Authors: Stephen Knight
As her fingertips touched the door knob, she sensed movement to her right. She crouched instinctively as the first pistol shot tore through the wooden door, sending splinters flying. The second shot hit her in the back, but the armor protected her from most of the damage, though she screamed as the force of the impact knocked her asprawl. She continued with the motion, rolling across the carpeted floor as Lin Yubo stepped around the desk, his pistol held before him in both hands. He squeezed off another shot. It missed, but not by a wide margin.
“Face me!” Lin shouted in Shanghainese. “Face me! Don’t hide behind your mask, show yourself, assassin!” As he spoke, he continued firing, again and again. Meihua backpedaled as quickly as she could, leaving a broken trail of blood on the carpeting from her leg, whimpering behind her mask as the shattered bones of her right arm ground against each other. A bullet struck her right hand, decimating the fine bones there. Another slammed into her chest, followed by another, but both rounds were turned by her armor. She backed into the hard, unyielding credenza behind her, and another bullet smashed through the fine wood only an inch from her left ear.
And then the Walther PPS Lin held was out of ammunition, its slide locked back. Smoke rose from its exposed breech. Lin kept the weapon trained on her, as if unaware its magazine was depleted.
Slowly, painfully, Meihua pushed herself to a half-standing, half-leaning position against the credenza. With her bleeding hand, she pulled the black hood from her head and tossed it to the floor. She wiped at the blood pouring from her nose and glared at him. For his part, Lin returned the stare, and even now his gaze was cold, reptilian.
“A woman,” he said, almost disgusted. “A woman was able to penetrate my defenses, kill my sons, and almost kill me. A woman. The gods must be laughing.”
“Do you know who I am, Lin Yubo?” she asked. Her voice was still strong and vital, even though her body was damaged and failing. But she had strength enough to overpower an old man in his 80s. She knew that. It was fate, both his and hers.
“I know you are Ren Yun’s translator.”
“My family name is Shi. My father was Shi Yue, my mother Zuo Gong, my brother Shi Tian. You and your people killed them in your purges. In Shanghai.”
“Do you think I care?” Lin asked, his voice pitched low. “Do you think I even knew their names? Do you think you would have done any differently? You want revenge, Shi Meihua? Find the ghost of Mao Zedong. Take it up with him.” As he spoke, Lin ejected the Walther’s spent magazine and pulled another from his pocket.
Meihua screamed and lurched toward him, her blade glittering in her left hand. Lin’s eyes registered something other than cold calculation for the first time as an expression of surprise befell his face. It was clear he hadn’t expected such vitality from her, that he had been convinced her time was over. He stepped back at the very last moment to avoid her blade, but it slashed open the back of his right hand. Lin cried out and dropped the Walther to the floor as he backpedaled, steadying himself against the expanse of his desk as she continued her advance. Meihua grinned. At last, she had her quarry cornered—
She was rammed against the desk as Manning charged into her like a bull, using his superior weight to pin her against it. The wind rushed from her lungs, but still she twisted and elbowed him in the face. Manning grunted but did not relent, so she buried her blade to its hilt into his chest twice. Manning gave her a head-butt in return that made her see stars, and she felt at least two teeth break when her jaws slammed together. But Manning did fall back slightly, and she kneed him in the groin and elbowed him in the face again. His jaw dislocated with a brief
pop!
and he staggered backward. Blood poured from his nose, and his eyes looked wild, unfocused.
But his gaze never left her.
Meihua reached behind her with her good hand and groped about Lin’s desk. Her fingers contacted something smooth, hard, cold; she seized it and hurled it at Manning as he charged toward her again, his left arm already shooting out from his body. The glass paperweight she had thrown smashed against his forehead, and Manning lurched to his right drunkenly, then collapsed to the floor on his back. His eyes rolled up in his head as he passed out, and Meihua limped over to him and yanked her knife from his body. She turned back to Lin, who stared at her with wide eyes.
“Lin Yubo,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper, “you’ve troubled humanity for long enough. I’ve killed your bloodline, and now, I shall kill you.” She rose and advanced upon him, blade held high.
“I don’t think so, lady.”
The voice was a total surprise, catching her off guard at the moment as surely as a delivery of flowers from FTD would have. She turned and saw the policeman, Ryker, crouching in the doorway, his gun trained on her. His grip was steady, and there was nothing to indicate he would have trouble gunning her down. And he was over twenty feet away; too far for her to get to him before his bullets got to her.
“And before you decide to try and take me on, I know you’re wearing body armor,” Ryker said. “And believe me, I’m good enough to put a round in your head before you can take a single step.”
“Do…do not interfere!” she said, almost pleadingly. “Lin Yubo must pay for his crimes! He killed
thousands!
”
“I get that,” Ryker said. “But no, you can’t kill him. I can’t let you, even though I know he’s one dirty motherfucker. I’d put down the knife, lady. And I’d do it right now.”
Meihua hesitated, then looked back at Lin. He still fairly cowered before her, only a few feet away, holding his cut hand in the other. But now there was hope in his eyes, hope that the policeman would be able to save him from his just fate. Hope that he would once again escape the punishment he so deserved, punishment for ordering the blood of thousands spilled—
No.
Using every bit of speed she could summon, using every ounce of energy she had left, she lunged toward Lin Yubo. The tip of her blade caught the office light, reflecting it for a moment like a bright jewel. And then the tip found Lin Yubo’s flesh.
