Thunder God

CHAPTER NINE

Scarlet spoke first, and with undisguised contempt. “Is that it?”

“What do you mean?” Lexi said. “It’s beautiful.”

Hawke held the tiny portrait in his hands. It was much smaller than he had expected, and less colorful as well, but there was a certain beauty in its depiction of Xi Shi. She was sitting on a riverbank beside a peach tree in a pale blue dress, now faded by the centuries, and staring at herself in the water.

“So what have we got, Joe?” Scarlet said, and peered over Hawke’s shoulder to take a closer look at the portrait while Lexi strapped Johnny Chan into his leather chair and taped his mouth shut.

“We don’t want him telling his boss that we’ve got the portrait,” she said matter-of-factly, and shrugged her shoulders.

“But what’s so damned special about this particular picture?” Scarlet said. “I just don’t get it.” She took the portrait from Hawke and turned it over in her hands. “Makes you wish we had a vase to smash.”

“I don’t understand,” Lexi said, confused.

“A long story,” said Hawke. “Perhaps another time…”

Hawke took the picture back and studied it in close detail. He already knew it was a job for Ryan, and decided the quicker they got it back to the hotel the better.

“I want Ryan to take a look at this thing,” he said at last. “But first we have some loose ends to tie up here.”

Hawke stepped over Chan and tore the duct tape off his mouth.

“Who commissioned you to steal this portrait?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Chan said.

“How much did you get paid?”

Chan was silent.

Without warning, Hawke punched him hard in the face, breaking his nose. Scarlet rolled her eyes. Lexi winced.

Chan screamed and spat blood onto his polished floorboards. “You’re crazy, man! Why would you do that?”

“He’s not very good with words,” Lexi said.

“Lets his fists do the talking,” said Scarlet.

“Once again, and then I’ll reintroduce you to Cairo Sloane’s persuasive talents. “Who commissioned you to steal this picture, and where is Lea Donovan?”

“Seriously, I am very professional,” Chan said. “I never reveal the names of my clients. If I did, I would be out of business in a day and I have never even heard the name Lea Donovan in my life!”

“And you’ll be out of this world in less than a minute if you don’t overlook your touching little client-confidentiality agreement right now… Cairo?”

Scarlet purred with delight. “I thought you’d never ask.”

She stepped forward and pointed Chan’s Colt in his groin. The thief’s eyebrows went to the moon and his eyes widened like saucers.

“Okay, maybe just this once I could bend the rules a little, just for you, you understand?” He tried to grin through the fear, his eyes crawling from the muzzle of the Colt and up Scarlet’s arm to her calm, smirking face.

“I want a name, Johnny,” Hawke said. “ A name, and the location of Lea Donovan, right fucking now.” His meaty fist hovered menacingly at a solid punching-distance above Chan’s bloodied face, his arm coiled like a spring.

“Please, I beg of you just one thing,” Chan said, his voice breaking with renewed fear. “When — or more likely if — you get close to this man, please don’t tell him where you got his name. He will kill me in a heartbeat, and when I say kill, I don’t mean shoot me like you want to shoot me, I mean he will torture me to death in the most terrible way you can imagine.”

“Name, Johnny. Now.”

“I was commissioned to steal the portrait by Sheng Fang.”

“Means nothing to me, darling,” Scarlet said.

“Me neither,” said Hawke.

But Lexi spun around and stared at Chan for a few seconds in horror. She spoke to him rapidly in Mandarin, and he returned a few short sentences.

“What are you saying, Lexi?” Hawke asked.

“I just asked him if he’s telling us the truth.”

“But we have no way of knowing that, do we now, darling?” Scarlet said, looking at Lexi with thinly veiled suspicion.

“It’s the truth,” she said. “I asked him if he was being truthful and he said he was. He stole the painting for Sheng Fang. He says he was supposed to deliver the portrait to him half an hour ago but couldn’t because we’ve got him taped to a chair. He says Sheng will just send some guys to get the painting and we’re all dead, basically, and I believe him. This is Sheng Fang we’re talking about, Joe.”

“And the significance of that is… what?” Hawke asked.

“Sheng Fang is one of China’s richest men,” Lexi said. “Ostensibly he made his money in the telecom sector but there are many rumors about him and his activities in the criminal underworld.”

Hawke sighed. “Why do I have a bad feeling about this?”

Lexi casually brushed Chan’s paperwork on the floor and sat on the desk. “Many people say he made his first fortune in the human slave trade as a trafficker and used that money to invest in real estate before the economic explosion here in the last few years. Among those who know the real man and not merely the public persona he has a reputation for extreme violence and close ties to the Triads.”

