Inside the shrine room Qingzhao had led him to, Gabriel gazed with breathless disbelief.

Suffocated by vines and tree roots at the far end of the chamber, clotted with decades of dried mud and impacted dust, was a giant bronze statue of a grotesque figure, pointing one bony sculpted finger toward the center of the room. Underlit by torchlight it was positively ghoulish, a nightmare vision, an evil god. The scaling and tarnish on the bronze made the looming statue appear to be leprous.

It took the better part of two hours for Gabriel to clean, hack, and chip away the main debris around the base of the statue, uncovering an iron panel. The panel, nearly a foot thick, gradually inched backward until there was a gap into which Gabriel could shove a lantern. He popped a flare and dropped it through. That was when he first saw that the metal floor below was writhing with worms and salamanders, some as much as a foot long…

Prologue

The sign was in eleven languages including Arabic, German, Dutch, English, Russian, and both Mandarin and Cantonese variants for the locals. The English interpretation read:

Chapter 1

“I give up.”

Gabriel Hunt was widely known for solving mysteries and rising to challenges. This time, however, frustration had bested him.

“I give up. You do it.”

He relinquished the Rubik’s Cube, placing it onto the table (itself a Chinese antique gifted by a beneficiary of a Hunt Foundation grant) next to a more obscure and even more difficult puzzle called the Alexander Star.

“It’s a toy, Gabriel. Children do it.”

“So give it to a child then,” Gabriel said.

Michael picked the cube up, began idly turning its sides. Instead of colors, each square was labeled with a piece of the Hunt Foundation logo against a different metallic background—silver, copper, bronze, gold—and the toy itself was made of stainless steel rather than plastic. “You give up on things too quickly,” he said. In his hands, the facets slowly reorganized themselves.

“Name one thing I’ve given up on,” Gabriel said. “Just one. Other than this toy.”

“The Dufresne report.”

“I brought back the mask. Dufresne should be happy.”

“He wants a report.”

“Here’s your report: I brought back the mask, close quotes, signed, Gabriel Hunt. What else does he want to know?”

Michael shook his head. “He has a board of trustees he has to answer to. It’s not enough to hand him a carton and say, here, here’s your mask. That’s not the way things are done in the foundation world. You should know that.”

Why was it that every time Michael opened his mouth, he sounded like he was the older brother rather than the younger? Gabriel was his senior by six years and change.

Michael set down the Rubik’s Cube, its sides neatly arranged, entropy defeated once again.

“Never mind,” he said, heaving a familiar sigh. “I’ll write it.”

“Make it good,” Gabriel said. “Tell them I had to sneak past a tribe of cannibals to get it.”

“In the south of France?”

“Gourmet cannibals.”

“I’d appreciate it, Gabriel, if you could show a modicum of seriousness about these things.”

“I know you would, Michael. It’s what I love about you. You use words like ‘modicum’ with a straight face.”

They were a study in contrast, Gabriel and his brother.

Both were still in tuxedos—how often had that fate befallen them?—the evening’s entertainment having consisted of the Hunt Foundation’s annual Martin J. Beresford Memorial Awards dinner two floors below. But where Michael wore his bespoke tailored suit with quiet dignity, Gabriel had untied the bowtie and cummerbund of his rented number and undone the shirt studs halfway down his chest. Michael was scholarly, almost tweedy, bespectacled; the pallor of his skin reflected a life spent largely indoors, these days behind a computer screen much of the time, or else talking on the telephone to similarly pale men halfway around the globe. Gabriel was darker—hair as black as shoe crème, skin browned by the sun of many lands. He was chiseled, the muscles of his long arms ropy. The last time he’d found himself behind a computer he’d been using the thing as a shield. You can’t beat a nice solid IBM laptop for stopping a bullet.

The aegis of the Hunt Foundation had made both brothers moderately famous in their respective ways, and to an extent they depended on one another for their success. Gabriel’s discoveries in the field and unearthments of historical significance would not have been possible without the Foundation’s financial support. Michael, in turn, acknowledged grudgingly that much of the Foundation’s prestige derived from the attention Gabriel’s higher-profile successes had brought in—the kind of risk-taking that is indefensibly reckless until it yields something suitable for publication.

“Your presentation went over well,” Michael said in a conciliatory tone.

“It had pictures. Everyone likes pictures.”

“Oh, you’re in one of your moods,” Michael said.

“Four hours of speeches from guys in penguin suits will put anyone in a mood. Anyone but you.”

“Maybe so.” Michael sorted through some of the neatly arranged papers on the table, pulled a sheet and turned it to face Gabriel. “Before you go.” He uncapped a fountain pen and held it out. “You still have to cosign the endowment for the Indonesian group.” All significant expenditures of the Hunt Foundation needed to bear the signatures of both brothers, though Michael handled all other aspects of the organization’s administration on his own.

“The Molucca figures,” said Gabriel. “Right.” He reached out for the pen, and at that moment both brothers heard the sound of footsteps outside the office door. The knob turned, the door swung toward them, and a member of the Foundation staff stuck his head inside. “Mr. Hunt?”

“Yes?” Michael said. “What is it, Roger?”

But Roger said, “Not you, sir,” and turned to Gabriel.

“Me?”

“There’s a woman, sir, asking for you. Quite…informally dressed. She insists on speaking with you. I let her know you were occupied with Foundation business, but she insisted she has something of utmost importance to discuss with you…in private, sir.”

“Do you know who this is, Gabriel?” Michael asked. “Some old paramour of yours?”

“Probably,” Gabriel said. “Though how any of them would know to look for me here I don’t know.”

“Possibly your last name on the plaque by the door,” Michael said, “next to the word ‘Foundation,’ had something to do with it.”

“Where is she?” Gabriel asked Roger.

“In the club room, sir.” Roger’s expression was unreadably neutral. He was very good at his job.

Gabriel bent over the Indonesian papers, signed them swiftly in triplicate, re-capped the pen and followed Roger to the door. “Don’t wait up for me,” he told Michael.

“Oh, I know better than that,” Michael said.

