He listened at each door. All were identical — cheap and hollow-core, with steel mail slots and name plaques that announced the businesses housed inside, everything from accountants to start-up Web site companies, dentists to secretarial services. Muted voices sounded from behind several, and a radio station from one. He was beginning to worry that he had somehow lost Mcdermid when he heard him again.
He slowed. The muffled tones were coming from the other side of a door that proclaimed in Chinese and English: dr. James chou, acupuncture & shiatsu. It appeared that Ralph Mcdermid indulged in acupuncture or shisu massage or both. But why did he go to the trouble of taking the subway here and then the long walk? Mcdermid was a physically soft man.
Or was he here for a different purpose? Perhaps this was a front for an old-fashioned “massage parlor.”
As Jon thought that, he dropped low and peered in through the mail slot.
The reception area was sparsely furnished, with cheap molded-plastic chairs and tables. The couch was overstuffed and had bamboo arms and braces.
Magazines in both Chinese and English lay on the tables and couch. The waiting room was deserted. So where was the voice coming from? Had he been wrong?
Weapon in hand, he turned the knob and crept inside. That was when he saw the second door. Mcdermid said something from the room on the other side of it.
Jon had begun to smile to himself when suddenly there was complete silence. The talk had stopped in the inner office. Two people — Mcdermid and the doctor or the masseur — should make some sound … Jon’s chest tightened as a new answer occurred to him. There was another reason Mcdermid might take the subway and walk. Mcdermid could have expected to be followed. He could have expected Jon. The unpleasant truth was … Mcdermid could have lured him into an ambush.
Jon spun, dove to the floor, and skidded behind the couch, his Beretta ready.
The hall door flew open, latch and hinges ripping, and crashed to the floor in a shower of splinters. Two of his earlier tails slammed through the opening, pistols preceding them.
Jon squeezed off two rounds. One of the men fell onto his face and slid across the linoleum floor, leaving a slash of red blood. The other flung himself backward out of harm’s way, into the hall again. Jon’s bullet had missed him.
Jon snaked forward on his elbows. The second man darted into view again, gun aimed at the couch. Jon was halfway toward the door, where the gunman had not expected him to be. Jon fired once. This time there was a grunt of pain, a curse, and the man fell back.
Warily, Jon reached the shattered doorway and positioned himself low but where he could rise to see along the hall toward the elevators and where anyone trying to enter the reception room through the second door would have to be fully inside before they could focus on him and shoot. Ahead in the hall, two men bent over a third, who sat against the wall. Blood pooled at his side, where Jon’s shot had connected. They glanced angrily back at the office where Jon hid and watched.
Jon scrambled up, ran to the couch, laid it on its cloth side, and pushed it to the doorway. He positioned it to cover his flank and dropped to the floor again.
He could hear the sounds of feet outside in the corridor, trying to be quiet. His hunters were moving in. He made himself stay down. He counted off ten seconds, raised up, and dropped one with a single shot as he burst in, low to the floor.
As the cry of pain echoed against the marble walls, the office’s other door blasted open and shots slammed into the couch’s bamboo and stuffing. Jon fell flat, waiting. His heart ticked into his ears.
Finally, a man jumped through the door and into the room, a tiny submachine gun in his hands. Jon fired off a bullet. The man catapulted back against a large window and crashed through, his scream receding as he dropped from sight.
Jon raised above the couch again to check the hall. They were closing in — three this time. He fired twice, and they scurried back, but for how long? They would try again from the inner room, too. He had another clip, but eventually they would coordinate better, attack simultaneously from both doors, and that would end it. He would be killed or captured.
He was unsure which they wanted.
Sweat broke out on his forehead. On one knee, he waited for the next assault from the inner office. Without warning, they barreled through.
There were two now. They moved faster and were cleverer, diving to either side, while he had to remain alert in case those in the hall attacked simultaneously. He emptied his gun, spraying the chairs, tables, walls. He slammed in his last clip — and they were gone.
Or were they? Abruptly, more shots exploded, shook the walls. But from where? The hall or the inner office? And where were the bullets? Nothing hit the couch where he crouched, and nothing slammed into the waiting room. Should he drop or remain kneeling? As another fusillade erupted, he realized the noise came from out in the hall. Oddly, they were not shooting at him.
He raised up and looked. There were four of them, including the two from the inner office. The fifth and sixth — both injured — lay in one of the elevators, the doors jammed open. The remaining four hunters were firing away from him, toward the opposite end of the corridor. Abruptly, one turned and shot back, trying to keep him pinned down.
He returned fire, rising and dropping. Suddenly there was swearing, scrambling, and the slam of a door as heavy feet raced away. He listened. An elevator door closed. There was silence from both the corridor and the inner room. Were they really gone? Or was this another damn trick?
Cautiously, he leaned out to look. The hall was empty in both directions.
The old building creaked. Somewhere on another floor, a toilet flushed.
Jon inhaled. He wiped his sleeve across his forehead as he studied the motionless man he had shot, who still lay sprawled on the floor of the waiting room. He crab-walked to him. The man was dead, and his pockets carried nothing that would identify him.
Disappointed, Jon jumped up and sped into the inner office. There was a massage table, a cabinet, a chair, and a portable radio-and-CD player.
Everything had been riddled with gunfire. Wind whistled through the broken window through which one of the men he had shot had crashed.
Below, sirens screamed. The Hong Kong police were on their way.
There was a second door in here, too. It stood open into the hall. He sprinted toward it and gazed carefully out. The corridor was still deserted, blood and bullet casings making a trail to the elevator.
Beretta in both hands, he moved toward the elevators, too, swinging the pistol front and back, covering the passageway, as he continued past and reached the last door in the hall, the only other one that was open. It faced the length of the corridor.
Beretta up, he rolled around the doorjamb and pointed. In his sights was the Chinese peasant woman he had seen earlier from his hiding place in the stairwell. Still dressed in her black pajamas and conical straw hat, she sat cross-legged on the floor, her back against a rolltop desk.
There was a cell phone at her side. Both hands aimed a thoroughly non-peasant 9mm Glock at him.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
Still keeping her Glock aimed at him, her voice was irritated as she said in perfect American English, “So this is the answer. Your goal in life is to screw up my operations. Your timing stinks.” But she smiled.
“Randi?”
“Hi, soldier.” She lowered her weapon.
He stared as he put his away. “Unbelievable. The CIA just keeps getting better at their disguises.” So this was where the other gunfire had originated. Randi had created the diversion that had saved him.
She uncoiled from the floor and rose to her feet in a single motion. “Do I hear sirens?”
“You do. We’d better get the hell out of here.”
The scent of camellias floated in from the lush garden at Zhongnanhai as Niu Jianxing — the Owl — leaned back, listening angrily to the discussion at tonight’s special Standing Committee meeting. All of his intellect was being required to keep his program on track in the face of the Empress crisis. He could not allow his bad temper to show.
