Hunt Among the Killers of Men

Chapter 25

The hairy eyeball. That is what the black-suited Cheung men were giving Gabriel. They had been vaguely alerted, but few specifics had trickled down the chain of command this far, to the ground-level enforcers. They were strictly guns, muscle, hired hands.

Further, they eyeballed every Zhang soldier who saw fit to trespass upon the Peace Hotel as though personally affronted their limited authority was being usurped by the emergency brewing out in the street.

They were tetchy and trigger-happy; itching for conflict.

“You are going to have to be my prisoner,” Ivory told Gabriel. He drew his trusty OTs-33, his thumb automatically switching the gun to three-shot-burst mode.

For him to grab Gabriel’s arm would be too aggressive, thus alerting the sentries. For them to casually stroll in without a declared hierarchy—Cheung operative plus prisoner—would be too casual. Ivory opted for polite formality: The captive or suspect proceeds one pace ahead, to the left. Normally this was a submissive, almost servile position for the man behind, but the guards would understand that Ivory was keeping a ready weapon trained on Gabriel’s kidneys. Under normal circumstances, a jacket would be draped over the weapon in deference to public view. These circumstances were not normal—weapons were abundant thanks to the panic from the chopper crash—hence Ivory’s gun would be visible, reinforcing the idea of a general alert. The guards would see the gun and the prisoner and never think this was any sort of deception. This was business, expediently out in the open, and so Ivory would be taken at face value since his disfavor in Cheung’s eyes was still not widely known.

The two men bracketing the brass doors to the Peace Hotel were named Bennings and Jintao. Acquisitions, Ivory knew, from a recent canvass of Cheung security candidates based on such employment advantages as blackmail leverage, capacity for violence and general criminal records.

“For Cheung,” Ivory said, indicating Gabriel. “Dinanath was sent to retrieve this top-priority guest. He failed and I have assumed personal responsibility for the delivery. Check with Constantine on the fifth floor if you must, but this is most urgent.”

Gabriel did his best to look captured and cowed.

Bennings, a rangy Australian, was the guy giving Gabriel the once-over, twice. “Does this have anything to do with that balls-up?” he said, pointing to the wreck of the helicopter and the attendant madness.

“With what?” Ivory said, not even looking back.

Gabriel had to admire the ice-cold resolve of this guy.

Jintao had removed his sunglasses, silently exposing his eyes to his superior, and Ivory gave the man his own stern gaze in response. Jintao averted his gaze first.

“Is there a problem?” said Ivory.

“No problem,” said Bennings, waving them inside.

They crossed the lobby in silence. The Old Jazz Bar of the Peace Hotel featured a large easeled placard that boasted Real Shanghai Style Jazz Nightly!

“I helped Jintao’s children get into their present school,” said Ivory finally, when they were out of earshot. “There are many like him in Cheung’s employ—decent men who do this work from fiscal necessity. It would have been a pity to kill him.”

“Would you have?”

“If it had been necessary,” Ivory said. “I am glad it was not.”

Cheung’s floor was privately keyed, but Ivory still had the magnetic card that permitted direct elevator access.

“Wouldn’t Cheung have deactivated your card if he didn’t trust you?” said Gabriel once they had begun their ascent.

“Cheung does not wish to admit to himself the inevitability of my betrayal,” said Ivory. “I believe that he expects me to return, in fact, of my own accord.”

“So he left the door open for you,” Gabriel said. “He’s hoping you’ll come back.”

“I have come back, Mr. Hunt. And I have brought him the prize he seeks.”

Gabriel was contemplating Ivory’s gun, which had not lowered. “Please tell me…that I’m not worth a trap this elaborate.”

Ivory’s eyes indicated the ceiling, and the surveillance camera there.

“You are worth every effort, Mr. Hunt,” he said. “Maximum effort.”

The doors parted to admit them to the Junfa Hall.

Gabriel stepped out but was halted by Ivory, who merely said, “Hold.”

He pointed.

The two Tosa dogs were strewn all over the hallway in a welter of blood. Over there, between two of the warlord statues that lined the corridor, were the protruding feet of at least one deactivated sentry.

A single shot of rifle fire resounded so crisply through the hall that you could hear the ejected brass sing. Gabriel and Ivory hotfooted it to the alcove that lead to Cheung’s Temple Room.

Which is where they found Sister Menga with her brains painting the wall, and an insane-looking Mitch holding down on Cheung himself at point-blank range.

Getting past the door guards had been easy. All Mitch had to do was wait for a pair of Zhang soldiers to make for the Peace Hotel doors on some mission, perhaps to set up a triage center or summon medical backup. She blended through in their wake and made sure she was not noticed once she broke away from them. The soldiers were barely aware that they had even been tailed.

The captured helmet over her shaved head covered up a multitude of giveaways.

Getting to the top of the hotel had been tougher. Scaling the exterior wall was not an option. She might fall, be spotted or get shot. While she felt the drive and had the strength, more nimbleness than she possessed would be required for her to navigate slight brick interstices and dicey, crumbling handholds all the way up. One slip, one misplaced boot-tip, and her life and mission would end in a big wet splattered puddle. Like they’d told her in jump school, It ain’t the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop.

Qingzhao had warned her about guards and security elevators. Mitch was going to have to concoct a plan on the fly, and not hesitate lest she betray her own unauthorized presence. She quickly found the utility stairs and took them two at a time, as though she knew where she was going.

On the fourth floor she found a lone Cheung man patrolling the hallway. She hustled toward him with the urgent affect of a messenger, snapped a sharp salute, and hit him in the forehead with the butt of her borrowed carbine. The man’s eyes crossed as he fell. She stripped him of a Beretta nine and a fighting knife the length of a bayonet. In a jacket sheath she found a silencer for the handgun that was nearly a foot long. Serious business.

She jabbed the blade into the rubber seal of the nearby elevator and levered the doors about eighteen inches apart—far enough to see cables reeling past. The car squeaked to a stop at the floor below. It was near enough for her to snake into the shaft, spider downward, and put her boots on the roof as softly as a moth lighting on a lampshade.

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.