Chapter 2

Michelle “Mitch” Quantrill was a piece of work indeed. Twenty-nine years old, tall and square-cut, sturdy and practical, strong, attractive but not glamorous, zero makeup. Blonde hair, cut indifferently. Eyes of milky green.

For Gabriel, it was worth the bail money just to meet her. And to see her and Lucy together provided some interstitial links.

“Not what you think,” chided Lucy, but Gabriel had a feeling it was exactly what he thought.

“You’re Lucy’s brother?” said Mitch. Her handshake grip was strong and to the point.

“One of them,” Gabriel said.

“Well, I appreciate your getting me out of there. I was beginning to lose my mind.”

They caught a cab outside the precinct house and told the cabbie to take them to Valerie’s apartment, a building near 45^th and Eighth.

“Have you ever heard of Kangxi Shih-k’ai?” said Mitch, who was in the backseat with Gabriel. Lucy was turned around in the passenger seat up front, watching them through the Plexiglas divider.

“Sure. The warlord of warlords,” Gabriel said. “Around the turn of the century—the last century—he mantled himself the Favorite Son of China. He’s said to have personally killed twenty thousand enemies. He died in, what, 1901 or 1902, something like that? Assassinated by his own bodyguards, as I recall.”

“Right. Well, Valerie told me that working at Zongchang she’d uncovered some kind of dirt on a guy named Cheung—the guy in charge of the CCC, the one they’re saying will be the new Mao? She said she’d found proof he wasn’t Chinese at all—he’s really a Russian trying to pose himself as a Chinese. Specifically, as a blood descendant of Kangxi Shih-k’ai, who was known to have over two hundred children.”

“Cheung is the guy who collects the statues,” said Lucy.

“What statues?” said Gabriel.

“The terra-cotta warriors. Life size.”

“You mean the famous ones?” said Gabriel. “Those are all in government hands. They have been since they first started digging them up in the 1970s.”

Gabriel dredged up what he knew about China’s First Emperor and his statue-making predilection.

In 246 B.C., the then 13-year-old Emperor Qin had tasked over 700,000 workers with building his mausoleum. The project, including the terra-cotta army of over 8,000 figures, took nearly forty years to complete. When a group of farmers digging for a well in Shaanxi Province uncovered the first terra-cotta head in 1974, they had no idea they had uncovered the archeological find of the 20^th Century. It dwarfed even Howard Carter’s 1922 uncovering of Tutankhamen’s tomb—yes, Qin’s tomb was larger, the size of two entire cities, complete with a pearl-inlaid ceiling to simulate nighttime stars. Besides the figures of soldiers, generals (the tallest figures, averaging six feet in height), acrobats, strongmen and musicians, there were 130 chariots drawn by 520 terra-cotta horses, not to mention another 150 additional horses for the cavalry. The “four divine animals“—dragon, phoenix, tortoise and a sort of giraffe-like chimera called a qilin—were represented, as well as the unicorn, or xiezhi. Diggers found the remains of artisans and craftsmen (in addition to all of Qin’s barren concubines), suggesting that they were sealed inside the complex to prevent them from divulging their knowledge of the tombs…or of the 30-meter-high adjacent building discovered nearby in 2007 by Chinese archeologists. The side building remained unexplored to this day.

“Cheung has offered a flat ten million dollars to anybody who can find the terra-cotta warrior of Kangxi Shih-k’ai,” said Mitch.

“But that makes no sense,” said Gabriel. “Kangxi Shih-k’ai lived at the end of the 19^th Century—the terra-cotta warriors are two thousand years older.”

“Kangxi Shih-k’ai apparently had his own terra-cotta army made,” Mitch said. “That’s what Valerie told me. And it has never been found.”

“Hold on,” Gabriel said. “You’re saying he built an entire second terra-cotta army and buried it somewhere in modern China and nobody has ever heard about it except your sister?”

“No, Mr. Hunt,” Mitch said. “Except my sister and this guy Cheung. And he’s looking for it.”

“Did she say what he wants with it?”

“The main resistance Cheung is getting to the rise of the CCC is from old-school Chinese traditionalists. If he can prove he’s somehow related to Kangxi Shih-k’ai, that resistance evaporates.”

“And how would the statue prove anything?”

“Because it contains Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s skeleton,” she said. “Sheathed in lead and gold. Or at least his skull—Valerie wasn’t clear which. But something. Something Cheung could use to perpetrate a bit of DNA flummery, I guess, or maybe that wouldn’t even be necessary. It’s such a powerful cultural icon, just possessing it would give him enormous credibility.”

“Your sister told you this?”

“Yeah,” said Mitch. “Right before she went to a meeting with Cheung and wound up dead.”

The cab drew up to the curb beside Valerie’s building. Gabriel gave the driver a twenty and followed Mitch out the door.

They plodded through the typically New York experience of the walk-up: twelve steps, turn; twelve steps more. Mitch had a fistful of keys out, but it was Lucy who reached the apartment door first. She paused, then raised one hand in a silencing gesture.

“Hang on,” she whispered. “It’s already open.”

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.”

“Time for you to ruin my reputation on the lecture circuit, you mean,” Michael said sourly.

“Come on, no one will pay attention to the lectures themselves,” said Gabriel. “You know how it goes in China—they’ll want to wine and dine us and tour us around to demonstrate their cultural diversity and goodwill. And I’ll be perfectly charming, I promise.”

Michael put a hand to his forehead and massaged the deep furrows that had appeared there. “This is sounding worse and worse,” he said. Then, as he usually did, he diplomatically tabled the topic. “Let me think about it.”

Which was all the approval Gabriel needed.

Chapter 4

It was the first time Mitch had worn a dress in over six years, and the last time had been at a funeral. She felt askew in her rakish feminine attire, but it was necessary if she wanted to blend.

Zongchang Ltd. had tentacles all over urban Shanghai, and the destination to which her cabbie took her turned out to be a casino.

A floating casino.

A floating casino housed inside a converted aircraft carrier anchored in the harbor. The word “Zongchang” was painted on its side in four-foot-high red characters, English and Chinese both.

Inside a buoy-marked perimeter, scuba-capable security staff patrolled from one-man speed skiffs featuring gun mounts.

Loudspeakers advised potential trespassers to stay clear of the boat zone.

