70
They played cat and mouse as Mabeki came to the end of Route Twisk and kept driving south. Carver followed him along an urban motorway between two long lines of tower blocks that rose on either side. The road fed like the tributary of a great river into another, even mightier highway that followed the coastline down towards the port of Kowloon. As he dodged between the thickening traffic, steadily closing the gap on Mabeki, Carver saw vast yards filled with rusting containers, and barges with cranes painted in vivid combinations of red, white, yellow and blue.
Up ahead towered the sixteen-hundred-feet-high ICC Tower, the tallest building in Hong Kong. It looked like a glass rocket, sitting on its launch pad, counting down to blast-off, and for a moment Carver wondered if Mabeki had somehow arranged for a chopper to pick him up from its roof: it was a suitably melodramatic location for a man who had chosen to live as the star of his own private horror movie. But no, Mabeki kept going towards the toll leading to the Western Harbour Tunnel that linked the mainland to Hong Kong Island.
As he approached the toll, Carver finally caught sight of the Rolls-Royce for the first time since it had left the Gushungos’ driveway. It was about two hundred yards up ahead, caught in a line of cars all waiting for their turn at the tollbooth. Carver was close enough to get out and run. Every protective instinct he felt for Zalika urged him to do it. He’d surely reach Mabeki before he could get through the toll. But then what? The Rolls was virtually impregnable. He’d be left standing beside it, exposed to God knows how many witnesses’ eyes, behaving like a lunatic and getting precisely nowhere. No, he’d have to bide his time.
Up ahead, Mabeki reached the booth, handed over the forty-five-Hong-Kong-dollar fee and sped away into the tunnel.
The seconds dragged by as Carver sat in the line of cars, his frustration mounting until he too reached the barrier, paid his cash and drove into the tunnel beneath Victoria Harbour. When he emerged on the northwest tip of Hong Kong Island, he was soon caught in the crowds of Sunday day-trippers. The traffic inched down Highway 4 along the island’s northern shore, through the heart of Hong Kong’s financial district and past all the bank headquarters and corporate towers whose lights had flashed so brightly at him and Zalika two nights earlier as they’d stood by the rail of the ferry. Carver thought of her kissing him then looking at him with such tender, loving eyes as she said, ‘You’re a good man, Samuel Carver.’ Well, he wouldn’t be much good if he couldn’t rescue her.
But what was Mabeki doing? Where was he going?
According to the tracker, he’d swung right off Highway 4 and was now heading south again. But then what? When Mabeki reached the south shore of Hong Kong Island there’d be nothing left in front of him but the South China Sea. Within the next three or four miles, Mabeki would come to the end of the line. That, for better or worse, was where everything would be decided. And Mabeki knew it too. Carver could see from the tracker that the Rolls was slowing down; letting Carver close the gap; leading him on. It didn’t take a massively tactical brain to figure out that Mabeki had some kind of plan. Maybe he was hoping to make an exchange: Zalika’s life for his freedom. Or even Carver’s life for Zalika’s.
Forget it. Carver had unfinished business of his own. As long as Mabeki was alive, he and Zalika would never be safe. Killing him was simply a matter of self-defence.
Carver drove past the Happy Valley race track where vast crowds gathered to watch the horses and, far more importantly to a population obsessed by gambling, wager huge sums on the results. Then the road dipped down into another tunnel that ran beneath the hills of the Aberdeen Country Park towards Aberdeen Harbour itself. That made sense. If you looked as horrifically recognizable as Moses Mabeki it was safer to quit Hong Kong on a fishing boat or even one of the speedboats that bobbed on the waters of the Aberdeen Marina than risk the multiple security procedures of an airport.
As Carver emerged from the tunnel and headed into Aberdeen, the Rolls-Royce came into view once again. Mabeki was swinging off the raised highway down a ramp that seemed to lead right into the heart of the great clusters of apartment buildings where the boat people of old had been resettled. From up on the raised highway, Carver could see that the towers were grouped in huge semi-circles and X-shapes, like fortified villages in the sky. He followed Mabeki down the off-ramp and saw his silver quarry up ahead, turning left into a side road. It wouldn’t be long now, Carver was sure of it.
