“I actually didn’t write that book,” Gabriel said, “in the strictest sense. It’s more of an ‘as-told-to.’ Dahlia Cerras did the hard part, the donkey-work. But of course her name is smaller on the title page than mine.”
“And nowhere at all on the cover,” Cheung said, clucking gently. “Poetic license, then?”
“I try not to embroider too much.”
He thought back on the book’s compendium of snake pits, booby traps, torch-bearing locals, gunfights and wild escapes. Yes, it probably would seem ridiculous…to anyone who had not been there.
“No literary aspirations?” said Cheung, apparently genuinely intrigued, leaving Ivory to keep an eye on the rest of the room.
“My brother Michael is more the author type,” said Gabriel. “In that respect he takes after my parents. I’m afraid I’m the roustabout.”
Gabriel also watched Ivory, watching Cheung. This man knew his exits, backstops, contingencies and cover plans. But there was something off about his manner. Ivory was a man of secrets, more than simple hired muscle. He seemed to command the bodyguards and thus be ranked higher. Not quite a partner of Cheung’s, but not quite an employee, either.
“Our lots tonight include adult men and women,” Red Eagle told her guests, clapping briskly to draw everyone’s attention. “Psychics, androgynes, jesters, amputees. Ah, Ms. Carlsen.”
A tall Scandanavian woman with an elaborate Maori neck tattoo had just joined them. She drew tiny birdlike sips from a cut crystal flute of champagne.
In his peripheral vision Gabriel saw Ivory running check-ins with his sentries. Very pointedly, none of the security men in the room were drinking.
There was no way, Gabriel knew, that Qi could take Cheung from ground level. She had to be lurking in one of the buildings across the way, with a good angle on the proscenium of Red Eagle’s balcony.
Her chosen tool was a “slightly used” bolt-action British L115A, a sniper rifle codesigned by an Olympic gold medalist shooter and chosen by the SAS to use against the Afghans in 2001. It could destroy the engine block of a truck at 1,200 meters. Body armor did not matter to this weapon.
Gabriel wrestled with the role he was about to play. He did not doubt that Cheung was an unsavory sort—but so far all of Cheung’s crimes had been hearsay, not verified.
Someone
had killed Mitch’s sister and someone had ordered the attack on the pedicab, but there was no way to be certain who. Meanwhile Qi was hardly the most stable person Gabriel had ever
met. Her whole touching story (complete with pathos in all the right places) might have been fabricated to recruit him.
But perhaps Qi was right, and perhaps everything she’d told him was so. At least it jibed with what he’d heard from Mitch. That had to count for something.
Though the question of Gabriel’s role remained. He was supposed to steer Cheung onto the balcony and into the path of a bullet. But why? If Qi had the capacity to shoot through a bodyguard to nail her target, why was Gabriel needed? As an on-site witness to confirm the kill?
Red Eagle rang a small gong to indicate commencement. Outside, from high above them, counterweighted cages began to lower into view on chains. The sale stock hung in the air before them like Christmas ornaments. In one cage a twelve-year-old girl stood with her hands on the bars and a tri-pronged lot tag stapled to her earlobe. He could have been looking at Qingzhao, fifteen years ago. The girl’s eyes were dull with tears and she stood without energy or focus, as if she did not have any real awareness of where she was or what was transpiring.
In another cage, a Caucasian woman in her early twenties, same deal.
In another, an eight-year-old boy, twirling a black sucker in his mouth.
In another, a man with both forearms missing. He was the most active of the lot, scampering from one side of the cage to the other and calling out in a language Gabriel didn’t recognize. He wore a fixed, forced smile, apparently trying to court bidder favor.
Mr. Yawuro pointed at the girl and said, “Open for ten thousand.”
“Pacific dollars?” Red Eagle asked. The man nodded.
Cheung countered: “Eleven. In platinum.”
If Qi was to be trusted, Cheung had the advantage, when bidding, of a man who knows he is giving money only back to himself. He attended these auctions to play the players.
“Mister Yawuro?” Red Eagle prompted.
“Twelve,” Yawuro said.