At the dock, more security men assisted patrons onto custom mini-ferries that ran to and from the ship’s ornate gangplank. The security men were dressed in nononsense, upscale eveningwear, rather like Mitch was.

Except Mitch was not toting a visible MAC-10 with a huge, priapic SIONICS suppressor stretching the barrel.

The carrier shell had been hollowed out and structurally reinforced to provide for broad, windowed views of the shimmering Bund, with outdoor restaurants on the flight deck. Inside, French staircases curved from level to level. Some bled off toward premium members-only gambling areas.

The main casino floor was anything but Vegas, favoring baccarat and chemin de fer, though tables for blackjack, roulette and Texas Hold ’Em were also in view.

At the armored cash windows, the currency of many different countries was being exchanged for the casino’s special chips.

Mitch passed through another body scanner at the entry. There was no way she could have come in armed. She thought: Play it as cool as dry ice. You’re not Michelle Quantrill. You’re Valerie. You’re not dead. You’re seeking your employer. You’re a guest. Simple. Just ask. Don’t panic.

A tray of drinks was being offered to her before she’d even found her focus on the gambling floor. Mitch hesitated. Chose a martini.

“I’m looking for Mr. Cheung,” she said, but the server had already departed.

She tried again with a passing security man who apparently “did not have the English.” He arched an eyebrow at her and strode away.

Insane bass-heavy house/trance music thundered at her as she crossed an opaque dance floor of solid glass.

Mitch didn’t know it yet, but she had already been made.

Qingzhao Wai Chiu took note of the blonde woman crossing the dance floor. Another lost, clueless American. Another despised tourist.

Qingzhao looked quite different from her previous public appearance, when an aerodynamic suit with a concealed mini-chute had permitted her to disappear into the blackness of the Huangpu River…instead of hitting flat water from a 300-meter drop, which would have been like landing on stone.

Tonight she was dressed to kill, literally and figuratively. New wig of cascading black curls. Tinted designer glasses. She had applied makeup so as to cause light to change the planes of her face. Enough exposure of thigh and décolletage to ensure she could steer men. The prostitutes in the casino were tawdry and obvious. Qingzhao prided herself as a chameleon.

She, too, had entered unarmed.

She, too, sought the man known as Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung.

Qingzhao found herself a likely security man. A bald East Indian, supersized, muscle packed atop more muscle.

“Ladies’ toilet?” she said in a high, squeaky voice.

The idol-huge man rolled his eyes, then jerked a thumb. “That way, gorgeous.”

Qingzhao giggled, as though from too much champagne. In her real life, she almost never laughed anymore.

The East Indian would not do. She needed somebody more reckless, younger, a hotshot on staff here.

“Don’t mind Dinanath,” said a voice behind her. “He’s never polite.”

She turned. Bingo. This guy was like a horny raptor with the eyes of a pit viper. He could be steered.

“You’re funny,” she said vacantly. “Listen…I need to find the toilet. I might need a little help getting there without becoming embarrassed.”

He offered his arm. “Certainly. My name is Romero.”

Qingzhao and Romero navigated across the dance floor, Qingzhao keeping her pace just halting enough to be convincing. By the time they reached the nearest restroom, Romero had already brushed her breasts twice and her ass once, strictly to guide her.

“Wait here, okay?” She gave him a little wave and tottered inside.

What she had been doing while in transit was noting the locations of the security cameras in the non-gambling zones. While there was a spy-eye (much more discreet) in the powder room, there were none in the individual toilets, which were set up in Western-style stalls.

Once inside a stall, she levered loose the stainless steel clip-lid of the toilet tank. The plunger works came loose easily enough. She bent the flimsy metal to form a spiked punch she could wrap around one fist.

Then she ventured a shy around-the-corner peek at Romero through the bathroom door. “Hey,” she said. “This thing doesn’t work.” He stepped toward her. She smiled, grabbed his belt buckle, and pulled him along.

The cameras would only see two hard partiers headed for a stall and perhaps a taste of inebriated hanky-panky.

Qingzhao made sure Romero kept his eyes on her smile and other assets as she boxed him into the stall and quickly punched a gushing hole into his neck. One more strategic punch and the man was soundlessly down. She quickly stripped him of an automatic pistol and spare magazine, concealing the gun in the only place her show-offy dress would allow.

Done, armed, and not a drop of blood on her. So far so good.

Chapter 5

Gabriel Hunt’s first view of the Zongchang was impressive—the ship was one of the four Kiev class warships built for the Soviet Navy in the mid-1970s and decommissioned in 1995. One was sold to the Indian Navy for modernization; one was scrapped and the other two were sold to China as “recreational pieces.” The nonmilitary paint job incorporated a lot of dead black and silver, in sweeping lines that reminded Gabriel of formula race cars back in the hero days, before all the advertising sponsorships.

He wondered if any of the ship’s firepower was still functional.

Gabriel had just gotten his first taste of the vast main gambling floor when two men came exploding through a slanted, one-way observation window at the far end.

Flashes of gunfire, from within the chamber.

And a split-second glimpse of the only person in this place that Gabriel might recognize—Mitch Quantrill, dolled up as her own sister. Blood on her face.

Gabriel moved as the main floor erupted into chaos.

A Frenchman in the poker pit stood up and stopped a stray round, his busted flush flying into the air like cast-off flower petals. Half the clientele hit the deck while the other half was galvanized into directionless flight. Gabriel shoved one runner aside in time to save his life. The man cursed him in Arabic. The casino’s black-suited security men had unlimbered a frightening variety of snubbed full-autos and were handing their disorganization back to the crowd in the form of scattered bullet-sprays at anything and everything that might be an antagonist. Gabriel knew that, in a firefight, those little earphone-buds only worked in the movies, so if the shooters were trying to communicate or coordinate, right now they couldn’t hear a damned thing.

The racket was incredible inside what was still essentially a huge metal room. Flat-nosed slugs chuddered up a balustrade and destroyed a fake Grecian urn next to Gabriel’s head.

The two acrobats who had made their grand entrance by defenestrating from the security portal were still trying to find their wits and their feet. One man was yelling and pointing. The other was trying to shield his boss.

