"Of course; I would not be here otherwise. Do you have the price that was asked?"
"Naturally." Was he trying to impugn HsienKo"s honour?, Probably not; these westerners just didn"t understand respect or face. "She recommends a direct exchange; your wares for ours."
"The exchange will be made at Gongpinglu Wharf as we suggested?"
Kwok"s leathery face split into a professional smile. "It was an excellent choice. We approve. We will bring our payment to the wharf at midnight. I suggest you and your people be ready."
"We will be." Vogler drained his gla.s.s, and rose. "Until midnight, Herr Kwok."
Kwok nodded, and Vogler left as the waiter returned with Kwok"s sparkling beer. "Bring a telephone." The waiter hurried off again, and Kwok relaxed slightly. He was reminded of his first meeting with HsienKo. That had been in a club not unlike this one, albeit smaller and less cla.s.sy. He had been a bouncer then and she had been making such deals with the likes of Vogler. Things had been simpler then, but no less satisfying.
He sipped his beer as the singer began a new song. The confirmation of the deal would please HsienKo, and that was what mattered.
Four.
couple of grubbily dressed stevedores were sitting Aaround a brazier with a coffee pot when Li arrived on the wharf. He had come dressed in similarly disreputable clothes so as not to arouse suspicion, and knew that the other officers who were already at the wharf and in hiding had also come in disguise.
It had taken him some time to decide what to wear; the very idea of clothing himself in anything that was not properly washed and pressed smacked of laziness. At first he had tried to a.s.semble a suitably grimy set of rags, but it was obvious even to him that the mixture was too methodical, and so clearly false. That meant that there was a danger that others could spot it as false, too.
In the end, he had confiscated the clothes of a genuine dock worker roughly his size, who had been arrested earlier for drunkenness. You couldn"t get more authentic than the real thing. He only hoped the British had enough sense to keep the Sikhs in hiding in their truck as he had instructed: one flash of a uniform, and the suspects would never arrive.
He had brought a simple canvas sack with him, just as the other workers would have for their snacks. Li"s, however, contained a torch, a camera for photographing any evidence that might need to be verified as untampered with later, and a Very pistol with which to signal his men to move in. He hoped it wouldn"t be a long wait: the sooner he got rid of these filthy rags and into something more respectable, the better.
The British Public Gardens were on the northern sh.o.r.e of the Huangpu just along from where the TARDIS had landed. A Sikh guard had been standing in a sentry box by the gate, opposite a sign which read "No dogs or Chinamen". The Doctor and Romana, not being Chinese, had had no difficulty in making their way through. Once through the peaceful park, they had continued onwards, following the eastward curve of the Huangpu along towards the easternmost docks which were halfway between the city and the sea.
Cars and small vans pa.s.sed occasionally as the docks were constantly in use, even at night. A few workers gave them odd looks as they pa.s.sed through the main gate, but they went unchallenged. The necks of steel cranes poked above the long roofs of various warehouses and workshops. "It"s a large place," Romana said quietly.
"Ships from all over the planet come here. If someone is messing around with the fourth segment, though, they"ll want to do it somewhere that isn"t too busy." He looked around.
"Try the tracer now."
Romana activated the device, which ticked softly when pointed east. "The far end of the docks."
"Probably a smaller dock; one that isn"t important enough to use this late at night." He started off along some rails set into the cobbles, whistling the theme to Popeye Popeye. As they moved, they saw fewer workers, and the shadows around the decreasing number of illuminated buildings grew deeper and darker. The Doctor stopped whistling. "Stay on your guard.
This isn"t a very friendly area."
"I had gathered that."
They moved on towards a large building whose windows were mostly broken. A sharp hiss ahead made the pair stop in their tracks as a match flickered into brief life. The Doctor and Romana pressed themselves against the dark side of the building as a man slouched round the corner. In the light from the match with which he was lighting a cigarette, they could see the glint of a Thompson submachine gun that was held in the crook of his arm.