Gabriel took a step forward and Cheung came forward with him. They had cleared the overhang and were now in plain sight. Ivory was already moving toward the balcony, to advise his master to back up.
Though it wasn’t his turn to bid again, Yawuro uttered a small sound, like a chest cough. Then he was flung backward as the incoming round blew both of his lungs out through the back of his rib cage. His blood lingered on the air as fine red mist.
A second shot sizzled through the air, spanged off one of the hanging cages, missed Red Eagle’s beehive hairdo by two inches and burrowed into the wall, starting a fire. A tracer bullet.
Why was Qi firing tracers?
thought Gabriel as he hit the deck. That would only happen if—
The muzzle of Ivory’s big automatic was nestled beneath Gabriel’s jaw, and from his prone sprawl Gabriel saw Cheung’s other bodyguards all leveling firepower directly at his head.
Quite abruptly, as one of the men swung the butt of his gun at Gabriel’s injured temple, Gabriel found himself out of the world again.
Qingzhao could not believe she had missed the shot, and quickly chambered her tracer—her followup round, to track and correct aimed fire.
She’d had Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung dead in her sights on the balcony across from her, with only a ten-degree angle of correction for a downward shot. The picture in the crosshairs told her that Cheung was history. Her trigger pull was a steady, clean, slow squeeze.
But the man standing next to Cheung had died instead.
Which meant that the sights on this ex– Royal Marines rifle had been tampered with.
Her tracer shot strayed to bounce off one of the hanging cages and ignited the wallpaper inside Red Eagle’s eyrie. Perhaps it was because Qi, too, had seen the young girl up for sale, so much like herself, once; perhaps it was because Qi had fired with tears welling in her eyes? But no—the tracer proved the weapon’s sights to be decalibrated. The scope was supposed to have been zeroed. It obviously had not been. Useless.
Even more useless: The adjustment ticks on the
scope had been shaved down, preventing a fast adjustment with a coin edge or anything else.
Cheung was under cover by now. Ivory’s response was frighteningly efficient.
She could have chambered the next powerful Magnum round and taken out one of the bodyguards, but there was little point.
Her window of time had spoiled faster than burning paper. Without checking the window again she fired up her preset fuses and ran from the room, abandoning the rifle and going hot on her backup pistol—a supersized Ruger revolver, so as to avoid even the faintest possibility of a jam.
Ten seconds later, cherry bombs, M-80s and firecracker strings began to detonate around the perimeter below. This would give eager bodyguards false gunfire they would waste time trying to track. The final fuse crisped the support rope for her buckets of coins, which tumbled loose and sprayed a metallic rain of money from the sky, all jingling downward to spin and roll across the cobblestones of the Night Market. Everyone below would scramble to collect the coins, which was good for Qi’s escape plan. Sentries would be blocked, hazarded, mobbed and trafficjammed as they tried to fan out from the archways.
From the doorway into the wild free-for-all of the Night Market, it was five swift steps to the bridge to the Tea House. Qi sprinted across, zigzagging. The propane tanks she had emplaced earlier were still in position. She shot each one with modified tracers like the big hazard-striped rounds she had used at Pearl Tower. Both tanks combusted and blew spectacularly, punching the air out of the space with twin fireballs and lopping off the first fifteen feet of the bridge, which
noisily redistributed itself over the surface of the pond water, blackjacking a few curious fish.
Inside the Tea House was a narrow stairway leading down to a supply room with a trapdoor in the floor. The access led down into the sewer system, where Qi had a small motorboat waiting.
Gabriel was not there to meet her as planned.
She had to leave the area now. She waited a few extra beats anyway.
At the very least, she had seen Cheung crawling on his hands and knees, clothing disheveled, panic on his face.
That would have to do until next time.
At the top of the Peace Hotel, Cheung commanded an entire floor. From the elevators one walked across his Junfa Hall, a long corridor lined with statues of Chinese warlords and decorated with ostentatious Peking Opera weapons on wall displays. But for the sliding glass doors, all bulletproofed, and the sentries at each end, the hall held the stately ambience of a museum.
