Droll, intuitive, smart, and skillful, thought Nate. He was glad he had these two on his side, and he knew he could trust COS Burns to support him in Langley, whichever way the operation went. He didn’t know what to expect from the panicked PLA general; or whether his own Russian would suffice; or if he could sell the false-flag approach; or how to deal with the Gordian knot challenge of hostile MSS surveillance. The rigors of his past internal operations on the streets of Moscow seemed relatively straightforward in comparison.
Just then Grace Gao walked across the dining room, nodding at diners, conferring with the ma?tre d’, inspecting the already-immaculate table settings. If she saw the Australians and Nate, she didn’t acknowledge them. From across the room, Nate watched her movements—light and balanced—and how she held things in her hands, a menu, a wineglass, a linen napkin. When she turned in profile, Nate noted the slight swell of her stomach and buttocks, the fine line of her chin and jaw, the prominent, straight nose, and the rise and fall of her camisole top, stretched flat as a drumhead. She had no idea she was being watched and probably would not have cared. Marigold leaned across the table and handed Nate a menu.
“She’s really not on,” she said softly. “Not recruitable. Totally locked up inside.”
“Maybe you’re right,” said Nate, lifting his wineglass. “Here’s to the general.”
THE PENINSULA ROLLS-ROYCE COCKTAIL
Fill a mixing glass with ice. Measure one bar spoon of Benedictine, 15ml of Mancino Secco Vermouth, 15ml of Mancino Rosso Vermouth and 60ml of Tanqueray No. Ten Gin into the glass. Stir for ten seconds. Remove a chilled glass from the freezer and strain the mix into it. Serve with an orange twist to garnish.
26
An Outhouse Door in a Hurricane
The signal from Boothby’s agent came two days later, sooner than anyone expected. Zhong Jian Fang, Lieutenant General Tan Furen of the PLARF, had landed after midnight at Macao International Airport on a PLA Air Force Xian MA60 short-range turboprop, and had been driven to his usual hotel, the Conrad Macao on the Cotai Strip, one of three luxury hotel-casinos stacked side by side like shimmering neon bookends along the traffic-choked Estrada do Istmo.
General Tan was shown to a VIP suite—his status as a PLA general was subordinate to his casino designation as a high-stakes whale—and after an hour in his room with a favorite escort from South Africa known as “Air Jaws,” went down to the gaming floor where, in the wee hours of the morning, he lost an additional $50,000 at blackjack and fāntān, an obscure Chinese variant of roulette. As usual, his ardor for gaming was suddenly eclipsed by visions of the firing wall, and he summoned Boothby’s agent to his suite at 0500 hours to urgently beg him to arrange a meeting with his Russian “friend” who, the general hoped, would agree to become his benefactor. There was need for haste, the general blubbered, because casino officials that evening had displayed a marked reluctance to honor his gambling markers, an ominous indicator that scandal was around the corner.
Boothby’s agent—his cryptonym was CAESAR—had immediately texted yǒu yuán qiān lǐ lái xiāng huì to Bunty’s nonattributable ops cell phone, the Chinese proverb meaning “Fate brings people together no matter how far apart they may be.” It was the signal that the meeting with the general at Fernando’s Restaurant on Hac Sa Beach was on for tonight at 1900. A flurry of ops cables at 0600 local to Canberra (where it was 0800) and Langley (1800 the day before) kept the encrypted channels glowing cherry red throughout the morning. ASIS South China Chief FIGJAM dictated a brace of niggling, futile cables warning about “ambush and provocation,” while CIA Chief of China Ops Elwood Holder sent a one-line message of “Good luck, good hunting.” Not to be outdone, CIA Chief of Counterintelligence Simon Benford released a two-word cable that simply said, “Scare Me.” Game on.
Bunty and Nate met at the Macao ferry terminal in Kowloon at 1000 and boarded the stubby burgundy-colored hydrofoil for the hour-long dash past sugarloaf islands of the South China Sea, their peaks cloaked in a humid haze. The two officers slipped on board in the midst of a crowd of chattering Chinese day-trippers, and sat apart on airliner seats with cloth covers on the headrests, listening to the grommets in the overhead panels chittering with the vibration, as the hydrofoil skimmed over a dead-flat sea, throwing a rooster tail of white spray behind it. Nate wore a lightweight summer suit and a shirt with a long pointed collar; a florid necktie in a vertigo-inducing pattern favored by fashion-challenged Russian officials worldwide was in his pocket. He had slicked his dark hair down with a perfumed pomade supplied by Marigold, and wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses with lightly smoked lenses. The light disguise would break up his profile.
They took care to exit the Macao terminal in the middle of the same gaggle of tourists, and walked several blocks before flagging a random cruising taxi on the street. With Bunty speaking passable Chinese, they hired the driver for the day, and proceeded on a meandering sightseeing tour, crisscrossing the thirty-square-kilometer island of Taipa looking for indicators of trailing surveillance. They stopped at the Macao Giant Panda Pavilion, took a winding mountain road through the rain forest to the A-Ma Cultural Village, then angled southwest to the Portuguese colonial village of Coloane, and walked among the pastel villas and storefronts, ending up in the quaint Marques Square, paved with cobblestones of black and white set in a wavy pattern, a vestige of the colony’s maritime past. They stepped into the cool recesses of the canary-yellow chapel of St. Francis Xavier, the royal-blue front apse painted with clouds and seagulls. Nate peeked out a window and snapped his fingers softly to attract Bunty’s attention.
A short Chinese man dressed in black slacks and white shirt loitered under an arch of the flanking colonnade in the square, the first “possible” they had seen the entire day. So far, inconclusive, but time to stretch him a little to see what he’d do. They meandered through the narrow streets of the village, executed two natural reverses, and entered three separate stores, but the man did not reappear. Was he a spotter? Was a bigger team watching from the wings? Were they stuffed in a bottle and didn’t know it? How could coverage be that good? This was the familiar hell of surveillance detection: not seeing anything, not knowing. Keep going.
Back in the taxi they drove around the southern end of the island, past the black volcanic beaches on sweeping horseshoe bays, then off the main road again onto a rutted winding road up to the A-frame Chapel of Our Lady of Pain. “Fucking appropriate,” Bunty muttered, his shirt stuck to his back. Unlike the Panda Pavilion, this mountaintop clearing was deserted. No vehicles appeared, no pedestrians came out of the trees. Leaving the taxi driver in the parking lot, Bunty and Nate followed an overgrown and curving cement walkway into the stinking jungle, and in three minutes came to a clearing and a cluster of five small derelict houses in the Portuguese colonial style with columns and porticoes, and a magnificent view of the sea below. Broken stone stairways led up to crumbling porches and fallen lintels. Ragged window frames were choked with jungle creeper. The ruined interiors were green with moss and dripping in the sour air. The middle house in the semicircle of the five villas had a splintered balustrade along the once-elegant porch, rusted iron poking out of the flaking cement. A large ornamental stone urn stood to one side of the splintered front door, its matching twin long since tumbled and smashed. Bunty and Nate looked carefully into the deep urn, then looked at each other. “Dead drop,” whispered Nate, and Bunty nodded. They now had at least one Macao drop site for use with the general.
Back in the taxi, Bunty asked about the five abandoned villas in the jungle. This prompted an extended explanation in agitated Chinese from the driver, who several times turned around to look at his passengers, usually as the taxi was entering a hairpin curve, and was accompanied by a violent brushing of hands, and a remarkably loud pantomime of violent sneezing. Bunty sat back in the seat and laughed.