Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Among the Killers of Men

“You’re not…him,” she said when Gabriel entered.

He leapt forward and clamped his free hand over her mouth. “It’s Gabriel. Gabriel. Remember?”

“ Gbrl ?” she mumbled against his palm.

He tried to find her eyes. They were still there where they were supposed to be but somewhere else at the same time, distant and dilated and opalescent. He risked giving her a hard crack across the face, openhanded. Her eyes swam into focus briefly and met his, then slipped away. He slapped her again. This time her eyes locked and before he could give her a third crack her hand shot up to lock onto his throat.

“That’s it,” he croaked, reddening.

“Gabriel?” she said. Her voice sounded confused, disoriented.

“Yep.” He freed her grip before his Adam’s apple imploded. “Come on, Mitch. We’ve got to get out of here before—”

A burst of gunfire, from not very far away.

“Who’s shooting at us?” she said.

“Time for that later,” Gabriel said as he levered her to her feet and thought to himself: You optimist, you.

Chapter 16

Ivory surveyed the damage. According to what Dinanath could glean under mild duress from one incapacitated Sikh, Hellweg had ordered all his spies to bail out just prior to the assault. The Sikhs had attempted to liberate all the auction stock and caged fighters to add to the confusion. About twenty of these latter were dead now, sprawled on the floors, shot in their cages, incidental casualties of a sweep-and-clear by the trigger-happy intruders. If it moved, they had fired at it, and sometimes if it hadn’t.

Those who were not salvaged or recovered, Ivory knew, would start going into convulsions in about two days.

Dinanath put the bore of a .357 Magnum to the Sikh’s head and spared the man the chagrin of having to seek new employment.

From the invading gunmen, Red Eagle had reaped a bullet in the face for her trouble. She was spread out awkwardly across a lounging chair in her salon, trailing spilled silk saturated with blood. Her wig was on the other side of the room. She did not appear happy or fulfilled in death.

The lone enemy casualty was not talking. He had suffocated on his own blood, losing the fight to breathe with a hypodermic needle through his windpipe. Ivory found him in a vast, fresh pool of scarlet not far from the cage where Gabriel Hunt had been parked. The intruder’s weapon was not to be found.

The woman had also disappeared.

Directly or indirectly, the intervention of Qingzhao Wai Chiu had closed down the Moire Club at the Pearl Tower and disrupted the Zongchang Casino. Then it had compromised the Night Market and now, shut down the Iron Fist. This situation was metastasizing. Cheung was right; Ivory knew what he had to do and each incident that passed without his doing it hurled his loyalty to Cheung further into the shadow of doubt.

The manifestation of Ivory’s dilemma—his demon—was Qingzhao, the Nameless One.

The engine of his new uncertainty was Michelle Quantrill.

The unexpected wild card was Gabriel Hunt.

Just kill them , Ivory thought. Kill them all and be done with it.

Gabriel would have dearly loved to blend into the crowd, but it was hopeless and would have been even if he hadn’t been dragging Mitch along with him. Gabriel was easily a head taller than any of the Chinese cruising the Bund, and Mitch’s buzz-cut blonde pate and green eyes might as well have been a searchlight at a gala premiere. He was carrying the stolen gun and had no good place to conceal it, having been caged in nothing but a soiled T-shirt and trousers; he tried jamming it into a pocket, but enough stuck out to make it no concealment at all. Mitch, meanwhile, was hampered by the laceless sneakers that threatened to fly off each time she increased her speed above a rapid, shuffling walk. Together they looked like a pair of alcoholics who had just spilled out of a bar fight or escaped from a detox facility.

Mitch was slowly coming back into focus. “I don’t understand,” she said distantly. “It was like a dream—I was back in combat training. I wasn’t in a ring waiting for a bell. I was in a desert somewhere, we’d been shot down, and I was trying to keep insurgents from killing me. But it felt absolutely real—more real than the prison. The times when I could see the cell, it felt…it felt like that was the dream, because it was the only time I knew I could rest. All the rest of the time, it was combat, nonstop combat.”

“I know,” said Gabriel, trying to maintain a watchful eye in all directions at once and to keep them moving. “They spiked me with that junk one time and I was in three different places at once, fighting for my life. It’s as though the drug uses what you know against you. It produces hallucinations, picks and chooses from your experiences and your imagination to produce a situation of maximum distress.”

“I don’t see why they bothered,” Mitch said. “It’s not like the reality of the situation wasn’t distressing enough.”

“Point,” said Gabriel.

As they passed the front lot of a western hotel, he tried to recall whether Michael would have landed in Shanghai yet. It hardly mattered, though; there was no good way to reach out to him. Inquiring through ordinary channels—a hotel, a university, a tourist bureau—would bring the People’s Police down on their heads, and the police were controlled by Cheung’s partner, General Zhang, formerly of the Red Army school of compassionate understanding. Even exposing themselves on a public street long enough to puzzle out the rat’s maze of the Chinese pay-phone system was a bad idea. No, for now they were on their own and would have to fend for themselves. They needed food, clothing, disguises (sunglasses, a watch cap, something ), money, transportation, identities on paper, and a way out, a way back to a world where the most agonizing decision they faced involved browsing a selection of tempting desserts.

Gabriel steered Mitch by the elbow toward an enclosed mall area on their right.

“We’re going to have to do a little shopping,” he said.

Gabriel had never classed himself as a criminal. So much for that comfortable delusion. In the world of the Night Market, everybody was guilty of something.

Right now, Gabriel was guilty of shoplifting.

Of course, in the past few days he had been present at extravagant symphonies of carnage and destruction, playing his little solos where the orchestration required it. But now he had to engineer a grand opera of distraction just to pinch a sweatshirt.

It should have been a simple snatch-and-grab—but the elderly pipe-smoking gentleman who ran the clothing stall had an eye on Gabriel. He checked back repeatedly to see where Gabriel was looking, and each time Gabriel made sure he was looking somewhere else. No point confirming the man’s suspicions.

Shortly, the elder got into a spirited haggle with a young American woman, a forceful blonde who fully indulged the elaborate grammar of hand-wringing, waving, coaxing, position-jockeying and street theater necessary to a really satisfying negotiation. It was a thousand bucks’ worth of production value over a onedollar item.

Gabriel ducked low, slid two hoodies from the bottom of the rearmost stack beside the counter, and quickly scooted.

His turned one of the hoodies inside-out to hide a blazing Day-Glo logo of some boy band that had been all the rage two years ago. It was an XXL, and with it dangling to his upper thighs at least the gun was covered.

He looked around for Mitch, who, having walked away from the negotiation in a decent simulation of a huff, was now loitering near the restrooms. He saw her chatting up a tall fellow in an expensive sharkskin suit, the sort you’d have to go to Hong Kong to buy. Gabriel raised her hoodie and was about to call to her when he saw her unzip her jumpsuit a few inches and guide the man’s hand inside for a sample squeeze.