Zero Minus Ten

FOURTEEN

BEDTIME STORY

ZERO MINUS SIX: 25 JUNE 1997, 1:00 A.M.

The speed with which Bond was disarmed was startling. He felt as if he was moving in slow-motion and that everything else was happening too fast. The Triads with the choppers marched him to the adjacent building, one that was obviously still in use. One of them unlocked the door and roughly shoved Bond inside. He was led down a hallway to a locked, steel door. Behind it was a dark staircase leading to a basement. Bond was pushed inside, and the door slammed and locked behind him.

Bond crept down the stairs in the dim light to a small, bare room containing a narrow bed and a toilet. It was, to all intents and purposes, a jail cell.

Sunni Pei was sitting on the bed. When she saw him, she jumped up and ran to him. “James! My God, James!” she cried, then fell into his arms and held him tightly.

Bond stroked her hair and embraced her. “It’s all right, Sunni. We’ll get you out of this.”

“They’re going to kill me, James, I know it!” She said this with anger and spite, not with the tears he had expected. “And after all I’ve done for them!”

She released him and led him to the bed.

“I told you before that they’ve merely used you,” he said. “They never made you a full member.”

“The oaths still apply to me, though,” she said. “And I was taking just as much of a risk with regard to the law in Hong Kong.”

She stood up and started pacing the cell. “I can’t tell you how I hate myself, James! I was their goddamned whore! I sold my body to put money in their pockets!”

“Sunni,” he said, “you did it because you believed in them. I understand. You believed they would get you out of Hong Kong. You believed they were your brothers and sisters. You believed they would take care of you.”

She sat down again. “Well, in many ways they did take care of me. I couldn’t have afforded that flat otherwise. They paid for most of it. They gave me a social life, such as it was.”

“Sunni, you know that if you hadn’t received an American education, that if you had grown up entirely as a Hong Kong Chinese, then you would be thinking quite differently. You would have killed me the other day. You would have been loyal to the Triad. Your cultural background would have prevented you from even considering associating with a gweilo. ”

“Oh, I still have a strong Chinese cultural heritage,” she said. “I just happen to speak like an American.” She used an exaggerated accent on the last word, then pouted. “You’re right, though. It’s surprising that they even allowed me into the Triad with my westernized habits.”

“You had other assets that they deemed valuable.”

“And what might those be?”

“You’re beautiful and you’re intelligent.”

She smirked. “Oh, right, I’m the perfect hostess. I can go with Chinese, American, Japanese, German, English … you name it.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said.

The sound of keys in the door interrupted them. It opened and two Triads stepped in. They gestured for Bond to come with them. Sunni stood up, too, but one of the men roughly pushed her back on to the bed.

Bond shoved the thug against the wall. The other man brutally delivered a spear-handed chop between Bond’s shoulder blades, sending him to his knees. The blow had hit the nerve centre below his neck, and for a moment Bond saw nothing but stars. The man shouted at Bond in Chinese, then kicked him. 007 got weakly to his feet and followed the men out of the room.

He was brought upstairs, down a hall, and up another flight of stairs. He was finally able to take in more of his surroundings as he walked. The building was a modern business office. It might have been the corporate headquarters of a small real-estate or insurance company. They passed open offices containing new, expensive-looking black and white leather furniture. In many ways, the place reminded him of the way the new M had refurnished SIS headquarters.

He was finally led into a large, plush office and left alone. It was decorated in the same fashion as the other rooms he had seen, but with a distinctive Chinese flavour. Along with the high-tech, modern furniture, there was a bamboo screen against the wall, brightly painted with a scene of Chinese fishermen snaring a dragon. A small Buddhist altar stood in a corner, with an idol of the god Kwan Ti, or Mo, on it. Bond remembered that not only was Mo the god of policemen, he was also the favoured deity of the underworld. There was nothing else in the room that would suggest that the office belonged to the Dragon Head of a Triad. It was clearly Li Xu Nan’s legitimate office.

Before Bond could sit down, Li entered the room and shut the door behind him. They were alone.

“We meet again, Mr. Bond,” Li said in Cantonese. “I am sorry that it is under unfortunate circumstances.”

“You can’t hold me, Mr. Li,” Bond said. “I’m a British citizen. My newspaper will be trying to find me when they’ve realized I’ve gone missing.” His Cantonese had improved since arriving in Hong Kong.

