Free The Dragon's Tale: A Jack Lauder Thriller by Clive Hindle Page B

Mandarin’s reception system was among the best in the world. You didn’t stand at a desk and fill in a registration form. They took you into a room and completed the process. Everything was done as if you were their first and last visitor and that carried on until the moment the bellboy left you, luggage carefully stowed, the electronics of the room explained, and the tip safely in his pocket. 
     
         Once on his own, Jack took nostalgia one step further and ventured into the Captain’s Bar. Some things never change and this was one of them. As he quaffed from the silver tankard in which the beer was still served, he was already planning his next move. Back in England he had tried to contact Gerry's work place. Sometimes he’d got no response; sometimes a Chinese girl answered but he’d always got the barest of information. Now he marked carefully the place where he would find it – in the Jardine Building, near the Star Ferry. Gerry hadn’t gone into any of the traditional chambers. Confident that his reputation alone would guarantee him work, he had set up alone.
     
         He acclimatised himself with a stroll round Statue Square and the Supreme Court Building. On a whim he took a tram up towards Wanchai and recognised the smell when he was a quarter of a mile away: palm oil, sesame, vaporized diesel, comminuted oranges and ginger, the scent of the Orient. The hot, steamy heat was like a Turkish bath. It insinuated itself down the street like a living body. You could almost see it in the air, writhing its tactile way between the pedestrians and the buildings, relieved once in a while by a blast of cold air from a doorway or by the constant overhead drip of the air-conditioners. Space was at such a premium they had constructed walkways above the road like arteries full of flowing blood cells. The crowds streamed to and fro all day long but, at rush hour, police at each end guided the human traffic into lanes. Back home, when preparing for this journey, he’d wondered what his reaction would be, how changed he would find the town. But what had struck him was how much of it was the same. Okay, yes, they’d put the tunnels in the air and built a few more monoliths like the Lippo and the Wanchai Towers but those were superficial things. The city was the same as it had been all those years ago when he had half-promised friends that he would return swiftly.
     
        He never had. Secretly, even as he’d mouthed the words, he knew he wouldn’t return, that it was a closed chapter. He didn’t tend ever to go back and even now only fate had put him in reverse gear. He climbed up the stairs to the walkways and looked down Hennessey at the vehicle congestion. In the building opposite was a gymnasium. Lined up against the window, a row of runners, twenty long, raced on their machines, staring fixedly ahead, oblivious to their neighbours, like lemmings desperate to throw themselves through the plate glass into the street below. Looking up the walkway past the intensifying throng of bodies he saw the sign for the Wanchai station of the MTR. He descended into the clean, mosaic halls of the underground for the short trip to Central.
     
         When he came back up into the light, the Jardine Building towered over the Star Ferry. Out in the harbour junks and sampans with their red pterodactyl sails, ploughed the narrowing channel towards Causeway Bay, criss-crossing with lighters and inshore freighters. Larger vessels made for the open sea away from the lee shore, while the smaller vessels made for the typhoon shelter. Across at the naval base the No. 3 was hoisted. A storm was approaching. Somehow he’d missed that piece of information. He had to get his skates on so he headed for the lift. If the No. 1 went up the city streets would empty. When he reached the suite which housed Gerry’s chambers, the Chinese receptionist seemed surprised when he asked for his old friend by his first name. She looked at him