Avenger (3 page)

Alex Morgan stared through the billowing steam straight into the pair of cold eyes that met his, challenging him with an interrogator’s calculating precision. The stark brilliance of the downlighting cut through the haze, intensifying the angular structure and hardened features of the face, giving it a cold, impersonal quality.

There was damage and triumph in equal measure in the eyes as they stared back at him, flaunting an encyclopedic knowledge of his darkest moments and secrets: the lies, deception and betrayals that were an inherent part of his line of business. The job. How much of him was now just the job? What was left of the man he was before the soldier and, ultimately, the agent?

Feeling self-conscious, Morgan looked away from the eyes, shifting his attention to a more detailed examination of the face, searching for some point of reference that would return him to familiar territory. The once occasional laughter lines around the green eyes were fast becoming a permanent feature; there was a tight cluster of three short scars on the left-hand side, a long, slightly crooked nose – the result of a dodgy repair – and flecks of gray were taking up residence amid the dark hair at the temples; all classic signs of the subtle, unavoidable changes that under intense scrutiny make something once very familiar suddenly unfamiliar. Morgan’s study inevitably returned to the eyes. There was no escaping them. They remained ruthlessly fixed, staring him down. It was the eyes that told the real story, the truth. They were tired and aged beyond their years, with none of the optimism or energy of youth. They’d seen too much.

Annoyed and struggling to fight off his melancholic mood, Morgan glanced away from the mirror and plunged his shaving brush into the piping hot water of the half-filled basin. An involuntary shudder rippled through him and, dropping the brush, he grasped the basin with both hands, steadying himself.
No, not again. Not now
. His heart began to pound and his scalp began to claw at his skull, pulling his skin taut across his face. He closed his eyes, not wanting to face them mocking him from the mirror. He hung on tight to the basin. In a few moments the spasm had passed. With a trembling hand, he retrieved the brush from the hot water, squeezed away the excess, and then swirled it determinedly around and around in the wooden bowl of scented soap until he’d achieved just the right consistency.

Not good
, he thought.
Not good at all
. This was happening far too often. He couldn’t afford for it to happen while he was working. He just had to get through this mission which, after all, should be straightforward babysitting, and then he’d tell the general he had to take leave, whether the old man liked it or not. His chin and cheeks white with lather, Morgan began to scrape away the stubble.

An hour and a half earlier, he had flown into Hong Kong from Tanzania. Thankfully, the rest of his mission to extract Chomba from Malawi had gone smoothly. Morgan had manhandled him out of the house and in a matter of minutes had him tightly secured and face down in the back an old Land Rover he’d located out front. It had been a tense thirty-minute drive to Mangochi Airport to meet Barboza. The two of them had hauled Chomba on to the DC-3, strapped him into a seat and were away.

But now with Operation Usalama finally behind him, Morgan was dog tired, fed up and in desperate need of a break. With ten years of protracted military combat operations under his belt and four more of seemingly endless back-to-back operations as an Intrepid agent, he was in the grip of mission fatigue and these episodes of self-doubt were happening more frequently, each one more intense than the last.

Intrepid, known unofficially as the “Sword of Interpol,” became fully operational in September 2006. The Secretary General of the United Nations had proposed its creation in the aftermath of 9/11 and the UN Security Council had turned to Interpol – the International Criminal Police Organization – to raise a new division of unique young men and women, handpicked from across the globe, to take on the worst of humankind. In a break from the official Interpol charter, these agents would not be facilitators of cooperation between the law-enforcement agencies of member nations, they would be enforcers of international law – part soldier, part policeman and part spy, empowered in every way to, as the Secretary General declared, “fight fire with fire.” For official purposes, the ambiguously designated IPS Division of Interpol’s Terrorism sub-directorate was based in Lyon, France. However, the actual operational headquarters were located in London and accessed via an unremarkable door off Broadway behind a labyrinth of latest generation biometric security measures, not far from St James’s Park tube station.

Morgan, a decorated veteran of East Timor, Iraq, and Afghanistan, had risen to the rank of major in the Parachute Regiment before being recruited to Intrepid in 2010. In one of his increasingly frequent bouts of cynicism, Morgan mused that he’d been deployed so often during the past two years he could scarcely remember where the hell the covert entrance to the London headquarters was. His numerous attempts to take leave had all been indefinitely shelved. Just prior to his departure from Tanzania, his orders changed and he was redirected to Hong Kong, to assist fellow agent Dave Sutherland in providing “top cover,” an allusion to the way in which jet fighters give overhead fire support to ground troops: they were providing backup for another agent. All Morgan knew so far was that she was ex-Interpol and new to Intrepid. He wasn’t enamored of the idea of sacrificing his precious leave to babysit someone green. He hoped she knew what she was doing.

The sat-phone on the edge of the basin buzzed. Morgan sighed and checked the time: 8.30am.

