Hunt Among the Killers of Men

Chapter 19

Michael Hunt was met at the airport by an official car that conducted him into the city, and the waiting representatives of the Shanghai Cultural Alliance. Much bowing, many cocktails, even more handshakes as a modest summit was initiated, and Michael suffered it all graciously. As Gabriel often pointed out to him, pressing the flesh took time and patience—a patience that Michael had cultivated while his brother was gallivanting around the globe.

His brother, from whom he had not had word in days. Who was presumably somewhere in greater Shanghai; who had, by all best guesses based on personal experience, gotten swept up in yet another sideroad that rendered him incommunicado. It was Gabriel’s rowdy way. If anything were truly amiss, Michael would have seen a red flag, a flare, a message in a bottle, something. Meanwhile his duty was to make nice with the academics Gabriel had jilted at the start of his trip and tell them the things they wished to hear.

Michael’s schedule awaited him in his suite, printed out and laid against the stacked pillows on the kingsized bed. He was staying in a hotel off the Bund that had apparently been an embassy at some past time. Looking over the printout, Michael saw there were the usual tours of monasteries and museums, as well as a brace of receptions, the first of which was—oh, look at that—in exactly 45 minutes, at some location he could not have found with a map, a native guide and a GPS device. He was in the hands of his handlers and had no choice but to trust himself to them.

Showered, shaved, plucked, dressed and polished, he presented himself at the appointed time (thanking all the valets and doormen in Mandarin) and found himself whisked to a phantasmagoric skyscraper-top discotheque one entered by walking through the enormous resin-cast jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull.

The throb of the music was physically assaultive, the bass notes reverberating in his diaphragm. Strangers shouted greetings he could not hear, and the best response he could manage was to smile, nod and allow himself to be swept along through the strobing neon, the dry-ice fog, the mirrored surfaces that multiplied several hundred jam-packed revelers into thousands. Everyone was smoking, drinking and whipping themselves into an aerobic frenzy.

Michael winced inwardly, but on the surface showed nothing but serenity, calm, earnest goodwill. Patience.

His stewards guided Michael to one of many private VIP rooms fanning out from the central club floor. These exclusive chambers were lozenge shaped—like railroad flats—and padded with a sort of silver lamé tuck-and-roll on the walls that made them look like high-class cells in some A-list lunatic asylum. Table pods sprouted from the floor like mushrooms. And when the door thunked shut, the music vanished to a mere background thrum.

Michael snuck his cheat sheet out of his pocket, glanced at it. This event involved city fathers and local politicos who wished to have a posed snapshot with the head of the Hunt Foundation. It was the next best thing to a grant, and seen by some of them as a likely (perhaps necessary) prelude to same. As they filtered into the VIP room one by one, he shook hands and accepted proferred drinks, which he then mostly set down on the table behind him, untouched.

Eventually the line of people waiting to meet him had dwindled to just a single, singular individual, a willowy black masterpiece that exceeded six-two in heels. She took his arm like a lover and urged him out of the room. He glanced at one of the handlers who’d been steering him around all afternoon, and the man nodded. Michael allowed himself to be led by this amazon—whose name, he gathered, was Shukuma—toward a table in the back.

A burly cosmopolite rose to greet him, an unusuallooking Chinese with stark blue eyes.

“Mister Michael Hunt,” Shukuma said, “may I present Mister Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung.”

“This is both a great pleasure and a deep honor,” said Cheung. They shook hands briskly in the Western style. “Please join us.”

Every fiber of Qi’s combat mind screamed kill him now.

Ivory sat before her with an infuriating smile of calm, awaiting a bullet to his head.

She could tell by the weight of the sleek Glock in her grasp that the gun was loaded. This was no trick. Ivory had mentally infected her with indecision. All his buttery-smooth talk of conflicted obligations. But above all, perhaps without intending to, he had reminded her that he, Ivory, was not her target. All of her life’s work of despair and foxed chances now offered her an unclear choice.

“You wish for me to kill you?” she said. “Or is it that you wish for me to kill Cheung and free you from the burden of your conflicted duty?”

Ivory shrugged.

She raised the gun, then gave him the barrel in a sweeping backhand to the temple. A tiny grunt eased from him. Bright blood appeared as his eyeballs swiveled up and went opaque. He slumped from his seat, one leg hung up, his foot jutting out. It was undignified.

She took one small moment to arrange him on the floor of his sanctuary. Then she checked the Glock for loads and made for the door.

Mitch was freshly dressed and running her hands all over herself, as though someone had slid her into a new and confusingly alien body, inside-out. She seemed

mildly embarrassed when Gabriel returned to the shrine room.

She peered at him, trying to suss out her recent past. “Did I…?” she said. Her tone was diminished and uncharacteristically modest. “Did we…?”

“No,” Gabriel said.

“You undressed me.”

“I had to. You were burning up. It’s that stuff they stuck you with.”

“But I distinctly remember…” Her eyes went a little glassy. “…at least I think I remember…being, uh, extremely turned on.”

“That part is true,” said Gabriel.

“But we—you and I—we didn’t…?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said. “Thank you. Not that you aren’t a good-looking man—”

“Understood,” Gabriel said. “I saw you and Lucy together, back home.”

At the mention of her name, a buried memory seemed to surface, and with it a deep crimson blush. “Your sister is a very special person.”

