Wingrove, David - Chung Kuo 02 (17 page)

"I see . .
."

She leaned
closer, her voice lowered to a whisper. "Then you'll kill him,
neh? As you said you would if he double-crossed us?"

Gesell shuddered
involuntarily, then nodded. "If it's true," he said softly.
"But he'll deny it."

"Then
you'll
know
it's true."

"Yes . . ."
He turned and looked across to where the albino was standing,
watching their exchange. "Where is he?" he demanded, his
voice raised for the first time since they had come up in the
elevator.

"He'll be
here," Lehmann answered coldly.

"And if
he's not?" Ascher said softly at his side.

"Then we
die here," Gesell said, not looking at her, returning the
albino's cold stare.

In the distance
there was the stutter of small-arms fire, then a muffled explosion
that made the floor shudder beneath their feet. The armaments had
been shipped out more than fifteen minutes before. It was time to get
out. But they couldn't. Not until Turner was here.

Gesell spat,
then turned away, pacing up and down slowly, looking about him at

* *
*

the men and
women gathered in the corridors nearby. "What's keeping him?"
he muttered angrily. He could see how tense his people were, how
quickly they had caught his mood. Under his breath he cursed Turner.
Emily was right. They should never have gotten into this.

Then, as he
turned back, he saw him.

"Well,"
he said quietly, glancing at Ascher. "Here he is now."

DeVore spoke
briefly to the albino, then came across. "You're ready?"

Gesell shook his
head. "Not yet. I want some answers."

"About Shen
Lu Chua?"

Gesell laughed
briefly, surprised by his audacity. "You're a cool one, Turner.
What happened?"

DeVore was
staring back at him, his whole manner candid, open. "I killed
him. I had to. He attacked me."

"Why?"

"I don't
know. I tried to explain to him why I was there, but he gave me no
chance."

"No . . ."
Gesell looked to Ascher, then back at DeVore. "I knew Shen. He
wouldn't do such a thing."

"You knew
him?" DeVore laughed. "Then I guess you knew he was
smuggling out eight prisoners? Senior Security officers."

Gesell felt
Ascher touch his elbow. "He's lying . . ."

DeVore shook his
head. "No. Ask your man Mach to check on it. Shen's sidekick,
Yun Ch'o, has taken them to an apartment in Ottersleben. Level
Thirty-four. I think you know the place."

Gesell tensed.
Maybe Turner
was
bluffing, stalling for time. But that made no
sense. As he said, it was easy for Mach to check. In any case,
something else was bothering him. Something Turner hadn't yet
explained.

"They tell
me they found the body down at One-twenty. Even if it's as you say
and Shen was double-crossing us, why were
you
down there?"

He stepped back
sharply as DeVore reached into his uniform jacket. But it wasn't a
weapon DeVore drew from his inner pocket. It was a map. Another map.
DeVore handed it across to him.

"It was too
good an opportunity to miss. I knew it was down there. I'd seen it,
you see. Years ago."

Gesell looked up
at him again, his mouth open with surprise. "Bremen . . . Gods!
It's a Security diagram of Bremen."

"A part of
it. The rest I've sent on."

"Sent on?"
He was about to ask what Turner meant when one of his messengers
pushed through the crowded corridor behind him and came up to him,
almost breathless. He made the man repeat the message, then whirled
about, facing DeVore.

"There's a
problem."

"A
problem?" DeVore raised his eyebrows.

"It seems
we're trapped. The last of the bridges has been blown."

"I know. I
ordered it."

"You
what?"

"You heard.
We're not going out that way. That's what they're waiting for, don't
you see? They'll have worked out what we've done and they'll be
sitting there, waiting to pick us off in the side corridors on the
other side of the bridge. But I'm not going to give them the
opportunity. I've craft waiting for us on the roof." DeVore
glanced at the timer inset into his wrist. "We've less than five
minutes, however, so we'd best get moving."

Gesell glanced
at the map, then looked back at Turner, astonished, the business with
Shen forgotten. "You've transporters?"

"That's
what I said. But let's go. Before they work out what we're up to."

