The China Dogs (46 page)

“Not right now, but I think I will be when the drugs wear off.”

“Doctors tell me the attack to your face isn't as bad as first feared.”

“Your dog bit me mostly on the top of the skull, coz I stuck my head down when he went kinda mad. I had a heap of stitches in there and he scraped a lot of hair off but they say it'll grow back.”

“I'm relieved.”

“Me too, sir. My face won't nothin' to shout about to begin with—couldn't have done with him makin' it any worse.”

Molton's relieved the guy has a sense of humor. “Glad you can joke about this, sir. Please rest assured that my family will be living up to its responsibilities, so don't hesitate to talk to my aides about making proper compensation claims and us picking up your medical bills. And don't worry about time off work. Whatever you lose because of the attack, I'll make it up to you.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. President. I have five kids and my wife was laid off from her night job two months back.”

“Sorry to hear it. Five kids—my, that sounds like a real ­handful.”

“It is, sir. Five girls too. All of them princesses.”

“I'm sure they are. Mr. Stephens I have to go now, but I'll call you again in a few days' time to see how you're getting on. Meanwhile, if you need anything, then please call my secretary and we'll do what we can to fix things for you.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. God bless you and God bless America.”

Molton hangs up and instantly dials his wife.

Sheryl picks up on the second ring, delighted to get an unexpected call. “Hi.”

He hits her with the news right away. “Honey, the dog has had to be put down.” He waits for it to sink in.

She wants to believe she hasn't heard him right. “Emperor?”

“He bit two guys at the depository, one of them badly.”

“Oh my God. He was jumpy and scared when I got him out of the car. Clint, there were a zillion cameras going off in his face, the poor thing was frightened to death.”

“Doesn't matter, Sheryl. He savaged two people and a cop had to shoot him to protect the public.”

“What do I tell the kids?”

“The truth. It's the only way they'll make any sense of it.”

Silence hangs heavy on the line.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she answers. “I'm just thinking back to when he nipped Jack. Maybe we had a lucky escape.”

“I know. I've been thinking the same thing.” Molton doesn't add that he's also been wondering if the canine “present” from Xian had been meant to attack and kill him and his children.

“I'm going to go and tell them now, Clint.” Her voice sounds strained but focused. “I won't sleep tonight if I don't do it straight away.”

She hangs up.

For a moment the phone dangles in the President's hand. He realizes he's just urged his wife to tell the truth to his kids, yet that's what he's not done with the American public. As much as he'd love to blow away the smoke screen of lies, he knows he can't. There'd be domestic panic and global instability on a scale never seen since the Second World War. For now, he has to keep quiet. Keep his silence and hope America prevails.

173

Big Cypress National Preserve, South Florida

G
host lets one of Harries's agents carry out battle zone surgery on his wound. They shoot him full of morphine, dig out the slug, wipe it clean, and stitch him up. Nothing pretty, but within the half hour he's nursing a dressing and is back on his feet.

Harries insists he's not fit to drive and has a copter airlift him from the big park all the way back to Jackson Memorial. She promises to take care of the Dodge and not fill it full of bugs and tracers.

Ghost gets directions from the hospital's front desk and heads to the surgical wing. He sees a desolate, blond woman sitting on a plastic chair, near a low table full of magazines. Her head is down and she seems to be staring a hole in the floor but he knows it's Jude Cunningham.

“How is she?” he asks gently.

Jude raises her head and her face fills with shock. First, because she didn't hear or see him approaching. Second, because of his filthy, ragged state. His suit is covered in dried mud, his shirt ripped and his shoulder patched with bandages and sticky plaster. “I don't know. She's been in there for nearly three hours now.”

Ghost grabs a chair and pulls it up close. “What's wrong with her? I mean, they said she was stable. I wouldn't have left her alone here if I'd thought she was going to get any worse.”

“I haven't been able to find out.” The medic in her takes over. “Head injuries are often complicated. I suspect there's been ­bleeding.”

