Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER THREE

Court had spent almost all of the past nineteen hours in the air, and he’d worked through nearly all of the flight. He’d known nothing about his assignment when he boarded the Falcon, not even if he would accept it, but before the plane took to the sky he’d read his eyes-only orders and he was fully on board with the mission. And by the time the plane had reached its cruising altitude, Court had sketched out a mental to-do list for the long flight ahead of him.

The flight attendant, herself a CIA employee, had brought him dinner and offered him drinks, but he ate lightly and drank nothing but water and coffee, knowing he needed a plan of action to hit the ground running in HK more than he needed a buzz, a heavy stomach, and some shut-eye.

Now he knew that both jet lag and hunger would kick in before long, but he had more work to do. He opened his carry-on and his backpack and dumped everything out onto the bed. He went through each item slowly and carefully, because he’d not packed these bags himself and none of these belongings were his.

He’d already been through this gear on the plane, but he wanted to go over it again. In addition to clothing and toiletries, it had all manner of mission-specific items, from encrypted mobiles to infrared scopes masked as binoculars. He’d taken only a small portion of the equipment left for him on the Falcon, and now he decided to pare this down even more. Most anything could have a GPS tracker in it these days, and he didn’t want the CIA knowing his exact whereabouts, just in case someone in the CIA had passed on the tip about the plane’s identity and arrival here in the first place.

Now he sat on his bed and searched everything that came off the plane with him. He found nothing that raised an eyebrow, so he thought it likely that Brewer was right — the aircraft itself had been compromised.

He knew what he had to do to get back on track. Tonight he would lose his tail, and tomorrow, when no one knew he was the guy who got off that CIA aircraft, he would intentionally pick his tail back up again, because those were his orders from Langley.

This was going to be a weird op, of this he was certain.

He’d come to meet with a man who had been detained by the Chinese, and since he didn’t know where this man was, the only way to find him was to make the Chinese aware of who he was and who he was looking for.

But they could not know he was here on a mission for the CIA, or this whole operation would fall to pieces.

He grabbed a pillow from the bed, stepped into the closet, lay down on the carpet, and fell asleep while the hot Hong Kong day raged on outside.

Several hours later Court sat at the bar at the Felix, an ultra-chic Philippe Starck — designed restaurant on the top floor of the hotel. The view over the harbor was breathtaking; the lights of Hong Kong Island to the south looked like the Manhattan skyline as seen by a helicopter from just a few hundred yards away. In fact, in many ways it was more dramatic; HK was the world’s tallest urban agglomeration, with one building reaching 118 stories and 312 buildings here standing at least 150 yards high, many more than in New York City.

While Court ate a steak and drank a beer at the bar with his back to the windows, forty-four buildings on both sides of Victoria Harbor flashed colors synchronized to music in the nightly Symphony of Lights show. Well-dressed men and women stood at the windows of the Felix and marveled at the spectacle, even though it happened every evening.

Court didn’t turn and look at the lights, and neither did one other man in the room. Tao Man Koh sat at a table near the window high above the harbor and sipped a glass of wine. Through the reflection in the glass next to him he could see the back of the American, and he kept eyes out for anyone who might try to communicate with him in a clandestine fashion.

So far he’d not seen a thing that gave him any impression that Roger Hartley was anything other than a businessman here having a meal, but he continued his covert surveillance, careful not to give himself away.

While Tao watched the target, his partner Wang Ping Li stood in the middle of the hotel room of the man he knew as Roger Hartley, checking the area carefully one more time. He’d done this an hour earlier upon his arrival in the room, scanning for anything out of the ordinary, thinking that if Hartley was CIA, he might have prepped his room with hidden cameras or listening devices of his own, or he might have placed objects in specific ways so that he’d know immediately if anything had been tampered with. It was tradecraft 101, and while Wang worked these days as a direct-action operative for the Ministry of State Security, he’d been trained as a simple spook and he knew how to scan a room for telltales.

Wang had spent an additional half hour going through the man’s luggage, taking apart his laptop, and looking through the top dozen places someone might hide items in a hotel room. He took the drawer out of the desk, unscrewed heating ducts, searched below trash can liners, behind wall art, under the mattress, even in the toilet tank.

He didn’t find a single item of interest.

The phone buzzed in Wang’s pocket, and he checked it quickly; it was Tao.

Wang answered in a whisper. “He’s moving?”

“Negative. No movement. He ate dinner and he is just sitting and drinking a—”

“I don’t give a shit what he’s drinking. You are to inform me when he leaves.”

Tao asked, “Anything in his room?”

“Nothing. Unless he has something on him right now, he is clean. We might find ourselves following this son of a bitch for days waiting for him to meet someone.”

“Doubt it.”

Before Wang could respond, his phone told him another call was coming. “Shit. It’s Dai now.”

“Let me know what he—”

Wang hung up and rejected the new call. He wasn’t going to talk to Dai from his target’s room. Instead he left and went across the twenty-fifth-floor hallway to his own room, where he immediately hit redial.

