With a flick of her wrist, she drew the knife and slashed at the dog as the blade sprang open. She felt the sharp edge slice through the dog’s skin, and Cher yelped in pain as she recoiled from the strike. Tan Lily took the opportunity and snatched Shen Li’s wrist and yanked her off the bed.
“You hurt Cher!” the little girl shrieked.
But Tan Lily wasn’t listening. For the moment, the loving mother and dedicated professor was gone. She was SUBLIME, the skilled intelligence operative and dedicated servant to the State. The only thing that mattered now was getting out from under the Americans’ thumb and to a Ministry safe house, where she could activate the weapon.
Towing her daughter behind her, Tan Lily fled from the room as Cher alternated between whimpering and barking at the fleeing woman. Unfortunately, she hadn’t hit any vital areas, and she needed to get out of the house before the dog finished licking her wounds and pursued her attacker.
“You’re hurting me,” Shen Li yelled, twisting and pulling to free her arm from her mother’s grip.
“Stop it!” Tan Lily yelled. “We’re leaving.”
“No!”
She suddenly stopped and turned to strike her daughter across the mouth with the back of her free hand. She had never hit her daughter before, and she saw the immediate look of hurt and betrayal cross her little girl’s face. Part of her regretted it, but the larger part knew it was for a greater cause. If she escaped and was able to complete her mission, the rogue island of Taipei would once again fall under China’s protective arm.
“Stop fighting me, Shen Li,” she said in an angry snarl. “We are leaving. Now.”
A bright red mark rose angrily from the girl’s cheek where her mother had struck her, but Shen Li bit her tongue and remained silent. Tan Lily knew her daughter didn’t understand what was going on, and she would have to work to repair the damage she had caused. But it couldn’t be helped. She needed to get them out before she could return to being the mother she had once been.
She turned back for the stairs, quickly bypassing the room where Margaret’s body cooled in a pool of her own blood, and started down the steps two at a time. Shen Li lost her balance and fell, but Tan Lily held her upright and continued pulling her toward their freedom beyond the front door. “Mama… you’re hurting…”
Before she could finish her thought, the front door burst open and Jax stumbled into the room with his gun drawn. He saw Tan Lily covered in blood, clutching her daughter’s arm, and he quickly spun away to look for the threat. “Where is he? Where’s Margaret?”
Jax took two more steps into the room and gestured for Tan Lily to move behind him. He incorrectly assumed the woman under his care was in danger. It was an assumption that would be his downfall.
Tan Lily quickly stepped behind Jax, then flung her daughter to the side. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and jerked his head back, then raised the knife and sliced it across the front of his neck. His skin split open and showered the air in crimson, but she didn’t stop. She withdrew the blade and quickly stabbed upward into his lower back. Then she pulled it out and stabbed him again. And again.
He struggled against her and threw his weight back to knock her off-balance, but she clung to his hair and pulled him down on top of her. The impact knocked the wind out of her, but she was filled with a rage that couldn’t be tamped. She shifted her grip on the blade and brought it around his body, pulling it into his abdomen with reckless abandon. Finally, his hand clamped down on her wrist and stopped her from removing the blade from his stomach. He coughed blood, but his grip was strong, and his body weighed heavily on her as she struggled to breathe.
Somewhere in the background, she heard her daughter screaming in terror. She heard a woman shouting in the distance. And she heard a dog snarling with unbridled anger.
57
Punky had crashed through the gate when she saw what remained of her car and Jax’s Audi S3. They were both empty, which meant that Jax was probably in pursuit of the man who had shot her. But it also meant that Tan Lily was probably in the safe house protected only by Margaret and her dog.
To his credit, Camron hadn’t said a word as the gate flew off its hinges and she pressed harder on the gas pedal to race down the narrow street toward the house. She had almost missed the turn and her tires dropped off the edge of the driveway into the grass, but she pushed onward to the front of the house.
She slammed on the brakes behind an empty Ford Raptor pickup truck and jumped from the Tahoe with Camron only half a step behind. She ached and felt light-headed, but the sudden scream of a little girl pierced through her fatigue and spurred her onward at a sprint.
“Punky, wait!” Camron yelled.
She ignored him. “Shen Li! I’m coming!”
All that mattered was getting inside and getting the little girl and her mother to safety. She reached the front steps and took them two at a time, launching herself up into the open front door. What waited beyond the threshold stunned her, and she froze with her gun in one hand and took in the scene.
Shen Li cowered against the wall at the foot of the stairs, screaming at the chaos unfolding in front of her. A bloody Tan Lily held a knife in one hand and shoved an unconscious Jax off her with the other. And Cher, Margaret’s trusty Black Mouth Cur, raced down the stairs like a fur missile homed in on the woman she had come to rescue.
Without thinking, Punky lifted her gun and aimed at the dog but hesitated in pulling the trigger.
What’s going on?
She looked at Jax and saw his gun drawn and the bright red gash across his throat where it had been slit open. She saw Cher’s powerful mouth clamp down on Tan Lily’s forearm and whip her head from side to side, ripping and tearing at the doctor’s flesh as the knife fell from her grasp and clattered to the floor. She saw the little girl again, still screaming, and she lowered her gun and quickly scooped Shen Li up in her arms.
The girl flailed against her, but Punky only cared to get her away. The last thing Shen Li needed to see was a dog tearing her mother to pieces. She pressed Shen Li’s head to her chest and spun for the door, brushing past Camron, who also had his gun drawn but stood motionless just outside the door.
“I’ve got you,” Punky whispered.
A few minutes later, Camron came outside and walked over to where Punky had placed Shen Li in the back seat of the Tahoe. Flashing police lights reflected off the house and surrounding trees as the safe house was descended upon by a horde of local law enforcement officers who were responding to multiple reports of gunshots and a vehicular accident at the neighborhood’s main gate.
“What a mess,” he said.
Punky turned away from where Shen Li sat crying softly with a blanket wrapped around her and looked at her supervisor. The shock on his face said it all. “What’s it like in there?”
He turned and looked at the handful of uniformed police officers who were questioning the Agency security personnel who had emerged from the woods west of the house not long after they arrived. What had started out as a tense standoff with the armed men as immediate suspects became a sharing of information between professionals who only wanted to understand what had taken place.
“The older woman — Margaret, you said — is dead. Her body is in the armory, the victim of multiple stab wounds.” Camron’s face paled as he struggled to compose himself. “I’m no expert with knives, but it looked like whoever killed her knew what they were doing.”