Zero Minus Ten

NINETEEN

FAREWELL TO HONG KONG

THE ALBINO TOM IMMEDIATELY MOVED FORWARD AND DISARMED BOND. HE tucked the Walther PPK in his belt, then moved back into position. Harry slowly released Sunni, and she moved to join Bond.

“How touching,” Thackeray said. “It looks as if you two have some sort of affection for each other. Surprised to see me, Mr. Bond?”

Bond was speechless.

“No, I’m not a ghost,” Thackeray said. “Still alive. I haven’t felt better in years!”

“What’s going on, Thackeray?” Bond ground out. “Let us go!”

“But you two are my guests,” the man said with mock sincerity. “I was about to have breakfast. Won’t you join me? I promise to tell all.” He gestured to the albinos. Bond and Sunni were shoved roughly towards the passageway. Bond removed his radioactive-resistant suit, then the entire party made their way out of the mine. They walked across the gravel towards the main building. The temperature had risen considerably in the hour Bond and Sunni had been underground.

They were led into a comfortable private dining area on the second floor. Tom shoved Bond towards a chair. Angered, 007 turned and swung at the albino. Tom was unbelievably quick for his size—he blocked the blow effortlessly, grabbed Bond’s arm and twisted it sharply. Bond winced in agony.

“Enough of that!” Thackeray commanded. Tom released Bond, who jerked his arm away from the albino and stared at him menacingly.

“Who are the three stooges, Thackeray? I should have known they worked for you when I first saw them in Macau.”

“Oh, these are the Chang brothers. All three of them were born albino. Their parents were my grandfather’s servants. My own father saw to it that they were raised in a safe environment and they have been loyal to my family ever since,” Thackeray said.

“Sit down, Mr. Bond. Sit down, Miss … uhm, what shall I call your lovely companion?”

Before Sunni could answer, Bond replied, “Her name is no concern of yours. She’s completely innocent. You should let her go. She won’t go to the police.”

“I cannot believe she is completely innocent, Bond,” Thackeray said.

“For that matter,” Bond said, “you have no right to keep me either. I promise you, my newspaper won’t publish anything about you.”

“Your newspaper?” Thackeray laughed loudly. “Come, come, Bond. Cut the crap, please. I know all about you. You’re no reporter. I knew you weren’t a reporter before we parted company in Macau. You work for the British Secret Service. You see, my albino friends here kept tabs on Mr. Woo after he had played mahjong with me a couple of times. I wanted to know more about him. It wasn’t difficult to ascertain that he worked for your government. You people really are becoming careless, you know. I was about to do something about him, but General Wong in China beat me to it. Woo knew too much. It wasn’t a huge leap of logic to see through you, Mr. Bond.”

A Chinese servant brought in a tray of food: scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, orange juice, and coffee.

“Ah, breakfast,” Thackeray said. “Eat up, please. It may be the last good breakfast you’ll ever have!” He sat down and started piling food on his plate.

Bond looked at Sunni. She was terribly frightened. He took her hand. It was trembling. He wished she had stayed at the motel and was angry with himself for allowing her to come. Once again he had put a girl he cared about in jeopardy. Bond gave her hand a squeeze as if to say, “Don’t worry.” He then put on his best façade of nonchalance.

“I bet you say that to all your guests, Thackeray,” he said, sitting down. “This looks good. We’re quite hungry, aren’t we, Sunni?”

She looked at him as if he was mad. Bond gestured with his head for her to sit. Sunni sat down and played with her food.

“So, tell me,” Bond said, “how did you manage to survive that car bomb?”

“Oh, that,” Thackeray said. “Simple stage illusion. I once made a paltry living doing magic, but you probably already know that. I used to perform the same trick on stage with a cabinet and a curtain. I’d step into the cabinet, and my assistants would hold a large drape in front of it. The top of the cabinet could be seen behind the curtain, but it shielded my escape through the bottom. The cabinet was set on fire, and then I miraculously appeared at the back of the house and walked down the aisle to the thunderous applause of the audience. It was a nice illusion. On the day of my ‘disappearance,’ I simply got out of the limo when the vehicle was shielded by a large lorry that pulled up beside it. I jumped on to the side of the lorry and rode with it up the street. A man I’d hired then threw the bomb into the car. It was quite spectacular, if I do say so myself. I understand you had something to do with the man’s demise?”

Of course, Bond thought. He should have known it had been a magician’s illusion. It just proved the old adage that the hand really was quicker than the eye.

