Jade Dragon (28 page)

Mr Tze suggested that they be careful not to terminate anyone already in
the early stages of the rapture, that they take every opportunity to
induce more to the glory should the opportunity present itself. To this
end, Qin Hui tossed a slow-release canister of aerosol Z3N into the air
ducts while Blue Snake examined the hospitals computer system. Her mask
extruded a wire into the reception terminal’s interface socket and she
sat motionless, the monitor in front of her flashing through pop-up
permissions screens.

White Snake ensured that the channels on all the hospitals d-screens
were tuned to the live feed from Wyldsky. They had learnt only recently
that one of the clinic’s doctors had been causing problems, attempting
to interfere with the pattern. It was of course no accident that this
same doctor had made contact with the Chen boy. This was the way of
things, the play of designs laid down by the King and his brethren.

The canister began to hiss; thousands of others, some spraying mists,
some dripping thick blue liquid into reservoirs, were doing the same
across the city. The Masks had been planting them for months in places
where they would lie undiscovered. Metro stations and schools.
Shopplexes and parks. Trams and taxis. Everywhere.

But this was only the secondary objective; the primary was to locate the
targets. This directive was also broken into two elements. The first was
to Isolate and Apprehend. The second, the simpler of the two that would
come into play if the first could not be achieved, was to Kill.

“I have them,” said Blue Snake. “Eastern quadrant of the building,
emergency exit stairwell number four. They are together, descending from
the roof.” Before her, grainy video feeds from monitor pods showed a
pair of blurry figures.

“Hey!” shouted a voice, attracting White Snake’s attention. A security
guard with a large taser hove into view, his expression confused at the
trio of incongruous porcelain masks. “Step away from the computer!”

White Snake adjusted something on the hypo, and aimed it at the guard.
Reconfigured for dartgun mode, the device coughed, and one of the
cartridges embedded itself in his right eye. The man screamed and clawed
at his face, foam forming at the edges of his lips.

“Moving,” said Qin Hui, producing a flechette pistol and pointing. He
didn’t need to speak; none of them did. But the public relations
department felt that, at least around humans, they should converse in a
normal fashion. Alienation of the client base was never good for
business.

The Masks moved into the hospital corridors, laying people down as they
came across them.

Ko grabbed the op’s shoulder and pulled. “Come on, man!” he cried. “What
are you waiting for? We’ve got to run, get distance… Get Nikita out of
here!”

But Fixx hesitated, thinking. “They don’t want her. She’s already dead
in Tze’s eyes. They’re here for us.”

“What?”

The other man rubbed his chin.
Yeah.
It was making sense to him now,
the pieces of sensation and distant, weird vibes he’d been collecting
over the past few months at last starting to cohere into something
tangible. The waking dreams that led him to the singer in Newer Orleans,
the fragments of deep fear that bled across the night from the Eastern
sky. The words of the old Sifu and the steel-sharp determination in the
eyes of this streetpunk. All of it reflected in the psychic aftertaste
of the man who had violated Nikita’s mind, the man called Tze. In The
Han, they had looked at each other for a fraction of a second, and Fixx
knew.
There were other clouded souls and dark forces at work here, but
this monstrous plan had Tze at its heart. He glanced at Ko, and felt a
sudden understanding, a sharp and painful realisation. As much as he
wanted to, as much as it seemed Maitre Carrefour had brought him here
for it, Fixx at last saw the role that he was to play. The final pages
of the script for this night became clear. “You have to stop Tze,” he
told the teenager. “He has to die by your hand. ”

Ko’s jaw dropped open. “Me?”

“Listen,” Fixx lent close to him. “World turns, she’s gotta a pattern,
see? Layers and levels, moves like clockwork. The whole of life works on
one principle, slick. Right man, right place, right time. When one of
those is off, all hell breaks loose.”

The kid swallowed hard. Fixx knew he was remembering the visions, the
carrion city and the horrors of the emerald serpent-demon.

He prodded Ko in the chest. “You and your boy Feng. You gotta do it.
No-one else can.”

“I steal cars, for Buddha’s sake. I’m just a… a thief, and not a very
good one at that,” he said, dejected.

