Striking macho poses with real guns in cheap, grimy hotel roomsin lonely far-off cities, en route to commit murder on behalf of other people. I had a sudden urge then to be back home in Luang Prabang, sat out on my balcony and watching the sun go down beyond the Mekong River. I’d lived there for nearly three years now – a sleeping partner in a small travel agency and money exchange, catering to the intrepid backpackers who came there to enjoy the sights of the city and the magnificent natural scenery surrounding it.
I wasn’t happy. If truth be told, I haven’t been happy for a long time now, but I was settled at least and, as I’d told Schagel, I could just about scrape a living from the business, even without the hefty subsidies provided by my other, unofficial job.
But, of course, Bertie Schagel was the constant dark cloud on my horizon. If I could be rid of him and his hold on me, then I could finally leave this grim, savage life behind and live in peace.
For the moment, though, I was going to have to do what I was being paid to do, even though I didn’t like the sound of this job. You can’t just go blundering in as Schagel wanted me to do. When you’re targeting a person, you have to get to know them from afar, and that takes time. You need to follow them, learn their routines, the places they frequent and when they frequent them, while always looking for your opening. It’s not a pleasant task, watching a living, breathing person going about his daily business, knowing that you’re the one who’s going to end it all for him – in fact, it’s deeply depressing – but if you want to survive, it’s also absolutely essential.
It’s a lot harder than people think to take someone out without being seen. It took me over a week to work out how I was going to do it with the ex-pat businessman in Hong Kong. The problem was, he lived in an apartment complex with round-the-clock security on the door, and worked in a similarly secure officeenvironment in downtown Hong Kong Island. There was nowhere to park a car outside either place, making it hard to remain inconspicuous while I kept an eye on things. Also, he always drove between the two locations on busy, very public roads, making it impossible to take him out en route.
In the end, with Bertie Schagel breathing down my neck demanding results, I’d had to resort, quite literally, to radical tactics. Early one evening on the ninth day of the job, before my target had returned from work, I called the local office of the
South China Morning Post
from a backstreet call box and, putting on a particularly dodgy and very non-specific Asian accent, told the man on the other end of the line that I represented a group called the Uighar Islamic Mujahideen and that we’d planted a bomb in the target’s apartment building in retaliation for the Chinese government’s brutal treatment of our Uighar brothers in Xinyiang Province. The bomb, I explained loudly and angrily, would explode in exactly fifteen minutes. Then I hung up.
Ten minutes later, I joined the large crowd of more than a hundred evacuated residents on the pavement outside the walls that surrounded the target’s building. I stood among them in the darkness, keeping myself to myself and avoiding conversation, until an hour later, with the crowd now double that number, the police and fire brigade finally gave the building the all clear. I’d gambled that the security guards on the gates wouldn’t look too closely at the people milling back in, but would be glad to have them no longer causing an obstruction on the street, and I was right. I walked right on through, but instead of going into the building itself I headed into the underground car park, donning a cap and glasses as I did so, and found a spot out of sight behind a pillar in a corner by the rubbish bins. Then it was simply a matter of waiting.
He drove his black Porsche Boxster into the car park at just after nine p.m. – a little later than
I wasn’t happy. If truth be told, I haven’t been happy for a long time now, but I was settled at least and, as I’d told Schagel, I could just about scrape a living from the business, even without the hefty subsidies provided by my other, unofficial job.
But, of course, Bertie Schagel was the constant dark cloud on my horizon. If I could be rid of him and his hold on me, then I could finally leave this grim, savage life behind and live in peace.
For the moment, though, I was going to have to do what I was being paid to do, even though I didn’t like the sound of this job. You can’t just go blundering in as Schagel wanted me to do. When you’re targeting a person, you have to get to know them from afar, and that takes time. You need to follow them, learn their routines, the places they frequent and when they frequent them, while always looking for your opening. It’s not a pleasant task, watching a living, breathing person going about his daily business, knowing that you’re the one who’s going to end it all for him – in fact, it’s deeply depressing – but if you want to survive, it’s also absolutely essential.
It’s a lot harder than people think to take someone out without being seen. It took me over a week to work out how I was going to do it with the ex-pat businessman in Hong Kong. The problem was, he lived in an apartment complex with round-the-clock security on the door, and worked in a similarly secure officeenvironment in downtown Hong Kong Island. There was nowhere to park a car outside either place, making it hard to remain inconspicuous while I kept an eye on things. Also, he always drove between the two locations on busy, very public roads, making it impossible to take him out en route.
In the end, with Bertie Schagel breathing down my neck demanding results, I’d had to resort, quite literally, to radical tactics. Early one evening on the ninth day of the job, before my target had returned from work, I called the local office of the
South China Morning Post
from a backstreet call box and, putting on a particularly dodgy and very non-specific Asian accent, told the man on the other end of the line that I represented a group called the Uighar Islamic Mujahideen and that we’d planted a bomb in the target’s apartment building in retaliation for the Chinese government’s brutal treatment of our Uighar brothers in Xinyiang Province. The bomb, I explained loudly and angrily, would explode in exactly fifteen minutes. Then I hung up.
Ten minutes later, I joined the large crowd of more than a hundred evacuated residents on the pavement outside the walls that surrounded the target’s building. I stood among them in the darkness, keeping myself to myself and avoiding conversation, until an hour later, with the crowd now double that number, the police and fire brigade finally gave the building the all clear. I’d gambled that the security guards on the gates wouldn’t look too closely at the people milling back in, but would be glad to have them no longer causing an obstruction on the street, and I was right. I walked right on through, but instead of going into the building itself I headed into the underground car park, donning a cap and glasses as I did so, and found a spot out of sight behind a pillar in a corner by the rubbish bins. Then it was simply a matter of waiting.
He drove his black Porsche Boxster into the car park at just after nine p.m. – a little later than
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