“Oh, dispense with your crap, Mr. Bond,” he said. “You are no journalist. I know who you are.”

“I work for the Daily Gleaner …”

“Please, Mr. Bond! I am no fool!” Li walked to his large oak desk and took a cigarette out of a gun metal case not unlike Bond’s own. He lit it without offering one to his captive. “You are James Bond, an agent with the British Secret Service. It was not difficult to ascertain this. You see, I know Mr. T.Y. Woo and what he does. I have known for years that his shop on Cat Street is a front for your station here in Hong Kong. You were followed from Miss Pei’s flat the other day. When we saw Mr. Woo’s private taxi pick you up, it all fell into place.”

“Then it was you who killed J.J. Woo? It was you who ransacked the place?”

Li shrugged. “We wanted the girl. She is a traitor. We deal with traitors most severely. We only messed up the place to leave a message. The elder Woo attempted to stop us. He was an obstacle that we had to overcome. It was not personal.”

“Where are T.Y. and his son?”

Li said, “I honestly do not know. They were not there when we raided the building.”

“Don’t you see that he knows who you are and what you do? He can have the Hong Kong Police down on you at any minute.”

“He cannot prove a thing. You’re the only one who has witnessed anything,” Li said. “Let me make this perfectly clear, Mr. Bond. You are a gweilo. We don’t like you. You are not welcome here. Our ceremonies are sacred and secret. You have seen something no other gweilo has ever seen. You are a dead man, Mr. Bond. If I had not stopped them, my brothers would have already killed you.”

“Why did you stop them, then?”

Li paused a moment, walked to the drinks cupboard, and removed a couple of glasses. “Drink, Mr. Bond?”

He wanted to refuse, but a drink would actually do him a lot of good. “All right. Bourbon, straight.”

Li filled the glasses and handed one to Bond. “Do you remember the other day when you ‘interviewed’ me? I told you that you were in my debt.”

“I remember.”

“The time has come for you to repay the debt.”

“Why should I?”

“Hear me out, Mr. Bond. You have no other choice.”

Bond settled on the sofa. “All right, Li, I’ll listen.”

“I’ll have to tell you a story,” he said, sitting opposite Bond in a leather armchair. “A little bedtime story. It involves someone else you know … Mr. Guy Thackeray.”

Bond interrupted Li. “Did you kill him?”

Li paused a moment and shook his head. “No. We had nothing to do with that. Let me tell you something: I hated Guy Thackeray. He and I were mortal enemies. But I wanted him alive. I needed him alive. And the story I’m about to tell you will explain why. No, he was killed by General Wong, a lunatic up in Guangzhou. You have heard of him?”

Bond nodded. “Are you sure? Why would he do that?”

Li held out his hands tolerantly. “Patience, Mr. Bond. Hear me out. And then you will understand.”

The Dragon Head paused a moment, then spoke evenly and calmly. “The year was 1836. A twenty-six-year-old man named James Thackeray had sailed from his home in Britain two years earlier to the Pearl River Delta in southern China. He had heard a fortune could be made trading goods to the Chinese, but it was a difficult time and place to make a living. Gweilo were not welcome in southern China. You see, Mr. Bond, China needed nothing from the West, but was quick to perceive that the West needed China’s tea, among other commodities. Therefore, the government grudgingly allowed the “white devils” to trade on the outer fringes of her empire.”

Bond interjected, “It seems to me that each side treated the other as inferior.”

“Yes,” Li said. “Anyway … James Thackeray had originally attempted to trade manufactured goods and had made a meagre living from silver, but it wasn’t enough to feed his wife and young son, neither of whom was allowed into Guangzhou, or Canton, as it was called then. Other British traders were in the same predicament, and it appeared for a while that trade with China would be a failure.

“No one was quite sure when it happened, but eventually some ingenious trader discovered that the English did possess a commodity that the Chinese wanted. It was opium. The merchants had no qualms about peddling opium to wealthy Chinese, and it soon became the most valuable resource in that part of the world at the time. China was quick to ban the substance, but the British managed to find a way to smuggle it in anyway.”

“And the opium trade became big business,” Bond said.

“Correct. In 1836, James Thackeray began trading opium and quickly developed a small clientele which provided him with more money than he had ever dreamed of. Thackeray’s best customer was an extremely wealthy Chinese warlord and government official residing in Guangzhou. His name was Li Wei Tam.” Li paused again, then added, “He was my great-great-grandfather.”

