Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Among the Killers of Men

“Would you have?”

“If it had been necessary,” Ivory said. “I am glad it was not.”

Cheung’s floor was privately keyed, but Ivory still had the magnetic card that permitted direct elevator access.

“Wouldn’t Cheung have deactivated your card if he didn’t trust you?” said Gabriel once they had begun their ascent.

“Cheung does not wish to admit to himself the inevitability of my betrayal,” said Ivory. “I believe that he expects me to return, in fact, of my own accord.”

“So he left the door open for you,” Gabriel said. “He’s hoping you’ll come back.”

“I have come back, Mr. Hunt. And I have brought him the prize he seeks.”

Gabriel was contemplating Ivory’s gun, which had not lowered. “Please tell me…that I’m not worth a trap this elaborate.”

Ivory’s eyes indicated the ceiling, and the surveillance camera there.

“You are worth every effort, Mr. Hunt,” he said. “Maximum effort.”

The doors parted to admit them to the Junfa Hall.

Gabriel stepped out but was halted by Ivory, who merely said, “Hold.”

He pointed.

The two Tosa dogs were strewn all over the hallway in a welter of blood. Over there, between two of the warlord statues that lined the corridor, were the protruding feet of at least one deactivated sentry.

A single shot of rifle fire resounded so crisply through the hall that you could hear the ejected brass sing. Gabriel and Ivory hotfooted it to the alcove that lead to Cheung’s Temple Room.

Which is where they found Sister Menga with her brains painting the wall, and an insane-looking Mitch holding down on Cheung himself at point-blank range.

Getting past the door guards had been easy. All Mitch had to do was wait for a pair of Zhang soldiers to make for the Peace Hotel doors on some mission, perhaps to set up a triage center or summon medical backup. She blended through in their wake and made sure she was not noticed once she broke away from them. The soldiers were barely aware that they had even been tailed.

The captured helmet over her shaved head covered up a multitude of giveaways.

Getting to the top of the hotel had been tougher. Scaling the exterior wall was not an option. She might fall, be spotted or get shot. While she felt the drive and had the strength, more nimbleness than she possessed would be required for her to navigate slight brick interstices and dicey, crumbling handholds all the way up. One slip, one misplaced boot-tip, and her life and mission would end in a big wet splattered puddle. Like they’d told her in jump school, It ain’t the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop.

Qingzhao had warned her about guards and security elevators. Mitch was going to have to concoct a plan on the fly, and not hesitate lest she betray her own unauthorized presence. She quickly found the utility stairs and took them two at a time, as though she knew where she was going.

On the fourth floor she found a lone Cheung man patrolling the hallway. She hustled toward him with the urgent affect of a messenger, snapped a sharp salute, and hit him in the forehead with the butt of her borrowed carbine. The man’s eyes crossed as he fell. She stripped him of a Beretta nine and a fighting knife the length of a bayonet. In a jacket sheath she found a silencer for the handgun that was nearly a foot long. Serious business.

She jabbed the blade into the rubber seal of the nearby elevator and levered the doors about eighteen inches apart—far enough to see cables reeling past. The car squeaked to a stop at the floor below. It was near enough for her to snake into the shaft, spider downward, and put her boots on the roof as softly as a moth lighting on a lampshade.

Mitch flattened out. It would not do to get hamstrung in a big cog or fail to see the metal girder-brace at the top of the shaft if it happened to rush at her suddenly in the near-darkness here. There were no Western numerals spray-painted on the cement stanchions, only Chinese characters. But she knew where she needed to be: the top floor.

Eventually somebody would need to go all the way up.

She ejected the Beretta’s clip and verified the pistol was full up, with one in the pipe. She screwed on the hefty silencer and snugged the gun into her waistline, ruefully thinking it would take a week to draw out in combat. She slid the knife into her boot.

Her heartbeat was redlining. She could hear the thumps and clunks of the building’s own metabolism—it, too, had a heartbeat. A fine, clean sweat had broken all over Mitch’s body. She was an invading virus.

Another elevator car husked past on her left.

Then the car she was on was climbing, climbing.

At the apex of the shaft was a short service ladder, which led to a bolted vent. Mitch used the bayonet again. The vent led to a grate, and the grate emptied her into the Junfa Hall.

The Junfa Hall was crowded, but not with the living. Warlords lined the corridor of honor, stolid in their cast metal and forged expressions. Mitch peeked around a life-sized bronze of Zhang Zongchang, also remembered as Marshal Chang Tsung-ch’ang, who died in 1928. Perhaps Cheung had named his floating casino after this man.

Two Cheung men in the corridor, pacing like expectant fathers, sticking more or less to the row of statues, one on each side, their pace so metronomic that they always crossed in the center of the room. One Chinese, one western, Latin American, perhaps. The Chinese man looked like the boss hog, so Mitch took him first, at the end of his circuit.

When he turned, she yanked him backward by the strap on his shortie M4 rifle, chopped his throat to shut him up, and buried the bayonet in his solar plexus. Thrust, twist, withdraw. He fell into her grasp behind a Wu Dynasty bronze.

“Hey, Penga,” said the man from the opposite end of the corridor, realizing his partner had vanished. Yu Peng, when alive, had wrongly assumed that Dagoberto Ayala’s nickname for him was a friendly diminutive—like “Bobby” for “Robert”—but in truth, it was closer to a dirty pejorative. Ayala detested anybody higher than him on the command chain.

Ayala keyed open the bulletproof glass doors. If kept open, the doors allowed the Tosa dogs to run back and forth—endlessly—between the Junfa Hall and the Temple Room, as if the retarded mutts could not decide whose butt to sniff more, Cheung’s or Peng’s.

“ Podido ,” Ayala griped. “You go to the can, at least tell me—”

Mitch took him. Thrust, twist, withdraw.

But the Tosa dogs in the adjacent room had already whiffed Yu Peng’s freshly liberated blood, and came charging in like assault tanks. Mitch heard their claws scrabbling on the slate tile of the corridor and had no idea how to close the glass doors.

She caught the first headlong animal with her forearm, feeling the crushing jaws closing to snap her bones as she buried the bayonet to the hilt in the huge beast’s chest. It rolled—and her with it—but hung on. She put five shots from the silenced Beretta into the second one, which at least slowed it down, but also seemed to piss it off.

She jammed the pistol under the dog’s chin and blew the crown of its head off, swearing she could feel the slug pass right by her own arm. By then the other one had a grab on her leg at the bootline. She had to fire without hitting her foot, and abruptly realized there was blood everywhere. Her own, in part, plus a generous geyser from the first dog. Its demon pal finally relaxed its chomp after Mitch emptied her mag into it. She felt the teeth slowly withdraw from her leg as the bite went slack, but that caused even more blood to course out.

The xipaxidine would roadblock the pain, though only for a time. Her leg felt malfunctional but just now she could still stand on it.