Warriors (34 page)

His father, an old navy bastard himself, had a saying he had liked to repeat whenever someone irked or threatened him . . .

You fuck with a truck, you get run over.

He’d have to remember to mention that to the North Koreans as soon as he arrived.

C
H A P T E R
  4 6

A
mbrose froze momentarily at the sound from above, then calmly hung his tightly rolled umbrella on the back of the nearest chair and switched off his torch. He next bent down and unclasped his leather murder bag. Among the many disorganized vials, pairs of thin latex gloves, glassine evidence bags, black lights, and Luminol . . .

Was his loaded .38 snub-nosed revolver.

He got it firmly seated in his right hand and moved swiftly and silently into the shadows of the hallway leading back to the kitchen. Anyone entering the parlor would have to show himself. Odd, he’d seen no evidence of another vehicle on the property. But of course he’d neglected to double-check by walking around to the rear of the house, hadn’t he?

At first he could hear nothing but the beating of his own heart. And the faint ticking of a clock somewhere.

And then he heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

Careful, deliberate steps, as if someone was testing his weight on different areas of each step, trying to avoid making a sound. Too heavy for the elegant and perfumed woman whose scent still lingered. A man, no question, heavyset with labored, husky breathing. A man descending with one hand on the banister and the other against the wall to lighten his weight. A man who’d seen and heard his Morgan motorcar turn off the high road and rumble-rumble along the causeway, heard the piercing creak of the front door, and yet for all that, a man had chosen to remain hidden and silent, undiscovered. A man who—

The fifth step from the top creaked . . . and so did the last.

The hall was dark as a pit. But Ambrose saw a dim glint of light . . . the twin barrels of the side-by-side shotgun slowly protruding into the parlor gloom. This before he could see who was carrying the weapon. It was as if the fellow were probing the air with the gun, unsure of his next move.

“Police!” Congreve said sharply. “Scotland Yard. Drop the weapon now. Throw it down where I can see it. Come out with your hands where I can see them. Do it now.”

No reply.

Suddenly, and with a wild animal howl, a squat, heavy figure clad all in black leaped into view, aiming his double-barreled shotgun directly into Congreve’s face.

“Drop it, now!” Ambrose said calmly.

“Aieee!” the man screamed, then lunged forward and fired one barrel.

Congreve was in the process of dropping to one knee and raising his own gun. The pattern of shot tore into the ceiling above his head. A shower of plaster and fine dust filled the air around him and Ambrose squinted desperately to see what he—

The man lowered the shotgun to fire the other barrel.

Congreve shot him before he could pull the second trigger.

The shotgun thudded to the floor, and the man pitched backward, landing faceup, his head and torso twitching in the foyer, his thick legs spread-eagled in the parlor.

Ambrose rose and went to him, kneeling to check his vital signs. The bullet, because of the angle, had entered his chest, struck a rib, bounced around, and severed something major. A sucking wound. He was very dead, he just didn’t know it yet. His eyelids were fluttering and Ambrose knew he didn’t have much time.

Congreve leaned over and spoke slowly and clearly to the dying man.

“Can you talk?” Ambrose said.

“Wh-what?”

“What’s your name?”

“G’fook yerself,” he said in a death rattle rasp.

“Beats dying. Did you kill Professor Watanabe?”

“Why? They gonna hang me for it? I didn’t kill him.”

His eyes were rolling back in his head, eyeballs turning to marble already.

“Who did?”

“Fookin’ hunger birds killed him.”

“Birds?”

“You heard me . . . get a doctor . . . it hurts . . .”

“I will. Why’d you come back here tonight?”

“Lookin’ . . . the . . . For the bloody . . .”

“Never mind that. Tell me now. Who killed Watanabe?”

“Ch-Chyna . . .” he managed to croak. “Chyna . . .”

“China? A Chinese assassin? The Te-Wu? Talk!”

“Aw, sod all, it hurts . . . it’s all about . . . I’m . . .”

“Hurry up, for God’s sake, man, save yourself . . .”

“Moon,” he said, and his dead eyes rolled back.

“Moon?” Congreve said, looking beyond the dying man to the window. There was a fingernail moon, barely visible through the heavy cloud cover. He placed two fingers on the carotid artery of the dying man.