Dai answered after several rings. “Still on your little errand for Beijing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you have to report?”

“Our target is sitting in the Felix bar at the top of the Peninsula.”

“What is he doing?”

“He had dinner, and now he’s drinking. Just sitting there. We think he may be waiting to meet someone, but perhaps he’s just jet-lagged and lingering over dinner. I have searched his room, but I’ve found nothing to indicate why he is here.”

“I didn’t bring you and Tao to Hong Kong to sit in a bar all night. Your real target here could be slipping out of the city at this very moment.”

“I understand, sir, but I saw no way to avoid my orders from the Ministry of State Security, which supersedes your command at the Ministry of Defense. I report first to—”

“Wang, let me ask you… when I snap your neck the next time I see you, will that supersede your orders from State Security?”

Wang just gazed at the floor of his hotel room. Finally he said, “What do you want me to do, sir?”

“Has MSS ordered you to move on the target?”

“No. Just investigate and report contacts.”

“How long is the target registered at the hotel?”

Wang hesitated, knowing his answer was going to send Colonel Dai into orbit. “Eight days, sir.”

As Wang fully expected, Dai screamed at him. “You aren’t sitting in a fucking hotel for eight days!”

“Sir, if you would like to speak with MSS I am sure they can send in another team from Beijing and—”

“They already have more assets here in Hong Kong than they are comfortable with! They won’t send anyone else!”

Wang had no answer to this so he just sat there, his phone to his ear.

“You will confront the target. Immediately.”

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand.”

“I am ordering you to end this wasted journey and take him. I’m not telling you to terminate the subject. You have drugs to obtain information, do you not?”

“You issued them to each of us the day we arrived.”

“Use them. Find out who he is, what he wants. Those drugs will render his memory foggy, so he won’t have any idea you questioned him. Then throw him in his bathtub, turn the shower on, and break his leg with the heel of your shoe. When he wakes he’ll be too fucked-up to know what happened and too injured to continue his mission here.”

Wang spoke the truth now, but his heart wasn’t in it. He knew he would lose. “Colonel, you have no authority to order me to circumvent my orders from my divisional director.”

“My op here is a national priority mission! I will pull rank on you and change your orders. Call your masters at MSS in exactly fifteen minutes and you will see that your mandate and rules of engagement have been updated. But after that, return to Beijing, don’t come back to me. I’ll have no use for you or your partner after you challenge my authority. I have thirty-four other men here who would not dare this insubordination that you seem so comfortable with.”

Wang knew this was bullshit. Dai was just being petulant.

But Wang also knew Dai had the capacity to make his life hell if he disobeyed him.

Wang said, “No need to contact Beijing, sir. We will comply immediately.” Wang didn’t need enemies at MOD, especially not someone who could make or break everyone in his family. And on top of this, Wang wouldn’t mind roughing up the CIA officer. He’d never done that before.

“Very well,” Dai said.

“I will do as you say and report back to you with what we found out.”

Dai snapped back. “No. You can tell MSS all about your American; I don’t care about him. I only care about my target here in HK. I want you back on my job first thing in the morning.”

“Shi de, xian sheng.” Yes, sir.

Wang hung up and called Tao.

Tao answered with, “Target has asked for the check.”

“Our plans have changed.” Wang explained Dai’s orders.

When Wang finished, Tao asked, “Rules of engagement?”

“We force compliance. We meet resistance with escalating resistance.”

“Up to?”

A pause. “Up to everything.”

“Told you.”

“You told me this would be an assassination. It’s not that. We take him as he returns to his room. Overpower him, tie him up, drug him, get the intel, and bust him up. Dai wants us back with him in the morning.”

“I hope this guy is a fighter.” Tao chuckled. “I’ll get my check and head down.”

Court didn’t really want the third beer; he’d barely sipped it, spending most of his time fiddling with his wedding band and pretending to surf the Internet on his phone. He only wore the band for the op; he wasn’t married, but the Agency had put it in his backpack on the plane, and he’d recognized it for what it was, so he slipped it on, along with a set of designer eyeglasses that did nothing for his vision but used a special refracted glass to break up the outline of his face to hamper facial recognition software.

Court took his time lounging here at the bar, for the simple reason that he wanted the lookout seated behind him to report to whoever was in his room right now that the coast was clear.

He’d ID’d the watcher minutes after sitting down, pegged him as likely to be one of the men who’d followed him from the airport, because this still felt like a small op. If he was right about that, then there would just be a few other men involved, and they would be conducting a site exploration in Court’s room three floors below right now. If this was, indeed, the case, Court wanted to give them plenty of time to do their work.

It wasn’t that Court was afraid to confront a couple of guys in his room. The fact was he didn’t need the aggravation. He wanted to give the Chinese the time they needed to go through his belongings so he could convince them he was no one worth following, or at least that they didn’t need to call in any backup.