“Very clever, Thackeray,” Bond said. “But why? I know all about the contract between your great-great-grandfather and Li Xu Nan’s great-great-grandfather. But why disappear? Unless it was simply to escape being arrested as a drug-smuggler?”

“Yes, well, the contract …” Thackeray suddenly seemed lost in thought. “It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? My father had told me about the agreement, and I thought it had been lost forever. Li Xu Nan hated me on principle. He thought my family had cheated his family. But we didn’t lose the contract. The Thackerays had nothing to do with his family’s exile from China. Yet he blamed me for some reason.” Thackeray chuckled. “It didn’t stop him from doing business with me!”

“And then General Wong came to see you …”

Thackeray nodded. “Yes. A black day, to be sure. General Wong came to see me in, what year was it … ? 1985. At first I couldn’t believe he could get away with what he told me. I was determined to find a legal defence against him. At the same time, though, I had to keep silent. I couldn’t put the company’s market value in jeopardy. If the news that EurAsia Enterprises was going to change ‘management’ in 1997 had been made public then, I could not have conducted business. There are plenty of big corporations that have pulled out of Hong Kong in the last ten years. I was stuck, so I had to make it work until that fateful day.”

Thackeray stood and began to walk around the room as he spoke. He took a bottle of vodka, poured some into a glass, and drank it quickly. For the next half hour, he continued to refill the glass regularly. His address slowly became a rant, as if he was justifying himself to the gods rather than talking to people in the same room as him.

“I had to live with it for ten years!” he said. “Ten … bloody … years … Imagine it! Imagine knowing that everything your family had built was going to vanish in one swift blow, and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it! I alone carried that weight on my shoulders. My solicitor knew of course but he was helpless as well. So, about a year ago, I finally knew what I had to do. I would get everything I could out of the company, escape, and then wreak havoc on the society that had destroyed five generations of wealth and success.”

He sat down again and faced Bond and the girl. His face was flushed and he was now beginning to lose his composure. “I hate the Chinese. I hate the two-faced bastards! They smile to your face, eager-to-please, but behind your back they have nothing but contempt for you. And you know something? The British are no better! I hate them as well! What idiots! They agreed to hand over the wealthiest city-state in Asia to the yellow bastards, and it was rightfully theirs!”

So, Bond thought, not only was Thackeray a raving madman, he was a racist as well. “There are many who would argue with you, Thackeray,” he said. “It was the Chinese who got the unfair deal back in the nineteenth century. The land was originally theirs. Hong Kong was won only because of the greed and opportunism of opium traders. That was the reasoning behind the treaty Britain signed with China in 1984. China has lived with what they felt was shame and humiliation that England has nurtured one of her children. Hong Kong is a part of China, Thackeray. You cannot refute that.”

“Balls!” Thackeray shouted. “Don’t speak to me about opium traders! My great-great-grandfather was a pioneer, and if it weren’t for men like him there wouldn’t be a Hong Kong! Do you think the territory would have flourished the way it did if it had been under Chinese rule all this time? It might never have been developed at all! No, Bond, I don’t buy that argument. You think Britain is selling out because she feels guilty? If that is the truth, then it’s a stupid reason to hand over a gold mine to a country full of ignorant people who will most likely run it into the ground!”

“Mr. Thackeray,” Bond said evenly, “China is full of people who have worked and sweated all their lives just to have a piece of land on which to build a home. They have a heritage of defending themselves against all manner of threats. Their country has been conquered and restructured countless times over the centuries. They have learned that not everything in life is about wealth. You know as well as anyone how important maijiang is in the East. If Britain decided to hand over Hong Kong, it was because she felt it was the honourable thing to do. She had to save face.”

“Don’t talk to me of honour, Bond. It was a business transaction. Nothing more.”

“I’m afraid there are a lot of people who don’t see it that way.”

“And after July the first, will those people still see it as an act of honour? When six million people suddenly find themselves living under communist rule, they will come to the realization that they were the pawns in a business transaction gone wrong. They were betrayed. I think they’d rather be dead.”

“What are you saying, Thackeray?” Bond was now beginning to lose his temper, too. “What is it you’re planning to do? I know you have a bomb down there in your mine. It was you who tested a device in the outback a few weeks ago, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, that was me. I had to make sure my little home-made toy worked before I exacted my revenge on those who have done me wrong.”

“And who might they be?”

“Don’t you see?” Thackeray pounded the table. “If I can’t have my company, no one is going to have it! If Britain can’t have Hong Kong, then no one is going to inhabit it! The world has to be taught a lesson.”

