Razing Beijing: A Thriller (74 page)

The man stepped back onto the elevator with Stuart. The
doors slid shut.

THERE SEEMED NOTHING
UNUSUAL
about a hotel guest waiting in the Tokyu lobby for the 1:00
A.M.
limousine ride to Narita. Seated next to
his luggage, Ian Sorensen was coming to grips with Kirazawa-san’s anxious
report and McBurney’s command to quickly but quietly conclude the operation. He
lowered a corner of the
Financial Times
to view the concierge desk and
the bank of elevators beside it. Two of the Chinese security detail stood waiting
for the other’s return from the Lipo Bar. They craned their necks to look up at
the elevator indicator.

The elevator door opened. Four stunned men stood
motionless, two inside and two outside the elevator car, all wondering what to
do when Stuart reached to press the elevator control. The man riding with him
stepped off—Stuart disappeared behind the closing doors.

Shit...
Sorensen shielded his mouth with his hand in
preparation to speak. Beside the concierge desk, the Chinese security men
absorbed the news delivered by their agitated colleague.

Sorensen spoke just above a whisper into the knot of his
necktie. “This is the lobby—very bad. Three are panning out and they don’t look
happy. Looks like
Courier
rode up from the bar with one of them, and that
guy stepped off to launch into reporting what he must’ve seen down in the bar. Our
man’s on his way up the elevator alone—strike that, he’s arrived. Fourteenth
floor.”

Sorensen glanced to his left in time to see another of
the Chinese detail take up his position just inside the main lobby doors. The
short, well-attired and powerful looking middle-aged man clasped his hands and
eyed him with suspicion. That clinched it for Sorensen. “Plan B is blown,” he
announced.

CURSING HIS OWN STUPIDITY,
Stuart watched the elevator indicator and checked his watch repeatedly, wondering
what he should do if one of McBurney’s team wasn’t waiting once he got to his
floor. Why had the Chinese security officer’s interest been
him
and not
Deng? Surely they were looking for the commissioner; he had seen the man
visibly register Deng’s presence in the bar. Why, then, had the sneer and
accusing eyes been leveled at him? Beneath his shirt a bead of perspiration
trickled from under his arm down to his waist. The elevator stopped.

The doors slid open. There was nobody there.

He stepped into the hallway and found it eerily quiet, as
it should be at 1:02 in the morning. The original plan called for riding the
service elevator to the rear of the lobby. He could think of no reason not to
take it there now.

Pressing the service elevator call button, Stuart’s
thoughts returned to his meeting with Deng. He had not expected the man’s
stoicism after unfolding the slip of paper and discovering who had murdered his
family. Maybe it just needed time to sink in.

The approaching service elevator ground to a halt and the
door slid open. Stuart’s jaw dropped and he stood motionless. The Chinese man
stepping out of the elevator into the hallway smiled affably, like a long-time
friend. McBurney had shown Stuart a lot of photographs; this looked like the
burly guy walking with or behind Deng in virtually all of them, the one they
called Cheung.

The man’s smile vanished when he struggled to speak. “Would
you please take a moment to talk, Mr. Stuart?”

Stuart was taken aback by the use of his name. “Wrong guy. The
name’s Pedersen.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Pedersen. Would you please take a moment to
talk?”

With that, Stuart shook his head and turned to walk away.
What
now?
The door to the stairwell was ten feet away; he headed for it at a
brisk clip. When he swung the door open, he was surprised to find the man right
on his heels. They entered the fire tower stairwell with Cheung muttering
something unintelligible. Then the Chinese security officer made the mistake of
grabbing him.

Stuart glanced down at the man’s hand. “Let go of my arm.”

Cheung’s eyes went wide at Stuart’s abrupt defiance and,
after a moment’s hesitation, eased his grip. Too late.

Stuart drove his fist as hard as he could into Cheung’s
face.

Chinese are not accustomed to the Anglican attack of a
clenched fist—Cheung wavered, disoriented, sagged to one knee and latched onto
Stuart, who tried unsuccessfully to shake his arm free. He slugged him again,
and the man fell to the ground like a sack.

