The Golden Mountain Murders (25 page)

Fong turned and raced into the dense woods.

The assassin stood by the back entrance to the reception centre restaurant and surveyed the landscape on the park map in his hand. He placed the luminescent yellow dot into the geography of this place. Then he smiled. “Very good, Zhong Fong,” he said aloud. If I were being chased, that’s the kind of place I would seek out too. His body ached to run after Fong but the voice of his teacher came to him again,
“Choose the place carefully. Never fight on the target’s ground. Strike from either above or below, never on the plane your opponent expects. Patience is the only knowledge available to all.”

Then an elderly Chinese waiter stepped out and lit up a cigarette. The elderly man smiled at the assassin, “Wanna smoke?” he said holding the pack out.

“Wanna smoke” were the man’s last words.

Fong waited in the centre of the swaying bridge. He tried desperately to contact any of his “troops” on his cell phone but the gorge evidently created problems. Over and over again he got the message: “This call cannot be completed. The customer you are calling is out of your calling area or has his phone turned off.”

The rain had slowed a bit, but the boards of the swinging bridge were slick underfoot. Fong watched every person who ventured onto the bridge, waiting for the three assassins from the BlackBerry image.

Finally they arrived. Without umbrellas. Without hoods. They allowed the water to drip down their faces and headed directly toward Fong . . . and then past him.

Fong couldn’t believe it.

Half an hour later Fong finally was able to get through to Matthew, “I’m in the restaurant at the reception centre at Capilano Park.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fucked up but all right.” He had the BlackBerry on the table with the image of the three men with their hands on Loa Wei Fen’s coffin. A Chinese waiter approached his table, “More tea?”

Fong nodded.

The waiter poured the tea; a little splashed over the side onto Fong’s lap. “I’m so sorry, sir. I’ll get a cloth,” the waiter said, as he walked back to the kitchen.

Fong smelled chocolate. Chocolate?

He stood and looked around. In the reflection of the big mirror on the west wall of the restaurant he noticed his waiter clearing a table. Fong was about to sit when he saw the man deftly scrape a finger along the top of a piece of half-eaten chocolate cake then quickly suck the icing off his finger.

Chocolate.

The squiggle taken off the top of the Hostess Cup Cake in the refrigerator of Kenneth Lo’s apartment.

“Sweets are only of interest to the young and the very old,” the Yale nurse had said to him.

Fong’s heart felt like it had stopped in his chest.

Two coal-black eyes reflected in the shoe-store window. An old man standing on one leg on Jericho Beach. An old man on the airplane. An old man standing on a bench on the raised promenade on the Bund looking at him. No. Looking through him.

A heart cut in half with soft impressions, soft impressions because the aged assassin’s mouth had so few teeth left!

Fong sat and looked at the BlackBerry image again. This time not at the three men by the coffin but at the one older man – the servant – who was pushing the cart.

“So sorry, sir.” The man’s voice was terribly loud. He reached towards Fong with the towel.

“Not a problem,” Fong said through the fog of his fear. Then he looked the old assassin in the eyes. “You like sweets.”

“Sir?”

“You explode bombs in apartments of innocents, including a baby, a sleeping baby.”

“Really . . .”

“You work for rich white men against the interests of our people. Who employed you?” This last was said so loudly that the entire restaurant turned towards them. “Why not kill me here, in front of all these nice white people?” Fong screamed. “You take their money, you do their dirty work, so go ahead and kill me here. Who gives a fuck about peasants dying in Anhui Province! You don’t give a fuck about anything . . .”

Not true, the assassin thought, I cared about Loa Wei Fen. The swalto blade pierced Fong’s shoulder and sent him spiralling to the ground. Instantly the assassin was on the table – from above – and launched himself at Fong.

Light flickered off the blade and Fong rolled. Rolled beneath the next table. Patrons scattered everywhere and Fong scrambled to his feet and threw himself out the open window to the wraparound porch. He landed on his side and the pain roared down his arm.

He heard screaming from within, then he was running.

Running through the fishery ponds and back towards the swinging bridge.

