Hungry Ghost by Stephen Leather

Author:Stephen Leather [Leather, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2008-10-16T06:00:00+00:00

Thomas Ng couldn’t remember exactly when it had happened, but somewhere along the line he’d begun to develop a fear of flying. He could remember the time when he thought no more of making the trip from San Francisco to Hong Kong than he did of driving through the Cross Harbour Tunnel or over the Golden Gate Bridge. The first few times he’d actually enjoyed the flight, relishing time to relax away from ever-ringing phones and the demands of others, time to watch a movie and catch up on some work. Then the trip became a regular chore, something that had to be done to keep the family business running, painless but boring. Not something he gave any thought to. But recently he had started to dread the flight, lying awake the night before, tossing and turning, trying wherever possible to postpone the time when he’d be sitting in an aluminium tube thousands of feet above the earth. He’d begun asking for aisle seats so that he couldn’t see the wings flexing, he’d started taking a couple of Valiums an hour or so before checking in at the airport. And whereas in the old days he’d have sipped a tonic water with his meal, now he’d put away a couple of Martinis. Or more. None of it helped; he could still feel his heart beating, the sweat beading on his forehead, the physiological symptoms of his apprehension. To make it worse, this time he’d had to fly United Airlines, all the Asian airlines had been fully booked. So instead of being waited on by the girls of Cathay Pacific he had to suffer overweight gweipors with fat arses, plastic smiles and too much make-up.

First had been full and half the plane seemed to have been given over to Business Class and the treatment he was receiving was worse than he’d ever got in Economy with Cathay or Singapore or Thai. He’d held out his jacket to a blonde with scarlet-smeared lips and over-plucked eyebrows but she just looked at him with contempt and suggested he put it in one of the overhead lockers. He’d asked for a Martini and been told he’d have to wait. He asked for headphones and was told they’d be issued after they’d taken off. Ng supposed it was to be expected with a Western airline, but he’d had no choice, he had to get to Hong Kong immediately.

One of the ways he tried to dampen his newly acquired fear of flying was to concentrate on work for as long as possible during the flight, and he sat with a Toshiba laptop computer in front of him, checking and cross-checking his accounts. At first he’d had great doubts about trusting the micro-computer with information about the family business, the drugs, the extortion, the money laundering, the dummy corporations and bank accounts that now spanned the world. He dreaded to think what would happen if it ever fell into the wrong hands. But one of his programmers

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