“My brother’s son,” Steve said, pointing to the driver.
They drove through busy streets for a few minutes before the car pulled over and drew to a halt. Steve looked up an alley.
“Come, we go.”
Two floors up, over a seedy photographer’s studio, was a dingy little office complete with overhead fan, wooden desk and old metal filing trays.
“A guy is coming in half an hour. He can help. But it will cost more than money.”
“What does he want?”
“Other than money? What everyone want. A passport. A real one,” he finished wistfully.
Quayle thought about that. It was possible. “Who is he?”
“Driver,” Steve said seriously, miming steering with his hands. He had never mastered the art and was in constant admiration of anyone who had.
“Why is he prepared to betray his master?”
“Family. His older brother was killed some years ago in a gang fight. Fung Wa’s people did it. He only find out when his father die six weeks ago. He want revenge.”
“Do you believe him?”
“If it was money only, no, I think not. But the passport show he thinking about running anyway. I know the family. It all fit. But we take precautions. He betray us and his cousin’s sister never get over the wire. She in a boat people camp now, pretending she a Vietnamese. I said you could help there too.”
Quayle nodded. This might be the break they were looking for.
“Whose driver is he?”
Steve smiled. It was a leery triumphant thing that said he had hit paydirt. “Fung Wa family!” he said gleefully.
“Jesus!” said Quayle, almost disbelieving. “That is a stroke of luck.”
“Fung choi,” Steve said happily. Fate was on their side.
Half an hour later, fate arrived.
They sat with the man for five hours, grilling him first on the motives for his act and then – when convinced he was genuine – on the routines and habits of the family: the time Fung Wa travelled to the office, and left for home, the security systems, the staff in the household, where the family ate, where the staff ate, everything they could think of, Quayle promoting Steve and keeping the two Chinese men to a rigid chronological pattern for a typical day. Now immersed in the concept, Steve would suddenly stop to offer Quayle good used Thompson machine guns or a bulk rate on tear gas by the crate, but Quayle tactfully refused each offer and brought them back onto the subject.
The size of the task was becoming clear. Fung Wa had a low visibility security machine that was based round a few talented well-trained people, rather than hordes of men and fences. The triad wars over for some years, his security was residual and seemingly routine for an Asian millionaire: personal bodyguards for all members of the family supported by electronic measures – and the entire show overseen by supervisors from a security company that Fung Wa owned.
The last servant of his gang days seemed to be his choice of major domo in the house, an old retainer who had a bulge under his armpit and frightened the servants. Aside from that, Fung Wa had shed the remainder of the old network to two trusted captains and now enjoyed the benefits of the rackets at a distance, while publicly deploring their existence.
But Fung Wa had one other weakness…
One of the privileges that he regularly indulged in was a call girl called Fay Ling. Fay was one of the ultra high priced string that the organisation ran and she made regular appearances at the office in the lunch hour, taking the private elevator to Fung Wa’s thirty-eighth floor office. Her speciality was anal sex and she sometimes brought other very young girls with her. The driver Quayle sat with had twice been asked to pick them up from the plush Peak apartment where she lived. He felt a sudden flash of fear for Holly. If they have touched you, just one hair on your head, he promised to himself, I will kill them all.
Fay Ling was due in the office at 1pm, and that meant that Fung Wa would be lunching at his desk. With a plan formulated, Quayle gave Steve a list of things to do and headed back to the safe-house at Aberdeen Harbour. It would be after 8am by the time he got there. He needed a meeting with Cockburn and Alexi Kirov. There was much to do.
They were in place by 10.40, Kirov and Quayle down near the big Causeway Bay department store, waiting in the back of a delivery truck parked away from the shop fronts. Sogo, the Japanese-owned shop, was forty meters down the street on a busy corner and Steve – who sat in the front of the truck – could see the main doors that led into the designer goods section on the ground floor. Here, Gucci and Dunhill vied for space with Louis Vitton and the perfume houses of France – and it was here that they would do the job. Cockburn was with McReady the Special Branch man, ready to run interference and Kurt Eicheman was supervising the fifty-eight foot pleasure boat as they moved it from its berth up to the typhoon barrier and the walkway. The crew who normally operated the charter vessel had been told to take the day off and now two of Kirov’s Spetznazt boat section men were aboard, one massaging the big twin throttles in the wheelhouse as the thrusters nudged the sharp bows round to the wall and the fuel pumps. Lastly, Quayle’s demonstration would be completed by three of the Spetznatz team, already on a boat and moving towards their target. It had all taken just two and a half hours.
It was only seven hundred yards from Sogo’s to the marina, but driving meant risking the one way system and getting round the entrance to the harbour tunnel, so it would take five or six minutes. Quayle stretched in the back of the truck
