Hunt Among the Killers of Men (13 page)

Mitch’s defeated opponent from the Iron Fist bout that Gabriel had witnessed turned out to be a lot more important than anyone reckoned.

The woman’s name was Garima Bhatia; in her native Indian dialect “Garima” meant “prowess, strength and honor.” That she had been tough and competent did not matter. That she had lost money for some bettors did not matter. That she had been defeated by Mitch did not matter.

What mattered was that Garima Bhatia had died soon after the match from a brain aneurysm.

What mattered more was that Garima had been Mads Hellweg’s fighter, bonded and branded.

Mads Hellweg, the underground lord of New Shanghai’s water and power, had long distrusted Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung, and had significant reservations about the fixing of matches at the Iron Fist. For the purposes of inside intelligence, Hellweg had emplaced most of the Sikh guards used by Red Eagle, having obtained these men through the same channels and business interests in India he had used to procure Garima. But over the prior months the pipeline had broken down and his Sikh spies were being kept out
of the information loop. Garima’s defeat had come at an inopportune time, never mind her death, and Hellweg was now in dutch with the local Triad shylocks.

Normally, Hellweg would have requested that Cheung use his influence to take some of the creditor heat off. Except he knew that Cheung was brimming over with his own plans and needed to curry favor with the selfsame Tong bosses to get what he wanted. Hellweg’s request was doomed to go into channels and never come out.

Plus, Cheung was visibly becoming increasingly erratic. Assassins were trying to kill him in public. He had taken to soliciting the counsel of an astrologer. And he had fallen into the habit of murdering rivals at the least disagreement or split-hair detail. Hellweg had begun to suspect his uneasy relationship with Cheung was going to blossom into a less-than-equal partnership.

Fortunately, Hellweg had other allies. Quietly marshalling their forces against the Tongs in China were the members of the Japanese
yakuza.
Though nominally subject to a cross-cultural cease-fire, they were just waiting for the right excuse to commence full-scale gang warfare in the streets of Shanghai. Hellweg had maintained a back-door deal with some of the
oyibuns
of the 30,000-strong Kobayashi Clan just in case it ever proved necessary.

And this, he thought, could be the moment. If he deactivated the Iron Fist using yakuza mercenaries, Cheung would blame the Japanese and drag the Tongs in for reprisal. Both sides would suffer glorious losses, including the Triad loansharks trying to bleed Hellweg, and Hellweg himself would skate blame-free.

Then, when the tumult died down, he could debut his own fighting pit, one strictly under his control.

Best of all, if Cheung didn’t suspect his involvement, he might even come to Hellweg for support, might ask him to help architect the retaliation against this bold, slap-in-the-face attack by Japan. This moment would bond them as equals in a way nothing else had to date…

Hellweg made the call on his ultra-secure landline.

The warning on the sarcophagus was clear. Basically, anybody who opened the tomb was to be cursed, blahblah, the usual rot.

Gabriel tilted back his pith helmet and mopped his head with a kerchief once white, now gone to oily yellow. Weeks of digging to find a burial chain-of-title regarding a Second Dynastic Period ruler named either Kaires or Seth-Peribsen; scholars disagreed. What Gabriel had found instead was more intriguing—an overlooked intermediate ruler, sort of a vice president, name unknown, signified only by a unique, untranslatable hieroglyph—a bit like the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, but without all the platinum albums.

According to the glyphs, Mr. Unknown’s guardian was supposed to be a kind of Frankensteinian version of a mummy assembled from the parts of all his best soldiers and consigned to an eternity of guard duty in the afterlife.

The sarcophagus creaked on hidden stone hinges—

Pause.

Gabriel snorted water and surfaced, having miscalculated his depth and evacuated the mouthpiece for his air tanks. Frequently the current stirred up the basal muck of this part of the Amazonas, and until it settled it was impossible to see anything underwater. The evidence was thin at best for the missing link between
human and fish, and Gabriel was about to give it up for the day when something grabbed his leg while he was treading water—

Pause.

