Hunt Among the Killers of Men (15 page)

“Thank you all for coming,” Cheung said, straightening his seams and perching one hand on the black leather flap holster belted around his middle. “We gather today to confer honor upon our fallen comrade, Tuan, and to help him toward the afterlife with such ceremony as he merits.”

He leveled his gaze at everyone in the room, including Qingzhao.

In his hands was another of the tiny carved caskets.

“And one of you will be accompanying him to the afterlife, right now.”

Gabriel riffled Qi’s first-aid supplies for saline with the thought he might be able to play alchemist and whip up a larger batch of the mystery drug from the eight cc’s he had remaining in the syringe. Mitch had lapsed into comfortable silence in the big iron tub, much akin to a heroin nod. Without a fresh application of the drug, the slamming headaches and disorientation would soon resurge, and without a medical facility at hand, Gabriel was trying his best to preload a stopgap.

All the supplies he and Qi had ferried back from her bartering excursion were still here, indicating that whatever had happened to Qi, she had not yet abandoned her stronghold. But of saline there was none. Gabriel gently set the precious syringe down under a protective protrusion of rock and turned his attention back to the big bronze statue.

He had gathered 200 feet of climbing rope in 50-foot coils, along with a basic climbing kit—a bandolier of base hooks, rock anchors, carabiners, pitons and spikes; a vertical harness, an array of belay and rappel geegaws, plus a couple of high-impact strap-lamps. Among his other tools and gear were a crate of chemicals in plastic
bottles, and a few sticks of dynamite, this last courtesy of Qi’s armory.

“How’re you doing, Kangxi, old fella?” he said. “Still rotting away inside? Still got bats in your belfry?”

Those bats needed to tell Gabriel how they normally got out of the cave to hunt. He presumed a hole in the ceiling somewhere, fifty or sixty feet above the dung-fouled bowl of the floor.

Only once he’d found this secret could Gabriel put the Killers of Men to work on his behalf.

Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung spoke multilingually. Leftovers were handled by interpreters.

“I particularly wish to thank our brothers from Sechen Tong for attending,” he said. “It is their work in chemical engineering that will permit us shortly to commence worldwide distribution of our new narcotic, which we have elected to call ‘freon’ for short. General Zhang’s selfless work with the constabulary of the military police and affiliated forces has proven invaluable, and his men have proven to be compassionate and worthy.”

Zhang, in the dress uniform of his office, bowed slightly.

“As the West becomes more socialist, so do we inevitably become less communist,” continued Cheung. “It is a new century. It is the order of things.” He opened his fingers into a butterfly. “Information now flies freely through the very air. This in no way should be perceived as a threat.”

Mads Hellweg shuffled foot-to-foot, waiting to be congratulated for his supposedly equal role in the coming new order.

Qi’s hand drifted back toward her gun. Was it Cheung’s intention to bore them all with a banquet speech?

“I further wish to assure all of our most honored Tong brothers that your Japanese counterparts have been assuaged. I have taken independent action to ensure their noninvolvement. The ruffled feathers are eased.”

Hellweg narrowed his gaze.
What?

Cheung was looking directly at him. “Your plot to disrupt was obvious and doomed,” he told Hellweg. Then with the air of someone bestowing a great boon, he handed the little wooden casket to Hellweg.

Ivory saw confusion mar Hellweg’s gaze. The man did not understand the meaning.

It became clear as Cheung unholstered the revolver on his belt and fired point-blank, not stopping until all six heavy-powder rounds were snugged deeply into Hellweg’s chest. The cacophony of report seemed to stop time itself.

Hellweg staggered backward without a word and fell with his legs in a figure-four. Gunsmoke grayed the air.

Everyone in the room was frozen in tableau, as though posing for a Renaissance painter.

Ivory’s crew had all drawn down on Hellweg’s bodyguards. Qi, following suit, had pulled her pistol and leveled it at the nearest subject most likely to preserve her disguise.

The uncertainty in the room was thicker than the drifting webs of gunsmoke. Half the other bodyguards had freed their weapons, but nobody dared to aim at Cheung. Ivory had a gun in each hand, pointed at two different men.

Nobody held as much import in that instant as General Zhang, whose hand had flown down to his sidearm. It hovered there, tentative as a hummingbird.

Cheung watched him. “If I have done wrong, General, then it is your duty to kill me right now.”

Zhang sought out Cheung’s eyes. Their communion was massive. He slowly withdrew his hand from his holster. Cheung smiled.

“You see? The General is with us.”