Light exploded behind Meihua’s eyes as a loud report filled her ears, and then she knew nothing more.
CHAPTER 26
Manning awoke in the bright hospital to the visage of a rough Hispanic nurse taking his vitals. She looked down at him without an ounce of compassion and said, “Welcome back.”
“Where am I?”
“In a bed in Saint Francis Memorial Hospital.”
“Where’s—where’s—”
“It’s nine hundred Hyde Street.”
“No. No, that’s not what I meant. Where’s Lin Yubo?”
“Don’t know who that is.” The nurse finished taking his vitals and turned toward the door. “People will want to talk with you, now that you’re awake. Glad you’re feeling better.”
“I feel like shit,” Manning said.
“Better than the alternative.”
Better than feeling good?
Manning wanted to ask, but he knew she was talking about heading the other way: feeling like shit was better than waking up dead.
He must have fallen asleep, because when he woke up, the room was semi-dark. His mouth and throat were as dry as the Sahara desert in high summer. He sighed and tried to sit up, but the wound in his side reminded him he might want to be careful. Manning gasped at the sudden pain, and a chill sweat broke out across his entire body. He slowly relaxed, muscle by muscle until the pain abated. He looked to his right and found the call button clipped to the rail of the hospital bed. He reached for it with his left hand, mindful of the intravenous lines that were plugged into him there. His right arm was in a cast from wrist to elbow.
“You need something?” said a gruff voice from nearby.
Manning almost jumped out of his skin. He turned to find Ryker sitting in the chair near the window, a newspaper folded on his lap. The homicide detective looked haggard, but all in all, he seemed to be in better shape than Manning at the moment.
“Some water,” Manning said. Even his voice sounded dusty.
Ryker grunted and reached for a pitcher on a high table next to the bed. He poured what sounded like ice water into a cup, then capped the cup with a lid and straw. He handed it to Manning, who reached out for it. He missed it twice, and Ryker grabbed his wrist and put the cup in his hand.
“You got it? Because I’m not going to hold it for you to drink from,” Ryker said.
“No. I got it.” Manning brought the cup toward him and slowly drank from the straw. Only a few pulls at first, just enough to keep the thirst at bay for a time. “Sorry. I’m still out of it, I guess.”
“You ought to be, you’re on enough morphine to addict a thoroughbred racing horse. And you should be dead.”
“What happened?”
“We killed the assassin.”
“‘We’ killed the assassin? I don’t think I remember that part.”
Ryker sat back in the chair by the window. “According to the medical examiner, you’d hit her hard enough to cause devastating swelling of the brain. She would have dropped dead in five minutes, but she had enough force of will to want Lin dead that she kept at it until I popped her in the head with a nine mil round. So basically, you killed her, I just hurried things up a bit.” Ryker looked at Manning for a long moment. “How well did you know her, Manning?”
“Not well at all,” Manning said. “I’d only known her for a day or so, before…before it became clear to me that she was probably the person I was looking for. But I didn’t know where she was, so I had to wait for her to come to me.”
“She was a loner. No family, because I guess Lin killed them off. No one in her life. I guess the only thing that kept her going was hate. No one can find much evidence she even existed, other than a few old records in China. I didn’t know they actively tracked single people there, which is kind of weird.”
“It’s called a certificate of single. Everyone has one,” Manning told him. “Here, we place more value on wedding licenses.”
“Like I said, kind of weird.”
“Or just kind of different.” Manning drank some more. “What else did you find?”
“Lin’s man Han turned up dead in the trunk of a car, and about four or five of his guys were chopped up and put in garbage bags and buried somewhere near the Southern Pacific tracks. Completely lucky find there, a railroad crew found them while doing track repairs, the poor bastards. And there’s a question about what happened to Baluyevsky—no one’s seen the Russian, and no one’s found a record of him leaving the country yet. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you Manning?”
“Talk to Lin.”
“I’d love to, but the Chinese government doesn’t seem to want that to happen. Lin went back to Shanghai the day after all this went down. Hopped onto his private jet and took off. He still owns Lin Industries, I guess, but now some other Chinaman is running it.”
Manning puzzled over that for a moment. “Why would he leave?” he said, more to himself than Ryker.
“Was hoping you could tell me. So far, you haven’t exactly been a wealth of information, Manning.”
“You said it yourself, Ryker—I’ve got enough morphine in me to string out a horse. What did you expect?”
“About what I’m getting. Anyway, now that we have her body, we’re able to match her up with some of the crime scenes. Certainly at Danny Lin’s, and also with the man Han—we found one strand of her hair on him. And of course, the attack against James Lin. The regrettably
unsuccessful
attack.” Ryker leaned back in the chair and looked at Manning. “You have to answer a question for me, Manning. What the hell is a decorated soldier like yourself doing working for a guy like Lin?”
“I don’t work for him, Ryker. Just a contract. I don’t ask too many questions, and the world’s full of men like him. You’re right, he is a scumbag, and one of the biggest ones out there. But before you get all bent out of shape, let me remind you that both of his sons are dead, and there are probably others out there just waiting to get their shot at him. One way or another, Lin Yubo will die, and he won’t go peacefully. He’ll always be looking over his shoulder or under his bed or behind the shower curtain.” Manning paused to drink more water, and he looked back at Ryker. “That woman deserved her revenge, Ryker. But you know why I didn’t just step aside? Because I gave Lin my word that I wouldn’t. And I’m good to my word.”