They were alone in the stairwell, their voices echoing. Fixx looked
around. “Ask the ghost what he thinks. ”

Ko fell silent for a moment, looking into the middle distance. After a
moment, he nodded. “What do I have to do?”

“Get up to the Peak, find that black-hearted sonuvabitch… and end him.
Else, there’ll be no place to run to.”

“Nowhere to hide,” added Ko, his voice low. “What’re you gonna do? What
about that Lam guy?”

Fixx smiled. “Don’t you worry none, I’ll give ’em some-thin’ to think
about.”

The metallic gridwork of the stairs clanged as Ko took them three at a
time, vaulting over the banister to leap off to the next floor. He
glimpsed Feng on every landing, nervously watching for any sign of the
Tze’s sinister henchmen. The running made it easier for Ko to keep his
concentration in the moment, worrying about where he was going to be in
the next second instead of letting the conflicted emotions inside him
take over.

He was leaving Nikita alone; Fixx was standing his ground to let Ko
escape; there was something awful hatching on the Peak; the man who
ruined his sister was in league with monsters. Any one of these things
would cripple him with fear and doubt if he let them.z/p>

Ko dropped past the ground floor and went down one more, into the
basement sublevel. He was moving so fast he lost his balance and bounced
off the door, practically tumbling through it into the open grey cavern
of the vehicle park. He slipped on a patch of old motor oil and fell
against a concrete stanchion. There were cars dotted about in some of
the parking spaces. All of them were the same kind of unremarkable
compacts, Kondobishi Yasumes or Toyomazda Sunrays. Nothing with any
poke,
as traditional go-ganger slang called it.

He took a breath, scanning the underground car park for Feng. On the
other side of the garage, he spied the swordsman gesturing at a rank of
white vans. Ambulances. Over there, the paramedics waited on alert
status for calls that would send them racing out into the night; but for
some reason nobody was around down here, and Ko could hear the far-off
sound of a phone ringing and ringing. The meat wagons were bulkier than
the compacts, but they made up with overcharged engines what they didn’t
have in grace. Ko jogged across the asphalt and got halfway there when
Feng shouted out a wordless warning.

He turned and saw a woman in a white mask sprinting out of the stairwell
toward him. She was so
fast.
Ko vaguely remembered the sight of a
similar mask on the face of a driver, crossing the Tsing Ma Bridge; then
she was on him, a hammer blow punch spinning him around. He turned into
the impact, feeling his teeth rattle and slid away down the flank of a
parked vehicle. She came at him with a kick that stove in an ambulance’s
fender, popping the headlight out like a glass eye.

Belatedly, Ko wished he’d asked Fixx if he could borrow his crossbow. In
his pocket, his fingers traced the shape of something and on reflex he
threw it at the guardian, moving and taking cover by the van’s open
doors.

The woman caught the missile out of the air and examined it quizzically.
“Tarot card,” she said, without a hint of exertion in her voice. “Knight
of Wands.”

Ko came at her at full tilt, dragging a heavy fire extinguisher from a
snap-clip on the wall. The red cylinder swung into the masked woman’s
head and Ko heard something break. She staggered and fell over. He
followed up by letting the thing off into her face, great gouts of white
chemical foam smothering the guardian. She batted at the acidic stuff
like an animal with tar on its fur.

“Mine,” he grated, recovering the card. Ko tossed the extinguisher and
vaulted into the ambulance’s cab. He didn’t even need to hotwire it; the
motor was already in standby mode. The thief stamped the accelerator
pedal into the floor and the hydrogen engine snarled. Automatically, a
two-tone siren started wailing and the blue lamps dotted over the
vehicle strobed wildly.

In the wing mirror, Ko saw the woman in the white mask getting to her
feet as he launched the ambulance out on to the street. She had her head
cocked, like she was talking to someone.

Ko turned on to Princess Margaret Road and headed south, watching the
accelerometer needle drift up the dial. He hoped that would be the last
he’d see of the Masks, but somehow, he doubted it.

From the spidercopter’s window, Tze saw the spread of Wyldsky and he was
pleased with it. The sprawling mass of the concert crowd moved like
wheat in a breeze, rocking as they threw themselves into the music. The
noise from the towering speaker stacks was so loud that the ’copter’s
approach was hardly noticed. The flyer crossed behind the stage and
turned to land in the statue park behind it.

