Dead in Hong Kong (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (20 page)

Teffinger
twisted the card in his fingers.

“I think we need to have a chat with our new friend, Brittany So Kwak.”

Fan Rae frowned.

“If she knows something, it’s not like she’s just going to spit it out. She’s a professional.”

“Then we need to get some leverage on her.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “My job is to think of the problems. Your job is to solve them.”

“In that case, I want to switch jobs.”

THEY STOPPED FOR LUNCH and
Teffinger
took the opportunity to hit the restroom and call the Fleming.

No, no one had left any messages for him
o
r dropped anything off.

Damn it, d’Asia, don’t be like this.

THEN HE CALLED
SYDNEY
IN DENVER.

By the tone of her voice, he’d obviously woken her up. “Sorry to wake you,” he said. “I can’t even begin to keep the time difference straight.”

No problem.

What’s up?

“Nothing, really, I just wanted to hear the sound of your voice.”

“Bullshit,
Teffinger
,” she said. “Whatever it is, spit it out so I can get back to sleep.”

Spit it out.

Right.

Spit it out.

Why did he call her?

He honestly didn’t know.

Then he said, “I think I’m in trouble. It’s like I’m in a car doing a hundred miles an hour, headed straight for a concrete wall. I can see it ahead of me, plain as day, and I have plenty of time to stop. But instead of putting my foot on the brake, I just keep pushing down harder on the gas. I know I’m going to die, but I just keep going faster.”

“Do you want my advice?”

He paused.

Then he said, “No, because I won’t take it, and then I’ll feel bad.”

Silence.

“
Nick
, you’re on the edge.”

He knew that.

“But that’s where you go when you need to,” she said. “That’s the difference between you and everyone else in the world. You’ve always been able to make your way back.”

“So what are you saying, No problem?”

No.

She wasn’t
, n
ot at all.

“What I’m saying is,
Be careful
.”

“Of what?”

“Of yourself.”

Day Seven—August 9

Sunday Morning

______________

KAM LEE MET KONG in the back of the mansion and led him to one of the dungeons that had a private entrance. Emmanuelle Laurent was gagged, naked and stretched tight in a standing spread-eagle position. She didn’t look anywhere nearly as defiant as last night.

“I’ll take it from here,” Kong said.

Kam Lee headed for the door and said over her shoulder, “Have fun.”

Alone with hi
s captive, Kong removed the gag, t
hen sat on the floor and leaned against the wall.

“It’s not too late for you to get out of this alive,” he said. “But as you can see, I’m out of patience and out of time. What you do in the next five minutes is going to determine if things get ugly or if things get nice. Now I want you to close your eyes and think about that for a minute.”

She stared at him.

“Do it!” he said.

She closed her eyes and kept them closed.

“Have you thought about it?” Kong asked.

She opened her eyes.

“Yes.”

“And what’s it going to be, ugly or nice?”

“NICE.”

Kong nodded.

“Good choice,” he said. “Now, I’m going to ask you some questions. You’re going to answer each one fully and truthfully. If you lie, even once, the deal’s off. Things will get ugly and there won’t be any turning back. There will be nothing you can do or say to get you back to where you are right now. I want to be sure you fully understand that. Do you?”

She nodded.

“Say it.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes I understand,” she said. “Can I ask one question before we start?”

Kong raised an eyebrow.

Curious.

“Sure.”

“Where’s my friend?”

Kong nodded, respecting the concern.

“What’s your friend’s name?”

She hesitated.

Kong gave her a warning glance.

“Prarie Dubois.”

“See, that wasn’t so hard,” Kong said. “Your friend—Prarie Dubois—to the best of my knowledge, never came out of the house last night.”

“Is she alive?”

Kong shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t stick around to ask questions.”

OVER THE NEXT HOUR, she told him a story that he could hardly believe, except that it was too strange and too detailed to be fabricated. Her friend, Prarie Dubois, was kidnapped while attending the University of Hong Kong, as leverage to make her father participate in stealing fi
ve paintings from Musee d’Orsay
in Paris. Emmanuelle was currently working in an unofficial capacity for an insurance company to recover the paintings. Prarie was helping her.

“Why?”

“Lots of reasons,” Emmanuelle said. “Primarily to find out who killed her father, but also to get the paintings back where they belong, as a way to restore her father’s legacy and reputation.”

“Is she going to kill them, when she finds them?”

“Who?”

“The people who killed her father.”

“I don’t know,” Emmanuelle said. “I’m not sure she’s capable.”

Kong smiled.

“You are though, aren’t you?”

She looked away, t
hen locked eyes with him.

“Yes.”

“That will be your gift to her for helping you.”

“Yes, if she wants.”

SO WHY WERE THEY ON KONG’S SAILBOAT?

“We thought that you were the one who picked Prarie up at the club and slipped something into her drink,” Emmanuelle said. “That’s why we broke into your boat, to try to get more information. That’s why we took the computer.”

“It wasn’t me,” Kong said.

