Dead in Hong Kong (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (32 page)

Inside that case was money.

A lot of money.

U.S. currency.

From the mother ship, Misfit, it took a full thirty minutes to reach shore, which was a desolate, rocky beach between Baltim and Damietta, Egypt. It took another three minutes to drag the vessel far enough up to where the waves couldn’t grab it.

There.

So far, so good.

He pulled the case out of the boat, carried it a hundred meters up the shore, and stashed it in the rocks. He went back to the boat, walked a kilometer in the opposite direction along the shore, and cut south for three hundred meters until he came to the road.

Then he called Rafiq and spoke in English.

“I’m here.”

“You’re late.”

Kinjo ignored it, gave him the coordinates, and said, “Be sure you come alone. I don’t want anyone in the mix that I don’t already know.”

“You got the money?”

“Of course I have the money,” Kinjo said. He almost hung up but added, “If there’s anything weird going on in your life, if there’s any reason why this isn’t going to go exactly the way it’s supposed to go, this is the time to tell me.”

Silence.

Then Rafiq said, “You worry too much. I’ll see you soon.”

KINJO HUNG UP, sat on a rock for a few heartbeats, then stood up and paced. At five-foot-nine, 150 pounds, he wasn’t big, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t intimidating. Every pound of his 28-year-old Tokyo body was taut, compressed and fast.

His stomach was concrete.

His chest was strong enough to do push-ups until
dawn a
nd his hands could snatch flies out of the air.

He had a rough, bad-boy face.

He wore his hair long, eight inches past his shoulders, sometimes loose and free but usually, like now, hanging in dreadlocks. He had two tattoos, one on his right chest and one on his right arm, both black tribal markings.  His left ear was pierced and so was his left nipple. Several pieces of bling hung around his neck, together with a cross.

The Egyptian air was hot.

Kinjo was almost dry when he first spotted headlights in the distance.

Two minutes later, Rafiq pulled u
p in an older model Honda sedan, a
lone.

He looked a couple of years older than the last time Kinjo saw him, but otherwise about the same—darkly handsome, bushy eyebrows, short black hair and a muscular body. He wore beige cotton pants and a white, long-sleeve shirt. 

“It’s been a long time,” Kinjo said.

“Three years, my friend. Three years.”

The man turned the car around, pointed the front end towards Cairo and said, “I’m still a little shocked that you had the high bid. I had no idea that you had such good clients.”

“Well, now you know.”

“Still, I’m impressed. I almost didn’t even call you for a bid. It was a last minute fluke, to tell you the truth,” Rafiq said. “And now here you are, sitting in my car—such as it is. So who is this mystery client of yours, anyway?”

Kinjo cocked his head.

“Someone who trusts me,” he said.

Rafiq laughed.

“Then you’re one up on me,” he said. “So good for you.”

An hour and a half later they pulled up to a small metal warehouse in a raggedy industrial area on the south edge of Cairo. Rafiq unlocked a metal door, stepped inside, turned on a flashlight and relocked the door behind them.

The building had no windows.

The interior was as black as an underground cave.

“Sorry, no electricity,” he said.

With the flashlight as their guide, they walked across a dirt floor to a stack of wooden pallets. Next to the pallets, lying in the dirt, was a crude ladder made of two-by-fours and nails. Rafiq picked it up, carried it across the floor, and leaned it upright against the side of the building.

Then he climbed.

Kinjo followed.

They ended up in a wooden storage area, three or four meters off the floor. The front area was cluttered with junk. Behind it, Rafiq pulled a tarp away to reveal a wooden box the size of a coffin. He grabbed a bar next to it and pried the top off. Inside was a sturdy plastic box. He lifted it out, opened the top and handed the flashlight to Kinjo.

Inside were two carefully packaged 18th Dynasty gilded cartonnage masks from the tomb of Thuya and Yuya, who were the parents of Queen Tiye, who in turn was the grandmother of Tutankhamun. The masks—initially discovered in the Valley of the Kings in 1905—recently disappeared without a trace from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Kinjo studied them carefully
a
nd found them to be genuine.

“I’m impressed,” he said.

“You are satisfied?”

“I am.”

“They’re the real thing,” Rafiq said. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

“I can tell,” Kinjo said. “How the hell did you pull it off?  That’s what I want to know—”

Rafiq slapped him on the back.

“That’s for me to know and for you to not know,” he said. “Tell your buyer there will be more interesting things for sale down the road.”

“I’ll do that.”

BACK AT THE SHORE, Rafiq counted the money and said, “There’s more here than we agreed on. Two hundred fifty thousand more, if I’m counting it right.”

“That’s my profit, from the client,” Kinjo said. “I want you to take it with you and wire it to me in Tokyo.”

Rafiq raised an eyebrow.

“You trust me to do that?”

Kinjo nodded.

“Then you’re crazier than I thought,” Rafiq said. “You must not have a very good client if you think he’s going to kill you just because you’re carrying a little of your own money around.”

“If I thought he’d do that, I wouldn’t be here right now,” Kinjo said. “But he’s anchored thirty minutes out to sea, waiting for the delivery, as we speak. That means that very soon, he’s going to have what he’s been waiting for. Sometimes, after people get what they want, they get greedy. And sometimes other people vanish at sea.” He slapped Rafiq on the back and said, “I don’t see a reason to tempt him—do you?  I’ll call you tomorrow with the account information.”

