Hunt Among the Killers of Men (14 page)

“
Gbrl
?” she mumbled against his palm.

He tried to find her eyes. They were still there where they were supposed to be but somewhere else at the same time, distant and dilated and opalescent. He risked giving her a hard crack across the face, openhanded. Her eyes swam into focus briefly and met his, then slipped away. He slapped her again. This time her eyes locked and before he could give her a third crack her hand shot up to lock onto his throat.

“That’s it,” he croaked, reddening.

“Gabriel?” she said. Her voice sounded confused, disoriented.

“Yep.” He freed her grip before his Adam’s apple imploded. “Come on, Mitch. We’ve got to get out of here before—”

A burst of gunfire, from not very far away.

“Who’s shooting at us?” she said.

“Time for that later,” Gabriel said as he levered her to her feet and thought to himself:
You optimist, you.

Ivory surveyed the damage. According to what Dinanath could glean under mild duress from one incapacitated Sikh, Hellweg had ordered all his spies to bail out just prior to the assault. The Sikhs had attempted to liberate all the auction stock and caged fighters to add to the confusion. About twenty of these latter were dead now, sprawled on the floors, shot in their cages, incidental casualties of a sweep-and-clear by the trigger-happy intruders. If it moved, they had fired at it, and sometimes if it hadn’t.

Those who were not salvaged or recovered, Ivory knew, would start going into convulsions in about two days.

Dinanath put the bore of a .357 Magnum to the Sikh’s head and spared the man the chagrin of having to seek new employment.

From the invading gunmen, Red Eagle had reaped a bullet in the face for her trouble. She was spread out awkwardly across a lounging chair in her salon, trailing spilled silk saturated with blood. Her wig was on the other side of the room. She did not appear happy or fulfilled in death.

The lone enemy casualty was not talking. He had
suffocated on his own blood, losing the fight to breathe with a hypodermic needle through his windpipe. Ivory found him in a vast, fresh pool of scarlet not far from the cage where Gabriel Hunt had been parked. The intruder’s weapon was not to be found.

The woman had also disappeared.

Directly or indirectly, the intervention of Qingzhao Wai Chiu had closed down the Moire Club at the Pearl Tower and disrupted the Zongchang Casino. Then it had compromised the Night Market and now, shut down the Iron Fist. This situation was metastasizing. Cheung was right; Ivory knew what he had to do and each incident that passed without his doing it hurled his loyalty to Cheung further into the shadow of doubt.

The manifestation of Ivory’s dilemma—his demon—was Qingzhao, the Nameless One.

The engine of his new uncertainty was Michelle Quantrill.

The unexpected wild card was Gabriel Hunt.

Just kill them
, Ivory thought.
Kill them all and be done with it.

Gabriel would have dearly loved to blend into the crowd, but it was hopeless and would have been even if he hadn’t been dragging Mitch along with him. Gabriel was easily a head taller than any of the Chinese cruising the Bund, and Mitch’s buzz-cut blonde pate and green eyes might as well have been a searchlight at a gala premiere. He was carrying the stolen gun and had no good place to conceal it, having been caged in nothing but a soiled T-shirt and trousers; he tried jamming it into a pocket, but enough stuck out to make it no concealment at all. Mitch, meanwhile,
was hampered by the laceless sneakers that threatened to fly off each time she increased her speed above a rapid, shuffling walk. Together they looked like a pair of alcoholics who had just spilled out of a bar fight or escaped from a detox facility.

Mitch was slowly coming back into focus. “I don’t understand,” she said distantly. “It was like a dream—I was back in combat training. I wasn’t in a ring waiting for a bell. I was in a desert somewhere, we’d been shot down, and I was trying to keep insurgents from killing me. But it felt absolutely real—more real than the prison. The times when I could see the cell, it felt…it felt like
that
was the dream, because it was the only time I knew I could rest. All the rest of the time, it was combat, nonstop combat.”

“I know,” said Gabriel, trying to maintain a watchful eye in all directions at once and to keep them moving. “They spiked me with that junk one time and I was in three different places at once, fighting for my life. It’s as though the drug uses what you know against you. It produces hallucinations, picks and chooses from your experiences and your imagination to produce a situation of maximum distress.”

