Several of the captives—the lot-tagged “merchandise”—were staying put in their cages like sheep.
“Move it!” Gabriel yelled, banging on the bars and wire mesh as he faded along a corridor of cells. “Get out! Get out now!”
But they didn’t, and only steps behind him, black figures entered the holding area, swathed in hoods, bearing automatic handguns with stretch magazines. He heard their racing footsteps, the ratchet of magazines being slammed home, the chatter as they hosed anything questionable with gunfire. Glancing back, Gabriel saw several prisoners—young women, kids—shredded in their cells. They didn’t even cry out. He turned and kept going.
He couldn’t save everybody. He knew he’d be lucky if he could save himself. His skin was on too loose and felt feverishly hot, making his reflexes and reaction time unreliable. The only other person he could think about was Mitch, and that only because of his promise to Lucy, because she was counting on him. So: Get his ass, and hers, out. Save who he could on the way. It was the best he could do.
The cage run was a narrow grid of rows and sections, floodlit from above. Gabriel stalled between two rows in a section that held mostly lot-tagged young men, their eyes drug-dusted, the aluminum bands stapled to their ears. He ducked out of sight just as one boy stumbled from his confinement in time to block a three-bullet salvo from a gunman wielding a pistol that cycled quicker than you can blink.
Gabriel held fast and watched the shadows pass on the floor. They were sweeping the room by section, like a SWAT team following a playbook.
He fished up one of the syringes from his pocket, silently counted to three, and struck, stepping out in a wide pivot, jacking his strength from the elbow and burying the needle into the neck of a slender, lizardy man in black whose face was obscured by a classic sanjaku-tenugui wrap. A jetstream of carotid scarlet scribbled a high arc across the air and the man gobbled, clutching, already falling. Gabriel wrested away his pistol as he dropped. It was a Beretta nine modified for auto-fire or three-shot bursts, a nasty little puff adder of a gun.
Instead of engaging, Gabriel stayed ahead of the advancing force, moving into the next of the warren of rooms.
Mitch occupied a cell about seven-by-seven, with a futon pad and a privy hole—the block’s Grade A accommodations, in other words. She was wearing a one-piece zippered fatigue jumper and laceless tennis shoes. She sat with her ankles crossed on the pad, staring dead ahead at nothing and feeling her shaved skull with one hand as though trying to identify something in the dark.
“You’re not…him,” she said when Gabriel entered.
He leapt forward and clamped his free hand over her mouth. “It’s Gabriel. Gabriel. Remember?”
“Gbrl?” she mumbled against his palm.
He tried to find her eyes. They were still there where they were supposed to be but somewhere else at the same time, distant and dilated and opalescent. He risked giving her a hard crack across the face, openhanded. Her eyes swam into focus briefly and met his, then slipped away. He slapped her again. This time her eyes locked and before he could give her a third crack her hand shot up to lock onto his throat.
“That’s it,” he croaked, reddening.
“Gabriel?” she said. Her voice sounded confused, disoriented.
“Yep.” He freed her grip before his Adam’s apple imploded. “Come on, Mitch. We’ve got to get out of here before—”
A burst of gunfire, from not very far away.
“Who’s shooting at us?” she said.
“Time for that later,” Gabriel said as he levered her to her feet and thought to himself: You optimist, you.
Chapter 16
Ivory surveyed the damage. According to what Dinanath could glean under mild duress from one incapacitated Sikh, Hellweg had ordered all his spies to bail out just prior to the assault. The Sikhs had attempted to liberate all the auction stock and caged fighters to add to the confusion. About twenty of these latter were dead now, sprawled on the floors, shot in their cages, incidental casualties of a sweep-and-clear by the trigger-happy intruders. If it moved, they had fired at it, and sometimes if it hadn’t.
Those who were not salvaged or recovered, Ivory knew, would start going into convulsions in about two days.
Dinanath put the bore of a .357 Magnum to the Sikh’s head and spared the man the chagrin of having to seek new employment.
From the invading gunmen, Red Eagle had reaped a bullet in the face for her trouble. She was spread out awkwardly across a lounging chair in her salon, trailing spilled silk saturated with blood. Her wig was on the other side of the room. She did not appear happy or fulfilled in death.
The lone enemy casualty was not talking. He had suffocated on his own blood, losing the fight to breathe with a hypodermic needle through his windpipe. Ivory found him in a vast, fresh pool of scarlet not far from the cage where Gabriel Hunt had been parked. The intruder’s weapon was not to be found.
The woman had also disappeared.
Directly or indirectly, the intervention of Qingzhao Wai Chiu had closed down the Moire Club at the Pearl Tower and disrupted the Zongchang Casino. Then it had compromised the Night Market and now, shut down the Iron Fist. This situation was metastasizing. Cheung was right; Ivory knew what he had to do and each incident that passed without his doing it hurled his loyalty to Cheung further into the shadow of doubt.
The manifestation of Ivory’s dilemma—his demon—was Qingzhao, the Nameless One.
The engine of his new uncertainty was Michelle Quantrill.
The unexpected wild card was Gabriel Hunt.
Just kill them, Ivory thought. Kill them all and be done with it.
Gabriel would have dearly loved to blend into the crowd, but it was hopeless and would have been even if he hadn’t been dragging Mitch along with him. Gabriel was easily a head taller than any of the Chinese cruising the Bund, and Mitch’s buzz-cut blonde pate and green eyes might as well have been a searchlight at a gala premiere. He was carrying the stolen gun and had no good place to conceal it, having been caged in nothing but a soiled T-shirt and trousers; he tried jamming it into a pocket, but enough stuck out to make it no concealment at all. Mitch, meanwhile, was hampered by the laceless sneakers that threatened to fly off each time she increased her speed above a rapid, shuffling walk. Together they looked like a pair of alcoholics who had just spilled out of a bar fight or escaped from a detox facility.
Mitch was slowly coming back into focus. “I don’t understand,” she said distantly. “It was like a dream—I was back in combat training. I wasn’t in a ring waiting for a bell. I was in a desert somewhere, we’d been shot down, and I was trying to keep insurgents from killing me. But it felt absolutely real—more real than the prison. The times when I could see the cell, it felt…it felt like that was the dream, because it was the only time I knew I could rest. All the rest of the time, it was combat, nonstop combat.”
“I know,” said Gabriel, trying to maintain a watchful eye in all directions at once and to keep them moving. “They spiked me with that junk one time and I was in three different places at once, fighting for my life. It’s as though the drug uses what you know against you. It produces hallucinations, picks and chooses from your experiences and your imagination to produce a situation of maximum distress.”
“I don’t see why they bothered,” Mitch said. “It’s not like the reality of the situation wasn’t distressing enough.”