The man paused to look around, then turned and wandered back beyond the corner. The Doctor and Romana let out sighs of relief. "I see what you mean," Romana whispered. "He didn"t look very friendly. He was obviously a guard of some kind, but what was he guarding?"
"Something on the other side of this building, obviously."
The Doctor sidled a few feet along the wall, then stopped with a m.u.f.fled groan. "Maybe he was guarding the lights that should be illuminating this fire-escape! Come on." He scrambled up the iron staircase in a matter of moments. While Romana followed, he bent to listen at the door at the top.
"What"s inside?"
The Doctor shook his head. "I can"t hear a thing. Probably a mimes" convention." He made a few adjustments to his sonic screwdriver and opened the door. The s.p.a.ce inside was pitch-black, though a few patches of moonlight formed grey windows on the floor below. The door itself seemed to have opened onto a wide upper catwalk. More dim greyness formed squares on the far wall, as the moonlight shone into a windowed upper office.
Treading carefully, the Doctor and Romana made their way round to the office. It was a small wood-walled cubbyhole with interior windows overlooking the floor below and exterior ones overlooking the wharf outside the building. "This must have been some kind of customs office," the Doctor said, "but it looks as if it"s the maid"s year off."
"Dust is the least of our concerns; there are men with guns out there, remember?"
"Exactly; and now we have a grandstand view of what they"re up to."
Li ducked back into the shadows under a crane as a trio of Opel Maultier trucks rumbled slowly around the corner of the warehouse. The trucks ground to a halt at the foot of one of the saurian cranes that reached out across the waterfront. Men jumped down from the backs of the vehicles and pulled their tarpaulin covers aside.
Two men who were waiting amidst a junction of rails a short distance away began to approach. The cab doors opened, and a trio of Europeans emerged to meet the others halfway.
Fortunately the night was quiet and Li could just about make out their footsteps, which meant he would possibly hear their speech as well.
"I see you"re very punctual," the leader of the waiting men said smoothly. He was lean with a pockmarked face and s.h.a.ggy hair.
The European in the pale suit nodded. "Naturally, Herr Kwok. I"m told we value efficiency more than anything.
Where is she?"
"On her way. In our business, it pays to be careful."
Yan Cheh listened with interest. He had recognized Kwok at once as the driver who had been waiting with the Studebaker for that oddly familiar woman in Bubbling Well Road. He wondered if she would turn up tonight as well.
He was perched on a warehouse roof directly above the leading truck and so had an excellent view of the proceedings.
His sources had informed him of an unusual meeting to take place with a man called Vogler and some other Europeans, but he had scarcely dared imagine that the mysterious pair from last night would be the other party involved.
Whatever was going on, they certainly weren"t common thieves, so perhaps they weren"t his problem anyway. He had to be sure, however. His ruminations were interrupted by the sound of a powerful engine erupting into life in the middle of the harbour. Looking across, he could make out the lights of a boat surging across the water towards the wharf. It was odd that he hadn"t noticed its presence there already, but he had had other things on his mind.
The engine sound faded away as a motor launch of highly polished wood coasted in towards a jetty at the foot of the quayside steps. Several figures in the tiny shelter deck behind the wheelhouse were already bracing themselves for the imminent halt. One was unmistakably the same white-coated girl he had followed from Bubbling Well Road to Nang Tao; very slight, but carrying herself with remarkable confidence and purpose.
With her were a couple of coolies and a pa.s.senger so unexpected that Yan Cheh wondered if he were hallucinating an older woman in a nursemaid"s blue uniform, with a pram.
The coolies secured the launch, while Kwok lowered a set of steps to the boat. The younger woman paused to speak inaudibly to the nursemaid and check the pram, then ascended to the dockside. Kwok led her over towards the trucks where the Europeans were waiting.
The tracer"s crackles were already fading by the time Romana had fixed the direction it was indicating. It had returned to that steady ticking in a matter of moments. "It"s reading due south."