“No doubt,” Gabriel said. “Now, if you’re through needlessly feeling embarrassed, I’d like to tell you about what I—”

Gabriel stopped speaking when he realized she wasn’t looking at him any longer, that she was looking past him, over his shoulder, at a figure behind his back.

Gabriel sucked in a hasty breath and turned. Qingzhao was standing at the far end of the chamber with her arms folded.

Safe. Gabriel and his two charges were armed, safe and reasonably whole.

“Let me get this straight,” said Mitch. “Now you don’t want to leave?”

“Of course I do,” said Gabriel. “But not with unfinished business, and I have business with Cheung. Mitch, you were abducted, drugged, pressed into a kind of slavery, shot at. Hell, forget ‘at,’ you were shot. I was, too,” he said, fingering the healed scar where the bullet had creased his temple. “And it’ll keep happening unless Cheung is dealt with. To us, to other people, to the whole country—the man needs to be stopped.”

“Very revolutionary of you,” said Qi. She was stripping and cleaning a gun. “Very inspiring. Except it is easier to say this than to do it. Believe me, I have tried and I know. You forget that we are all fugitives now, and Zhang’s police force is looking for us.”

“But we have the one thing Cheung wants,” Gabriel said.

The women looked at each other, puzzled.

“This place,” he continued. “We know the location of Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s Killers of Men.”

“That is true,” said Qi cautiously, “but only to a point. The army we found is not of terra-cotta and there is no sign Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s remains are there. Surely the warlord did not have himself impaled on a spike. So, impressive as the display may be, it is not what Cheung seeks.”

“That bothered me, too,” said Gabriel. “I didn’t see anything in the cave that would serve Cheung’s purpose. So I looked at the statue again.”

He led them to the second shrine room and to the back wall where the giant statue reposed in horrible, shadowy splendor.

“Look at the eye sockets,” said Gabriel. “You see how they’re angled? And there’s a slight rim—as though they’re settings.”

“Settings? For what?” Mitch said. “You mean like a jewel? It would have to be huge.”

Gabriel thought back to an expedition that had taken him to the Kalahari Desert. There had been a statue there with jewels for eyes that made even this behemoth look tiny. “I’ve seen larger,” he said.

“Something like this?” Qi said. She climbed down into one of the deep trenches in the dirt from which she’d exhumed the terra-cotta figures she’d traded to Tuan for supplies. She crouched down, vanishing from view for a moment, then emerged holding an object nestled in decades-old newspaper. “I found this on the ground by the idol when I first came here.”

It was a dusty, faceted red sphere, like a cut-glass Christmas ornament.

“It fits in the socket,” she said. “I tried inserting it. But nothing happens when you put it in.”

“Was there another one?”

“There was, at one point,” Qi said. “By the time I got here, there was only one that was whole, and pieces of another, shattered on the ground. Fragments. Would you like me to get them?”

“No, that’s okay,” Gabriel said, turning the faceted sphere in his hands. It was not a gem—it was glass, worth about as much as a chandelier at a discount house. But he’d been around enough giant, ancient statues over the years to know it surely had a function. “Give me a hand here, Mitch, would you?”

Gabriel handed the eye to Mitch and scaled the idol, climbing up to its shoulder. Mitch passed the sphere up to him once he had. It fit equally well into either eye socket on the giant, glowering statue.

“Give me some light.” Gabriel said. She turned a flashlight on, pointed it up at him.

After brushing away the accretions of ages with his sleeve, he could see a fine, almost microscopic line of ideograms around the rim of each eye socket.

He called down a description of what he saw. “You think you could you read them?” he asked Qi. “Give us even a rough idea what it says?”

Up went Qingzhao.

“No,” she said as she perched in the crook of the statue’s arm. “They look like they’re upside down or backward, or both—they make no sense.”

“Mitch,” Gabriel called, “shine that light up toward the eye. No, the big light,” He was referring to the dual-xenon job he had used in the cave, the million-candlepower one.

Nothing. Part of the ceiling turned red as the light reflected, but that was about it.

“Pass it up here,” Gabriel said.

Qi descended to the lap of the idol, took the heavy lamp from Mitch and passed it up.

“The glass is faceted,” Gabriel said. “In fact—” he shifted the lamp into position “—it looks like it’s ground to a very fine tolerance, like optical glass.”

“Like a lens?” said Mitch from below.

“You got it.”

He held the lamp dead-center on the crimson eye and turned it on.

The tiny glyphs sprang into hard relief in a wide arc on the opposite wall of the chamber, each about a foot high. Optical graffiti.

“They still do not make any sense,” said Qi, after straining to read them.

“That’s because it’s only half the information,” said Gabriel, dislodging the crystal and mounting it in the other socket. Sure enough—a second set of characters appeared on the far wall, like a bi-pack cipher. “If we had both eyes and lit them at the same time, the projected images would merge on the wall and you could read them.”

“So what do we do?” said Mitch from below.

A low, almost subaural hum had become present in the chamber.

“We start writing down those characters,” said Gabriel, “exactly the way they appear.”

The hum became a louder sound, a kind of chuddering bass note.

“What is that?” said Qi. “Did we start up some kind of machine?”

“No,” said Mitch. “It’s outside, damn it.” “What is it?” said Qi.

Before Mitch could answer, the sound became loud enough for them all to recognize it.

A chopper, incoming.