Jin Fe appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘Hungry?’
‘No,’ Nadia said. A reflex, because these days she never had any appetite. She’d lost weight in the past two weeks, even though she’d had none to lose in the first place. But she was hungry. As if to emphasise the point, her stomach rumbled.
‘Actually …’
Jin Fe beamed and disappeared back into the kitchen.
Nadia sat up and scrolled through the phone address list. It was very short. Five numbers. Her fingers hovered over one of them. What had he said to her at Jones’s funeral, back in London?
Anything, anytime, anywhere.
She barely knew him. Yet Greaves was the only other survivor from a team of six who’d chased Salamander into the sewers beneath London, and stopped him from detonating a nuclear warhead. What was the phrase? Brothers in arms? He was a foot-soldier for MI6. Not like Jake, certainly not like the Chef. And not like her. He would have seen the news. The Chef would absolutely not want her to bring in someone else. But Greaves had said what he’d said. And it was his private cell, so he wouldn’t do anything like try to put a trace on it.
The aroma of cashew-and-chicken wafted towards her, the sizzles and pops of a good home-made stir-fry. She tapped the number, and pressed ‘Call’. There was a sizable chance he wouldn’t pick up. Nadia was by now both a disavowed Russian agent and an enemy of the British Crown, her slaughter of Hanbury a matter of public record, going viral on YouTube. The weight of it pressed down on her. He wouldn’t pick up. She and the Chef and Jin Fe would all be dead soon, and Jake not long afterwards, despite Salamander’s oath. She’d been outplayed. The Colonel was right, Sakuro was right. She should have taken the offer, and stopped kidding herself, she was ill for Christ’s sake, bloody well dying. She recalled the Chef’s hand signal earlier, and its third meaning. Defeat. Salamander had …
Greaves picked up.
She couldn’t speak for a moment. She got up and paced. ‘It’s Nadia,’ she said, sounding hoarse even to herself. ‘Listen, the video, you must have seen it. I didn’t … that is, it wasn’t the way—’
‘Stop, Nadia. What do you need?’
She leant her back against the door, slid down into a sitting position, and began talking.
Afterwards she returned to the table and ate with gusto, and thanked Jin Fe for the best Chinese meal of her life. Then she retired to the bathroom, closed the door, and stared into the mirror. It was high time she practised snake eyes, because Salamander wouldn’t be an easy kill. And what Jake and the rest of the world needed right now was a predator.
The Chef needed to call in a favour. They were holed up in Fortress Hill for a reason. He walked down the curving road, then stopped at a pharmacy that was also a herbalist – not uncommon in Hong Kong – waited until the owner was free, and spoke to him in fluent Cantonese. The herbalist gave him a curious look as he listened to the order, then nodded and disappeared out the back for ten minutes, returning with a brown paper bag stuffed with roots. The Chef paid, left the shop, and hopped on a tram, paying with a Hong Kong two-dollar coin as the dilapidated, double-decker bus rattled its way through rush hour traffic. Victoria Park approached on the left, a haven of green hemmed in by skyscrapers and expressways.
He walked around the perimeter, taking in the different groups limbering up, cooling down or else in the heat of training, from martial artists to basketball players to footballers. For him, life was motion, and he’d never known a more active city, especially the older generation. He paused to watch a group of ageing women performing the slow, dance-like tai chi fan form, in perfect harmony, all with serene, smiling faces. Under a clutch of trees, a lithe man was teaching the sword form. He crouched low, thighs horizontal, the two fingers of his non-sword hand pointing like a pistol, parallel to the sword held above his head. The fingers represented a knife. The Chef wondered if the teacher really knew knife tai chi – it was almost a lost martial art, replaced by Navy SEAL knife-fighting techniques. The teacher was good. He went from low to high, perched on one foot as the sword angled down at forty-five degrees. His students were not so good, and he didn’t correct them. It was his one criticism of Chinese martial arts training – they didn’t do much actual teaching. They demonstrated, and waited to see if the student got it. It was closer to a talent vetting system. He didn’t criticise too much, however, because it worked. Most people gave up or accepted their limitations, while a few, the very talented ones, persevered and became legends.
He walked on until he found the person he was looking for. He had to pass by a couple of men who appeared to be chatting, laughing at something on a smartphone. They were watchers. The Chef made a triad hand signal and caught one of the men’s attention. The Chef flicked his eyes to the old man seated on a rusting iron bench beneath a weeping willow. The watcher nodded almost imperceptibly then laughed some more at the smartphone screen.
The Chef sat next to the old man and placed the brown bag between them.
‘Good students never forget,’ the man said, in English.
He looked sixty. The Chef knew he was closer to eighty, and resembled Hotei, the laughing Buddha. He’d been the Chef’s teacher – his Sifu – for three years back when Hong Kong was a British colony. The Chef had learned Iron Shirt chi gung, a gruelling, body-hardening process that worked on the fascia – thin layers between muscle groups inside the body – and rendered the body resilient to blunt force attacks, and quicker to heal. It had taken nine months, during which the Chef had had to abstain from sex – and then he had stayed longer to perfect the internal arts.
He recalled asking, on his first day, what the difference was between external and internal martial arts. In the West it was the subject of years of chatroom discussion. His Sifu had replied, matter of fact, that the internal arts were so called because you couldn’t see what was going on. He’d then added that in the West people often sought depth when the water was shallow and the bottom was clear enough. The Chef realised later what a perfect fighting strategy that was, especially for an assassin, because an enemy’s weak spots were often on the surface, not hidden. And at the end of the day, everyone is a bag of flesh and bone, containing a heart, brain and other vital organs. Countless ways to end somebody. Shallow, clear water.
‘I must challenge Blue Fan,’ he said. ‘Will I defeat her in combat?’
The old man sighed, a wrinkle appearing on his shiny forehead before it flattened out. ‘Hand-to-hand, yes, though she is the best Hsing Yi fighter I have ever seen. But if she has her knives, you will not survive.’
Not what he’d hoped for. But fighting – and war – were about more than single combat. The Chef had always relied on two guides: the Chinese text compiled by Sun Tzu – the Art of War, the distillation of lessons learned from five hundred years of war – and the legendary Japanese swordsman Musashi’s Book of Five Rings.
‘I need to know the ground. I have been away for a long time. What are the forces in play.’
‘You seek Salamander.’
It wasn’t a question. The Chef didn’t insult his master by asking how he knew.
The old man leant forward and grunted as he rose slowly to his feet. Suddenly the two young men were by his side, supporting him. It was an act. The old man would only show his prowess behind closed doors, and then only to a chosen few. It was when such teachers neared their end that they became more generous, finally imparting their secrets. Most students wanted to train with younger teachers who looked good; a few smart ones knew where they could gain the deepest knowledge.
The Chef remained seated. He’d not been invited to join them.
‘You must not kill Blue Fan,’