Ivory had to admire the sheer bravery on display, no matter how foolhardy it might have been. Cheung was showing the assembly the sort of leader he was. This was a public demonstration of his capacity to rule as well as a test of his personal magnetism. If he could swing Zhang, then he could swing the Tongs, and the traditionalists, too, especially since he had just coldly blown down another invading outsider. He’d still need to verify his true Chinese identity in the bloodline of older warlords, of course; there would be no winning over the hard core without that. But today’s events would go a long way toward silencing his critics.

Hellweg’s bodyguards were left dangling. Most of them were not aiming at anyone. They were gawping at their dead boss, now full of holes and slowly cooling on the cobblestoned floor. To a man, they were all hired Chinese muscle.

“We welcome you,” Cheung told them. “You were misguided, but now your minds have been set free. Ivory will see to your employment needs.”

Hellweg’s men took their cue and departed en masse with nervous shows of respect.

Call it charisma or call it power, Cheung ruled the
room. His aspirations were not delusional, thought Ivory. This man could really do it, and he had just proven it.

It was that unmitigated show of power that had caused Qi to hesitate, just at the microsecond she should have been blowing Cheung’s brains all over the tapestry.

Now Ivory’s grip closed on her forearm from behind. His other hand already had her gun.

“You’re coming with me,” he said.

As though he had known all along it was her, Cheung gave a little nod and motioned his partners back to business.

Gabriel fired a round from the Navy Colt into the blackness of the cavern, and the bats all freaked out, taking wing.

He ducked down among the dung-encrusted impalement victims, these skeletal Killers of Men, to observe. He wore a hat borrowed from Qi’s stores and the rainfall of batshit, both dislodged and fresh, descending from on high spattered on its crown and brim. He tracked their nightwing pattern with a handheld million-candlepower spotlight.

There.

There, in the back curvature of the ceiling about sixty feet from the cave floor, was a geological rupture that resembled a scowling stone mouth. The bats were piling through it in a centrifugal pattern that indicated it was fairly large. Apparently it led to a switchback to the surface, presumably S-shaped, since that would account for the fact that it admitted no light to the cavern in daytime.

Gabriel roughed out the distance and calculated as best he could the location of the rift on the outside of the mountain. It would have to be on the eastern slope—the steepest and most overgrown side, from what he had seen.

The vent was funnel-shaped, with the wide end inside the cavern. He headed toward its opening, lugging his climbing gear behind him. It should be possible to arrange a mechanism that would lift him toward the opening…

Gabriel had no way of knowing that, as he worked out this problem in engineering, back in the city the Hellweg Tower—sometimes called the Tower of Flame—was already burning for real, a five-alarmer that froze traffic for miles and caused firefighters from four districts to be called in as reinforcements.

He knew nothing about this. He concentrated instead on the work he was doing. Even when it was done, he still had some repairs he wanted to make. So he needed to work hard and work fast and not be distracted.

So he shut out all thoughts and got to work. Only one thought made it past the barrier he’d erected, and it was a thought about Qi: Where the hell was she?

The monastery had stood since 247 A.D. on the out-skirts of Shanghai with the presence of centuries crushed upon centuries, witness to the rise and fall of monarchs and tyrants. Like Longhua Temple it was configured in a time-honored seven-hall structure. Bald monks in yellow robes glided phantomlike through halls appointed with intimidating idols while
huge coils of incense smoldered like mutant beehives, rendering the air particulate and opiate.

Ivory had held Qi at gunpoint for more than an hour, all the way from Tuan’s funeral to this place, and she liked to think the stress fatigue of staying alert for her every twitch and gesture was beginning to tire him. They held fast in the First Hall while Ivory conferred with a man in monk’s robes.

“You bought off Buddhist monks?” said Qi.

“Pan Xiao is not a monk,” said Ivory.

Only then did Qi notice the baffled gun muzzle, barely visible, winking in and out of view beneath Pan Xiao’s robes as he moved. Some automatic equalizer on a shoulder sling, positioned for rapid deployment.

“Please,” Ivory said, indicating Qi should precede him along the corridor. He had to stay ready to shoot her at the first sign of misbehavior or trouble.

He directed her by lantern-light down narrow wooden stairs. They were about two floors beneath street level.

A warren of disused corridors led to a now-dormant fermentation room and abandoned wine cellar. After a few more twists and turns they came to what appeared to be a vault door, anomalous in its stainless-steel frame against the ancient stonework of the wall.

Qi anticipated some sort of dungeon, cell or holding area. When Ivory key-coded the door and opened it, she was frankly startled.