He read the message. As expected, it was from Sutherland.

Welcome to HK, bud. Hope you’re ready. Your room in 30.

ACK
, Morgan typed, and hit send.
Here we go again
, he thought.

He finished shaving, dropped his towel and stepped under an already steaming shower. He allowed the hot water to sting his skin. It was a ritual of sorts, not that he ever thought of it like that; a few moments of peace and solitude to purge the turmoil and uncertainty that had become his life.

Just got to hold it together a little longer. A day or two more and you’re done.

Elizabeth Reigns folded away the sofa bed, neatly replacing the cushions. Responding to the kettle’s whistle, she walked stiffly across to the kitchenette of her small, sparsely furnished, one-roomed apartment, complete with en suite bathroom the size of the average refrigerator. She lifted the kettle from the single portable gas burner, which she’d bought because the hot plate didn’t work, and turned off the gas. She took a cup from the wooden drying rack on the sink, dropped in a bag of green tea and poured water on top of it. Then she took the tea and sat down at the vinyl-covered card table by the window, looking out on a solid brick wall that was within touching distance if she raised the grimy window. As she lifted the cup to her lips she realized that her hands were shaking. She immediately put the cup down on the table, placed her hands on her thighs, closed her eyes and began a well-practiced meditation regime her mother had taught her many years before.

Reigns, a newly recruited Intrepid agent operating under the cover name Mei-Zhen Tan, was Chinese American; her father was from Los Angeles and her mother from Shanghai. She’d been born and raised in the USA and, on her mother’s insistence, spoke Mandarin and Cantonese fluently, which was exactly why she’d been chosen for this operation. In fact, she’d never before been to Hong Kong, and was a complete unknown in this part of the world. Reigns had been instructed to take a job as the office manager’s assistant and book-keeper with a designer apparel, mobile-phone parts and engine-component manufacturing operation in the Mong Kok district of Kowloon. The business was a “black” factory owned by Triad crime boss Wu Ming, running a significant manufacturing operation with a large workforce of illegal immigrants, and she had been covertly infiltrated to investigate it.

She had taken the shabby apartment on the basis that it was close enough to the factory that her travel time was kept to reasonable limits, but out of the way enough to discourage unwanted attention from her fellow workers. The twenty-minute bus ride to the factory gave Reigns the chance to prepare herself mentally for each and every day spent working in that hellish place. The events of yesterday afternoon had increased her sense of vulnerability exponentially.

After five minutes, Reigns concluded her meditation. She took up the tea again, albeit now lukewarm, and thought through her plan for the day. She had only an hour before her scheduled meeting at the Mong Kok Ladies’ Market. Today of all days she had to make it, but she knew she had to show her face in the office first. If she didn’t, her absence would be noticed. It would be cutting things fine but she had no other choice.

Reigns finished her tea and checked her watch. It was time. She stood up slowly, feeling the coarse fabric of her clothes catch against the welts and scabs left on her flesh by the beating she’d been given the night before when she had protected the young office boy, Chi. She strode purposefully across the room, ignoring the pain, and pulled the chair out from under the doorknob where she had wedged it. It was a crude security measure but effective enough in causing delay and buying her time to react. Standing still for a moment at the door, she drew in a deep breath, held it for a few moments and let it escape slowly. Then she opened the door and stepped out, ready to take on whatever the day had in store for her.

Inspector Victor Lam of the Hong Kong Police Force’s Organized Crime and Triad Bureau, the OCTB, saw a familiar figure approaching him and was instantly filled with dread. The man was Chief Superintendent Chan Man-kin – Fat Freddy Chan – and he was the last person Lam wanted to run into right now, but it looked as though he had no choice. He nervously stepped up the intensity of his search for a fugitive packet of menthol cigarettes, hoping he might manage to avoid being seen by Chan and somehow escape before being cornered. However, in a matter of seconds, Chan had managed to plough his way through the maze of narrow gaps and cul-de-sacs between the desks of the OCTB, and appear in the doorway of Lam’s shoebox-sized, windowless corner office.

“Where are you running off to now, Lam? Another of your special errands? If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you were trying to avoid me.”

Chief Superintendent Chan bore no resemblance to the fit young man who had been a classmate of Lam’s when they were both recruits at the police academy back in the early 1980s. Now Chan was grossly overweight and the buttons of his uniform tunic strained under the pressure. His face was oily and heavily pockmarked. A large brown mole the size of a coat button protruded from his right cheek. It had long strands of wiry hair growing from it. He clung desperately to the merest few strands remaining on his otherwise bald head, which he combed over almost from the tip of his right ear. The thick lenses of his spectacles magnified two predatory brown eyes.

“I’m working, Chan, as you can see,” Lam replied, feigning indifference. He put on his suit jacket while still searching for the packet of cigarettes, worried about the time. “You do remember what that is, don’t you?”

