Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Among the Killers of Men

And the damned dream would not allow him to wake up.

Cheung was busy carving another wooden casket.

Ivory’s gaze found it but didn’t linger there; he searched Cheung’s eyes for illumination.

Sister Menga splashed animal entrails into a bronze bowl. Without looking up she spoke in a monotone: “Victory over an enemy. The exposure of a traitor. All as prophesized.”

“Tuan was premature,” said Ivory respectfully.

“Nonsense,” said Cheung. “I should have killed him a year ago, for the information I did not know he was concealing. Why did you not bring that information to me?”

“I only suspected,” said Ivory. “I did not know.”

“Well, then, now that you know that the Nameless One shot Red Eagle’s salon to kindling…now that you know I was humiliated when that creature Carrington spilled his drink on me and, even worse, when Yawuro got some of his blood on my clothing…now that you know all that, Longwei Sze Xie, tell me: when are you going to emerge from whatever dream-state has clouded your reason and return to be useful to me, other than as a shield?”

“For whom is the casket?” said Ivory.

Cheung snorted. “This is for our friend and fellow Quad Leader, Mr. Hellweg.”

“What has Hellweg done?”

“It’s not what he’s done. It’s what he plans on doing. Again, Longwei Sze Xie, your intelligence is tardy. Don’t make me turn my scrutiny on you.”

Cheung never gave people the benefit of the doubt, and the fact that he was doing so now made Ivory feel a twinge of fear—the kind of reflex horror one feels in the presence of a rabid animal, of some threat that cannot be dealt with rationally.

“Hellweg is as Tuan was,” explained Cheung cryptically.

“If you take Hellweg out, the Tong Leaders may object.”

“They won’t,” said Cheung. “I have purchased Hellweg’s debts to them and made them good. Let him make his pathetic gesture of protest. Let him discover for himself what true impotence feels like. Then we discard him.”

“How?”

Cheung smiled. “I shall resolve Hellweg’s difficulties at the funeral.”

“Tuan’s service?”

“Yes. At the same time I shall find out about General Zhang’s fidelity.”

Ivory refrained from asking how. Cheung would just tell him again to permit him his “mad little schemes.”

“Your path is clear,” he said to Ivory. “You know what you must do. I have been patient with you, but the American woman you are babysitting at the Iron Fist has clouded your judgment. It happens to all of us, and it is better that we recognize it has happened to you, and move onward, because we have larger plans. Today you will kill the American woman. Then you will use the information we gained from Tuan’s interview to kill the Nameless One. And we shall become whole once more. Sister Menga has prophesied it. Do not beg my forgiveness. It is not needed.”

“I will do my duty,” said Ivory.

Dinanath hurried into the Temple Room, breathless, neglecting to ask pardon because what he had to say was urgent. “Sirs,” he said, sweat standing out on the bald dome of his head. “There’s shooting at Red Eagle’s.”

“Who?” snapped Cheung, his eyes coming up to full flame.

“Apparently…ninjas,” said Dinanath.

Gabriel woke up with his own blood crusting one eyelid half-shut and blocking the hearing in his left ear. His body felt pummeled and tender, as though someone had borrowed it, had a really swell party, and then returned it without dry-cleaning it. His wrists and knees throbbed with pain. He had bruises all over—some severe, with broken skin.

He was still in his cage at the Iron Fist.

He had suffered a dream; a dream of combat against multiple enemies, each defying description. Was that what the mystery drug did to Mitch, he wondered—make her think she was battling something else entirely when she was in the fighting pit? Geared up and heroic, still soldiering for her country perhaps?

Gabriel would’ve loved to analyze the stuff in the syringes, almost more than he presently wanted a sauna, a first-aid kit and a good night’s sleep.

He went to work cleaning off his eye, and as he did, two of Red Eagle’s Sikhs swept through the cage room. Rather than doing any of the things he might have expected—feeding, watering or doping up the prisoners, for instance—they went along the line methodically releasing cage latches and unhinging padlocks. In almost no time at all, the doors had all been opened so that everyone could escape to freedom…if they had enough presence of mind to do so.

Gabriel considered briefly the possibility that this might be another hallucination, or some sort of trick, but he rejected it. Something was going down. The Sikhs were gone as fast as they had appeared. Gabriel could not know that they had received a five-minute heads-up from their stealth employer, Mr. Mads Hellweg.

Then came the sounds of panic, violence and gunfire. Sporadic at first. Growing nearer.

Gabriel kicked out of the cage, his muscles protesting. He grabbed two of the syringes from the tray and pocketed them. Nothing else at hand even remotely adaptable as a weapon.

Several of the captives—the lot-tagged “merchandise”—were staying put in their cages like sheep.

“Move it!” Gabriel yelled, banging on the bars and wire mesh as he faded along a corridor of cells. “Get out! Get out now!”

But they didn’t, and only steps behind him, black figures entered the holding area, swathed in hoods, bearing automatic handguns with stretch magazines. He heard their racing footsteps, the ratchet of magazines being slammed home, the chatter as they hosed anything questionable with gunfire. Glancing back, Gabriel saw several prisoners—young women, kids—shredded in their cells. They didn’t even cry out. He turned and kept going.

He couldn’t save everybody. He knew he’d be lucky if he could save himself. His skin was on too loose and felt feverishly hot, making his reflexes and reaction time unreliable. The only other person he could think about was Mitch, and that only because of his promise to Lucy, because she was counting on him. So: Get his ass, and hers, out. Save who he could on the way. It was the best he could do.

The cage run was a narrow grid of rows and sections, floodlit from above. Gabriel stalled between two rows in a section that held mostly lot-tagged young men, their eyes drug-dusted, the aluminum bands stapled to their ears. He ducked out of sight just as one boy stumbled from his confinement in time to block a three-bullet salvo from a gunman wielding a pistol that cycled quicker than you can blink.

Gabriel held fast and watched the shadows pass on the floor. They were sweeping the room by section, like a SWAT team following a playbook.

He fished up one of the syringes from his pocket, silently counted to three, and struck, stepping out in a wide pivot, jacking his strength from the elbow and burying the needle into the neck of a slender, lizardy man in black whose face was obscured by a classic sanjaku-tenugui wrap. A jetstream of carotid scarlet scribbled a high arc across the air and the man gobbled, clutching, already falling. Gabriel wrested away his pistol as he dropped. It was a Beretta nine modified for auto-fire or three-shot bursts, a nasty little puff adder of a gun.

Instead of engaging, Gabriel stayed ahead of the advancing force, moving into the next of the warren of rooms.

Mitch occupied a cell about seven-by-seven, with a futon pad and a privy hole—the block’s Grade A accommodations, in other words. She was wearing a one-piece zippered fatigue jumper and laceless tennis shoes. She sat with her ankles crossed on the pad, staring dead ahead at nothing and feeling her shaved skull with one hand as though trying to identify something in the dark.