The King's Tomb

CHAPTER SEVEN

A lithe, tall woman in her late twenties was waiting for them in the basement of the safehouse. “Sam, meet the team,” said Hawke. As he spoke, Reaper and Devlin bundled Rat over into a chair in the corner of the room and started tying the struggling, hooded man to it. “This one’s Vincent, but we call him Reaper, and that’s Danny Devlin. The scowling woman with the cigarette hanging off her lip is…”

“Cairo Sloane,” the young woman said.

Scarlet raised an eyebrow. “My reputation precedes me.”

“Something like that.”

Scarlet looked her up and down, ignoring Rat’s squeals and grunts as he struggled to free himself from Reaper’s vice-like grip. Devlin calmly continued to tape him into the chair. “And who might you be?”

Hawke answered. “This is Samantha Dearlove.”

Scarlet lit the cigarette and shook her hand. “Delighted, I’m sure.”

Devlin finished taping Rat’s legs to the chair, checked he was secure and stood up to his full height. Reaper tore the bag from the man’s head and tossed it on the floor.

“We get anything for returning this scrote back to its rightful owners?” Scarlet said.

Dearlove shook her head. “He’s part of the Zodiacs. Officially they don’t even exist and if any of them get caught the Chinese Government just cut them loose. So he’s worthless as far as any sort of trade goes, if that’s what you had in mind?”

Scarlet shrugged. “He’s worth something to us, darling. He snatched one of our team and he’s our only lead. Without him we have no chance of getting her back.”

Dearlove was strictly by-the-book and already she was starting to regard the ECHO team with increasing anxiety. “Let me speak with him first.”

Scarlet sighed and looked at her watch. “If you must, but remember we’re up against the clock here.”

Dearlove stared them down. “On my own, please.”

The others gave Hawke a glance. He shrugged and turned to the MI6 agent. “You have five minutes.”

They waited outside as Dearlove used all her training on the captive, but when she appeared at the door it was obvious she had failed to extract anything from the assassin. “It’s as we thought,” she said dolefully. “He’s clammed up.”

“My turn,” Hawke said.

Dearlove gave a nervous sigh. “We don’t want an international incident on our hands.”

“Leave it to me,” Hawke said with a cocky wobble of his head.

“Not too rough, Hawke. I mean it,” Dearlove said anxiously. “Don’t forget he’s the property of the Chinese Ministry of State Security and sooner or later they’re going to get wind of this.”

“C’mon, you know me,” Hawke said. “I’m the poster child of restraint.”

Scarlet laughed and nearly spat out her cigarette.

“All the same, this isn’t the movies, Hawke,” said Dearlove haughtily. “Do try and control yourself.”

Hawke walked back across the basement. Rat wasn’t even breaking a sweat as he turned a confident smile on him. The prisoner even managed a smug nod of the head.

“How you doing, Ratty?” He picked up a lug wrench and held it casually in his hands, testing its weight and balance.

“If you think you can beat the information out of me, you are sadly deluded. There is nothing you can do to me that is worse than what the Ministry will do to me if I speak.”

“We’ll see about that.” With the forehand swing of a Wimbledon champion, he brought the head of the lug wrench crashing down on his leg and smashed his right kneecap to pieces.

Rat screamed and struggled to escape his bonds, but Devlin had stuck him down too tight. His screams turned hoarse but the Zodiac man clamped his jaw down, gritting his teeth hard to restrain himself.

“That’s going to take a good surgeon to fix up, mate,” Hawke said.

“Screw you!”

“Careful, lad. You’ve only got one other kneecap.”

The man grunted and writhed, fighting the urge to lose his temper and insult Hawke. He was a prisoner now and there were protocols to follow, but it didn’t look like these guys were too bothered about protocols.

“My turn,” Scarlet said, sliding another lug wrench off the top of a toolbox on the floor beside the bound prisoner. “I’m not going to lie to you, Rat. This is going to hurt you more than it’s going to hurt me.”

She took the lug wrench and aimed between the man’s legs. He fought to bring them together and protect himself but each leg was taped securely to its own chair leg. It was impossible to close the gap, and it was clear that he sensed his terrible vulnerability.

Scarlet swung the wrench and brought the end of it crashing down on the tiny patch of seat that was visible between Rat’s legs. The weight of the steel combined with the accuracy and power of Scarlet’s swing to smash a fist-sized chunk of the wooden seat to pieces.

Rat squeezed his eyes shut and screamed.

“Next stop is your nuts, Rat Man,” she said coolly, and brought the wrench back over her head for the next attack.

“All right, all right! Stop!”

“You’re going to give me something?”

Rat was breathing heavily, fighting hard not to show weakness in front of his enemy, but the agony of a smashed kneecap was too much to bear. In his struggle to hide his pain from Hawke, he started to hyperventilate and his face turned red. He opened his eyes and looked up at Scarlet with a terrifying mix of fear and real, burning hatred in his eyes. “Yes, just please get her away from me.”

“No,” Hawke said bluntly. “Not until I hear the quality of your information.”

“What do you want to know?”

“We’ll start with the location of my friend, Lexi Zhang.”

