The Kowloon Contract

By Philip Atlee

Operative Joe Gall heads to Hong Kong to identify a bizarre new weapon and the mysterious forces behind it in this thriller from the Edgar Award nominee.
 
What could’ve caused the sudden, multiple miscarriages among the ordinary, healthy women working at an innocuous Asian company? To solve the mystery, Joe Gall must head to Hong Kong—where he will tangle with a Taiwanese businessman and Soviet agents to uncover a complicated conspiracy . . .
 
“[Philip Atlee is] the John D. MacDonald of espionage fiction.” —Larry McMurtry, The New York Times

“I admire Philip Atlee’s writing tremendously.” —Raymond Chandler

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781504065870

Philip Atlee

Philip Atlee (1915–1991) was the creator of the long-running Joe Gall Mysteries, which is comprised of twenty-two novels published in the 1960s and 70s. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Atlee wrote several novels and screenplays—including Thunder Road starring Robert Mitchum, and Big Jim McLain starring John Wayne—before producing the series for which he is known. An avid flyer, he was a member of the Flying Tigers before World War II and joined the Marines after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

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Chapter 1

The Crown Colony of Hong Kong, fabled entrepôt in the South China Sea, is divided into three parts. Of these, the largest and least exotic is called the New Territories and does not belong to the English Crown. The New Territories are leased from the Chinese Government, and that lease expires in 1997.

Hong Kong Island, with its spectacular harbor frontage, Victoria Peak, Repulse Bay, and lesser marvels, is the most impressive third. Kowloon, on the mainland side of the great port, has its own share of luxury hotels, the enormous Ocean Terminal bazaar, and the same teeming, crooked streets where you can buy dope, apes, ivory, or young girl slaves.

(These mui-tsai girls, some sold on an optimistic basis while they are still in the womb, are ostensibly adopted children. They become, in fact, indentured household servants for life, and after puberty are at the mercy of male members of the household.)

The New Territories, stretching beyond Boundary Street at Kowloon’s north edge, are a welter of bleak hills. Commercially, however, they are important, containing thousands of factories, godowns, and other business enterprises. Like the two more exotic sections of the Colony, they have floating restaurants (both surrounded by polluted water), duck and pig farms, a hilltop view of the People’s Republic of China at Lok Ma Chau, and an exclusive golf course at Fan-Ling.

The latter is open to taipans and their guests only, but the membership now includes taipans of many races. This diversity of pigmentation is an admirable advance over the day when the entrance gates to the International Settlement in Shanghai proclaimed that no Chinese or dogs were allowed inside….

On a clockwise route from Kowloon through the New Territories, the traveler passes the San Miguel Brewery, which is a branch office for the fine beer made by a Filipino concern. A few miles beyond it is a small, modem plastics factory engaged in turning out toys—the Kong Yick Company, Limited. Its products go, principally, into the export trade, most of them to the United States, although an increasing percentage is shipped to Europe. There, the better-made German plastic toys, although more innovative technically, are beginning to price themselves out of the market….

The Kong Yick Company’s factory is immaculate, and it employs forty-seven girls who are well-paid by local standards. The employees are young girls because manual dexterity and sustained concentration are required to handle the output of the Bramah presses and Towler hydraulic equipment. The plastic toys are molded and extruded, and in both processes close attention is required of their operators, especially in transfer operations.

Three months ago, the Kong Yick Company went out of business with a rush. A few minutes after eleven one morning, seven of the girls attending the machines began to scream, clutching their bellies, and dropped quivering to the clean cement floor. As they writhed, faces contorted in agony, their co-workers rushed to aid them. The untended machinery continued to spew out half-formed toys.

The seven girls who had been stricken were all pregnant, and all in the process of violent miscarriage. Blood stained the bottoms of working smocks as their lower abdominal seizures continued. Two ambulances were hastily summoned by an astonished Mr. Kong Yick, the proprietor, and the affected girls were hastily loaded into them, and dispatched to St. Elizabeth Hospital’s emergency room, in Kowloon.

Even before the urgent klaxon warnings of the ambulances were out of hearing, the remainder of the female work force at Kong Yick Company had marched out of the factory.

At the hospital emergency room, one girl died while being examined by puzzled interns and the other six were cleansed of dead fetuses, which had apparently been stricken simultaneously. All of them seemed perfectly formed, with reference to the periods they had yet to come to term, and no injuries were apparent.