The Doctor peered out of the dusty customs office window.
"Just the direction that boat came from."
"Could the fourth segment be on board?"
"Anything"s possible."
"We should have brought K9. Perhaps his sensors could have told us something."
"Time to use our own sensors, I think." Romana gave him a puzzled look as he held out his hand for the tracer.
"Out there? Are you mad?"
"Shh. Stealth and subtlety, remember?"
The westerner in the pale suit doffed his hat with the slightest of bows. "Good evening, fraulein," the leader began. "It is a pleasure to see you and Herr Kwok once more."
HsienKo nodded pleasantly. "I"m sure it is, Herr Vogler. I trust the wait hasn"t been too unpleasant."
"Tolerable. You are prepared to do business?"
"Naturally. You have my purchases?"
Vogler nodded and waved to two of his companions who brought forward a pair of crates and set them down. Vogler opened the larger crate"s lid, and lifted out the tubular frame of a submachine gun. Unlike the weapons with which Kwok was familiar, there was no wood anywhere in its construction.
"Next year"s model, MP 38. Made by Ermawerke in Erfurt, it"ll be issued first to the Bodyguard next year." He handed it over to HsienKo. Kwok opened the smaller crate. It was full of rectangular magazines. Kwok picked one up, weighing it in his hand. "Twenty-five rounds each," Vogler told him.
HsienKo examined the MP 38 closely, working the mechanism experimentally. "Interesting. How many have you brought?"
Vogler shrugged. "Six hundred, plus six hundred thousand rounds of ammunition."
HsienKo"s head tilted slightly. "The deal was for a thousand guns and one million rounds."
Vogler spread his hands. "These haven"t even been issued in Germany yet. Security surrounding the factory is outrageous. If the authorities even began to think that extra numbers have been made and smuggled out of the country, I"d be hanged immediately."
HsienKo pa.s.sed the gun to Kwok. "Isn"t the price I"m paying you worth that risk?"
Vogler looked away briefly. "Not quite, no."
HsienKo gazed at him for a few moments. "Then you"ll understand if the payment is reduced by a similar percentage?
Six hundred pounds of opium resin."
"Perfectly understandable, fraulein."
Yan Cheh slipped quietly along the roof, making for a rusty fire-escape. The purchase of so many guns would be beyond the scope of most of the Tongs, but not beyond the KMT.
They might simply be conducting underhand deals with the Germans to avoid putting the Americans" noses out of joint.
That being the case, the guns were unlikely to end up on the streets.
The door to the customs office below opened with the tiniest of creaks, and Yan Cheh froze. A tall westerner with curly hair and a ridiculously unseasonal scarf slipped out. The westerner looked around without even bothering to duck out of sight, and tiptoed down the fire-escape. A woman in a plain red skirt and top followed him.
Curious, and wondering if this might be a betrayal on the part of the Europeans, Yan Cheh dropped silently onto the canvas top of one of the empty trucks. From here he could take whatever action might be necessary.
Li waited with baited breath. The moment that the opium was brought out from that launch, he would have them. His ancestors would be proud of him for such a victory. He pulled the Very pistol from his bag, checking that a signal flare was already loaded.
Any moment now... A flicker of movement caught his eye: a tall man with curly hair was slipping out from the corner of the warehouse, and heading towards the crane just aft of the launch. No one else had noticed him yet, but the moment they did, everyone would vanish like the morning mist after sunrise. "d.a.m.n!" he hissed, and quickly fired the Very pistol into the black sky. Sikhs and the other undercover police immediately leapt out from behind the warehouse doors and the nests amid piles of dockside cargo.
Kwok slapped the palmed magazine into the MP 38 as HsienKo glared at Vogler. The German was looking around with the expression of a startled rabbit. Clearly he was innocent of betrayal, or he wouldn"t be so shocked. There was still the question of his being able to identify them, however, so Kwok opened fire anyway.