Rat visibly deflated and closed his eyes. His breathing had calmed now, and he’d had time to assess the situation. He might be a ruthless, trained assassin but today his greed and stupidity at the racecourse had gotten him into a lot of trouble. Now his life was reduced to a fight for his survival, and everyone in the room knew it.

“They’ll kill me,” he said at last.

“So will we,” Scarlet said.

Dearlove moved forward from the corner. “This has to stop now.”

Reaper put his hand out and stopped her from going any further. “Let them work. They won’t kill him, but we need the information.”

She gave the Frenchman a doubtful look and then nodded her assent. “But I’m keeping a close eye on this. If it goes much further it has to stop or I’m calling into my superior. What’s going on in here is torture.”

“Where is Lexi Zhang?” Hawke interrupted bluntly. He knew Samantha Dearlove better than to accept she cared about the torture of a man like Rat. Her concerns were entirely for her career advancement and that ranked considerably lower on his scale of concerns than the kidnap and potential execution of a member of his team. “I want to know right now or things are going to get ugly.”

Rat was working hard to stay in control. Recalling his training. Thinking carefully about how his boss back at the Ministry, the much-feared Zhou Yang, would deal with him when he found out he’d given up the location of the traitor Dragonfly to save his own worthless skin.

“Is it Beijing?” Hawke asked.

“Yes, but they’re not keeping her in the Ministry itself,” he said, glumly accepting his fate. “She’s in a government facility used by the Zodiacs. There is no way you can get to her. That is why she is there. It is one of the most secure sites in China.”

Reaper, Devlin and Dearlove shared a look of hope. Hawke was getting somewhere after all.

“Tell me more about this facility. I want to know exactly where they’re holding her and how I get there.”

Rat managed a laugh. “You’re crazy! I already told you it’s one of the most secure government sites in the entire country. You’d have more luck trying to break into Fort Knox.”

Scarlet swung the wrench again, and Rat spilled all the information they wanted in a hurry. “She’s in the basement of a building called the Torture House.”

“Of course she is.”

“It’s on East Chang’an Avenue near Tiananmen Square.”

“Turns out you can be a very helpful rat when you have to be,” Scarlet said with a smirk.

“Now you trade me for her?”

“Never mind trading you for a hostage, buddy,” Hawke said, staring at him without so much as blinking an eye. “You’re going back to the UK on an RAF transport plane. You’ll fly into Brize Norton and then disappear.”

Rat was deflated. “You will regret this.”

“I think not, pal,” Hawke said. “But you’re going to regret hurting my friend.”

He swung a powerful uppercut into the man’s face and knocked him out for the second time in the hour.

Dearlove gasped. “Was that strictly necessary, Hawke?”

“Not at all,” the Englishman said with a grin. “But it sure was fun. Now, we need to get to this building he’s just described and work out a way to get into the basement levels.”

“And how hard can that be?” Devlin said.

“Exactement,” said Reaper. “We will be in and out with Lexi like this.” He snapped his fingers to indicate the lightning nature of their raid.

“Either that or breaking into one of the most heavily guarded government sites on earth is a suicide mission,” Scarlet said, lighting a cigarette. “And we’ll all be dead within twenty-four hours.”

Hawke laughed. “Always the optimist, Cairo.”

“You know me. And we’re one Zodiac down now, as well. Only three more to go.”

“Let’s go get our friend.”

Two thousand kilometres north, Lexi Zhang awoke to the sound of a door slamming. She was certain it was day, but the world was black. Her breath was warm on her face and when the confusion cleared she realized she had a bag over her head.

Footsteps clipped on the stone. A man sighed. She heard a lighter fire up and then smelled smoke.

“I’m very disappointed in you, Xiaoli.” The words were delivered in quiet, calm Mandarin.

Zhou.

Shit.

She kept her voice level. “I’ll never talk.”

“I think we both know you will.”

She said nothing.

“Not only will you tell me everything I want to know about your treachery, and any other details I desire to know, but you will also beg me to make your death a quick and painless one.”

“Screw you, Zhou.”

“When did you first cross to the other side?”

“Who killed my parents?”

Another deep exhalation and the smell of smoke. “The Zodiacs.”

“Which one?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because whoever did it is going to die very painfully.”

He sighed. “I understand you’re angry, but you don’t seem to grasp the situation. You are a prisoner now. Chained up in a location quite unknown to you. Soon you will be tortured until I am satisfied you have been squeezed dry of all information, and then you will be slowly killed. There is no possibility of you exacting revenge against my men.”

“Which one!”

“When did you first defect?”

“I will never talk.”

She heard him tap on the door. The hinges creaked and then she heard Zhou speaking with some men.

“Good news, Xiaoli. Pig is here.”

She said nothing.

“He thinks you are very beautiful. He particularly admires your hands. He says he finds your nails very tantalizing. So much so, he wants to pull them out and keep them for himself.”

She felt her skin crawl. “You bastard, Zhou.”

“Tell me what I want to know or I will let him go and get his toolbox and take a pair of pliers to you.”

“Son of a bitch!”

“We’ll leave you now. Give you some time to think. When we return, you will talk or I will give him carte blanche to do as he pleases with you.” She heard them walk to the door. “And then you will talk, believe me.”