Thunder God

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Hawke stared hard at the man in the white suit. His eyes were obscured by a pair of Persol sunglasses but he didn’t need to see behind them to know who he was looking at.

The man grinned. “You are a very difficult man to get hold of, Mr Hawke.”

Hawke never broke eye contact with him. He was older than he had expected, with silver in his temples and an ominous snarl that seemed to be a permanent feature on his lean, clean-shaven face.

“My name is Sheng Fang, perhaps you have heard of me?”

Hawke made no reply. His eyes crawled over the room as he assessed the situation for a potential egress point. That seemed unlikely. The only door was behind him, and guarded by two men wearing shoulder-holsters, and behind Sheng was nothing but an enormous window offering an impressive view of downtown Beijing, but too high to use as an escape route. Beside him, Lea said nothing, and Han stood in silence too, measuring his fate.

“And you are even more elusive, monk. You and your secret.”

Sheng lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at the ceiling. “Where are my manners?” He clicked his fingers and an armed man immediately pushed the silver box of cigarettes to Hawke.

“I’m trying to cut back,” he said. “What do you want?”

“Ah — this I think you already know, and if you do not give me what I want, then I will kill you all, starting with the lady.” He fixed his eyes on Lea. “How nice of you to rejoin us, by the way. I was most disappointed with you in Shanghai. You were supposed to be payment for a portrait I desired.”

“You bastard, Sheng!” Hawke moved forward to attack him — an involuntary impulse caused by the thought of Lea being kidnapped and used as common currency, but a second later he felt a heavy blow in between his shoulder blades and collapsed to the floor in a wheezing heap.

“Please, Mr Hawke, I must ask you to refrain from using bad language in the presence of a lady.”

Hawke got to his feet and saw the person who had struck him was the woman with the shaved head who had held a gun to Lea’s head back in Jenny Tsao’s house. She was dressed from head to toe in black. She was smiling sadistically at him as he tried to get his breath back.

“Meet my personal assistant. She calls herself the Lotus.”

Hawke struggled to get the air in his lungs. “She needs work on her interpersonal skills, Sheng.”

“A joke, how British of you… but I thought you would be more interested in her — she is after all the person who killed Felix Hoffmann.”

Hawke finally got his breath back and looked hard at the woman… so she was where all this had started back in Paris.

“I thought,” continued Sheng smugly, “that framing the traitor Dragonfly was a particularly nice touch of hers, but then that’s the Lotus, always thinking outside of the box. Please don’t underestimate her diminutive stature, Mr Hawke. That was Hoffmann’s mistake. The Lotus is an expert in Jeet Kun Do, Jiu Jitsu and Muy Thai.”

“Thank you, but I’ve already eaten today.”

Sheng was expressionless. “I’m glad you have a sense of humor, Mr Hawke. You will need it a great deal over the next few hours.”

Hawke ignored the threat. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

“Because I can, is the simple answer. The pursuit of the elixir is a venerable Chinese tradition going all the way back to our very first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, Mr Hawke, as I hope you are aware. I am merely following in a long line of brilliant leaders who desired the ultimate power for themselves.”

“Like Hugo Zaugg, you mean?”

Sheng laughed loudly. “Mr Hawke, please don’t make me laugh. Hugo Zaugg was a small-time amateur compared with me. In fact, as you may know, he was in my employ. Leading a man with his particular psychology to believe he was searching for the map for himself was very easy. Only when he discovered that it was not in Poseidon’s tomb did I redirect my studies elsewhere.”

“And that’s when you found out about Qin?”

“Indeed. I have known about his brave search for the elixir almost all of my life, but it was only when we realized the map was not in the Greek tomb that it became apparent that someone had raided the tomb and removed it. With a little help from Professor Felix Hoffman and the Reichardt Papers we were able to work out that the Secret History of the Mongols had a previously unknown thirteenth chapter, and that in that document we would find the final piece of our puzzle.”

“Only we got there first.”

“Too bad for you, but yes. Now we know that the legends were right, and that the map was raided by men working on the instructions of Emperor Qin himself, and brought back here to Chinese civilization.”

“How did you know we would go to Dr Tsao in Beijing?”

“A simple deduction. Tsao is a world-renowned scholar of ancient Chinese and Mongolian studies, and an acknowledged expert on deciphering linguistic codes. As soon as we cracked the Reichardt Papers we knew we would need Tsao, but as you say, you got there first. We would have beaten you to it had the Lotus brought Hoffman to me alive, as were her instructions, but she has always been very difficult to control and is not the most reliable assassin.”

“You just can’t get the staff these days.”

Sheng was silent for a long time, and then he spoke. “Won’t you please join me?”

Before he could answer, Hawke felt another hefty whack delivered by the Lotus, this time in the small of his back. It was her way of hinting that he should walk with Sheng Fang.

With Lea back in the office, they led Hawke and Han along a plush corridor and into a large chrome elevator. Seconds later they emerged on the roof of the skyscraper. It was a vast area of satellite dishes, industrial-sized water pipes and humming air-conditioning vents. Above the city of Beijing hovered an ominous brown smog.

Sheng wandered casually to the edge of the roof, hands in pockets. He glanced down over the side for a few moments and stepped back. “You see before you the rise of the dragon, Mr Hawke. For hundreds of years your Western nations pillaged us, and humiliated us. Your imperial power took everything from us and left us a burned-out husk, but now all of that is changing.”

“If you say so.”

“We are now the most powerful economy on earth, Mr Hawke, overtaking even the United States. Soon we will dwarf that country, and then we will expand. Our military has the fastest growing blue-water navy in the world, and we launch a new submarine every few months. Soon we will make the Pacific Ocean our private playground.”

“You’re as mad a box of frogs, Sheng.”