He’d decided to simply check out of his hotel tomorrow morning and lose his tail then, but for now he just wanted to look as sedentary, nonthreatening, and downright boring as possible to the men watching him.

Finally he paid his bill, then went to the bathroom here at the Felix to take a leak, giving the men downstairs even more time to clear out of his room. He stood at a space-age-looking urinal in front of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out and down twenty-eight floors, which Court found bizarre and a little silly, but it was a decent distraction for a man taking his time while taking a piss, and as far as bathrooms went, this one was indeed memorable.

He headed for the elevator. The watcher was gone from his seat by the windows, which Court hoped meant his surveillance team had pulled the plug for the night.

Court fiddled with his key card outside his door for a moment, then slid it into the lock, all the while hoping like hell the sweep had been completed and the man performing it had done a decent job hiding evidence of his search. If it was obvious his belongings had been disturbed he’d need to report it to hotel management, just to continue along with his ruse that he was like any other Western businessman here. It would be in keeping with his cover that he’d freak out if someone went through his stuff while he was at dinner, so if the goons who searched his room couldn’t be bothered to refold his clothes and zip his luggage back up, then Court would have to make a scene.

As soon as Court entered his room, his shoulders sank. Down the little entry hall, past the bathroom ahead on his left, he could just see the front edge of his king-sized bed. His laptop was lying open there; cords, chargers, and socks were strewn about, hanging down to the floor.

Shit, his room had been tossed. He’d have to call the front desk and throw a fit, to pretend he thought housekeeping had rummaged through his belongings.

As he moved forward into the room, he knew the bathroom on his left was a blind spot, and there was a chance a member of the site exploration team was still in there, either working or hiding. The chance was small considering the lookout in the bar had been given ten minutes to warn anyone in his room, but if these guys sucked so bad at their job they didn’t even try to clean up after themselves, it was also possible their comms were down.

But even though he thought it possible he might be about to disturb someone in the act, he knew he had to remain in cover. He couldn’t just fly into the room and waylay anyone standing there. That wasn’t the normal behavior of a businessman who had just downed a steak dinner at a swanky bar.

If it turned out there was someone in there squeezing out Court’s toothpaste into a rubber glove, Court would just feign shock and confusion, then adopt a posture of nervous anger.

He passed the bathroom and looked in matter-of-factly, and suddenly his already thumping heart began to pound harder. An Asian man in a black tracksuit and dark wraparound sunglasses sat on the toilet seat, and he held a pistol with a suppressor on the end, leveled at Court’s chest.

This Court had not expected.

He slowly raised his hands.

Now he heard a key card placed in the door behind him, and then a second man entered. Court looked back over his shoulder to confirm that it was the man in the suit and tie from the bar. He wore dark glasses now, as well.

So, still just the two guys, he said to himself. It seemed to him MSS could scare up fifteen operatives if they wanted something bad to happen to a CIA officer in HK. Perhaps whatever was going on here was off book, or MSS just didn’t think they needed much muscle to do whatever it was they were about to do.

Court thought about Suzanne Brewer’s assurances that MSS didn’t get physical with CIA. Either these dudes weren’t MSS, they didn’t think he was CIA, or the rules had changed. There was an equation he’d have to solve to sort all this out, but that was a problem for down the road.

The man in the bathroom stood up slowly. He appeared calm, professional, and his English was accented but more than adequate. “Sit on chair by window.” He motioned with the pistol for Court to enter the bedroom, and Court complied.

Across the ransacked space, a swivel chair pulled out from the desk sat positioned with its back just inches away from the twenty-fifth-floor window looking out over Victoria Harbor. On the desk to the right of the chair, a set of high-end steel handcuffs lay on a towel.

Court said, “If it’s money… I have a little cash. My credit cards are in my—”

He felt the tip of the suppressor of the pistol jabbed against the back of his head. The man in the tracksuit spoke from behind. “You sit in chair!”

Court sighed now. “Okay, pal. I sit in chair.”

Court crossed the room and sat down. The man in the business suit spun him around to face the window; Court couldn’t help but look straight down, twenty stories, to the roof of an adjacent seven-story building below. Beyond that was a busy road, the headlights and taillights snaking in either direction in red and white. Court felt hands on his wrists, and then his arms were yanked behind him and the steel cuffs were clicked tightly in place.

His pockets were rummaged through. His wallet, his phone, and his hotel room key were tossed on the bed, and then he was swung back around to face the two men.

The men spoke to each other in Mandarin for a moment; neither seemed particularly worked up about what they were doing. Then the guy in the tracksuit disappeared into the bathroom.

While he was out of view, Court looked to the other man. “Do you speak English? Will you tell me what is going on?”

The man in the business suit made no reply. Instead he just went to the bed, laid his pistol down on it, and unzipped a black satchel. From it he pulled out two small blue items. In seconds he opened one up and Court recognized it for what it was.

A surgical mask.

Uh-oh.