“He arrived in Macau on Sunday night, the ninth of October, at five o’clock, but you already knew that. There is a gap between that time and when he showed up at the Grand Lisboa Hotel. That you may not have known. He wasn’t preregistered, didn’t even have a reservation. That suggests a last-minute move, or an effort to keep his travel as far as possible under the radar. I don’t know where he was between the moment he put his feet on the soil of Macau and when he walked into the lobby. It might matter a lot, or it might not matter at all. If you ask me, it was the first time he had been out of the country in a while. Maybe he wanted to stretch his legs and gather his thoughts before the operation got underway.”
I kept myself from staring into Kang’s eyes. I knew they would tell me nothing. They would go from expressionless to dead, barren orbs in a frozen sky. It wouldn’t even help to watch his hands. I’d learned the lesson sitting across from him fifteen years ago, and I never forgot. Kang was in complete control of his every gesture; if he needed a nervous tic, he could time it to the millisecond. If I wanted a reaction, the only thing to do was wait. I’d laid down the challenge to him-that I was pretty sure what had happened in Macau wasn’t the result of an accident, that it was far worse than that, that it was a political assassination. I’d already told Greta that I suspected she had been in Macau to pass a message. Kang knew I was picking up the shards of a broken operation, but now I was challenging him directly to tell me the details, or at least a few of them.
“Maybe someone spotted him while he was walking around.” Kang’s voice was completely noncommittal. Then his cheek twitched. Astounding, I thought, right on schedule. “Maybe it was someone who wasn’t supposed to know he was there.”
“Could be.”
“That wouldn’t help if, as you say, he was involved in an operation.”
“Listen, either we play this on level ground or we finish our lunch and go our separate ways. You know exactly what the operation was. I have my suspicions. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but please don’t play dumb. It’s annoying. After all these years, it’s very annoying.”
Kang nodded. “Let’s put it to the side for now. Good enough?”
It wasn’t nearly good enough, but it was clear that I wasn’t going to get anything more on this from him, not yet, so there was no sense pouting. “I’ll throw some more in the pot. You tell me when to stop. He arrived at the hotel at half past six. He wanted a very specific room. He gave the front desk a list of requirements, but that was chaff. There was only one thing he really cared about: It had to have a good view of the Portuguese fort on the hill. I think I know why. I think you do, too.”
Kang made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “More for the side pile.”
“He had one suitcase with him, a Louis Vuitton Pegase 60. That’s a two-wheeler, good enough for a few days’ travel if you don’t care about wrinkling your suit. Not as good as the 70.”
“Get on with it, O.”
“He goes up to his room and locks himself in for three days. I think he was nervous. He wanted to be alone to think. Maybe he wasn’t sure he was ready for what was coming. And he was waiting for a message. That’s when he made the first mistake. He put on the DO NOT DISTURB light. He may not even have known he turned it on. The light switches in those rooms are a nightmare. They’re like the control panel in an agent submarine. But the housekeeping staff had no way of knowing whether he did it by mistake or not. All they knew was that the light was on and that meant they were supposed to stay away.”
“And they did?”
“Religiously. He waited for the message. By the second day he began to worry when it didn’t come. His stomach was in knots and he couldn’t eat. He wanted to talk to someone, anyone, but he knew he couldn’t do that because he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone at all where he was. It was too dangerous. He was alone, without friends, without protection, for the first time in his life. His only hope was the message. That would be his lifeline. But the message didn’t come.”
“Why not? It was delivered.” Kang bit off the last word. He knew he had gone too far. Or he wanted me to think he had.
“Yes, it was delivered. It showed up the first night, exactly according to plan. But the concierge held it. The DO NOT DISTURB light was on. The next morning, word came in that the message was to be ‘misplaced’ for another day or so. The concierge didn’t ask why. He just put it in the bottom drawer. Once that happened, the trap was set.”
The waiter came over to the table to see if we needed anything else. Kang waved him away.
I continued. “Almost as soon as our boy disappeared from Pyongyang, there was a frantic search. Alerts went out. He had to be found. And he was. I still don’t know how. You said it could have been that someone saw him walking around. Maybe. Or maybe you have a problem in your organization.”
“I can do without the free advice, Inspector. We’ll leave it where you put it-he was found, and we don’t yet know how. You said something about a trap.”
“Once he was found, a decision was made to make sure he never came back. It was a quick decision, almost instantaneous. It was one of those things that came out of nowhere. No one thought about it. The opportunity was too good to pass up, not merely because it was a chance to eliminate him physically, but because his reputation-and everything he stood for-could be destroyed as well.”
“Let’s not deal in ciphers, Inspector. You think you know who made this nondecision. Throw that in the mix.”
“You told me Major Kim wanted to destroy his reputation. I’ve had enough to do with Kim over the past several weeks to think he wouldn’t stop at that. And if he had second thoughts on murder-which he would-Zhao would have convinced him it could be done without danger. It was merely a question of activating certain connections, bringing to bear certain resources. Zhao knew people who were very good at what they did, and took pleasure in their work. They were on call. Yes, it was a challenge to carry this off on such short notice, but the greater the challenge, the more intense the pleasure. Have you ever seen Zhao’s eyes glow in the dark? Phone calls were made, probably to Russia. An order was placed. Money transferred. On the evening of October thirteenth, the goods showed up at Hong Kong Airport-a Korean-Russian who was unusually good with a knife.”
“Full stop, Inspector. You’re telling me Zhao put out this order? Not Kim?”
“Does it matter?”
“It might.”
“Then you’ll have to pursue it on your own. I have no way of knowing for sure. Kim is basically weak. If there hadn’t been someone to push him along, he wouldn’t have gone ahead with any of the murders on his own, not this one or the ones that followed. You want me to keep going?”
Kang nodded. “Do you have a name for this Korean-Russian killer?”
“Tanya.”
“You’re sure?”
“You asked for a name, Kang. That’s the name I came up with.”
“How? How would you know that? Did you meet this person?”
“No. But I got close.”
“How?”
“Pork buns. There was an MSS officer who kept an eye on the Russian prostitutes. He had lists of the girls, what they wore, how they worked, whether they had any clients that were on the watch alerts. Mostly, things were routine, so he ate pork buns and snoozed. Past midnight on October fourteenth, he noticed a new girl, a blonde. She didn’t dress like the others, didn’t walk like them, and only worked for a few hours before she disappeared. He never saw her again. He has an agreement with the Russian pimp who runs that group to be kept up to date on new faces. Who was the blond girl? The pimp was real nervous, said he’d only taken her on as a favor for a friend, but she was strange and he didn’t want her to scare away clients. He said her name was Tanya.”
“Tanya. I should have known.”
Kang knew Tanya? I felt like I had stepped off the continental shelf.
“After she killed him,” Kang was feeling his way here, “they killed her?”
“Yes, only it wasn’t a her. She was a he.”
“Tanya was a him?” Kang looked stunned. “You know this?”