“I don’t see why they bothered,” Mitch said. “It’s not like the reality of the situation wasn’t distressing enough.”

“Point,” said Gabriel.

As they passed the front lot of a western hotel, he tried to recall whether Michael would have landed in Shanghai yet. It hardly mattered, though; there was no good way to reach out to him. Inquiring through ordinary channels—a hotel, a university, a tourist bureau—would bring the People’s Police down on their heads, and the police were controlled by Cheung’s
partner, General Zhang, formerly of the Red Army school of compassionate understanding. Even exposing themselves on a public street long enough to puzzle out the rat’s maze of the Chinese pay-phone system was a bad idea. No, for now they were on their own and would have to fend for themselves. They needed food, clothing, disguises (sunglasses, a watch cap,
something
), money, transportation, identities on paper, and a way out, a way back to a world where the most agonizing decision they faced involved browsing a selection of tempting desserts.

Gabriel steered Mitch by the elbow toward an enclosed mall area on their right.

“We’re going to have to do a little shopping,” he said.

Gabriel had never classed himself as a criminal. So much for that comfortable delusion. In the world of the Night Market, everybody was guilty of something.

Right now, Gabriel was guilty of shoplifting.

Of course, in the past few days he had been present at extravagant symphonies of carnage and destruction, playing his little solos where the orchestration required it. But now he had to engineer a grand opera of distraction just to pinch a sweatshirt.

It should have been a simple snatch-and-grab—but the elderly pipe-smoking gentleman who ran the clothing stall had an eye on Gabriel. He checked back repeatedly to see where Gabriel was looking, and each time Gabriel made sure he was looking somewhere else. No point confirming the man’s suspicions.

Shortly, the elder got into a spirited haggle with a young American woman, a forceful blonde who fully
indulged the elaborate grammar of hand-wringing, waving, coaxing, position-jockeying and street theater necessary to a really satisfying negotiation. It was a thousand bucks’ worth of production value over a onedollar item.

Gabriel ducked low, slid two hoodies from the bottom of the rearmost stack beside the counter, and quickly scooted.

His turned one of the hoodies inside-out to hide a blazing Day-Glo logo of some boy band that had been all the rage two years ago. It was an XXL, and with it dangling to his upper thighs at least the gun was covered.

He looked around for Mitch, who, having walked away from the negotiation in a decent simulation of a huff, was now loitering near the restrooms. He saw her chatting up a tall fellow in an expensive sharkskin suit, the sort you’d have to go to Hong Kong to buy. Gabriel raised her hoodie and was about to call to her when he saw her unzip her jumpsuit a few inches and guide the man’s hand inside for a sample squeeze.

More crime in the making, and the poor bastard didn’t realize it. He watched her lead the man off toward the toilets.

Shouldn’t take long for her to roll him, he figured. Gabriel turned to scan the space, keep an eye out for trouble, and found himself face-to-face—well, face-to-chest—with a man a good ten inches taller than him. And stronger: a pair of massive, callused hands gripped Gabriel’s neck and hoisted him clear off the ground.

The guy holding Gabriel looked like a renegade circus strongman, a yard wide at the shoulders, totally hairless but for a drooping Fu Manchu mustache, sumo-sized
and well north of six feet tall, with skin-stretching plugs in both earlobes and a grip like a construction crane.

Where had this guy come from? Was he on Ivory’s crew or…?

This was not the time to ponder such questions, Gabriel realized. Gabriel’s head was struggling to pop away from his body while his neck muscles tried to keep it where it was. The kicks he landed were ineffectual; he was a dangling marionette in the larger man’s grasp.

Then the old man from the clothing stall appeared, smoldering pipe in one hand. He commenced hollering in Chinese, jabbing his finger repeatedly at Gabriel and yelling a word that sounded like “queasy,” over and over.

As Gabriel’s brain started to shut off from lack of oxygen, he realized the man was shouting
qiè zéi
—thief.

The colossus had acres of ridged scar tissue on his bald head. Gabriel could whale on that skull all day and distract him no more than a fly. A small fly. A small, crippled fly.

He reached under the sweatshirt, pulled the gun out of his pants pocket, aimed it outward and downward.