Ivory found Cheung in his Temple Room, a chamber enameled in shiny black and hung with silks. Catercorner to a small shrine was a custom dentist’s chair on a hydraulic riser. Mugwort leaves smoldered from a salver next to a sterile work tray.
A technician in a crimson medical tunic was meticulously inserting long acupuncture needles into Cheung’s face and scalp.
Cheung indicated his eyebrow. “Here. Deeper.”
Dinanath waited in one corner with the behemoth Tosa dogs on stand-down. Cheung ignored them and kept his gaze on Ivory.
Lurking silently in her usual corner was Sister Menga, a white-haired, pink-skinned Taoist soothsayer with the bearing of a lifelong martial arts practitioner. She was one of Cheung’s spiritual advisors and seemed to thrive on breathing fog-thick incense smoke.
“Do we know whose base area is the Night Market?” said Cheung, already knowing the answer. Ivory nodded.
Cheung handed Ivory the small carved casket he had been tooling earlier. His expression was benign, yet made hideous by all the needles sticking out of his face.
The Tosa dogs snarled, sensing the gravity of the moment.
Ivory nodded, turned and departed.
Tuan hand-fed a toucan from his table in the Pleasure Garden and meditated on the little coffin that had just been delivered to him. He treated himself to an extra goblet of absinthe and waited for Ivory to arrive.
Ivory entered the room with no fanfare.
Tuan spoke first. “Real warlords made no such foolish rules as Cheung demands.”
“This was not a personal decision,” said Ivory, taking the seat across from the big man.
It was all smoke in any event, Tuan knew. “Real” warlords were rapists and plunderers, thugs and mercenaries risen to glory via massacre, whose idiom was the raid, not the bargaining table. Once they got legitimized, the rigors of politics almost always unseated them.
Ivory helped himself to the glass that had been put out for him. “Tell me about the rifle,” he said.
Tuan chuckled. “You already know about the rifle.”
“A very efficient weapon for its intended purpose,” said Ivory, who had examined the gun once it had been recovered from the Night Market. “But tampered with so as to be useless for that purpose. Why?”
“To even the odds,” said Tuan. “A last-minute change of heart. A perverse notion of fairness in combat.” He lifted his big hands to the air. “What does it really matter, now?”
“You supply the rifle,” said Ivory. “But you make sure the sights are skewed. You are still trying to play both sides against the middle, Tuan. Unwise, given your position in this scenario. It suggests that you would prepare to align yourself with whichever side emerged victorious. It should be clear to you that Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung is destined to rule New Shanghai. It is an inevitability, not a choice.”
“You sure about that?”
“As I said, it is not a choice,” returned Ivory. “We cannot abide allies who are less than committed to our purpose. Collaboration with our enemies is more than interference, it is antiparticipation.”
“I supplied the terra-cotta figures, as requested,” said Tuan.
“Yes. Four so far. Four figures of indeterminate origin, which Cheung found to be useless. A stalling tactic.”
“By which I take it to mean that Cheung destroyed them? In his search for a skeleton or a skull or a jewel or a key or
anything
that would relate them to the dynasty of the Favored Son?”
Ivory had, in fact, witnessed Cheung knock off the heads, lop off the arms, powder the fragments with the intensity of a junkie searching for a fix. He’d found
nothing to assuage him. Each time his reaction had been more terrifying. Cheung needed a breakthrough to the past so badly that he was apt to start killing his own men left and right just to vent his rage.
“Cheung’s quest after his heritage is no longer a concern of yours,” Ivory said. “Even in that, you have failed him.”
Neither Cheung nor Ivory, nor for that matter Tuan, had any idea that the figures brought to the city by Qingzhao had come from
outside
the tomb, that they had been decoys, leftovers. Vague hints as to what lurked farther onward, nothing more.
“Further,” said Ivory, “you became culpable by dealing directly with the woman formerly known as Qingzhao Wai Chiu, when you know Cheung has designated her as one of the Nameless. The figures were brokered directly through your offices.”
“Guilty,” said Tuan. “But I did it to further my own interests, while providing a layer of insulation between the statues and Cheung himself. I may play both sides against the middle, as you say, but I never
cheat
anybody.”