Then he, too, turned left into the shadow of the towers.
71
The street was crowded with cars and people: a few white tourists who’d ventured inland from the scenic harbour-front, but mostly locals bustling purposefully to and fro, or standing in groups, talking and gesticulating with a vehemence and energy that belied the clichéd image of Chinese inscrutability.
Mabeki had parked the Rolls-Royce on the left-hand side of the road, about fifty yards ahead. He was standing by it, watching Carver’s Honda crawl towards him, hemmed in by cars and trucks, taunting Carver, challenging him to make the next move.
Carver pulled over to the left, double-parking and ignoring the horn-blasts and shouts from the drivers now half-trapped behind him as he got out of the car and tried to push his way through the crowds towards the Rolls-Royce. Mabeki stood quite still, just staring in Carver’s direction until he’d caught his eye. Then he raised a hand, waved mockingly and walked away, heedless of the fact that he was turning his back on an armed enemy, his tall, twisted figure towering over most of the people around him.
And he walked away alone.
The question ripped through Carver’s mind, driving every other thought from his head: what had Mabeki done with Zalika?
The Rolls-Royce was just ahead of him now, its boot pointing at him. Mabeki had left it unlocked so that it had opened a fraction. If Zalika was in there, she could get out, so why hadn’t she?
He ran through the possible reasons. She was bound and immobile. She was unconscious or even dead. And then it struck him that Mabeki had left him an invitation. ‘Open me,’ the boot seemed to be saying. ‘Open me and see what happens next.’
It would have been so easy for Mabeki to set a booby trap. Carver flashed back to the memory of Justus’s prized VW van: the nylon line and the hand-grenade that had blown when the door was opened. Was that what Mabeki had in store for him now? Or was his real aim simply to buy a little time?
The longer Carver stood around wondering what to do, the further away Mabeki would get.
‘Zalika,’ he called out, ‘are you there? You OK?’
There was no reply.
Carver moved closer to the boot, bent down and peered at the narrow opening, trying to spot any sign of a trap. Oh the hell with it. He’d had enough p-ssyfooting around. He grabbed the boot, swung it open with one swift movement …
And nothing happened. There was no explosion, no trap … and no Zalika.
But that was impossible. Carver had tracked the signal from her phone all the way from the Gushungos’ house. Mabeki hadn’t stopped at any point in the journey, apart from the delay at the tollbooth by the Western Harbour Tunnel. So where was the girl?
Frantically, irrationally, Carver opened the driver’s door of the Rolls, leaned in and peered into the interior as if there was some faint chance that Zalika might be sitting there. She wasn’t.
But her phone was sitting on the passenger seat. And it was ringing.
Carver picked it up. He pulled himself back out of the car, stood up again and looked down the street, searching for Mabeki, knowing that it would be his voice he heard as he pressed the ‘receive’ button and held the phone to his ear.
‘Goodbye, Reverend,’ said Mabeki. ‘Or rather, goodbye, Mr Carver. You will not see me or Miss Stratten again.’
The phone went dead. Carver hurled it to the ground, anger and frustration getting the better of him. Then he looked up again and the anger was replaced by the chilly realization of imminent danger. There were five men walking abreast across the pavement, barging people out of their way as they made their way towards the Rolls-Royce. But it didn’t take a genius to work out that it wasn’t the car they were aiming for. Mabeki had indeed set a trap for him. And it had just been sprung.
72
Just across the road, Carver saw a grocery store. It was about as basic as a shop could get – a single room, open to the street, with steel shutters at the front that could be drawn across like garage doors at the end of the day. He made his way smartly towards it, aware that he was being followed, the men fanning out behind him to block any possible attempt to run his way out of trouble. The man giving the orders was walking in the middle of the line. He sported a scraggly goatee beard and moustache and was wearing an old olive-green army shirt, unbuttoned over a black vest. He was about thirty yards away now. At a steady walking pace, that gave Carver around fifteen seconds’ start.