“You will find out what insanity is only when your country is humiliated like mine was. What man doesn’t desire that kind of revenge?”

“To be honest, all I want these days is a quiet night in front of the TV.”

“Always with the jokes… but life is more serious than you admit. Your Western ideas have dominated our world because of your military and economic power, but now we are overtaking your military and economic power the ideas will soon change too. The world will have our values, not yours.”

Hawke laughed. “And how do you plan to make all this happen?”

“I am the Thunder God, Mr Hawke! Reincarnated and ready to take my destiny in my own hands. What I make happen will happen. It is preordained.”

“Better make that five boxes of frogs!”

“Ah — you think it is insanity to talk of being a god… of course you do! You have such an ordinary mind. You should ask yourself what makes a god?”

Sheng clicked his fingers and the Lotus and another guard dragged a woman from the elevator. She was unconscious, so he had the Lotus kick her in the stomach. Seconds later she was awake and gasping for breath.

Hawke saw Han’s eyes widen in horror. “What is it, Han?”

“That’s my sister! They have my sister!”

“A god is a god because he is immortal, Mr Hawke,” Sheng continued, watching the poor woman with relish in his eyes. “A god may give life and take life.”

“A few assumptions there, but do go on… I haven’t had a good sleep in a long time.”

Sheng ignored him. “And so if a mortal man could become immortal then would he not be a god?”

Sheng spoke in rapid Mandarin to the Lotus and she dragged the woman to the edge of the skyscraper. She made no effort to escape and a look of total despair spread across her face like a hideous shadow.

“The God of Thunder, Mr Hawke — Lei Gong! A genius! A powerful and divine ruler who used his omnipotence to punish sinners — but he was once a mortal man, just like me. A mortal man who tasted the peach of immortality… and I too will drink of the elixir that gives eternal life, and have the total power and knowledge that comes with it!”

“I’ve heard it all before, Sheng,” Hawke said, thinking of Switzerland. He knew he had to stand up to this maniac and not show any sign of weakness. “Zaugg had the same look in his eyes as you do now — until I killed him, that is.”

“As I have said, poor Hugo had no real fight in him. He was obsessed with his father’s Nazi legacy and allowed too much of the past to cloud his mind. Also, he made the fundamental mistake of surrounding himself with idiots, which I have not done.”

As he said these words, the elevator doors opened to reveal a stocky man with a long pony tail and wispy black beard. He stalked across the roof of the building and approached Sheng. They exchanged a few quick words, and then Sheng turned to Hawke.

“This is the indispensable Mr Luk, from Hong Kong. He has certain unique talents which are hard to come by, but so necessary in my line of work.”

Luk’s face was expressionless, his eyes cold as sharpened steel.

The Lotus held Han’s sister on the edge, where one nudge meant a fall of hundreds of feet to her certain death. Luk joined her and grabbed Han’s sister by the neck.

“Where is the final chapter of the Secret History?” Sheng demanded, staring expressionless at Han.

“I… I don’t know,” Han said, glancing from his terrified sister to Hawke.

“An unfortunate lack of knowledge on your part,” Sheng said, and ordered Lynn Han an inch closer to the edge. Luk and the Lotus pushed her almost over the side, holding on to her by her arms.

“Please!” Han screamed. “Don’t hurt her. She knows nothing.”

“Don’t tell them, Qiao!” his sister screamed.

“I assure you I am not bluffing, monk,” Sheng said firmly. “In less than a minute your sister is about to commit a terrifying and extremely painful suicide. The location of Khan’s manuscript, now!”

“I… I…” Han shut his eyes tight and shook his head in disbelief. Hawke had been to the same place in his mind, but knew it wouldn’t help Han change the reality of the situation no matter how much he wanted it to.

“You’ll pay for your life with this, Sheng,” Hawke shouted. “I’ll see to that personally.”

Sheng was calm and undeterred. “I think not, Englishman.” He stepped closer to Han, almost face to face now, and lowered his voice to a whisper, icy cold and emotionless. “Last chance — the location of the missing manuscript or she dies, right now.”

Hawke saw Han wrestling with his terrible situation. On one hand, his very own sister, her life in his hands, and on the other, a lifelong vow of the most grave import.

“I…, Lynn… I’m…sorry…” He lowered his head and began to sob.

Sheng raised his chin and looked at Han with something that might have resembled respect in a man with any humanity. Then, with no further thought he snapped his fingers a final time and Luk and the Lotus launched Lynn Han over the side of the building. They all heard her screams recede into the busy Beijing bustle. Moments later the sound of car horns and sirens.

Han collapsed and screamed with rage on the concrete roof of the skyscraper. Hawke clenched his jaw and fixed his eyes on the monster who had ordered an innocent woman’s death right in front of him.

“I can see your psychological training is indomitable, monk,” Sheng said. “But if I cannot break the mind, I will break the body.”

He ordered Luk and the Lotus over to Han, where they roughly hauled him to his feet and Hawke saw the monk’s tear-streaked face in the bright sunshine. His neck muscles were bulging with rage as he began screaming at Sheng in Mandarin, but Hawke needed no translation to understand what was being said.

Before Han could finish his threat, Luk punched him in the back of his head and knocked him out. Moments later they were tying him to the side of an industrial air-conditioning unit. Then, Luk tore the shirt from the monk’s back as the Lotus pulled a horsewhip from her belt and prepared to whip him until he gave the location of the missing text.

A wave of crushing disappointment and anger rushed over Hawke as he watched the eyes of Sheng, Luk and the Lotus settle on the monk’s back for the first time and behold the elaborate tattoo. Sheng smirked. They had what they wanted, and when Han awoke from his unconsciousness, he would know he had lost his sister for nothing.