Forgoing the increasing availability of weapons as a good contingent of assorted bodyguards and security men inadvertently shot each other, Gabriel bypassed his instinctual craving for a firearm (if anything, he would have wanted his Colt, but he’d left that stashed back on the Foundation jet) and made for the vacant security window. Mitch was up there. Alive, dead or compromised—he had no way of knowing except through immediate action.

Slugs tore across the baize at his heels as he hit a chemin de fer table at full tilt and vaulted toward the gaping eye of the blown observation port. Its rubberized mount was fanged with shards of glass but Gabriel managed to pull himself up and over.

He found himself in the security nest with a couple of dead guys and one gibbering employee still stashed beneath the console. Equipment was sparking and blowing out all around him as incoming fire destroyed costly electronics the way rock breaks scissors.

Outside the nest door was a secondary corridor more in keeping with the ship’s utilitarian naval origins—a lot of cast iron and shatterproof lights.

Thirty yards ahead, Qingzhao and Mitch encountered two security men rushing toward the danger zone. Qingzhao flat-handed one in the face, pile-driving his palate back toward his spine. He collided with his buddy, whose legs Mitch took away in a fast and clumsy sweep-kick. It was enough. The man bonked rivets and decking with his head all the way down. Qingzhao quickly disarmed them and handed off the extra firearm to Mitch.

They had no time for a huddle. No time to exchange numbers. No time to recognize each other as anything but an ally.

“Where to?” said Mitch.

“Out,” said Qingzhao.

They untethered a blistering spray of bullets back the way they had come, just as Gabriel Hunt ran into their field of fire.

Gabriel flattened out in a home-run slide. An inch higher, a split second sooner, and he would have caught a bullet in his left nostril.

The women were firing at the gunmen who had crowded into the passage in Gabriel’s wake. Men who were shooting back just as ferociously as the women tried to flee.

Hornet swarms of lead exchanged position above Gabriel as he pulled himself into an opening in the wall—steam piping, cold now, unused in the new incarnation of the aircraft carrier. There would come an eyeblink instant when all shooters had to reload, and that was what Gabriel was waiting for.

The volley ebbed and Gabriel mad-dashed for the next hatchway, knowing from seafaring experience how to grab the upper ledge and swing through without giving himself a skull fracture.

Mitch had spotted him during the exchange. She had even uttered his name—“Gabriel?“—but this had gone unheard in the cannonade. She hesitated. Qingzhao had to drag her along with a snort of frustration.

Her yanked arm erupted with sudden pain and Mitch looked down to see a bullet hole in her left shoulder. Dammit, she’d been hit! Stupid!

They were trying to figure out which way to abandon ship when Gabriel came soaring at them from the hatchway in a flying tackle. Expertly catching both women by the neck in the crooks of his arms, Gabriel used his momentum to take them over the observation deck edge and tumbling down into the drink.

Chapter 6

When Gabriel opened his eyes, he was staring at a parked motorcycle.

Which was odd, because he seemed to be indoors.

A series of smells hit his nose—smoke, burning wood, incense, packed dirt, pine-scented air, charred paper, and beneath all that a subtle tang of gasoline, gun oil and engine lubricant.

Most enticing of all was the smell of coffee.

The bike appeared to be a vintage German BMW R-71 from 1938. Four-stroke, 750cc, with a sidecar, just like dozens seen in every World War II movie ever made. This one looked newer, and was more likely one of the painstaking Chinese rebuilds called Changjiangs, very popular with motorcycle clubs in this part of the world.

He heard light rain pattering down into what sounded like a Japanese water garden.

He tried to rise and found he was lying on a rawhewn wooden pallet and facing a huge rope candle on a rusted bronze stand. The candle was fashioned on the same principle as the gigantic coils of incense Gabriel had seen in assorted Eastern houses of worship. It could burn for hundreds of hours if fed through the windproof receiver judiciously.

Wick-smoke twisted ceilingward and the sudden light of the flame made his head throb. The chamber was roughly circular, the walls formed of ancient cut stone blocks.

There was a dressing on his head. He touched it gingerly. He didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore, which was nice. He figured the bullet must’ve come closer than he’d realized, must have hit him a glancing blow, perhaps scoring a neat groove in his thick skull. He’d made it a while on adrenaline alone, but when that had run out…

He tried to stand up and experienced whirling vertigo. At first he thought it was from his injury but a moment later he realized that the floor of the room actually was slanted, and a moment after that he realized it was necessary to compensate for the incline of the building itself. The effect was disorienting, though he suddenly knew where he was: in one of the leaning pagodas outside Shanghai.

Through a small alcove he caught sight of the temple ruins outside.

He was halfway up a mountainside, inside snaggletoothed fortifications choked by wild foliage. The leaning pagoda jutted crookedly toward the stars, like Pisa.

Several centuries ago temples like this had served as waystations for travelers as well as locations for worship and ritual. They generally consisted of three sequential courtyards, each with its own shrine. He made his way through an overgrown courtyard to the nearest of the shrine rooms. It was so large Gabriel could see clusters of bird nests near the holes in the domed ceiling. It was mustier in here where the damp had gotten through to the limestone. Vines had claimed the walls.

Gabriel saw Qingzhao toss a packet of ceremonial money into the flames licking up from an iron urn. Greasy smoke corkscrewed into the air.

He cleared his throat and Qingzhao’s free hand shot up holding a gun whose barrel looked a foot long. Gabriel tried not to react. Turning her head his way, Qingzhao recognized him and gestured idly toward a small cookstove—pointing with the gun, of course.

“Coffee. All Americans like coffee,” she said, her voice having an almost African lilt concealed within it.

She saw him look at the money she was burning. “You wonder why I would burn—”

“For the dead to use in the next world,” said Gabriel. “Don’t burn enough, and you’re considered cheap. That’s the superstition, anyway. How much have you burned?”

“You can never burn enough.”

She offered him a tin cup of strong coffee that smelled just the way Nirvana is supposed to.

Gabriel’s eyes had adjusted to the sputtering light long enough for him to now make out a mural of a frothing demon on the far wall, obscured by wear and time and the overgrowth of underbrush. He touched the bandage on his head while Qingzhao, apparently, read his mind.

