The reception desk was long and manned by three young women in traditional Thai dress with lots of orange and flecks of gold embroidered into the material. King couldn’t quite decide if they were saris or something else. He took a seat at a low table and waited. Guests came and went, the drivers miming their steering impression, the receptionists checking in people and giving out replacement keycards. The fans turned the warm air, and the open sides allowed some breeze in. The air conditioning ran continuously, blasting the entrance in arctic drifts, only to waft out the open sides of the reception building.

  King’s driver stopped and chatted to a lacklustre security guard in a soaked shirt, a baton hanging from his belt. The driver pressed his palms together and bowed his head and the security guard reciprocated. The gesture was the traditional Thai greeting, used frequently and quickly and given as either a hello or goodbye. The driver looked around the reception area, then hurried over when he saw King. He gave King the greeting, and King simply nodded in return.

  “You have something for me?” asked King.

  “In car,” he said. “Come… come…”

  King got up and followed the man to his vehicle, which he had parked way back from the hotel under a cluster of trees. King looked around him as the man opened the boot. Warm air greeted King in the face, along with the smell of oil. An open sports bag revealed several guns, and King pulled a few out and rested them on the carpeted surface. An old Colt 1911 .45 that could well have come across from Vietnam more than fifty years ago. King liked the weapon, but it was heavy and limited to just seven rounds. He discarded a couple of revolvers for the same reason. He preferred not to use wheel guns, unless it was specifically the Smith & Wesson model 60 snub nose. That weapon made sense because of its pocket size. He would also need to tuck the pistol into his waistband and revolvers did not tend to hold securely when carried in such fashion. He had once felt a heavy Colt .357 slide down his backside and halfway down a trouser leg and he vowed for that to never happen again. The Ruger LCP caught his eye. A compact semi-auto in .380 (sometimes known as 9mm short) that packed ten rounds into its magazine. It was a true pocket pistol, which negated the waistband carry, and he also decided it was the newest firearm there by thirty years. He liked the .380 round as well, less recoil than a 9mm from its slightly shorter case yet still good on ballistic performance, which allowed for accurate rapid fire.

  “I’ll take the Ruger,” King said. He searched for another magazine, but there wasn’t one. He found the .380 ammunition, twenty-rounds in a box that once contained fifty. “Is this gun clean?” he asked.

  “Yes, just oiled,” the driver replied.

  “No, I meant has it been used in a crime?”

  The driver laughed. “Many!” he replied. “All used many times.” He shrugged. “You want clean, get Thailand residency, join gun club and apply for licence!” he wailed with laughter.

  King pocketed the tiny pistol and tipped the twenty rounds into his left pocket, then took out his wallet. “How much?”

  “Five hundred dollar.”

  King didn’t argue. He peeled off five one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them to the man.

  “You still want woman?”

  “No, I don’t,” King replied. “Nor ladyboys or goats or donkeys or drugs.” He turned and made his way back into the lobby. The children were still teasing the monkey and the two drivers, ash now covering their feet, continued to smoke and chat.

  Back inside his room, King stripped the tiny pistol down and checked the firing pin. He loaded ten rounds into the magazine and set it down on the table while he reassembled the piece. He inserted the magazine into the butt, worked the slide, then repeatedly worked the slice back and forwards ejecting the bullets onto the bed. He reloaded the magazine a second time, then loaded the weapon and made it ready. It fitted into his pocket well, and the baggy cargo shorts hid any bulge. King then checked his phone. Ramsay had the location of the Genesis server – the server where their hacker had first signed in. Ramsay suspected a defection, and this was ground zero for King’s search. Just an infinitesimally minute unit of time, three-hundredths of a second between logging onto the Wi-Fi and being routed to a dedicated server that bounced between a thousand IP addresses, all without their operators knowing that their systems were piggy-backing hostile intent, but those three-hundredths of a second had put the hacker in a hotel in Bangkok just minutes before the doors to the ferry had opened to disaster.

