Dominika peeked into the bathroom. Flickering candlelight was barely enough to see through the fogged glass partition of the big walk-in shower. Zhen stood with her back to Dominika beneath the rectangular rain showerhead luxuriating under the soft deluge, arms above her head, muscles in her buttocks bunching as she moved, wet hair slick on her skull. Dominika tried to remember the locations of the major veins and arteries in the human body, knowing the box-cutter blade was only an inch long. Get on with it, she told herself, before you start moaning like a cow.
A wave of rage boiled in Dominika’s gut for what she was about to do, for what They were forcing her to do. She measured the distance through the opening of the glass, and felt for the box cutter, thinking Slash, don’t stab, slash at throat, eyes, neck. Just before she stepped forward, her eye caught a kimono hanging on a wall peg and she left the box cutter alone, reached over, and drew the silk belt free, then quickly twisted two loops into a constricting slip knot, stepped into the shower, and slipped the loop over Zhen’s head, pulling the knot tight. Moving faster than humanly possible, Zhen turned to face her and tried to bow her head to slip the loop, but Dominika stepped outside the glass, drew the belt over the top edge, and pulled the belt down with all her might, adding her body weight, yanking Zhen’s cheek sideways against the inside of the glass with a clunk and, with another pull, off her feet. The glass kept Zhen’s hands and feet away from her.
Zhen’s toes drummed against the shower wall; her breasts, brown nipples, and pubic delta flattened against the wet glass, her fingers scrabbling at the material around her throat, but the soaked silk had tightened into an impossible knot, the loop pulling her head ear-high, and she shook like a fish side to side, and tried to push off the glass with her feet, her thighs flexing. Rasping grunts came out of her open mouth, but the noise of the shower covered the sound. After three minutes of violent thrashing, as the oxygen in her brain was used up, her kicking slowed, and her hands fell away from her throat, and she quivered for another three minutes, head canted sideways, spittle drizzling out of the corner of her mouth. Rivulets of water ran down the glass as Zhen stared through it dead eyed and openmouthed at Dominika, who had sat down on the bathroom floor with a thump, feet braced, holding the belt, her arms screaming, staring back at the wet corpse.
Five minutes, ten, an hour later—Dominika couldn’t tell—she made her cramping hands let go, and Zhen slid down the partition, her pancaked breasts squeaking on the wet glass, normally a bawdy and erotic sound during shower sex, but now it was ugly and final. Zhen flopped on her back, chin up, legs splayed, the shower water filling her mouth and dribbling down either cheek. Dominika turned off the water. The tock-tock sound of the dripping drain beneath the body was her only requiem.
Frantically drying her feet and legs, Dominika moved fast through the living room—no more chakras to palpitate with vibrating gongs here—opened the front door, ignoring the possibility of a silent alarm, and left it ajar, got into the stairwell, and pulled the handle of the fire-alarm box she had marked the day before. Now she wanted noise and confusion. The peculiar Hong Kong fire alarm was a woop-woop siren that brought tenants out into the hallway as Dominika ran up one flight to her apartment door, pushed it open, and quickly put on a robe, then stood in the corridor, looking uncertain and frightened. Rainy Chonghuan came running down the corridor in a hoisin-stained sleeveless undershirt and boxer shorts, and he protectively bustled her down nine floors in a stairwell crowded with yelling residents, crying children, and a squawking cockatoo in a bamboo cage.
Dominika was booked into a luxury hotel suite in Kowloon that night, her clothes, toiletries, and belongings packed up and delivered to her the next morning. A shaken and embarrassed Rainy told her that fire investigators responding to the alarm had found Zhen Gao murdered in the operational apartment, strangled in the shower. The MSS were convinced that a CIA action team had killed her—likely they had rappelled from the roof—and that the American Nash had probably assisted. There were other theories as they cast wildly for explanations.
“No single person could have caught Zhènniǎo off guard, and bested her in combat,” said Rainy. “There’s no other explanation.”
“It could not have been a random crime? Rape? Robbery?” asked Dominika.
Rainy shook his head. “Impossible. She could have thrown a petty thief over the balcony railing with one arm.”
“An unfortunate and frustrating conclusion to this operation,” said Dominika. “What will you do now?”
Rainy wanted to regain some face in light of this debacle. “The gweilo, the foreign devil Nash, is in Hong Kong temporarily, without diplomatic immunity. Beijing has instructed me to direct the Hong Kong Police to arrest Nash on suspicion of murder. He will be remanded to Stanley Prison until his trial and sentencing, then sent to a Laogai, a work camp, in western China where he will learn to dig coal in the mines. That is if something worse does not happen to him while he is in custody.”
This was a whole new danger. If Nate was arrested and jailed, the MSS wouldn’t have to assassinate him. They would stage a dramatic show trial, with international coverage. He would die in a prison camp on the windswept steppes of western China. He had to get out of Hong Kong immediately. But would the Station learn about Grace’s death and the arrest warrant in time? Or would Nate blithely appear at her apartment tonight with a bouquet of flowers? Bozhe, God, he could walk right into their arms.
Dominika fought her panic: Would she have to barge into the US Consulate to deliver a warning? She daydreamed about it. The end of her career as a spy and the start of a life together with Nate. It was a warm daydream. He would be astonished to see her in Hong Kong, halfway around the globe. She imagined their first kiss in the lobby of the consulate, not caring who saw them. Snap out of it.
But the MSS made up her mind for her. A female escort stayed in the hotel room with her for the evening, and the next morning Dominika was driven to the airport by a dyspeptic Rainy Chonghuan and put on a direct Air China flight to Moscow, with no further courtesy calls in Beijing proposed or offered. It wasn’t exactly a snub: The Chinese were agitated and bewildered. The MSS, General Sun, and the Minister of State Security, moreover, were mortified over their operational failure, witnessed firsthand and up close by a Russian intelligence officer. The loss of face was too great for her to be received as a guest at the ministry. What would they think if they learned that their exalted guest from a fraternal service was the one who had throttled their highly trained executioner?
Now it was a race against time. Would the Americans learn about the warrant before Nate was rounded up by the Hong Kong Police? She wouldn’t know until tomorrow. The flight would take ten hours. She’d read the SVR Asia reports in the morning. Nate was on his own.
* * *
* * *
As it turned out, Dominika needn’t have worried. A cooperative young lieutenant in the Hong Kong Police who received an envelope every month for “confidential chats” with Bunty Boothby passed the news about the murder and the arrest warrant. The ASIS officer requested an urgent meeting with Nate and COS Burns. They all were seriously shaken to learn that gorgeous Grace Gao was an MSS bird dog. Nate was utterly gobsmacked when Bunty’s agent added that Grace had been part of an MSS operation to suborn Nate and elicit the name of their new PLA recruitment. A close call. But who had killed her? COS Burns paced in the five feet of his cubicle office.
“Right now, it doesn’t matter who whacked her. We’ll find out sooner or later,” he said. He pointed at Nate. “You just avoided the Little Bighorn.”
Nate put his head in his hands. “The university, and the restaurant, I should have seen it,” he said almost to himself. “I was too focused on signing her up.”
“You did nothing wrong,” said Burns. “By the book. I read and released all your cables and contact reports.”
“These things happen, mate,” said Bunty solicitously, one leg hooked over the arm of the couch in Burns’s office. “Tell me at least she gave you a gobby.”
* * *
* * *