Bunty and Nate met at the Macao ferry terminal in Kowloon at 1000 and boarded the stubby burgundy-colored hydrofoil for the hour-long dash past sugarloaf islands of the South China Sea, their peaks cloaked in a humid haze. The two officers slipped on board in the midst of a crowd of chattering Chinese day-trippers, and sat apart on airliner seats with cloth covers on the headrests, listening to the grommets in the overhead panels chittering with the vibration, as the hydrofoil skimmed over a dead-flat sea, throwing a rooster tail of white spray behind it. Nate wore a lightweight summer suit and a shirt with a long pointed collar; a florid necktie in a vertigo-inducing pattern favored by fashion-challenged Russian officials worldwide was in his pocket. He had slicked his dark hair down with a perfumed pomade supplied by Marigold, and wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses with lightly smoked lenses. The light disguise would break up his profile.
They took care to exit the Macao terminal in the middle of the same gaggle of tourists, and walked several blocks before flagging a random cruising taxi on the street. With Bunty speaking passable Chinese, they hired the driver for the day, and proceeded on a meandering sightseeing tour, crisscrossing the thirty-square-kilometer island of Taipa looking for indicators of trailing surveillance. They stopped at the Macao Giant Panda Pavilion, took a winding mountain road through the rain forest to the A-Ma Cultural Village, then angled southwest to the Portuguese colonial village of Coloane, and walked among the pastel villas and storefronts, ending up in the quaint Marques Square, paved with cobblestones of black and white set in a wavy pattern, a vestige of the colony’s maritime past. They stepped into the cool recesses of the canary-yellow chapel of St. Francis Xavier, the royal-blue front apse painted with clouds and seagulls. Nate peeked out a window and snapped his fingers softly to attract Bunty’s attention.
A short Chinese man dressed in black slacks and white shirt loitered under an arch of the flanking colonnade in the square, the first “possible” they had seen the entire day. So far, inconclusive, but time to stretch him a little to see what he’d do. They meandered through the narrow streets of the village, executed two natural reverses, and entered three separate stores, but the man did not reappear. Was he a spotter? Was a bigger team watching from the wings? Were they stuffed in a bottle and didn’t know it? How could coverage be that good? This was the familiar hell of surveillance detection: not seeing anything, not knowing. Keep going.
Back in the taxi they drove around the southern end of the island, past the black volcanic beaches on sweeping horseshoe bays, then off the main road again onto a rutted winding road up to the A-frame Chapel of Our Lady of Pain. “Fucking appropriate,” Bunty muttered, his shirt stuck to his back. Unlike the Panda Pavilion, this mountaintop clearing was deserted. No vehicles appeared, no pedestrians came out of the trees. Leaving the taxi driver in the parking lot, Bunty and Nate followed an overgrown and curving cement walkway into the stinking jungle, and in three minutes came to a clearing and a cluster of five small derelict houses in the Portuguese colonial style with columns and porticoes, and a magnificent view of the sea below. Broken stone stairways led up to crumbling porches and fallen lintels. Ragged window frames were choked with jungle creeper. The ruined interiors were green with moss and dripping in the sour air. The middle house in the semicircle of the five villas had a splintered balustrade along the once-elegant porch, rusted iron poking out of the flaking cement. A large ornamental stone urn stood to one side of the splintered front door, its matching twin long since tumbled and smashed. Bunty and Nate looked carefully into the deep urn, then looked at each other. “Dead drop,” whispered Nate, and Bunty nodded. They now had at least one Macao drop site for use with the general.
Back in the taxi, Bunty asked about the five abandoned villas in the jungle. This prompted an extended explanation in agitated Chinese from the driver, who several times turned around to look at his passengers, usually as the taxi was entering a hairpin curve, and was accompanied by a violent brushing of hands, and a remarkably loud pantomime of violent sneezing. Bunty sat back in the seat and laughed.
“What’s so funny,” said Nate. “What did he say?”
“Jesus Christ, the bloody place was a leper colony in the twenties,” said Bunty. “The driver suggested we wash our hands before dinner.”
“
