Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Among the Killers of Men

“Zhang,” said Ivory. “You are right—to win Zhang to our cause would be to put the entire army at our disposal.”

“Why not just kill him the way you killed Tuan?”

“Zhang has not betrayed Mr. Cheung. He will be offered a deal, as Mr. Hellweg will be.”

Gabriel almost wished Ivory weren’t being so open in discussing his plans—it surely meant he was confident Gabriel would never leave the cage alive.

“Listen, Ivory,” Gabriel said, figuring he might as well confront it head-on, “you and I can work out a deal, too.”

“I am sorry for your unfortunate confinement,” Ivory said, “but no. If I were to let you go, I would have to answer to Mr. Cheung. As I would if I allowed Qingzhao to continue living. There are no options.”

“There are always options,” Gabriel said. “And if I find one before you do, you may regret not making a deal with me.”

“You speak very bravely for a man in a cage, Mr. Hunt.”

“I’m not being brave,” said Gabriel, “just telling you the truth. I have something Mr. Cheung wants very badly. How long do you think he’ll keep me in this cage?”

Gabriel caught the fleeting expression of uncertainty that ghosted across Ivory’s face at this news. But he had no time to appreciate it, because while he was watching Ivory someone slipped up from behind and jammed a spike full of joy juice into Gabriel’s shoulder.

Chapter 15

Mitch’s defeated opponent from the Iron Fist bout that Gabriel had witnessed turned out to be a lot more important than anyone reckoned.

The woman’s name was Garima Bhatia; in her native Indian dialect “Garima” meant “prowess, strength and honor.” That she had been tough and competent did not matter. That she had lost money for some bettors did not matter. That she had been defeated by Mitch did not matter.

What mattered was that Garima Bhatia had died soon after the match from a brain aneurysm.

What mattered more was that Garima had been Mads Hellweg’s fighter, bonded and branded.

Mads Hellweg, the underground lord of New Shanghai’s water and power, had long distrusted Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung, and had significant reservations about the fixing of matches at the Iron Fist. For the purposes of inside intelligence, Hellweg had emplaced most of the Sikh guards used by Red Eagle, having obtained these men through the same channels and business interests in India he had used to procure Garima. But over the prior months the pipeline had broken down and his Sikh spies were being kept out of the information loop. Garima’s defeat had come at an inopportune time, never mind her death, and Hellweg was now in dutch with the local Triad shylocks.

Normally, Hellweg would have requested that Cheung use his influence to take some of the creditor heat off. Except he knew that Cheung was brimming over with his own plans and needed to curry favor with the selfsame Tong bosses to get what he wanted. Hellweg’s request was doomed to go into channels and never come out.

Plus, Cheung was visibly becoming increasingly erratic. Assassins were trying to kill him in public. He had taken to soliciting the counsel of an astrologer. And he had fallen into the habit of murdering rivals at the least disagreement or split-hair detail. Hellweg had begun to suspect his uneasy relationship with Cheung was going to blossom into a less-than-equal partnership.

Fortunately, Hellweg had other allies. Quietly marshalling their forces against the Tongs in China were the members of the Japanese yakuza. Though nominally subject to a cross-cultural cease-fire, they were just waiting for the right excuse to commence full-scale gang warfare in the streets of Shanghai. Hellweg had maintained a back-door deal with some of the oyibuns of the 30,000-strong Kobayashi Clan just in case it ever proved necessary.

And this, he thought, could be the moment. If he deactivated the Iron Fist using yakuza mercenaries, Cheung would blame the Japanese and drag the Tongs in for reprisal. Both sides would suffer glorious losses, including the Triad loansharks trying to bleed Hellweg, and Hellweg himself would skate blame-free.

Then, when the tumult died down, he could debut his own fighting pit, one strictly under his control.

Best of all, if Cheung didn’t suspect his involvement, he might even come to Hellweg for support, might ask him to help architect the retaliation against this bold, slap-in-the-face attack by Japan. This moment would bond them as equals in a way nothing else had to date…

Hellweg made the call on his ultra-secure landline.

The warning on the sarcophagus was clear. Basically, anybody who opened the tomb was to be cursed, blahblah, the usual rot.

Gabriel tilted back his pith helmet and mopped his head with a kerchief once white, now gone to oily yellow. Weeks of digging to find a burial chain-of-title regarding a Second Dynastic Period ruler named either Kaires or Seth-Peribsen; scholars disagreed. What Gabriel had found instead was more intriguing—an overlooked intermediate ruler, sort of a vice president, name unknown, signified only by a unique, untranslatable hieroglyph—a bit like the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, but without all the platinum albums.

According to the glyphs, Mr. Unknown’s guardian was supposed to be a kind of Frankensteinian version of a mummy assembled from the parts of all his best soldiers and consigned to an eternity of guard duty in the afterlife.

The sarcophagus creaked on hidden stone hinges—

Pause.

Gabriel snorted water and surfaced, having miscalculated his depth and evacuated the mouthpiece for his air tanks. Frequently the current stirred up the basal muck of this part of the Amazonas, and until it settled it was impossible to see anything underwater. The evidence was thin at best for the missing link between human and fish, and Gabriel was about to give it up for the day when something grabbed his leg while he was treading water—

Pause.

The arctic air in the middle of the Greenland ice cap was so cold that it could shatter a plastic bag, or solidify water thrown from a cup before it hit the ground. To his left, a hundred miles of featureless ice. Ditto for all other directions, save up, where hung nothing but blistering, cloudless sky. Beneath his boots, more ice, ten thousand feet of it, straight down. He was so far inland that there were no birds, for there was nothing here for them to eat. The air would crystallize his lungs if he inhaled it quickly enough. All blinding white, like the end of everything…until he plummeted through a thin scab of crust masking the treacherous layer of blown snow, and crashed into a cavern network that had last been open to the sky sometime during the Industrial Revolution. Even now, glacial drift was narrowing the rift, threatening to seal him in forever—

Pause.

The man-shaped creature, evil and desert-dry, had him by the throat. Gabriel could smell the mold—

The river throwback, an obscenely large mutation of the Paleozoic coelacanth, was in the process of swallowing his leg—

He looked up and saw the sun blotted out while he froze to death in the harsh Greenland icefall—

The narrative nature of dreams denies the concept of build, or the slow accumulation of facts necessary for deductive logic or extrapolation. As soon as your mind thinks of the eventuality, you flash-forward to the heat of it without the benefit of intermediate orts and bits of drama, as in a cinematic jump cut. The velocity of the dream-narrative can relentlessly shove your mind toward wakefulness, which is why many sleepers awaken before they “die” in the dream state.

Gabriel punched and flailed, battling the homicidal monster, kicking at the killer fish, fighting the cold and grinding ice floe. He fought for his life. He fought to breathe. He fought not to die.