James Rollins - The Eye of God - A Sigma Force Novel

As with many such places, she understood there was an unspoken relationship between the storeowners and the prostitutes who prowled this lower level, defined by the mutually beneficial flow of commerce.

The shops drew prospective clients, while the prostitutes lured potential shoppers.

The great circle of life.

She counted on that relationship extending to the two sides protecting each other. When she reached a farmers’ market, she sank to her knees against its steel fence. She rocked and moaned, looking lost and frightened.

As she had hoped, her plaintive cries finally drew someone out of hiding. A tiny white-haired man with a dirty apron came timidly to the gate. He made a motion to shoo her away, scolding her.

Instead, she clung to his gate, hanging from it in an operatic display of despair and fear, pleading with him.

Realizing she wasn’t going to leave, he dropped to a knee. He searched over her shoulder to make sure she was alone, and only then did he risk unlocking the gate.

As soon as he began to lift the steel fence, Seichan secretly motioned to Gray and Kowalski.

The stairwell door creaked open behind her, accompanied by the pounding of boots coming toward her.

The proprietor’s eyes grew huge. He tried to push the gate back down. Before he could, Seichan skirted under it and elbowed him back with one arm and yanked the fence higher with the other.

Gray ran up and skidded on his knees under the gate.

Kowalski barrel-rolled after him, slamming into a stand of oranges.

Gray pointed his rifle at the man.

“Lock it,” Seichan ordered, straightening her back and shedding her act like a snakeskin.

The storeowner obeyed in a rush, resecuring his gate.

“Tell him we mean him no harm,” Gray said.

Seichan translated, but from the cold look in her eyes and her stony countenance, he did not seem soothed. She questioned him briefly, then turned to Gray.

“The warehouse exit is back this way,” she said and led them in that direction.

Moving deeper into the market, they passed along a long counter supporting boxes of locally grown fruits and vegetables. On the other side, rows of watery tanks held live fish, turtles, frogs, and shellfish.

Upon reaching the far side, she found a concrete ramp headed up, ending at a large roll-up door used by delivery trucks. A smaller service entrance beckoned to the left.

Glad to be rid of them, the proprietor keyed the side door open and angrily waved them out into the night.

Gray led the way with his rifle.

Seichan followed, pushing into a narrow service alley.

Sirens echoed from all directions as emergency vehicles closed in on the Lisboa, but the press of the festival’s crowds around Nam Van Lake and its surrounding streets continued to stymie a fast response.

In fact, out here, most of the drunken revelers seemed unaware of the neighboring turf war. Fireworks rang out from the crowd around the lake, exploding over the waters, reflecting among the thousands of candlelit lanterns floating on the lake. Closer at hand, the neighboring Wynn casino danced with flumes of water, rising from an acre-sized fountain, the jets set to the tunes of the Beatles.

“What now?” Kowalski asked, having to yell somewhat.

“We need a fast way out of here,” Gray said, heading down the alley toward the crowds around the lake. “But it’ll be hard to hail a cab, and it’s not like we can blend into the crowd.”

“I can,” Seichan said.

She closed her ripped blouse by crossing one side over the other like a sarong and tucking the ends into her jeans to hold everything in place.

“You stay here,” she ordered. “Stick to the shadows until I return.”

2:28 A.M.

Gray kept to the mouth of the alley, his eyes never leaving the festival crowd. Kowalski hung back deeper in the alley, making sure no one snuck up behind them.

A moment ago, he had traded weapons with Kowalski. The big man’s long duster made it easier to hide the length of the AK-47 rifle. Gray kept the pistol at his thigh, turning his body to keep it out of direct sight.

Sirens grew louder and louder.

To his right, the grounds around the neighboring lake were still packed with revelers, but to his left, the throngs on the streets were already beginning to stream away, heading to bed or into one of the many casinos or bars.

As he stared down the street, the flow of pedestrians began to scatter, like startled pigeons.

The sharper timbre of a two-stroke engine cut through the cacophony of music and voices. A motorcycle burst into view, carrying a familiar rider. Seichan artlessly plowed through the straggling crowd, trusting them to jump out of her way.

As the people cleared, Gray saw it wasn’t a cycle but more of a rickshaw. The front end was a motorbike, the back end a small-wheeled buggy. Such vehicles were called trishaws . He had seen them whizzing about the streets on their way here. In Macau, a city with one of the densest populations, trishaws were much more practical than cars.

But maybe not when one was being hunted by warring Triads .

Seichan skidded to a stop next to them. “Get in! Stay low!”

With no choice, Gray and Kowalski climbed into the buggy in back. Gray felt exposed in the open like this, especially as one of the rare white faces amid a sea of Asian countenances.

Kowalski tried to sink into the depths of his long coat, clearly mindful of his conspicuous bulk. “This is a bad idea.”

Once they were seated, Seichan sped the vehicle around and headed away from Casino Lisboa, skirting the edge of Nam Van Lake.

“It’s the best I could commandeer,” she yelled back to them. “Roads are blocked all over the city. No way I could get something larger through in time.”

She continued around the lake.

Gray realized they were heading away from the Macau ferry terminal.

“Where are you going?”

“Over the causeway.” She pointed across to the neighboring island of Taipa. A brightly lit bridge crossed to it from here. “A smaller ferry terminal lies on that side, not far from the Venetian hotel. It’s less likely anyone will be looking for us over there. I learned the last boat of the night leaves in twenty minutes.”

And we need to be on it .

With targets painted on their backs, Macau had become too hot.

Gray hunkered low in the buggy seat as Seichan hit the main drag and raced toward the causeway. She wound in and out of traffic, even flying through slower-moving bicycles and pedestrians when necessary.

As they hit the bridge, it was a straight three-kilometer shot to the other island. Congestion bottlenecked on the bridge, but it barely slowed Seichan. They whisked along at a heady pace, weaving and dodging their way across. To either side, the moonlit waters of the Pearl River Delta glowed with thousands upon thousands of floating lanterns, spreading far out to sea, mirroring the stars in the sky.

Ahead, Taipa Island blazed with neon, a cheap spectacle to the quieter beauty found here.

In less than ten minutes, they had cleared the causeway and turned for the narrow streets that fronted the Taipa ferry terminal.

Before they had gone twenty yards, the massive grill of a Cadillac Escalade careened out of an alley to the right and T-boned their trishaw, sending it spinning and slamming it hard into a waist-high beach wall.

Gray got tossed, flying, tangled with Kowalski.

They hit the rocky sand and rolled. Gray managed to keep hold of his pistol as he came to a skidding stop. Still on his back, he swung the weapon up toward the road, where the Cadillac sat askew, blocking traffic.

Men—a mix of Chinese and Portuguese—burst out of its doors, but they kept low, the wall blocking a clear shot. They swarmed to the left as a group.