He was already gone.

CONGREVE NOTED THE BLOOD SPATTER
on the wall and surmised that the forensic police would have a perfect picture of whence the fatal shot had been fired. He assumed he would not find himself in the inconvenient position of having to prove self-defense. It was self-evident. Good.

China, the fellow had said. This man had worked for the Chinese. A Te-Wu assassin, most likely, from the look of him.

The dead man had a flat Asian face. Thick black brows that joined in the middle above his nose, red-rimmed eyes now vacant.

Adult acne scars on his cheeks and neck. He was powerfully built, massive biceps beneath his tight-fitting black turtleneck and . . . his hands. They were gnarled and bruised as if he had lived a life of hard labor. Long, powerful fingers, hideous in their strength and brutality. Fingernails chewed to the quick. And look. The tip of his right index finger was missing. Neatly snipped off, as it were.

Something about the maimed digit rang a distant bell. He couldn’t be sure, but somewhere along life’s highway, he heard mention of such a mutilation. It wasn’t any form of punishment. It was some kind of reward. Yes, that was it.

A reward for services rendered.

In the world of the Chinese secret society.

The bloody Te-Wu.

CONGREVE GOT TO HIS FEET
and strode to the grimy window, all his senses on alert now. He extracted his mobile from the pocket of his tweeds and rang the Cambridge Police. He asked for Detective Inspector Cummings. When the man came on the line, Ambrose told him precisely and in great detail what had happened. Precisely who did what to whom. He listened for a moment. He said, no, he wasn’t hurt and that he would wait for Cummings and his medical examiner to arrive at the scene.

Cummings countered that it would take at minimum a couple of hours to gather up his team and drive all the way to the professor’s cottage from the station in central Cambridge. He asked the legendary Scotland Yard man for all his telephonic contact information, told him (he ignored the faux pas in the spirit of the moment) to do nothing at all to disturb the evidence, and go home and get a good night’s sleep; they would contact him the following morning.

That sounded good. Happy to be alive and unhurt, Congreve desperately wanted to be at home with his feet up, whiskey to hand, basting by a roaring fire and listening to the offshore shipping forecast weather on Radio BBC 4. That was his preferred soothing ritual, and God knows he needed to cleave to it now.

There was, Ambrose fervently believed, a tender spot in all great men. Achilles had his heel. For one Ambrose Congreve, it was the shipping forecast. Couldn’t possibly exist without it. None of the broadcast information was of the slightest use to him, of course, nor for that matter the millions of nonseafarers who listened to it religiously, mesmerized by the calm, cadenced recitation of names of sea areas followed by a sonorous recitation of winds, weather, and visibility . . . names like Fisher, Dogger, German Bight . . . ah, bliss, for a man to be comforted and strangely uplifted by what someone or other had called “that cold poetry of information.”

He rang off with Cummings and called Alex Hawke, repeating word for word what he’d told the Cambridge copper. Then he added a wee bit more.

“He was still alive, Alex. I got two words out of him. Asked him who he worked for.”

“Yes?”

“China.”

“China. As in the country?”

“I hardly imagine he was referring to tableware, Alex.”

“Well. Good work. I should hang up right now, call Sir David and tell him the Chinese are definitely involved in the murder of your friend . . .”

“But, Alex, wait—”

“You said two words. What was the second?”

“Moon.”

“How odd. Was the moon out? In all that messy moorish weather?”

“You could barely see your hand in front of your face. But, yes, a sliver of moon above. So what?”

“Agreed. So, China, at least . . . That’s something, I suppose.”

“Well. That’s all I got out of him. Oh, and Alex?”

“Yes?”

“No trace of a car. Anywhere. So how the hell did he get here?”

“Someone dropped him? Sometime before you arrived.”

“Hmm. My thought exactly.”

“He was waiting for you. Watched your approach from an upstairs window. Remained hidden after you’d entered the house.”

“It would seem that way.”

“Who else knew you were going out there?”

“Diana, of course. Inspector Cummings in Cambridge. I alerted him in case he felt the trip might be unwise . . .”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, not Cummings, that’s for sure. Someone else in the Cambridge constabulary, possibly. Someone on the pad for our friends?”

“The Cambridge Te-Wu.”

