Nate quickly flagged a taxi and dashed west crosstown into Sheung Wan and threaded back on foot to Mid-Levels, along Queen’s Road, Elgin Street, and Upper Albert Road—quieter streets recalling past doyens of the Crown Colony—that curved, and snaked, and doubled back on themselves, past the squat old Foreign Correspondents’ Club, with its alternating red and white striped fa?ade. He hopped onto the Mid-Levels open-air escalator that ascended eight hundred meters to Robinson Road. He didn’t detect any parallel coverage on the wings of the escalator line. He waited in a doorway, listening for the sound of running feet, got nothing, then angled back to the zoological and botanical garden. Nate lost count of the number of CCTV cameras along his route. He hadn’t come close to identifying anything remotely suggestive of active surveillance, but had no confidence in his status. His shirt was stuck to his back and his legs ached from the uphill walking.
Jesus, this was unlike anything he had ever experienced. This city was a fairy-tale stage on the hazy Pearl River delta, a city of layers, pious colonial ghosts mixed with centuries of persevering Cantonese, both now in the long shadow of the politburo in Beijing, that collection of stone-faced men in identical baggy suits that claim the city as their chattel, but do not really own it.
AGNES’S LOSOS PIECZONY—FOIL-BAKED SALMON
Pat salmon dry. Season with salt and pepper. Place fillet, skin side down, on aluminum foil. Separately mix butter, dill, garlic, lemon juice, and white wine. Spread compound butter over the top of the salmon fillet, and crimp the foil into a loose tented packet. Bake in a medium-high oven until fillet is cooked through. Serve with mizeria salad of grated cucumbers mixed with sour cream, sugar, white vinegar, and chopped fresh dill.
25
Bunny Boiler
Nate and Bunty Boothby had agreed to meet that evening at The Bar in the Peninsula Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui for a get-acquainted drink, after which Bunty’s girlfriend, Marigold Dougherty, would join them for dinner at Felix, the ultrahip restaurant on the hotel’s twenty-eighth floor. Marigold was a reports officer in the ASIS station, had lived in Hong Kong for five years, and knew the city exceedingly well. Nate needed to turbocharge his area knowledge, and hoped both Australians would help him learn the city quickly.
Nate had warmed instantly to Boothby during their initial meeting in the Australian Consulate. Bunty was short and blocky, with a broad face and gray eyes. He had the wide shoulders of a swimmer and the sun-bleached, perpetually unruly blond hair of the inveterate surfer. He had been drafted into ASIS immediately after graduating from the University of Melbourne and, thanks to his passion for riding monster waves, operated for his first three years with the quite remarkable cover of “surfie,” a globe-trotting beach boy looking for the perfect point break. He was one of the first foreigners to surf the infamous Silver Dragon, the thundering eight-meter tall, full-moon-triggered tidal bore on the Qiantang River near Shanghai, for a record fifty-two minutes, sluicing and cutting across the chocolate-brown wave on his Twin Fin short board for seventeen kilometers. The next day, the inconspicuous, twenty-three-year-old surfer dude in board shorts and flip-flops reestablished contact with a clandestine ASIS reporting source—a colonel in the 61398 bùdui, the shady PLA cyberwarfare unit in Shanghai—with whom contact had been lost, a screamingly risky operational act considering that the long-haired young man had no diplomatic immunity in China.
Bunty was laconic, irreverent, and ingenuous, every bit the informal, loose-limbed Aussie, a wry observer of the “tossers, wankers, and ratbags” who roamed the Earth and, occasionally, sullied his beloved service. But Nate quickly saw that Bunty’s playing the huffy rustic was camouflage for an operations officer with a shrewd eye and a killer instinct for recruiting human intelligence sources. Now a ten-year veteran, Bunty had traded his puka-shell necklace for a necktie and two-button suit, but he was still a larrikin, a wild child.
The bar at the Peninsula Hotel was all dark wood, polished brass, and sparkling glassware. They sat in two deep leather chesterfield armchairs in the corner of the bar, and on Bunty’s recommendation ordered two signature Rolls-Royce cocktails. Nate leaned back in his chair.