Without warning a deafening shrill of fire klaxons filled
the air. Price O’Connell burst through the door from the corridor looking
anxious and out of breath. He saw the man slumped unconscious on the concrete
floor, shot an accusing glance at Stuart and crouched to check the man’s
carotid artery.

“He grabbed me,” Stuart tried to explain over the klaxon.

O’Connell looked frantically around the landing. He swung
open a narrow red door. Attached to the wall inside was a spool of canvas fire
hose and a first aid box.

Motion in the tiny square window of the door to the
corridor caught Stuart’s eye as guests began wandering out of their rooms,
dazed and barely awake. At any moment they would realize the elevators didn’t
work.

“We are truly screwed!” O’Connell informed Stuart. “Better
give me a hand.”

Stuart and O’Connell dragged the Chinese agent by the
shoulders to the fire hose closet. Stuart felt something hard beneath the man’s
armpit and realized with dread it was the butt of a pistol. They propped him
with his back against the wall in the space beside the spool. O’Connell maneuvered
the man’s legs inside and Stuart slammed the fire closet door shut.

O’Connell motioned with a sharp jab toward the stairs. “We
run!”

Emergency halogen lights cast hard shadows as Stuart bound
down the stairs behind O’Connell, two and three steps at a time, and around
each of the landings. The smoke smelled of burning plastic; at one point Stuart
stumbled full into O’Connell’s back. Guests flooding the stairwell with their
belongings encumbered their descent. The smoke became particularly thick by the
time they reached the third floor landing.

O’Connell held his hand to his earphone in order to
hear and squinted to look in through the door. He turned and shouted over the
klaxons to Stuart, “Follow me!”

DESPITE THE JAPANESE
PENCHANT
for disaster planning inconceivable to most cultures, the
hotel’s capacious lobby erupted in pandemonium. Hundreds of nonplussed guests
carrying luggage swarmed from stairwells out onto the marble esplanade, many
refusing to leave until their friends or associates appeared. The night manager
raced about issuing orders as calmly as possible, directing his guests to the
sidewalks outside the building, an effort all the more difficult thanks to the
din of alarms and sirens of ladder trucks and ambulances encircling the building.

Two guests complaining of sprained or broken ankles were
escorted to a remote corner of the lobby to await medical care. The sea of
commotion parted to allow two orange-clad emergency medical crew with a gurney
to pass through the lobby. Strapped beneath the blanket was a woman overcome by
smoke inhalation, her hair ashen with soot, an oxygen masked strapped to her
face.

Unheeded by all were the Chinese security officers, who
were forced to back away from blocking the exits. Their eyes scanned the crowd
as people poured out into the crisp night air.

Upstairs on the fourteenth floor, the corridor had filled
with an inert gray smoke and throbbed with the force of the klaxon. It appeared
otherwise deserted; three of Cheung’s men were attempting to make certain. They
unlocked the door of the room reserved in the name of a man they had been told
was an enemy of the state. One stood watch in the hall while his colleagues
charged inside with handguns leveled.

Why the television was blaring was unclear to the men. There
was dampness in the air and they turned their attention to the closed door of
the bathroom. Sergeant Bao readied his aim before giving his subordinate a nod.
The younger man whipped open the door and sprung to the side. Steam billowed
out into the room.

Sergeant Bao cautiously entered the bathroom. The shower
was running and through the mist-covered doors he saw the figure of the man
standing inside—his foe stood resting his arms against the wall beneath the
showerhead, immersing himself, strangely oblivious to the alarms and the smoke
and commotion. Bao never pondered a reason for this beyond that ingrained in
his training, that an unstable adversary was the most volatile danger of all. With
one hand he leveled his weapon, with the other he reached out to pull open the
shower door—

—the naked mannequin fell rigidly out of the shower and
crashed to the floor.

THE AMBULANCE DRIVER
saw the sparse morning traffic and increased his speed to one hundred sixty
kilometers per hour, not that any urgency was really demanded. The chartered
business jet would still be waiting for departure clearance.

