Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Among the Killers of Men

Cheung excused himself from the company of his supporters after making sure they had drinks all around. Extra security, all first string except for Romero (who was MIA somewhere), formed an outer ring for privacy as Dinanath, Ivory and their visitor came over. She was not a beautiful woman, noted Cheung. More…handsome. But there was something compelling about her, something about the hardness in her eyes.

Mitch stared. It was not polite, but she couldn’t help herself. Cheung was burly, bristly. Nothing about him seemed Chinese except for the epicanthic folds of his eyelids, and she realized, with a jolt, that the man had probably had surgery to acquire the look. In any event, his eyes were bright blue.

“And, this is…?” said Cheung, not speaking to Mitch, but to Ivory.

“I’ve come about Valerie Quantrill,” said Mitch.

Dinanath was upending her small clutch purse on a vacant table, rummaging.

“Who is Valerie Quantrill?” said Cheung, again to Ivory.

“A woman you left dead in a Dumpster in New York,” said Mitch, reddening.

Upon hearing this, Dinanath turned to Cheung and shrugged. It was all we could find. A garbage bin. As if to say, so what ?

Cheung looked around to his fellows as though he had missed something, like a punch line. “And…?“

“And I want to know what you had to do with it,” said Mitch.

Cheung splayed his fingers across his mouth, pondering. “Hmm. All the way from the United States? Seems like a lot of trouble just to hurl an accusation. Why bother?”

“She was my sister.”

Cheung seemed truly at sea. Mitch wondered if he was going to toy with her, string her out, maximize the pain. But what he said was infinitely colder. He again turned to Ivory and said, “What does she want? Money? Then pay her some money.”

“I don’t want your money,” Mitch said through clenched teeth.

He looked at Mitch as though truly seeing her for the first time. “You want an apology?” He shrugged. “Very well—you have my apologies for your loss.”

Mitch said, “That’s not all. You know that’s not all.”

Cheung had already turned to resume other business, but allowed himself a parting shot: “That’s all you get, my dear.”

Mitch’s thumb snapped the martini glass she was holding at its stem. With the base held against her palm, she shucked Dinanath’s light grasp and lunged at Cheung’s face, putting her shoulder into the thrust.

Ivory was there instantly, his hand arresting her wrist in a vise-grip, as though he had snatched a fly in midair. The jagged stem of the glass hovered inches from his own eyes. He had stepped in to shield Cheung with unnatural speed. Stoically, he nerve-pinched the glass from Mitch’s hand.

Cheung was grinning—not smiling. The expression was vulpine. “See if you can find another Dumpster,” he said to Dinanath. “And don’t alarm the dakuan. ” Cheung needed the high-rollers to remain unagitated.

The backwash of adrenaline in Qingzhao’s system was nauseating.

In a vital confluence of dozens of moving people and wavering vantage points, she’d briefly had the perfect shot at Cheung’s head—maybe time to get two or three rounds in before general panic ruined the target. And that American bitch had spoiled everything!

Now this…this amateur was being escorted to the security nest.

But wait: after a beat, she saw Cheung and his head of security (that son of a bitch, Ivory) headed the same way.

She still might have a chance.

Qingzhao moved across the grand hall as quickly as she could, blending.

“This is really good for headaches,” said the Chinese security man, who wore Buddy Holly glasses and a goatee, and was apparently named Chino. He was referring to a leather glove on his right hand. The glove had rivets across the knuckles. He punched Mitch a second time in the side of the head. “Got one, yet?”

His first punishing blow had been dealt to the left side of her head, so it was only fair that he rock her back the way she came. For balance.

Mitch lolled in the chair, half-conscious.

Chino automatically became less cocky when Cheung and Ivory entered the security room. Zero kept to his monitors.

“Oh, don’t do it here ,” Cheung said, piqued.

Before further debate could ensue there came a businesslike rap on the door. Chino yanked it open, prepared to repel all invaders. “ What !” he said, full up with brine.

Qingzhao shot him in the head.

Mitch tried to scoot her chair out of the way of Chino’s falling corpse and wound up dumping herself backward on the floor. One chair arm cracked violently loose and the bindings securing her fell slack. She freed herself as quickly as she could.

More gunfire. She saw Ivory tackle Cheung and both men disappeared through the slanted observation window in a hailstorm of glass.

Zero huddled in a quivering ball beneath the console where his monitors were disintegrating from bullet hits as Qingzhao tried to track Cheung.

No go.

Qingzhao was holding her hand out to Mitch.

“Come on. We’ve got to go now.”

The moment Chino answered the door was the same moment that Gabriel Hunt, freshly arrived from America, entered the Zongchang casino ship for the first and only time in his life.

Chapter 5

Gabriel Hunt’s first view of the Zongchang was impressive—the ship was one of the four Kiev class warships built for the Soviet Navy in the mid-1970s and decommissioned in 1995. One was sold to the Indian Navy for modernization; one was scrapped and the other two were sold to China as “recreational pieces.” The nonmilitary paint job incorporated a lot of dead black and silver, in sweeping lines that reminded Gabriel of formula race cars back in the hero days, before all the advertising sponsorships.

He wondered if any of the ship’s firepower was still functional.

Gabriel had just gotten his first taste of the vast main gambling floor when two men came exploding through a slanted, one-way observation window at the far end.

Flashes of gunfire, from within the chamber.

And a split-second glimpse of the only person in this place that Gabriel might recognize—Mitch Quantrill, dolled up as her own sister. Blood on her face.

Gabriel moved as the main floor erupted into chaos.

A Frenchman in the poker pit stood up and stopped a stray round, his busted flush flying into the air like cast-off flower petals. Half the clientele hit the deck while the other half was galvanized into directionless flight. Gabriel shoved one runner aside in time to save his life. The man cursed him in Arabic. The casino’s black-suited security men had unlimbered a frightening variety of snubbed full-autos and were handing their disorganization back to the crowd in the form of scattered bullet-sprays at anything and everything that might be an antagonist. Gabriel knew that, in a firefight, those little earphone-buds only worked in the movies, so if the shooters were trying to communicate or coordinate, right now they couldn’t hear a damned thing.

The racket was incredible inside what was still essentially a huge metal room. Flat-nosed slugs chuddered up a balustrade and destroyed a fake Grecian urn next to Gabriel’s head.

The two acrobats who had made their grand entrance by defenestrating from the security portal were still trying to find their wits and their feet. One man was yelling and pointing. The other was trying to shield his boss.

Forgoing the increasing availability of weapons as a good contingent of assorted bodyguards and security men inadvertently shot each other, Gabriel bypassed his instinctual craving for a firearm (if anything, he would have wanted his Colt, but he’d left that stashed back on the Foundation jet) and made for the vacant security window. Mitch was up there. Alive, dead or compromised—he had no way of knowing except through immediate action.