The big man shifted so that he was holding Gabriel with just one hand and swatted the gun away effortlessly with a single swipe of the other. Then he grabbed hold of the purloined sweatshirt Gabriel had on and peeled it off him like a banana skin. He let gravity take over and Gabriel piled up on the wet cobblestones, stunned and insensate, his legs feeling far away.

The man bent down and snatched up the second sweatshirt, which Gabriel had dropped when lifted off his feet. It was filthy. He shook it in Gabriel’s face while the old man came near to offer a bit more shouted admonishment. Gabriel let his eyes slide shut and shortly they left, or at least stopped yelling at him. The next voice he heard was Mitch’s.

“What are you doing?” she said, one hand under his arm, helping him up. “This after you told
me
not to attract attention.”

“Need to work on my Artful Dodging,” he muttered. Gabriel saw she’d picked up the gun. Good. At least one of them had done something right. He limped with her away from the glare of the crowd. “How’d you make out with your new boyfriend?” he asked hoarsely.

“Let’s just say he didn’t have quite the good time he was hoping for. When he wakes up, unties his ankles and pulls up his pants, he’ll find his wallet missing.” Off Gabriel’s expression, she added, “He’s not hurt. Just his pride, and he had too much of that to begin with. And we needed the money.”

“How much did we get?”

She flashed him a palmful of currency. Not much. Enough.

“All right,” said Gabriel. He steered them on. They didn’t speak till he stopped short a few minutes later.

“What is it?” Mitch said.

“We’re going to need better weapons.”

“And…?”

“And I know a place where we can get some.”

He pulled her past the half-hidden wooden sign that read
SU-LIN GUN MERCHANT
.

You would not think so from watching the average Hong Kong action movie, but private citizens in China are expressly forbidden to own or sell firearms. The penalties range from several years’ imprisonment to a death sentence. This hard line to prevent “gun violence” is maintained by the same government that executed ten thousand lawbreakers in 2008, making China number one in the wonderful world of capital punishment. Preferred method of legal execution: a hollow-point to the head.
Boom
—done, and no one says a word about irony.

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” said Gabriel, “but you can also pull the death penalty here for stealing a cultural object. Or killing a panda.”

“So
how
is this all legal?” Mitch said, slack-jawed at the diversity of Su-Lin’s arsenal.

Gabriel gave her a dour look.

“Never mind,” Mitch said.

Capital crime was little deterrent where profit was involved. The temptation here was the same as it was for dirt farmers in the U.S. to move crystal meth. Here, a person could sell a single gun and make three times his or her yearly pay.

Gabriel moved to the dual laptops as tiny Su-Lin grinned in recognition. Repeat customers were highly desirable.

Gabriel typed:
YOUR PIG MOTHER EATS NIGHT SOIL
.

Mitch read this over his shoulder and gave him a look of confusion crossed with bemusement—but it was cut short by what appeared to be a sudden migraine jolt that caused her to pinch the bridge of her nose and squeeze her eyes shut, wetly.

“You okay?” said Gabriel.

She waved away his concern. “Mm-hm, yeah. It’s just a spike—like brain freeze from ice cream, you know?” Gabriel knew—but he didn’t think ice cream had anything to do with it.

Su-Lin typed back on her keyboard:
I LOVE YOU
,
TOO
.

I NEED A WEAPON
, Gabriel typed. He took the ungainly Beretta back from Mitch, passed it across the counter.
I CAN TRADE THIS IN
.

Su-Lin gamely dug under her counter and came up with the same modified .36 Colt revolver Gabriel had lost after his visit to Tuan with Qingzhao. It was like seeing an old friend. He wondered how many times she’d sold and resold the same guns.

IT HAS ALREADY BROUGHT GREAT PROFIT
, Su-Lin typed,
SO I GIVE SPECIAL PRICE TO YOU
.

DONE
, Gabriel typed.
NOW FOR MY FRIEND
?

“We need to get out of the middle of this thing,” said Gabriel. “Nobody is going to back down. Everybody is going to get killed.”

The leaning pagoda was within view as they crested a jut of rock. Mitch was climbing right behind him, but her attention seemed to be wandering and she had gone from breathing nasally to orally—not a good sign, for someone as fit as she was.

