get down in the MTR with Jack and take a train to Wan Chai Station. I’d bet money that’s where they are going. You can be there ahead of them if you hustle, and I’ll guide you to wherever they are.”
“En route,” said Ding, and he disconnected from the conference call and ran down to the MTR entrance to meet Jack.
As Chavez and Ryan rode in the long subway car, Jack disconnected his phone from Adam and leaned into his superior’s ear. “If the marshals get too close, Zha’s going to bolt. If he does that, then we’ll never know about Center and the Istanbul Drive.”
Chavez had been thinking the same thing. “Yep.”
But he had not been thinking anything along the lines of what Ryan said next: “We need to grab him.”
“How, Jack? He’s got a significant security detail.”
“Manageable,” declared Ryan. “We can orchestrate something quick and nasty. Look how big the stakes are. If FastByte Twenty-two did the UAV hack, then he’s got blood on his hands. I’m not going to lose sleep over wasting a couple of his henchmen.”
“
“Of course not. We slip him out on the Gulfstream.”
Ding shook his head. “We stick with Adam Yao for now. If an opportunity arises that looks good, we consider taking him, but right now the best thing we can do is support the Agency guy who knows his way around.”
Jack sighed. He understood but worried they would miss their opportunity to bag FastByte and learn who he was working for.
THIRTY-NINE
The two Campus operatives exited the MTR at Wan Chai Station, and by then Adam had tracked the taxi carrying the five men to a strip club called Club Stylish on Jaffe Road, just a few blocks away. Yao warned the two Hendley Associates men that the girlie bar was a known 14K hangout, and there would be, among the crowds of lonely businessmen and Filipino waitresses and strippers, some presence of heavily armed and heavily drinking 14K mobsters.
Jack and Ding suspected they had a different definition for “heavily armed” than did Adam Yao, but neither Jack nor Ding was carrying any weapons whatsoever, so they told themselves they would keep their heads on a swivel and do nothing to raise the ire of the locals in the establishment.
Jack and Ding found the entrance to Club Stylish to be just a narrow dark doorway at the street level of a high-rise ramshackle apartment building on a two-lane street one block over from Lockhart Road, the nicer and more touristy section of Wan Chai. Ryan pulled off his paper mask and entered first, passing a bored-looking bouncer, then descended a little staircase lit only by Christmas lights strung along the ceiling. The staircase seemed to go down at least two stories, and at the bottom he found a large basement nightclub with a high ceiling. On his right was a long bar along the wall, in front of him was the floor of the establishment, full of tables and lit by candles, and on the far wall was a raised stage made out of see-through plastic tiles over garish amber lighting that gave the entire room an odd golden glow. Above it, a large spinning disco ball created thousands of swirling white lights that painted the crowd.
Four stripper poles stood near the corners of the raised dance floor.
The establishment seemed to be running at about twenty percent capacity, and a strictly male audience sat around at the tables, in booths along the walls, and at the bar. Some talked to the bored-looking dancing girls who milled between them. Jack saw Zha and his group of four Triads sitting in a large booth in the corner of the far wall, to the right of the stage on the other side of the entrance to a darkened hallway that led out the back of the club. Jack assumed there would be restrooms back there, but he did not want to pass so close to Zha to get a better lay of the land. Instead, he saw a spiral staircase off to his left, and he climbed to find a little mezzanine over the back bar area. Here a few businessmen sat in groups and looked out over the paltry action. Ryan liked it up here — he could watch Zha while keeping a low profile with the dark and deep booths. He sat alone, and he ordered a beer from a passing cocktail waitress a few minutes later.
Within moments two young Filipino exotic dancers took the stage and went through the well-practiced motions of dancing seductively to loud, thumping Asian-influenced techno music.
Zha and his security detail remained in their booth stage left of the strippers. Jack saw that the young man remained more interested in his handheld computer than he was in the semi-naked women twenty feet away from him, and he barely glanced up at them as he typed furiously with his thumbs.
Jack thought about how much he’d love to get his hands on that handheld device. Not that he’d know what the hell to do with it, but Gavin Biery would likely have a field day cracking its secrets.
Domingo Chavez entered the club a few minutes later, and he sat back by the downstairs bar near the entrance. He had a good view of the stairwell up to street level and a decent view of the 14K entourage, but mostly his job was to back up Jack, the eye in the surveillance.
They communicated with Adam through their tiny earpieces. Yao was sitting out in the borrowed Mitsubishi, positioned in a back alley that ran between the rear of the high-rises on Jaffe and the high-rises on Gloucester, just blocks from the northern shore of Hong Kong Island. Here he parked in a small lot and had a view of the back exit of Club Stylish, which was good, but he was parked next to dozens of full garbage bins outside a seafood restaurant, meaning a foul rotten stench and the scuffling feet of rats were all he had to keep him company back there.
Adam informed the Hendley Associates men how lucky they were, via the conference call. Chavez sipped his first beer of the evening and regarded the women working for tips on the stage and the other dancers milling about the crowd.
He assured young Adam that he was not missing much.
The two mysterious Americans who had been on the ferry entered the club a few minutes later, confirming Jack’s suspicions that they were, in fact, tailing Zha. Ding reported this to Ryan, and Jack saw them from his overwatch on the mezzanine when the men sat down in plush chairs in a dark corner, far from the stage. They bought Budweisers from a cocktail waitress and sipped them while rejecting advances from the strolling bar girls.
As Chavez turned and scanned the stairwell, two more Western men, both in blue blazers and ties, entered together.
There were a dozen other Westerners in the bar, Ding and Jack and the two younger guys from the ferry included, but these guys stood out to Ding. They looked like Feds, and Chavez could ID Feds easily, which wasn’t saying much, because they had a way of standing out. The two men sat down just a few tables from the Triad entourage, positioning themselves awkwardly so that they had a better view of FastByte22 than they did of the stage.
“Looks like a damn weatherman convention in here,” Chavez said softly, hiding his moving lips behind his beer bottle before taking a swig.
Adam Yao’s voice came over the headset. “More Americans?”
“Two suits. Could be DOJ guys from the consulate, here trying to confirm Zha’s presence.”
Yao said, “Okay, maybe we should think about backing off. By my count there are now six
Chavez said, “I hear you, Adam, but I’ve got another idea. Wait one.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out his mobile phone, then opened a video camera feature. He put the conference call with Ryan and Adam on hold and called Gavin Biery at the Peninsula.
Gavin answered on the first ring. “Biery.”
“Hey, Gavin. I’m sending you video transmission from my phone. Will you get on your laptop and check that you are receiving?”
“I’m already on. I’m picking it up.” A few seconds later he said, “How ’bout you zoom in on that stage for me?”
Ding placed the phone on the table, propped it against a small glass candleholder, and turned it toward Zha’s