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“I believe you.”

“No you don’t,” he said. “But it’s true. It wasn’t me.”

WHAT ABOUT THE HOUSE LAST NIGHT? Why were they there?

That belonged to someone named Guotin Pak.

“Now that we’ve been inside, we’re almost positive he was the one who painted the replicas that ended up in the museum,” Emmanuelle said.

Kong cocked his head.

“So he might know where the originals are?”

“Exactly,” Emmanuelle said. “At a minimum, he knows who else is involved; and they would know.”

Interesting.

Very interesting.

“How much are these paintings worth?”

She shrugged.

“Somewhere upwards of $80 million a piece, in U.S. dollars.”

Kong did a quick conversion to Hong Kong currency.

The number shocked him.

“This is huge,” he said.

“Yes it is,” Emmanuelle said. “And you can be part of it if you want.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that we’ll cut you in,” she said. “I have the case on a one-third contingency. I’ll give you one-third of my one-third, which is roughly 10 percent. That’s $8 million a piece, U.S. dollars—$40 million total, if we get all five.”

Kong wrinkled his forehead.

“Don’t insult me, I can do the math,” he said. “So I get 10 percent, just to let you live?”

Emmanuelle laughed.

“Just to let me live? Hell no, there’s a whole lot more to it than that. If we don’t find the paintings, no one gets anything.”

“So you want my help?”

“Yes.”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“You don’t,” she said. “Now let me down before I change my mind.”

Kong smiled.

“You got some balls, lady.”

Day Seven—August 9

Sunday Morning

______________

PRARIE DIDN’T REALIZE THE FULL EXTENT of Guotin Pak’s ugliness until he pulled her off his shoulder and threw her on the bed. That was her first good look at him. He must have gotten the scars at a young age because they hadn’t grown with his face. Instead, they sucked his skin in. His eyes were too far apart and his teeth had gaps. He reminded her of a troll. And now he had her—a nice looking woman—in his control.

He glared at her.

Pissed.

He shouted something mean in Cantonese.

She recoiled as far as she could on the bed.

He waited for an answer.

She said in English, “I don’t understand.”

He switched to English. “What were you two doing in my house?”

“Nothing.”

Nothing?

Nothing?

“Did you just say nothing?”

He grabbed her feet, pulled her back into the middle of the bed and flipped her onto her stomach. Then he tied her wrists together behind her back, did the same with her ankles, and the
n tied her ankles to her wrists, a
hogtie position.

“Nothing?” he said. “Talk now, before I lose my patience. What were you two doing in my house?”

“We got lost, and then—”

He slapped her ass.

THEN HE PICKED HER UP, carried her outside where the waves were lapping against the bluff and laid her in a recessed crevice on her stomach, a meter or two above the water, where she couldn’t be seen from either side.

He studied her.

“The tide is coming in,” he said. “I may or may not come back to see if you’re in the mood to talk. If I do, you’d better make the best of it.”

Then he was gone.

She was alone.

Day Seven—August 9

Sunday Afternoon

______________

FAN RAE’S RESEACRH on Brittany So Kwak revealed that the woman was a partner in Phantom, Inc., one of Hong Kong’s most reputable and pricy private investigatory firms. “Our office has butted heads with them before,” Fa
n Rae said. “It wasn’t pretty,” m
eaning the woman would never reveal who she was working for.

Teffinger
studied a printout of the woman’s face.

“She’s attractive,” he said.

“Don’t you ever think of anything besides sex?”

Teffinger
raised an eyebrow.

“I think of coffee sometimes,” he said.

She punched him in the arm.

“Actually, what I’m getting at is that maybe I could find a way to bump into her and buy her a drink,” he said.

“You do stuff like that?”

“Ordinarily, no,” he said. “But the clock is ticking.”

He didn’t tell her the rest, namely that he’d been feeling guilty lately. He’d had a couple of abducted-woman cases like this in his day. What happened was always the same, namely, he get obsessed. He put his life on hold. He worked the window of opportunity before it disappeared. But with Syling Wu that obsession hadn’t been there. Going out with Fan Rae and Xiang and partying last night was proof evident. He didn’t know what the problem was. Maybe it was because she technically wasn’t his case. Maybe it was because all this was happening in Hong Kong instead of Denver. Maybe he was just getting jaded. He didn’t know why it was. But he did know one thing. He needed to get
that obsession back in his life, n
ot in ten minutes
, n
ow
, t
his second.

Syling Wu deserved it.

“If there’s no front door to Brittany So Kwak, maybe there’s a back door,” he said. “I don’t want to do it though unless you’re totally okay with it.”

“I don’t want you sleeping with her,
Nick
.”

Teffinger
grunted.

“I’m not talking about anything even remotely close to that,” he said. “All I’m talking about is seeing if I can meet her and then get her to spit something out, before she even knows she’s doing it.”

Fan Rae studied him.

“It was okay for you to be with Xiang, but that’s only because I was there,” she said.