Nine Dragons - A Beatrix Rose Thriller: Hong Kong Stories Volume 1 (Beatrix Rose's Hong Kong Stories Book 2) (8 page)

She heard the sound of footsteps coming down from above.

She waited until it sounded like they were on the final flight, leading down to the lobby.

“Li?”

Beatrix turned out of cover. The two were halfway down to the lobby.

“
Li
?”

Two rounds left. She couldn’t afford to miss.

She fired. The triads collapsed and slid down the remaining few steps. Beatrix grabbed the nearest man beneath the shoulders and dragged him into the storage room. She returned for the second man. Grace stared at the three bodies with her hand clasped over her mouth.

“Come on,” she said, taking the girl’s hand and leading her into the busy street outside.

BEATRIX TOOK GRACE back to the building they had just escaped.

“What are we doing?”

They were out of sight of the street. Beatrix paused and turned the girl to face her.

“Grace, listen to me. They were looking for something.”

The girl frowned.

“Did your sister hide something?”

She shook her head, confused.

“They said something about a video.”

Grace paused. “There is something.” A frown crinkled her brow as she searched for the right word. “Something for computer.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Yes. I show you.”

Beatrix dared not trust the lift, so they climbed the stairs. She moved as quickly as she could.

They reached the landing. The door to Beatrix’s apartment was badly damaged. The area around the lock had been blown out by the shotgun blast, and other holes studded it from where she had fired through it. Facing it, the door to Grace’s flat was still open. It, too, was damaged from the kicking that it had received.

Beatrix went inside first. It had been turned upside down. Drawers had been emptied out, the chairs overturned, pots and pans thrown about in the tiny kitchen. Grace scurried over to the bedroom, lifted the futon and pushed it against the wall, and knelt down. She pushed down on one of the floorboards and one end popped up. She slid her fingertips beneath it, lifted it clear and reached into the cavity beneath.

She took out a small waterproof bag.

“Here,” she said. “My sister put this here. I saw her. Is it important?”

Beatrix took the bag. Inside was a thumb drive.

“It might be.”

Grace nodded. Beatrix put it in her pocket and led the way back outside.

She went back into her flat, telling Grace to wait on the landing. The two dead men were sprawled across the floor, blood and brain matter congealing around their shattered heads in gory halos. The apartment was rented under a false name, and she only ever paid cash. It would be difficult to trace it back to her and she didn’t have time to dispose of the bodies. They would have to stay here.

She gathered her bag and packed the things that she knew she would need. She removed her hardback copy of
Bleak House
from the shelf and opened it up. Two magazines for the Glock were nestled inside a niche that she had carved into the pages. She ejected the spent magazine and pushed in one of the fresh ones.

She put the second magazine into her pocket, collected Grace’s bag, put the pistol back inside her waistband and took one final look around.

Keep moving.

You’ll never settle down.

Not until you find Isabella.

She went outside and led the way down the stairs to the street below.

BEATRIX AND GRACE stopped at a pharmacy. Beatrix bought a bottle of disinfectant, a pair of tweezers and a packet of surgical strips. Then they stopped in the nearby McDonald’s. Beatrix bought Grace a Happy Meal, told her to stay and eat it, and then went into the bathroom. She unwound the wrap and examined the damage to her left hand. Now that the blood had stopped, it did not look as bad as she had feared. The cuts, although deep, had missed the tendons, and she had full movement. She held her hand over the sink and, gritting her teeth, emptied the disinfectant over it. She examined the flesh carefully, using the tweezers to pull out the tiny fragments of glass that had lodged there, and then sealed the cuts with the surgical strips. She opened and closed her fist and flexed her fingers. The damage was minimal. She had been lucky.

