& Lapierre. He’ll be right back.” She glanced at the clock. “Oh, my. He said he’d be gone just ten minutes, but it’s fifteen already. Should I call to see what happened?”
“Yes. But ask only whether he’s there now or was there. That’s all.
Don’t speak to him or have him sent up.” It was possible the man could have gone to Donk & Lapierre for some reason.
She called, asked her questions, and ended the connection. She looked at Mcdermid in confusion. “They say he’s not there and never was. Not even earlier.”
Behind Mcdermid, the elevator doors opened. As Mcdermid turned, Feng Dun stepped out. Feng held a 9mm Glock that looked small in his big hand.
The receptionist’s eyes grew large and frightened as she took in his appearance. Her gaze froze on the Glock.
Feng’s whispery voice asked, “Where is he?”
“Gone,” Mcdermid said, disgusted. “He left fifteen minutes ago.” “He’s still in the building,” Feng said flatly. “We’ve been watching. He can’t leave. He’s trapped.”
Jon was on edge, his shoulders tight, his muscles aching to fight.
Still, he remained hidden behind the mezzanine pillar, studying the lobby below.
After Feng Dun had instructed his three gunmen, he entered an elevator.
The numbers above the door indicated it had shot straight up to the penthouse. Even though Jon had already guessed, he was still shaken: It looked increasingly probable that Ralph Mcdermid had stalled Jon upstairs so he could summon these killers. Which meant the chairman and CEO of the mighty Altman Group was likely not only a player in the Empress crisis but was intimately involved in the bloody aspects of it.
Beneath Jon, the three hunters took up unobtrusive positions, where they could cover all exits. When Feng Dun returned, he did not so much stride from the elevator as appear as if by magic, suddenly there on the lobby floor. He made a subtle gesture close to his hip, and the four converged on a corner behind potted palms. As they conferred, they observed everyone who passed through. Feng glanced up at the mezzanine once and seemed to fix his gaze on where Jon stood in the shadow of the column.
Jon stepped slowly back. He checked his disguise, from the Hawaiian shirt to his blue tennis shoes. He tugged the Panama hat lower over his forehead and slipped his Beretta into the small of his back under the seersucker jacket. As he headed for the staircase, he bent his knees a fraction of an inch and aimed his toes inward, giving him a faintly prissy walk.
He did not look at the killers, although each glanced at him. He found himself stiffen with tension, waiting for one to decide he was worth stopping. As he passed them and closed in on the glass doors that opened onto the street and safety, he could feel someone’s gaze hot on his back. He pushed through the glass doors, waiting to be stopped.
When he was not, he felt a moment of surprise, then relief. As he walked out of the building and crossed the street, the daylight seemed particularly bright and welcoming. He took up a position in the shadows and waited.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was nearly dark when Ralph Mcdermid finally left the building through a side door, although Feng Dun and his hunters had emerged hours before, one at a time, and scattered as if on assignments. Because the Hong Kong crowds had swollen with the evening rush to go home, Jon did not hang back. During the afternoon, the humidity had broken, and the struggle through the mass of pedestrians was easier.
Frustrated and worried, he hurried to keep the CEO in sight. Mcdermid walked only as far as the Central station of the M. T.R., the subway. Jon waited twenty seconds, bought a ticket, and followed. There were fewer people on the platform, and Jon paused, making certain no one else surveilled the CEO — either surreptitiously or as a hidden bodyguard.
When the train came, Mcdermid entered a car, and Jon slipped on behind, through a second door. Mcdermid wove forward until he found a space he liked on one of the stainless steel benches. He sat and stared into space, making eye contact with none of his silent, weary fellow passengers and ignoring the colorful advertisements, all of which were in Chinese, very different from the days before the island returned to mainland China’s control and commercials appeared in English as well.
Jon moved in the opposite direction and grabbed a pole, his back half turned, where he could catch Mcdermid in a window reflection. He found himself wondering why anyone of Mcdermid’s position and wealth was riding the subway. Not going far? Not wanting to use company cars or personnel in another man’s empire? Tired of the pandemonium and pressure of the streets? Cheap? Or, more likely, he wanted no one, not even a chauffeur or taxi driver, to know where he was going.
The ride was remarkably quiet and smooth. Mcdermid never bothered to gaze around, apparently unconcerned that he might have picked up a tail.
He got off a couple of stops later, at the Wanchai station. Jon waited until the last moment again, when the CEO was already some forty feet away, to squeeze out through the closing doors. He hurried out to Hennessy Road, where Mcdermid was ambling along, looking relaxed.
Mcdermid led him through Wanchai, Hong Kong’s former red-light district.
Once notorious for sex and drugs, the area had fallen on hard times. The result was that the city’s booming financial district had invaded. New high-rises clustered together, and the newest and best hotels asked and received more than three thousand dollars a night for rooms.
Hands in his pockets, Mcdermid strolled down neon-lighted Lockhart Road, where most of the remaining sex trade was. Here, Wanchai still lived down to its tawdry reputation. Wanchai girls loitered at bar doors and gave a well-rehearsed pssst to any man who looked as if he could pay.
There were gaudy hostess clubs, topless bars, discos, and raucous English and Irish pubs. The signs and the spielers, the neon and the come-ons were still loud and bright here, broadcasting the delights inside for the hungry and the lonely.
But the beat was gone. Neither he nor Mcdermid gave more than a glance at the tarnished pleasure shacks, while Jon again wondered where Mcdermid was headed — and why.
At last, the CEO turned into a side street and then into a brick office building in the shadow of a spanking new higher-and-shinier, glass-and-steel monolith of offices. The street was narrow. Vendors assembled their gear. A few stores offered peep shows and porn, tattoos and adult toys. At the same time, a steady stream of middle- class office workers and executive types left the brick building on their way home to the darkening hills and suburbs, a reflection of the cultural schizophrenia that Wanchai had become.
His curiosity growing, Jon used the exiting stream as cover and slipped inside. In the marble-lined lobby, Ralph Mcdermid stood facing a row of filigreed elevators. When a car emptied a small river of people, he walked inside, the only passenger, since everyone else was leaving.
Again Jon watched the numbers of the floors light up on the indicator above the door. Me-Dermid’s car stopped on the tenth then returned down.
Jon stepped into another car and pressed the button. At the eleventh floor, he rushed off and ran down the fire stairs two at a time. Finally on the tenth, he peered out into a twin of the empty, marble-lined corridor above. Where had Mcdermid gone?
Jon jerked back when three women left one of the offices and headed toward the elevators, chattering in Chinese. Flattened against the stairwell, he listened, mystified, wishing he had learned the language.
Before he could look out again, other footsteps clattered along the marble floor and stopped at the elevator, where the three women were still talking. More doors opened and closed, and the unseen corridor was silent again … except for a rustling that passed directly outside his door.
Jon cracked it open and peered out. Dressed in the black pajamas and conical strawhat of a rural peasant, a Chinese woman disappeared through the door at the very end of the hall. But where was Mcdermid? As he was about to go looking, he heard what he thought was the CEO’s voice from somewhere to the right, beyond the elevators. He gave a grim smile, pulled out his Beretta, and padded into the corridor.
