Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

“What are you doing here?” Gabriel asked.

She came forward. She was wearing scuffed, mudspattered sneakers and well-worn leather pants; a battered denim jacket with a black T-shirt underneath; and a canvas rucksack over one shoulder. She had obviously just thundered in out of the rain. Her wet hair was dyed brick red and chopped short, and she had a large Celtic tattoo Gabriel didn’t remember decorating one side of her neck. She’d filled out a bit since Gabriel had seen her last, put on some weight that she’d badly needed; she was in her mid twenties now and quite pretty, and cleaned up she’d be a killer. But that was about as likely to happen, Gabriel knew, as a televangelist refusing a tithe.

She stopped beside him. “I can only stay a short time, Gabriel. I’m not even supposed to be in the country. I’m supposed to be under house arrest in Arezzo.” She lifted one leg of her pants to reveal a bit of high-tech apparatus clamped around her ankle; a red LED on it flashed silently every few seconds. “I hacked it so it says I’m still there. But they do visual sweeps every three days, which only gives me till tomorrow night to get back.”

“Jewelry-wise, you might want to go with something a bit more spidery,” Gabriel said. “So I repeat, what are you doing here?”

“When I heard about Mitch, I had to come. She needs help. Which means I need your help.” She took note of Gabriel’s monkey suit, nodded toward it. “Hey. Business or funeral?” she said.

“Funeral would have been more fun,” said Gabriel.

“Why I got the hell out,” she muttered. “So, what about it? Talk?”

“Sure, what the heck? We can get Michael down here, make it a real family reunion. There’s got to be some ice cream in a freezer around here someplace. Marshmallows. We can put on our pjs and talk all night.”

“Serious,” she said, shucking water like a cat. She took him by the wrist, tugged him toward the door.

“What’s wrong with talking here? It’s wet out there.” But she kept tugging. “Fine.” Gabriel grabbed an umbrella from an elephant-foot stand, buttoned up his shirt with his other hand. “After you,” he said.

“I’ve got this friend, Mitch,” Lucy began. “Short for Michelle.”

She had steered Gabriel to a caffeine dive in the Village where the espresso ran extra-strong and the lights were kept mercifully low. On the way out of the townhouse, Gabriel had abandoned his suit jacket for a nicely broken-in A2, US Army Air Corps vintage circa 1942, with the emblem of the Eighth Air Force and the Flying Eight-Balls on one shoulder. He was still wearing the white piquet tuxedo shirt under it, though.

“Mitch is air force—or she was, before they threw her to the wolves for a helicopter crash, a training flight accident. They needed a scapegoat and wouldn’t nail the pilot because of rank. Plus they hate the idea of a woman in the program, needless to say.”

“Is this going to be another feminist soapbox thing?” said Gabriel. “Or does it get interesting?”

“Just shut up and listen and I’ll get to it.”

“Okay.” Gabriel took another sip. The coffee here really was very good; the kind of drink that made you want to sit and contemplate deeper mysteries.

“So: Mitch gets defrocked. She comes back to New York to stay with her sister, Valerie, who works in the records department of a company called Zongchang Limited. But the day Mitch arrives, Valerie goes to a meeting with Zongchang’s foreign corporate heads at a hotel. The police find her heels-up in a Dumpster at 1 A.M. the next day with the stale Caesar salad. Her throat’s been cut, and she’s been shot through the heart.”

“Both?”

“Yeah—and that’s not even the interesting part. Do the cops go hunting for someone who might have done it? No—they nail Mitch for it. For the murder of her own sister. No way in hell, but that’s what they’ve decided. She Twittered it on the way to jail. I snuck myself onto the next flight over.”

“Twittered?”

“It’s a microblogging tool—think of it as a way you can update a blog from your cell phone—” She saw Gabriel’s blank stare. “Never mind. Point is, she told me what was happening. They’re only calling her a ‘material witness’ for now, but it’s obvious they think she did it. The only good part of the whole thing is that, over the prosecutor’s objections, the judge has set bail. Which by the way means I need some bail money.”

“If what you want’s money,” Gabriel said, “Mi-chael’s got the checkbook.”

“I can’t ask him. Can you picture that, first time I see him in a decade, it’s Hey, Michael, can you get my friend out of jail? And by the by, I’m sort of under arrest myself… ” Lucy shook her head. “Anyway the money’s not all I want. Listen. The high muckety-mucks in this company have something to do with ‘ethnographic Chinese antiquities.’ ”

“I think I remember reading something about that,” Gabriel said, “the head of Zongchang being a collector. Ching, or Chung, something like that.”

“Yeah, well, Mitch is pretty sure Ching-or-Chung whacked her sister because she found out something she wasn’t supposed to. But now the men who did it have hightailed it back to China—to the CCC. You know what that is?”

Gabriel pinched the bridge of his nose. The CCC. He knew this political movement-cum-Mafia only by ruthless reputation, since he had somehow managed to avoid a hands-on run-in with them. “The Chinese Cooperative Confederation. It’s a lot like Russia after the Soviet Union fell apart. Like Morocco during World War Two.”

“Bastards who play for keeps, was how Mitch put it,” said Lucy. “They’re outside international law. No extradition—”

“No diplomatic inquiry,” said Gabriel, nodding.

“Once someone’s tucked away in there, there’s no getting them out.”

“And you want to get someone out?”

“Mitch does. And unless they keep her locked up for the rest of her life, she’s going to go after him herself. Neither of which is a great alternative. I mean, Mitch can take care of herself, but I wouldn’t want to see her go up against an or ganization like this.”

“Unlike me, for instance,” Gabriel said.

Lucy nodded, and the look of utter confidence in her eyes shot right through Gabriel’s defenses. It was like when she was eight years old and he was twenty, freshly back from a year in North Africa, and she’d listened to his exaggerated tales of his exploits with rapt attention each night after Michael had headed off to bed. She’d believed he could do anything. He’d believed it for a while himself.

“And who is this woman?” asked Gabriel. “Why is it so important to you to help her?”

Lucy paused before answering. “She’s a friend,” Lucy said. “I’ve known her a long time. She got me through some very bad stuff. I owe her a lot.”

“All right,” Gabriel said. He mulled over the possibilities. “The CCC,” he said. “Well, moving around inside China’s easier than it used to be, though you’d still want cover for something like this. One possibility, Michael was telling me about a lecture series he’s setting up at a bunch of Chinese universities. He’s supposed to give the lectures himself—but who’d really complain if I showed up with him?”

Lucy allowed herself the ghost of a smile. “Or instead of him. You’d really wake up some of those rooms.”

“No doubt,” Gabriel said. “So, tell me straight: what exactly is it you want me to do?”

“First thing is help me get Mitch out of jail,” said Lucy. “And then convince her that she doesn’t need to fly to China to kill this guy.”

“Because I’ll do it for her? I’m not some sort of assassin, Lucy.”