The assassin’s heart was beating heavy in his chest. He had never felt that before. He disentangled himself from the terrified restaurant patrons and dashed out the door. Fog had replaced the rain. “Good,” he thought. “This night you return to the fog, Zhong Fong.”

On the bridge Fong made his way carefully to the very centre and yanked out his cell phone. No connections. Then he remembered his BlackBerry. Captain Chen had said something about a different network system for it. Something about it being powerful. Something about how the fuck to use the thing as a phone.

The assassin approached the swinging bridge from beneath. He’d spotted Fong’s position from across the way. No need to walk right up to him when you can approach from beneath. He put the swalto in his mouth. The snakeskin handle tasted sour; the cobra on his back flared. Then he reached up and wrapped a strong hand around the metal cable that ran beneath the bridge.

Menu. It’s in menu. Fuck, everything in electronics is in menu. But where in menu?

The river sang to the assassin as it thundered beneath him. He looked down. There in the shallows of the river was a native stone statue of a man. Six beautifully balanced stones – too much like the one upon which he had bled only yesterday, he thought. Then he nodded. If it is so, it is so. He hung there by one hand as he undid the buttons to his shirt and then allowed it to slip off his back and into the river. He turned and grabbed on with the other hand – the cobra now fully alive on his back.

The BlackBerry yakked. He turned up the volume. “Where the fuck are you, Fong?” screamed Matthew Mark out of the thing.

“In the centre of the Capilano . . .”

He said no more. Pain roared through his foot. He looked down and the point of the swalto blade peaked out from the top of his left shoe. Blood added to the slickness and he staggered. But despite the fact that the swalto had split the board cleanly in two, the knife held him fast to the broken board of the bridge.

Then the cobra came over the side and perched on the railing of the swinging bridge, its hood filled with blood, its eyes black with hatred. And it spoke, in an old man’s voice. “You killed the boy I loved. I loved.” The cobra seemed to sway on the railing. “I have seen so many things – the end of the Manchus, the rape of Nanking, the liberation of our country, the rise of our power. But things of beauty I have seen very few. But he was beautiful. Beautiful. And you took him from me.”

The cobra leapt off the rail and landed with a surprising thud on the decking of the bridge.

Fong forced himself to stop shaking and slowly inched his foot up off the swalto blade.

Then the cobra hit Fong across the face so hard that his head smacked into the planking with a sickening thud. Before the pain set in Fong had a flash of thought, Not my teeth again. Please not my teeth.

The next blow broke two ribs on his left side.

Fong rolled over to protect his ribs and waited for the next blow.

And waited.

Then he heard the assassin whisper in a hoarse voice, “Why do they call this place the Golden Mountain? This is not our Golden Mountain. It is our doom.”

Fong reached for the swalto and yanked it free of the split board. The thing flew from his hand – a foreign object – careened off the railing and pierced the old assassin beneath the right armpit.

The man turned to Fong, a strange look on his face. He made one attempt to take the swalto from his body then turned – and the cobra fell forward, over the railing – towards the rock statue of a man that stood on the river’s bank.

As the old assassin crashed to the ground, the tip of his nose caught the edge of the jagged stone and he heard, deep in his mind, the snap of bone and, as his hands flailed for but failed to find purchase, the grinding of cartilage and snap of ligaments as the bone shard slid between his eyes and pierced his thinking self.

A moment of blossoming pain – then light.

He was young again and in the centre of the Guild Academy’s contest ring. His left arm was raised and blood coursed down it as he sunk his strong teeth into the half of a heart he held aloft in his right hand.

Then he bit down hard and tasted his opponent’s essence – then he spat it hard into the dust as the cheers of his teachers and fellow students filled his soul.

His first victory. His first kill. His life journey just beginning.

The carved cobra on his back leapt to life as he took his swalto blade and threw it with all his might straight up in the air.

The Tibetan knife flew perfectly straight then, as if on some godly command, turned, flattened out and seemed to embrace its return to the earth.

But just millimetres from the ground an elegant boy’s hand grasped the handle of the swalto and with a wild cry threw it high in the air a second time. Then the hand moved to a mouth – Loa Wei Fen’s mouth.

So beautiful.

