There was still a potential problem with witnesses, of course. I didn’t stick out here the way the Arabs had, but I didn’t exactly fit in, either. It’s hard to explain the clues, but they would be enough for the Sham Shui Po locals to spot, and perhaps to remember. My clothes were wrong, for one thing. I had been dressed for a day of lunch and shopping in Central, not for the hivelike back alleys of my current environs. The locals here were dressed more casually. And what they were wearing fit differently, usually not that well. Like the area itself, the colors on their clothes were slightly dulled. These people weren’t getting their delicates dry cleaned, starched, and returned on hangers. They weren’t laundering their things in Tide with Bleach and Extra Stain Removing Agents and Advanced Whiteners, or drying them on the gentle cycle in microprocessor-controlled driers. They hung their things on lines, where they would evaporate into the polluted air around. These and other differences would tell. Whether witnesses would be able to articulate them, I couldn’t say. So I needed to take every possible measure to ensure that it wouldn’t matter if they could.

I turned a corner, balled up the jacket, and stuffed it deep into a ripe pile of refuse in a metal container. I unbuttoned the shirt I was wearing and gave it a similar burial. I was now wearing only pants and a tee-shirt, and looked a little more at home.

I made a few aggressive moves to ensure that I wasn’t being followed, then took the MTR to Mong Kok, where I found a drugstore. I bought soap, rubbing alcohol, hair gel, and a comb. Next stop, a public restroom, reeking of what might have been decades-old urine, where I shit-canned the baseball cap and changed my appearance a little more by slicking my hair. I used the alcohol and soap to remove any traces of gunpowder residue that could show up on my hands under UV light. By the time I walked out of the lavatory, I was starting to feel like I had things reasonably well covered.

I bought a cheap shirt from a street vendor, then found a coffee shop where I could spend a few minutes collecting myself. I ordered a tapioca tea and took a seat at an empty table.

My first reaction, as always, was a giddy elation. I might have died, but didn’t, I was still here. Even if you’ve been through numerous deadly encounters, in the aftermath you want to laugh out loud, or jump around, shout, do something to proclaim your aliveness. With an effort, I maintained a placid exterior and waited for these familiar urges to pass. When they had, I reviewed the steps I had just taken to erase the connection between myself and the dead Arabs, and found them satisfactory. And then I began to think ahead.

Three down. That was good. Whoever was coming after me, I had just significantly degraded their forces, degraded their ability and perhaps also their will to fight. The paymasters must not have had ready access to local resources. If they had, they wouldn’t have sent a bunch of obvious out-of-towners. Now, when word got back that the last three guys who signed up for this particular mission had all wound up extremely dead as a result, they might have a harder time recruiting new volunteers.

My satisfaction wasn’t solely professional, of course. The fuckers had been trying to kill me.

I took out the cell phone. Christ, I’d forgotten to turn it off while I moved. Shame on me. Getting sloppy. All right, let’s see if I’d just created a problem for myself.

The unit was an Ericsson, the T230. It had a SIM card, meaning it was a GSM model, usable pretty much everywhere but Japan and Korea, which employ a unique cell phone standard. I examined it for transmitters and didn’t find any. I thought for a minute. Did the T230 incorporate emergency services location technology? I tend to read almost compulsively to stay on top of such developments, but even so things slip through the cracks. No, the T230 wasn’t that new a model. I was okay on that score, too.

Still, I knew that some intelligence services had refined their cell phone tracking capabilities to the point where they could place a live cell phone to within about twenty feet of its actual location. Any worries on that score? Probably not. Whoever was coming after me had limited local resources. I doubted they would have the contacts or expertise that tracking the phone would require.

Under the circumstances, I decided it would be worth hanging onto the unit, and leaving it powered on. It could be interesting to see who might call in.

I checked the stored numbers. The interface was in Arabic, but the functions were standardized and I was able to navigate it without a problem.

The call log was full-he hadn’t thought, or hadn’t had time, to purge it. I didn’t see any numbers I recognized. But the guy I’d taken it from had been talking to someone when I spotted him at Shun Tak station. Unless he’d made or received ten calls in the interim, there would be a record inside the phone of the numbers he’d dialed and of those that had dialed him. I had a feeling that some of those numbers would be important.

I drank my tea and left. I took out Kanezaki’s cell phone and called him from it, moving on foot as the call went through.

“Moshi moshi,” I heard him say.

“It’s me.”

“What’s going on?”

“I’m concerned about something.”

“What?”

“Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong.”

“What?”

“Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong.”

“I heard you. Are you serious?”

I didn’t detect anything in his voice, but it was hard to tell over the phone. And he was smoother now than when I’d first met him.

“You think I make this shit up to amuse you?” I said.

There was a pause, then he asked, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just concerned.”

“Are you in danger now?”

“Not from the three who were after me.”

“You mean-”

“They’re harmless now.”

Another pause. He said, “You’re concerned about how they found you.”

“Good for you.”

“It wasn’t me.”

I already half-believed that, I supposed. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have warned him by calling. Or I would have conceived of the call simply as a way to lull him, to set him up. I couldn’t imagine why he would have turned on me, but you never have the full picture on things like that. Circumstances change. People develop reasons where they had none before.

“Who else knew I was in Macau?” I asked. “They tracked me from there. One of them was waiting to pick me up when I arrived at Shun Tak in Hong Kong.”

“I don’t… Look, I have absolutely no reason to try to fuck you. No reason. I don’t know who they were or how they got to you. But I can try to find out.”

“Convince me,” I said.

“Give me what you’ve got. Let me see what I can do.”

I decided to give him a chance. I didn’t see any down-side. I also didn’t see a good alternative.

“They look Arab to me,” I said. “Maybe Saudi. They dress like they’ve got money. One of them was carrying a cell phone with an Arabic interface, and was using it to make or receive calls while they were following me. I’ll put all the numbers from the phone’s log on the bulletin board. You can run those down. They had at least one partner on Macau, probably more, and probably all of them transited Hong Kong recently. They were sloppy, they might all have arrived at the same time, maybe even on the same plane.”

“That’s a lot. I can work with that. You think there’s a connection with our friend?”

Belghazi. There were only a few Arabs in my life, and they were all recent arrivals. Although my thinking might not go down well with the antiprofiling crowd in the U.S., it was hard not to suspect that they were all connected.

But I didn’t see anything to be gained from speculating aloud. “You tell me,” I said.

“I’ll try.”

“You need to convince me,” I said again.