Hungry Ghost Read online

  ‘MI6 tells us that the ultimatum was delivered to Beijing by one of the triads in Hong Kong, the Chinese mafia if you like. They are especially fearful of what will happen when the colony comes under full Chinese jurisdiction. They execute criminals in China, you know. In football stadiums. Parents take their children to watch.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a simple matter for the big hongs like Jardine Matheson to switch their domicile to Bermuda, or for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank to invest money overseas and transfer its capital around the world, but the triads are firmly rooted in Hong Kong. They cannot afford to give up their illegal activities in the colony. They simply have too much to lose. So with only a few years to go before the British pull out they have decided that their only hope is to delay the handover. They want the status quo to continue, for fifty years at least.’

  ‘Why fifty years, sir?’ asked Donaldson.

  Grey smiled thinly at the man’s lack of knowledge. ‘In 1997 Hong Kong will be given back to China, but for fifty years after handover it will operate under its own rules and regulations. It will have its own Government, including its own elected representatives, and its own laws, which are currently being drafted. It will be part of China, but at the same time separate from it. Special Administrative Region, I think they’re going to call it. It will stay that way until 2047 when it will become just another part of China. But during those fifty years the policing of Hong Kong will be the responsibility of the Chinese. And it is that which is worrying the triads.’

  ‘I thought they were bailing out along with anyone else who can afford to buy a passport, sir,’ said Donaldson, and was rewarded with a nod from the older man.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not as simple as that. Any sort of criminal record will stop them getting into Canada, Australia or the United States. The middle classes and the rich have no problems buying second passports, but it’s standard practice in most Western countries to cross-check with Special Branch in Hong Kong to ensure that applicants don’t have triad connections. I’ve no doubt they could buy a passport from Andorra but most of them have nowhere to go. Some have managed to get out and as a result many of the triads are active overseas. They operate anywhere where there are Chinatowns … or Chinese restaurants. But the bulk of their income comes from vice, drugs and extortion in Hong Kong. And they are naturally reluctant to lose that revenue.’

  ‘But surely, sir, contaminating Hong Kong is no answer?’

  Grey shrugged and reached for his cup and saucer again. ‘It seems to be a sort of scorched-earth policy. If they can’t have it, no one else will. But I suppose they assume that their demands will be met.’

  ‘All they want is for the police force to remain British, you say?’

  Grey drained his cup and sighed. ‘You know what happens when you give in to blackmail, particularly where terrorists are involved. You submit once and the stakes are raised next time. The Chinese are not stupid. They know if they give in to this demand then more will follow. And to be frank, there is not one hope in hell of the Chinese – or the British – agreeing. The British Government just wants a clean withdrawal and the Chinese want complete control. No, their demands will not be met. The men behind it must be stopped.’

  Donaldson nodded.

  ‘That’s why I need your help,’ said Grey.

  ‘I don’t follow, sir,’ said Donaldson, feeling out of his depth.

  ‘On no account must the Chinese be aware that we know of the blackmail threat. We haven’t been approached officially, nor will we be. That is why we cannot deal with this through normal channels, as news would soon filter back to Peking.’

  ‘I hardly think we have any Chinese double-agents, sir,’ said Donaldson smugly.

  ‘If we have I wouldn’t expect you to know about them,’ said Grey, and Donaldson winced at the reprimand. ‘No, our department cannot be involved officially. Or unofficially for that matter.’

  ‘So you want me to arrange a freelance, sir?’

  ‘No,’ said Grey, carefully putting his cup and saucer back on the table and looking wistfully at the now empty teapot. ‘No, not a freelance.’ He looked up at Donaldson, eyes shining like a ferret’s. ‘We want to use Howells.’

  Donaldson stiffened as if he’d been plugged into the mains.

  ‘Howells is dead,’ he said.

  ‘Retired,’ stressed Grey.

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ said Donaldson.

  ‘No,’ smiled Grey. ‘I mean he really was retired. Pensioned off. He’s alive, and available.’

  Donaldson sank back into the easy chair, his mind whirling as it tried to come to terms with what he’d heard.