“You are embarrassed,” she said. “You are a strong American man, it is your job to save the girl, and here I have saved you instead.” She almost smiled. Almost. “I will not tell anyone and thus embarrass you further.”

Gabriel was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Why did you bring me with you?”

“I think you and I wish to kill the same man.”

“Sorry to say, lady, you’ve got that wrong. I’m not here to kill anybody.”

She stopped what she was doing and regarded him.

“I came here to find someone in trouble who needed help,” he said. “She jumped the gun and came here sloppy. Emotions on high-burn, full up with revenge. She didn’t even have a plan worthy of the name.”

“The blonde woman at the Zongchang.”

Gabriel nodded. “Now she did want to kill the same man you do—she believed Cheung murdered her sister in New York City, or had her murdered.”

“I sensed we had a connection,” Qingzhao said quietly.

“Wanting to kill Cheung? I think you’ve probably got that in common with quite a few people.”

“No. Something deeper. This woman wished to avenge her sister, who has been murdered.” She tossed some more money into the fire. “Cheung murdered me, as well.”

Chapter 7

Trash fires choked the street with milky smoke. The pedicab in which Gabriel and Qingzhao rode, with their inanimate charge wedged between them, threaded its way through the riot of human shapes that constituted the nightlife beyond the favored, protected realm of the Bund. Here were thousands of vendors, prostitutes, thieves, huanquiande bartering for money, DVD hucksters, homeopathic herbal medicine men, pirate electronics dealers, clothiers, all blurring past. Open petrol and propane tanks warned in English NO NAKED LIGHT, meaning fire.

They stopped at the Beggar’s Arch, which was a long stone tunnel like a Roman aqueduct, its shadows lined on both sides by castoffs and derelicts. According to beggar etiquette, the seated and squatting men kept their eyes down and their cups (or cupped hands) up as Gabriel and Qingzhao passed, carrying the canvas-wrapped statue of the bowman carefully between them.

They emerged into one of Shanghai’s many Night Markets, a tightly packed maze of tents reminiscent of an American swap meet or flea market, interspersed with solo hustlers and other racketeers working out of the shells of now-useless automobiles. Gabriel saw several more people burning ceremonial cash at drumfires, and a man putting trained birds through their paces inside an entire corridor of bird-sellers.

“It’s like Mardi Gras,” Gabriel said.

“More dangerous,” said Qingzhao.

“You’ve never drunk a Hurricane, I bet.”

Qingzhao ignored the remark. Wit, charm or humor were not her coinage.

Presently they emerged into a large open area completely engirded in stonemasonry, with drains in the floor. It could have been a covered outdoor patio or a deceptively big space between buildings with a canopy overhead. It reminded Gabriel a bit of an abandoned food court. There was a scatter of tables and chairs. At one, a wizened, skeletal man ceaselessly folded squares of paper into origami shapes and dropped them into an iron pot. Across from him, an equally ancient woman sat surrounded by disassembled cell phones, probing them with tiny jeweler’s tools. They were both clad in simple Maoist tunics and the woman smiled at Gabriel as they passed. Every other tooth was missing.

Qingzhao spoke briefly to the old man in a dialect Gabriel could not place.

“Who are we talking to here?” Gabriel asked.

“Sentries.”

“Sentries,” said Gabriel.

Now the old man was grinning, too. Apparently he had scored all the woman’s missing teeth.

Qingzhao whispered a monosyllable, and the next thing Gabriel knew, two guns were pointed right at his head.

The old folks were still smiling at him.

A big, booming, basso laugh rebounded from the rock walls.

The entryway to the next chamber in the maze filled up with a large black man, six-six easy in flat slippers, with a calm Buddha face and vaguely Asian eyes below a close-cropped crewcut.

“Your expression!” The big man thundered with mirth. “Priceless!” He took a moment to settle. “Forgive me.”

The oldsters stowed their firepower and resumed their innocuous activities, the woman still smiling sweetly at Gabriel.

“I know what you want, I’m sure of it!” The big man embraced Qingzhao. Even more surprisingly, Qingzhao allowed this.

“And I know what you want,” she said before the breath could be squeezed out of her.

The big man stuck out a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt toward Gabriel. “Ni chi le ma?” It was a common greeting for a stranger—have you eaten?—testifying to the centrality of food in most Asian culture. Gabriel shook the proffered hand in the Western fashion. A more traditional Chinese handshake would have consisted of the men interlocking their fingers and waving them up and down a few times; but today this was done mostly by the very elderly or the very etiquette-conscious.

“Tuan, at your service,” boomed the big man, “and the service of our little snapdragon, here.”

Like some grandiose, benevolent street pasha, Tuan escorted Qingzhao and Gabriel through the heart of his domain, which rose in tiers from the cobblestoned street into a labyrinth of subdivisions and alcoves overpopulated with mercantile bustle. Over here, you could get your head massaged, cheap. Over there, your ears swabbed out. It was indoor-yet-outdoor; the grandest treehouse of all.

Besides Beggar’s Arch, three other tunnels fed into the amphitheater. At one end was a traditional Chinese teahouse accessed by a zigzaggy footbridge over a turbid flow of water.

“Four people are in charge of the Bund, now,” said Qingzhao as they trailed Tuan, their fragile burden held between them.

“Like gang turf?” said Gabriel.

“More akin to social castes.”

“Classes.”

“Tuan runs street level. All you can see.”

“It is my privilege,” chimed the big man leading them. “An entrepreneur named Hellweg has a lock on municipal services such as power, water. You may have noticed his petroleum tower—the Fire in the Sky. He’s some sort of European; Danish, or Scandanavian at any rate.

“Our local army of mercenary police is owned by Lo Pei Zhang, who was once a military general. The soldiers are all ex–Red Army.”

“And the fourth is Cheung?” said Gabriel.

“Yes. Qingzhao’s former employer,” said Tuan, and Gabriel realized it was the first time he’d heard the woman’s name. “I believe he made his millions in currency speculation. His first millions.”

Gabriel fired a glance back at Qingzhao. “So you were an employee of his.”

