Year of the Dragon (39 page)

“Relax,” Carol murmured. “No one knows you here. You don’t have to be embarrassed. You can do whatever you like, and your date wants to be kissed.” He gave her an uncomfortable grin, disentangled her arms from around his neck, and held both her hands on the table so she could not start again.

A little later she told him, “I think I’m falling in love with you all over again.”

“I certainly am glad to hear that,” he said. Either he had won her back again or never lost her, and the way was clear now to take her back to the hotel and to bed, which was all he had ever hoped for since early in the day.

But first it was necessary to conclude their dinner and pay for it, and catch a taxi outside that wound slowly down the twisting roads of the Colony. This took time. Time enough for the mood to cool. Powers sensed this. He couldn’t tell if Carol did or not.

When he asked for their keys at the desk, he was handed a message to call Sir David.

They went up to Carol’s suite where, as soon as the door had closed behind them, Powers took her in his arms, and the kiss this time was a real one, that went on and on, the deepest and most satisfying kiss of his entire life, he thought, for it seemed to him that he had never before known an emotion this strong, a love this intense. The miracle had indeed recurred. Love must be similar to drunkenness, another miracle. If you have been drinking all day, if the residual level of the alcohol is high enough, then all it takes is another swallow and you are floating once more. You are giddy, incautious, happy. Bizarre behavior becomes automatic.

“Oh, Carol,” he said, “I love you so much.”

She went and sat down on the bed, took her shoes off, and began massaging her toes. Powers, meanwhile had plucked Sir David’s message out of his pocket. He went to the phone and dialed the number.

“We have a man in custody,” said Sir David. “Two of my people picked him up this afternoon, shortly after he sold Koy a forged United States residence car - what your Immigration fellows call a green card, I believe. It’s in the name of Orchid Koy - Koy’s wife. Koy paid for it with cash money out of an attaché case.”

“He must be taking her to America,” said Powers. He was thinking it out. Koy had had to buy a forged green card because he couldn’t bring Orchid to America as his legal wife. His legal wife was the one in New York. To Sir David, Powers said, “Are you obliged to tell our Immigration Department about this?”

“We usually do.”

“Can I ask you not to tell them? Can I ask you to let me handle our end of this?”

When he had hung up and turned from the phone Carol, on the bed, said, “What was that?”

“Nothing important.”

Carol was still rubbing her toes. “Tell me what it was.”

“No, really. It wasn’t important. It has nothing whatever to do with your story, and I can’t see where it has anything to do with my case.”

“Please tell me what it was.”

Instead of answering, Powers lifted her upright, embraced her, and began another long kiss. He was conscious of how much shorter she had become, standing now in her stockinged feet. He also realized that she was not responding.

Carol broke the kiss off. “Are you going to tell me?”

Powers became annoyed. “Why don’t we just say I’m not at liberty to tell you. That it isn’t my information to give away.”

They stood appraising each other.

“It’s late, and I’m exhausted,” said Carol. “I think we both ought to get a good night’s sleep tonight, don’t you? I’ll see you in the morning.”

She had turned away from him and begun undoing her dress. Powers thought: I’m certainly not going to beg you to go to bed with me. Not tonight. Not any night. If you want to, okay. If you don’t want to, that’s okay too.

“When you wake up,” he told her, “if you feel like having breakfast, give me a call.”

He strode to the door. “In any case, we’ll have dinner together tomorrow night,” said Carol quickly.

“Sure.”

Slamming the door behind him, Powers walked slowly toward the elevator banks, his mind crowded with musings and emotions, none of which were very clear to him.

THE LIMOUSINE waited out front. Koy, who had come out of his mansion, was about to get into it when he noticed a car parked up the street. Not a truck today. A car. But always something. Below him in the sunshine sparkled the South China Sea. From its surface protruded lumpy islets that were as irregular, as angular as the carcasses of wrecked ships. They looked like pieces of cliff that, having broken off from the mainland, had floated out that far and then sunk. The view from Koy’s gateposts, and from the limousine that he now stepped into, was spectacular, but he did not notice it. Watching out the back window, he soon perceived the probable tail car. It followed him down the hill. Not the first car, but another. Two cars then - someone was going to great expense. He watched it carefully. It contained only its driver, a woman, which was unusual, even imaginative. Or perhaps the only imagination at work here was his own. Leaning forward he ordered the chauffeur in Cantonese to make a series of abrupt turns. That the tail car made no attempt to follow even the first of these turns, was possibly good news. Possibly bad news, too. Either Koy was not being tailed at all or more than two cars were involved--the expense would be astronomical. Which meant that interest in him originated at the highest level.

Was he being paranoiac or merely shrewd? Koy shook his head at himself. Sitting back in his seat, he began to scan that day’s
South China Morning Post,
one of Hong Kong’s English-language newspapers, which the chauffeur had laid out on the seat beside him.