“Shit.” He stands and starts to pace nervously.

“What happened to you?” she asks. “You fight some dogs as well?”

“Not a dog, a bullet. These days bullets are less dangerous.”

The door opens and a nurse appears. She looks toward Jude. “They've just finished. The surgeon, Dr. Brook, says he'll come and see you as soon as he's scrubbed up.”

“How is she?” Ghost and Jude ask in unison.

The nurse smiles weakly. “Best I leave it to Dr. Brook to tell you.” She makes her exit before either of them grills her further.

174

Beijing

T
hey strip him bare. Search every inch of his uniform. Every fold and sewn edge of cloth, where a garrotte or spike might be hidden.

They rip the dressing from his wound.

They ram fingers deep into his anus.

But they find nothing.

The soldiers kick the back of his legs and force him down to his knees at the side of the general's desk.

“This very moment my men are arresting Chunlin,” Zhang tells Kai. “I know you serve him. I know you have been patronized and favored by him. I knew it the moment you were chosen to fight me. Did the pair of you not think I would have you checked out? You are a pair of fools. Now tell me, how were you supposed to kill me?”

Luo Kai says nothing.

“It is getting late and you are keeping me from my pleasures.” Zhang puts a hand to the man's knife wound and digs his fingers through the stitches. Digs until he can feel the wetness of blood and the meat of his sinews and muscles. “Be honest and I will be merciful.” He twists with his fingers and works them back and forth in the wound.

Kai fights an urge to scream.

He locks off his thoughts. Hovers them in a space of nothingness.

Zhang senses he is fighting the pain. He frees his blooded hand, rests it on Kai's forehead and slams his steel toe-capped boot hard into his testicles.

The young soldier doubles up.

His hands are cuffed behind his back so he can't even touch the injured area. He falls coughing and spluttering to the wooden boards of the office.

“Hold him up.” Zhang pulls paper from a printer to wipe the blood from his hands.

Two soldiers struggle to straighten Kai. His muscles are locked up in pain and they don't have the strength to force him upright.

Zhang can't believe their incompetence. He strides over and forces his thumb into the soldier's right eye socket. “Threaten a man's eye and you control his body. See how it now yields.”

The young soldier is panting now. It's no longer possible to keep the pain out. A stream of fire is burning its way from his reopened wound to his ruptured testicles. His heart is hammering its way close to the point of arrest.

Zhang holds his head up and screams at him, “Tell me!”

Then he punches him.

Hits him so hard, Kai's lips burst and his jaw breaks.

He moves his tongue in the sea of blood swimming in his mouth.

It's gone.

Zhang sees the blood and saliva, tooth bone and drool, spatter on the floor and he feels a deeply sadistic surge of power and excitement.

In the middle of the mess is a lump.

Not a tooth.

Something more interesting.

He bends down and picks it up.

An elliptical glass bead. Small enough to have been concealed as a filling in a tooth. Filled no doubt with something deadly.

175

Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami

T
he morphine has all but worn off. Ghost is feeling the pain, a deep throb like someone is sliding a hot sword in and out of his wound. He steps into the corridor and makes a series of calls. Things he's been putting off. People he's been putting off. He calls Vasquez over in Jacksonville then sends an e-mail on his phone to Annie, listing a whole bunch of things that need to be done quickly, quietly, and confidentially. Finally, he asks her to buy a new shirt and bring a pile of stuff to the hospital from his desk so he can tie up loose ends.

When he returns to the waiting room, Jude Cunningham is fighting sleep in a chair. Her head is resting against a blue plaster wall and the sun is busting through a side window and illuminating one side of her face.

The door creaks open and a tired looking surgeon comes in and lets it bang shut behind him.

Ghost breaks from his trance and looks across the dull room. Jude slowly gets to her feet.

The medic is in his late thirties, well-tanned, dark-haired, and slim. But for the bags under his eyes he'd look a picture of good health.