Stuart sat upright on the gurney and removed the wig, while
McBurney eyed him scornfully from a bench beside racks of emergency medical
paraphernalia. Sorensen, Mekler and Ross mostly stared at the floor. That
Stuart felt like a fool was compounded by the fact that he undoubtedly looked
it. The woman’s dress was entirely open in the back; he quickly stripped it off
his front and arms in about the time it had taken to slip the thing on. Tired
of watching him struggle with the back of his brassiere, Carolyn Ross reached
to unclasp it. His two prosthetic oranges fell to his lap and onto the floor of
the ambulance.

“Go Syracuse,” Stuart deadpanned. Nobody smiled.

The driver flipped off the sirens. Ross handed him a towel.

Stuart looked at it.

“Lips,” she pointed.

“Christ.”

McBurney finally asked: “How did he take it?”

Stuart thought for a moment. “Quietly. I’m not sure he
believed me. Either that, or he no longer cares.”

“I’m not so sure that it matters.”

The comment numbed any reaction from the rest of the group.

Stuart smeared the unsightly cosmetic from his lips with
the towel. “Okay, I’m the one who fucked up.”

The others in the ambulance cast him a glance. McBurney studied
him indifferently. “You don’t say?”

“Why don’t you tell me what really happened tonight,”
Stuart said.

“Why don’t you tell
me
what really happened
tonight,” McBurney countered.

“One of them called me by name. He knew who I was.”

“Your cover was blown. It happens. Hence our emergency
preparation.”

“Right—no big deal. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but
you obviously expected more trouble than I was led to believe. The guy
O’Connell and I bagged was wearing a pistol under his arm.”

Stuart and McBurney exchanged probing stares.

“This ruse with the fire wasn’t about whisking me away
without their knowing. You knew that my life was going to be in danger. I’d probably
have been okay with that, except for the fact you deliberately kept it from
me.”

McBurney eyed him with newfound contempt. “You people don’t
believe much of anything we say, but the truth is you’re wrong. It really was
about making sure they didn’t have the opportunity of connecting you in a
rendezvous with Deng Zhen. For the sake of our objective, for Deng’s sake, and for
yours, in about that order of priority.”

“Did you know they’d be packing weapons?”

McBurney’s expression softened. “We were never sure Beijing
hadn’t intercepted Deng’s Internet message to you. This was all a calculated
risk. I have no idea how your cover was blown, but I’d guess off-hand it had to
do with Deng’s message. You have to view it from their perspective. Their very
existence depends upon their ability to control information. There was no way
Beijing would willingly allow you or anyone else to leave that hotel without
first knowing what a high-level guy like the commissioner might have told you.
Especially
if they already suspect he’s a traitor.”

Ten minutes elapsed without conversation. The ambulance
pulled off the highway for Narita New Tokyo International and headed toward the
general aviation terminal. The waiting Gulfstream came into view on the tarmac,
its starboard engine idling. Waiting by the retractable steps leading up to the
fuselage was a well-dressed and exceptionally tall Japanese man whom McBurney
seemed to recognize.

“What do you suppose will happen to Deng?” Stuart asked as
they gathered their belongings.

McBurney looked sad, and very tired, as he considered the
question. “They’ll fly him home. If he’s lucky his death will be quick and
painless, but I doubt it.”

Stuart was stunned. “So we’ve gotten him killed?”

McBurney stood in a low crouch and waited, eyes down and
searching, as the others exited the back of the ambulance. “Odds are Deng was
already dead. In retrospect, I’m a little surprised he showed up in Tokyo to
begin with.”

Stuart rose from the gurney in order to follow McBurney
out.

“Oh,” said McBurney, turning toward him. “You should just
have a seat.”

“What? But we’re heading out.”

“Yeah, that was before you pulled your little stunt. Now
we’ve got a little extra debriefing to do.”

Stuart looked through the window. Carolyn Ross offered her
hand to the tall Japanese man while Sorensen and Mekler climbed the stairs and
disappeared into the business jet. “Look, McBurney. I’ve got other responsibilities.
Sticking around Tokyo wasn’t part of the deal.”