Middle Road, side entrances on Nathan Road, and the grandiose main entrance on Salisbury Road. Another kept an eye on the Kowloon lobby. However, after three minutes no one reported anyone leaving the Peninsula stairwell. Shen An-ling called He Qiang’s phone, which rang seven times without an answer. Xu Guanzhong moved from the lobby to the stairwell, keeping an open line, and in that small Beijing office Zhu listened to Xu Guanzhong’s breaths and feet echoing in the stairwell before the feet stopped and Xu Guanzhong said, “Oh.”
“What is it?” asked Shen An-ling.
“I think he’s dead. Yes. He’s dead.”
“He Qiang?”
“Garrote,” came the unnerved reply. “His head is nearly…”
Zhu pulled at his lower lip. He Qiang was dead? There were only five floors to the Peninsula’s original building, but thirty floors had been added in the midnineties with the construction of a modern tower. This could take forever. “Continue up the stairs,” Zhu ordered. “Wei Chi-tao, you, too. Everybody else, move inside.”
On his computer, Xin Zhu had a map of the two Hong Kong blocks that encompassed the Peninsula and the Kowloon, on which he watched his men’s cell phones. Red spots on the screen, all in motion. Three red spots in the stairwell of the Peninsula, and five more closing in. Shen An-ling, in the lobby, began to deliver orders personally, and two more red spots moved into the stairwell.
Xu Guanzhong had more bad news. “He didn’t go back to his room, and the other corridors are empty. We’re going to check the maids’ closets.”
Shen An-ling’s voice, irritably, “You didn’t do that already?”
Xu Guanzhong didn’t bother answering, and Zhu realized that while Alan Drummond might have checked into that hotel, he had probably never gone up to the room. He knew from experience how easy a trick like that was to pull.
On the map of the Peninsula, the red dots were moving through the corridors, and only one remained in the stairwell-the immobile He Qiang. Over the speaker Xu Guanzhong breathed heavily when, suddenly, there was a loud two-tone squeal. “Fire alarm. He pulled the fire alarm. The sprinklers are going.” Noise, voices. “Evacuation.”
“Keep looking,” Zhu ordered. Shen An-ling had kept three men in the lobby. “Watch the crowd.”
A woman’s scream, and Xu Guanzhong stated the obvious. “Someone’s discovered He Qiang in the stairwell.”
Then, after a moment, Xu Guanzhong said, “Wei Chi-tao?”
No answer.
Xu Guanzhong said, “Wei Chi-tao, where are you?”
“He’s on the fourth floor,” Xin Zhu said, though he could see that Wei Chi-tao’s phone was as immobile as He Qiang’s.
Then he heard, “Uhh,” as if Xu Guanzhong had just lost all the air in his body.
“Xu Guanzhong,” said Zhu. On the screen, Xu Guanzhong’s phone, on the third floor, was not moving either. “Answer, Xu Guanzhong.”
A voice spoke to him in English. “He’s coming to get you, Xin Zhu.”
“Who is that?” Shen An-ling shouted.
On the computer screen, Xu Guanzhong’s telephone moved swiftly down the corridor and out a window.
Shen An-ling shouted, “Everyone! Third floor!”
The other spots around the Peninsula swept inward, toward the stairwell, slowed as they fought the evacuating crowds, but Zhu knew that didn’t matter. They wouldn’t find this Sebastian Hall. He was a Tourist.
“Stop them,” Zhu said to Shen An-ling.
Shen An-ling said, “What?”
“Immediately. If he’s still there, he’s going to kill off all our men. Send everyone to the Kowloon, and we’ll see if we can do better there.”
“But-”
“ Immediately, Shen An-ling.”
5
In the Peninsula lobby, as before, he found it hard to spot shadows-rock gardens, as his father would have called them-but this time he wasn’t able to see well because of the emotions. They are safe, just as the note in his father’s pocket had said. Twenty minutes ago, when the door to room 212 had opened, his confusion had been compounded, but by the end of his talk with Tran Hoang the confusion had been cleared away, and with that so much of his anxiety. He’d felt it falling away in chunks as he left Tran Hoang, and when the big Chinese man, He Qiang, offered him a new phone, his joy told him just what to say, “Go fuck yourself.” He’d taken the stairs back down here to the lobby and was blinded by the knowledge that they were safe. When, almost at the door, he spotted his sister sitting on a sofa, arms crossed over her stomach, staring at him, he gave her a smile and a wink before leaving.
Outside, his vision was clear enough to see across Salisbury Road, and he saw that Leticia and Hector were no longer there. He had no doubt that they would find him on their own, so he turned the corner, walking up the packed sidewalk along Nathan Road, and at the intersection with Middle Road entered the Kowloon. Here, finally, he noticed a man who, he suspected, was all too aware of his entrance, but he let him be. His shadow would matter or he wouldn’t matter, but in the end all the shadows in the world mattered so little. Really, none of this mattered now.
He took the elevator to the seventh floor and used his key on the door, and it was when he closed it behind himself that Hector Garza stepped briskly out of the bathroom, right arm extended, a Heckler amp; Koch USP pointed at Milo’s face. Milo saw the emotions working through the Tourist’s features. “On the bed,” said Garza.
Milo sat on it, slowly raising his hands, and said, “Left pocket.”
Garza reached into Milo’s pocket and took out the lady’s gun. His own pistol not wavering, he lifted the Browning to his nose and sniffed but smelled nothing other than gun oil. Then the door opened and Leticia strode in from the corridor, and the most worrying thing wasn’t Garza’s pistol but the expression on Leticia’s face. It was the look of a Tourist, of someone who has disconnected herself from the emotional impact of what she’s about to do. Only now did he realize how much he had been depending on her good moods to get him through all of this.
She took the Browning Garza offered her, then crossed to the television, turned it on-CNN was showing smoke and destruction from a bomb in a place called Kumarikata, in India-and raised the volume. She sat beside Milo on the bed and, without looking at him, said, “How long have you been working for him?”
So that was it. “This is the sixth day.”
“You know what we have to do now, don’t you?”
Milo didn’t speak. He tightened his pelvic muscles to keep from urinating on himself.
Leticia said, “This isn’t how it was supposed to end.”
She seemed to be waiting for a reply, so he said, “No. I didn’t think so either,” for that was true. If she’d found out an hour ago, he might have even welcomed it, for a quiet death seemed the only real solution to his problems. Now, his own death had become pointless.
“How did you know? Did I give it away?”
“Probably,” she said, “but I didn’t notice. I got a call.”
“Collingwood?”
“Yeah.”
“And you think this was the first she learned of it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure what I mean. Did she tell you to kill me?”
Her silence was answer enough. Finally, she cocked her head, regarding him, and Garza shifted his weight to his other foot. She said, “How did he get to you?”
“How do you think? My family. It’s the same way he got Alan.”
