Hunt Among the Killers of Men

Chapter 6

When Gabriel opened his eyes, he was staring at a parked motorcycle.

Which was odd, because he seemed to be indoors.

A series of smells hit his nose—smoke, burning wood, incense, packed dirt, pine-scented air, charred paper, and beneath all that a subtle tang of gasoline, gun oil and engine lubricant.

Most enticing of all was the smell of coffee.

The bike appeared to be a vintage German BMW R-71 from 1938. Four-stroke, 750cc, with a sidecar, just like dozens seen in every World War II movie ever made. This one looked newer, and was more likely one of the painstaking Chinese rebuilds called Changjiangs, very popular with motorcycle clubs in this part of the world.

He heard light rain pattering down into what sounded like a Japanese water garden.

He tried to rise and found he was lying on a rawhewn wooden pallet and facing a huge rope candle on a rusted bronze stand. The candle was fashioned on the same principle as the gigantic coils of incense Gabriel had seen in assorted Eastern houses of worship. It could burn for hundreds of hours if fed through the windproof receiver judiciously.

Wick-smoke twisted ceilingward and the sudden light of the flame made his head throb. The chamber was roughly circular, the walls formed of ancient cut stone blocks.

There was a dressing on his head. He touched it gingerly. He didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore, which was nice. He figured the bullet must’ve come closer than he’d realized, must have hit him a glancing blow, perhaps scoring a neat groove in his thick skull. He’d made it a while on adrenaline alone, but when that had run out…

He tried to stand up and experienced whirling vertigo. At first he thought it was from his injury but a moment later he realized that the floor of the room actually was slanted, and a moment after that he realized it was necessary to compensate for the incline of the building itself. The effect was disorienting, though he suddenly knew where he was: in one of the leaning pagodas outside Shanghai.

Through a small alcove he caught sight of the temple ruins outside.

He was halfway up a mountainside, inside snaggletoothed fortifications choked by wild foliage. The leaning pagoda jutted crookedly toward the stars, like Pisa.

Several centuries ago temples like this had served as waystations for travelers as well as locations for worship and ritual. They generally consisted of three sequential courtyards, each with its own shrine. He made his way through an overgrown courtyard to the nearest of the shrine rooms. It was so large Gabriel could see clusters of bird nests near the holes in the domed ceiling. It was mustier in here where the damp had gotten through to the limestone. Vines had claimed the walls.

Gabriel saw Qingzhao toss a packet of ceremonial money into the flames licking up from an iron urn. Greasy smoke corkscrewed into the air.

He cleared his throat and Qingzhao’s free hand shot up holding a gun whose barrel looked a foot long. Gabriel tried not to react. Turning her head his way, Qingzhao recognized him and gestured idly toward a small cookstove—pointing with the gun, of course.

“Coffee. All Americans like coffee,” she said, her voice having an almost African lilt concealed within it.

She saw him look at the money she was burning. “You wonder why I would burn—”

“For the dead to use in the next world,” said Gabriel. “Don’t burn enough, and you’re considered cheap. That’s the superstition, anyway. How much have you burned?”

“You can never burn enough.”

She offered him a tin cup of strong coffee that smelled just the way Nirvana is supposed to.

Gabriel’s eyes had adjusted to the sputtering light long enough for him to now make out a mural of a frothing demon on the far wall, obscured by wear and time and the overgrowth of underbrush. He touched the bandage on his head while Qingzhao, apparently, read his mind.

“You are embarrassed,” she said. “You are a strong American man, it is your job to save the girl, and here I have saved you instead.” She almost smiled. Almost. “I will not tell anyone and thus embarrass you further.”

Gabriel was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Why did you bring me with you?”

“I think you and I wish to kill the same man.”

“Sorry to say, lady, you’ve got that wrong. I’m not here to kill anybody.”

She stopped what she was doing and regarded him.

“I came here to find someone in trouble who needed help,” he said. “She jumped the gun and came here sloppy. Emotions on high-burn, full up with revenge. She didn’t even have a plan worthy of the name.”

“The blonde woman at the Zongchang.”

Gabriel nodded. “Now she did want to kill the same man you do—she believed Cheung murdered her sister in New York City, or had her murdered.”

“I sensed we had a connection,” Qingzhao said quietly.

“Wanting to kill Cheung? I think you’ve probably got that in common with quite a few people.”

“No. Something deeper. This woman wished to avenge her sister, who has been murdered.” She tossed some more money into the fire. “Cheung murdered me, as well.”

In a high-security chamber with walls of pumice situated atop the Peace Hotel, Cheung conducted his own rituals in the incense-choked, churchlike ambience.

Seated behind an artful, almost ephemeral desktop of hewn onyx, Cheung was working with a leather rollup of antique carving tools, delicately carving a detailed cherrywood casket about ten inches long.

