Appointment In Baghdad

The doorman took the bank notes and thumbed through them suspiciously. He looked back up at Bolan and repeated Jigsaw Liu’s name.

“Jigsaw Liu,” Bolan agreed.

The wad of money disappeared into a pocket and the guard rapped sharply against the metal door. It swung open immediately and a skinny, sallow-skinned man with a hand-rolled cigarette clenched between crooked, yellow teeth eyed Bolan up and down. From behind him the noise of the room spilled out.

He said something to the doorman, who grunted and repeated Jigsaw Liu’s name. The skinny 426 nodded once and stepped out of Bolan’s way. The soldier ducked his head and stepped into the chamber beyond.

His senses were fully assaulted as he stepped through the door. The ceiling was low on the long room. The haze of cigarette smoke was thick in the air and looked like a gray-blue fog above the heads of the shouting gamblers. The cacophony of chattering, arguing, belligerent voices was punctuated by the sharp clacking of mahjong tiles. He saw numerous tables filled with frantic men, many clutching their own wads of HK dollars.

Bolan’s gaze wandered across the room, noting additional exits and the hard-eyed men standing sentry on the edge of the gambling pits. Other than the pistol tucked into the waistband of the outside doorman, Bolan saw no other weapons on flagrant display, though he was positive they were present. He’d been somewhat surprised not to have been searched at the door, but he assumed most customers here were local and, from the look of it, older.

The sallow-skinned Chinese man repeated Jigsaw Liu’s name and indicated a gloomy tunnel leading off the main, cavernous parlor. Bolan began to make his way across the crowded room, sticking close to the back wall as he did so. More than one pair of suspicious eyes followed him.

He crossed the chamber and ducked into the narrow tunnel running off at a sharp angle from the parlor. He felt at once exposed and claustrophobic in the hallway. The pit was a perfect place for a trap, and he had a hunch that its proximity to the harbor made the disposal of bodies an uncomplicated matter.

Bolan stepped over the sprawled and unconscious body of an opium smoker. The ancient Oriental habit had become modernized and had morphed into the use of more current narcotics in Hong Kong, as it had in the rest of the world, but there were still more “traditionalists” of opium in Hong Kong slums than elsewhere on the globe. The man’s eyes stared dully, pupils glassy and out of sync with the gloomy light in the tunnel. The man’s filthy, short-sleeved, button-down shirt was stained with vomit. His breathing was so shallow that Bolan at first thought him a recent corpse.

Bolan turned a corner in the hallway and exposed metal pipes suddenly erupted from the packed earth, ran for a length of several yards then just as abruptly turned back into the wall. Up ahead he saw two heavyset Chinese men standing in front of a door set back in the hallway wall. Both 426 grunts openly sported Beretta 92-F pistols. Despite the damp, they wore stylish black T-shirts and tan slacks with shiny dress shoes. Their arms crawled with tattoos.

Though the hallway ran down a ways past them and split off into an intersection, Bolan felt sure he had found Jigsaw Liu’s office. He walked up to the men, who watched him from beneath hooded lids, their hair slicked back in pompadours.

“Cooper,” he said, giving his cover name. “Jigsaw Liu.”

They seemed to recognize the name, and Bolan sent a silent thanks to the Agency case officer who had cleared the way. One of the guards knocked softly on the door. At a muttered response from within the man opened the door and stuck his head inside.

Bolan heard a rush of whispered Cantonese, the name “Cooper” and then a gruff response from deeper within the room. The bodyguard pulled his head out from behind the door and indicated with a curt gesture that Bolan should enter.

The soldier stepped forward and crossed the threshold. The interior of the office couldn’t have been more at odds with the general atmosphere of the pit. Bolan stepped onto thick carpet accented by tasteful lighting. A massive desk of Oriental teak dominated the room. The narrow, vertical paintings popular in Asian cultures hung from walls made of the same teak as the desk.

The desk itself could have belonged to any successful businessman. It was neatly organized and two separate laptops flanked the main PC screen, all done in a lacquered ebony sheen. One of the screens was turned in such a way that Bolan could see it. He recognized software designed to track up-to-the-second stock market variations.

The man behind the desk regarded Bolan with the eyes of a reptile. He did not rise as the big American entered. His dark, Western suit was immaculate and in sharp contrast to the jigsaw patterns of scars that traversed his almost moon-shaped face. Bolan knew from Jigsaw Liu’s file that the Hong Kong mobster had gotten the scars when he’d been propelled through the windshield of his car during an assassination attempt. In the parlance of his kind, Jigsaw Liu was the Red Pole of the Shimmering Raindrop Triad.

Behind him a long, low cabinet ran the length of his office wall. Books in stylish and expensive leather bindings took up one side. The other held two closed-circuit television monitors. The screens were divided into four squares, each revealing a different image as captured by Liu’s security system.

