“Do what you do best, General,” Ivory said with respect. “Order needs to be restored here. Cheung shall answer fully.”
Gabriel swore he could see telepathy passing between the two men, and Ivory saying: I shall fix it.
“Very well.” Zhang turned, pointed and barked orders to his men. “You say that this assassin—the one who has been trying to kill Cheung—is now neutralized at last?”
A quick check of the steaming wreckage of the chopper, now cordoned off by men with chemical extinguishers, confirmed this. Gabriel saw Ivory’s stature warp almost imperceptibly; the cool-as-ice operative’s shoulders bowed slightly in sadness.
Qingzhao Wai Chiu had been incinerated. Gabriel felt the regret settle on his shoulders as well.
But there was no sign of Mitch.
“Cheung needs to be told immediately,” Ivory said. “And he will not believe it unless it comes from you or me.”
“I have duties here,” Zhang sniffed with harried-bureaucrat superiority. “It is your burden.”
Ivory’s performance was pretty spectacular, thought Gabriel. But damn it all, the man had not lied to Zhang. He had merely found a way to circumvent the truth. And in the bargain, won both himself and Gabriel an armed police escort right up to the entrance of the Peace Hotel.
Mitch finally unlocked her limbs from her frozen fetal position in the alleyway when someone, a stranger, tossed a few coins at her, thinking she was a beggar.
She could not see Gabriel and Ivory palavering with General Zhang less than fifty yards away. Too much smoke, too many people, confusion squared. Her face was scuffed, scabbed and blackened. Blood on her fatigue jersey.
She snugged her fatigues and retied a wayward bootlace. She had to make it out of this alley and into the Peace Hotel—she had to. And she could, she knew she could find some way in, if only her brain would stop slamming against the walls of her skull.
She slid the syringe from her pocket. Yes, she had deceived Gabriel back at the leaning pagoda when she’d clutched onto him and implored him to watch his ass. She’d meant what she’d said—but it had not been as important as liberating the hypodermic she knew he carried, the syringe that held all the solutions to her distress. She could seek forgiveness later, if they all lived.
She stuck the spike in her arm and gave herself the full remaining eight cc’s of the drug, all the while repeating her own instructions to herself. She didn’t want to lose her plan to the drug, slip away into sleep or waking dreams of unrelated combat. Somehow she needed to hold onto enough mental control to steer herself even when—
The hit when the drug took effect was similar to a great orgasm, the kind you still remember years later, yet contoured with vitamins and excellent speed, like an energy drink made with plutonium.
A deep breath, and her vision seemed to clear, though it was almost too clear at the edges, realer than real. She would have to concentrate, focus.
She moved directly to a Zhang soldier on the sidewalk who was shouting directives to an apparently deaf gentleman who wanted to argue that he could not extricate his big tricycle from the grille of a wrecked car because it was augured into a phone pole. When the soldier made to strike the man with the butt of his rifle, Mitch grabbed the gun barrel and yanked the soldier off balance. As he turned, Mitch shot a fist into his exposed throat. The weapon came free in her hands as the man went down bug-eyed and crimson-faced, unable to draw air. She gave a quick thumbs-up to the citizen, who looked horrified rather than properly grateful. No matter. She appropriated the Zhang man’s helmet and moved on down the street.
The gun settled comfortably into her grasp. With the helmet and weapon, she could pass for another uniformed solider, if no one looked too closely in the midst of all the commotion.
And while Gabriel and Ivory were still occupied with Qi’s few remaining molecules and the contentions of General Zhang, Mitch made straight for the Peace Hotel.
“Zhang and the Tong leaders will expect treachery,” murmured Sister Menga, not looking up from her steaming chalice of entrails.
“We shall be allies,” said Cheung, making the knot in his necktie hard as a walnut. He was clad in his conventional businesswear, augmented by the sort of veneered body armor Ivory had favored.
“You are children in a nursery, squabbling over toys,” said Sister Menga. Each of her pronunciations seemed to issue from the haze of incense smoke just before her. “You carve coffins and hope events turn in your favor. You are losing your grasp, but not the strength of your grip.”
“And you are starting to sound like a fortune cookie,” said Cheung. “Why not feel my skull and tell me the future? I might as well burn Hell Money or seek the favor of paper gods.” He spun on his adviser. “Ivory is lost to me. Guanxi is lost. That is what it takes to achieve what I want, and I do not shrink from it.”
One of the Tosa dogs rose from Sister Menga’s nest and padded out into the Junfa Hall. The other followed soon after. Since Dinanath was gone and Shukuma was occupied, stewardship of the dogs would currently be the purview of a man named Yu Peng, who had come to be in Cheung’s service from the Gedar Township of the area formerly called the Tibet Autonomous Region after the devastating earthquake there in 2006. Another Ivory recruit.
Cheung wondered how many of Ivory’s recruits might turn, how many remain loyal.
The dogs’ barking echoed through the museum ambience of the hall. They, too, were impatient for action.
Yu Peng would calm them down.
The other man in the hall was a Brazilian, newly hired by Cheung to salvage his skills from a murder rap in Sao Paulo. His name was…was…
Cheung hated the imprecision in his own mind. Romero? Chino? No, they were dead. Ayala, that was it. Dagoberto Ayala.
The Russian soul of Anatoly Dragunov, smoldering inside the shell of the persona he presented as Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung, resented his inability to enforce brutal fixes to essential, simple problems. In Shanghai the protocols were about ritual first, then political gain. This was frustrating. He understood peace through dominance and reflected that his plays were all logical and effective. Pawn for pawn, he reigned among ruthless men. Gabriel Hunt had come to China for a reason, and that reason had nothing to do with Valerie Quantrill’s unfortunate but necessary murder, or with her deranged militant sister. All these events were threads of a tapestry of challenges and rebuttals which Sister Menga had foretold in her cloaked fashion, but which Cheung had also seen in terms of his own destiny. Gabriel Hunt was here because now was the time for Cheung to discover the Killers of Men. Gabriel Hunt’s brother was here because a bargaining chip was needed in reserve. If this revelation required the betrayal of Ivory—Cheung’s Immortal—then so be it. He had sacrificed his Number Ones before and would probably be required to do so again. Right now, he had no one in mind to sacrifice. While he had carved another little casket, he remained uncertain to whom it should be assigned.
According to a transmission from one of Zhang’s lieutenants, the wrecked helicopter in the middle of Zhongshan Road contained none of the nearly twenty men sent with Dinanath to investigate the homing beacon with which the Nameless One, Qingzhao, had been kindly belled by Ivory. This spoke as evidence in Ivory’s favor. Yet Qingzhao had no pilot skills. There was a fatal gap in information and hence, treachery was afoot everywhere today.
The soldier had reported back—not Shukuma. Another failure.
Dinanath had not reported back from the leaning pagoda.