Past the altarlike desk, past the bank of flat-screen monitors, several of his operatives worked damage control by phone, but none would proffer information or news, good or bad, until Cheung addressed them directly.

Finally, Cheung looked up and lit a long, poisonous-looking cigarette.

“Mr. Fleetwood,” he said.

Fleetwood, a rangy Anglo wearing octagonal glasses wired around his completely shaved head, terminated the call on his headset.

“How much will last night cost us?” said Cheung, meaning the free-for-all at the Zongchang, including janitorial services.

“Ten days to reopen at a cost of $2.6 million New Pacific dollars. That’s the repair versus the lost income.”

“They’re robbing us because they think we’re desperate,” Cheung said. He picked up a hardwood abacus and started clicking the beads on the device’s lower deck, bottom-to-top, right-to-left, carrying totals to the upper deck, where each bead represented five times more value. It was the simplest base-ten counting system in the world.

“Get everything right. Tell them they have twenty days to reopen. Give them one point one. More time, but less loss.”

“What about General Zhang’s military loan?” said Fleetwood. “What about the interest the police owe us?”

Cheung waved this away because Longwei Sze Xie had entered.

“Ivory,” Cheung said. “My Immortal. Tell me true things.”

After a formal bow, Ivory exhibited several printouts salvaged from the surveillance cameras at the casino ship.

“The Nameless One,” he said, unnecessarily. “Same as at the Oriental Pearl Tower. And here, again. And again.”

“Is she a ghost?”

“No,” said Ivory.

“Tell me,” said Cheung, his voice succoring. “Is she a genuine threat, or is she just crazy and lucky?” The implication that Ivory’s job hung in the balance was clear.

“She will be no threat. I will see to it.”

Cheung rose and—very uncharacteristically—laid an avuncular hand on Ivory’s shoulder. He rarely touched any of his employees.

“Longwei Sze Xie,” he said, using respect language, “I shall need you close by at all times. You help enable my…mad little schemes, and I shall always be grateful. There is one small errand to which I would like you to attend.”

“Name it and it is done,” said Ivory.

He whispered into Ivory’s ear.

“Sir, Nairobi’s finally calling back on line two,” Fleetwood announced.

“I’ll take it,” said Cheung, who picked up his phone and began speaking in perfect Kenyan dialect.

Ivory had already vanished from the room.

Qingzhao was punching holes in a sheet of tin with a mallet and chisel. Each time she smacked the metal the perforation made a pank! sound that echoed inside the shrine room.

“Was she a soldier, this woman?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Gabriel. “A U.S. Air Force pilot.”

“Then she knew about soldiers in battle. They die.”

“Her sister was no soldier. She was a database engineer at the American office of a Chinese corporation.”

“Cheung’s?”

Gabriel nodded.

“Cheung is a warrior. Anyone who works for him has to be prepared for the worst.”

“Bet they don’t tell employees that before they take the job.”

Qingzhao shrugged this away.

“What’s your connection to Cheung?” Gabriel asked. “Were you an employee, too? Before you were…what did you say, murdered?”

She flared with anger: “You have no right to show disdain. Have you fought and killed another man? Ever been wounded in battle?”

In his nearly twoscore years on the planet Gabriel had been shot six times and stabbed or cut with edged weapons over a hundred.

“Lady, trust me, I’ve been wounded plenty,” he said.

“Lady,” Qingzhao repeated as though testing a new word and finding it inadequate.

Qingzhao inverted the holed metal so the sharplipped edges of the punctures were facing her. Then she punched the metal with her bare fist.

Gabriel winced.

Qingzhao pounded the metal like a boxer, then turned to a basket of lemons at the base of the shrine. She squeezed one freehanded until it burst, and worked the juice into both bleeding hands. Gabriel knew the pain must be incredible, but Qingzhao’s expression did not change.

“Toughens the skin,” she said, as though that was answer enough. It ended their conversation.

Some lady, Gabriel thought.

At the archway to the pagoda, there had once been a gate guarded by immense stone lions of marble. Now there remained only weathered pedestals and severed stone paws, one holding a child, the other, a globe of the world.

Gabriel stood between them watching the setting sun, trying to frame an argument. Mitch Quantrill was lost; swallowed by the Huangpu with a bullet in her. The odds that she had survived were low. Lucy would be distraught when she found out. And furious with him. Still—was it his responsibility to pick up her doomed mission? Would that make things right?

No.

Then there was this woman, with the motorcycle and the tough skin and the story about having been murdered. All right, chalk some of it up to the language barrier, but still, she seemed mildly crazy. And whatever mission she was on seemed fraught with who knew what sort of damage in her past. If she wanted to go after Cheung, was that his problem?

No.

