Stone woke up habitually at the least sound. A habit from the days of undercover surveillance under the foliage in Kosovo or Afghanistan. He instinctively lay perfectly still so as not to betray his position. Listening for tiny rustlings or distant voices. Only when he identified where the sound was coming from could he nod off back to sleep.
Even so he woke with a start in his bunk, to the sound of the barking of attack dogs and a hoarse Scottish voice shouting over and over, ‘Stay where you are! Don’t move. DO NOT. FUCKING. MOVE!’
Stone was in the backpackers hostel. Eighteenth floor of the Chungking Mansions. A Kowloon tower block. On the top bunk of three in a dorm of eighteen people.
‘I said, do not fucking move!’ bellowed the Scottish voice again. A British officer of the Hong Kong Police, a hangover from the old days. Three Chinese policemen behind him.
Assorted backpackers and students from Canada, Malaysia, Japan, Mexico were scrambling for backpacks and money belts. Girls covered themselves with the bed sheets, squinting into the strip lights. Two lads dropped little bags of white powder behind the bunks. They were thinking ‘drugs raid’.
Stone knew it wasn’t. Amid the rustling and scrambling in bags, Stone sat up and dangled his legs over the side of the bunk and looked at the officer. Then he slowly strayed an eye over the three Chinese policemen in blue shirts and cargo pants. Probably fit enough, with decent martial arts. All four had pistols, but still clipped into their belts. An escape looked on for the moment.
Then a scream. A couple of tall Chinese men in those olive drab uniforms and shiny black boots had appeared in the brightly lit dorm. More screams as the others saw the sub-machineguns pointed their way. Dogs barking, girls screaming. Boys shouting ‘Don’t shoot!’ and holding their hands in the air.
‘SHUT. THE FUCK. UP!’ bellowed the Scottish guy. His was a limited but effective vocabulary. A tense silence. The Scot began eyeballing all the men in turn and pointing with a stick.
Enough of this. Stone jumped softly down from the bunk. The Scottish guy stepped back. Too slow. Stone could have leaned his weight into the cop. Caught him a percussion blow on the temple before he’d even raised his hands. The other three cops were distracted, their eyes flitting about the room at those hands in rucksacks and arms shooting in the air. Stone could have had them too. Maybe. Would have been fun to try at any rate.
The two olive drab boys at the door were the problem. They were pros all right. The one was covering the room with his assault weapon, causing all the screaming. The other fellow had crouched low to get a shot upwards at Stone’s head, at an angle where he could be sure not to hit anyone else. Near enough to give no chance of missing, but far enough to be out of reach of an unarmed, but dangerous, man. Such as Stone. If the Scots policemen hadn’t recognised Stone, the Gong An boys certainly had. They were pros. And they knew all about him.
Stone offered his wrists to the Scottish officer. His forearms were wiry, covered in light blonde hair. The policeman looked in distaste at the green, homemade tattoo of new age design on Stone’s right forearm.
‘How did you know it was you we wanted?’ said the policeman, his tone triumphant but suspicious as he broke out the cuffs. ‘Something to hide, have we?’
‘You are arresting me for the murder of Junko Terashima,’ said Stone.
That video of the killing he’d received through the NotFutile.com anonymous electronic dropbox. Completely untraceable. But there on the hard drive of Stone's computer nonetheless. Stone had just been framed.