran in Shenzhen, and Dai gave that order, as well. The colonel is in a killing mood on this job, you must admit. I say Dai will have us terminate this CIA boy and dump his body in the harbor and then lie to Beijing about it.” Tao sniffed. “Dai is mad.”

  “Stark raving,” Wang agreed. “But a dead CIA officer in Hong Kong will just make his operation more complicated, not less.”

  Tao was unyielding in his opinion. “Complicated for us. Not for him. Colonel Dai doesn’t give a damn. Beijing has given Dai free rein, so that man in that Mercedes will be dead by midnight. There are no fucking rules for Dai in Hong Kong these days.” After a dry little chuckle in the back of his throat, he added, “The streets of this city will be running rivers of blood before this one’s over.”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Courtland Gentry sat in the front passenger seat of the Mercedes, much to the confusion of his driver. Normally passengers sat in the back and their luggage rode in the trunk, but Court had hurried off the aircraft and into the front of the car to disrupt any potential surveillance at the FBO, and since the driver didn’t know anything about tradecraft, he thought this American to be some kind of a weirdo.

  Court hadn’t seen the two men on the roof, but he saw them now, or at least he saw the black Aurion varying between six and ten car lengths behind his Mercedes, always there, despite the turnoffs, red lights, and off-and-on gridlocked traffic of a Hong Kong workday.

  Court had picked up a tail and he hadn’t even been on the ground here in HK for ten fucking minutes.

  Terrific.

  He considered bailing out of the Mercedes somewhere en route to his destination to lose the surveillance detail, but he figured this driver was probably an informant for Chinese intelligence, and the man would just pass on the fact that his passenger had, with no warning, dived from his hired car and dashed up some alley.

  Nope, that wouldn’t do. Court’s cover for status had to be maintained, which meant Court would just pretend like he didn’t see the black car lurking behind him.

  He’d been here to HK before, but only once. To the extent he had a regular beat, East Asia certainly wasn’t it, so he did his best to push the tail car out of his mind and instead spend his time doing all he could to observe the fabric of life on the streets around him. He noted what the police cars looked like, where the street signs were located, the flow of traffic, and the manner of dress of the commuters. He made a mental note of the cardinal positions of several major buildings in view. He’d spent hours of his flight over from the States prepping for his op here, but he’d not had time to digest more than a thumbnail sketch of this area of operations and, as he had learned countless times in the past, not only was the map not the territory, but most preconceived notions about a place were dead wrong.

  You really had to experience a location to know it at an operational level.

  Court had a lot of work to do to get up to speed, but his assignment here was as time sensitive as they came, so he’d have to work out the atmospherics of this AO while on the job.

  His car drove onto the Tsing Yi Bridge, and he glanced back in the passenger-side mirror to confirm that the black Aurion continued to follow. It was in a reasonable position for a tail car; Court gave these boys credit for knowing their stuff, but he had been either the tailer or the tailee thousands of times in his life, so sniffing out a car on his six was nothing to him.

  Both vehicles left the bridge, continued south along the water, and finally entered the Hong Kong district of Tsim Sha Tsui, on the southern tip of Kowloon. The black sedan was still back there, which meant to Court this tail on him was a simple affair. There were no teams of vehicles in radio contact leapfrogging all around, which was what he would have expected if mainland China’s Ministry of State Security was working here and had ordered up a large surveillance package on him. Either the guys in the tail car were working for some group not tied to the Chinese intelligence services, or else Chinese intel found him more of a curiosity than a real concern, so they just sent a couple of men to see where he was heading and what he was up to.

  Looking away from the mirror, he got his first glimpse of his hotel. The five-star Peninsula Hong Kong sat at the southern tip of Kowloon, just across the street from the harbor ferry terminal. He was anxious to get into his room—not so he could rest after the two-leg, nineteen-hour flight from th
e United States; rather so he could whip out his encrypted phone and call his handler. He would let her know about the surveillance, and he would let her have it, because this bullshit wasn’t his damn fault, and it could ruin this mission before it began.

  No, Court told himself. This wouldn’t hurt the op. It couldn’t, because his assignment here was possibly the most important of his life. The potential for gain was exponentially larger than any intelligence haul he’d ever heard of short of wartime.

  And lives were on the line, including the life of a man who had saved Court Gentry years ago.

  Court told himself he would not fail. Regardless of the hurdles ahead, he would see this through somehow, even if he had these Chinese motherfuckers breathing down his neck for the duration of his assignment.

  The Mercedes drove around the fountain in front of the Peninsula and stopped under the awning. A bellman opened the back door, but Court climbed out of the front seat with barely a nod to his driver. He handled his own luggage and passed the attentive bellmen with a curt nod, like he was a businessman who did this every day of his life.

  A stunning fleet of green Rolls-Royce Phantoms, eight in total, were lined up near the entrance to the hotel, and Court pretended to give a damn about them, just as a foreign businessman might. He knew the cars were here to take the well-heeled guests to and fro around Hong Kong, and he wouldn’t mind going for a ride in the back of a luxurious classic car, but this wasn’t going to be that type of assignment. No, he figured he’d likely spend his time skulking alone in shady alleys and cracking heads in opium dens and strip clubs.

  Despite the nice hotel and his nice suit, he fully expected to find himself serving as a low-grade ground pounder on this gig, not a high-flying cocktail circuit spook.

  After slowing a moment to fulfill his cover by looking over the Rolls-Royce fleet approvingly, he returned to his brisk pace and entered the lobby.