She led the way to Sheung Wan and took a room at the Sohotel. The place catered to backpackers and those on a budget. The room was small, just over a hundred square feet, with wall-to-wall windows doing a little to make up for the lack of space. Beatrix knew the area. Possession Point, the spot where the British landed and took possession of Hong Kong in 1841, was in nearby Hollywood Road Park. The park was now a pleasant green where locals practised
t’ai chi
. Sheung Wan was also within walking distance of the Macau Ferry Terminal for outlying islands, and was served by an MTR station. If they needed to get out in a hurry, there would be plenty of options.

Beatrix made sure that Grace was comfortable and then told her that she needed to step out for a moment.

The girl’s eyes went wide with fear. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll be five minutes away. Don’t worry, Grace. I’m the only person who knows where you are. The triads won’t find you if you stay here. Can you do that?”

“How long will you be?”

“An hour. No more.”

The girl’s jaw stiffened and she nodded.

“Stay in the room,” Beatrix repeated. She took the Do Not Disturb sign, opened the door, and hooked it over the handle. “Don’t open the door, not for anyone. Okay?”

She nodded again.

Beatrix smiled at her, patted her pocket to confirm that she still had the thumb drive, and left the room.

THE HOTEL was at 139 Bonham Strand. Beatrix asked for directions to a place where she could access the Internet. The woman behind the desk suggested the business centre, but Beatrix asked for somewhere outside the hotel. The woman shrugged, and, with a little buzz of amused disdain, pointed out of the front door and south to Aberdeen Street. Beatrix thanked her and walked the six hundred metres to the 908 Cyber Café.

She paid for a terminal. There was no time to use the Facebook dead-drop. There was a payphone on the wall in the back of the café and she used it to call Chau, telling him where she was and that she needed to see him.

CHAU ARRIVED thirty minutes later.

“What is happening?”

She explained how the triads had visited the apartment block again and how, after they had forced their way into her flat, she had killed them all and escaped.

“All?”

“I didn’t have much choice, Chau.”

His face went pale and she saw his fingers begin to tremble against the table.

“How many?”

“Six.”

“
Six!
”

She nodded.

“I cannot clean
six
triad!” he hissed.

She leaned forwards against the table. “I don’t want you to clean them, Chau. They will have been found by now. I’m not proposing to go back there.”

“Then you must leave Hong Kong.” He frowned for a minute, becoming even paler as he recognised the consequences. “Maybe
I
must leave Hong Kong.”

She reached across and gripped his wrist. “Calm down, Chau. I need you to relax.”

“How can I relax—”

“Because it’s not very likely that Ying will know who I am. He’s never seen me. The men he sent to find the girl are all dead. They can’t describe me to him, and, even if they could, how would he know who I am?”

“Blonde Western woman, very dangerous, good with a gun? I think he will guess.”

“He won’t know yet.”

“Then he will ask your landlord.”

“My landlord has never seen me.”

“Then he will ask your neighbours. They will have noticed. You are different. You will stand out.”

“We’re fine for now, Chau.”

“For now?”

“For now.”

He looked at her with suspicion. “Why do I think I am not going to like what you are about to say?”

“Those men were looking for something at the flat. That’s why the first man was there. I think I have it.”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the thumb drive.

“What is on it?”

“I have no idea.”

She took the stick and pushed it into the computer’s USB port. It detected the drive and displayed the single file that had been stored there.

It was labelled in Mandarin:

趙

It had a .mov extension and a suggested duration of three minutes.

“What does it say?”

He squinted at the screen. “It is a name. Zhào.”

“Mean anything to you?”

“No. It is a common name.”

Beatrix had chosen a computer in the corner of the room that was not overlooked and, after glancing over her shoulder to double-check, she clicked the file. The default video viewer opened and the video played.

The footage showed a bedroom. Beatrix paused for a moment before she realised that she recognised it. It was the bedroom in Grace’s apartment. She recalled the patterned sheets on the futon and the picture of a vase of flowers that had been hung on the wall. The camera was placed in the corner of the room and was at a low height. She guessed that it had been concealed in something, a bag, perhaps. A blind had been pulled down over the single small window and the room was dark. The camera was not particularly good and it struggled to adapt to the dim light.

