Reign of Coins (17 page)

“That’s a start,” I said, making sure I looked pleased by their initial acceptance of the idea. Now came the sales pitch that had to work, or the idea would sink fast, like the steel battleships in the Battle of Hong Kong long ago. “To make this a foolproof ruse, we’ll need to get out of the boat a few times so the last spot we visit—Wong Chuk Kok Tsui—won’t look any more special than the other places we visit beforehand.”

“How can we do that if we’re walking around with a map in our hands?”

That was the image in Alistair’s head.

“Maybe we can have it out at all times, and never give an indication we found anything of importance in all the islands, or along the northern shores of the channel?”

That was our lovely hostess’s point of view. Getting closer to what might work….

Here’s mine.

“No…I’ve almost memorized the details already, so give me another moment and this baby will go back in your bag,” I said, drawing skeptical looks from them both. “If it makes you feel any better to have it along, I suggest spending the most time with it in one of the first two to three places we visit, and don’t bring it out at all in the last one. It should be an easy sell to admire the rock formations near the famed ‘Devil’s Fist’. According to what I’ve gathered from the map, the cave should be easy to recognize…unless I’m missing something.”

“No, you are correct,” Sulyn advised, moving over to show me a long inscription in tiny Chinese symbols along the bottom. “That is what the inscription tells us…the cave should be ‘in line with the base of the middle of the back knuckles of the fist’, and the entrance should be in plain view.”

“That seems easy enough to follow,” said Alistair, obviously pleased this didn’t seem overly complicated. He stepped over to the ship’s railing to take a peek at the water a dozen feet below. “Now that we’ve got it taken care of, let’s have some fun!”

It must’ve been the cue she was looking for. Sulyn said something excitedly to one of her bodyguards, who had patiently waited for us to finish our quiet discussion just out of their ear’s reach. As the older crewmember had done, this one bowed and stepped inside the salon, while the other remained stoic as he studied me.

“Well, William…shall we join your father?”

She held out her arm and I took it, gently, escorting her to my boy who met my gaze with a slightly jealous one. He had nothing to fear, as I’d never do anything to knowingly hurt him.

Me bowing out seemed to suit my son and Sulyn just fine, and before long the personal guard who disappeared returned with a small wait staff that prepared a table for us on the deck. So, the afternoon began with a light lunch and fine Chardonnay, and before long we had visited three islands of the many that surround Hong Kong.

I had forgotten the beautiful lagoons and almost surreal beauty in this part of the world. However, I would’ve enjoyed it more if the threat of danger hadn’t been hovering over our heads. Three helicopters passed over us, which raised more than a tiny bit of suspicion our progress was being tracked. It seemed excessive, where a subtle approach would be more in line with the goal of catching us holding the prize.

It kept me looking out to the sea around us, for as far as my gaze would reach. But for now, Kaslow’s voyeur tricks had yet to resume.

Finally, after a few hours spent enjoying our playful ruse, we returned to the channel and approached the famed monuments that marked our destination. Alistair commented on how crazy it was that something so prominent and ‘touristy’ would mark the spot where two of the most legendary and destructive objects lay at rest.

I’m sure he had a lot to say about the subject, since he held Sulyn’s rapt attention. However, I listened to something else, as the pull of my blood coin began to send the familiar trembling sensations up and down my left arm. It was here. Whether it meant inside the cave or not would have to be determined, but the sucker was within the span of a football field from our boat and the incredible formations before us.

It would be a tough sell we were simply enjoying the final stop of our sightseeing tour and wanted a brief look around. This would especially be true if the sensation turned painful for me. It doesn’t always happen, but sometimes the bloodier coins with the most deaths upon them bring a stiffer penalty for my efforts to reclaim them from the world.

A handful of chartered boats were anchored near the shoreline. Roughly two-dozen tourists mulled around the spot where we hoped to find our mysterious cave. Would there be room for all of us inside? Such a humorous musing could turn into a deadly prophecy if my Soviet enemy caught wind of what was here—regardless of the significant number of innocent people loitering near the cave entrance.