But he could not concentrate on headlines. He was interested neither in world events nor in sordid domestic violence, and this newspaper, like all newspapers, contained very little in between. He was too uneasy to concentrate on printed words, which seemed to him small and exacting, like the claws of birds - too small to grip him. They did not pertain to the profound uneasiness that expanded inside his skull as inexorably as ice. The ice had begun to freeze not only his thoughts but even his movements. The chill factor no longer produced mere discomfort: it was becoming real pain.

Koy kept glancing out the rear window, but there were many cars behind him now, too many to tell if some other tail car had picked him up. As his car moved over the spine of the island and down the other side, he blamed Orchid - he had allowed himself to be distracted by his wife. She had caused him to ignore signals. His perceptions had not been acute enough. As soon as they entered city traffic, he ordered the driver to pull up beside a sidewalk call box. The driver had to park half on the curb to let the traffic behind them get by. Koy didn’t care - that was the driver’s problem. He jumped out and dialed a number at Police Headquarters. As he listened to it ring he concluded that he should not have lingered in Hong Kong. He might have done his business and been gone in a matter of hours. He should have insisted on it. It would have been wiser, and safer as well.

“Go out to a secure line, and call me back,” said Koy, as soon as his party came on the line. He read his own number off the dial and broke the connection.

Above five minutes passed before the incoming call made Koy jump. He was already nervous, and inside the call box the bell had gone off like a fire alarm. Speaking in Hakka in measured, deliberate tones, Koy gave certain instructions - he wanted to know who was interested in him and why - and then hung up and got back in his car.

A short time later the limousine drove up in front of the Hilton Hotel on Garden Road opposite the Peak Tram Building. Koy walked inside and straight to the reception desk, where he engaged a sitting room for the day, paying in advance. Koy almost always paid cash money in advance, ending the transaction then and there, leaving little record, or none. Cash, however heavy the sum, left no finger- or footprints, it had no memory, no voice. It could not give evidence in court. Taking his key, he turned away from the desk and carefully eyeballed the lobby, but picked up nothing. This was only to be expected. There was no way law enforcement - whichever agency it might be - could have known about today’s meeting in advance, or planned for it. Yet why, as he entered the elevator was his discomfort so acute? What was he reacting to? What had set him off? He did not know, and wanted to believe he was imagining things, but instinct told him his anxiety was real. There was somebody moving around the outer rooms of his life, bumping into furniture and walls, somebody carrying heavy square objects, bags of cumbersome tools. Inevitably, this person or persons had made nicks in the wood, in the plaster. Koy wanted proof. He was like a man down on his hands and knees searching for these nicks.

Upstairs he waited at the window staring down at the harbor. He watched a Star Ferry boat start out toward Kowloon. Green. Two decks. There were two more coming the other way. A Boeing jetfoil crossed toward the harbor exit en route to Macau, the Portuguese enclave forty miles down the coast. The jetfoil, a kind of railroad car on the hull of a boat, and powered by jet aircraft engines, was still riding low, leaving a heavy wake. But even as Koy watched, its jets came on hard, and it began to lift out of the water. In a moment it was skimming along high on its ailerons, its speed building up to sixty miles an hour.

There came a knock on the door, and Koy crossed to open it. Two of the three former station sergeants entered the room. “Our other brother is not here yet?” one asked in Hakka.

“We’ll wait for him,” answered Koy.

DOWNSTAIRS POWERS and Sir David, both looking agitated, came into the hotel and moved directly toward the elevators.

“We have the phones covered, of course,” Sir David said over his shoulder. “But we have no bug inside the room. We had no idea this meeting had been set up, so how could we?

“Sooner or later they’ll call down for food.” Powers said. “Can we send a bug in on the tray?”

“Indeed we can.”

BY THEN the conference upstairs had been underway more than thirty minutes. The three executive vice presidents were reporting to the chairman of the board. The first of them, Sergeant Woo, whose home base now was San Francisco, had made arrangements for moving the oversized mail bags on and off post office trucks operating between Hong Kong central and Kai Tak airport. The false mailbags themselves had been manufactured and stenciled. The first shipment of cash to Bangkok had been sewn into certain of them, and would go out later today; the rest of the money would follow over the next three days. The return shipments of raw morphine bricks should begin reaching Hong Kong a day or two after that, assuming that no hitch developed in the Thailand end of the operation.

“How many Hong Kong postal employees are involved?” asked Koy.

“The minimum,” said Sergeant Woo. “The superintendent with jurisdiction over the trucks, and one truck driver.”

“And how many members of our organization here are involved?”

“Again only two. One underboss - you know him, it’s Chang Man Bun - and one soldier.” The second ex-sergeant, whose name was Li, had made arrangements for secreting the merchandise as it arrived inside the Crown Colony. “I decided to break it down into five loads,” he said. “Each load goes to a different underboss. Each one knows only where his own load is hidden. That way, no single leak can result in our losing all of it. Each of them has been ordered to bring his own load forward in a specified order.”