He fastens the blue suit jacket he's clearly just changed into from his operating room scrubs. “Lieutenant Walton?”

“Yes.” He gets up from the back-aching, black plastic seat. “This is Zoe's friend Jude.”

“Jude Cunningham.” She offers a hand and the nervous suggestion of a smile.

“I'm Nathan Brook, I've just finished operating on Zoe.”

“And?” Ghost takes a worried breath.

“We won't know for a while. She's had major surgery and we need to see how that plays out.” He studies the cop and the woman in order to work out how technical he should get. “Do you know what an epidural hematoma is?”

“I have a medical degree,” says Jude in a nonboastful tone. “It's a bleed in the brain, between the dura mater and the skull.” She says it for Ghost's benefit more than anything. “It's a bad place to have a bleed.”

“It is.” Brook adds a little more info for the cop. “The dura is the tough outer membrane of the central nervous system. It surrounds the brain and spinal cord and is responsible for keeping in the cerebrospinal fluid. The blow to Zoe's head caused a buildup of blood there and it reached a point where it could have killed her.”

“Could have?”

“Pressure was building up in the intracranial space, compressing delicate tissue and causing what we call a brain shift—a type of hernia in the head. We think we've relieved it.”

“Thank God for that,” says Jude.

“Is it common?” asks Ghost.

“No. Not at all. Which is why we were worried. The condition is present in only 1 or 2 percent of head injuries, and when it does manifest it often proves fatal.”

Ghost feels as though he's sinking. Every question he asks brings an answer laden with new terrors. “But she's okay now, right? You've fixed everything.”

The forced smile says things are not that simple. “We had to perform a type of decompressive craniectomy. In layman's language, we took out part of her skull in order to remove the etiologic mass and relieve the pressure. If we hadn't, she'd have died. Or at best, the risk of permanent paralysis and possible brain damage would have been very high. She's a long way from being okay, Lieutenant, a very long way. But the next few hours will tell us which direction she's heading in.” He checks his watch. “I'm going to have to go to another operation now. But I'll check on her when I'm done and if there's any improvement I'll let you know.”

176

Beijing

T
hey're coming for him.

Geng Chunlin knows they are.

The fact that he hasn't heard from Luo Kai means that the young soldier has been discovered.

Zhang is probably torturing him. The thought makes him wince. The brute is without mercy and will mix humiliation and cruelty in measures that even he wouldn't think of sanctioning.

Chunlin thinks it is unlikely that Kai has been killed. Just as it's unlikely that he will be. The general will want them alive for a show trial, for a way to discredit President Xian and as justification for his planned coup.

He thinks for a moment about his old friend and leader, destined to touch down soon in Hawaii. Once he's out on the blistering blacktop of the runway, he will be desperate for good news and will try to contact him.

The minister picks up his cell phone and removes the data card. He walks to the corner of the office and squeezes it between the corner joint where the skirting boards of two walls come together.

He throws the carcass of the phone into a bottom drawer and begins to shut down his computer. Zhang's men will find nothing incriminating on it, but he doesn't want to make life easy for them. Let them search. Let them waste their precious time.

Chunlin takes out his pistol and puts it on the rectangle of white blotting paper in the middle of his desk. He pushes back his chair and takes a book from the shelves behind him. It's a gardening manual, dedicated to the creation and care of miniature landscaping. The minister has always had a soft spot for paying attention to the tiniest of details.

The office door opens and six armed soldiers march in. At the front is Senior Colonel Lie Han, Xue Shi's right hand man. “Minister Chunlin, I have a warrant for your arrest for crimes of treason.”

He swings his legs down and puts a piece of paper in his book so he doesn't lose his page. “I presume you have no objection if I bring this with me?”

177

Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami

T
he door to the waiting area opens. An Hispanic nurse, coils of sumptuous black hair tied back, enters with an expressionless look on her face. “Dr. Brook says you can see Zoe now. Please come with me.”