“What did they do with the ship?”
“Sold it to shipbreakers in Alang.” At his look she elaborated. “A beach on the west coast of India.” She shrugged. “An efficient means of disposing of the evidence. I was writing a story on Mumbai a couple of years ago and I took a trip out there. Hell of an operation. The beach is six miles long and on any given day there can be as many as two hundred ships being scrapped at once. The ship would have been gone in as little as six months. Maybe a year. Like I said, efficient.”
Sara would have hated the very idea of an operation like Alang’s, Hugh thought. “Can our friends in Hong Kong prove any of this?”
Arlene snorted. “It was a French-owned, Liberian-flagged freighter carrying a Chilean cargo bound for India, with Indian officers and a Filipino crew, taken by pirates of multiple Asian nations in international waters. No one country even has jurisdiction over the crime scene, never mind any evidence that would stand up in court.”
“Yeah,” Hugh said. “So?”
“So, I’ve been watching Mr. Noortman.”
“Have you? Any company?”
“Are our friends watching him, too, do you mean? They say not. I’d say yes, just not twenty-four seven. Noortman has done nothing to offend the local laws, which would be the smart thing to do if he wanted to stay here. Thou shalt not shit in thine own nest.”
Hugh couldn’t argue with that. “Where are we going?”
“To a restaurant with a conveniently placed front window. I’ve already reserved a table with a view of our boy’s office building.”
“Marry me,” Hugh said.
She grinned. “You’re too old for me.”
“Noortman actually has a storefront?”
“Oh yeah, Hong Kong Fast Freight, Ltd., is very much on the up-and-up, licensed, bonded, registered, incorporated, files quarterly tax returns, contributes to enough local charities in small enough amounts to stay low on the local social radar screen. All perfectly aboveboard and squeaky clean.” As an afterthought she said, “Of course, this is Hong Kong. Squeaky clean in Hong Kong isn’t squeaky clean in, say, Seattle. Or for that matter Beirut.”
“I thought everything tightened up after the Chinese took over.”
Arlene gave him a look. “It’s still Hong Kong.”
Hugh, who wasn’t about to admit that he’d learned most of what he knew about Hong Kong from the www.discoverhongkong.com Web site while he was sitting in the Baltimore airport waiting for his flight to board and the rest from James Clavell during the flight, gave a noncommittal grunt.
“You’ve been here before, right? So I don’t have to give you the tour?”
Half a dozen times to change planes, and once to meet in the British Airways lounge with a snotty little shit of a case officer who had started their conversation with a recitation of his family tree, which appeared to reach all the way back to the Mayflower, and reached forward to several members of Congress, a cabinet-level post in the current administration, and a Supreme Court justice. It had ended with the snotty little shit of a case officer white-faced and trembling, mumbling out his report of the nascent Islamic terrorist cell in Egypt he had stumbled across in his posting to the American embassy in Cairo. The report had been unexpectedly useful, but Hugh, who saved the rough side of his tongue especially for arrogant little pricks just starting out in the agency, didn’t make the mistake of saying so. Said prick was now warming the most junior of junior charge d’affaires seats in the American embassy in Zaire (or the Democratic Republic of the Congo or whatever the hell they were calling themselves nowadays), which gave Hugh the warm fuzzies all over whenever he thought of it, which wasn’t often.
“I’ve been here before,” Hugh said without elaboration. He was a desk man, not a field agent. He shook off his fatigue and watched the approaching skyline with interest. From a distance Hong Kong looked like a multitowered castle built on a tall green promontory, surrounded by the world’s largest moat. The water was crowded with craft of every kind and size, from homemade junks to boxy ferries to sleek cruise ships.
As they entered the city proper, Hugh saw a lot of concrete, a lot of neon, and a shitload of people, many in cars. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper stop and go, and none of the drivers would have made it a hundred feet on an American street without being pulled over for felony tailgating. Everyone, pedestrian and driver alike, ignored the stoplights, and Hugh saw a black Mercedes roll through an intersection against a red and literally hit a woman in the crosswalk. The car was moving slowly enough that all it did was hoist her up on the hood. She slid down and yelled at the driver. The driver stuck his head out the window and yelled an uncomplimentary reply, and for a minute Hugh felt like he was in New York.
“Here we are,” Arlene said, and leaned forward to tap the driver on the shoulder. They screeched to a halt, Arlene handed over an alarmingly thick wad of banknotes and they got out, elbowing for room on a street of storefronts thronged with people. “This way,” Arlene said, and led Hugh through a glass door into a tiny anteroom with a podium barricading the rest of the establishment from just anyone who might wander in off the street. Arlene smiled at the hostess, who didn’t smile back until the two hundred and fifty Hong Kong dollars Arlene tipped her disappeared down the front of her dress. She turned to lead them into the restaurant proper.
Arlene noticed Hugh’s expression and said in a low voice, “Relax. It was only about thirty American, and that’s cheap for a sit-down restaurant in Hong Kong.”
“It’s not that,” Hugh said, looking over her shoulder.
“What is it, then?” Arlene followed his gaze, and her eyes widened. “Holy shit.”
Noortman was sitting at the table in the window right next to the one the hostess was standing beside, menus in hand, watching them with an impatient look on her face.
For a moment Hugh was transfixed, and then he recovered his wits. “Smile and talk to me,” he whispered to Arlene, and gave her a gentle shove forward.
“What if he recognizes me from Pattaya Beach?” Arlene hissed.
“He won’t, he was too focused on his next big score,” Hugh said, and prayed he was right.
It was a safe bet, as today Arlene was dressed in a deep blue suit, cream-colored silk shirt, heels, and pearls, and her hair had been moussed and blow-dried into a smooth knot at the nape of her neck. She looked nothing like the zaftig tourist in the Bermuda shorts the previous October.
Noortman, on the other hand, looked exactly as he had in the photographs Arlene took of him. His nose was aquiline but his eyes were Asian, and his teeth were square and white, with the exception of the gold-encased incisor that flashed when he smiled. His skin was sallow, his stylishly cut hair dark but not black. Like Arlene, he was dressed to suit his environment, in a charcoal striped suit with a dark red tie that matched the silk handkerchief peeping from his breast pocket. The watch on his wrist had the glint of Rolex gold. His shoes probably cost even more.
He was drinking tea as he scrolled down the screen of a laptop. The server brought a tray just then and made a distressed sound. Noortman looked up and smiled. Hugh was in the middle of being seated but it looked like a perfectly ordinary smile, no fangs showing, although it was a smile that seemed familiar, crooking up at one side in what could almost have been called a sneer. Otherwise, Noortman looked like any other young and ambitious Hong Kong businessman.
He became aware that Arlene was giving him a minatory look, and he realized their server had materialized. On impulse he told the server, “Tiger Beer.” He smiled across at Arlene, and said in a voice just above a whisper, “You didn’t think that because this restaurant was so close to his office that he never came in here? Even pirates have to eat.”