Hawke told him to stop talking about the Te-Wu. Despite Congreve’s infatuation with the notion of renascent gangs, they had not a shred of evidence pointing in that direction.

He said get the hell out of there and hurry home to Diana. She had rung up Hawkesmoor three times. Worried sick about him. Besides, Hawke needed to get on to Sir David immediately. Tell him what they had.

“What have you got, Alex? Death rattles, nothing more.”

“One dead assassin. One dead professor. Two words from a dying man’s lips. Moon. And China. Maybe together they actually mean something. Find out who dropped him off and we’ve found Watanabe’s killer.”

“One would hope.”

“Hang up, would you, Constable? You’ve caused quite enough trouble for one evening, I should think.”

Ambrose rang off and looked once more around the shadowy scene of the crime, knowing he’d probably not return. He memorized the important spatial relations of objects, doors, windows. Then he turned to the corpse and began methodically going through the dead man’s clothing and effects, looking for any possible clues to his identity.

Perhaps this corpse would actually lead him to Watanabe’s killer.

And perhaps, of course, it would not.

His fingertips brushed something in the dead man’s pocket and he withdrew it.

A shiny black feather. A bird’s feather.

Something the dead man had said stuck with him. A phrase he’d used. Something nonsensical he’d entirely forgotten to mention to Hawke.

Hunger birds.

C
H A P T E R
  4 7

C
ongreve stepped through the doorway and out into the rank and bitter air.

A stiff wind blew across the tufted, tempting grass to either side of the narrow ribbon of earth winding back to his automobile. Despite its benign, meadowlike appearance, it was not grass at all, he knew, but a vast soggy marsh. When the wind blew upon the distant hills, it whistled mournfully in the crevices of granite, and sometimes it shuddered like a man in pain.

He winced at the thought.

The encounter inside the cottage had shaken him, he suddenly realized. Here he was, anthropomorphizing nature, giving it human qualities. This was the stuff of romantics and poets, he laughed to himself, not bloody policemen.

These people, whoever they were, were not to be taken lightly. They were stone killers. And he had to find out who they were. And why they killed. He tightened his woolen greatcoat around him, pulled down his cap, and set off, glad to be escaping this execrable place.

As he walked, he repeatedly glanced back over his shoulder, looking at the dark cottage and trying to draw information from it and the very ground it stood upon. He was perhaps a quarter of a mile away from it when the oddest thing happened.

A solitary bird began to bother him.

Or perhaps a bat. Diving on him and swooping out of the darkness to brush the top of his head. He felt repeated soft bumps through the woolen cap. He tried to bat it away and quickened his pace, even though the footing was sketchy at best.

But he couldn’t escape the shrieking bird!

It returned again and again to beleaguer him, and now its aggression was sharply defined. It had its claws out, and with each pass it was raking the top of his head and slashing at his frozen ears painfully. It would be humorous were it not so terribly disturbing, a wild creature harassing a lone man in the middle of nowhere and—

Blood was pouring down his face.

He tried to swipe it out of his eyes so he could see where he was going, but there must have been a large gash on his forehead. He slapped at the air and paused to think a moment, gather himself, and curse softly.

Then the creature attacked again, its most vicious stabbing yet. It staggered him and he plunged forward, desperate for the safety of his car. He hadn’t taken five steps when he felt the ground sag under his feet and he plunged down the rocky muddy slope and into the mist. He got to his feet, still blinded and now disoriented. He managed to keep his legs under him and headed in the direction of the causeway that was somewhere above.

He stumbled and fell again. And suddenly he was up above his knees in weed and slime. He reached out for a tuft of grass and pulled. It sank beneath his weight. He kicked out with his feet, and they would not answer him. He kicked again and one foot sucked itself free, but as he plunged ahead, reckless and panic-stricken, he trod deeper water still.

Now he floundered helplessly, beating the weed with his fist and rolled umbrella. He heard a scream rise from his throat. He was sinking into the muck. He knew how this ended. Alex Hawke’s friend Stokely Jones had nearly suffered a similar fate once in the Florida Keys. Quicksand. Stoke had been breathing through his nose when the cavalry arrived. But Congreve’s cavalry was a good two hours away, and he didn’t have that long.