Nine Dragons - A Beatrix Rose Thriller: Hong Kong Stories Volume 1 (Beatrix Rose's Hong Kong Stories Book 2) by Mark Dawson Page A

has gone well, the heat will be off. I’ll drive her to Tianjin.”
    “You know how far that is?”
    “Two thousand kilometres. I know.”
    Chau suggested that she should fly, but she had already dismissed that. The airports in China were sophisticated, and she knew that there would be no possibility of her not having her details—perhaps even her photograph—input into a computer. She knew that Control and the analysts of Group Three would be looking for her, and she had no interest in making that search any easier. Driving, and staying off the grid, was preferable.
    “What now?” he asked.
    She looked back at the table. Grace was gazing out over the incredible vista, an expression of wonder on her face. She might never have been up here before, Beatrix realised. What would have been the point? Her own horizon was hemmed in by circumstance; her prospects offered a much narrower world than the one that was laid out from here. What would be the point of tempting herself with things that she could never have?
    “Come to the Sohotel in Sheung Wan. Get a room. Stay in the hotel. Don’t leave, not for anything. Don’t open the door. Don’t answer the phone. I’ll leave at ten in the morning. I’ll need you to stay with Grace until I get back.”
    “Yes,” he said.
    “Thank you, Chau. I appreciate it.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    THE NINE DRAGONS was a cheap, tatty, and thoroughly down at heel sort of place. The entrance was below ground, accessed by way of a steep staircase that was guarded by a doorman who stood behind a lectern.
    Beatrix walked up to the staircase, glanced down into it to fix it in her mind, and then walked on.
    She circled the building, following the block formed by Lockhart Road, Tonnochy Road, Jaffe Road, and Marsh Road until she had skirted it front and back. In addition to the main entrance, there was a ramp that led down to a basement where goods could be delivered. There was also a metal fire escape that had been fixed to the rear of the building. There was no way of saying whether either of those exits would be passable, but it might be useful to know that they were possibilities.
    She returned to Lockhart Road and the front of the club. She descended the stairs. One of the walls was decorated with posters of ’80s film stars and the other was mirrored, floor to ceiling.
    Beatrix paused at the lectern.
    The doorman was a big man with a cruel face. He was wearing a cheap-looking white sweatshirt with the club’s name embossed on the breast, a pair of black slacks and cheap patent leather boots. “Club closed,” he said.
    “I know.”
    “What you want?”
    “I’m here to see Mr. Ying.”
    The man looked down at her sceptically. “He not here.”
    Beatrix glared at him with unmasked impatience. “Yes, he is. Tell him that Mr. Chau’s friend is here. And that she doesn’t like waiting.”
    Slow realisation dawned over his face. “You?”
    She wondered how much he knew. “Go and tell him before I lose my temper.”
    The man told her to wait and hurried around the corner into the club.
    She felt vulnerable. It went against all of her instincts to walk into a place like this without a weapon. Ying, and the men he led, were dangerous and amoral. He would not hesitate to kill her. After all, she had been killing for him for the last six months. She was visiting him on his turf, in a place with which she was unfamiliar, without anything to defend herself apart from the contents of the memory stick and the leverage that might provide her. She had to hope that she hadn’t overplayed its importance.
    The doorman returned.
    “I search,” he said, nodding at her.
    “Fine.”
    He patted her down, sliding his hands up and down her ribcage and then frisking her legs. It was an unprofessional job. She would have been able to bring a weapon into the club with her, but she had not anticipated that they would have been so perfunctory about it. The doorman stood away from her and then stepped