and Bruce bumping into Clyde solved itself. The Australian threw a HK$100 note on the table as he stood up to leave and told Clyde to stay back and pay the waitress.
John grabbed his mobile, dialled up Kyle and kept his voice low. ‘Where are you?’
‘We’re lurking by a cash machine fifty metres down the road.’
John’s brain tried to turn a dozen contradictory factors into a decision.
Kyle spoke tautly. ‘Come on, John. We’ve been waiting six weeks. Me and Bruce can handle this.’
John took a deep breath. Help Earth had killed more than two hundred people since they first surfaced. This was an exceptional opportunity to crack the organisation open and the boys were keen to go.
‘All right,’ John said, running an anxious hand around the back of his neck. ‘You’re going for it, but no stupid risks, OK? Your mark is tall, two hundred centimetres. Big shoulders, squashed up nose like a rugby player. Blond hair, side parting. Smart suit, rectangular glasses with an orange tint.’
‘Just eyeballing him now,’ Kyle said. ‘He’s stepping out. How far are we taking this?’
John had no basis for making a decision on how dangerous the Australian was. ‘Kyle, it’s down to your training and common sense. There’s nothing I can say.’
‘Do we just follow, or do you want us to take him down?’
‘Yeah,’ John said. ‘If you think you can do it, take him down.’
He snapped the phone shut and hoped he’d made the right call.
*
Kyle grinned at Bruce as he pocketed his phone. ‘John’s got the jitters, but we’re on.’
‘Mission controllers always get the jitters,’ Bruce shrugged. ‘I think it’s in their job description.’
‘And we’ve got ourselves a nice easy mark.’
The Australian’s blond head stood out in the crowd, and because he didn’t know Kyle or Bruce they could follow more closely than John and Kerry had been able to follow Clyde. Still, the boys couldn’t get cocky: two teenaged Europeans stood out, wandering the streets of Hong Kong after dark.
After walking a kilometre, the bobbing blond head ducked into an underground MTR station, down a flight of steps and into a gloomily lit ticket hall. The Aussie had a pass and entered through the electronic turnstile. The boys didn’t.
‘Shiiit,’ Kyle said, as he headed up to the ticket machine with a hand burrowing down his pocket looking for change.
An elderly man stood in front of them, trying to feed in a twenty-dollar note. It was agony watching the note whirr in and out, with a red LED flickering above the slot. Finally, the note got sucked in and a paper ticket and a flurry of coins clanked into the dispensing drawer.
‘Come on, Granddad,’ Kyle murmured impatiently, as the old codger scooped up his change.
Bruce pushed in and began feeding his coins. As soon as the first ticket popped out, Kyle grabbed it. He raced through the turnstile and began sprinting down an empty fixed staircase that ran between two crowded escalators. Bruce was fifteen seconds behind him, but there was no sign of the Australian when they met up at the bottom.
‘Which way?’ Bruce gasped, as the crowds bustling around them divided off towards platforms for trains heading east and west.
‘We’ve gotta split,’ Kyle said anxiously. ‘You try eastbound.’
The boys headed through the crowd on to separate platforms. The metro was packed out, and Kyle got jammed into a slow-moving crowd on a short flight of steps leading down to the westbound platform. The crush made it impossible to see anything beyond the head of the person in front and no amount of pushing was going to help.
Bruce had an easier time making it on to the other platform, but a distant rumbling and rush of air meant a train was arriving at any second. If the Aussie was on the platform, he had to identify him fast.
Bruce scanned the platform, but couldn’t see the distinctive blond head. To get a better look, he pushed through to a drinks vending machine at the back of the platform, wedged his trainer in the drawer where plastic bottles dropped out and used it as a step to raise himself above the crowd.
It only took a second to spot the blond head, fifty metres down the platform. Meanwhile, the wind coming through the tunnel was blowing back Bruce’s hair and the two lamps on the front of the incoming train lit up the tunnel.
There wasn’t time to fetch Kyle. Bruce stumbled forwards as he stepped down, clattering into the back of a rough looking