Vogler and his comrades barely had time to blink before they spun, dead, to the ground. Kwok replaced the empty magazine with another from the crate, and tossed the gun to HsienKo, who caught it deftly. "Good gun."
The smugglers scattered as policemen swarmed into the open under the red light of the flare. A few gunshots boomed out across the wharf.
HsienKo had frozen in mid-step, her head canted to look at the man with the scarf and curls. She started to frown, then her eyes widened in an expression of surprised recognition. "It can"t be..."
A policeman knocked the gun from her frozen hands, but Kwok speedily kicked him to the ground. "Run!" Two more policemen took aim with their own guns, but Kwok hurriedly lifted their unconscious colleague as a shield. They held their fire, and Kwok ran forward to hurl their colleague bodily into them. He grabbed the arm of one, and cracked him on the chin with his elbow. The policeman"s gun went off as he blacked out, and the shot blasted the other officer into the river before he could regain his balance.
Yan Cheh didn"t know who the two westerners were, but it seemed they were definitely not with either Vogler or the Tong. Perhaps they too were friends of the Fallen Angel.
Kwok was blasting away at anyone who got in his way, and was already turning towards the western woman.
Yan Cheh wasn"t about to let her be murdered, so he leapt upon Kwok from atop the truck. Both men fell, their hands locked around Kwok"s gun. Kwok"s eyes held a glint of obsession, or madness, and Yan Cheh recoiled from them. Yan Cheh twisted his head away as the gun went off with a flash, almost deafening him in his left ear. Kwok screamed, tumbling backwards and losing his grip on the gun. Yan Cheh saw that Kwok"s right eye was obscured by blistered flesh where the muzzle flash had seared the side of his face.
Yan Cheh leapt atop the nearest truck and scrambled for the warehouse roof before anyone saw him. The police were perfectly capable of dealing with everyone here.
The launch"s engine roared into life, and the propellers churned the water white while it was still moored. Li ducked as a coolie flew at him, and the man hurtled over his shoulder and into the river. The woman had recovered her senses and bolted for the steps, while her s.h.a.ggy-haired companion leapt feet-first at the nearest policeman.
Li took aim at the woman in the white overcoat, but soon caught another threat out of the corner of his eye. The uniformed nursemaid had reached into the blue and white pram and pulled out a Bren gun. She balanced the bipod mount atop the pram"s canopy and opened fire. Police and gangsters alike dived for cover and Li ducked behind the crane"s iron leg under a shower of sparks. One of his men quickly shot the gunner, who splashed overboard. The gun dropped back into the pram, but there was no cry from within.
When Li tried to aim again, the woman had abandoned her run for the too-distant jetty and was already arcing towards the water in a smooth dive from the quayside. The launch slipped her moorings, while the woman swam out to meet it. Li ran along the edge of the quayside until he had a clear shot at her back and raised his gun.
A loop of coloured wool abruptly wrapped itself around his hand, jerking the pistol out of his grip and into the water. Li turned, lashing out intinctively, and knocked the curly-haired gwai lo gwai lo to the ground. to the ground.
Li untangled the loop of scarf from his hand and watched with an irritating feeling of helplessness as the woman clambered aboard the accelerating motor launch. The westerner on the ground groaned, touching the back of his hand to his bleeding lip. Li glared at him in disgust.
"a.s.saulting a police officer is a serious offence, as is gun-running."
"I suppose the phrase you"re looking for is "you"re nicked, squire"? It"s funny, you know, you don"t look particularly a.s.saulted." He winced pointedly.
Li shoved him against the leg of the crane and started to rummage through the stranger"s pockets. It took only moments to come up with a knife, crusted with dried blood. "Someone does I was investigating a stabbing just this morning."
"I found that knife "
"Most people claim to have "found" wallets. Knives tend to get lost rather than found." The presence of a knife-wielding westerner in connection with a case involving a stabbed westerner could hardly be coincidence.