The dead embryonic babies were immediately delivered to Dr. Jack Wong, the pathologist, and he and his two assistants began their dissections. (The afterbirths, through the connivance of the head surgical nurse and an orderly, went a different route: they were hastily collected, bottled, and delivered to a Kowloon herbal doctor, who would wash them in wine, dry them, and form pills from the result. These pills would command a high price for a variety of women’s ailments.)

Dr. Wong had trained at Johns Hopkins, yet after six hours of scalpel and testing work on the fetuses, he and his colleagues remained surprised, interested, and still in the dark. There were no external blemishes on the unborn children, all the mothers had been in widely differing stages of pregnancy, and there was a single, unavoidable pathological conclusion: the embryonic babies had died of cerebral hemorrhage, at precisely the same time.

When Wong reported this finding to Dr. Vincent Liu, medical director of St. Elizabeth’s, he was greeted with skepticism. Told by portly and graying Dr. Liu to keep two of the specimens and all his reports, and to dispose of the other embryos, Wong returned to his pathology laboratory. There, he deviated slightly from his instructions, and had only three of the seven small scraps of potential humanity, or what was left of them after dissection, bagged and sent to the hospital incinerator. He sealed separately the remains of the two nearest to term, attaching a complete pathological report. These he placed in the refrigerated vault, next to the two his superior had ordered retained.

Dr. Liu, the medical director, sat staring reflectively at the framed parchment diplomas on his office walls for several minutes. Without seeing them, considering what his younger colleague had told him. Finally, reaching for his phone, he called Kowloon C.I.D. Chief Inspector T.P.M. Hutchings. After Liu had described the odd autopsy reports on the seven simultaneously aborted fetuses, Hutchings asked brusquely if he could provide a logical medical explanation. When Liu admitted that he could not, the inspector requested a full report written in lay language, to be sent to him sealed, by safe-hand messenger.

At six that afternoon, Dr. Wong, the pathologist, drove his new white Mercedes down Nathan Road to the circular drive before the Peninsula Hotel. A doorman greeted the young doctor by name, took over his car, and Wong walked jauntily past the couchant stone lions and the Rolls Royce fleet used by the venerable hotel as transfer vehicles from Kai Tak Airport

From a phone off the lobby, Wong called a number at the U.S. Consulate on Garden Road, just above the Hilton, on Hong Kong Island. Leaving the number of the pay phone, Dr. Wong asked that Pat Nichols call him back immediately. In ten minutes, Nichols called, and in another half hour he was walking into the lobby, where, sooner or later, the world and his brother pass by. He had an affable late-afternoon chat with his Chinese doctor friend. As they chatted, the beefy American in a sports jacket and swollen tie and the quietly dressed young Chinese, American, and Japanese tourists milled around them in the ornate old lobby.

Four hours later, an American military transport, plush-type, jetted off the runway at Kai Tak. It carried two U.S. ambassadors returning to the States on leave and various other lesser dignitaries, but its most important burden weighed very little. Two polyethylene sacks, with records attached and sealed, stored in the refrigerator section of the cargo hold.

Before noon the next day, the aborted embryos with sawn-open, pulpy heads would be in the agency’s Washington medical laboratory….

Chapter 2

Nine thousand-odd miles around the world, I was kneeling on the western slope of my remote hilltop estate in the Ozark Mountains, doing a surgical job on my grove of black bamboos. It was wearing work because a freak December tornado had come rumbling out of the Texas Panhandle and flattened and matted most of the grove I had planted seventeen years ago, to border my formal Edo garden. In that time, the graceful stalks and fronds of the grove, bambusa nigra, had arched up over forty feet, like a graceful dark-green fountain.

The tornado winds, out of season, had smashed the grove like a highballing freight train. Using a machete, a hedge trimmer, and digging tools, I was. slashing away the obviously dead stalks, their fronds already beginning to yellow, and attempting clump division where gaps had been left in the dark grove. This involved cutting the clumps to be transferred carefully, for in early spring the buds on their rhizomes had begun to push. But unless I could retain the root systems, branches, and foliage of each, clump intact, I knew they would not propagate.

Behind me was a weathered limestone bodhisattva figure, life-sized and smiling faintly. It and a lacerated ankle were all I had brought back from the Korean War, and the figure had been framed admirably by the black bamboos. The statue’s benign glance was directed perpetually across the Edo garden, past the glacial waterfall spilling into a dammed lagoon, toward my towering clapboard castle on the crest of the hill. The baroque old mansion, with its turrets and cupolas, was over a hundred years old, and I had done all the restoring personally, with the exception of the re-wiring and plumbing. For these jobs, contracted crews had been brought in from another state.