As he got closer to the store, Carver saw that a grey-haired old boy was sitting on a white plastic garden-chair to one side of the entrance. In front of him was a waist-high wooden counter. Cardboard boxes were piled up against the counter and along the side walls. Most of them were still taped shut, but the ones on the top row had been opened to reveal their contents. In the ones nearest him, Carver spotted a random collection of eggs – some regular, some pale blue, some covered in what looked like green mould – dried mushrooms, abalone and starfish, long-leaf Chinese lettuces in clear plastic bags, cooking sauces in glass bottles and folded cotton dishcloths. Above these boxes was an equally disordered collection of vegetables, dried goods and even sweets hung in plastic bags from hooks whose top ends were attached to metal rails suspended from the ceiling.
Behind the shopkeeper’s head, so that he could not look in it without turning round and craning his neck, was a mirror in which it was possible to see almost the whole interior of the shop. Two narrow lines of bare metal shelves – dirt-cheap free-standing units, rising above head-height – stretched about fifteen feet back to front through the store, creating three very narrow aisles, one by each of the two side walls and the third down the centre. There was a door in the far wall, opposite the centre aisle. Carver was counting on that leading to a rear exit from the building. Without it, he had no way out.
He walked into the store and started assembling his weapons. He picked up three of the sauce bottles, placed them on top of one of the dishcloths, then closed the corners of the cloth over them and twisted the ends so that the bottles were tightly trapped in the cloth. Now he had a crude but effective club. Keeping it tightly clasped in his left hand, he reached up with his right and unhooked a large net filled with bulbs of garlic. Carver removed the net and was left holding the hook in his right hand.
The only other customers in the store were a couple of middle-aged women a few feet away, who were chattering over a display of dried chillis arrayed by the side wall of the shop. Without any warning, making the change in his demeanour as extreme as possible, Carver took two paces towards them, raised the hook menacingly and shouted, ‘Bad men coming! Get out! Get out now!’
They glared defiantly at him and did not budge. One of them started shouting at him in Chinese. He got the feeling she wasn’t exactly passing the time of day. Carver didn’t have time to argue. He swept the hook along the shelf to his right, sending glass jars filled with something that looked like white testicles floating in brine crashing to the floor at the women’s feet. The one who’d been shouting shut up. The other one gave a little scream. Carver raised his hook at them again and this time they took the hint, hurrying past him, neither of them even as tall as his shoulder, out into the street.
As he watched them go, he could see that the five men were closing in on the shop. They were barely five yards away, walking with the steady, purposeful gait of professionals going about their business. Carver saw the shopkeeper catch sight of them, too, glance back at him, then dive beneath the countertop. Very sensible, Carver thought. Now it was his turn to save his skin.
He backed away to his left, into the aisle furthest away from the shopkeeper’s counter, letting the men come towards him. The aisle was so narrow, there would only be room for one man at a time to attack him.
Unless, of course, they came from two different directions at once.
The man in the army shirt pointed down the centre aisle and two men stepped towards it. They were going to try to outflank him. The leading man was dressed in jeans and a pale-grey hoodie top. The one behind him had on a black T-shirt and a pair of jeans from which a chain hung loosely. Wherever Carver went in the world, the punks always seemed to look the same.
Two more men stepped into the aisle where Carver was standing: a gaudy, short-sleeved floral shirt and a camouflage T-shirt. The one in the camo had his hair pulled back in a ponytail. His pal wore metal-framed aviator shades.
Carver backed away from them.
As he went, he glanced up into the mirror. The two men in the centre aisle, the hoodie and the black T-shirt, were almost level with him.
Carver kept moving back. The men in his aisle kept pace with him, not closing the gap, waiting for the trap to close behind him.
Out of the corner of his right eye, Carver was looking at the goods on the shelves beside him. There were jars of herbs; more jars of some indeterminate bits of beige gristle with a picture of a snarling shark stuck to the glass; tins of vegetables … none of this was of any use to Carver. He was being backed all the way to the end of the aisle. He didn’t have any room for manoeuvre.
Then he saw packets of tea, racked from top to bottom.