“Forgive me, Loa Wei Fen, I have failed you.”

“You stink of wet paper, old man!”

The swalto seemed to give off a high-pitched, woman’s scream as it came back to earth, slicing through Loa Wei Fen’s shoulder and splitting open the boy’s torso to the waist.

The snakeskin handle of the knife slowly turned crimson and everything changes.

A hand, a female hand, reaches in and wraps its fingers around the snakeskin handle of the swalto blade – and in a single move cuts open the chest cavity and frees the heart of its ligament moorings. Then, holding it aloft, slices it in half and bites down hard.

Blood sluicing down her chin and neck, crimson outlining her young breasts beneath the cotton shirt, she turns and bows to the old assassin.

Yes, now he remembers, it had been a young woman who had surprisingly won the Guild tournament to honour the death of Loa Wei Fen.

He smiles.

She smiles back at him. She opens her mouth – her teeth are etched in blood.

He senses the cobra on his back turning.

“Sleep now, Grandfather. Sleep. You have earned your rest.”

“But I failed.” His voice sounds like sand scraping against stone.

“Allow your cobra to sleep. It is now my job to avenge Loa Wei Fen’s life.” He feels the snake on his back free itself from his skin and crawl down his leg. He wants to cry out for it to stay. But the great beast is already moving down his calf, then slithering off his left foot – then is gone. He feels himself stumble and her strong arms catch him and hold him tight. “Zhong Fong will pay with his life for your life. I swear it by the cobra on my back, Grandfather. Now sleep and dream the dream of dreaming.”

“A girl is a good disguise for an assassin – a very good disguise,” he thought. Then he wondered if she had a candy, something sweet for him.

Even as he thinks this he knows it is his last thought on this earth.

A blood vessel tears open behind his eyes and his last vision of this world comes from behind a crimson curtain of his ancient blood. And there he is, Zhong Fong, as he must have been nine years ago in that construction pit in the Pudong – a killer of assassins, a tamer of cobras – a man destined to die at the hands of a girl.

He wanted to bow to Zhong Fong, to acknowledge his talent, but he was already on the ground, his face pressed hard into the moist earth of the Golden Mountain. And he knew that he would shortly return to the earth from which he had come.

Fong watched as he had watched the death of Loa Wei Fen, breath rasping in his chest, head alive with terror, nightmares accumulating, ghosts enwrapping him. Then he reached down and grabbed the old assassin by his shirt and slammed him hard against the stones of the ancient statue. Then again. Then again until his hands were red with blood and rage.

Then he looked at the night mountains and took a full lungful of the clean air of the Golden Mountain and flung the old assassin aside.

The man landed like a pile of rags – a pile of rags with a clink.

Fong hobbled quickly over to the man. Ignoring the blood, he tore off the man’s clothing.

In an inner pocket he found the man’s cell phone.

Fong was screaming into his BlackBerry. Captain Chen on the other end in Shanghai was trying to get him to slow down.

“What is broken, sir? Exactly what on the assassin’s phone is broken?”

“I don’t know what you call it.”

“The antenna, the body of the phone, the screen?”

“The screen. The screen is cracked, no, it’s completely black.”

“Is the power on, sir?”

“Yes, that light is on the side.”

“Okay, sir, so the liquid display is broken. So you can’t see anything like the number when you dial out.”

“I don’t care about that. I want to see the last number that called him.” There was a long pause. “Chen, are you still there?”

“Yes, sir. I’m still here. The last call would have come from whoever activated the assassin, is that right?”

“That’s my hope.”

“Okay, sir. Take off the case, carefully. There are serial numbers. Find them and tell them to me.”

It took Fong a while but he finally found them and recited them slowly to Captain Chen. “Okay, sir. Don’t touch the assassin’s phone anymore. Call me back in ten minutes on your phone.”

“So?”

“The assassin’s phone was manufactured in China, sir, under a special government contract. It’s a single-use phone. It can receive one call and respond only to that call. Do you understand, sir?”

“No.”

“The phone was set up to receive only one call and by pushing any of the number keys the phone will dial back that number.”

“So we can get the number off the phone and trace it.”