Mitch flattened out. It would not do to get hamstrung in a big cog or fail to see the metal girder-brace at the top of the shaft if it happened to rush at her suddenly in the near-darkness here. There were no Western numerals spray-painted on the cement stanchions, only Chinese characters. But she knew where she needed to be: the top floor.
Eventually somebody would need to go all the way up.
She ejected the Beretta’s clip and verified the pistol was full up, with one in the pipe. She screwed on the hefty silencer and snugged the gun into her waistline, ruefully thinking it would take a week to draw out in combat. She slid the knife into her boot.
Her heartbeat was redlining. She could hear the thumps and clunks of the building’s own metabolism—it, too, had a heartbeat. A fine, clean sweat had broken all over Mitch’s body. She was an invading virus.
Another elevator car husked past on her left.
Then the car she was on was climbing, climbing.
At the apex of the shaft was a short service ladder, which led to a bolted vent. Mitch used the bayonet again. The vent led to a grate, and the grate emptied her into the Junfa Hall.
The Junfa Hall was crowded, but not with the living. Warlords lined the corridor of honor, stolid in their cast metal and forged expressions. Mitch peeked around a life-sized bronze of Zhang Zongchang, also remembered as Marshal Chang Tsung-ch’ang, who died in 1928. Perhaps Cheung had named his floating casino after this man.
Two Cheung men in the corridor, pacing like expectant fathers, sticking more or less to the row of statues, one on each side, their pace so metronomic that they always crossed in the center of the room. One Chinese, one western, Latin American, perhaps. The Chinese man looked like the boss hog, so Mitch took him first, at the end of his circuit.
When he turned, she yanked him backward by the strap on his shortie M4 rifle, chopped his throat to shut him up, and buried the bayonet in his solar plexus. Thrust, twist, withdraw. He fell into her grasp behind a Wu Dynasty bronze.
“Hey, Penga,” said the man from the opposite end of the corridor, realizing his partner had vanished. Yu Peng, when alive, had wrongly assumed that Dagoberto Ayala’s nickname for him was a friendly diminutive—like “Bobby” for “Robert”—but in truth, it was closer to a dirty pejorative. Ayala detested anybody higher than him on the command chain.
Ayala keyed open the bulletproof glass doors. If kept open, the doors allowed the Tosa dogs to run back and forth—endlessly—between the Junfa Hall and the Temple Room, as if the retarded mutts could not decide whose butt to sniff more, Cheung’s or Peng’s.
“Podido,” Ayala griped. “You go to the can, at least tell me—”
Mitch took him. Thrust, twist, withdraw.
But the Tosa dogs in the adjacent room had already whiffed Yu Peng’s freshly liberated blood, and came charging in like assault tanks. Mitch heard their claws scrabbling on the slate tile of the corridor and had no idea how to close the glass doors.
She caught the first headlong animal with her forearm, feeling the crushing jaws closing to snap her bones as she buried the bayonet to the hilt in the huge beast’s chest. It rolled—and her with it—but hung on. She put five shots from the silenced Beretta into the second one, which at least slowed it down, but also seemed to piss it off.
She jammed the pistol under the dog’s chin and blew the crown of its head off, swearing she could feel the slug pass right by her own arm. By then the other one had a grab on her leg at the bootline. She had to fire without hitting her foot, and abruptly realized there was blood everywhere. Her own, in part, plus a generous geyser from the first dog. Its demon pal finally relaxed its chomp after Mitch emptied her mag into it. She felt the teeth slowly withdraw from her leg as the bite went slack, but that caused even more blood to course out.
The xipaxidine would roadblock the pain, though only for a time. Her leg felt malfunctional but just now she could still stand on it.
Valerie would have been horrified. Her sister had transmogrified into a butchering monster who even killed animals. Poor doggies.
Yeah, thought Mitch, say that when you see your own limbs hanging out of their mouths, little sis.
Her vision zoned out for an instant, then snapped back into focus. The edges glistened now, as if she were seeing through a glaze of ice crystals.
She collected her rifle and moved for the glass doors, wondering how many more mad dogs she would have to put down before she was done.
Chapter 26
Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung was laughing. He loved the theatrical. Exaggerated gestures. Glandular suspense. Cheap thrills.
He and Mitch were pointing guns at each other. Ivory was pointing a gun at the back of Mitch’s head. And Gabriel Hunt was pointing a gun at Ivory.
Alliances were more fluid than they seemed.
“Laugh at me, you bastard, and I’ll blow your tongue through the back of your head,” said Mitch, holding steady with the Chinese carbine. She could do it, too, with this gun—maybe twice before gravity dropped the man. Upon entering the Temple Room, Mitch’s first sight was Sister Menga raising a hand against her. The seer’s ornate fingernails caught the light and suggested a weapon. Mitch was aboil with endorphins and the drug coursing through her, and her body reacted without the time-delay of premeditation. She had automatically put Sister Menga down because her eyes had seen a threat. Her eyes had lied. But so what?
In response to Sister Menga’s moist demise, Cheung had whipped out a Czech CZ-52 pistol, two pounds of gorgeously machined steel filling his enormous hands.
Their stand-off was about five seconds old when Gabriel and Ivory brought up the rear.
Ivory put his pistol, still set on three-shot-burst, within four feet of the curve of Mitch’s occipital.
Gabriel’s hands familiarized themselves with Dagoberto Ayala’s M4, which he’d scooped up on the run from the Junfa Hall. Cocked, locked, ready to rock. He did not think Ivory would actually shoot Mitch, but he had to draw on somebody, and Cheung was already staring down the bore of Mitch’s rifle. Tension ran molten-hot through the room, thickening the air. Hell, sheer trigger reflex would kill them all if somebody sneezed.
That was when that son of a bitch Cheung started laughing.
“You impress me,” Cheung told her. “You have accomplished the unthinkable. You got under Ivory’s skin. You have truly earned my awe.”
“Mitch,” Gabriel said softly. “Don’t take him. Not yet. He’s got my brother.”
“He already got my sister.”
“I could use someone like you,” Cheung told Mitch, “as my new head of security.” His gaze indicted Ivory, but Ivory did not waver.
“Lower the weapon, Jin Huáng,” Ivory said. It was not a request.
Gabriel saw Mitch almost comply.
“No.” She refocused on Cheung. “Valerie Quantrill.”
“Who?” said Cheung.
“My sister. You should think more about the people you murder.”
“And how many have you murdered?” said Cheung, almost avuncular. “Killed in the name of your just cause? You should thank me. I determine what people like you become.”
“Don’t listen, Mitch,” said Gabriel.
“You may avenge your sister’s death,” said Cheung, “but it will cost you your own life.”
Cheung smiled like a cobra and lowered his own weapon.
Gabriel’s hand touched Ivory’s back, but he spoke to both Ivory and Mitch: “I need him alive.”
Tears were rolling from Mitch’s eyes but she fought to preserve her zeroed aim.