Carver glanced back up at the mirror, stopped walking backwards and moved closer to the shelf till his right shoulder was almost touching the packets of tea. Then, still holding on to the hook, he smashed his right hand through the tea and out the far side of the shelf. He swung it forward and felt the impact as the end of the hook drove into the soft flesh at the base of the hoodie’s neck. He heard a gurgling yelp of pain and pulled the hook hard back towards him, slamming the hoodie into the far side of the shelf.
One down.
Carver let go of the hook, switched the bundled-up sauce jars to his right hand and in the same movement swung his right arm like a tennis backhand at the ponytailed punk in the camouflage T-shirt. The guy swayed back, but not enough to evade the blow entirely, and Carver hit him just above the right eye, drawing blood and making him stagger backwards. Carver drew back his arm and swung again, in a brutal downward chopping motion, hitting the forearm the man raised to protect himself, hearing the crack of a bone and then driving the heel of his left hand into the side of his face.
That was another man downed, for now at least. But it was also the end of the good news.
Carver felt a throat-tightening, nauseating shock of pain on the point of his left shoulder and realized that he wasn’t the only one smart enough to use a weapon. The dandy in the floral shirt and shades had flung one of the shark jars at him and was reaching for another.
Carver dived forward, rugby-tackling the dandy to the ground, then reaching out to grab his head and smash it into the shop’s tiled floor.
Behind him, he could hear scuffling as the fourth man rounded the far end of the shelf and came dashing towards him. Carver rolled on to his back and kicked out, catching an oncoming knee with his heel. The man in the black T-shirt staggered back a couple of paces, giving Carver the fractional amount of space and time he needed to spring to his feet and leap upwards to catch the suspended rail above his head, swing forward and hit Mr Black T-shirt smack in the face with both feet, sending him careering into several boxes of iced seafood lined up along the back wall.
Carver kept moving, allowing the momentum of the swing to pull his legs forward and up, letting go of the rail and executing a backward somersault, like a gymnast dismounting a high bar. A gymnast, of course, aims to land in a perfect upright position, with his feet close together. Carver, however, stumbled when his feet hit the floor and fell forward.
That was what saved his life.
The fifth man, the leader of the group in the army shirt, had evidently tired of the low-tech approach. If he couldn’t take Carver alive, he would have to take him dead. He’d reached round to the back of his trousers, pulled out the gun shoved inside the waistband and fired two shots that missed Carver’s head by inches and instead hit his pal in the black T-shirt, who had just been extracting himself from the seafood display and was staggering to his feet.
The group leader didn’t seem to care. He fired again, and Carver had to fling himself forward and scramble on all fours round the end of the aisle as bullets smashed into jars, ricocheted off the metal shelving and dug craters in the floor tiles. He got to his feet, came round the far side of the shelving, almost slipping on the blood that had spurted from his first victim’s neck wound, then hurled himself against the nearest shelf-unit with all his strength, pumping his legs to overcome the dead weight of all the goods stacked upon it until finally it toppled over, deluging the man in the army shirt in a hail of jars, cans and cardboard packets.
The men who’d come to take him were all down. But not all of them would stay that way.
73
Carver dashed for the door on the far wall, wrenched it open and charged through. It led into a bare concrete passage that stretched for a good twenty yards in either direction, lit by occasional naked bulbs. Carver turned right and started sprinting, waiting for the sound of pursuit, his back prickling in dread anticipation of the first shot.
Up ahead, he saw a doorway. He glanced back. The passage behind him was empty: no sign of the man in the army shirt.
Carver kept running flat-out for the door. It was wooden, flimsy-looking, roughly painted in flaking blue gloss. He tried the handle, but it was locked.
He looked back again. Still no one in the passage.
Carver stepped back, kicked the door open and walked through into a store very like the one he had just left: more boxes, more shelves, but this time they all seemed to be laden with jars of herbs and strange-looking liquids. By the look of them, and the huge antique black cabinet divided into hundreds of small drawers, it was some kind of traditional chemist’s or apothecary’s. The counter in front of it was fancier than the one in the grocer’s shop, fronted with glass and filled with brightly coloured boxes covered in Chinese script. The woman behind it was talking to two diminutive middle-aged customers who were competing to get their point across to her. Carver realized with a shock that these were the same women who had been in the grocer’s store. They turned at the sound of the opening door, recognized him too, and raised the pitch and volume still higher as they pointed and shouted at him.