  Chapter Twenty

  Long Beach, California

  Rashid stared at the CCTV footage. His task was akin to searching for a needle in a haystack, but Ramsay had insisted that he make the journey and get what they needed. His MI5 identification carried no weight here, but five-thousand dollars had been enough to bribe the head of security and allow him access to the call logs, security camera database and the room booking software. At the time of the three-hundredths of a second that the hotel’s server showed up, there had been twenty-two signatures online. The reception desk, dining room and security office took care of three of those signatures. Seven more accounted for movie channels of various taste with three that would show as ‘specialised entertainment’ on the customer bills. That left eleven signatures who were browsing the internet and one who was controlling a 787 Dreamliner from the comfort of their hotel room.

  Rashid had the list of names and contact details and all he could do for now was to photograph them and email them to Ramsay, where the techs on the floor below would start finding out everything about them.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Bangkok, Thailand

  At the same moment that Rashid was now driving north towards Silicon Valley on the gloriously scenic Pacific Highway, King was paying the hotel manager at the Rama Gardens Hotel in Bangkok a substantial sum of money to give him access to the hotel computer. Not as large a number as Rashid had paid the security manager in Long Beach, but certainly a third of a year’s salary, which in real terms, was usually the figure to tempt people to look the other way over everything except life and death.

  King had the list of guests in front of him and he sent a photo of it to Ramsay, but unlike Rashid’s search, there had only been ten digital signatures, three belonging to hotel departments. One-hundred and eight-eight delegates had been spread across three function rooms in the hotel’s business suite, and King discounted these because of the hacker’s unlikeliness to blend in and do what would be required at a laptop, even if they were doing it by proxy through a server most likely on another continent. Which left four guests had been logged on for almost half a second around the time of the ferry disaster. King briefly wondered whether four bullets could prevent further loss. It was extreme, but… No, too extreme, he thought. He checked the front of house software and saw that one of the names had just checked out, and he leapt up and ran around to the lobby and reception desk. The two drivers had left their spot and the children had stopped tormenting the monkey, but other than an old couple checking in, the foyer was empty. King darted outside, stopped on the damp cobbles and looked both ways. The gardens were rich in that scent you only seem to get in tropical streets and the jungle – soil, leaves and decay, all permeated by excessive heat and humidity. King hadn’t even noticed the torrential rain shower while he had been in the manager’s office, but everything was now soaked and steaming in the sun. The humidity was intense, making the cobbles steam, but through the distortion he saw a slightly built Asian man getting into the rear of a white saloon with a petite, attractive Asian woman. The name on the check-out had been Hong. Korean was King’s best reckoning, and the woman certainly looked Korean. He wondered whether this could be it – Iron Fist caught in the act of evacuating from their operating base. He stared long enough for the slightly built man to stare fleetingly back at him, then the woman shoved him inside, giving King a cursory glare. That was all King needed to see. He sprinted towards them, but the vehicle sped forwards, its front wheels spinning briefly on the wet cobblestones. King followed the vehicle through the gardened grounds and into the tarmacked carpark. The car was a Toyota Corolla, the ubiquitous rental car in Southeast Asia, and a popular taxi, Uber and private hire car. Once it got out onto the streets, he would likely lose it in the traffic unless he could get a vehicle. A car would be pointless because it was doubtful that he would be able to overtake the traffic, and he could already hear the traffic noises of revving engines and sounding horns, a melee of chaos that remained constant but had been drowned out by the hotel’s walled gardens.