“You’re part of it now, too,” she said, her breath more ragged than it should have been.

“No, I’m not, and neither are you. We get to Qi’s place, I call my brother. I’m pretty sure Qi’s got a secure cell phone or can bash one up. Michael calls the embassy and the Marines and we burn our tail feathers straight out of here.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?”

He turned and gave her a hand over the next rise. “You’re going to tell me that the guy who imprisoned you, drugged you, turned you out to fight for money, the guy who imprisoned
me
, for god’s sake, has some kind of hypnotic hold over you that’s going to keep you trying to kill phantoms?”

“No,” she said. “Stop. Please. I’ve got to stop.” She halted, bent over, hands on her thighs.

Mitch sat down heavily on a knobby outcrop of feldspar.

“It is the drug?” said Gabriel.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I can’t tell if this is an aftereffect, or withdrawal, or bad chemistry, or what. But it’s starting to hurt so bad I can’t keep my eyes open.”

“You can’t go to sleep,” warned Gabriel. “You might not wake up.”

She took a deep breath and her vision seemed to clear slightly. “He told me a story,” she said. “A parable.”

“Ivory?”

“Yes. He asked if I’d ever had a crisis of faith…god, I can’t remember what he said. It seemed to make a lot of sense at the time. He was talking about himself, I’m pretty sure, and about Valerie. He said he didn’t kill her. But he didn’t stop it when he saw it happening.”

“That was his crisis of faith,” said Gabriel.

“Exactly. His duty versus his honor. Very Chinese.”

“I know how this one ends,” said Gabriel. “Betrayal. It’s who betrays whom I’m having a hard time figuring out.”

Meanwhile, Gabriel was suffering his own crisis. He still had a syringe of the Iron Fist happy-hour cocktail in his pocket. He’d grabbed two and only used one on the gunner in the cage room. The other he’d begun thinking he could get to a lab, have them break it down, analyze it. Synthesize countermeasures.

But if what he was seeing in Mitch was the first stage of withdrawal, he was going to have to use the needle on her. Perhaps diluted. Perhaps in increments.
But even so, the sample would soon be gone—and she’d be rendered a null-sum as a team member for the duration.

Part of his mind—the impatient part, the selfish part, the part that had so often kept him alive in tight spots—was asking what, really, did he owe her? Hadn’t he picked up that check? Hadn’t he been picking them up for Mitch ever since he’d posted her bail back in New York? Hadn’t he paid plenty in skin and blood and gunfire; in nightmares and pain?

But his sense of justice was at stake here. That was the other part of his mind, the part that kept getting him into all those tight spots in the first place. He had allowed the undertow to drag him this far because Lucy was relying on him—and because men like Cheung needed taking down. And if Mitch’s tragedy was a minuscule one for planet Earth, so what? Move a single grain of sand on a beach, everything in the world is changed. How’s that for Zen?

“I’m not so sure Qi won’t just shoot us on sight,” said Gabriel, considering their range from the pagoda. “If Tuan knew her whereabouts, then Ivory knows, which means Cheung knows. And if she’s found out that Tuan’s dead, that he betrayed her…”

“…she may be in a mood to shoot anyone that approaches.”

“Keep your eyes open,” Gabriel said.

“I’ll try,” Mitch said.

But Qingzhao was not to be found.

They entered the pagoda without incident and searched from room to room without turning her up. Mitch doubled over with a cramp about the time they entered the third of the shrine rooms.

“God, this feels really…weird,” said Mitch, breaking a sudden sweat. Her temperature was skyrocketing.

The puzzle-box base of the idol was securely shut. Qi’s bike was gone.

But most of her hair was still here. It lay at the foot of a narrow mirror, hacked off in clumps, apparently with the combat knife lying atop one clump.

The water in the big iron cauldron was room temperature. Gabriel decided to stick Mitch inside to keep her from running too hot. She didn’t resist as he undressed her. He helped her up and over the side. She settled in, laid her head back against the rim. Her head jittered against the metal, perspiration beading on her brow.

He had ten cubic centimeters of amber fluid in the needle.

Okay, give her two.

