Don Pendleton - Appointment In Baghdad

“Good work, Carmen,” Price said. “What else?”

“Apparently the agency had a middle management mole in the triad. It was a report about that asset, Jigsaw Liu, that mentioned Scimitar. Jigsaw Liu was given control of triad gambling operations in Hong Kong. He was briefly the focus of an Immigration and Customs investigation into human smuggling with the FBI. The Agency stepped in and asked the DNI to squash it, despite the various crimes, because he represents a backdoor into the CCI.

“I have a contact number for Jigsaw Liu’s handler if you want to make contact before you go overseas,” Delahunt finished.

“Might give us a little more to go on before we commit,” Price said, thoughtful.

Bolan nodded. “Every little bit helps,” he agreed. “Check with the Agency man, set up a meet.” He turned to Price. “Go ahead and send Rafe and Cal to Zagreb,” he said. “Have them set up and start initial recon. I’ll handle the meet alone. It’ll expedite the whole operation.”

Price pursed her lips. “Rafe and Cal are probably our best choice for moving through Baghdad unnoticed, but they won’t exactly blend into the Croatian crowds.”

“I’m going to approach Mirjana as a representative of North American International. Don’t have them pretending to be local. We’ll set them up as company reps since they’ll obviously be pegged as foreigners.”

“Good point. I’ll send Rafe and Cal over on a commercial flight. You three can fly into Jordan from Zagreb later and then take a commercial flight into Baghdad International.”

“I’ll call the Agency handler and set up a meet with Jigsaw Liu,” Delahunt stated.

“Let’s make it happen,” Bolan said.

Things were starting to click. He just couldn’t tell if the pieces were falling into place or if this was the beginning of an avalanche.

Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong

Bolan stood in the alleyway behind the Mandarin restaurant.

Several streets over the sound of a busy Hong Kong night met his ears. Along the waterfront it was quiet. There were no streetlamps, the only illumination coming from bare bulbs set over the back doors of various businesses.

It was quiet enough that he could just make out the gentle lapping of harbor water against the wooden pilings of the piers. The alley he was in stank of urine, rotting vegetables and fish guts. Under a naked bulb casting a weak light, Bolan faced an old wooden door. The paint was peeling and the wood had grown soft with age and the erosion by salty air. A Chinese ideogram had been spray painted in the center of the door.

Bolan recognized the symbol from Carmen Delahunt’s report as standing for the Shimmering Raindrop Triad. Down the alley three Chinese men in their early twenties crouched and smoked, talking rapidly. One of them watched Bolan, dragging on his cigarette. The Executioner thought the youths likely to be security forces. Soldiers in the triads were differentiated by the slang numeric code 426.

Hong Kong had changed a lot since 1997 when the British had returned it to the control of the People’s Republic of China. Hong Kong formed one of only two Special Administrative Regions, the other being Macau. Despite the PRC’s take over, Hong Kong had maintained a high degree of autonomy and was China’s richest city, operating in accordance with terms laid out in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, existing under not Beijing rule, but the Basic Law of Hong Kong.

Under this “One Country, Two Systems” policy Hong Kong kept its own legal system, customs policy and currency until 2047. As a result, the city had one of the most liberal economies in the world and had maintained its status as an epicenter for finance and trade. It had long been a seat for the People’s Republic of China’s espionage efforts. In many ways it had come to replace old Berlin as the spy center of the world, though Islamabad and Amman gave the Asian metropolis a run for its money.

In spite of all this, or more accurately, because of all this, Chinese crime syndicates flourished in the environment. Bolan was about to enter living proof of that as he prepared to attend the meet set up by a junior Hong Kong case officer in the CIA.

Bolan turned the knob on the door in the alley and let it swing open. A concrete staircase, littered with multicolored stubs of paper and crushed cigarette butts, ran down to a small square landing. From this landing a second set of stairs led even deeper into the earth under the Mandarin restaurant.

The soldier walked through the door and descended the stairs. The door swung shut behind him and the gloom on the steps thickened. Another naked bulb hung from a cord above the landing below him, and Bolan carefully moved toward it.

The smell of the raw earth around him was dank. He could faintly hear the squeal of rats moving behind the packed dirt walls and rotted timbers. The earth had absorbed decades’ worth of body odor, spilled alcohol and cigarette smoke. He was entering the pit, an underground warren of small rooms and low tunnels devoted to the greatest vice of the Chinese: gambling.

The only legal gambling permitted in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong was the horse races sanctioned at the Happy Valley tracks since 1846 or at the relatively newer Shatin facility. This fell far short of satiating the traditional penchant for wagers and games of chance, and in the spirit of ruthless entrepreneurialism the Hong Kong triads had stepped in to meet the need.

Bolan turned the corner in the narrow staircase at the landing. Below him the second staircase halted at a sturdy metal door. A Chinese male sat on a tall, three-legged stool, guarding the door.

As he moved closer in the uncertain light, Bolan saw the butt of a Beretta 92-F sticking out of the guard’s waistband. On the back of the man’s right hand was a tattoo of the same ideogram painted on the door in the alley above them. More ideogram tattoos crawled up the man’s fat neck in precise, if sprawling, patterns. From through the cast-iron door Bolan could hear muted but obviously raucous activity.

The man scrutinized Bolan with narrowed eyes. He barked something in what Bolan took to be Cantonese. The soldier shrugged helplessly, then held up a thick wad of Hong Kong dollars. He said Jigsaw Liu’s name.

The doorman took the bank notes and thumbed through them suspiciously. He looked back up at Bolan and repeated Jigsaw Liu’s name.

“Jigsaw Liu,” Bolan agreed.

The wad of money disappeared into a pocket and the guard rapped sharply against the metal door. It swung open immediately and a skinny, sallow-skinned man with a hand-rolled cigarette clenched between crooked, yellow teeth eyed Bolan up and down. From behind him the noise of the room spilled out.

He said something to the doorman, who grunted and repeated Jigsaw Liu’s name. The skinny 426 nodded once and stepped out of Bolan’s way. The soldier ducked his head and stepped into the chamber beyond.

His senses were fully assaulted as he stepped through the door. The ceiling was low on the long room. The haze of cigarette smoke was thick in the air and looked like a gray-blue fog above the heads of the shouting gamblers. The cacophony of chattering, arguing, belligerent voices was punctuated by the sharp clacking of mahjong tiles. He saw numerous tables filled with frantic men, many clutching their own wads of HK dollars.

Bolan’s gaze wandered across the room, noting additional exits and the hard-eyed men standing sentry on the edge of the gambling pits. Other than the pistol tucked into the waistband of the outside doorman, Bolan saw no other weapons on flagrant display, though he was positive they were present. He’d been somewhat surprised not to have been searched at the door, but he assumed most customers here were local and, from the look of it, older.