‘Afternoon, ladies,’ he said as he walked by as casually as he could, half-wondering if the old biddies might be crazy or angry enough to attack him as he went.
Once outside, he turned left and began walking back towards his car. Then he stopped. Now he knew why the gang leader had not followed him. He was heading for Carver’s car, presuming that it would be his first port of call.
Carver took out his phone as he watched the man in the old army shirt walk up to the Honda, looking around as he went. Confident that Carver was not yet in the area, he leaned back against the car and took a packet of cigarettes from the chest pocket of his green shirt. Either he was a well-known local hardman or he simply carried an air of violence with him wherever he went, because the crowds seemed to part round him, leaving plenty of open space around the car – a good thing as far as Carver was concerned.
As the man tapped the bottom of the packet to punch out a cigarette, Carver tapped a key on his phone. He had always expected that he might need to do this at some point during the day, but it had only been planned as a means of destroying evidence, rather than taking out the enemy. Still, you couldn’t complain about two birds with one stone.
The speed dial called up the number of the phone Carver had bought the previous day. The phone that was held down with zip-ties on to the piece of wood he had brought from Geneva. Two AA batteries were also tied to that piece of wood, as was the rocket sparking device. The two screws, their bolts and washers were also fixed to the wood, between the phone and the batteries.
Two crocodile-clipped wires ran from one screw to the batteries and from the batteries to the sparker. A third wire was clipped from the other screw to the sparker. Two much shorter lengths of plastic-coated electric wiring ran from the screws into the hole Carver had made in the side of the phone casing. Their bare ends were just a couple of millimetres apart inside the hole.
When he called the phone, the vibrator did its job and started vibrating. In so doing it touched the two bare wires together and completed the circuit that led to the batteries and the sparker. The sparker ignited the rocket engine, which in turn set off the acetone and then the petrol, and then the whole car went up in an explosive burst of flame, taking the man in the army shirt with it.
As screams and shouts echoed down the street and hordes of people poured out from shops, bars and restaurants to catch a glimpse of the drama, Carver walked ignored and unnoticed into a bar, and went to the men’s room. Having made sure he was alone, he chose one of the toilet cubicles and locked the door. He took off his wig and glasses. He transferred the wallet with all the Bowen Erikson papers and cards from his jacket to his trouser pocket. Then he removed the jacket and his vicar’s bib. He stopped, listened to make sure the men’s room was still empty apart from him, then came out of the cubicle and stuffed all the vicar gear into a tall wire-mesh wastepaper bin that stood beside the toilet’s washbasins, covering it all up with paper towels from the dispenser on the wall.
As he walked back out through the bar, attracting no more attention than he had on the way in, Carver considered trying to find Mabeki, but dismissed the thought at once. By now he would have disappeared into the apartment blocks on the Aberdeen shore, or, much more likely, the boats crammed in its harbour. Wherever Mabeki was, there, too, Zalika would be. Carver could not believe he would kill the girl, not before he’d extracted his full helping of pleasure at her expense. And he wouldn’t do that in Hong Kong, either; not when there was work to be done and power to be grabbed in Malemba.
Mabeki had known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Gushungo hit was going down that day. He’d known, too, that Carver and Zalika would be doing the job. All that being the case, it followed that he’d known about the coup in Malemba. Carver was prepared to bet every cent in his offshore bank accounts that the coup had not succeeded – or not in the way he had been told about, anyway.
Someone had tipped Mabeki off about the entire plan, someone who had been willing to sell out Carver and Zalika. But who? Had Klerk been lying all along about his love for his niece? If Mabeki had offered him a better deal than Patrick Tshonga had done, would Klerk have put money before family? Carver didn’t want to believe that, but he had long since learned the hard way that men who truly love money always value it more highly than any mere human affection. And what of Tshonga himself? Had he just been playing Klerk, leading him on with the promise of easy money, when all along he’d cut a deal with Mabeki? It would be an abdication of all Tshonga’s principles to ally himself with Gushungo’s right-hand man. But for anyone who really wanted power in Malemba that might be the smart, cynical move to make.