It would be the easiest thing in the world to make his way back to the city. By Gabriel’s reckoning they were perhaps fifty miles into the mountains along the Yangtze River. He could jet back to the States. Michael could reschedule the lecture tour, make apologies for Gabriel’s mysterious absence. And all this would become a bad bit of history. It made sense.

So why did he feel no desire to do it?

Gabriel tried to kid himself that he was still recovering from the bullet skid to the temple, but he knew better. Maybe he was attracted to Qingzhao; was that it?

He was still trying to work out the answer to that one when she appeared silently beside him.

“Don’t let them see you.”

Gabriel’s senses instantly hit high alert. “Who?”

“The soldiers.”

His body tensed, automatically crouching down and scanning the grounds for cover. “What soldiers?” he said.

“My army,” said Qingzhao. “The Killers of Men.”

The pair of Tosa dogs were schooled aggressors, each nearly 200 pounds. Also known as Japanese Fighting Mastiffs or “Sumo Dogs,” their jaws could render nearly 600 pounds of crush pressure, and this brindle pair stood 25 inches at the shoulder. Highly prized as fighters, this type of dog had been banned in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia. As a breed they were alert, agile, and quick to respond with unbelievable reserves of stamina, which meant that gladiatorial training amplified all their most dangerous traits.

Dinanath had overseen the training of this pair. Neither dog had a name. Right now, Ivory was holding the remote fob keyed to their electronic discipline collars.

In his other hand he held the gleaming meat cleaver he had just confiscated from Lao, the fisherman.

Aboard his sampan, Lao was busy pleading for his life in Mandarin.

“It appears,” Ivory said, “that Qingzhao Wai Chiu had not one ally, but two.”

“This is getting out of hand,” said Dinanath.

Ivory sighed and nodded. He was tired of trying to maintain a standard of honor that was increasingly irrelevant.

He keyed the fob and the Tosa dogs tore into the terrified Lao. His screams disappeared down chomping gullets, and Ivory rendered the man the small mercy of shooting him in the head before it was all over.

Gabriel gazed with breathless disbelief at one of the full-sized terra-cotta warriors inside the shrine room Qingzhao had led him to.

There were four in all, half-buried in deep dirt trenches, broken and weathered like long-vandalized tombstones. Two vacant slots suggested two figures had already been removed.

But that was not the most awe-inspiring thing in the shrine room.

Suffocated by vines and tree roots at the far end of the chamber, clotted with decades of dried mud and impacted dust, was a large bronze statue of a Chinese grotesque, pointing one bony sculpted finger toward the center of the room. Underlit by torchlight it was positively ghoulish, a nightmare vision, an evil god. The scaling and tarnish on the bronze made the looming grotesque appear to be leprous.

“Is this supposed to be Kangxi Shih-k’ai?” asked Gabriel. “The Favored Son of China? He looks like Nosferatu.”

The reference was lost on Qingzhao. “I do not know. I only know of Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s history because of Cheung’s obsession with him. Whether this statue depicts him, I cannot say. But the phrase ‘Killers of Men’ struck me as appropriate for the others. My soldiers here help my cause.” She pointed out one of the terra-cotta figures, missing an arm. “He was a bowman.”

“Now he doesn’t have a bow or an arm to draw it with,” said Gabriel, marveling at the possibilities. “His face is almost gone.”

“They all had weapons of bronze, a long time ago. They did not need shields, nor helmets. Cunning and ferocity were their protection.”

Was she referring to the men who’d been the models for these figures or the figures themselves? Gabriel wasn’t sure.

“You found them here? Out in the open? Or did you excavate them yourself?”

“They were buried,” she said. “I dug them out.”

“How did you find them?” She didn’t answer. “How did you know they were here?”

“I knew.” It was all she said.

“Does Cheung know they’re here?”

She shook her head. “I found them; he does not know.”

“And were there more? More figures?” She shook her head. “Not necessarily in this room,” Gabriel said. “Maybe one of the other shrine rooms, or…is there a way into this mountain? A path to the inside?”

“You mean like a secret chamber?” She seemed amused. “No. I have seen all the caves and passageways this mountain has to offer. I was hoping to find more of the Killers of Men myself; I would certainly have use for them. These are all that there are.”

Gabriel began scraping debris off the base of the huge bronze statue against the far wall. Maybe she was right that she’d found everything there was to find. But maybe she wasn’t. A half-mad assassin using one of the leaning pagodas as a hideout would not search the way Gabriel Hunt could search.

“How do you use the warriors?” he asked as he continued to work his way around the sculpture’s base.

“Tonight I will take the bowman to a friend at the Night Market,” said Qingzhao. “Perhaps if you come you will find out what you wish to know. I would welcome your help.”

She very pointedly did not remind him that he was in her debt.

What the hell, thought Gabriel. He could give China one more day.