  ‘Howells is a psychopath,’ he spluttered.

  ‘Actually, I think the phrase the psychologists use is sociopath, admittedly with homicidal tendencies. Though you’ll have to take it from me that Geoff Howells is a changed man, for the moment at least. Have you seen the garden?’

  The change in subject caught Donaldson by surprise. ‘I’m sorry, sir?’ he said.

  ‘The garden, have you seen the garden? Come on, I feel like a walk.’

  He led the younger man down along the hall to the back door where he pulled off his slippers and donned a pair of green Wellington boots. He gestured towards a matching pair.

  ‘The grass is still wet. Try those for size. They’re my son’s, he’s up at Oxford.’

  He would be, thought Donaldson. The boots fitted, though.

  Grey hauled open the door to be greeted by two heaving Labradors, one black, one golden-brown, tongues lolling out of the corners of their mouths, tails wagging madly, overjoyed to see their master. Donaldson had seen similar reactions from section heads going into Grey’s monthly think-tank meetings. Not that Donaldson had ever attended one. The black dog leapt up and tried to lick Grey’s face and he pushed it away, though obviously pleased at the show of affection.

  ‘Down, Lady,’ he said, but there was no harshness in his voice.

  The dogs ran in circles around the two men as they walked along the edge of the lawn which sloped gently down towards a small orchard. The grass formed a triangular shape with the base at the house and the clump of apple trees filling the apex. The garden was bordered by a thick privet hedge some ten feet high and between it and the lawn was a wide flower bed packed with plants and bushes. The air was cool and moist and Donaldson breathed in deeply, savouring its freshness.

  ‘Do you live in the country?’ asked Grey.

  ‘Ealing, sir,’ replied Donaldson.

  ‘Ah,’ said Grey quietly, as if he’d just heard that Donaldson was an orphan.

  ‘I have a garden, though,’ Donaldson added, and then inwardly squirmed as he realized how lame that sounded. They walked in silence for a while until Grey sniffed the air and turned to peer upward at the roof.

  ‘Damn chimney’s smoking too much, I’ll have to get it swept. Have you any idea how much it costs to have a chimney swept?’

  Donaldson didn’t; his three-bedroomed semi had radiators in every room.

  They wandered into the orchard, a dozen or so trees twice the height of a man, a mixture of apple, pear and plum, and Grey carefully inspected each one.

  ‘Do you think they need spraying?’ asked Grey, but Donaldson guessed it was rhetorical.

  You never knew with Grey, that was the problem. He was often so subtle, so obtuse, that it was easy to miss what he was trying to say. He’d once called in one of his departmental heads for a half-hour chat and the poor man had walked out of the office without even realizing that he’d been sacked. It wasn’t until Grey passed him in the corridor a week later that he discovered he was still on the payroll. It wasn’t unusual for group meetings with Grey to be followed by a flurry of phone calls along the lines of ‘what exactly did we decide?’ Donaldson was on edge for any hint, any clue as to what it was that Grey wanted. All he knew so far was that it involved Geoff Howells, a man he thought had been dead for more than three years.

  That was the last time one
of his expense sheets had passed over his desk. Ridiculously high, as usual. Donaldson had enjoyed wielding the red pen, often slashing them by half. Until the day Howells had burst into Donaldson’s office. Jesus, he’d been terrified. Damn near pissed himself.

  ‘Did you ever work with Howells?’ asked Grey.

  Donaldson shook his head. ‘No, but I followed his career with interest.’

  ‘Short but eventful,’ said Grey. ‘He managed to gain quite a reputation in a relatively short period of time.’

  ‘Captain in the SAS, wasn’t he? Trained to kill.’ And the bastard damn near killed me, thought Donaldson. He’d grabbed him by the throat and pinned him to the wall. That’s all Donaldson remembered until he woke up in the empty office with one of Howells’ expense sheets shoved between his teeth. That was the last time he’d used the red pen.

  ‘Special Boat Section, actually. One of the best. Did a superb job during the Falklands War, led one of the advance reconnaissance teams sent in to identify the Argentinian positions. Recorded nine kills during a four-day mission.’