“Work? Not really,” came the shameless reply. “I’m chief superintendent now, if you hadn’t noticed. I have other people to do that for me.”

“I don’t have time for your chitchat, chief superintendent.”

“Of course you don’t. Still the crusader. The cop who doesn’t need help. Doesn’t need friends. Am I right?”

“You’ve got it wrong. As usual. I pick my team according to the task at hand. I get results that way,” Lam replied.
Damn!
Now was not the time for this. “Was there something?”

Chan turned and waved toward the OCTB office, bristling with plainclothes detectives and uniformed officers going about their business.

“You handpick your team based on the task, do you? Interesting. So, are you saying you don’t trust your colleagues?” he said, loud enough for those nearby to hear. “These fine, upstanding men and women of the Hong Kong Police!”

No, but I don’t trust you.
That’s what Lam wanted to say but knew he couldn’t. Instead he allowed his silence to answer for him.

“You’re a fool. You’ve always been one,” Chan continued in a conversational tone. “Ever since the academy. Incorruptible. And what do you have to show for it? You’re still just a lowly inspector, nothing more. You are tolerated only because of a freak success early in your career. Now you are nothing but an annoyance to the hierarchy. And what of your private life? Divorced. Estranged from your children. You’re too stupid to realize that when this job has finally chewed you up and spat you out, no one will even remember your name. So, tell me, Lam, isn’t it about time you started thinking about retirement? Bowing out gracefully now? Finally making some friends? I can help you with that.”

“I don’t need friends like your friends,” Lam said, meaning it.

“I think you need them more than you realize. And sooner rather than later.”

“I’m not interested. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m working.” He checked his watch discreetly. He had to make the rendezvous on time. If he was late, his contact would abandon the meeting and he couldn’t let that happen. “So, why don’t you step aside and let me get on with my job?”

“What exactly are you doing this morning? You seem anxious to get going. Perhaps I could come with you?”

“I’m meeting an informant so I’m going alone. I don’t need you and I don’t need your friends.” Lam gave up on finding his cigarettes and moved toward the door. Chan did not move.

“You should watch your step.” This response, issued from behind clenched teeth, was delivered with an air of menace that Lam had never seen in this man, and he had known him for many years. “There are more people than you realize taking an interest in what you are doing. Your personal obsession with influential people in this city has not gone unnoticed and I would suggest that you avoid stepping on any more toes … including mine. Or you may find yourself retiring earlier than you had anticipated.”

Lam remained silent, bowing his head, reluctantly respectful. He was unsettled by what he perceived as the new level of threat in Chan’s voice. Still, he needed to stand his ground. He couldn’t afford to show fear. “These influential people you’re talking about, the ones I’m apparently obsessed with – they are criminals, you know that, don’t you?”

Chan slithered the final few steps until he was completely inside Lam’s office and blocking the doorway. He leaned closer to the desk and, from under the pile of paperwork, retrieved the pack of cigarettes Lam had been searching for. He flipped it open, extracted a cigarette, placed it between his teeth, lit up then threw the packet back at Lam, who just managed to catch it.

“You know, I came here to help you, Lam,” said his superior, fat tongue awkwardly forming the words as the cigarette bounced on his dry brown lips. “I offered you the hand of friendship and the opportunity to retire with dignity. But you’ve made it clear that you do not want my help. So I will warn you instead.” He reached behind and shut the door with a click. “I don’t care if you live or die. In fact, you are worth more to me dead, but to kill you myself would be foolish. So, I am telling you to end this secret operation you are running – immediately. Your crusade has come to an end. If you do not, there will be consequences.”

“But I—” Lam caught himself mid-sentence as Chan added, “You should have been more careful when you agreed to help … Interpol.”

Lam’s blood ran cold. How could Chan know that? Only the assistant commissioner was aware that Lam was assisting an Interpol operation, and even he didn’t know the details. That was the arrangement with Interpol. In fact, they had specifically demanded Lam’s discretion with regard to his superiors. The assistant commissioner was a good man, a man Lam had known and trusted for many years. It couldn’t have come from him, of that Lam was certain. Chan could be bluffing, although Lam didn’t believe he was. Not this time anyway.

All Lam could say in reply was, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Have it your way,” said Chan. “Walk away from this operation now or you’ll be dead before I have my lunch and I won’t give you another thought.” He remained silent for a few seconds, fixing those deadly brown eyes upon Lam. Then a cruel, knowing grin split his features. “You and your little girlfriend should have been more discreet. Isn’t she a bit young for you? I’m giving you until midday. Let’s see if you can pull her out in time.”

With that, he opened the door and walked slowly across the expanse of the open-plan office. When he reached the foyer he pressed the elevator button and turned back to face Lam, tapping a finger to his wristwatch. Then he disappeared into the elevator.