“And now you understand my reluctance to give you his name,” Johnny Chan said, a look of vindication on his face. “I don't know what Sheng wants with the portrait but there’s word on the streets — rumors in the wind. Something very big and very dangerous is going to happen, and soon too. A man like Sheng doesn’t play games. He wants everything, and he’s already halfway there.”

“Yeah, you can shut up now,” Scarlet said, taping his mouth back up once again.

“This isn’t good news, guys,” Lexi said. “If Sheng really is behind the disappearance of the portrait and the murder of Hoffmann, then it must be him behind the theft of the Tesla device from the American transport vessel, and worse than that, Lea’s disappearance.”

Hawke sighed. “This sounds like bad news on a great many levels…”

“I’ll say. Does this mean I don’t get to shoot his balls?” Scarlet said, jabbing the Colt into Chan’s crotch a second time. Chan moaned beneath the duct tape. Hawke wasn’t sure if she was feigning the disappointment he heard in her voice or not.

“Afraid so. Cairo — you need to get in touch with Richard and give him an update. I’m going to speak with Nightingale and see if the Americans know anything about this.”

Scarlet contacted Sir Richard Eden. Hawke left Lexi in charge of Chan while he called Manhattan.

A second later Nightingale answered the phone.

“N, hi. Joe.”

“Well if it isn’t Joe Hawke,” she said. “Not heard from you for a while.” She sounded happy.

“What can I say? I’m a busy man.”

“And here I was thinking that you liked me. You know you asked me on a dinner date when you were flying into Athens. What happened to that?”

“Must have been the altitude,” he said. “And as I recall, you still haven’t even told me your real name.”

She laughed, but now there was a sadness to it. “I think you and I must have the world’s most dysfunctional relationship.”

“We’re in a relationship?”

“You know what I mean, Joe.” He heard her sigh. “So I guess you’re not calling to ask me on a dinner date this time?”

“Sorry, N, but no. I’m just wondering what you can get me on a guy called Sheng Fang. He has something to do with a case we’re on, only this time Lea is missing. He’s supposed to be a real…”

“A real bad guy, I know. And you’re talking about Lea Donovan, right?”

“Yes. Listen, you’ve heard of Sheng?”

“Sure. We’re not all as ignorant as you, Joe.”

“Touché, but I would prefer the word Anglo centric next time.”

“Hmm, if you say so. Sorry about Lea by the way. ”

‘Thanks, but we need information more than sympathy, N.”

“I know…”

He heard her firing up her computer and after a few seconds of key-tapping she came back to the phone. “Sheng’s a big player in the telecom sector in China — we’re talking twenty-five billion dollars here, and that’s just the legit end of things. Various covert agencies are pretty sure he still has a few fingers in the human-trafficking pie as well, and how much he makes from that we just don't know. His wealth makes your man Zaugg look like some kind of welfare bum. He has his own private island, and rumor has it that’s where he kills his enemies and holds his slaves.”

“He sounds like he has reach. Am I right?”

“You most certainly are. Sheng has so many politicians on strings he treats the National People’s Congress like a puppet show. Upsetting him is like upsetting China itself. You need to tread carefully here, Joe.”

“I will.”

“I mean, try not to be yourself at any point and you might just get away with it.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“You’re welcome. What’s your interest in this guy, anyway?”

“We think he’s behind the murder of a theological scholar in France and the theft of a portrait in Hong Kong. Oh, and the Tesla machine that you guys were playing with on an atoll in the Pacific.”

“The what?”

“Maybe you should start to do some research into that, N. I have it on very good authority — a General McShain of the US Army, for one — that someone recently stole a highly classified earthquake machine from the US Navy and now a little bird, call it a nightingale if you like — is making me think the culprit is Sheng Fang.”

“I never heard of a project like that, Joe — honest. But then I’ve been out of the loop for a long time I guess.” He heard another sigh and then a few moments of silence.

“Are you all right, N?”

“Me? Sure — why wouldn’t I be?”

“Just that you sometimes tune out for second, if you know what I mean. What happened to you, N? Why did you leave the CIA?”

“Maybe another time, Joe. I’ll tell you over that dinner date we’re never going to have.”

And then she disconnected.

Hawke didn’t have time to think about her last sentence. A second after he hung up, Scarlet ended her call to Eden and began to brief everyone on what he had told her.

“He says if it’s Sheng Fang we need to make sure we look after ourselves. He says Sheng is known by various British intel agencies for his trafficking empire, but no one has ever been able to link it back to him.”