  ‘Impressive,’ said Donaldson.

  ‘Problem was,’ said Grey, studying a small patch of green mould on the trunk of one of the plum trees, ‘two of them were SAS troopers. That’s when he came to our attention.’

  ‘What!’ exploded Donaldson.

  ‘We hushed it all up of course, we were getting enough bad publicity at the time as it was.’

  By ‘we’ Donaldson assumed he meant the British. ‘What happened, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘He joined one of our more low profile departments.’

  ‘No, sir, I mean what happened to the SAS men?’

  ‘Howells was sitting in a hole a hundred yards or so from an Argentinian artillery unit when two SAS soldiers practically fell on top of him. According to Howells one of them was about to shoot and he reacted instinctively, killed one with a punch to the throat and knocked the other to the ground and broke his neck. It was over in seconds, apparently, and the Argentinians didn’t hear a thing. He left the bodies in the hole. One of life’s little tragedies.’

  Donaldson thought for a moment that Grey had made a joke, but realized that he was serious.

  ‘We took him in and trained him. He was good, very good. One of the best, in fact. Ten clean kills in a two-year period. Never any problems, not as far as the technical side was concerned, anyway. I am going to have to speak to Perkins about this.’

  ‘Perkins?’ said Donaldson, totally confused.

  ‘My gardener. He’s going to have to do something about this mould. It can kill the tree if it isn’t treated, you know.’

  Donaldson didn’t know, and frankly he didn’t give a toss. He had only one tree at the end of his pocket-handkerchief of a garden.

  ‘He started to enjoy the work, that was the trouble.’ Donaldson realized Grey had switched back to Howells, though he was still studying the mould intently.

  ‘The psychologists picked it up during his monthly checkup. He was fretting when he wasn’t working and they discovered that he’d put a little too much, shall we say, effort into his last job. His target was a Libyan student who planted that messy bomb in Manchester some time back, you remember the one? Killed three people. Nothing we could prove in court so Howells’ department was told to arrange a termination. Howells decided to make it look like a car accident. And he did, too. By the time they cut the Libyan out of the wreckage there was barely an unbroken bone in his body.’

  ‘So?’ said Donaldson, though he knew what was coming.

  ‘So that’s the way the Libyan went into the car. Howells killed him with his bare hands – slowly and very painfully.’

  That was one of the crazy things about their line of work, mused Donaldson. You could do the job, and do it professionally, but once you started to enjoy it, you were finished. The psychologists reckoned that only a madman could enjoy killing, but they never asked if a truly sane man would do the job in the first place. Going by the names and expense sheets that went across Donaldson’s desk, three years was as long as they normally lasted in the job, though some could go on for much longer. The CIA was rumoured to have a grandmother on their books who’d been active for nigh on thirty-five years.

  ‘You know why he wasn’t transferred?’ Donaldson didn’t, of course. ‘We tried to shift him over to a desk job, but Howells wouldn’t have any of it. Said he wanted to carry on doing what he was good at, what we had trained him to do. Said he wouldn’t accept a transfer.’

  That happened sometimes, when operatives got so addicted to the adrenalin rush that they couldn’t bear to lose it. And if they were forcibly moved into another job they’d find another outlet for their frustrations and innocent bystanders would get hurt. It happened, but when it did the man, or woman, was swiftly retired. And retirement didn’t mean a pension and a cottage in Devon. Retirement meant permanent. It was never spoken about openly, not at Donaldson’s level, anyway. But every now and again a name would just disappear from the approved-expenses list and the file would be recalled by Personnel and never seen again. Donaldson had breathed a sigh of relief when Howells’ name and file had gone. The man was a nutter, a dangerous nutter.

  The two men walked out of the trees and back along the lawn towards the house. Grey picked up a small dead branch and threw it for the dogs. They rushed after it, barking and barging into each other. They reached it at the same time and grabbed an end each, pulling it and grunting with pleasure. Donaldson knew exactly how the stick felt.

