Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Among the Killers of Men

“Yes.”

“She’s gone,” Lucy said. “I went to take a shower, and when I got out…”

“No Mitch,” Gabriel said.

“She left a note,” Lucy said. “Just one line.”

“And what’s that?”

“ ‘Enough’s enough,’ ” Lucy read. “ ‘I’m going to get those bastards.’”

Chapter 3

“For god’s sake, Gabriel, you don’t know anything about the Han Dynasty,” Michael grumbled. “The Later Han Dynasty? The Three Kingdoms and the Period of Disunion? You’ll never get away with it.”

“For one or two lectures? I think I can. And then you can take over from me after that, finish the tour yourself.”

“What, are you going to speak to Mandarin students in Cantonese?”

“I’ll speak English. They’ll chalk it up to American arrogance and move on. They’re used to it.”

“You…you don’t even have a degree !” Michael protested, flustered. If you started counting up Michael’s assorted doctorates on your fingers, you’d be compelled before long to remove your shoes.

“We’re not talking about a debate, Michael. I don’t need to hold my own. You’ll give me your slides and I’ll work off them. Not like I can’t regurgitate names and dates with the best of them.”

Michael switched gears: “You don’t even know if this Cheung had anything to do with that woman’s death.”

“Well, according to you , these documents show he’s guilty of plenty else.” He waved the sheaf of printouts in Michael’s face. “Arms trafficking, drug smuggling, racketeering, not to mention a murder or five.”

Michael flushed crimson. “Gabriel…it’s a different country. Different laws. We’d be intruding where we’re not invited.”

“My specialty,” said Gabriel, with slightly more pride than he needed to drive his point home. “One day of travel in, one day out. In between, a couple of days of poking around the edges of things. See what spills forth. Michael—it’s what the Foundation does best , don’t kid yourself. You clear the paperwork and I kick down the doors.”

“You really think,” Michael said, “there’s a second terra-cotta army out there no one’s ever seen, waiting to be discovered.”

“I do,” Gabriel said. “And even if there isn’t, there’s a young woman out there who’s going to get herself arrested and executed for trying to kill somebody who, as you point out, we don’t even know has done anything—not to her, at least.”

“This is the girlfriend of your…what was she again, one of your nurses in the hospital in Khartoum?”

Gabriel had made up a story, at Lucy’s request; she didn’t want Michael to know she was in New York. So Gabriel had, but he unfortunately no longer remembered what it was he’d said. “Something like that. Look, Michael, it won’t cost much—”

“It’s not about the money, Gabriel. It’s the principle of the thing.”

“I agree. And as a matter of principle, I don’t like to let innocent people get themselves killed when I can prevent it.”

“I suppose,” Michael said in a resigned tone, “you’ll be taking the jet.”

“Yes,” said Gabriel. “For two reasons. One: I can’t go as you on a commercial flight—they’ll check my passport.”

“What’s the other reason?”

“Because I don’t want to run this through baggage check.”

Gabriel hoisted up his work-belt, worn around the world in one situation or another. It was tooled steerhide with faded intaglio, furry at some of the rivets, an old friend and constant companion that had seen him through more than one tough scrape. Lashed to the belt was a big holster. Sheathed inside was an even bigger sidearm, itself a pricey antique, Gabriel’s own restored single-action Colt Peacemaker—a first-generation Cavalry model circa 1880 with the 7 1/2-inch barrel, chambered for the .45 “Long Colt” cartridge. The original heavily distressed ivory grips had been replaced, by Gabriel himself, with burnished mahogany.

Nearly two centuries ago, Samuel Colt had been the man who did not understand the meaning of the word “impossible” when naysayers told him the idea of a repeating handgun could never be realized. While he did not actually invent the revolver, he won his first patent in the early 1800s and was instrumental in introducing the use of interchangeable, mass-produced parts.

Whenever people said “impossible,” or that a thing should not be done or could not be done, Gabriel always thought of old Sam Colt.

Michael was staring at his older brother with an odd tilt of his head, like an explorer mantis or a curious puppy. “Okay,” he began carefully. “What part aren’t you telling me? What are you leaving out?”

“There is one thing,” Gabriel said.

“I knew it.”

“The name of the man behind the second terra-cotta army,” said Gabriel, not without a dramatic flourish. “It’s Kangxi Shih-k’ai, Michael. The Favored Son of China. The last real-man warlord before the modern world stomped them down. The Vlad the Impaler of Chinese history—the history that the Cultural Committee never talks about during stuff like the Olympics. We’re not talking about an ordinary monarch, Michael. We’re talking about one of the most frightening figures of his time, or any time. You remember what he called his champions while he was alive?”

“The Killers of Men,” Michael murmured.

“The Killers of Men, that’s right. And this is the man who constructed a second terra-cotta army as a monument to his ego, and nobody has ever seen it. Can you imagine what those figures must be like? Wouldn’t you want us to be the first in the world to see them, to bring them to light?”

Gabriel hefted an original hardcover first edition of Space, Time & Earthly Gods by Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt, first published in 1982, the year their daughter Lucy had been born. “Take a closer look at Appendix III—the one where they listed what they thought were the greatest undiscovered treasures of the modern world.”

The Hunt Foundation’s foundation (as it were) was the success enjoyed by Gabriel and Michael’s parents through a series of improbably popular books that conjoined history, religion, linguistics and anthropology for the modern reader. Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt were hailed as the new Will and Ariel Durant, and at the time of their mysterious disappearance (to this day, even Michael was hesitant to say “death”), their fame had spread worldwide.

Gabriel gestured with the book; did not open it. “It’s right there at big number four, before the Bermuda Triangle pirate shipwrecks and after the ‘lost pyramid’ scroll that supposedly explains the destiny of the world. It doesn’t say what it is, exactly, but it talks about ‘the legacy of Kangxi Shih-k’ai.’ Check Dad’s journal library and you’ll find a lead he recorded, right outside Shanghai. It’s one of the last entries before they vanished.”

During the Mediterranean leg of a Millenniumthemed speaking tour at the end of 1999, Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt were among the passenger contingent of the Polar Monarch , a luxuriously appointed cruise ship of Norwegian registry. The ship disappeared from sea radar for three days, then reappeared near Gibraltar without a living soul on board. Three crew members were found in the wheelhouse with their throats slit. Subsequently, bodies and stores began to wash ashore, but a dozen or so passengers were never recovered in any form—including Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt.

“You’re not making this up, are you?” said Michael.

“Kangxi Shih-k’ai was on Mom and Dad’s Most Wanted list. They were on the verge of something and they knew it; they just never had the time to pursue it. Now, I’m not saying there’s a connection to Michelle Quantrill and this Russian who wants to run China…but it’s enough to make me think there really is something there in China for us to find. It’s time, Michael. We should have gone after this years ago.”