“Mr. Cheung arrived in our fair land just as Communism was gasping its last,” Tuan rattled on. “The CCC is the new land of opportunity, but it is all quite subsurface now. That’s why Occidentals fear it so much, I think.”

“And you,” said Gabriel to Qingzhao, “used to work for this guy? The one you’ve been trying to—”

Her hand was on his forearm, extended across the body of the bowman between them. “Yes.” Her eyes added: Not now. Not in front of Tuan. Please.

This was one raincheck Gabriel was going to follow up on.

Next to a booth whose sign proclaimed CHANGE YOUR I.D., Tuan pointed out an ammo hawker with half a face, masked as though by a giant eyepatch. Most of the man’s fingers were missing or truncated.

“Do not purchase ammunition from that man,” Tuan said. “Unreliable. Misfires.”

“The man or the ammunition?” asked Gabriel.

“Both.”

Tuan led them into another cubbyhole with signage halfway-hidden from the commonweal: SU-LIN GUN MERCHANT. It stank of gunpowder and gun oil, and was a cramped warren of firepower old and new. Su-Lin was a gnomish woman with a calm Easter Island gaze; she weighed maybe 75 pounds. Tuan bent from his enormous height to grace her cheek with a kiss.

“You must use the keyboard,” said Qingzhao. Two laptops were set up collaborator-style on a small counter, with Su-Lin perched behind one as though ready to commence a game of Battleship. “This translates. First you type the proper greeting.”

They set down the bowman and Qingzhao typed: YOUR PIG MOTHER EATS NIGHT SOIL, which transposed to Chinese characters on Su-Lin’s screen.

Su-Lin typed back: I LOVE YOU, TOO.

Gabriel’s attention meanwhile had been arrested by a very special gun hanging from a clip on the back wall. His eye coded it as a close cousin to his faithful Colt Peacemaker, which he still wished he had strapped to his hip. That one was out of reach. This wasn’t.

“You have seen something you like?” said Tuan.

It was a large Colt revolver—age-burnished, true, but Gabriel recognized it as the treasure it was. “If this is what I think it is…”

Tuan lifted it off the wall and handed it to him. The gun sprang open cleanly at his touch. There wasn’t a spot of rust on it anywhere.

“This,” Gabriel said, as if he were introducing an old friend to a new one, “looks like an old Navy Colt, .36 caliber—from when they first started converting cap-and-ball ‘percussion pistols’ to the more newfangled revolver. They called them ‘wheelguns.’ ” He glanced back at Su-Lin. “How much do you think she might take for it?”

“That depends on whether you like it,” Tuan goaded.

“I like it very much,” said Gabriel. “Anyone who knows about guns would.”

“Then it is yours,” Tuan said. “For your trouble. With my compliments.”

“Why?”

“You are a guest. Qingzhao said you helped to save her life. That is a favor bestowed upon me as well. Please allow me to repay this debt in a way that pleases you.”

Gabriel nodded his thanks. He was always ill at ease accepting gifts, because you never knew what obligations might accompany them. But he wasn’t about to turn down this one. He had a feeling he might need a good gun very soon.

The place Tuan called his Pleasure Garden featured a cabaret stage—empty just now—and about a million varieties of flowering plant life nourished by misting nozzles and artificial sunlight, here in the middle of a city of stone.

The newly unwrapped terra-cotta warrior—Qingzhao’s bowman—watched silently as they ate from a table carved from a monkey-puzzle tree, laden with about forty dishes of food.

Tuan held up a goblet of absinthe for a toast.

“To my newest soldier,” he said.

The licorice-flavored drink went down hard and sizzled with an afterbite of burned sugar.

Apparently, Qingzhao bartered the terra-cotta warriors with Tuan for supplies and intelligence. The figures she had discovered near the idol in the shrine room had great value, even as damaged as they were. The two empty slots Gabriel had noticed were remnants of earlier deals between Qingzhao and Tuan; their collaboration had been ongoing for the better part of a year.

“Barter being the best form of trade?” asked Gabriel.

Tuan nodded.

Gabriel surveyed the table. “My apologies, but this seems like an awful lot of food for three people.”

“I am showing off,” Tuan smiled. “Forgive me.”

“It will feed others when we are done,” said Qingzhao. “Tuan is responsible for filling many bellies.”

“So,” Gabriel said, returning to the subject of the clay warriors, “value for value. Like the black market in religious ikons in Russia.”

“Not quite,” said Tuan. “The Russian way provided an interesting lesson on the subject of smuggled antiquities, because so many of their black- and gray-market religious ikons were forgeries. Of course, one of my business interests is a thriving popular outlet for replica warriors. We’ve copied most of the basic templates from the warriors found in the Xian pits and the army of Emperor Qin. We do custom paint jobs. We even have a service whereby your own features can be worked onto the terra-cotta warrior replica of your choice. My artisans use photographs of the subject. You’d be surprised at how many people want a recreation for their garden or foyer. How many people actually collect them.”

“At a couple grand a pop, no doubt,” said Gabriel. It was no different to him than some spinster collecting plates from the Franklin Mint. “But the replica market provides cover for moving the real warriors to private collectors who can’t show them because it would be illegal to possess them.”

“They pay for that privilege,” said Tuan. “The funny thing is, the replica company actually started turning a profit last year. And most people cannot even discern authenticity, which has allowed the market in art forgeries to thrive the way it has.”

It was true. Forgers had become so painstaking at their craft that the difference between a fake masterpiece (which hung in galleries and toured worldwide to the acclaim of millions) and the genuine article (which hung in someone’s expensive, climate–controlled cellar and was available for viewing only by an elite few) had been reduced almost to nil. As far as the world was concerned, the fake was real. The real paintings only increased in value every time a subterranean auction was held, and sometimes the aficionados tried to screw each other. Michael had told him that half the Impressionists in the last Getty exhibition were bogus, but no one wanted to say so. What was the point in starting that blaze of controversy unless the whereabouts of the real ones were known?

The epidemic had gotten so dire that within the last five years, even the Mona Lisa had come under serious doubt. Which might explain her goofy, cryptic smile at last. I’m a fake, boys.