He did not want to waste time or serum on a skin pop that might not take hold, and she was compliant when he tapped up a vein in her forearm. He uncapped the syringe. It was the sort of small, disposable plastic hypodermic found at free clinics all over America. The Iron Fist had probably went through these things by the gross.

Very carefully, he allowed about a drop and a half to enter her system.

Her response was instant. The tremor in her head and neck vanished, and she seemed to nod off. Gabriel hurriedly checked her pulse (slow), respiration (shallow), pupil dilation (considerable). Her breathing was barely audible but regular. She wasn’t dead.

He checked her again about every two minutes while
he fired up a few torches and managed to get some coffee going on Qi’s campstove.

It was the better part of an hour before Mitch cracked her eyes open. Her pupils were huge. Her green irises had subsided to a pale shade similar to algae.

She brought up a handful of water as though it was a rare treasure, and trickled it over her face. Droplets hung from her brow, nose and chin as she watched the water return to the tub in a stream. Her expression was concentrated, one of almost religious intensity. She ignored Gabriel checking her vital signs. Watching the water was paramount right now.

“Are you back?” said Gabriel. “You okay?”

In response she grabbed his wrist, pulled him close. “Where am I? Who are you?”

“I’m Gabriel,” he said.

“Who?”

“Lucy’s brother.” Her face relaxed at the mention of Lucy’s name. Her grip did, too. He pulled his arm free. “Lucy,” she whispered. “Come here, Lucy.”

“Mitch,” he said. “Lucy’s not here.”

“Sure she is,” Mitch whispered, her gaze unfocused. “She’s right next to you. Why don’t you say something, Luce? You mad at me?”

“It’s not real, Mitch—it’s the crap in the needle. Mitch, are you listening to me?” She’d begun to weep, had raised one arm from the water and was reaching out toward the empty air beside him.

“I can hear your heartbeat, Luce,” she murmured. “Come here, baby. Come here. That’s it, get in.”

“Damn it, Mitch, she’s not…” He dropped it. There was no arguing with someone under the influence of a hallucinogen this powerful. At least she wasn’t
imagining herself at war again. Who knew what she was imagining, exactly, but it seemed to be giving her pleasure. The tears had stopped, and her head was tilted back against the cauldron’s edge once more. Her breathing was becoming rapid. Gabriel turned away. Let her have her privacy.

Full-blown traditional Chinese funerals are notoriously ornate, complicated and lengthy affairs. Some of the more elaborate ones last two years.

In the case of the late Tuan, many of the rites were Westernized in accordance with China’s lunging urge toward modernity. But his casket was the traditional three-humped rectangular box, decked head-to-toe with flowers and literally thousands of encomia calligraphed on white paper or cloth. Tuan would be wellhonored on New Year’s, and on Grave-Sweeping Day.

Presentation of the casket (not sealed until after the wake) was strictly according to
feng-shui
: the head of the deceased facing the inside of his place of residence, white cloth over the entrance, gong on the left side of the doorway. Along with jewelry, red appointments or clothing were forbidden, as red was a color of happiness (exceptions were made if one died eighty or older, but Tuan had been far from this milestone). Inside the casket, Tuan was swathed in finery, a yellow cloth over his face and a blue one over his body. All of his other clothing had been burned, and a pile of ashes on a rattan mat attested to this.

Tuan’s send-off was in defiance of the Communist imperatives that frowned on lavish funerals. Not only were big funerals seen as superstitious and wasteful, but their sheer level of filigree was in itself an indictment, suggesting that the deceased was a criminal,
since only ill-gotten gains could pay for something this fancy. Stacked against this official modern stigma was the common belief that expensive funerals guaranteed peace in the afterlife.

Tuan’s would be no simple village funeral. There would come snake dancers and professional wailers, demonstrative mourners, extravagance, fireworks, fury and a party atmosphere lit by a conflagration of burned paper effigies. So what if it implied he’d been a criminal? In his case, everyone knew it was true, and this liberated the planners to spare no expense.

But for now, the private, invitation-only elite entitled to a more privileged remembrance inside the Pleasure Garden were startled by the sight of
two
caskets on the ceremonial bier.