"But where?
Where are we going?"

DeVore smiled.
"South. To the mountains."

wANG
SAU-LEYAN stood before the full-length dragon mirror in his dead
father's room watching his own reflection while his brother's maids
dressed him.

"You should
have seen them! You wouldn't believe how offended they were!" He
laughed and bared his teeth. "It was marvelous! They're such
hypocrites! Such liars and schemers! And yet they fancy themselves so
clean and pure." He turned and glanced across at the Chancellor,
his mouth formed into a sneer. "Gods, but they make me sick!"

Hung Mien-lo
stood there, his head lowered. He was unusually quiet, his manner
subdued, but Wang Sau-leyan barely noticed him; he was too full of
his triumph in Council that afternoon. Dismissing the maids, he
crossed to the table and lifted his glass, toasting himself.

"I know how
they think. They're like ghosts, they travel only in straight lines.
But I'm not like them. They'll have prepared themselves next time,
expecting me to be rude again, to trample on their precious
etiquette. They'll meet beforehand to work out a strategy to deal
with my 'directness.' You see if they don't. But I'll wrong-foot them
again. I'll be so meek, so sweet-assed and polite they'll wonder if
I've sent a double."

He laughed.
"Yes, and all the time I'll be playing their game. Undermining
them. Suggesting small changes that will require further debate.
Delaying and diverting. Querying and qualifying. Until they lose
patience. And then . . ."

He stopped, for
the first time noticing how Hung Mien-lo stood there.

"What is
it, Chancellor Hung?"

Hung Mien-lo
kept his head lowered. "It is your brother, Excellency. He is
dead."

"Dead?
How?"

"He . . .
killed himself. This afternoon. An hour before you returned."

Wang Sau-leyan
set the glass down on the table and sat, his head resting almost
indolently against the back of the tall chair.

"How very
convenient of him."

Hung Mien-lo
glanced up, then quickly looked down again. "Not only that, but
Li Shai Tung's armory at Helmstadt was attacked this afternoon. By
the
Ping Tiao
. They took a large amount of weaponry."

Wang Sau-leyan
studied the Chancellor's folded body, his eyes narrowed. "Good.
Then I want a meeting with them."

The Chancellor
looked up sharply. "With the
Ping Tiao
? But that's
impossible,
Chieh Hsia . .
."

Wang Sau-leyan
stared at him coldly. "Impossible?"

Hung's voice
when it came again was smaller, more subdued than before. "It
will be ... difficult. But I shall try,
Chieh Hsia."

Wang Sau-leyan
leaned forward, lifting his glass again. "Make sure you do, Hung
Mien-lo, for there are others just as hungry for power as you. Not as
talented, perhaps, but then, what's talent when a man is dead?"

Hung Mien-lo
looked up, his eyes meeting the new T'ang's momentarily, seeing the
hard, cold gleam of satisfaction there. Then he bowed low and backed
away.

* *
*

KAO CHEN STOOD
in the corridor outside the temporary mortuary, his forehead pressed
to the wall, his left hand supporting him. He had not thought he
could be affected any longer, had thought himself inured to the worst
Man could do to his fellow creatures; yet he had found the sight of
the mutilated corpses deeply upsetting. The younger ones especially.

"The
bastards . . ." he said softly. There had been no need. They
could have tied them up and left them. Surely they'd got what they
wanted? But to kill all their prisoners. He shuddered. It was like
that other business with the hostages— Captain Sanders' young
family. There had been no need to kill them, either.

He felt a second
wave of nausea sweep up from the darkness inside him and clenched his
teeth against the pain and anger he felt.

"Are you
all right, sir?"

His sergeant, a
Hung Mao
ten years Chen's senior, stood a few paces distant,
his head lowered slightly, concerned but also embarrassed by his
officer's behavior. He had been assigned to Kao Chen only ten days
before and this was the first time they had been out on operations
together.

"Have you
seen them?"

The sergeant
frowned. "Sir?"

"The dead.
Cadets, most of them. Barely out of their teens. I kept thinking of
my son."