“What should we do?” asked Sulyn, staring out at the group that apparently found something their tour guide said to be quite funny. Nearly another dozen people were climbing along the rocks.

“We should go ahead with our plan,” I said. “If the passageway to the cave is where it should be, and we see clear evidence of it, we’ll come back later tonight. We will know what to look for under flashlights, instead of having to search for clues in the dark.”

“And if it isn’t here?”

I couldn’t believe Alistair bothered asking such a question, since it could only mean the map was inaccurate. We had nothing else to go by, other than my innate ‘coin sense’.

“Let’s go,” I said, ignoring his question.

We were close enough that I didn’t wait to be pampered with a dinghy moving slowly to the shore. I dove into the shallow water and swam to the shoreline, pleased the water’s temperature was warmer than expected. I soon heard Sulyn and Alistair splashing through the water to catch up with me. I stepped out of the water and casually cut a path through the tour groups. The coin’s pull had grown heavier…it was tantalizingly close.

Barely able to concentrate, I looked back at the massive fist rising out of the shallow water, the surf crashing softly against it. The middle finger easy to determine, I looked around to where the ‘back knuckle’ faced. I saw…nothing. Nothing immediately obvious.

I moved up closer to the sedimentary rock wall. If a doorway was concealed, there should be at least minute cracks to define it. Unless the doorway was camouflaged in some other fashion…perhaps supernaturally? The damned giant finger might as well literally flip me off.

“Do you sense where the doorway is on this thing…William?”

Alistair almost called me ‘Pops’ in front of Sulyn. Glad he didn’t, since I was having an increasingly difficult time trying to pinpoint the origin point of my coin’s call to me. It came from somewhere below the earth’s surface, although not directly beneath our feet. It was maddening.

“No, I don’t,” I confessed, releasing a low sigh.

Without clearer clues to work with, we were screwed. I allowed my gaze to scan the rock wall again. Still nothing, even when I lined it up with the frigging middle finger again.

“Maybe we should look around a little more…check more of the area,” Sulyn suggested. Hers was the most beautifully forced smile I’ve ever seen. At least she was sticking to my ruse instructions. “There is a path over here….we can walk behind—
huh?”

We all heard it at the same time. One of Sulyn’s bodyguards that remained on the yacht was holding the receiver from the ship’s telephone. He called urgently for her to return to the ship. It had something to do with a shooting at her grandfather’s estate. Something else was said, too, but I couldn’t make it out.

Cheung Sulyn could well be the most in-control, vivacious young woman I’ve known in some time. Whatever my sparse translation had missed of the hurried shouts in Chinese from her personal protector, she understood fully. Her refined façade disintegrated, and she ran screaming to the yacht, with Alistair and me close behind her.

In that instant, I fully understood what Viktor Kaslow’s ‘voyeur’ absence from our afternoon excursion meant. He had been busy taking care of other business…
very
busy, as it turned out.

Chapter 18

I believe nearly all of us have certain situations where no matter how hard we try, we invariably say the wrong thing. My shortcomings come up most often in the area of comforting those who grieve. My heart aches terribly for others—particularly when the innocent suffer. In the past, my heart has grown heavy enough that I’ve dropped to my knees and wept for days in agony. Yet, even though I feel this way, more often than not when I open my mouth something cold and callous comes out, instead of the overwhelming compassion I most often feel.

It’s what happened that late Friday afternoon in Hong Kong, where the summer’s unforgiving sun was almost unnoticeable in light of Sulyn’s profound grief as she wept on the deck floor. Alistair held her tenderly in his arms, comforting Sulyn as best he could for her terrible loss. It wasn’t the words themselves but the way he said them that drew her closer to him, as they sat together. I looked on helplessly from nearby.