A woman came into frame. She sat on the edge of the futon and reached down to take off a pair of high-heeled shoes.

“You know her?” Chau asked.

Beatrix nodded. It was the woman that she had seen in Grace’s apartment. The girl’s older sister.

A man’s legs came into frame. A conversation commenced in Cantonese.

“It is small talk,” Chau said for Beatrix’s benefit. “They seem to be familiar with one another. He calls her Liling.”

“And him?”

She caught the woman saying the name just as soon as she had asked.

“Zhào.”

Chau turned to her, an expression of befuddlement on his face. She ignored him, her attention fixed on the screen. The man’s legs retreated into shot as he moved away from the camera, revealing more of himself. He was wearing a suit and shoes that had been polished to a high sheen. He sat on the bed next to the woman and reached forward to work his shoes from his feet. He was looking at her, his face obscured, but then he turned and looked right at the camera.

“It
is
him,” Chau breathed out.

“Who?”

“Zhào Gao. He is businessman. Very important. Very rich. Influential. There are rumours he works with triads.”

They watched for another minute as the two of them undressed each other. The café had restrictions on what you could watch and Beatrix had no interest in drawing undue attention to themselves if the proprietor happened to notice what was on the screen. It was obvious what was about to happen. She paused the footage just as Zhào was looking into the camera again.

“You think he knows the camera is there?”

“No,” Beatrix said. “It’s hidden.”

Chau was agape. “Zhào’s company depends on his image. He is a family man. But this…” His voice trailed away.

“Whoever he is, someone set him up. That’s why they filmed it. It’s either her acting alone or someone else is behind it. Probably Ying.”

“I could understand it if it was her. He is rich. Extortion would be very profitable. But Ying? Why?”

“Same reason. Blackmail. Or, if Zhào was working with the Wo Shun Wo and they needed to keep him in line, he could be threatened with this.”

“But the woman had the file?”

Beatrix nodded as she closed down the video player. “And now she’s either dead or on the run because of it. And it’s going to get her little sister killed.”

“She is not our problem,” Chau said, his voice clipped and taut.

“No. She is. I’m not just going to abandon her. We need to help her get away.”

“To where?”

“She has family on the mainland.”

“Then give her the money for bus ticket and be done with it.”

Beatrix sighed, fighting impatience. Chau was fundamentally a good man. But he was also a coward with a selfish tendency towards his own preservation. She had no illusions about that. If his life depended upon it, he would serve her up to Ying or to anyone else who was threatening him. That was a good reason for the separation between them both that she insisted upon, and for the frequent reminders she gave him that she was just as dangerous as the men they served.

“Her sister got her into this,” she explained with exaggerated patience. “Liling has been working for the triads. Liling has been working for Ying.
Liling
got into trouble.
Not
Grace. It’s
not
her fault.”

“And neither is it our fault, nor our responsibility. Send her away. That will be that.”

“Her sister could be dead, but maybe she isn’t. Maybe she’s still be out there, hiding somewhere. But she won’t be able to stay hidden for long, and you can bet Ying will want to know where she is even more now that his men have been killed. The girl’s an addict. You think she won’t tell him about her little sister if he pushes her even a little? Maybe she tells him all about the relatives on the mainland. You think Grace will be safe there?”

Chau bit his lip, then shook his head. “No.”

“I can’t take the chance of sending Grace away until I know, for sure, that she will be safe. He’ll think that she has this footage. He’ll find her, bring her back, find out what happened. And if he finds her, maybe she tells him about the Chinese man who looks a little like Jackie Chan who worked with the blonde Western woman to clean up the dead body in her apartment. Maybe he comes and asks what you know about what happened.”

“But she didn’t see me.”

Beatrix knew that she was close to persuading him. Self-preservation was his pressure point. A lie would be the final gentle nudge he needed. “She was watching through the peephole when you came to clean her apartment. She saw you, Chau. She can describe you.”

The trembling got worse. “You said I was safe. You said—”

“You
are
safe, as long as the girl is safe.”