“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.
Chapter 12
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.