“You were the conduit to the Nameless One,” Ivory insisted. “You should have informed us of this detail directly. Instead, you kept it shadowed. Needless to say, Cheung can no longer trust you with the lower Bund.”
“Is that why I received this delightful item?” said Tuan, meaning the little carved casket. “It’s quite exquisite. Is it Cheung’s own handiwork?”
Ivory nodded gravely.
“Then Cheung is serious about all this,” concluded Tuan sadly. “Real warlords,” he said, “found no
dishonor in surprise attack, or night maneuvers, or bribery, or shifting alliances—these are our tools, the basic armament of deception.”
“In theory I agree with you,” said Ivory. “History bears you out. But Cheung’s intention is to rewrite history. That means new rules—
his
rules. There can be no gray area.”
“My friend,” Tuan laughed, “all of Shanghai is one gray area.” He finished his drink. “I’m not surprised by Cheung’s decision,” he said with a massive sigh. “I am surprised by his choice. I expected some cat-eyed assassin, skulking about in the shadows. Someone all steel and no heart.”
Ivory merely closed his eyes and nodded, respectfully.
“I suppose whistling up my bodyguards would be futile,” said Tuan.
“They have all left already,” confirmed Ivory.
Tuan spread his vast fingers across the tabletop like two opposing camps; the tents of honor versus betrayal, love versus hate, good versus evil. “Of all people,” he said, eyes down, “I hoped it would never be you.”
“So did I,” said Ivory.
Tuan extended his hand. Ivory accepted it. They clasped firmly.
With his free hand, Ivory drew his automatic and gave Tuan two in the chest and one in the head, to ensure a quick death. He held onto Tuan’s hand until the big man’s heart stopped forever.
Gabriel Hunt considered the limits of his cage.
The large, low-ceilinged room was like a pet sanctuary or a bondage emporium. A warren of floor-to-ceiling
bars, wire cages, food pans, filth and dicey light. On a medical tray a series of prepared hypodermic needles was lined up like little soldiers.
His companions were the grist of the slave sale, snoring in drugged sleep or sitting in the corners of their cages with eyes full of fog, blinking little, breathing shallowly, zoned out.
This is no way to treat an honored guest
, Gabriel thought.
A case-hardened padlock secured his cell; sadly, Gabriel had neglected to pack his secret agent kit. In any event he had been body-searched down to seams and naked skin before being remanded to Red Eagle’s custody. He presumed narcotics came next.
He wondered if Qi had gotten out.
Thinking about her, he realized this was how Qi had begun, perhaps in this very room. He might even be tenanting her old cage. This was the place that had set the path for her whole life.
One cage over, Gabriel saw the doll-eyed twelve-year-old, barely cognizant of her surroundings. She hummed softly and twirled her hair as though she had been left too long to simmer in a madhouse.
From his restricted vantage he could see another prisoner who reminded him very much of Qi—a ruined shadow version of her, same age and same general comportment. The woman was sleeping, or feigning sleep to avoid seeing where she was or attracting the attention of her captors.
It is a general rule of the flesh trade that high profit resides in the tarting up of what is, at heart, rather rude raw material. When up for bids in the open air, the girl would look heartbreaking, done up to entice you to save or pervert her. She would be a dazzling, powerful
temptress. Between shows, however, they were all cast back into this dungeon to live like animals.
“Gabriel. You are…Gabriel,” said a voice.
He looked up, expecting a jailor or tormentor.
That is the fresh fighter. Called Jin Huáng, for our purposes
, Ivory had said.
Chinese for ‘yellow’ or ‘golden.’
“Yellow” for her hair, Gabriel realized, seeing it now for the first time. It had been shorn, military style, to within a quarter-inch of her scalp, as he could observe now that her fighting mask was off. New wounds on her face, from the pit. One eye crusted with blood from a hard hit. The green gaze of her other eye opaque with some cocktail of drugs in her system.
But it was Mitch Quantrill, live in the flesh, back from the dead, incontrovertibly standing there in front of him.