Whatever had happened, the answer to the puzzle lay in the same place to which Moses Mabeki was certainly travelling, and where he would hide Zalika Stratten until he had done with her: Malemba. Carver had no choice. He had to go there, even if it meant going alone and unprotected against overwhelming odds. He thought of calling Klerk and Tshonga, but decided against it. If one of them really had double-crossed him, letting them know he was on his way was the last thing he should do.
When he got back out on the street, Carver walked down to the harbour promenade. Taxis were dropping off tourists. He hailed one of them.
‘Take me to the airport,’ he said.
74
The timing had been split second, and even then it had been a close-run thing. But with the help of two of Fisherman Zheng’s men, both armed and ready to use their weapons, Moses Mabeki had managed to get Zalika Stratten into the delivery van parked just outside the Gushungos’ house before Carver came out of the building. From that point on it had been a simple case of misdirection. He’d made a show of slamming the boot shut loud enough for Carver to hear, and standing right by it so that the Englishman would come to the obvious conclusion that the girl was in there. Then he’d taken the scenic route, leading Carver down Route Twisk, while the van went on the fastest possible highways from Hon Ka Mansions to Aberdeen.
It had gone straight to the waterfront where Zheng’s men opened up the rear cargo, removed Zalika Stratten and led her down a flight of quayside steps to a small motorboat that was bobbing on the water below. She’d lost her ridiculous sunglasses as well as her phone. Her hair had come unpinned and now hung round her shoulders. She looked much more like her true self, but dressed more cheaply than usual.
The boat had sped away, jinking between the other craft crammed into the narrow stretch of water between Aberdeen and Ap Lei Chau island on the other side of the harbour. It had pulled up alongside the streamlined, dart-like hull of a Sunseeker Predator 52 performance motoryacht moored off the Aberdeen Marina Club. Once again, there were armed men all around Zalika as she was led aboard.
The motorboat had then sped away again, only to return fifteen minutes later with Moses Mabeki.
The Sunseeker weighed anchor, eased its way through the harbour and then, when it reached the open sea, the skipper opened up the throttle and it raced away westwards, hitting thirty knots as it ate up the twenty-five-mile journey to the former Portuguese colony of Macau.
The boat was one of Fishermen Zheng’s favourite toys, and this voyage gave him particular pleasure. He had brought a diamond dealer along to inspect the stones Mabeki had agreed to sell him. The dealer assured him, in a Hoklo dialect incomprehensible even to the vast majority of Chinese, that they were worth almost twenty million US dollars. On Friday night, Zheng and Mabeki had shaken hands at six million, subject to delivery and acceptance. Now the money was paid directly into Mabeki’s personal account in the Cayman Islands. Everyone was happy.
Mabeki made his excuses and went to the cabin where the next stage of the extraction plan he had agreed with Zheng was due to take place. A doctor – Hoklo, like all Zheng’s associates, and thus guaranteed to keep his silence – injected Zalika with a heavy dose of nitrazepam, which knocked her out cold.
They were met at the Macau shore by an ambulance driven by two more of Zheng’s men, dressed as uniformed paramedics. The ambulance took Mabeki and his unconscious companion to Macau International Airport, which is specifically geared to the private aviation needs of the high-rollers who gamble their money at Macau’s twenty-eight casinos. There, a Gulfstream 550 ultra-long-range jet, equipped with medical facilities and with a doctor and nurse on its crew, was waiting to fly Mabeki and the comatose Zalika to a medical facility near Paris. No one enquired why she needed to travel so far for treatment. The airport’s officials had long since become accustomed to the foibles of the rich.
An hour into the flight, the pilot was re-routed on to a new southwesterly course, towards Sindele airport, Malemba.
They were barely two thousand miles from their destination when Zalika Stratten began very groggily to wake up. She cast bleary eyes around the cabin and asked where on earth she was.