As Nate left the consulate with the Station admin officer, the Chinese receptionist noted the pair—the admin guy was generally known to “work upstairs,” which meant the handsome young visitor likely was also CIA—and memorized Nate’s name for the weekly list of US Consulate visitors that she passed each Friday to the Hong Kong office of the MSS, located in the Amethyst Block of the Central Barracks of the People’s Liberation Army; that complex was, until 1997, the British Royal Navy shore station in Hong Kong.
The two officers went by car to the TDY guest quarters halfway up Old Peak Road. The eighth-floor apartment had two bedrooms, basic furniture, wood parquet floors, and a little flat-screen TV in a bookshelf. A small covered balcony with a deck chair had a magnificent view. To the right, the soft-green rain forest rose straight up to the fog-shrouded peak. To the left, the impossible, serried, bristling downtown of high-rise apartments, banks, and hotels thundered in the subtropical heat. Through the thicket of skyscrapers, Nate could make out the green double-decker, double-ended Star Ferries plowing in both directions across a harbor alive with Chinese junks with rust-red sails,
Nate thanked the admin officer, quickly unpacked, and walked down the hill into Central. He traversed Statue Square past the Cenotaph and the low, colonnaded Legislative Council Building, both now awkwardly quaint vestiges of British colonial rule amid the Mandarins’ towers of glass and steel. As he walked, Nate flipped the internal switch to street mode, and started paying attention. As a new arrival at the US Consulate, would he draw coverage? He slogged down sidewalks jammed with slack-faced city workers, counting faces, past high-end shops with the names of Gucci, Rolex, and Bally in the windows.
Checking a folded-up map in his pocket, he turned west on Lockhart Road, and pushed into Wan-Chai district, noisier, more Canton than Manhattan now, past countless identical restaurants all redolent with the sweet bloom of five-spice powder, dozens of roasted ducks the color of caramel hanging in the windows. Between the duck displays were white-tiled walk-in massage emporiums; old women in sandals waved for Nate to come in for a rub. He was in sensory overload and tried to find thinner zones. He weaved down quieter streets, through sour alleyways and along elevated walkways over thunderous Connaught Road jammed with taxis and swaying trucks spewing blue exhaust. Nate concentrated on clothing and shoes, looked for surveillance demeanor and signs of leapfrog coverage, but didn’t see a thing.
He stopped for a bowl of noodles and spicy pork, then ducked into Delaney’s, an English pub, with checked-tile floor, on the corner of Jaffe and Luard, and sat in the corner nursing a beer, watching the windows. Five overhead televisions blared a rugby match, and two British tourists were chatting up a pair of giggling Chinese girls in hot pants. No one came in to see where he was, or if he was meeting someone. No movement, no discernible trailing pressure, no tickles.
Nate quickly flagged a taxi and dashed west crosstown into Sheung Wan and threaded back on foot to Mid-Levels, along Queen’s Road, Elgin Street, and Upper Albert Road—quieter streets recalling past doyens of the Crown Colony—that curved, and snaked, and doubled back on themselves, past the squat old Foreign Correspondents’ Club, with its alternating red and white striped façade. He hopped onto the Mid-Levels open-air escalator that ascended eight hundred meters to Robinson Road. He didn’t detect any parallel coverage on the wings of the escalator line. He waited in a doorway, listening for the sound of running feet, got nothing, then angled back to the zoological and botanical garden. Nate lost count of the number of CCTV cameras along his route. He hadn’t come close to identifying anything remotely suggestive of active surveillance, but had no confidence in his status. His shirt was stuck to his back and his legs ached from the uphill walking.
