Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [80]
“Mr. Hawley?”
“Mr. Li.” James Hawley’s voice rose over the sound of the water. “Another apology. I’ve been called to an urgent meeting at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. About what, I don’t know. But it makes no difference—everything you need is in an envelope in the top dresser drawer. I know you have a train to catch. We’ll have tea or a drink the next time around.”
Li Wen hesitated, then went to the dresser and opened the top drawer. Inside was a hotel envelope with the initials L. W. handwritten on the front. Taking it out, he opened it, glanced quickly at its contents, then slid it into his jacket pocket and closed the drawer.
“Thank you, Mr. Hawley,” he said at the steam coming from the bathroom door, then quickly left, closing the door behind him. The contents of the envelope were precisely as promised, and there was no need to stay longer. He had little more than seven minutes to leave the hotel, dodge the traffic on Jianguomennan Avenue, and get to his train.
HAD LI WEN FORGOTTEN something and come back to retrieve it, he would have seen a short, stocky Chinese in a business suit exit the bathroom in James Hawley’s place. Stepping to the window, he looked out and saw Li Wen cross the street in front of the hotel and walk quickly toward the railroad station.
Turning from the window, he took a suitcase from under the bed, put James Hawley’s carefully laid-out clothes into it, and then left, leaving the room key on the bed.
Five minutes later he was at the wheel of his silver Opel, picking up his cell phone and turning onto Chongwenmendong Street. Chen Yin grinned. Publicly he was a successful merchant of cut flowers, but on quite another level he was a master of spoken language and dialect. One that he particularly delighted in using was American English—speaking the way a man like James Hawley, a polite, if harried, hydro-biological engineer from Walnut Creek, California, might, if he existed.
51
Cortona, Italy. Sunday, July 12, 5:10 A.M.
11:10 A.M. in Beijing
“THANK YOU, MY FRIEND,” THOMAS KIND SAID in English. Then, clicking off the cellular, he put it on the seat beside him. Chen Yin’s call had been within the allocated time window, and the news was as he had expected. Li Wen had the documents and was on his way home. There had been no face-to-face contact. Chen Yin was good. Dependable. And he had found Li Wen, not an easy thing to do—uncover the perfect all-too-accommodating pawn who had all the skills and reasons to do as asked, yet who, if circumstance required, could be disavowed or simply liquidated at any time.
Chen Yin had been paid beforehand, as a deposit in good faith, and once Li Wen had done his job, he would be paid the remainder of what he was owed. Then both would vanish: Li Wen because his usefulness would be over and they dared leave no trace back to them; Chen Yin, because it would be wise for him to leave the country for a time and because his money was out of China anyway, deposited in the Union Square branch of a Wells Fargo bank in downtown San Francisco.
SOMEWHERE A ROOSTER CROWED, the sound bringing Thomas Kind immediately back to the task at hand. Ahead, in the predawn light, he could just see the house. It sat back from the road and behind a stone wall, a layer of mist hanging over the ploughed fields across from it.
He could have gone in just after he’d arrived, at a little past midnight. He would have cut the power, and the night-vision goggles would have given him the advantage. But still the killing would have had to be done in the dark. And against three men in a house he did not know.
So he’d waited, parking the rented Mercedes on an out-of-the-way cul-de-sac a mile away. There he’d field-stripped and checked his weapons in the darkness—twin 9mm Walther MPKs, mascinen pistole kurz, machine pistols with thirty-round magazines—then rested, his