  Five minutes later he was checked into his twenty-fifth-floor room. It wasn’t a suite but it was roomy and ornate. It came with a dramatic floor-to-ceiling view of Victoria Harbor. Beyond the congested waterway, the massive skyscrapers of Hong Kong Island shot skyward. Past the stunning urban landscape, lush hills dwarfed the buildings, and Victoria Peak, the highest point in HK, was completely hidden by the low cloud ceiling.

  Court took in the view just for a moment before dropping his roll-aboard and his backpack on the bed, fishing in his luggage for his mobile phone and its battery, and reassembling the device.

  He turned on his room’s impressive stereo system, made sure the surround-sound speakers were each playing with the “all channel” stereo mode to remove the chance that a hidden surveillance mic happened to be positioned near a speaker that was only blaring music intermittently, and then he chose a station playing some annoying techno that was sure to madden anyone who might be eavesdropping. Court then entered the spacious bathroom and turned on the spigot in the tub. The sounds of water moving through pipes in the walls would play havoc on a microphone positioned nearby.

  More than once in his own career he’d had to yank headphones from his ears and throw them across the room to save himself from the roar of a filling tub or the thunder of a flushing toilet.

  Court’s mobile was encrypted with nonproprietary, off-the-shelf software that had been tweaked to improve the performance of the encryption but not augmented with any gadgetry that would give away the fact that Court got it from the Science and Technology Division of the CIA. It would withstand examination by experts at even top-tier intelligence organizations. If they ever got their hands on it, he’d seem like a paranoid businessman, an antisurveillance technology geek, but he would not look like a government spy.

  Gentry’s primary cover was as an American businessman, but his secondary cover was that of a freelance assassin—a hit man without portfolio—and he wasn’t about to give that away by using gear with the Agency’s fingerprints on it.

  It took a moment for his phone to establish a connection, but when it went through, the call was answered on the first ring.

  “Brewer.”

  Court checked his watch and saw that it was ten p.m. in Langley, Virginia, and he wondered if Suzanne Brewer was still in her office.

  He said, “Violator.”

  “Identity challenge, Roadster.” He heard a hint of relief in her voice. Court knew she’d been anticipating his call.

  “My response is Renaissance.”

  “Challenge response confirmed. I assume your operation is proceeding nominally.”

  “Not even close. There’s a problem.”

  “A problem? By the clock on my desk you should just now be arriving at your hotel. Is your bed too lumpy?”

  “I’ve got a tail.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “Are you—”

  Court interrupted. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “How the hell did you manage to pick up a tail?”

  “My plane landed, and there was a surveillance team waiting for me in a car as I left the airport.”

  Another pause. “That’s problematic.”

  “Problematic? At Langley, yeah, I guess that’s how it looks. Here, from my angle, it looks like an utter clusterfuck. How am I supposed to do this job with eyes on me?”

  Brewer remained detached and professional. “I understand your concern, Violator. I’ll begin a review immediately, look into the aircraft, see if there is a chance—”

  “Who knows about this operation?”

  Brewer answered without hesitation. “You, me, and Hanley. Full stop.”

  Matthew Hanley was the CIA’s new director of the National Clandestine Service. Court had a long history with Hanley, whereas his relationship with Suzanne Brewer was less than twenty-four hours old. But she was his handler, his single contact, his one lifeline with the Agency on this operation. He had to work with her, and to some extent, he had to trust her.

  But Court wasn’t a trusting guy. “You’re sure about that?”

  “Absolutely certain. Look, this isn’t about you. Can’t be. Whoever it is that’s following you doesn’t know who you are. They must just somehow know the plane belongs to us, so whoever climbed off the plane is now their target.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Brewer said, “I’m always right. We just met, so you can’t know that yet, but you will learn soon enough.”

  “You sure as hell weren’t right about the jet.”

  “That wasn’t my jet. That was the transport Hanley arranged. I’m as new to this op as you are.” She thought a moment. “If the Chinese know it’s an Agency asset, then we won’t use it again. When the job is done, I’ll fly you out of there on a clean aircraft, I promise you that.”

  Court gazed out the window and down at the harbor, twenty-five floors down. Dozens of different watercraft of all sizes and types were in sight. “Maybe I’d be safer on one of these old junks bobbing in the harbor.”

  “That’s your call, but until you complete your op, no slow boats for you. The clock is ticking. You know what’s at stake here.”

  Court breathed into the phone for a moment. “The men tailing me. Do they pose a physical danger?”

  “How can I answer that? I don’t even know who they are.”

  “I only spotted one vehicle, but the surveillance was competently conducted. I’m guessing they are MSS. My question is: have any Chinese intel operatives killed any Agency operatives in the past . . . I don’t know, ten years?”

  Brewer was unequivocal in her response. “Negative. It’s been more than twenty years, actually. And you’re in Hong Kong, not Beijing. Hong Kong has autonomy, in theory, anyway. If MSS is roving around there in force, it would only happen after the Chinese broke a lot of rules.”

  “But it could happen.”

  Brewer walked back her last comment. “Sure. We know MSS is there in Hong Kong, obviously. Your entire operation is based on the presumption that the Chinese are conducting intel ops in HK. I’m only saying it isn’t the same as it would be if you were on the mainland, in Beijing or Shanghai. Also there are transnational criminal groups in HK—the Triads, a few of whom China holds some sway over.”