Bond sat up straighter. This story was getting interesting.

“My honourable ancestor was a warlord who was ten years older than Thackeray. He had tremendous influence in Guangzhou and the area around the Pearl River Delta. Although the Ch’ing Dynasty was in power, Li’s loyalties were with the Mings, who had been overthrown in the seventeenth century. Of course, he would never have admitted this publicly. If he had done so, he would have been arrested and most likely put to death. Li Wei Tam was part of a secret society that had pledged to overthrow the Ch’ing Dynasty.

“It was pure luck, really, that James Thackeray had an audience with the warlord and was able to establish a relationship with him. In fact, the two men grew to respect each other. Although they probably wouldn’t have admitted it to other members of their respective races, they became friends. This was due in part, no doubt, to Li Wei Tam’s physical dependence on the drug that James Thackeray so happily supplied.” This last was said with a certain amount of venom.

Li went on: “In 1839, things started to change. The emperor decided to end the opium trade once and for all. The governor of Hunan Province was ordered to confiscate all of Guangzhou’s foreign traders’ opium, thus igniting the First Opium War. For the next three years, James Thackeray found it extremely difficult to get his opium into China and to his favoured customer. Likewise, Li Wei Tam had to go through unpleasant stretches of withdrawal from the drug. Finally, my great-great-grandfather used his influence in his secret society to establish an illegal pipeline from Thackeray to Guangzhou. In one of the first, albeit unethical, cooperative efforts between a British citizen and a Chinese warlord, James Thackeray was allowed to continue his lucrative opium trade and Li Wei Tam was able to perpetuate his comfortable, horizontal life on an opium bed. I suppose you know what happened in 1842?”

Bond answered, “The war had ended, and Hong Kong Island was ceded to the British.”

“Yes. The ban on opium still existed, however. The Chinese government, as a result of what they viewed as an unfair and unequal Treaty, made trade an even more challenging endeavour despite the fact that the Treaty had guaranteed Britain’s right to trade openly and freely.”

Bond added, “In China’s view, the ceding of Hong Kong Island was a humiliating experience and was never wholly forgotten nor forgiven.”

“You are an intelligent man, Mr. Bond,” Li said. “I can almost forget you are a gweilo. Shall I continue?”

“Please do.”

“While companies like Jardine Matheson were allowed to build headquarters on Hong Kong Island, James Thackeray still found himself dealing independently and without any established, legal structure from which to conduct business. He, too, needed a legitimate enterprise that he could call his own. Even though he had made what some men might call a fortune over the last few years, Thackeray needed more capital. It was Li Wei Tam who came to his rescue. One night in 1850, over an exquisite meal, a tremendous amount of rice wine, and quite a bit of opium smoke, a deal was struck that would have repercussions for both men’s descendants. My honourable ancestor offered to “loan” Thackeray the much-needed capital to start his own trading company. Thackeray, who was basically an honest man, was flabbergasted. He said he would accept the money only on condition that they made a provision by which Li could be repaid.

“My great-great-grandfather was drunk and high from the amount of wine and drugs consumed that night, and thought whimsically about Thackeray’s request. For the sake of xinyong, a term that means ‘trust’ in our language, Li Wei Tam attempted to think of a ridiculous demand, which Thackeray could never fulfil, as a gesture of his own generosity. After all, his primary motivation was the continuing supply of opium. James Thackeray was his friend, and Li Wei Tam hadn’t many friends—Chinese or otherwise.

“The ceding of Hong Kong happened to be a much-discussed and extremely controversial topic in southern China at the time. The Treaty signed at Nanking had provided that Hong Kong be handed over to the British in ‘perpetuity.’ ”

Bond added, “There were even British citizens who thought the Treaty was absurd.”

“Yes. At that time, no one could predict that it would one day be the Manhattan of the Far East. Therefore, with a sly grin, my great-great-grandfather told his friend, “Mr. Thackeray, you may have the money for your company on one condition. You must sign an agreement with me. Should Hong Kong ever come under Chinese rule again, then your assets in the company shall be handed over to me. It would then become my company.”