The arctic air in the middle of the Greenland ice cap was so cold that it could shatter a plastic bag, or solidify water thrown from a cup before it hit the ground. To his left, a hundred miles of featureless ice. Ditto for all other directions, save up, where hung nothing but blistering, cloudless sky. Beneath his boots, more ice, ten thousand feet of it, straight down. He was so far inland that there were no birds, for there was nothing here for them to eat. The air would crystallize his lungs if he inhaled it quickly enough. All blinding white, like the end of everything…until he plummeted through a thin scab of crust masking the treacherous layer of blown snow, and crashed into a cavern network that had last been open to the sky sometime during the Industrial Revolution. Even now, glacial drift was narrowing the rift, threatening to seal him in forever—

Pause.

The man-shaped creature, evil and desert-dry, had him by the throat. Gabriel could smell the mold—

The river throwback, an obscenely large mutation of the Paleozoic coelacanth, was in the process of swallowing his leg—

He looked up and saw the sun blotted out while he froze to death in the harsh Greenland icefall—

The narrative nature of dreams denies the concept of build, or the slow accumulation of facts necessary for deductive logic or extrapolation. As soon as your mind thinks of the eventuality, you flash-forward to the heat of it without the benefit of intermediate orts
and bits of drama, as in a cinematic jump cut. The velocity of the dream-narrative can relentlessly shove your mind toward wakefulness, which is why many sleepers awaken before they “die” in the dream state.

Gabriel punched and flailed, battling the homicidal monster, kicking at the killer fish, fighting the cold and grinding ice floe. He fought for his life. He fought to breathe. He fought not to die.

And the damned dream would not allow him to wake up.

Cheung was busy carving another wooden casket.

Ivory’s gaze found it but didn’t linger there; he searched Cheung’s eyes for illumination.

Sister Menga splashed animal entrails into a bronze bowl. Without looking up she spoke in a monotone: “Victory over an enemy. The exposure of a traitor. All as prophesized.”

“Tuan was premature,” said Ivory respectfully.

“Nonsense,” said Cheung. “I should have killed him a year ago, for the information I did not know he was concealing. Why did
you
not bring that information to me?”

“I only suspected,” said Ivory. “I did not know.”

“Well, then, now that you
know
that the Nameless One shot Red Eagle’s salon to kindling…now that you
know
I was humiliated when that creature Carrington spilled his drink on me and, even worse, when Yawuro got some of his blood on my clothing…now that you
know
all that, Longwei Sze Xie, tell me: when are you going to emerge from whatever dream-state has clouded your reason and return to be useful to me, other than as a shield?”

“For whom is the casket?” said Ivory.

Cheung snorted. “This is for our friend and fellow Quad Leader, Mr. Hellweg.”

“What has Hellweg done?”

“It’s not what he’s done. It’s what he plans on doing. Again, Longwei Sze Xie, your intelligence is tardy. Don’t make me turn my scrutiny on you.”

Cheung never gave people the benefit of the doubt, and the fact that he was doing so now made Ivory feel a twinge of fear—the kind of reflex horror one feels in the presence of a rabid animal, of some threat that cannot be dealt with rationally.

“Hellweg is as Tuan was,” explained Cheung cryptically.

“If you take Hellweg out, the Tong Leaders may object.”

“They won’t,” said Cheung. “I have purchased Hellweg’s debts to them and made them good. Let him make his pathetic gesture of protest. Let him discover for himself what true impotence feels like. Then we discard him.”

“How?”

Cheung smiled. “I shall resolve Hellweg’s difficulties at the funeral.”

“Tuan’s service?”

“Yes. At the same time I shall find out about General Zhang’s fidelity.”

Ivory refrained from asking how. Cheung would just tell him again to permit him his “mad little schemes.”

“Your path is clear,” he said to Ivory. “You know what you must do. I have been patient with you, but the American woman you are babysitting at the Iron Fist has clouded your judgment. It happens to all of us, and it is better that we recognize it has happened to you, and move onward, because we have larger
plans. Today you will kill the American woman. Then you will use the information we gained from Tuan’s interview to kill the Nameless One. And we shall become whole once more. Sister Menga has prophesied it. Do not beg my forgiveness. It is not needed.”

“I will do my duty,” said Ivory.

Dinanath hurried into the Temple Room, breathless, neglecting to ask pardon because what he had to say was urgent. “Sirs,” he said, sweat standing out on the bald dome of his head. “There’s shooting at Red Eagle’s.”