Bolan noted that one screen showed the alley where he had first entered the pit. The three youths he had witnessed loitering there were now gone. Another screen showed the mahjong parlor Bolan had cut through. On a third, potbellied and middle-aged Chinese men lounged as young girls in skimpy costumes and heavy makeup pampered them. On the other screen one of the picture sets showed the two men standing guard outside of Liu’s office door.

Set on the wall above the cabinet was a plasma-screen television. The HDTV was on with the volume turned down. Bolan was surprised to see that it was turned not to a Hong Kong or even Chinese station but to Al Jazerra. To the left of the plasma screen a single door made of dark wood was set into the wall. Bolan could tell at a glance that the door was very heavy and solid in construction.

“You come with impressive introductions,” Liu said.

When the Red Pole spoke there was a slur to his voice that Bolan immediately attributed to the facial scars and not to alcohol or drugs. The man’s black eyes glittered like a snake’s.

“As do you.” Bolan inclined his head.

The soldier had no use for the excessive manners common in the Orient, or the preoccupation with “face” that was almost stereotypical but still entirely prevalent. However he had a larger agenda than a Hong Kong kingpin. He had no intention of stepping on the CIA’s toes unless it became very necessary.

Because of that he remained standing until Jigsaw Liu indicated he should sit. When the Hong Kong gangster gestured, Bolan took a seat in a comfortable, wingback chair set on Liu’s right side. Bolan inquired after Liu’s health. The Hong Kong killer snorted his laughter.

“I appreciate the effort,” he continued in heavily accented English. “But I assure you it is unnecessary. I know how important it is for you gwailo to get down to business. So—” Liu templed his fingers in front of his double chin “—let us get down to business.”

“Good enough,” Bolan said.

He reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope and a photograph. He leaned forward in his chair and casually tossed both onto the top of Liu’s desk. The gangster reached out with one hand and pulled the items toward him, his eyes never leaving his visitor.

Bolan leaned back in his chair and absentmindedly scratched at his new beard. It was filling in nicely, and more quickly that he’d hoped.

Liu opened the envelope and ran a thumb across the tightly packed bank notes. He opened a drawer in his desk and slid the money into it.

Only after he had securely closed the drawer did Liu look at the picture. His eyebrows furrowed slightly as he inspected the image on the photograph Bolan had given him. He looked up and his eyes were quizzical.

He grunted. “I recognize al-Kassar, but who’s this with him?”

“Scimitar.”

“Scimitar?” Liu snorted.

“Isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You know Scimitar, don’t you? My people think you do.”

Liu regarded Bolan, his face expressionless, but a certain low, animal cunning made his black eyes glisten. He reached out and pushed the photograph back across his desk in Bolan’s direction.

“My establishment is a good place to hear rumors, you understand?” Liu said carefully. “I have heard that certain men of…influence, sometimes move certain contraband products out of Laos and into the Middle East. As I do not engage in such illicit activities, I do not have firsthand knowledge of these things myself, you understand?”

Bolan nodded. If Liu was uninterested in admitting his part in moving heroin out of the Golden Triangle and into Europe, then Bolan wasn’t going to challenge him. At the moment, anyway. Everything he learned would go into Stony Man files, and Bolan new that sooner or later such a heavy hitter as Liu would screw up and the Executioner would have him.

“Go on,” Bolan said.

“I can tell you that none of the people involved in that enterprise have ever dealt with the men in that picture.”

“But they have dealt with Scimitar?”

Liu held his hands up as if to say “who can tell” and smiled. “So they say. I am told, and I’m quoting now,” he continued. “I am told ‘Scimitar is a lie.’”

Bolan pondered Liu’s words and their implications. He felt deeply dissatisfied. He looked away from Liu’s sneering mask of a face and tried to decide on a fresh avenue. His gaze drifted to the CCTV monitors and a flurry of motion caught his attention.

The guards outside Liu’s office door staggered backward, their bodies jerking in crazy, disjointed dances. Blood spurted from their blossoming wounds. One 426 sentry stumbled back against the door and simultaneously Bolan heard the thump from behind him.

Liu cursed at the interruption and turned to look at his CCTV displays. He nearly screamed at what he saw.

Three men with balaclava masks burst into the camera view. One wielded a cut-down Remington 870 pump-action shotgun. He was flanked by a man with a mini-Uzi machine pistol, the sound suppressor nearly as long as the weapon itself. This man was still firing, and he raked the downed bodies of Liu’s 426s with ruthless abandon.

Behind the two men a third stepped into view. He wielded twin Beretta 92-F pistols, and he fired one several times back down the hall toward the mahjong parlor and off camera.

Bolan was going for the Beretta 93-R under his shoulder when he saw the shotgun-wielding hit man level his weapon at the door to Liu’s office and begin pumping blasts into the wooden structure. Behind Bolan 12-gauge slugs slammed through the lock mechanism and he heard the booms of the Remington 870.