“You do that.”

THEY GOT THE MASKS SECURELY STRAPPED into the boat and then dragged it to the water’s edge. Rafiq set the case of money on the ground and hugged Kinjo goodbye. Before they pulled apart, a terrible sound erupted from
not more than fifty meters away, t
he sound of a high-powered rifle.

Rafiq’s head exploded.

Brains and blood splattered onto Kinjo’s face.

Rafiq’s body went limp in his arms.

Just as the man hit the ground, the rifle fired again. Rafiq’s body jerked violently. The bullet passed through him and shattered the case of money.

There was no time to get the boat into the water.

Kinjo grabbed a handful of loose bills, ran into the sea and dived into the first wave.

A bullet flew past his head, then another a
nd another.

Day 1—May 15

Friday Evening

NEVA
NARATEJA
LANDED IN JAMAICA just as darkness settled over the Caribbean and the lights of Montego Bay started to twinkle. A heavy rain fell out of a dark sky and pounded against the aircraft. She didn't care and smiled easily, partly because of the two Rum & Cokes in her gut, but mostly because she just survived her first full year at NYU School of Law.

The big trick now was to make some money this summer.

Money.

Money.

Money.

She wore tennis shoes and a plain black T tucked into loose jeans. Her hair was pulled back and she wore no makeup. To the casual eye, she was just one more mildly-attractive black woman in her early twenties—nice enough, but not over-the-top gorgeous by any means.  A closer look, however, would show that the first look was wrong. It would show that her light-brown Jamaican skin was flawless, her eyes were hypnotic green, and her pitch-black hair was straight, thick and healthy. A third look would show that even the second look was wrong. It would show that, in fact, there was something mysteriously compelling about her face.

Not obvious.

Not blatant.

But addictive.

It was the kind of exotic island face that sailors killed for, once they realized it was there.

THE SUMMER WOULD BE A GOOD ONE and she was more than ready for it, starting right now, this second. She’d hit the clubs tonight with Breyona, jog on the beach for a week, and then get her ass back into the world of high-fashion and modeling. Her agent—the lovely Miss Renee—had already booked her with good-paying gigs that would keep her running around the globe until classes started again in the fall. 

In ten days she’
d be in Paris to do runway work, t
hen
Rome for a major fashion shoot followed by
Prague for TV commercials.

Under her clothes was a taut body, equally at home in a bikini, high heels, or the most outrageous and wildest fashion. Her stomach was flat, her ass was round and her thighs could crank out a hundred-meter dash in 11.2 seconds.

Her lungs were good, too.

When she snorkeled the reefs, no one could stay under longer. Not even the guys.

BREYONA WASN’T WAITING FOR HER in the terminal, even though she was supposed to be, and even though
Neva
had specifically called her just last night to remind her.

Breyona.

Breyona.

Breyona.

A good roommate, a good friend—ever since third grade, in fact—but a first-class scatterbrain.

Neva
dialed her number.

No
one
answer
ed
.

"God, you are so undependable."

She waited for a half hour before giving up and muscling two oversized suitcases through the concourse to a cab. Behind the wheel was a small wiry man in his fifties, smoking and bobbing his head to a Bob Marley song, not overly interested in getting into the rain to help her. The interior smelled like a forest fire that someone had tried to douse with a hose.
Neva
threw the suitcases into the back seat, got into the front, gave him directions and added, “I’ve been in New York for the last eight months. Do you know what sucks about New York?”

No.

He didn’t.

“The smog?”

“No.”

“The traffic?”

“No,” she said. “The thing that sucks about New York is that it has no weed, man, no weed at all. I need to get Jamaica back in my
blood
, if you catch my drift."

“Consider your drift caught,” he said.

“I know some places, if you don’t.”

The man laughed.

“Good one," he said.

Ten minutes later he pulled up to the back door of a bar called The Typhoon Baboon, left the engine running and the wipers on, and disappeared inside with a hundred dollars of
Neva
’s money.  Sixty seconds later he got back in, shook water out of his hair and tossed a baggie into her lap.

“Enjoy, pretty lady.”

She examined the bag to be sure it was a fair amount.

It was.

“Can I smoke in here?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you’re going to share.”

She laughed.

“I said I was in New York,” she said. “I didn’t say New York was in me. You got papers?”

He did.

She rolled a joint, extra thick.

T
hey smoked it as the headlights punched through an ever increasing storm. Thirty minutes later, the cabbie dropped her off at a small desolate bungalow perched on a sandy bluff on the south edge of the island.

It was Neva’s home, i
nherited from her mother.

The windows were black.

No lights came from inside.

Weird.

Where was Breyona?

At the airport?

A stiff wind blew the weather into her face. Beyond the house, at the base of the bluff, waves lapped violently against the beach.  She picked up the suitcases and scooted to the front door as fast as she could. One last look at the cab showed the taillights already disappearing.

She tried the knob.

It didn’t turn.

She knocked.

"Come on, Breyona!"

No one answered.

She fumbled around in her purse until she found her keys, then opened the door and stepped inside. The house was pitch-black except for a few small green lights on the CD player across the room. A Sean Paul song—“Temperature”—came from the speakers over by the window.