RainStorm

take
    chances. When you know you're alone, get to the airport and leave
    Hong Kong on the first flight you can get. Then go to Japan. Go
    home. You'll be safe there."
    She shook her head again. "I have ... I have things at the hotel.
    I can't just go."
    "If you go back to the hotel, they'll pick you up again and follow
    you in the hope that you'll lead them to me."
    "But--"
    "Your things aren't worth dying over, Keiko. Are they?"
    Her eyes widened.
    "Are they?" I asked, again.
    She shook her head. In agreement or disbelief, I couldn't tell.
    I wanted to go, but she needed to hear one more thing. "Keiko,"
    I said, looking at her closely, "in a few minutes, certainly in an
    hour, this conversation will start to seem unreal. You'll convince
    yourself that I was making this all up, trying to get rid of you,
    something like that. You'll be tempted to go back to the Mandarin
    to try to find me. I won't be there. I can't go back any more than
    you can. You seem like a smart girl and you've got a lot of good
    things ahead of you. Don't be stupid today. This isn't a game."
    I turned and left. I'd done all I could do. She would either act
    tactically or she wouldn't.
    I headed for the MTR subway's Central Station. I didn't know
    if they were armed, and the way they were configured around me
    I couldn't be confident of dropping all three and getting away
    clean. Also, there were a number of uniformed policemen in the
    area. The police presence would likely inhibit my friends for the
    moment, as it was inhibiting me. I decided to take them sightseeing
    someplace, somewhere casual where we could all let our hair
    down.
    This would be tricky. From the way they had been following
    us, my gut told me they were waiting for the right venue to
    act. Someplace unusually empty, or someplace extremely crowded.
    Someplace that would give them a chance to act and then get
    away without being stopped, or even remembered by witnesses.
    Until they found that place, I could expect them to continue to refrain.
    If they thought they were losing me, though, or if they sensed
    that I was playing with them in some way, they might decide the
    hell with it and do something precipitous.
    I hoped I was right about them. It was hard to be sure. I was
    used to dealing with western intelligence services and yakuza, not
    potential fanatics spawned by the culture that had once invented
    arithmetic but whose most notable recent contribution to world
    civilization -was the suicide bomber.
    I took the escalator down to the MTR station, maintaining a brisk pace to make it harder for them to overtake me in case I had
    been wrong about where they might make their move. The station
    was filled with surveillance cameras, and for once I actually welcomed
    their presence. Unless Larry, Moe, and Achmed wanted
    whatever they had in mind to be captured on video, they would
    have to wait a little longer. And a little longer was all I needed.
    That is, if they even noticed the cameras, of course. Assuming
    your enemy is intelligent can be as dangerous as assuming he's stupid.
    A Tsuen Wan-bound train pulled in and I got on it. My friends
    entered the same car on the other end. I'd been right, at least so far.
    They were hanging back, not yet wanting to get too close, not yet
    realizing that I'd already spotted them.
    I decided to take them to Sham Shui Po, a colorful community
    in West Kowloon, one of the many areas I had spent some time
    getting to know while setting up for Belghazi, contingency planning
    for circumstances like the one at hand. On a more auspicious
    occasion, we might have been hoping to take in the two-thousand year-old
    Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb or the century-old Tin Hau
    Temple. Or bargain hunting on Cheung Sha Wan Road, the area's
    "Fashion Street," where garment manufacturers sell directly to the
    public. Or hunting for secondhand electronic goods and pirated
    CDs and DVDs in the area's outdoor flea markets. But today I wanted
    to offer them something a little more special.
    I stepped off the train at Sham Shui Po station, moved through
    the turnstiles, and took the Cl exit to the street. The teeming scene
    in front of the station made familiar Tokyo look deserted by comparison.
    The street stretching out before me between rows of crumbling
    low-rises and slumped office buildings looked like a river of people gushing through a ravine. Cars jerked through congested intersections,
    pedestrians flowing around them like T-cells attacking a
    virus. Laundry