  King saw a young Asian man stepping off his motorcycle, undoing his helmet. The man had found a good place to secure the bike to with a chain, but he had not yet done it. King leapt onto the machine and the man stood stunned for long enough for King to turn the key in the ignition and press the start button. The man snapped to his senses and caught hold of King’s arm, but there was something in King’s eyes, the determination, a cruelness even, and the man hesitated a moment too long and it was enough for King to stamp the gears down into first and accelerate out onto the street. He saw the Toyota, or at least he thought he did, there was another identical vehicle coming towards him and another pulling out of a turning three vehicles ahead of him. King wound on the throttle and changed up through the gears, but the motorcycle was low on power, and he pulled back into the traffic having only overtaken two cars. The Toyota turned off into a side street and King undertook the row of vehicles in front of him and took the turning sharply, dropping his knee to the ground then levelling up as he accelerated. The street was narrow with overfilled rubbish bins lining the pavement and children played close to their doorsteps while mothers pinned out washing after the rainstorm and swept in front of their houses. They all looked up as King powered through their lives on the motorcycle. This wasn’t a thoroughfare, and as he looked ahead, he could see why. The Toyota was reversing towards him and swung into a J-turn, the vehicle swinging around amid tyre smoke on the hot, drying tarmac, the sound of protesting tyres and high engine revs clearly audible over the whine and rattle of King’s somewhat underpowered machine. King looked for an out, but there wasn’t one. He was only going twenty miles per hour, but the Toyota was accelerating hard, and the two vehicles were going to meet head on with a closing speed of close to seventy miles per hour. He came off the throttle, reached for the pistol and fired five shots in quick succession. The windscreen spiderwebbed but the vehicle continued to advance, gaining speed the entire time. With nowhere to go, King dropped the pistol and hit the brakes, leaping from the footpegs just a split second before the Toyota crashed into the front wheel of the motorcycle. King was airborne, the sound of crushing metal below him sounding like gunfire. He landed heavily on his feet just behind the car and chose to roll out the impact in a paratrooper roll. The road surface was unforgiving, but motion was lotion, the movement and momentum taking the sting out of the impact. He turned and looked back at the vehicle, its brake lights on, its bonnet dipped and rear bumper riding high as the driver stamped on the brake pedal. King would have reversed back to finish the job, and he limped to the curb, his eyes frantically searching the ground and wreckage of the motorcycle for the pistol. He was breathing heavily, both from exertion and the winding that the impact had left him with, and as he reached the curb, he saw the driver’s window lower, and the tough-looking features of a Korean man leaned out of the window. The man raised his middle finger and smiled, then brought his arm back inside the vehicle, only for it to return with a mini-Uzi 9mm machine pistol in his clasp. King sprinted for his life, his bruised limbs screaming in protest, and he felt like he was running in slow motion as the gunshots rattled off behind him. He flung himself behind a cluster of rubbish bins, the bullets clattering into the metal as he scrambled on his front like a threatened crocodile on a muddy riverbank trying to get back into the water. King found himself under a stoop that was dusty and filled with insects and spiders. He crawled on his belly, hearing the clatter of automatic gunfire and the impacting bullets behind him. The beams above his head were low and he scraped his back against the wood but made it to the end of the building and punched out the siding, both splintering the rotten wood and pushing entire boards free of the nails. He scrambled onto his feet and ran down the side of the building. Should he engage his enemy, or retreat? He didn’t often ask such questions, but the man meant business and King had lost his weapon. He also felt battered and bruised. As usual, he had a knife on him, this time a Leatherman and he opened the razor-sharp blade and kept it in his right hand. “Fuck it…” he said quietly, then tore down the side of the house towards his foe. He pumped his legs hard, sprinting at full pace. If he could surprise the man by running right into him and slash his neck with the blade, then he would stand a chance. If he couldn’t, well, then he would die trying.