“Where will they hide it?” asked Koy.

“That’s up to them, just as long as it’s dispersed.” This was acceptable to Koy. There were many places. Part would be stashed on outlying islands, he supposed. Part would be hidden in junks in the harbor. Part would be kept in safe houses here and up in the New Territories. He nodded his approval. Sergeant Li had recently established himself in Vancouver, and a good deal of the merchandise would enter the New World there. Vancouver had a large Chinese community, and was isolated enough so that pressure from law enforcement was less onerous there than in, say, New York or San Francisco.

About then Koy passed around menus, and the conference halted while all four men studied them. They decided on only four dishes - this was lunch, not a banquet - plus two pots of tea, and Koy phoned down their order.

The third ex-sergeant, whose name was Lao, and who now operated out of Boston, had been charged with setting up laboratories in Hong Kong to refine the Thai morphine into No. 4 heroin. There were many mountainous, isolated corners of the New Territories where danger of interruption was slight, and where a laboratory might be established in any shed or out-building. However, such laboratories sometimes drew attention to themselves. Heroin, being the chemically bonded synthesis of acetic anhydride and morphine, was difficult to work with. In the hands of unskilled chemists the stew had been known to explode. In addition, once it started to bubble it became putrid, it stank. It smelled like a corpse that had been exhumed for its bones too soon. If the wind was right, the ghastly odor could drift considerable distances. Therefore it made more business sense, Lao had decided, to set up his labs on junks, and to synthesize the heroin offshore. At sea, odor ceased to be a problem, coastal patrols could be observed approaching from a great distance, and chemists, with a hundred fathoms of water under them, would be inclined to work with utmost care. Also the heroin, once refined, could be off-loaded directly onto the anchored cargo ships that would carry it to its destination - about a third of it to Vancouver, the rest to Amsterdam for transshipment. Amsterdam had no drug problem of its own, and its customs authorities, therefore, were easier to circumvent. In any case, Amsterdam was Sergeant Hung’s problem. To minimize risks further, Sergeant Lao concluded, he had engaged three separate junk captains, none of whom knew of the existence of the other two. There came a knock at the door, and Lao, who was closest, opened it to admit a waiter pushing a rolling luncheon table whose tablecloth reached almost to the floor. The four ex-sergeants stood close to the table as the waiter raised its sides, removed the covers from the tureens it bore, and presented the bill to Koy, who again paid cash. Chairs were brought forward, and as soon as the waiter had left the room the four men sat down to eat.

SIR DAVID had set up his command post in a room three doors down the hall on the same floor, the closest unoccupied room available. Powers, Sir David and a number of other men stood around a Chinese technician in headphones, who sat monitoring a console.

“All right, the bug is in there,” said Sir David. “It’s merely stuck to the bottom of the table. It’s the best we could do. We didn’t have time for anything else.”

The technician at the console said, “The bug is working. I can hear the sound of the chopsticks.”

“But no conversation,” said Powers.

“The Chinese rarely converse when eating,” said Sir David. “I’ve told you that before.”

Powers was pacing. “New York cops are always talking with their mouths full.”

The technician held up the earphones. “Would you like to listen, sir?”

Sir David pressed one earphone to his head. “He’s right. You can hear the chopsticks. When their conference resumes, assuming they are indeed plotting something nefarious, we should be able to hear every word.”

Powers became as hopeful as a fan whose team had reached the one-yard line. There was not much further to go. All he needed was mention of a single specific drug shipment that could be intercepted entering the United States. His own testimony would put Koy in the room down the hall, Koy’s voice on this tape would tie him in with the shipment, even if he never came close to it personally, and American conspiracy laws would put him away for twenty-five years - and if the voices of the other two American-based ex-sergeants appeared on the tape, they would go with him. Powers believed himself on the brink of proving his theory, of decapitating the Chinese Mafia in America with a single stroke. He would have amply justified his trip to Hong Kong, and no one, after that, would be able to stop his advancement to the top of the NYPD.

It all depended on the next few minutes.

Suddenly from the speaker attached to the console, came a hollow banging. Inside the earphone the sound must have reverberated, stinging Sir David’s eardrum, for he held the earphone away from himself and stared at it distastefully.

“What was that?” asked Powers.

The technician said, “It sounded like someone knocking on the door. The waiter, maybe?”

Koy had stepped out into the hall. Standing there were two plainclothes police constables known to him.

“You were right,” reported the older of the two, and he told what he had learned. An investigation of Koy was in progress, and the police force had known nothing about it until last Friday when an American television woman had appeared at headquarters. After she left the building the police commissioner had caused inquiries to be made, and the investigation had been traced to the Corruption Commission, which appeared to have committed itself to a major effort. A Captain Powers from New York was in Hong Kong, and was behind it.

“Captain Powers,” murmured Koy, and a Chinese proverb came to mind: He who stands on tiptoe does not stand on firm ground. Which seemed to describe Powers’ situation in Hong Kong exactly.