Nine Days by Fred Hiatt Read Free Book Online Page B

not feel it necessary to make an appointment.”
    He smiled, and as he walked to his desk said, “You all must assumemy business is doing very poorly, since you are sure you can drop in and find me available.” He leafed back a page on his desk calendar. “The fourth, it was.”
    “And?” Ti-Anna said, her voice quavering slightly for the first time. “Did he tell you why he was here?”
    Horace hesitated. “You must be hungry,” he said. “Why don’t we continue our conversation over dim sum?”
    Before Ti-Anna could politely lie to him that we had already eaten, I interjected, “Yes!” It came out as a bit of a squawk. I realized, embarrassed, that it was the first word I had spoken.
    But Ti-Anna didn’t overrule me, and I realized, even more embarrassed, that his wanting to go out had nothing to do with food. He wanted to talk where he knew
they
would not be listening.
    As he held the office door for us, he and Ti-Anna started conversing in Chinese. The young woman at the front desk gave me the evil eye as we walked out. I smiled back. We rode the elevator down in silence.

Chapter 17
    I tried to memorize our route as Horace led, so that we could find our way back without him, but I soon gave up. He took us along skywalks and up and down escalators; only once did we come down to a road and have to wait at a traffic light.
    He loped easily on his long legs, his shock of black hair bouncing lightly over his forehead. Ti-Anna walked beside him, chatting quietly.
    Every once in a while I glanced over my shoulder, but if someone was following us, I didn’t have a chance in a million of spotting him. I had thought New York City was crowded, but it couldn’t match Hong Kong.
    There was no hiding the Taurus parked across from Ti-Anna’s apartment in Bethesda, and that was how they wanted it—to be visible, to be intimidating. The man on the Metro—if he was one of them—stood out from the crowd enough to be noticeable. But here, everyone was Chinese. Almost everyone was in suits. Not a few had military-style haircuts. There was just no way to know.
    But if they cared enough to break into our hotel room, I had to assume they might care enough to keep an eye on us now.
    Horace must have had the same idea, judging by how he behaved at the restaurant.
    Inside the front door a half-dozen employees, each wearing headsets, manned a desk as people jostled to get their names on a list for tables. When the boss saw Horace, she made room through the crowd, led us to a bank of elevators—it seemed to be a four-story restaurant, crazy as that sounds—and escorted us to the third floor.
    A wave of noise, a cheerful, hungry roar, nearly knocked us over as the elevator door opened on a huge room full of round tables. Before us a thousand people, or so it sounded, were eating and waving chopsticks and talking and arguing and drinking tea, while young women in uniforms pushed carts through the din, unloading little dishes at one table, then weaving on to the next and unloading some more.
    The manager led us to a corner that I guessed was Horace’s regular spot. But Horace whispered into her ear, and she led us right back into the middle of everything and plopped us at a table there.
    “This way you can enjoy the true Hong Kong experience,” Horace said to me with a polite smile. Yes, I thought, and this way no microphone could possibly pick up our conversation.
    It wasn’t easy to talk above the roar, anyhow, and for a while we concentrated on the food, or at least I did. Horace poured tea into our little round cups, and he said yes to almost every server who pushed a cart past us, until our table was covered with dishes of shrimp dumplings and pork wrapped in tofu skin and other things I didn’t recognize and couldn’t possibly name, even after tasting them.
    Ti-Anna nibbled, Horace popped an occasional morsel, his chopsticks like extensions of his long fingers. I … well, I may have eaten more than my share. I already