streets over the sound of a busy Hong Kong night met his ears. Along the waterfront it was quiet. There were no streetlamps, the only illumination coming from bare bulbs set over the back doors of various businesses.
It was quiet enough that he could just make out the gentle lapping of harbor water against the wooden pilings of the piers. The alley he was in stank of urine, rotting vegetables and fish guts. Under a naked bulb casting a weak light, Bolan faced an old wooden door. The paint was peeling and the wood had grown soft with age and the erosion by salty air. A Chinese ideogram had been spray painted in the center of the door.
Bolan recognized the symbol from Carmen Delahunt’s report as standing for the Shimmering Raindrop Triad. Down the alley three Chinese men in their early twenties crouched and smoked, talking rapidly. One of them watched Bolan, dragging on his cigarette. The Executioner thought the youths likely to be security forces. Soldiers in the triads were differentiated by the slang numeric code 426.
Hong Kong had changed a lot since 1997 when the British had returned it to the control of the People’s Republic of China. Hong Kong formed one of only two Special Administrative Regions, the other being Macau. Despite the PRC’s take over, Hong Kong had maintained a high degree of autonomy and was China’s richest city, operating in accordance with terms laid out in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, existing under not Beijing rule, but the Basic Law of Hong Kong.
Under this “One Country, Two Systems” policy Hong Kong kept its own legal system, customs policy and currency until 2047. As a result, the city had one of the most liberal economies in the world and had maintained its status as an epicenter for finance and trade. It had long been a seat for the People’s Republic of China’s espionage efforts. In many ways it had come to replace old Berlin as the spy center of the world, though Islamabad and Amman gave the Asian metropolis a run for its money.
In spite of all this, or more accurately, because of all this, Chinese crime syndicates flourished in the environment. Bolan was about to enter living proof of that as he prepared to attend the meet set up by a junior Hong Kong case officer in the CIA.
Bolan turned the knob on the door in the alley and let it swing open. A concrete staircase, littered with multicolored stubs of paper and crushed cigarette butts, ran down to a small square landing. From this landing a second set of stairs led even deeper into the earth under the Mandarin restaurant.
The soldier walked through the door and descended the stairs. The door swung shut behind him and the gloom on the steps thickened. Another naked bulb hung from a cord above the landing below him, and Bolan carefully moved toward it.
The smell of the raw earth around him was dank. He could faintly hear the squeal of rats moving behind the packed dirt walls and rotted timbers. The earth had absorbed decades’ worth of body odor, spilled alcohol and cigarette smoke. He was entering the pit, an underground warren of small rooms and low tunnels devoted to the greatest vice of the Chinese: gambling.
The only legal gambling permitted in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong was the horse races sanctioned at the Happy Valley tracks since 1846 or at the relatively newer Shatin facility. This fell far short of satiating the traditional penchant for wagers and games of chance, and in the spirit of ruthless entrepreneurialism the Hong Kong triads had stepped in to meet the need.
Bolan turned the corner in the narrow staircase at the landing. Below him the second staircase halted at a sturdy metal door. A Chinese male sat on a tall, three-legged stool, guarding the door.
As he moved closer in the uncertain light, Bolan saw the butt of a Beretta 92-F sticking out of the guard’s waistband. On the back of the man’s right hand was a tattoo of the same ideogram painted on the door in the alley above them. More ideogram tattoos crawled up the man’s fat neck in precise, if sprawling, patterns. From through the cast-iron door Bolan could hear muted but obviously raucous activity.
The man scrutinized Bolan with narrowed eyes. He barked something in what Bolan took to be Cantonese. The soldier shrugged helplessly, then held up a thick wad of Hong Kong dollars. He said Jigsaw Liu’s name.
The doorman took the bank notes and thumbed through them suspiciously. He looked back up at Bolan and repeated Jigsaw Liu’s name.
“Jigsaw Liu,” Bolan agreed.
The wad of money disappeared into a pocket and the guard rapped sharply against the metal door. It swung open immediately and a skinny, sallow-skinned man with a hand-rolled cigarette clenched between crooked, yellow teeth eyed Bolan up and down. From behind him the noise of the room spilled out.
He said something to the doorman, who grunted and repeated Jigsaw Liu’s name. The skinny 426 nodded once and stepped out of Bolan’s way. The soldier ducked his head and stepped into the chamber beyond.
His senses were fully assaulted as he stepped through the door. The ceiling was low on the long room. The haze of cigarette smoke was thick in the air and looked like a gray-blue fog above the heads of the shouting gamblers. The cacophony of chattering, arguing, belligerent voices was punctuated by the sharp clacking of mahjong tiles. He saw numerous tables filled with frantic men, many clutching their own wads of HK dollars.
Bolan’s gaze wandered across the room, noting additional exits and the hard-eyed men standing sentry on the edge of the gambling pits. Other than the pistol tucked into the waistband of the outside doorman, Bolan saw no other weapons on flagrant display, though he was positive they were present. He’d been somewhat surprised not to have been searched at the door, but he assumed most customers here were local and, from the look of it, older.
The sallow-skinned Chinese man repeated Jigsaw Liu’s name and indicated a gloomy tunnel leading off the main, cavernous parlor. Bolan began to make his way across the crowded room, sticking close to the back wall as he did so. More than one pair of suspicious eyes followed him.
He crossed the chamber and ducked into the narrow tunnel running off at a sharp angle from the parlor. He felt at once exposed and claustrophobic in the hallway. The pit was a perfect place for a trap, and he had a hunch that its proximity to the harbor made the disposal of bodies an uncomplicated matter.
Bolan stepped over the sprawled and unconscious body of an opium smoker. The ancient Oriental habit had become modernized and had morphed into the use of more current narcotics in Hong Kong, as it had in the rest of the world, but there were still more “traditionalists” of opium in Hong Kong slums than elsewhere on the globe. The man’s eyes stared dully, pupils glassy and out of sync with the gloomy light in the tunnel. The man’s filthy, short-sleeved, button-down shirt was stained with vomit. His breathing was so shallow that Bolan at first thought him a recent corpse.
Bolan turned a corner in the hallway and exposed metal pipes suddenly erupted from the packed earth, ran for a length of several yards then just as abruptly turned back into the wall. Up ahead he saw two heavyset Chinese men standing in front of a door set back in the hallway wall. Both 426 grunts openly sported Beretta 92-F pistols. Despite the damp, they wore stylish black T-shirts and tan slacks with shiny dress shoes. Their arms crawled with tattoos.
Though the hallway ran down a ways past them and split off into an intersection, Bolan felt sure he had found Jigsaw Liu’s office. He walked up to the men, who watched him from beneath hooded lids, their hair slicked back in pompadours.
“Cooper,” he said, giving his cover name. “Jigsaw Liu.”
They seemed to recognize the name, and Bolan sent a silent thanks to the Agency case officer who had cleared the way. One of the guards knocked softly on the door. At a muttered response from within the man opened the door and stuck his head inside.
Bolan