The man nodded.
"The
Ping Tiao
are shit, sir. Scum."

"Yes . . ."
Chen took a breath, then straightened up. "Well. . . let's move
on. I want to look at their dead before I report back."

"Sir."

Chen let his
sergeant lead on, but he had seen the doubt in the man's eyes. All of
this looking at the dead was quite alien to him—no doubt his
previous officers hadn't bothered with such things—but Chen
knew the value of looking for oneself. It was why Tolonen had
recruited Karr and himself, because they took such pains. They
noticed what others overlooked. Karr particularly. And he had learned
from Karr. Had been taught to see the small betraying detail, the one
tiny clue that changed the whole picture of events. "Here it is,
sir."

The sergeant
came to attention outside the door, his head bowed. Chen went inside.
Here things were different, more orderly, the bodies laid out in four
neat rows on trestle tables. And unlike the other place, here the
bodies were whole. These men had died in action; they had not been
tied up and butchered.

He went down the
first of the rows, pausing here and there to pull back the covering
sheets and look at a face, a hand, frowning to himself now, his sense
of "wrongness" growing with every moment. Finally, at the
head of the row, he stopped beside one of the corpses, staring down
at it. There was something odd— something he couldn't quite
place—about the dead man.

He shook his
head. No, he was imagining it. But then, as he made to move on, he
realized what it was. The hair. He went closer and lifted the head
between his hands, studying it. Yes, there was no doubt about it, the
dead man's hair was cut like a soldier's. Quickly he went down the
row, checking the other corpses. Most of them had normal short hair,
styles typical of the lower levels; but there were five with the same
military-style cut, the hair trimmed back almost brutally behind the
ear and at the line of the nape. "Sergeant!"

The man appeared
at the doorway at once. "Bring me a comset. A unit with a visual
connection."

"Sir!"

While he waited
he went down the line again, studying the men he had picked out. Now
that he looked he saw other differences. Their nails were manicured,
their hands smooth, uncallused. They were all Hung Moo, of course,
but of a certain kind. They all had those gray-blue eyes and chiseled
features that were so typical of the men recruited by Security. Yes,
the more he looked at them, the more he could imagine them in
uniform. But was he right? And, if so, what did it mean? Had the
Ping
Tiao
begun recruiting such types, or was it something more
ominous than that?

* *
*

The sergeant
returned, handing him the comset, then stood there, watching, as Chen
drew back the eyelid of the corpse with his thumb and held the
machine's lens over the eye, relaying an ID query through to Central
Records.

He had his
answer almost immediately. There were six "likelies" that
approximated to the retinal print, but only one of the full-body
descriptions fitted the dead man. It was as Chen had thought: he was
ex-Security.

Chen went down
the line, making queries on the others he had picked out. The story
was the same: all five had served in the Security forces at some
point. And not one of them had been seen for several years. Which
meant that either they had been down in the Net or they had been
outside. But what did it signify? Chen pressed to store the
individual file numbers, then put the comset down and leaned against
one of the trestles, thinking.

"What is
it, sir?"

Chen looked up.
"Oh, it's nothing, after all. I thought I recognized the man,
but I was mistaken. Anyway, we're done here. Have the men finish up
then report to me by four. The General will want a full report before
the day's out."

"Sir!"

Alone again,
Chen walked slowly down the rows, taking one last look at each of the
five men. Like the other dead, they wore the
Ping Tiao
symbol—a stylized fish—about their necks and were dressed
in simple
Ping Tiao
clothes. But these were no common
terrorists.

Which was why he
had lied to the sergeant. Because if this was what he thought it was,
he could trust no one.

No. He would
keep it strictly to himself for the time being, and in the meantime
he would find out all he could about the dead men: discover where
they were stationed and under whom they had served.

As if he didn't
know already. As if he couldn't guess which name would surface when
he looked at their files.

* *
*

NAN HO, Li
Yuan's Master of the Inner Chamber, climbed down from the sedan and
returning the bow of the Grand Master of the Palace, mounted the
ancient stone steps that led up to the entrance of the summer palace.