Tuan pushed back his seat. “My honored guest,” he said. “Permit me the ill manner of a private conversation with Qi.”

“Qi?” said Gabriel.

“My diminutive for our delectable little fighter. You have no doubt already felt the strange attraction she exerts.”

She lowered her gaze.

“No doubt,” Gabriel said.

He handed Gabriel a puzzle box of closely worked unlacquered cedar. “We have a few small affairs of business to transact that are not for all ears to hear.”

Gabriel accepted the box with mild interest. It called to mind nothing so much as the Rubik’s Cube he’d held just days before in Michael’s office.

“We’ll be nearby,” Tuan said. “While we’re gone, perhaps you will find this interesting to examine. What most people call a Chinese puzzle box, the kind one buys in the so-called ‘Chinatowns’ of various cities, is actually a Japanese configuration. Historically this has disallowed inquiry into something uniquely Chinese—a different configuration and puzzle strategy, now overwhelmed by the more common Japanese variants. This one is authentic. Its purpose is not to test skill at solving a mere puzzle…”

“But to test the mettle of the solver,” Gabriel said, feeling a tiny surge of dread: of all the ways Tuan might have chosen to test him…!

Tuan and Qingzhao repaired to a curtained alcove to speak in hushed whispers while Gabriel considered the box in his hands.

He wanted to set it aside and perhaps wander near enough to the curtain to eavesdrop on the conversation, but he suspected that neither would be advisable. His host had been cordial so far—but he was clearly a dangerous man and not one to anger.

Gabriel reluctantly focused on the box in his hands. Classic puzzle boxes, he remembered, always featured sliding panels. But no part of this one appeared to slide in any direction. Thinking back to the Rubik’s Cube that had so confounded him in New York, Gabriel began exerting mild stress on different parts of the box and sure enough, a triangular corner came free on a little interior hinge, now hanging out like a wing and spoiling the box’s symmetry. After a one-eighty revolve, it settled back into its appointed corner upside down, completing an ideogram that had previously been bisected. He recognized the ideogram: it translated roughly into “as above, so below.” Accordingly, Gabriel twisted free the corner that was diagonally opposite—a corner that had not budged before. It flipped out and settled back with mild pressure, and Gabriel felt something click definitively inside the box.

Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere.

The top of the box, he found, felt loose, as if it would slide if he pressed it. He did, and realized that the entire top half of the box could be eased away from the bottom half, turned like a knob and reseated. Each repositioning completed a Chinese character previously obscured or lost within the filigree of design.

The top half of the box displaced a quarter of its own length. Gabriel realized that if the bulky section could fold over, the box would retain its original size and shape. The engineering seemed impossible, but sure enough—click.

Now panels revealed themselves in the conventional manner. The wrinkle of an authentic Chinese box would be that some of the panels would be tricks, traps or dead ends. These enigmas were dependent on the user’s preconceptions of how such things might or might not work.

He pressed on one panel—

“A word of advice, my dear new friend,” said Tuan, returning.

Gabriel was embarrassed not to have heard his approach. He’d been more wrapped up in solving the puzzle than he’d realized. He put the box down unfinished, hearing somewhere, in the back of his head, Michael’s voice chastising him. You give up on things too easily.

“Qi has told me of your adventures and difficulties,” said Tuan. “I would say you should not expect to leave China, if that is your thought. You are on Cheung’s map now. The caution you take should be threefold. Really, if it was safety you sought, you should not have even dared to come back into the city at all.”

“Mind reader,” said Gabriel.

Chapter 8

Gabriel reached forward to pull the pedicab driver out of the line of fire.

The man was already dead, holed through the neck and chest.

The pedicab came to a lurching halt, pitching forward, crashing into a gent on a bicycle and sending him cartwheeling into the air.

Gabriel and Qi dived out and flattened in opposite directions, hugging cobblestones slicked with night mist.

Rolling on his back, Gabriel groped for his newly acquired Colt, still wrapped in cheesecloth and now sitting in the middle of the street as citizens, heedless to the silenced gunfire, crowded around and stumbled over him.

Then he had to claw the big .45 cartridges from his pocket. Conventional wisdom with guns like this held that one should load five shells and leave the hammer down on an empty chamber, since the gun had nothing that could remotely be interpreted as a safety. Gabriel always—always—loaded six.

Qi had already whipped out a sleek automatic from a spine scabbard and was seeking targets.

Several gunners in black, with hoods, materialized out of the throng to rake the pedicab with machine-gun fire. It vaporized into toothpicks and floating chaff as Gabriel rolled, sighted prone, and discharged his new gun for the first time. It kicked hard and roared like a cannon, a curling gout of fire licking from the muzzle. One of the gunners arched into the air and fell—a high center hit—knocking down several people who were stampeding at the sound and sight of gunfire.

Gabriel lifted the shattered wheel of the pedicab and with one mighty swing dislocated the jaw of a second shooter who’d run toward him. Almost instantly two more thugs focused their attention on the guilo and Gabriel found himself in an unwilling three-way.

He kicked out at one guy grabbing him, heard the picket crack of a blown kneecap, and swung the man into his nearest neighbor. Gabriel had dropped his gun; he retrieved it now and put a round into the chest of one attacker.

Where were the police when you wanted them? A show of force by some of China’s ubiquitous uniformed keepers of order might have put an end to this melee. But the police were no more anxious to rush headlong into a situation that might get them killed than anyone else would be, a guilty reality that could cost you your existence if somebody abruptly opened fire on your pedicab.

As he took down another attacker with a slash of his gun hand across the man’s face only to see two more pop up in his place, Gabriel wondered, How many shooters were he and Qi worth?

In the words of a famous bank robber: All of them.

Gabriel rather indecorously shoved a woman laden with wicker baskets aside as he thumb-cocked the hammer of the Colt one-handed and blew a round into an assailant who surely would have shredded the woman for a chance to nail Gabriel. The big lead slug spanged off the attacker’s AK-47, destroying the breech and rendering the gun useless except as a club. It also took away two of the attacker’s fingers, putting him out of the fight.