“Thackeray, who believed that Hong Kong would never leave British rule, laughed and agreed. The two men drew up official legal documents. James Thackeray signed them, and Li Wei Tam applied his chop, our official family seal, alongside the signature. It was maijiang of the highest order. Thus, EurAsia Enterprises was born.”

My God, Bond thought, the roots of this whole mess went back a century and a half!

Li continued. “Opium was legalized in 1856 as the Second Opium War began, and during the following years James Thackeray became one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest men. EurAsia Enterprises flourished, and even London recognized his and the company’s importance. The Kowloon peninsula was ceded to Britain in 1860, and finally, in 1898, the New Territories was leased to Britain for ninety-nine years. Little did anyone know at the time that this last Treaty, signed at the Second Convention of Peking, would have a direct effect on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon as well.”

“What happened to Thackeray and your great-great-grandfather?” Bond asked.

“James Thackeray died in 1871. His son Richard took over EurAsia Enterprises and continued to trade opium to Li Wei Tam, who had reached a ripe old age. The company expanded, opening branches all over the world. My great-great-grandfather finally succumbed to the gods in 1877, and the partnership between the Thackeray family and the Li family ended. My great-grandfather, Li’s only son, never approved of his father’s addiction to opium, nor of the gweilo who sold it to him. He did, however, make sure that the agreement signed by the elder Thackeray and his father remained intact and safe. Perhaps someday it would come in useful.”

Li stood and refilled Bond’s glass, then resumed his place in the leather armchair to continue the story. “Now the tale gets a little complicated,” he said with a smile. “To cut a long story short, in 1911 civil war broke out in China. You may know that an ambitious, Western-educated revolutionary named Dr. Sun Yat-sen initiated a rebellion dedicated to establishing a republican government in China. He succeeded; by 1912, the Ch’ing Dynasty was no more.”

Bond was quite familiar with China’s tortured twentieth-century history, but he allowed Li to tell it in his own words.

“It was a period of great turmoil. During a skirmish in Guangzhou, my great-grandfather was killed, leaving his son Li Pei Wu, my grandfather, to look after the family fortune. Unfortunately, the republican government was extremely unstable; between 1912 and 1949 there were times when it didn’t exist at all and the country was a …” again he searched for the right word, and finally said in English “… a free-for-all!” Li smiled at his choice of phrase.

Bond continued the history lesson. “As for Sun Yat-sen, he formed the Kuomintang party in an attempt to limit the republicans’ power. The government outlawed the Kuomintang and Sun Yat-sen was forced into exile.”

“You are well informed, Mr. Bond,” Li said. “Ambitious warlords vied for leadership for more than a decade. In 1921, the Communists organized in Shanghai, with Mao Zedong among their original members. They made bids for power in the turbulent country, and in 1923, Sun Yat-sen agreed to admit them to Kuomintang membership. But after Sun’s death in 1925, the young general Chiang Kai-shek took over the leadership of the Kuomintang and set about reunifying China under its rule, ridding the country of imperialists and warlords, and exercising a bloody purge of the party’s Communist membership.”

Bond wondered what all this had to do with Li’s family. In answer to his thought, Li said, “My grandfather’s family got caught up in the maelstrom that ravaged China during this period of unrest. The family fortune was lost to the Communists in 1926, and my grandfather was murdered for having “secret society” connections. My grandmother and her two young children became refugees and fled across the border into Kowloon. The eldest of the children was a boy of seven, named Li Chen Tam.”

“Your father?”

Li nodded. “The Communists had seized all of my family’s property, amongst which was the ancient document signed by James Thackeray and my great-great-grandfather, Li Wei Tam. The document was considered lost for all time. I’ve already told you a little about my father. Li Chen Tam fell into the hard life in which many Hong Kong Chinese refugees found themselves during the years between the two World Wars. He supported his mother and baby sister by selling food on the street. When he became a teenager, he made the acquaintance of several other young Chinese boys who belonged to a fraternal organization. They offered to help him financially and protect his family. In exchange, he had to pledge allegiance, as well as secrecy, to their organization. This organization was the San Yee On, which you know as one of the largest and most powerful Triads in Southeast Asia.

“My father rose rapidly through the ranks, especially after entering the lucrative entertainment business in the 1950s. Along the way, like so many of the Triad leaders at the time, he made a few enemies even within his own organization. In the early 1960s, when he was approaching fifty, my father broke off from the San Yee On and formed his own Triad, the Dragon Wing Society.