The magnitude of what Thackeray was implying hit Bond with great force. “You were responsible for all those terrorist acts, weren’t you! You’ve been intentionally trying to start a conflict between Britain and China!”

“Bravo, Mr. Bond, bravo!” he said with sarcasm. “Yes, I was behind it all. I decided that if my plan was going to be a success, I had to build up to it. I had to plant the seeds in everyone’s minds that China and Britain were at each other’s throats.”

“What the hell is your plan?”

“Why, the culmination of a hundred and fifty years of lies, betrayal, and pretension,” Thackeray said. “No more kowtowing on either side. No more speculation about what will happen to Hong Kong in the future. At exactly one minute after midnight on July the first, that bomb will detonate somewhere in the Hong Kong territory—successfully wiping out the entire legacy.”

This time it was Sunni who cried out. “No! You’re a madman! Why do you want to kill six million innocent people? You’re a child having a tantrum! Someone’s taken away your toy and now you want to get even! You’re pathetic!”

There was silence for a moment as Thackeray stared at her. Bond finally said, “I couldn’t have said it better.”

Thackeray stood again and began to pace the room. He was trembling with rage. The alcohol was starting to get to him, too. He was displaying the same signs of recklessness he had shown in Macau. It was not even mid-morning, and already the man was drunk on his feet. “You don’t know the half of it. Starting about a month ago, I slowly began to transfer EurAsia holdings into a private Swiss bank account, a little at a time. I had to be careful, for there were many people in the organization who could have found me out. First I had to get rid of my solicitor, Gregory Donaldson. He knew too much. At the same time, I could get at that bastard General Wong. I was going to make sure he wouldn’t get EurAsia! I made Donaldson’s death look like Wong’s work. Once that was done, I thought that Britain would reciprocate. When nothing happened, I had my aide Simon Sinclair assassinate the two officials from Beijing. I later got rid of him for that very reason. You were present at his demise, Bond.”

“The massacre in Macau? You staged that?”

“Of course I staged it! I wanted it to look like a Triad hit. The Chang brothers here hired some men to do the dirty work. You and your friend Woo should have been killed that night, too, but it didn’t work out that way.”

“What about the floating restaurant? You killed your entire Board of Directors?”

Thackeray nodded, his eyes wide. As he stared into space, he involuntarily brought his hand up and pulled on the left side of his face. Bond thought he resembled the famous detail in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting in which a condemned sinner suddenly realizes that his soul is damned forever.

“Yes, I did that,” he whispered, almost to himself. “They all had to go. They would have found out what I was doing.” Thackeray was talking to himself like a child, as if he was defending his actions to an adult who had caught him doing something wrong.

For a moment he seemed lost, his mind in a faraway place. Then he quickly snapped out of it and turned to Bond. He became his vindictive, angry self once again.

“I blamed that on General Wong, too, of course. For a while, it was working,” he said. “Britain sent a Royal Navy fleet to Southeast Asia. Chinese troops lined the border. The fuse had been lit. You, Mr. Bond, helped it along without any prompting on my part. You assassinated General Wong, didn’t you? I have my sources. I know all about it. It was you, was it not? You did it for that gangster Li. Tell me I’m right?”

Bond lied. “It wasn’t me.”

“I don’t believe you, but it doesn’t matter. Wong is dead, and I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. I suppose Li has that document now? Well, if he thinks he’s going to take over EurAsia Enterprises, then he needs to throw the chim again. He’s not going to be so lucky. Anyway, Wong’s murder only made China that much more suspicious and confrontational. My little surprise the other night was the penultimate move.”

“What was that?” Bond asked.

“Oh, you probably haven’t heard. One of the Star Ferries sank. Someone put a bomb on board.”

“You bastard,” Sunni whispered.

“And now the stage is set for the big transition,” Thackeray said. “Just as Hong Kong changes hands, my bomb will explode. No one will know who to blame. China will blame Britain. Britain will blame China. There are sure to be some … misunderstandings.” He laughed. “It will be wonderful!”

“You’re going to start what might be World War III!” Bond said. “Why? What do you get out of it? Just revenge? You think that destroying one of the wonders of modern civilization will make you happy? I don’t think so, Thackeray. I think you’re going to remain the miserable drunken wretch you are for the rest of your life, no matter what you do.”