“Two days ago, I walked for six hours,” said Nate. “At the end of the day, I couldn’t tell you whether I had surveillance or not.” Bunty sipped his drink, looking at him over the rim of his glass.
“Welcome to Honkers,” said Bunty, his voice low. “Your Moscow rules are about as useful in this city as an ashtray on a motorcycle. Too many locals, too much movement. We don’t think the MSS surveil us with any regularity. They have cameras everywhere, and static watchers, and co-opted informers, but they’re patient bastards who’re willing to wait. If they think something serious is going on, they can deploy a big team to bail a target up.” Nate held up his hand.
“What do you mean ‘bail a target’?” said Nate.
Bunty took another sip of his drink. “Sorry,” he said. “Australian slang; it’s an affliction—use it without thinking, so stop me when I say something unintelligible.”
“And bail somebody up?”
“Wrap them up, control movement, physically impede,” said Bunty.
“Thank you. So how are we getting to Macao without the MSS bailing us up?” said Nate.
Bunty smiled. “We’ll keep our eyes open, of course, but the hydrofoil and both sea terminals are covered, so we start cleaning ourselves when we step foot on land in Macao.”
“And then what?”
“Our guy will bring the general to Hac Sa Beach, on the south end of the island,” said Bunty. “There’s a secluded little Portuguese restaurant right on the water, Fernando’s, where you can have a quiet dinner meeting—try the red honeyed chicken, by the way. I’ll be at another table across the room, just in case. It’s just the two of us, and we’re on our own.”
“How do you think the general will react?” said Nate.
“She’ll be right,” said Bunty. “I mean, it will go fine. My canary has been talking to the general for months, softening him up. He’s scared and desperate, and he begged for help in replacing the official funds he lost. My guy told him he knew a Russian official who could get him out of his jam, and the general believes the Russians will keep it quiet. Our general’s quite the drongo—that’s ‘idiot’ in Australian; he’s expecting an offer. If you can sell that you’re a Rus—” Bunty suddenly stopped talking and got out of his armchair.
A woman entered the bar, and nodded to the barman who snapped to attention. She stopped briefly at a table to greet a Western couple, obviously tourists. She then walked over to their table and shook Bunty’s hand, smiling faintly. She turned to Nate and nodded while Bunty introduced her as Grace Gao, assistant general manager of the Peninsula Hotel. With studied indifference, she categorized Nate in the manner of all hoteliers, assessing in three seconds his financial, social, and professional status. She didn’t blink.
Nate’s case-officer instincts quivered like a spider on a hot rock. Grace Gao was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. She had a high forehead and straight brows over almond-shaped brown eyes. Her black hair was done in a braided bun at the back of her head, tendrils falling loose on both sides. Morning-after cheekbones framed the oval face and a chiseled mannish chin. An incongruous straight nose, a Roman nose with a slight bump, accentuated her most remarkable facial feature: a china-cup mouth with pink lips. She was Chinese, to be sure, but with the long-ago blood of a Portuguese sailor or a Dutch trader in her veins, that Eurasian hint of cardamom and cloves.
Behind the beauty, but not because of it, her face radiated diffidence, impatience, disdain. She chatted easily with Bunty, ignoring Nate. She was short and thin, dressed in a black skirt and soft black jacket with wide lapels, over a stretchy black camisole that did more than hint at a prodigious figure more commonly encountered in Manhattan or Malibu. She wore expensive black pointy-toed pumps. Nate noticed that blue ropey veins showed through the skin on top of her hands and slim feet, suggesting frequent physical activity and cracking good health. She shook Bunty’s hand, ignored Nate again, turned, and walked out of the bar displaying tennis-ball calves that pulsed as she walked. Another woman has legs like that, ballerina’s calves, Nate thought, feeling a stab of guilty longing. Bunty sat down, tilted his head back to finish his drink, and looked at Nate.
“Welcome to the club, mate,” said Bunty.