Ivory had brought modernity to this modest series of rooms in the form of electric lights, motion sensors, a security system and several computer monitors arranged on an old rolltop desk. Fish paddled about in a backlit 50-gallon aquarium and a small bonsai tree
thrived under an expensive multiband growth light. The furnishings were all handworked wood, apparently antiques.

Sure this was some kind of trick, Qi said, “Your apartment is in the city.”

“My apartment is not my home,” said Ivory. “It is necessary for appearances. No one knows of this place.”

“Not even Cheung?”

Ivory pursed his lips slightly. He closed the big iron door, then showed Qi he was standing down with the gun. He would not wield a weapon in here, and he was trusting her to listen to whatever he had to say. This was implicit when he stated, “I could have let Cheung have you back at the funeral.”

Then, maddeningly, he began to make tea as though it was the most natural thing in the world, even turning his back on her once or twice.

“Have you ever suffered a crisis of faith?” he said.

“Not religious,” Qi said, slowly taking a seat in an armless, hardback “drawer chair.”

“That’s exactly what Michelle Quantrill told me when I asked her the same question. You two have much in common.”

“I never saw her before the Zongchang casino,” said Qi.

“Nevertheless.”

“Why am I here?” Qi asked. “Why didn’t you do your duty and kill me when you had the chance?”

“Because I am finding out that some things transcend duty,” said Ivory. “Or at least some duties transcend others.” He waved this rather significant confession away. “Your holy war is to kill Cheung. Yet despite
multiple opportunities, you have not. My conclusion is that you are more interested in discrediting me through attrition. To avenge your status as a Nameless One.”

“Perhaps I’m just a lousy shot,” she said. They both knew it was not true.

“You were dealt with unfairly. Michelle Quantrill’s sister was dealt with unfairly. It is the way of things in Cheung’s vision of the world. But while I might be your adversary, I am not your enemy.”

“That sounds terrific,” said Qi. “But what does it mean?”

“You have heard the parable of the warrior of great honor,” said Ivory, serving them both tea in small hammered cups that were both exquisite and comfortably weighty. “He was obligated to a cruel and uncouth master. He discovered such honor as his can be a trap, a snare that tightens the more you struggle against it. The more he tried to serve his master honorably, the more obligated he became, and the more implicated in cruelty himself.”

“You have already betrayed Cheung by sparing me. He will not forgive this.”

“He might not,” acknowledged Ivory. “But I need to see you and this other woman clear of Shanghai. Then my obligations will be ended, and Cheung can take such measures as he will.”

“You are wrong,” said Qi, “that we two are the only ones you have wronged. You have involved this man Gabriel Hunt as well. The stain of your crisis of honor is spreading like a disease.”

“You are correct. If I kill you now, my obligation to Cheung is served, but I have dishonored myself. If
I do not kill you, if I let you go free, you have sworn to slaughter the man to whom I owe loyalty. There can be no honor in that. Is there any solution?”

He took a sip of tea as though it was the last one of his life, then handed Qi his pistol.

“I leave the dilemma in your hands.”

Ivory resumed his seat. And waited.

Michael Hunt was met at the airport by an official car that conducted him into the city, and the waiting representatives of the Shanghai Cultural Alliance. Much bowing, many cocktails, even more handshakes as a modest summit was initiated, and Michael suffered it all graciously. As Gabriel often pointed out to him, pressing the flesh took time and patience—a patience that Michael had cultivated while his brother was gallivanting around the globe.

His brother, from whom he had not had word in days. Who was presumably somewhere in greater Shanghai; who had, by all best guesses based on personal experience, gotten swept up in yet another sideroad that rendered him incommunicado. It was Gabriel’s rowdy way. If anything were truly amiss, Michael would have seen a red flag, a flare, a message in a bottle, something. Meanwhile his duty was to make nice with the academics Gabriel had jilted at the start of his trip and tell them the things they wished to hear.

Michael’s schedule awaited him in his suite, printed out and laid against the stacked pillows on the kingsized bed. He was staying in a hotel off the Bund that had apparently been an embassy at some past time.
Looking over the printout, Michael saw there were the usual tours of monasteries and museums, as well as a brace of receptions, the first of which was—oh, look at that—in exactly 45 minutes, at some location he could not have found with a map, a native guide and a GPS device. He was in the hands of his handlers and had no choice but to trust himself to them.

Showered, shaved, plucked, dressed and polished, he presented himself at the appointed time (thanking all the valets and doormen in Mandarin) and found himself whisked to a phantasmagoric skyscraper-top discotheque one entered by walking through the enormous resin-cast jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull.