  The Toyota had gone. The motorcycle was a wreck in two halves with fuel and fluids leaking into the gutter, and the playing children and mothers doing chores had vanished. King found the pistol, gave it a cursory check, then released the magazine, pocketed the weapon and reloaded the magazine from the loose rounds in his pocket as he walked back towards the busy street. He was silently cursing himself, cursing the loss of what was clearly the asset, and vowing to kill the man with the machine gun. Over everything else, he wanted another chance at the cocky Korean, but as he thought about the man’s arrogant stare and his middle finger, he couldn’t help chuckling to himself as he walked. He had an opponent not only with a fine set of skills, but with some attitude and spark. He was going to enjoy this.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Lambeth Pier, London

  Jack Luger stood when Harriet crossed the pavement and stepped down the three stone steps to his table. She reached over the table and kissed him on both cheeks. Her lips soft, her scent and feel sending all the wrong signals to his primal, carnal senses.

  “I’m not sure what to make of this,” she said, glancing at the menu written in chalk on a blackboard. “Sausage, egg and chips? It’s hardly The Ivy, dahhling…”

  “Wait until you see the chicken nuggets or the pizza.” He paused, returning to his seat with his back against the wall of the hut. “Although the pizza looks pretty good, to be fair.”

  “I’ll take your word for that,” she replied. “It’s a bit touristy, isn’t it?”

  “With one of the best settings in town,” he said, sweeping a hand towards the river, which their seats were partially suspended over. There were boats moored to the pier behind the café and sightseeing vessels motoring up the Thames to his left. “It does good coffee and is just far enough away from the London Eye and the aquarium for the tourists to pass. They’ve already flooded the eateries and ice cream shops down there, so most walk on by.” He nodded his head past the beautiful tree-lined walk, in front of St. Thomas’s Hospital and the Covid memorial wall. Opposite which, on the other bank of the river, Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster reminded people that they were in the beating heart of London.

  “So…” she said. “What’s new with you?”

  Luger shrugged. “I’ve got a dog.”

  “A dog? Hardly seems the thing for a man about town. Although I suppose Alfie had one at the end of the film. Quite fitting, really.”

  “Man about town?” he asked, somewhat irked by her comment. He’d seen the film. Both versions, and the reality hit him hard. He had already had to explain his behaviour to Lillia, and now he was being judged as a womaniser by a woman that he felt had seduced him. “It was just a work thing,” he added defensively, though not entirely honestly.

  “That girl was pretty,” Harriet commented guardedly. “If you like that kind of thing…”

  “Kind of thing?”

  “Obvious beauty,” she replied. “A model, a bit of an airhead.”

  “She’s an air crash investigator,” he said pointedly, instantly wishing that he hadn’t.

  “Really…” Harriet smiled.

  The Turkish waiter came out offering no conversation and they ordered their drinks. Harriet was tempted by a piece of cake but changed her mind mid-order. Luger knew her figure could only have been attained by hard work in the gym and discipline in the kitchen. They made stunted, somewhat awkward small talk, then thankfully the coffees arrived and gave them both a prop. Luger had opted for a large Americano and Harriet had a skimmed milk latte. They sipped them gratefully, then Luger said, “Shall we stop beating around the bush?”

  She smiled, a little coquettishly. “Already?” She paused, rubbing the two largest pearls on her necklace subconsciously. “At least give me chance to drink my coffee, you naughty boy…” she giggled.

  That wasn’t what he meant, but short of asking her why she had bugged his flat, he would have to play along. Luger studied her. He was usually good at reading people but was at a loss with her. She was clever, that was for sure. She had already got him to tell her about Lillia, simply by belittling the woman and waiting for his sense of fairness to come to her defence. Did she know that her two properties had been wired for video and sound? As he studied her, he could not decide. But he did know that he was almost certainly out of his league with the MI6 officer. “What are you up to?”

  She propped both elbows on the metal table and leaned her chin on her elegant hands. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Luger shrugged. “I mean at Legoland,” he replied, referring to MI6’s obscure looking headquarters. Both an architectural triumph and utter eyesore, depending on your taste.

  “Busy times,” she replied. “How about you?”

  “Always busy.”

  “Russia?”

  “Always.”

  “Currently?”

  “Someone will be on their case, but not me. Not at the moment.” Luger shrugged and sipped some of his coffee. “How about you?”

 

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