“He was quite aware of his great-grandfather’s agreement with EurAsia Enterprises but was unable to do anything about it. So, my father concocted an underhanded scheme to get his own back. By putting the squeeze on EurAsia’s shipping department heads, the Dragon Wing Society infiltrated the company’s inner workings. Nothing was shipped out of Hong Kong without the Triad’s intervention. Things came to a head, and eventually news of the squeeze went all the way to the top of the company.”

“Who must have been, let’s see … James Thackeray’s greatgrandson?” Bond asked.

“Correct. Thomas Thackeray, then the current taipan of EurAsia Enterprises, and Guy Thackeray’s father. While being a shrewd businessman, Thomas Thackeray had inherited his great-grandfather’s trait of greediness. If there was an opportunity to add to his fortune, then he would brush ethics aside and encourage the money-making to continue. It was with this attitude that Thomas Thackeray justified entering into a business alliance with my father. The two men met in person only once, and secretly, at one of my father’s nightclubs. It was agreed that EurAsia Enterprises would provide the means, the Dragon Wing Society would provide the goods and muscle, and together they would share in the profits. Thus, EurAsia Enterprises began distributing heroin all over the world as couriers for the Dragon Wing Society.”

Bond noted, “It seems the story has come full circle, practically a reversal of the partnership that existed in the mid-nineteenth century.”

“Ironically, that is true,” Li said. “There was, however, another piece of the alliance. The smuggled heroin had to come from somewhere, and that was the Golden Triangle. A certain young Chinese official in Guangzhou had influence over the operations of the poppy fields there. His name was Wong Tsu Kam. Extremely militaristic and a staunch Communist, Colonel Wong also happened to be even greedier than Thomas Thackeray! He was the unseen, silent partner of Thackeray and my father. He maintained the poppy fields. He refined the opium into heroin in his own laboratories located on site in the Golden Triangle. He cleared the way for the heroin to be safely smuggled into Hong Kong so that the Dragon Wing Society could get it onto EurAsia’s ships. For his efforts, Wong received a tremendous kickback. A man with those kinds of assets in China wielded great power, and he used it to advance within the Communist party until he became a fully fledged general in 1978.

“A year before Wong Tsu Kam became a general, Guy Thackeray took over EurAsia Enterprises. I had succeeded my father as Cho Ku of the Dragon Wing Society. Our uneasy partnership continued through the eighties and into the nineties. All along, my father knew of the ancient agreement that would have given us control of EurAsia Enterprises should the Hong Kong colony ever be handed back to China. In 1984, the speculation came to an end when the treaty was signed to do that very thing in 1997. The rage that my father felt at the Thackeray family, and at the Communists who had stolen his father’s assets, eventually killed him. He died of heart failure shortly after the news was made public. I carried on, but now a bitter rift existed between me and Guy Thackeray. Our partnership continued, but it was purely a business transaction. It had ceased being personal long ago.

“It was in 1985 that General Wong made his move. One afternoon, his people made an appointment to see Guy Thackeray at EurAsia Enterprises’ corporate headquarters in Central. With a Chinese lawyer in tow, General Wong met Thackeray in the company’s luxurious boardroom and pulled out a tattered document written in both English and Chinese. General Wong was in possession of the original agreement made between James Thackeray and my great-greatgrandfather! According to Chinese law, the state now owned the document and what it represented. Li Wei Tam’s heirs had fled China and their assets were seized by the Communist government. Therefore, as the representative of that Chinese government, General Wong informed Guy Thackeray that the 59 per cent of stock owned by Thackeray would automatically transfer to China at midnight on 30 June, 1997, just as the colony itself would be handed over after a hundred and fifty years of British rule. General Wong had been given full authority to execute the transition and implement whatever new management system he desired. Whatever he decided to do, Guy Thackeray was out. In essence, not only would General Wong gain control of a multi-billion dollar corporation, but he would also increase his profit margin in the drug smuggling operation by onethird. He would have the upper hand over me and the Society, too! General Wong would be able to call all the shots. As for Thackeray, he would be left high and dry. It made no difference that 41 per cent of the stock was owned by other British citizens. Wong implicitly made it clear that they would be persuaded to sell their shares and leave Hong Kong forever.”

“What happened?” Bond asked.

