The Prisoner's Gold

37

The team abandoned their beat-up Mercedes at the edge of downtown Guangzhou and walked a few blocks through the alleys before Papineau pulled up alongside them in a limo. They all piled in, and he took them back to the Westin hotel in silence. Cobb had instructed each of them to remain quiet until they reached their suite, which had been swept for listening devices.

Once safely inside the room, all hell broke loose.

‘Well, that was a clusterfuck of epic proportions,’ McNutt said. ‘Someone please tell me there’s treasure in those bags. Not descriptions of treasure, but actual treasure.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘It will take some time to—’

‘The treasure can wait,’ Cobb growled, anger flushing his cheeks. ‘I want to know who the hell that was back there. That wasn’t a fluke, people. That was an ambush. Those men came prepared for us. They knew we would be there.’

In the limo, Cobb had considered the possibility that the attack at the warehouse was related to the security men from Loulan who had tenaciously followed him and McNutt on the rekky, but he had quickly rejected the notion. Besides the prize that Cobb’s team was after, the dead zone in Xinjiang had no connections with the warehouse in Guangzhou.

Garcia was sitting at a desk, typing away. ‘I’m already looking into it, but I haven’t found much yet. The men who attacked you were clearly not cops, but the real police are investigating the incident now. The bombs threw the whole thing into chaos.’

‘Didn’t have a choice,’ McNutt said with a shrug. ‘No way they escape without it.’

Cobb glared at Papineau. ‘What about you, Jean-Marc? Is there any chance these guys found us through you? Maybe they were upset about a business deal of yours gone bad?’

Papineau gave the question some thought. ‘I haven’t done any deals in China in over a year. It has to be something else.’

‘Even if this did trace back to Jean-Marc,’ Maggie added, ‘how could they have even known we would be arriving in Guangzhou? We’d only gotten into town a few hours earlier.’

‘That’s what I was wondering,’ Sarah said. ‘No way anyone gets an ambush together that quickly. They weren’t following us. They were ahead of us.’

‘Which means somebody tipped them off,’ Cobb stated.

Sarah shook her head. ‘I didn’t talk to any contacts about extraction from Guangzhou — there were just too many conventional ways out of the city with trains, boats, and cars. Plus we weren’t looking to move a haul this time; just the books. So the leak didn’t come from my end.’

McNutt chimed in. ‘I met a contact in Hong Kong to collect weapons, but there’s no way those guys were involved. I’ve known a few of them for years. They’re unsavory types, I’ll grant you that, but there’s no reason they’d want to ambush us. They get a lot of business from referrals. Something like this would be bad for business. So it wasn’t me.’

Cobb turned to Garcia. ‘Hector?’

‘I don’t have any contacts in this part of the world. And there wasn’t even a computer network for me to hack at the site. Everything was pre-Y2K. Paper records and filing cabinets. I listened in on the police band, but that was it. The rest of the time I was waiting for something to do.’

Cobb glanced at Maggie but said nothing.

‘I contacted no one,’ she assured him, ‘and Professor Chu didn’t know where we were headed after our meeting. Obviously I know many people in the area — both in Hong Kong and Guangzhou — but I saw no one I recognized. I just assumed this was something from one of the team’s previous missions. Revenge, perhaps? These men were quite determined.’

McNutt nodded. ‘You can say that again. They sent in a lot of support to take us out. Did you get a visual on your guys, Jack?’

‘Both Chinese. I had no reason to suspect them until the second car arrived, and the two men started arguing. Maggie’s translation saved my life. No doubt about it.’

Maggie smiled with pride.

‘So where does that leave us?’ Papineau asked.

‘With an unknown enemy hunting us,’ Cobb said. ‘But at least we know they’re out there now. We need to be extra careful wherever we go. We have to assume they know our faces. We need to get out of the area, and we need to do so very carefully.’

Sarah stared at him. ‘Do you think they’re after the treasure — or just us?’

‘That’s the million-dollar question,’ Cobb admitted.

‘Five-million, actually,’ McNutt added.

Cobb nodded his acknowledgment. ‘For the time being, I’m only sure about two things. If they’re not after the Polo treasure, they will be once they find out about it.’

‘What’s the other thing?’ Papineau asked.

‘They won’t be getting it.’

The team started to pack their gear immediately and were out of the hotel before dawn. They boarded a battered commercial fishing boat and headed down the river to Hong Kong.

When the boat pulled into the familiar docks in Victoria Harbor, the team didn’t head toward a limo or a fancy hotel. They walked off in different directions, per Cobb’s instructions, before making their way to their accommodations.

They separately checked into budget guesthouse rooms at the infamous Chunking Mansions, a block of small, gray apartments renowned as a hotbed of backpacker activity. None of the team contacted any of the others, and they all had removed their communications gear and dropped it in the river on the way into Hong Kong.

They had ditched every weapon as well, retaining only their first aid and survival kits, which could easily be explained as backpacker gear. As an extra precaution, the documents from the warehouse were divvied up between team members.

At a predetermined time, they each wandered out of their rooms. Some of them had checked in for just a single night, while McNutt had requested three. None of them intended to spend an evening in Hong Kong, though. They returned separately to the docks and boarded the hydrofoil to the gambling city of Macau. They ignored each other on the boat and continued to do so once they had arrived.

They headed separately to the airport via taxis, but they all wound up on the same Japan Airlines flight to Tokyo. Although they each had connecting flights to different destinations, they reconvened in the terminal and exited the airport together, heading to the Imperial Hotel.

Only after showering and changing their clothes did they meet up in Papineau’s suite.

It was time to plan their next move.