“Oh, I intend to be perfectly happy, Mr. Bond. As I said, I’ve been slowly transferring my assets to a Swiss bank account. The company’s coffers are almost dry. I liquidated my entire stock the morning of my press conference, the day of my ‘death.’ It’s a good thing I died when I did, too! I probably would be under arrest for drug smuggling, wouldn’t I? I heard about the warehouse. You were probably responsible for that, too, weren’t you, Bond? Never mind. To answer your question, I think I will be very happy to see Hong Kong go up in flames. I plan to live anonymously here in Australia for the rest of my life. The Chang brothers will look after me. They are very loyal. I pay them well, too.”

Bond knew he had to stop the man. He needed to find out more about the bomb, so that in case he got away he could alert SIS. “How did you make an atomic bomb, Thackeray? It’s not something you learn out of a textbook.”

Thackeray laughed. “No, not a textbook. It was the Internet, actually. I found a most peculiar website called ‘How to Make an Atomic Bomb.’ That gave me the idea, and I hired the right people to help me. I had discovered uranium in my gold mine several years ago, but never reported it. I hired a nuclear physicist named VanBlaricum to work on it and design the machines you saw down below to extract U-235 from the U-238. That’s the difficult part. It’s not a sophisticated bomb. It’s really quite crude. But it’s big enough. It will be the best trick I’ve ever performed!”

“Where will you plant it? How will it be detonated?”

“You ask too many questions, Bond. I’m certainly not going to tell you where it’s going to be, even though you won’t be alive to witness it. Detonating it is easy. A small digital clock will be inside the cone. You know, it runs off of one of those small round batteries you find in wristwatches. It will be set as a timer to explode at 12:01 on July the first. When the time comes, the detonator will set off some conventional explosive inside the cone, thrusting a small portion of U-235 into the main chamber, thereby achieving Super Critical Mass. In an instant … farewell to Hong Kong! It will destroy forever China’s hopes of regaining the colony, and it will teach Queen and Country a lesson they will never forget. I have nothing for which to thank England. I have lived in Hong Kong and Australia all my life. England can go hang, for all I care.”

Thackeray seemed to be in a better mood now. He was quite drunk, but he was no longer in a rage. He moved behind Sunni and put his hand on her long, soft hair. She recoiled, but he grasped her neck and held her firmly. “You’re full of fight, you know that, my dear? I think you’ll make a nice figurehead for my little firecracker. I’ll see to it that you make it back to Hong Kong safely, and you can witness the event from a front-row seat! My ship is docked in Singapore, and it’s got a lot of nooks and crannies where we can hide you. I have a cargo seaplane in Perth waiting to take us to meet her. It’s a rather long voyage, so we must get started.”

He released her, then nodded to Tom and Dick. The two albinos grabbed Sunni and pulled her from the table. She screamed, “No!” and started to struggle. Bond rose to come to her aid, but Harry aimed an AK-47 at him and gestured for him to be still. Sunni attempted to use karate, but the two men held her fast and removed her from the room. The sound of her struggles became fainter as they took her to another part of the building.

Thackeray produced a pistol from thin air—another sleight-of-hand trick. It was Bond’s own Walther PPK. “Now, what shall we do with you, Mr. Bond? I can’t let you live, that much is certain. I should probably just shoot you here and now and get it over with. I’ve always wondered why the bad guys never do that to the heroes in action movies. Instead, they have to use some elaborate method of torture or execution. The hero ultimately uses the delay to his advantage and escapes. So I should just shoot you now, right?”

For a second Bond thought the sight of the madman pointing his own gun at him would be the last thing he would ever see. Thackeray only smiled.

“No,” he said. “Not yet. I don’t want anyone from your service coming to look for you. The Australian police and INTERPOL have already done a thorough search of our facility here a couple of weeks ago. As you can imagine, every mining company in Kalgoorlie was investigated over my little nuclear test in the outback. One of the area’s many side industries is explosives. Luckily, my uranium lode was adequately hidden, and EurAsia Enterprises Australia was given an all-clear. But one can’t be too careful. I don’t want anyone finding your body, or any remains of it.”

He gestured to Harry. “My friend Mr. Chang will take you for a ride in my private airplane. We’ll take you to a part of the country you’ve probably never seen. For that matter, it’s a part of the country you’d probably never want to see. We’ll shoot you there and dump your body. If anyone other than an Aborigine ever finds it, it will have been completely eaten by predators. I think that is best.” He then nodded to Harry, giving him a signal.

Harry slammed the butt of the AK-47 into the back of Bond’s head. He saw a flash of light, felt a moment of extreme pain, and then plunged into total darkness.