“Guy Thackeray never told a soul about this meeting apart from his own English solicitor, Gregory Donaldson. He spent the following five years consulting Donaldson about the matter. Donaldson was sworn to secrecy, and they searched for a way out. But it was hopeless. Once China took over the colony, their law would reign supreme and the original agreement would be deemed legal. For the next seven years, Guy Thackeray lived with the knowledge that he would have to give up his family’s company and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He became a bitter, unhappy man—a friendless recluse prone to gambling for high stakes in Macau.”

Bond realized that this explained the man’s eccentric behaviour and his alcoholism.

“Thackeray arranged a meeting with me one rainy night in 1995 and told me the news. At first, I was ecstatic that my great-greatgrandfather’s agreement still existed. Then, as the truth of the matter sank in, I was filled with hatred and the desire for revenge. I hated the Thackeray family for their role in the history of the mess, and I detested General Wong for stealing what was rightfully mine.”

Li smiled wryly as he ended the extraordinary story. “Since then, the drug-smuggling partnership has kept operating—it was business as usual. After all, a profit could still be made until things changed in 1997.”

James Bond had listened to Li Xu Nan’s story, fascinated and repelled at the same time. It was a classic case of injustice and irony. A vicious criminal was being cheated out of something of great value that was rightfully his, and Bond found himself feeling the man’s outrage, too.

“So you see, Mr. Bond,” Li said, “Mr. Thackeray and I had a mutual interest in keeping Wong from taking over the company. Thackeray and I were not friends. We were enemies, but we had a common goal. I did not kill him.”

“But why would General Wong kill him?” Bond asked. “If he was going to gain control of the company on July the first anyway, why murder Thackeray?”

Li shrugged. “I do not know. You will have to ask him.”

“And why was the solicitor, Donaldson, also killed? And the other Directors?”

“Perhaps they were going to get in the way legally,” Li suggested. “Maybe there was a loophole, and that was the only way Wong could close it. General Wong may be a Communist, but he is one of the most corrupt capitalist pigs I know.”

It made sense. It was Thackeray’s murder that was the big question mark.

“The other night we were in Macau. Some Triads chopped up a mahjong game at the Lisboa Casino. Were they your men?”

“No. I give you my word,” Li said.

Bond sat in thought. A big piece of the puzzle was still missing.

“Now we come to the task I must ask you to do, Mr. Bond,” Li said. “As I mentioned earlier, you are in my debt. If you perform this task for me and succeed, I will release you from my debt and also spare your life.”

“I don’t know what it is you want me to do, Li,” Bond said, “but I can tell you right now I don’t work for criminals. You can kill me now. I’ve lived my entire life with the prospect of death coming at any moment.”

Li nodded. “Brave words, Mr. Bond. Why don’t you hear me out first?”

Bond sighed. “All right. What is it you want?”

“I want you to go to Guangzhou and pay a little visit to General Wong.”

“And then what?”

“Steal my great-great-grandfather’s agreement. Wong keeps it in a safe in his office. Bring it back to me. If you have to eliminate the good general in the process …” Li shrugged his shoulders.

Bond laughed. “You must be joking, Li! How the hell do you think a gweilo like me could get anywhere near this general, much less break into his bloody safe? Don’t you think I would stick out like a sore thumb in China?”

“Hear me out, Mr. Bond. I have a plan.” Bond raised his hand, gesturing for Li to continue, but he knew the very thought was absurd. “You are sceptical, Mr. Bond, I see that, but listen to me. We have learned that a new lawyer from London will be arriving in Hong Kong later this morning after the sun rises. He is Gregory Donaldson’s replacement as EurAsia Enterprises’ solicitor. Since Mr. Thackeray’s untimely demise, this new lawyer will be handling things. He has an appointment in Guangzhou the next day with General Wong himself. I propose that you go to Guangzhou in his place. My organization has contacts at the airport. We can do a switch before the man even enters Immigration. You will be hand-delivered to General Wong by EurAsia executives. You will meet Wong privately. He will most certainly show you the original document. You will have the perfect, and probably the only, chance to get it. Then my brothers will help you get out of Guangzhou and back to Hong Kong.”

“Not on your life, Li.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to die, then.”

“I’ve heard worse threats.”

Li said, “Very well, I will offer you another incentive—the life of that girl, the traitor. She can leave with you, and I will cancel the death warrant on her head.”

Bond closed his eyes. The man had played the trump card.