On Fire

Dai Gu does not want to report back to Chung Yao. He has chased Zak and Kim as they have made their way to Hong Kong, and he has been careful not to be noticed. Yao can be counted on to be less than understanding with the way things have gone so far. For this reason, it would be much better to simply deliver the prize and avoid lengthy and unnecessary explanations. What do they benefit anyone?

  So Dai Gu has stayed on the case. He has had no difficulty in tracking Zak and Kim’s whereabouts since he picked up on them at the Chinese People’s Public Security Bureau. But this odd side trip has made him cautious. He is, as always, concerned about being made, so that a stop at the nation’s center of police training puts him on his guard. Whatever happens, he cannot let this egghead kid and his pretty girlfriend outsmart him. He would never live it down.

  Gu pokes his head around the corner of the end of his train car. He can get a view through the small windows between adjoining cars and just barely see the couple sitting at a booth at the other end of the smartly set out dining car. He can’t really loiter here long as his seat is back in another car and the Chinese are easily offended by interlopers just up and deciding to sit wherever they want. So he takes his time to the degree that he can, checks, and returns to his seat.

  Zak and Kim had returned to their apartment and it was outside that building where Dai Gu managed to be when the two of them left with full backpacks. He was not surprised when they took the Number 9 subway to the City’s high speed rail station. To get out of town when people start shooting is pretty much a normal human reaction. Gu has had to do it on more than one occasion himself. But when Gu flashed fake credentials to find out where they were going, questioning the ticket officer they had just bought their tickets from, he was surprised to be told that their destination was Hong Kong. After all, Hong Kong would be at the very end of that train’s high speed rail line, the longest in existence, not only in China, but in the world. That was a long way just to get out of town.

  The Beijing to Hong Kong CRH would take him directly to its Kowloon terminus in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Zak and Kim weren’t just getting out of town, they were leaving mainland China. Dai Gu would need a passport, as the woman at the ticket counter had requested, in order to sell him a ticket. Fortunately for Gu, he happened to have one. Chung Yao had seen to it, but the passport that was supplied to him was of course a fake. Furthermore, authorities were always coming up with new ways to look for false documents. He had heard that there now was a way to use the passport photo for a kind of facial recognition test. Being unmasked as Dai Gu in an airport security line would be a very tough spot to find himself in, tougher even to escape, and by many orders of magnitude.

  Nevertheless, Gu permitted himself to purchase a ticket. He had the presence of mind to ask for seating several cars away from Zak and Kim. Now he had to be careful that they didn’t see him. And he had to ditch the gun.

  What had started out as a piece of cake, find a kid, steal his toy, the memory device, and high tail it back to Yao, all of which seemed pretty simple at first, was now becoming, annoyingly, too much work. The only good thing was that Yao and the Triad were based in Hong Kong, so that by fleeing there, Zak and Kim were in essence leading him home.

  Chapter 15