The throb of the music was physically assaultive, the bass notes reverberating in his diaphragm. Strangers shouted greetings he could not hear, and the best response he could manage was to smile, nod and allow himself to be swept along through the strobing neon, the dry-ice fog, the mirrored surfaces that multiplied several hundred jam-packed revelers into thousands. Everyone was smoking, drinking and whipping themselves into an aerobic frenzy.

Michael winced inwardly, but on the surface showed nothing but serenity, calm, earnest goodwill. Patience.

His stewards guided Michael to one of many private VIP rooms fanning out from the central club floor. These exclusive chambers were lozenge shaped—like railroad flats—and padded with a sort of silver lamé tuck-and-roll on the walls that made them look like high-class cells in some A-list lunatic asylum. Table pods sprouted from the floor like mushrooms. And when the door thunked shut, the music vanished to a mere background thrum.

Michael snuck his cheat sheet out of his pocket, glanced at it. This event involved city fathers and local politicos who wished to have a posed snapshot with the head of the Hunt Foundation. It was the next best thing to a grant, and seen by some of them as a likely (perhaps necessary) prelude to same. As they filtered into the VIP room one by one, he shook hands and accepted proferred drinks, which he then mostly set down on the table behind him, untouched.

Eventually the line of people waiting to meet him had dwindled to just a single, singular individual, a willowy black masterpiece that exceeded six-two in heels. She took his arm like a lover and urged him out of the room. He glanced at one of the handlers who’d been steering him around all afternoon, and the man nodded. Michael allowed himself to be led by this amazon—whose name, he gathered, was Shukuma—toward a table in the back.

A burly cosmopolite rose to greet him, an unusuallooking Chinese with stark blue eyes.

“Mister Michael Hunt,” Shukuma said, “may I present Mister Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung.”

“This is both a great pleasure and a deep honor,” said Cheung. They shook hands briskly in the Western style. “Please join us.”

Every fiber of Qi’s combat mind screamed
kill him now.

Ivory sat before her with an infuriating smile of calm, awaiting a bullet to his head.

She could tell by the weight of the sleek Glock in her grasp that the gun was loaded. This was no trick. Ivory had mentally infected her with indecision. All his buttery-smooth talk of conflicted obligations. But
above all, perhaps without intending to, he had reminded her that he, Ivory, was not her target. All of her life’s work of despair and foxed chances now offered her an unclear choice.

“You wish for me to kill you?” she said. “Or is it that you wish for me to kill Cheung and free you from the burden of your conflicted duty?”

Ivory shrugged.

She raised the gun, then gave him the barrel in a sweeping backhand to the temple. A tiny grunt eased from him. Bright blood appeared as his eyeballs swiveled up and went opaque. He slumped from his seat, one leg hung up, his foot jutting out. It was undignified.

She took one small moment to arrange him on the floor of his sanctuary. Then she checked the Glock for loads and made for the door.

Mitch was freshly dressed and running her hands all over herself, as though someone had slid her into a new and confusingly alien body, inside-out. She seemed

mildly embarrassed when Gabriel returned to the shrine room.

She peered at him, trying to suss out her recent past. “Did I…?” she said. Her tone was diminished and uncharacteristically modest. “Did we…?”

“No,” Gabriel said.

“You undressed me.”

“I had to. You were burning up. It’s that stuff they stuck you with.”

“But I distinctly remember…” Her eyes went a little glassy. “…at least I
think
I remember…being, uh, extremely turned on.”

“That part is true,” said Gabriel.

“But we—you and I—we didn’t…?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said. “Thank you. Not that you aren’t a good-looking man—”

“Understood,” Gabriel said. “I saw you and Lucy together, back home.”

At the mention of her name, a buried memory seemed to surface, and with it a deep crimson blush. “Your sister is a very special person.”

“No doubt,” Gabriel said. “Now, if you’re through needlessly feeling embarrassed, I’d like to tell you about what I—”

Gabriel stopped speaking when he realized she wasn’t looking at him any longer, that she was looking past him, over his shoulder, at a figure behind his back.

Gabriel sucked in a hasty breath and turned. Qingzhao was standing at the far end of the chamber with her arms folded.

Safe. Gabriel and his two charges were armed, safe and reasonably whole.

“Let me get this straight,” said Mitch. “Now you don’t
want
to leave?”

“Of course I do,” said Gabriel. “But not with unfinished business, and I have business with Cheung. Mitch, you were abducted, drugged, pressed into a kind of slavery, shot at. Hell, forget ‘at,’ you were shot. I was, too,” he said, fingering the healed scar where the bullet had creased his temple. “And it’ll keep happening unless Cheung is dealt with. To us, to other people, to the whole country—the man needs to be stopped.”

