“Thank you all for coming,” Cheung said, straightening his seams and perching one hand on the black leather flap holster belted around his middle. “We gather today to confer honor upon our fallen comrade, Tuan, and to help him toward the afterlife with such ceremony as he merits.”
He leveled his gaze at everyone in the room, including Qingzhao.
In his hands was another of the tiny carved caskets.
“And one of you will be accompanying him to the afterlife, right now.”
Chapter 18
Gabriel riffled Qi’s first-aid supplies for saline with the thought he might be able to play alchemist and whip up a larger batch of the mystery drug from the eight cc’s he had remaining in the syringe. Mitch had lapsed into comfortable silence in the big iron tub, much akin to a heroin nod. Without a fresh application of the drug, the slamming headaches and disorientation would soon resurge, and without a medical facility at hand, Gabriel was trying his best to preload a stopgap.
All the supplies he and Qi had ferried back from her bartering excursion were still here, indicating that whatever had happened to Qi, she had not yet abandoned her stronghold. But of saline there was none. Gabriel gently set the precious syringe down under a protective protrusion of rock and turned his attention back to the big bronze statue.
He had gathered 200 feet of climbing rope in 50-foot coils, along with a basic climbing kit—a bandolier of base hooks, rock anchors, carabiners, pitons and spikes; a vertical harness, an array of belay and rappel geegaws, plus a couple of high-impact strap-lamps. Among his other tools and gear were a crate of chemicals in plastic bottles, and a few sticks of dynamite, this last courtesy of Qi’s armory.
“How’re you doing, Kangxi, old fella?” he said. “Still rotting away inside? Still got bats in your belfry?”
Those bats needed to tell Gabriel how they normally got out of the cave to hunt. He presumed a hole in the ceiling somewhere, fifty or sixty feet above the dung-fouled bowl of the floor.
Only once he’d found this secret could Gabriel put the Killers of Men to work on his behalf.
Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung spoke multilingually. Leftovers were handled by interpreters.
“I particularly wish to thank our brothers from Sechen Tong for attending,” he said. “It is their work in chemical engineering that will permit us shortly to commence worldwide distribution of our new narcotic, which we have elected to call ‘freon’ for short. General Zhang’s selfless work with the constabulary of the military police and affiliated forces has proven invaluable, and his men have proven to be compassionate and worthy.”
Zhang, in the dress uniform of his office, bowed slightly.
“As the West becomes more socialist, so do we inevitably become less communist,” continued Cheung. “It is a new century. It is the order of things.” He opened his fingers into a butterfly. “Information now flies freely through the very air. This in no way should be perceived as a threat.”
Mads Hellweg shuffled foot-to-foot, waiting to be congratulated for his supposedly equal role in the coming new order.
Qi’s hand drifted back toward her gun. Was it Cheung’s intention to bore them all with a banquet speech?
“I further wish to assure all of our most honored Tong brothers that your Japanese counterparts have been assuaged. I have taken independent action to ensure their noninvolvement. The ruffled feathers are eased.”
Hellweg narrowed his gaze. What?
Cheung was looking directly at him. “Your plot to disrupt was obvious and doomed,” he told Hellweg. Then with the air of someone bestowing a great boon, he handed the little wooden casket to Hellweg.
Ivory saw confusion mar Hellweg’s gaze. The man did not understand the meaning.
It became clear as Cheung unholstered the revolver on his belt and fired point-blank, not stopping until all six heavy-powder rounds were snugged deeply into Hellweg’s chest. The cacophony of report seemed to stop time itself.
Hellweg staggered backward without a word and fell with his legs in a figure-four. Gunsmoke grayed the air.
Everyone in the room was frozen in tableau, as though posing for a Renaissance painter.
Ivory’s crew had all drawn down on Hellweg’s bodyguards. Qi, following suit, had pulled her pistol and leveled it at the nearest subject most likely to preserve her disguise.
The uncertainty in the room was thicker than the drifting webs of gunsmoke. Half the other bodyguards had freed their weapons, but nobody dared to aim at Cheung. Ivory had a gun in each hand, pointed at two different men.
Nobody held as much import in that instant as General Zhang, whose hand had flown down to his sidearm. It hovered there, tentative as a hummingbird.
Cheung watched him. “If I have done wrong, General, then it is your duty to kill me right now.”
Zhang sought out Cheung’s eyes. Their communion was massive. He slowly withdrew his hand from his holster. Cheung smiled.
“You see? The General is with us.”
Ivory had to admire the sheer bravery on display, no matter how foolhardy it might have been. Cheung was showing the assembly the sort of leader he was. This was a public demonstration of his capacity to rule as well as a test of his personal magnetism. If he could swing Zhang, then he could swing the Tongs, and the traditionalists, too, especially since he had just coldly blown down another invading outsider. He’d still need to verify his true Chinese identity in the bloodline of older warlords, of course; there would be no winning over the hard core without that. But today’s events would go a long way toward silencing his critics.
Hellweg’s bodyguards were left dangling. Most of them were not aiming at anyone. They were gawping at their dead boss, now full of holes and slowly cooling on the cobblestoned floor. To a man, they were all hired Chinese muscle.
“We welcome you,” Cheung told them. “You were misguided, but now your minds have been set free. Ivory will see to your employment needs.”
Hellweg’s men took their cue and departed en masse with nervous shows of respect.
Call it charisma or call it power, Cheung ruled the room. His aspirations were not delusional, thought Ivory. This man could really do it, and he had just proven it.
It was that unmitigated show of power that had caused Qi to hesitate, just at the microsecond she should have been blowing Cheung’s brains all over the tapestry.
Now Ivory’s grip closed on her forearm from behind. His other hand already had her gun.
“You’re coming with me,” he said.
As though he had known all along it was her, Cheung gave a little nod and motioned his partners back to business.
Gabriel fired a round from the Navy Colt into the blackness of the cavern, and the bats all freaked out, taking wing.
He ducked down among the dung-encrusted impalement victims, these skeletal Killers of Men, to observe. He wore a hat borrowed from Qi’s stores and the rainfall of batshit, both dislodged and fresh, descending from on high spattered on its crown and brim. He tracked their nightwing pattern with a handheld million-candlepower spotlight.
There.
There, in the back curvature of the ceiling about sixty feet from the cave floor, was a geological rupture that resembled a scowling stone mouth. The bats were piling through it in a centrifugal pattern that indicated it was fairly large. Apparently it led to a switchback to the surface, presumably S-shaped, since that would account for the fact that it admitted no light to the cavern in daytime.