Hawke frowned. “Why do I get the feeling this is going to spin out of control?”

“He’s utterly ruthless, Joe,” Scarlet said. “Richard just told me that the last man who crossed Sheng was a Japanese Yakuza rival by the name of Fujimoto. Sheng had him kidnapped right out of the heart of Tokyo and — you’re not going to believe this — apparently they found his bloated corpse on a beach in Kyushu. His body was covered in a thousand cuts.”

“Death by a thousand cuts?” Hawke said, shocked. “That really happens?”

“Lingchi,” Lexi said coolly, as she spun Chan around in the chair with her foot for amusement. “Slow dicing. An ancient Chinese form of torturing someone to death. They sliced off tiny parts of your flesh in non-lethal cuts. They made sure not to let you bleed too much so you would live through it all. Often the victim would even live through amputations of whole limbs. It could last for days.”

“Sounds almost as bad as the X Factor,” Scarlet said.

“And worse than that,” Lexi said, “the Chinese believed that those killed by Lingchi would suffer through all eternity because they would not have their whole body after death. It’s how Sheng likes to kill people.”

“He sounds like he might benefit from some professional therapy,” Hawke said.

“He sounds like he might benefit from a hot bullet,” said Scarlet.

“That’s nothing,” Lexi said. “He’s renowned for the pleasure he derives from torturing those who cross him. His torturer is a man named Luk, a former Triad heavyweight from Hong Kong. Not a man to get on the wrong side of. He’s a confirmed psychopath and sociopath — born with no conscience. That’s why Sheng hired him. He will do things to people no one else would ever dream of doing — that no one else would even be able to do even if they wanted to. If he gets hold of any of us then this is what we should expect.”

“That’s me not sleeping tonight…” Scarlet said. “Anyway, Richard said that if Sheng is behind the disappearance of the Tesla device then the lives of millions could be at stake…”

“There’s a but coming, right?” Hawke said.

“But…” continued Scarlet, “he seemed more concerned about the missing portrait. We’re all scrambling to find out what’s going on but clearly the reference to Lei Gong the Thunder God and the missing earthquake machine are linked. What’s bothering Richard is what killing Felix Hoffmann to get the portrait has to do with any of this.”

“Doesn’t he have any idea what’s going on?” Hawke asked.

Scarlet shook her head. “Not really. He thinks maybe Sheng is after more than just an earthquake machine though, but the rest is up to us to work out.”

Hawke cleared his throat. “Lexi — now we know this Sheng guy is involved you can bet your bottom dollar we’re not going to be alone in this mystery for long, especially since we seem to have held up his little art purchase. Go to the back of the house and keep an eye out in case we get the kind of company our man Chan here says we can expect.”

Lexi went to the back of the villa but returned less than two minutes later.

“I hate to tell you guys this,” Lexi said, “but I think we already have a problem.”

“What’s up?” Hawke asked.

“I don't know who they are but a couple of SUVs just pulled up in the lane at the back and unloaded a dozen guys armed to the teeth. They look like they could take out a small army base.”

“I knew this day would come!” Scarlet said, pulling Chan’s Type 93 assault rifle from his desk and loading it up. “Seek and ye shall find, Joe.”

“Sure, but first take photos of the portrait and email them to Ryan right away!”

“Got it.”

Hawke flicked his eyes over Chan’s mini arsenal and selected a shotgun. Lexi opted for the Browning Hi-Power. “Looks like the war is about to begin…if only we knew who we were fighting.”

“Who cares?” said Scarlet. “Let’s just blast their bollocks off so we can get back and have a drink, that way we can…uh-oh.”

Hawke saw the look on Scarlet’s face. “What’s up, Cairo?”

“You’re not going believe this, Joe, but now I know why Chan was so reluctant to talk about how much he was getting paid to knock off the portrait in Hong Kong.”

“How?”

“Because another SUV has just pulled up out the front and the men who are getting out of it are holding Lea.”

“What?” Hawke could hardly believe what he was hearing. He raced forward to the window and saw she was speaking the truth. There, in the street outside Chan’s luxury villa was Lea, sandwiched in between two of Sheng’s goons.

“Looks like he was giving Lea to Chan as payment for stealing the portrait.”

“I don’t believe it,” Hawke said.

“I told you,” Lexi said almost in a whisper. “Human trafficking — it’s what Sheng does. This is how he pays people, with slaves.”

Not on my fucking watch, Hawke thought and pulled a gun from the desk.