Read Online Hungry Ghost by Stephen Leather - Free Book Online Page B

edged out into the afternoon traffic of downtown Kowloon. The car was a right-hand-drive automatic and the traffic drove on the left so it confused him for a while. He’d been in Bali too long and grown accustomed to driving on the right. Cars and vans were bumper to bumper for the first mile or so as he drove past the tourist shops packed with cameras, electrical goods and clothes. Hong Kong looked a prosperous city, with none of the obvious poverty he’d seen in Indonesia, where the pavements were full of beggars and children in tattered clothes and the roads buzzed with motorcycles. Hong Kong had few bikes, all the cars seemed new, and the crowds on the pavements were well-dressed and affluent. The buildings were as clean and new as the cars, blocks of glass and steel and marble. Howells drove out of Tsim Sha Tsui, through the industrial areas of Kowloon and past towering residential blocks, thirty storeys high. He glanced at the map a couple of times, but only for reassurance. His sense of direction was unfailingly good and he’d been trained to memorize routes. He left the built-up areas behind him and was soon driving through countryside that reminded him of the Brecon Beacons, rolling hills and thickets of wind-stunted trees.
    It was an hour’s drive from the hotel to where Ng lived, halfway up a hill that looked down on the South China Sea. The house stood alone, a single storey H-shaped building, two long wings connected by a third block in which was set the main entrance. It was surrounded by green, well-kept lawns on all sides and enclosed by a ten-foot-high stone wall. That was what the file had said, anyway; all that Howells could see from the main road as he craned his neck out of the Mazda’s window was the imposing wall. A single track side-road linked the main road to the compound, winding its way left and right up the wooded hill to a pair of black metal gates. The nearest houses were about half a mile away, red-roofed three-storey blocks that would have looked at home in a Spanish seaside town, but they were served by a separate road. There was only one way up, and there seemed to be no way of getting the car to the top of the hill from where he could look down on Ng’s house. He’d be able to make it on foot, but he’d have some explaining to do if he got caught.
    He drove the car off the main road and headed up the track but he’d barely travelled a hundred yards before the way was blocked by a horizontal pole painted in bright red and white. There was a large sign covered in foot-high Chinese characters and Howells didn’t have to be a linguist to work out that it meant ‘Halt’ or ‘Private Property’ or ‘Trespassers Will Have Their Balls Removed’. He stopped the car, but before he could open the door a man came out of a wooden gatehouse, hand moving towards the inside of his brown leather jacket. The hand didn’t reappear, it lingered around his left armpit as if idly scratching. Howells wound down his window and grinned. ‘I’m trying to get to Sai Kung,’ he said to the guard. The man was about fifty, but stockily built and in good condition. He shook his head.
    ‘Not this road,’ he said, and pointed at the barrier. ‘Private.’ He took his hand away from the shoulder holster, confident that he was talking to a stupid tourist who’d just lost his way. He rested both hands on the car door and leant forward, smiling at Howells with yellowed teeth. ‘You must go back.’
    ‘Whatever you say, sunshine,’ said Howells, conscious that another guard had moved out of the trees behind him and was standing at the rear offside wing of the car. Security was good, and he had no reason to doubt that there would be more men scattered through the woods. He reversed the Mazda back down the track and on to the road before driving around to the far side of the hill.
    So far as he could see the road was the only way he’d be able to get up to the compound. And even if he got there, what