“Who?” snapped Cheung, his eyes coming up to full flame.

“Apparently…ninjas,” said Dinanath.

Gabriel woke up with his own blood crusting one eyelid half-shut and blocking the hearing in his left ear. His body felt pummeled and tender, as though someone had borrowed it, had a really swell party, and then returned it without dry-cleaning it. His wrists and knees throbbed with pain. He had bruises all over—some severe, with broken skin.

He was still in his cage at the Iron Fist.

He had suffered a dream; a dream of combat against multiple enemies, each defying description. Was that what the mystery drug did to Mitch, he wondered—make her think she was battling something else entirely when she was in the fighting pit? Geared up and heroic, still soldiering for her country perhaps?

Gabriel would’ve loved to analyze the stuff in the syringes, almost more than he presently wanted a sauna, a first-aid kit and a good night’s sleep.

He went to work cleaning off his eye, and as he did, two of Red Eagle’s Sikhs swept through the cage
room. Rather than doing any of the things he might have expected—feeding, watering or doping up the prisoners, for instance—they went along the line methodically releasing cage latches and unhinging padlocks. In almost no time at all, the doors had all been opened so that everyone could escape to freedom…if they had enough presence of mind to do so.

Gabriel considered briefly the possibility that this might be another hallucination, or some sort of trick, but he rejected it. Something was going down. The Sikhs were gone as fast as they had appeared. Gabriel could not know that they had received a five-minute heads-up from their stealth employer, Mr. Mads Hellweg.

Then came the sounds of panic, violence and gunfire. Sporadic at first. Growing nearer.

Gabriel kicked out of the cage, his muscles protesting. He grabbed two of the syringes from the tray and pocketed them. Nothing else at hand even remotely adaptable as a weapon.

Several of the captives—the lot-tagged “merchandise”—were staying put in their cages like sheep.

“Move it!” Gabriel yelled, banging on the bars and wire mesh as he faded along a corridor of cells. “Get out! Get out now!”

But they didn’t, and only steps behind him, black figures entered the holding area, swathed in hoods, bearing automatic handguns with stretch magazines. He heard their racing footsteps, the ratchet of magazines being slammed home, the chatter as they hosed anything questionable with gunfire. Glancing back, Gabriel saw several prisoners—young women, kids—shredded in their cells. They didn’t even cry out. He turned and kept going.

He couldn’t save everybody. He knew he’d be lucky if he could save himself. His skin was on too loose and felt feverishly hot, making his reflexes and reaction time unreliable. The only other person he could think about was Mitch, and that only because of his promise to Lucy, because she was counting on him. So: Get his ass, and hers, out. Save who he could on the way. It was the best he could do.

The cage run was a narrow grid of rows and sections, floodlit from above. Gabriel stalled between two rows in a section that held mostly lot-tagged young men, their eyes drug-dusted, the aluminum bands stapled to their ears. He ducked out of sight just as one boy stumbled from his confinement in time to block a three-bullet salvo from a gunman wielding a pistol that cycled quicker than you can blink.

Gabriel held fast and watched the shadows pass on the floor. They were sweeping the room by section, like a SWAT team following a playbook.

He fished up one of the syringes from his pocket, silently counted to three, and struck, stepping out in a wide pivot, jacking his strength from the elbow and burying the needle into the neck of a slender, lizardy man in black whose face was obscured by a classic
sanjaku-tenugui
wrap. A jetstream of carotid scarlet scribbled a high arc across the air and the man gobbled, clutching, already falling. Gabriel wrested away his pistol as he dropped. It was a Beretta nine modified for auto-fire or three-shot bursts, a nasty little puff adder of a gun.

Instead of engaging, Gabriel stayed ahead of the advancing force, moving into the next of the warren of rooms.

Mitch occupied a cell about seven-by-seven, with a
futon pad and a privy hole—the block’s Grade A accommodations, in other words. She was wearing a one-piece zippered fatigue jumper and laceless tennis shoes. She sat with her ankles crossed on the pad, staring dead ahead at nothing and feeling her shaved skull with one hand as though trying to identify something in the dark.

“You’re not…him,” she said when Gabriel entered.

He leapt forward and clamped his free hand over her mouth. “It’s Gabriel.
Gabriel.
Remember?”