Tze felt a definite spring in his step as he came down the gangway. His
hands threaded together. Outwardly, he was maintaining an air of calm,
but inwardly he felt almost giddy with anticipation. Tonight, the things
he saw only as vivid dreams would be made flesh. Ahead, the band on
stage were coming to the climax of their final number. He knew little
about the group, cared even less. All that mattered was that the lead
singer, the oily man who had been there that night at the tower, that he
had greed and desires that the Cabal could easily turn to its advantage.
Tze had seen the anti-corporate banners in the crowds, heard the flaming
rhetoric in the songs. It was ample window-dressing for the main event.
For Juno Qwan.

He turned, playfully tracing the face of a terracotta soldier and found
her behind him, walking like she was approaching the gallows. “That
won’t do,” he told the singer.

Juno’s face was tear-stained, her eyes frightened. “Am I going… to
die?”

“You’re going to sing,” said the executive, tapping the hilt of an
ornate ceremonial sword on his belt. “And it will be perfect.”

“Why are you dressed like that?”

Tze laughed. “I have a penchant for the theatrical, dear girl.”

She’d been watching him all through the flight from the castle. “I know
you. I’ve seen your face. In my head. Sometimes.”

“They call that meta-engram imprinting.” He nodded. “An echo, if you
like, from the donor.” Tze leered a little. “There’s some of me in you.”

“Are you my father?”

“In a way. Along with a thousand others.” He sighed. “It’s all terribly
complicated.”

Juno looked at the stage. She seemed like a child now, lost and afraid.
“I don’t want Heywood to hurt me any more. Please don’t let him. He…
There are things in his eyes.”

Tze frowned. The simple honesty of the girl’s statement rang a warning
note within him; but he dismissed it. This was no time for distractions.
“He has business elsewhere, child. Monkey King will escort you.” The
Mask loomed.

Juno hesitated. “I… I can’t remember the words.”

Tze nodded to the guardian. “Help her.”

Monkey King produced the leather case with the injector device and
Juno’s eyes flashed with panic. “No, no! Just give me a moment…”

The Mask ignored her and shot a dose of Z3N into her jugular. She
staggered and he picked her up, carrying her forward.

Tze let out a laugh and raised his hands to the sky. “Let’s rock!” he
told the black clouds.

They caught up with him as the ambulance was crossing the Hung Horn
interchange. Up ahead, past the toll booths and the spread of evening
traffic, the black mouth of the Cross Harbour Tunnel yawned. Ko saw a
blink of silver bonnet in the rear-view and knew it was the Vector.

Two pale masks were visible through the windscreen. The driver had the
ram plate deployed from the bumper and slammed the ambulance hard,
trying to force a skid. Ko took the bite out of the attack by chopping
the throttle and drifting off the axis. The Mercedes sideswiped a
motorcycle and the bike flew away like a fish jerked on a line.

The roar of engines turned hollow as they entered the tunnel, and the
Vector came at him again. This time, one of the Masks was out of the
window, crawling on to the roof, swarming over the dented hood. Ko swore
as he lost a second of concentration, barely missing a snake-bus filled
with clubbers. The masked man threw himself at the ambulance and caught
on, clinging to the driver’s side. He used clawlike fingers to advance
up the outside of the vehicle.

In the wing mirror Ko saw a chilling, expressionless face in blinks of
reflected blue light. He threw over the steering wheel, hard. The
screaming ambulance bounced off the inside of the tunnel with a blast of
sound and tearing metal. Ko did it again, seeing the Mask disappear for
a second into the shower of sparks and glass. The wing mirror tore away
as he pressed the ambulance into the tunnel wall and held it there.
Panels sheared off, and a crimson wash streamed over the tiles.

Behind the vehicle, the distended and broken body of Qin Hui spun away,
bouncing up off the bonnet of the Vector and landing behind. The robot
bus rode over the guardian, grinding meat, porcelain and arcane metal
implants into the road.

White Snake activated the lasers in the headlights and opened fire.