Bond’s shoulder blades, sending him to his knees. The blow had hit the nerve centre below his neck, and for a moment Bond saw nothing but stars. The man shouted at Bond in Chinese, then kicked him. 007 got weakly to his feet and followed the men out of the room.
He was brought upstairs, down a hall, and up another flight of stairs. He was finally able to take in more of his surroundings as he walked. The building was a modern business office. It might have been the corporate headquarters of a small real-estate or insurance company. They passed open offices containing new, expensive- looking black and white leather furniture. In many ways, the place reminded him of the way the new M had refurnished SIS headquarters.
He was finally led into a large, plush office and left alone. It was decorated in the same fashion as the other rooms he had seen, but with a distinctive Chinese flavour. Along with the high-tech, modern furniture, there was a bamboo screen against the wall, brightly painted with a scene of Chinese fishermen snaring a dragon. A small Buddhist altar stood in a corner, with an idol of the god Kwan Ti, or Mo, on it. Bond remembered that not only was Mo the god of policemen, he was also the favoured deity of the underworld. There was nothing else in the room that would suggest that the office belonged to the Dragon Head of a Triad. It was clearly Li Xu Nan’s legitimate office.
Before Bond could sit down, Li entered the room and shut the door behind him. They were alone.
“We meet again, Mr. Bond,” Li said in Cantonese. “I am sorry that it is under unfortunate circumstances.”
“You can’t hold me, Mr. Li,” Bond said. “I’m a British citizen. My newspaper will be trying to find me when they’ve realized I’ve gone missing.” His Cantonese had improved since arriving in Hong Kong.
“Oh, dispense with your crap, Mr. Bond,” he said. “You are no journalist. I know who you are.”
“I work for the
“
“Then it was you who killed J.J. Woo? It was you who ransacked the place?”
Li shrugged. “We wanted the girl. She is a traitor. We deal with traitors most severely. We only messed up the place to leave a message. The elder Woo attempted to stop us. He was an obstacle that we had to overcome. It was not personal.”
“Where are T.Y. and his son?”
Li said, “I honestly do not know. They were not there when we raided the building.”
“Don’t you see that he knows who you are and what you do? He can have the Hong Kong Police down on you at any minute.”
“He cannot prove a thing. You’re the only one who has witnessed anything,” Li said. “Let me make this perfectly clear, Mr. Bond. You are a
“Why did you stop them, then?”
Li paused a moment, walked to the drinks cupboard, and removed a couple of glasses. “Drink, Mr. Bond?”
He wanted to refuse, but a drink would actually do him a lot of good. “All right. Bourbon, straight.”
Li filled the glasses and handed one to Bond. “Do you remember the other day when you ‘interviewed’ me? I told you that you were in my debt.”
“I remember.”
“The time has come for you to repay the debt.”
“Why should I?”
“Hear me out, Mr. Bond. You have no other choice.”
Bond settled on the sofa. “All right, Li, I’ll listen.”
“I’ll have to tell you a story,” he said, sitting opposite Bond in a leather armchair. “A little bedtime story. It involves someone else you know … Mr. Guy Thackeray.”
Bond interrupted Li. “Did you kill him?”
Li paused a moment and shook his head. “No. We had nothing to do with that. Let me tell you something: I hated Guy Thackeray. He and I were mortal enemies. But I wanted him alive. I needed him alive. And the story I’m about to tell you will explain why. No, he was killed by General Wong, a lunatic up in Guangzhou. You have heard of him?”
Bond nodded. “Are you sure? Why would he do that?”
Li held out his hands tolerantly. “Patience, Mr. Bond. Hear me out. And then you will understand.”
The Dragon Head paused a moment, then spoke evenly and calmly. “The year was 1836. A twenty-six-year- old man named James Thackeray had sailed from his home in Britain two years earlier to the Pearl River Delta in southern China. He had heard a fortune could be made trading goods to the Chinese, but it was a difficult time and place to make a living.
Bond interjected, “It seems to me that each side treated the other as inferior.”
“Yes,” Li said. “Anyway … James Thackeray had originally attempted to trade manufactured goods and had made a meagre living from silver, but it wasn’t enough to feed his wife and young son, neither of whom was allowed into Guangzhou, or Canton, as it was called then. Other British traders were in the same predicament, and it appeared for a while that trade with China would be a failure.
“No one was quite sure when it happened, but eventually some ingenious trader discovered that the English did possess a commodity that the Chinese wanted. It was opium. The merchants had no qualms about peddling opium to wealthy Chinese, and it soon became the most valuable resource in that part of the world at the time. China was quick to ban the substance, but the British managed to find a way to smuggle it in anyway.”
“And the opium trade became big business,” Bond said.
“Correct. In 1836, James Thackeray began trading opium and quickly developed a small clientele which provided him with more money than he had ever dreamed of. Thackeray’s best customer was an extremely wealthy Chinese warlord and government official residing in Guangzhou. His name was Li Wei Tam.” Li paused again, then added, “He was my great-great-grandfather.”
Bond sat up straighter. This story was getting interesting.
“My honourable ancestor was a warlord who was ten years older than Thackeray. He had tremendous influence in Guangzhou and the area around the Pearl River Delta. Although the Ch’ing Dynasty was in power, Li’s loyalties were with the Mings, who had been overthrown in the seventeenth century. Of course, he would never have admitted this publicly. If he had done so, he would have been arrested and most likely put to death. Li Wei Tam was part of a secret society that had pledged to overthrow the Ch’ing Dynasty.
“It was pure luck, really, that James Thackeray had an audience with the warlord and was able to establish a relationship with him. In fact, the two men grew to respect each other. Although they probably wouldn’t have admitted it to other members of their respective races, they became friends. This was due in part, no doubt, to Li Wei Tam’s physical dependence on the drug that James Thackeray so happily supplied.” This last was said with a certain amount of venom.
Li went on: “In 1839, things started to change. The emperor decided to end the opium trade once and for all. The governor of Hunan Province was ordered to confiscate all of Guangzhou’s foreign traders’ opium, thus igniting the First Opium War. For the next three years, James Thackeray found it extremely difficult to get his opium into China and to his favoured customer. Likewise, Li Wei Tam had to go through unpleasant stretches of withdrawal from the drug. Finally, my great-great-grandfather used his influence in his secret society to establish an illegal pipeline from Thackeray to Guangzhou. In one of the first, albeit unethical, cooperative efforts between a British
