Sauntering to the lifts with Fung Wa’s wife’s purse in his hands, he waited for a car to arrive, whistling a sad little tune to himself like a man bored with nowhere else to go. Above him, somewhere, he knew they would be scurrying like rats. This was the last place they would have expected him to walk in so boldly.
A bell pinged in the roofing tiles above him and a little arrow began to flash over one of the lift doors.
He stepped towards it and, as he did so, Teddy Morton’s beloved Newbolt flashed into his mind again, this time lines from Clifton Chapel: ‘to honour when you strike him down, the foe that comes with fearless eyes’. Quayle couldn’t stop himself smiling at the irony as he remembered words that came later in the same piece: ‘Qui procul hinc, the legends writ, the frontiers grave is far away, Qui ante deim perit, Sed miles sed pro patria’. My eyes don’t feel fearless, he thought, and I won’t die for my country. So will you Fung Wa? Will you die for yours?
Stepping into the lift, he pressed the button for the thirty-eighth floor. The doors hissed shut and the car began to move, the floor numbers lighting up above the doors as the car rocketed upwards.
When the doors opened, he had a reception committee.
There, evenly spaced across the wine coloured carpet and silhouetted against the floor to ceiling glass of the windows, four men in identical grey suits waited. Reptilian eyes set in expressionless faces awaited an order from somewhere. Behind them, at a huge reception desk, a pretty Chinese girl sat in fear, her face pale. The silence was palpable and lasted for three or four seconds before one of a pair of matched carved doors swung back and a man walked through. Tall and dressed elegantly in an expensive charcoal grey cashmere suit, his hair was combed back above a wide intelligent forehead and the tortoiseshell glasses gave him the look of a young banker. Nevertheless, the streaks of grey in his hair betrayed his age – and the eyes behind the lenses were not those of a banker. They were the eyes of a predator.
As he walked closer, Quayle could feel the power and the energy in the man. He oozed confidence like a man used to winning, like a man who thinks he has just won again. Fung Wa. It had to be.
“Mr Quayle. How considerate of you to visit us. You have saved me the trouble of finding you.”
“For you the trouble has just begun. Tell your gorillas to back off.” Quayle’s voice was loaded with menace.
Fung Wa laughed softly. “How amusing! You walk into my offices and make demands? And what if I don’t?” Putting his hands behind his back, he nodded to one of the four suits and the man stepped forward with a wolfish grin.
Quayle shook his head at the arrogance. You never knew who you were dealing with. Without taking his eyes of Fung Wa for more than a millisecond, his foot flashed up and took the approaching individual hard under the chin, his head snapping back viciously. It was a full contact blow and the man fell to the floor, his neck broken.
The others dropped into various stances, two drawing firearms, bulbous nosed silencers pointed at Quayle.
“We don’t get to talk and it’s bye bye to mummy Fung and baby Fung,” Quayle answered, his eyes glittering, holding up the purse, “and the wife of your visitor. Now, call off the fucking dogs.”
Fung Wa’s voice snapped a command but his tone was hesitant. He was thinking. Calculating the odds.
Quayle pushed his advantage. “Blue stretch Merc. I took them myself an hour ago outside Sogo’s. Your daughter is wearing jade green silk.” He paused. “Make your mind up! Do we deal or do you just let your mainland visitor give Fay Ling a quickie up the arse while you think about it?”
That threw Fung Wa. His eyes narrowed and he snapped another instruction in Cantonese. The three remaining men came up out of their stances, the two with the pistols slowly holstering their guns.
“My office is this way,” he said in English.
Quayle followed him through the big carved doors, the three remaining bodyguards between him and their master, the fourth left lying on the rug where he fell.
The office was big. Teak cabinets dominated one wall, the alcoves filled with prized pieces of carved jade. An antique table was surrounded by Louis XIV chairs and the remaining pieces of furniture were from the same period. The only evidence of the Twentieth Century was the bank of five telephones and the matched pair of facsimile machines beside a computer terminal on a smaller table.
“So, what is your proposition?”
“Easy. You give me back Holly Morton, unharmed, and you get your people back.”
Fung Wa studied him for a moment. “How naive you are. Do you really think it that simple?”
Quayle stepped forward a pace, his eyes narrowing.
“It’s people like you who complicate it. Now watch my lips. You have taken something of mine. I want it back. If I don’t get it back, your wife, and daughter and the woman from Canton, will just be the start. Your world, as you know it, will cease to exist.” His voice dropped lower until it was barely a whisper. “And you will die as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow. Understand me now.”
Fung Wa studied him for a moment. He was a man who respected courage.
“Come now. Let’s discuss this. I have a large organisation and I always have room for a… consultant like yourself. What do they pay you? Is it the woman? Come and work for me. You