“Very revolutionary of you,” said Qi. She was
stripping and cleaning a gun. “Very inspiring. Except it is easier to say this than to do it. Believe me, I have tried and I know. You forget that we are all fugitives now, and Zhang’s police force is looking for us.”

“But we have the one thing Cheung wants,” Gabriel said.

The women looked at each other, puzzled.

“This place,” he continued. “We know the location of Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s Killers of Men.”

“That is true,” said Qi cautiously, “but only to a point. The army we found is not of terra-cotta and there is no sign Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s remains are there. Surely the warlord did not have himself impaled on a spike. So, impressive as the display may be, it is not what Cheung seeks.”

“That bothered me, too,” said Gabriel. “I didn’t see anything in the cave that would serve Cheung’s purpose. So I looked at the statue again.”

He led them to the second shrine room and to the back wall where the giant statue reposed in horrible, shadowy splendor.

“Look at the eye sockets,” said Gabriel. “You see how they’re angled? And there’s a slight rim—as though they’re settings.”

“Settings? For what?” Mitch said. “You mean like a jewel? It would have to be huge.”

Gabriel thought back to an expedition that had taken him to the Kalahari Desert. There had been a statue there with jewels for eyes that made even this behemoth look tiny. “I’ve seen larger,” he said.

“Something like this?” Qi said. She climbed down into one of the deep trenches in the dirt from which she’d exhumed the terra-cotta figures she’d traded to Tuan for supplies. She crouched down, vanishing from
view for a moment, then emerged holding an object nestled in decades-old newspaper. “I found this on the ground by the idol when I first came here.”

It was a dusty, faceted red sphere, like a cut-glass Christmas ornament.

“It fits in the socket,” she said. “I tried inserting it. But nothing happens when you put it in.”

“Was there another one?”

“There was, at one point,” Qi said. “By the time I got here, there was only one that was whole, and pieces of another, shattered on the ground. Fragments. Would you like me to get them?”

“No, that’s okay,” Gabriel said, turning the faceted sphere in his hands. It was not a gem—it was glass, worth about as much as a chandelier at a discount house. But he’d been around enough giant, ancient statues over the years to know it surely had a function. “Give me a hand here, Mitch, would you?”

Gabriel handed the eye to Mitch and scaled the idol, climbing up to its shoulder. Mitch passed the sphere up to him once he had. It fit equally well into either eye socket on the giant, glowering statue.

“Give me some light.” Gabriel said. She turned a flashlight on, pointed it up at him.

After brushing away the accretions of ages with his sleeve, he could see a fine, almost microscopic line of ideograms around the rim of each eye socket.

He called down a description of what he saw. “You think you could you read them?” he asked Qi. “Give us even a rough idea what it says?”

Up went Qingzhao.

“No,” she said as she perched in the crook of the statue’s arm. “They look like they’re upside down or backward, or both—they make no sense.”

“Mitch,” Gabriel called, “shine that light up toward the eye. No, the big light,” He was referring to the dual-xenon job he had used in the cave, the million-candlepower one.

Nothing. Part of the ceiling turned red as the light reflected, but that was about it.

“Pass it up here,” Gabriel said.

Qi descended to the lap of the idol, took the heavy lamp from Mitch and passed it up.

“The glass is faceted,” Gabriel said. “In fact—” he shifted the lamp into position “—it looks like it’s ground to a very fine tolerance, like optical glass.”

“Like a lens?” said Mitch from below.

“You got it.”

He held the lamp dead-center on the crimson eye and turned it on.

The tiny glyphs sprang into hard relief in a wide arc on the opposite wall of the chamber, each about a foot high. Optical graffiti.

“They still do not make any sense,” said Qi, after straining to read them.

“That’s because it’s only half the information,” said Gabriel, dislodging the crystal and mounting it in the other socket. Sure enough—a second set of characters appeared on the far wall, like a bi-pack cipher. “If we had both eyes and lit them at the same time, the projected images would merge on the wall and you could read them.”

“So what do we do?” said Mitch from below.

A low, almost subaural hum had become present in the chamber.

“We start writing down those characters,” said Gabriel, “
exactly
the way they appear.”

The hum became a louder sound, a kind of chuddering bass note.

“What is that?” said Qi. “Did we start up some kind of machine?”

“No,” said Mitch. “It’s outside, damn it.” “What is it?” said Qi.

Before Mitch could answer, the sound became loud enough for them all to recognize it.

A chopper, incoming.