I had told her how terribly sorry I was for the loss of three family members, but the words sounded shallow…and not just to me. I felt numb, but it was based more on anger than grief. For the moment, all I wanted to do was find a way to destroy Viktor Kaslow for yet another terrible crime in his illustrious career of wickedness that seemed destined to never end. There would be time to deal with such anger, and it needed to come later.

I hated myself for my glib response—and trust me, I know it came across terribly. Even her guards gave me an odd look, and surely they weren’t strangers to expressing themselves without an ounce of emotion. 

But at least Alistair was there for her, making his initial move to catch her as she fainted, right after we stepped back onto the yacht. Her closest protector had just informed Sulyn that her two young nieces and nephew had been gunned down in Cheung Yung-ching’s palatial mansion in the hills overlooking the city. Those killings were in addition to the four guards, kitchen help, maid and butler that were on the property at the time. Thirteen deaths in all, and afterward the one hundred and fifty-year-old building was torched.

Details were hard to come by, and it took almost the entire trip back to Tolo Harbour to determine exactly what had taken place. The attack happened shortly after Sulyn and part of her grandfather’s staff—including the kid, Stephen, who picked us up that afternoon—had left the estate. Police were already on the scene looking for clues, and Sulyn had been advised that officers were waiting for our return to the pier. Apparently, they were making a rare move to place her in protective custody after another attack soon followed the first one, roughly an hour before our arrival at Wong Chuk Kok Tsui.

The fifth floor at the Adventist Hospital was the recipient of this second assault, and only a kill shot barely missing its mark kept Cheung Yung-ching among the living. His bodyguards and the nurses on duty at the time didn’t survive the violence. Only a young orderly, who hid beneath the nurse station, lived to tell what happened. He described the lone gunman as ‘a tall blonde man with unusual blue eyes’.

I would’ve remained ignorant of these details, if not for Sulyn’s tearful relating to Alistair what happened at the estate and hospital. Ignorant, that is, until Cedric could also bring me up to date on the latest news. He stood on the pier with two local homicide detectives when the ship returned.

“The detectives have requested that you and I go downtown with Cedric and wait for them to join us,” I told Alistair. He had continued to comfort Sulyn as the police contingent boarded the yacht. He looked up at me with reddened eyes from grief. “Sulyn is going with them to see her grandfather, who has requested to see her.”

“Please come with me—
please!”
Sulyn implored him.

It broke my heart to see her overwhelming distress. Who wouldn’t be on the verge of a complete breakdown upon learning most of their family had been suddenly taken away by senseless violence? It sounded like Cheung Yung-ching was on the verge of joining them in the after life. Very soon it could be Sulyn and her brother, presently in the Hawaiian Islands, left to carry on the Cheung family legacy.

“I don’t think they’ll let me,” said my boy, looking longingly at me to come up with something after he shot a disdainful glance at Cedric and the detectives. “If not, I promise to come to the hospital as soon as they finish with us.”

Alistair must’ve been expecting a quick interview and for us to be released. However, the pained expression on Cedric’s face foretold a worse experience was in store. Not that he intended to harm us—I didn’t get that from him at all. But, something was up.  I doubted we still had free rein to find the mantle, as indicated last night. The mass murders had changed the rules and stakes of the ‘find the coin and mantle mission’.

You might not believe me when I claim to have been more concerned about what happened to Sulyn’s family…but I was. Remember what I mentioned a while back, about preventing Christian Morrow from obtaining the Mantle of Genghis Khan was just as important as recovering my tainted silver shekel? In the depths of my soul I realized Sulyn’s personal well-being was tied to it all. Viktor Kaslow’s murderous rampage was obviously in response to his American boss’s determination to collect his prize at all costs, and to get the job done quickly. That prize’s location remained largely under her control, since she carried the map. No doubt, Kaslow was looking for it when he descended on the estate. The only aspect confusing to me is why he burned the place afterward…what was he trying to hide? Did he find something else he wanted to make sure someone like me never knew about?