Mads Hellweg and his entourage cast uneasy glances around the area. No sign of Cheung or his number one, Ivory. Their absence was a disappointment to Hellweg. Entrance to this sanctum sanctorum required crawling on hands and knees, kowtowing and offerings. Hellweg had a perverse desire to watch Cheung crawl for something, even if it was only to further his intrigues.

General Zhang’s group was present and the stiff-spined ex-military men gave the proper bows and acknowledgement to Hellweg’s group. Others present included Cheung’s customary cadre of international financiers and a scatter of the best and most influential Tong leaders. All with their bodyguards, of course.

And still, no Cheung. Which suggested deceit, possibly a trap.

No, wait—here was Ivory, acting cordial, even deferential, toward the high rollers in the room.

Then the lid of the casket next to Tuan’s opened entirely on its own.

Qingzhao was surprised least of all, but surprised nonetheless. She had expected and anticipated many things, but not this.

When the casket opened, she was standing near Zhang’s contingent of police enforcers. She was the only woman present in this boy’s club—more nonsense about females not being worthy, here—but so far no one had pegged her as such because she had taken great pains to blend.

She had cut her hair short and combed it straight back. She wore tinted glasses with stainless steel frames to abet the coarsening of her complexion, which she had achieved with makeup. Her brows were bolder, more masculine, and she had expertly stippled her cheeks and chin to provide the illusion of shaved facial hair. She had avoided using a padded suit to keep from making her head look too obviously small in contrast to her frame. The man’s suit she wore was black with a black respect band on one sleeve, and plenty of room for the hammerless automatic pistol nestled against her spine.

The secret lords of the New Bund’s underworld rarely congregated in one place together, making Tuan’s wake and funeral a notable occasion. Most of the important men, from Tong leaders to drug royalty, had come as a measure of respect to Cheung’s influence, not Tuan’s stature.

And Cheung was not present.

Qi immediately theorized a mass trap; Cheung drowning all rodents at once, slicing through the Gordian knot instead of unraveling it, and clean-slating the entire playing field. It was easy to envision the Pleasure Garden sealing up and filling with lethal gas.

But no…if trap there was to be, then Ivory wouldn’t have shown either. It was highly unlikely that Cheung would sacrifice his right hand man, and here he was as a kind of Cheung manqué, pressing the flesh and making sure everyone was acknowledged, given an equal show of respect.

Unless—

Unless Ivory had finally blown it one too many times, for instance by repeatedly failing to kill Qi.

He surely could have killed her, Qi knew—more than once he’d had the opportunity. She could not chalk her continued survival up to skill on her part or the operation of chance or luck. Ivory’s failure to end her life was beginning to seem more willful than inadvertent, a choice even if only an unconscious one and one wrapped up in some other struggle, purely internal, between Ivory’s ambition and sense of duty to Cheung on the one hand and, on the other, his sense of honor and duty to himself. Whatever the reason, something had kept him (so far) from completing the preordained arc that ended with Qi’s death. Qi was determined not to become similarly handicapped. When she had a clear shot at him, she’d take it. Because ultimately, one of them had to die.

The unexplained second casket opened, then.

Cheung was inside, and sat up. This was his entrance, intended to impress, and he was making the most of it.

The side of the second casket dropped down on hinges so Cheung could dismount the bier.

Qi should have drawn, fired and fled in that moment. She could not. Even she was momentarily transfixed.

Stunned, rather. As was everyone else in the room who beheld the spectacle of Cheung’s warlord outfit.

Qingzhao stared frankly, her jaw slowly coming undone.

In cut and architecture the costume was essentially military, following the aspirations of conquerors of the early 20
^th
Century, such as a photo Qi had once seen of Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin. High, stiff, embroidered collar with pins of rank, Sam Browne belt, tasseled epaulettes, cockades, pips, chevrons and medals with maniacal emphasis on the breast hash and ribbon rack. A sash. Three red stripes on the jodhpurs, also denoting high rank. Riding boots, leather puttees and golden
spurs
, for godsake. For those who care to recall history, it was comparably flamboyant to the outrageous tanker’s uniform confabulated by General George S. Patton—yes, the one said to be topped by a gold football helmet. But instead of olive or khaki, Cheung’s ensemble was rendered entirely in black silk brocade. The only thing missing was a flag and a plumed helmet.