  ‘Where is he now, sir?’

  ‘Bali.’

  ‘Bali?’

  ‘Indonesia.’

  This was becoming bizarre, thought Donaldson. In the space of a few minutes the conversation had gone from a threat to destroy a Chinese power station to a retired killer lying on a beach in Indonesia. And somewhere in the middle, like the stick caught between two dogs, was Donaldson himself.

  ‘We want to use Howells to clear up this Daya Bay business,’ said Grey.

  ‘Daya Bay?’

  ‘That’s where the nuclear reactor is. We want Howells to defuse the situation.’

  He didn’t seem to realize the pun. The black Labrador had won the tussle over the stick and came running over to Grey to present the trophy, and receive a pat on the head for her trouble. The other dog pretended to lose interest and wandered among the trees, sniffing at roots.

  ‘Why Howells, sir?’ asked Donaldson, hoping it didn’t sound like criticism.

  ‘We need someone who can’t be traced back to us, someone who isn’t on our books, and that rules out staffers and freelances. The Chinese mustn’t know that we know, if you see what I mean. So any action we take must be completely covert.’

  ‘But surely that would also rule out Howells, sir?’ Donaldson though he knew what was coming and he prayed to God that he was wrong. He didn’t want to meet Howells again – ever.

  ‘Because he used to work for us? That isn’t a problem. He’s never worked in Hong Kong or China, so it’s unlikely he would be recognized. His mental problems and his retirement are no secret, and if anything goes wrong it would be assumed that he’d just gone on the rampage. I can’t think anybody would believe that the British Government would use such an agent.’

  Donaldson agreed with that one. And his own involvement was starting to give him an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. His urge to go to the toilet was increasing by the minute. Maybe it was the tea, maybe it was the cold air, or maybe it was the thought of working with Howells. That seemed to be what Grey was suggesting.

  ‘I must repeat that it is crucial that the Chinese do not find out that the British Government is involved. The negotiations between the triads and the Chinese are being conducted at the highest level in Peking and there is only a handful of people involved. If they discover that we know what is going on, there is a good chance it will expose our source. There must be no connection at all seen between Howells and my department.’

  Which, thought
Donaldson, is why I’m here. To provide the distance.

  ‘Howells isn’t the man he was,’ continued Grey.

  ‘In what way, sir?’

  Grey thought for a while, oblivious of the dog shuffling backwards and forwards at his feet waiting for the saliva-smeared stick to be thrown.

  ‘Have you ever had a tooth capped?’ he asked.

  Donaldson shook his head. What the hell did teeth have to do with this? There were times when he wondered if the older man really was starting to go gaga.

  ‘It’s worth doing if you’ve got a tooth that’s so badly rotted that it can’t be repaired with a normal amalgam filling. You build another tooth out of porcelain and metal and bond it to what’s left of the original tooth. It looks real and it functions as normal.’

  He threw the stick hard and high and the dog hurtled after it as it curved through the air. The dog in the orchard pretended not to notice, but its tail wasn’t wagging.

  ‘Howells had a personality that was rotten to the core. For whatever reason, he’d got to the stage where he enjoyed inflicting pain, enjoyed killing. He spent six months in a private sanatorium while some of the best psychologists in the country tried to undo the damage – but to no avail. Their conclusion was that Geoff Howells could never be returned to society. He was facing a lifetime in a Broadmoor cell weaving baskets.’

  The dog was back, stick in mouth, but Grey ignored her. The two men had returned to the back door of the house but Grey made no move to open it. Donaldson’s bladder was starting to hurt.

  ‘We decided instead to try a different method, which brings us back to the dental analogy. They produced a new personality and in effect grafted it on to the old one, just like capping a bad tooth. They used deep hypnosis and God knows what drugs to suppress all his killer instincts, dampened his feelings and emotions and overlaid them with a new set. He has the memories of what went before, but it’s as if they belong to someone else. To all intents and purposes Howells is now a confirmed pacifist, as docile as a lamb. We’ve done a few favours for the Indonesian Government over the years so we arranged for him to live there.’