An arching bridge with seventeen coats of lacquer, mandarin red, led from the far slope of the imposing old house to the base of the waterfall. There, in a natural grotto behind the cascade of falling water, I had built a sauna hut of cast iron, with an inside lining of redwood. The crest of the hill, concealing the clapboard castle from the narrow rural road on the far side, was covered by a stand of virgin pine nearly ninety feet high.

As Mr. Frost, the poet, said, good fences make good neighbors, and when those fences are metal mesh and electrified with a jolt that will knock trespassers off their feet, you get even better neighbors. My remote estate of slightly over a hundred acres was entirely enclosed by such a fence, with power provided by my own generators. There was also an auxiliary generator in reserve.

The nearest inhabited place was a hamlet nine miles down the twisting backwoods road, and its less than fifteen hundred brave inhabitants knew me only as a former Marine major invalided out of service. They were mostly chill-eyed descendants of either the great wave of Anglo-Saxon migration which had spilled down through Pennsylvania and across the Great Smokies, or shiftless relics of the ill-starred Cherokee Trail of Tears, on the north tier of its route.

I had no telephone in the sumptuously restored clap-board castle. There was no mailbox before the metal gates of my eight-foot fence; I drove to a suburban Tulsa post office to get my mail, and into Missouri to buy my groceries, or to make phone calls. I required nothing at all from the nearby hamlet, not even the time of the day. The sole exception was Hank M., the high sheriff of the county, who once a month delivered to me a gallon of moonshine with a good bead in it, made in a real hand-braised copperpot still from mash worked out of sprouted corn, and triple-run.

I am not the jug man I once was, but this stuff, pure white whiskey, could make you bark like a fox and walk right up the wall in spontaneous levitation. Time was when I drank anything that did not have sand in it, but I had finally learned better. Because of the nature of my work, I had to stay in shape and so limited my ingestion of skylarking spirits to a pint a night. In the daytime, I trained like an Olympic aspirant in my basement dojo-gym, just trying to stay even.

I live alone. Once I was married, and lived in a small Mexican mountain town. But when one day, I returned unexpectedly from the city and found an artiste type screwing my wife in my bed, I sighed and told her to cover herself. Then I clubbed him to death with a portable radio, and never saw a man lose a proud erection so fast. This, of course, was before the permissive age.

After dropping the shattered radio on the tile floor, I had walked down to el centro in the art-colony village, and told the jefe of police what had happened. He was a bland, sympathetic mestizo type, and his mahogany face was saddened. Pouring us both a drink of warm tequila La Herradura, he accepted my five hundred dollars and said it would be best, possibly, if I was out of town by dark. His men would remove the corpse of my battered cuck-older, place him in the street, and say that the unfortunate gringo had perished while plunging drunk, from a balcony three feet above the street level.…

Every man, of course, needs something to love, but I decided that women wouldn’t be it for me, after that. Not over the route. When I had restored my remote Ozarks mountain estate, I bought three white tigers with blue eyes, contracting for them with the Majarajah of Rewa, who developed the breed. A magnificent male, and two females. Changed the whole ecology of the estate, planting ground cover recommended by the Majarajah, and introduced small deer, rabbits, and other suitable game for the white tigers. For several years, during the colder months, I used to dump chopped meat before the grove of black bamboos, and watch the blue-eyed tigers come to feed.

That love affair, my second, died as an adjunct to my work. A group of black militants, irritated because I had blown up a power installation in their staging camp in south Georgia, hidden on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp, caught me off guard. They had tracked me back to the hilltop house in the Ozarks, breached my electrified fences, damned near killed me, and slaughtered my white tigers.…

I was hacking away at the root systems of the black bamboos when the daytime klaxon mounted inside the stone lantern by the lagoon went off. (At night, it automatically converted to a system of warning lights.) I turned across the garden, crossed the arching red bridge, and walked up to the house. In the butler’s pantry, I switched on the closed-circuit television system, and got a panoramic view on the wall receivers of a soberly dressed man standing before my high front gate.

Yes? I said, after pressing the intercom button.

Got lost, sir, explained the neatly dressed visitor. "Was checking property values around here, but can’t find the acreage I wanted to look at. Perhaps you could help me.

A minute. I dialed the pantry lock-box and flipped to that date in the codebook. "Okay.