Bullet Number Four reaped a lucky hit, passing through one gunner and into the guy behind him. They would probably live, too, but they dropped their weapons and fell down, and that was all that mattered to Gabriel at the moment.

Gabriel looked around furiously, finally catching sight of Qi as she discarded her now-empty weapon and took on a barreling adversary by imploding a wire birdcage over his head and then delivering an expert pointed-toe kick to a nerve bundle near the man’s groin that put him down, spasming. Qi swiftly took charge of her victim’s pistol.

Gabriel reversed-out to a kneeling position and fanned his last two shots, blossoming two bright glurts of blood across the chest of another black-clad man seconds away from doing the same to him.

Gabriel leaped to his feet and barreled toward Qi, taking advantage of an instant’s lull. If there were a second wave coming, it was stalled long enough for Gabriel to locate Qi and turn an ambush into hot pursuit.

“Come on!” he yelled, grabbing her hand and almost spoiling her aim as she plugged a masked gunner.

“No, this way!” she yelled back. Gabriel accepted the change of direction; she’d know the streets here better than he would.

Two blocks away, Gabriel and Qi folded into the shadows of a wet bricked alleyway. “Lose your jacket,” she said, quickly stripping off her top and revealing a black lace brassiere with a thick backstrap. She mussed his hair, ripped the bandage from his head. “I’m a prostitute, you’re a client, we’re both drunk.”

With his jacket discarded on the ground, the spent Colt was conspicuous in his hand; he had no place to hide it. He reluctantly plunged it into a nearby vendor’s basket at the alley’s far end. As they moved out of the shadows, Gabriel could not help a mournful backward glance at his forsaken hogleg. Its weight in his hand had been comforting and familiar. But it had done its job. It had saved his life.

Threading her arm around his waist, Gabriel led Qi back out into the seething crowds on the street. She bumped one hip into him and forced him to misstep. She was like a warm, skittish animal in his grasp. She laughed and chewed on his neck. Two gunmen were walking right toward them when she grabbed a fistful of his hair and spun him into a devouring full-on kiss, working his mouth hungrily as though she really meant it.

The gunmen split and walked around them, scanning the shadows past them in a desperate attempt to spot their prey.

Gabriel half expected Qi to turn and go after the men from behind and he raised one hand to stop her, but she whispered, “No,” as if reading his mind. “We must get back to the motorcycle.”

Gabriel’s lips were still tingling. She tasted like mangoes and rare spice. Night-blooming jasmine. “The motorcycle,” he agreed.

“Don’t you dare get an erection, or I’ll have to shoot you.”

They were immersed to the collarbones inside a large cauldron of steaming water, which they had bucketed over from a wood fire inside the second of the leaning pagoda’s shrine rooms. Pressed herbs floated on the cloudy surface. Qi had insisted Gabriel join her—for purely therapeutic reasons, she explained, after she had applied antibiotic ointment to his head wound and to a new gouge, raw and red, that he’d acquired on the side of his neck.

As she’d climbed in across from him, Gabriel had noticed that Qi had a tattoo of some Chinese character on one hipbone. Oddly ridged with skin, as though to mask a wound. He did not ask about it.

She closed her eyes. After the action of the day the heat was penetrating to the bone, making them both dopey.

“You may ask me now,” she said, not opening her eyes.

“I’m not an interrogator,” said Gabriel, squeezing water between his palms. “But I would like to know.”

“My father used to bathe me. One day, I remember, he took very special care to make me presentable.”

“Special day?”

“Mmm. The day he sold me.”

Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. “Sold you?”

“At the Night Market. Where we just were, today. And he bought me.”

“Cheung?”

Qi opened her eyes, gazing at him, frank, stark, unashamed. Her eyes were like black volcanic glass in the flickering light. “It fed the rest of my brothers and sisters. This is not America, Mr. Hunt.”

Gabriel already knew that centuries of entrenched Chinese dogma and cultural preference held that female children were “undesirable.” The modern one-child-per-couple mandate had only made the situation worse. In the past, female children were abandoned; today they could be aborted if an ultrasound revealed a female child in utero—a practice some called “gendercide.”

It also stacked the census deck to the point where Chinese men had begun to outnumber women by a significant degree. Far from making unmarried women more desirable, women had come to be treated even less humanely…and the world’s second oldest profession—bond slavery—had come into a new underworld vogue. The border between China and North Korea was commonly called a “wife market,” as thousands of female Korean refugees from economic privation flooded forth to find Chinese husbands. They were destined to be sold in the bars and karaoke clubs of the Chinese mafia, if they weren’t scooped up first by the predatory “women hunters” who preyed on the exploding market. Few men were willing to say they had bought a wife, but that didn’t mean they weren’t willing to buy one. They knew they were getting someone pliable, hardworking and submissive. And from the women’s point of view, better that than starving to death in North Korea, watching your family die around you. A Korean woman cost between 240 and 1,700 Euro (about $300–$2,500 American dollars, depending on exchange rates) in a country where the per capita rural income was little more than a hundred bucks a year. Korean customs officers were routinely greased to the tune of $80 per person to cross the border. The bought women were then provided with the birth stats and name of a dead Chinese (for an additional fee), prompting an upsurge in identity traffic among China’s legitimate dead.

Needless to say, beauty, age, physical condition, virginity and health were all factored into a woman’s price. Qingzhao would not have been brought to market as a mere baby factory or working wife. She was young, attractive, robust and healthy, and even more importantly, not Korean, and so had been brokered to the extreme high-end of the human traffic sector—the highest bidders, the shielded and protected elite who gathered at only the most clandestine rendezvous.

“My tag was here.” She pointed to her left earlobe. A triangle of piercings there. Gabriel had assumed it was for jewelry.

“And this.” Standing, she indicated the tattoo Gabriel had glimpsed on her hip, distorted with scar tissue. “Cheung put it there. I tried to cut it off once. It didn’t hurt.” She poked the area. “Now it has no feeling—none at all.”

She dismissed the topic with a haughty sniff and sat down again. The last thing she wanted was pity. “In time, I became Cheung’s administratrix of protection. Head of security.”

“You were his bodyguard? Like that guy I saw take Cheung through a plate glass window at the casino?”

“Not like him. No simple employee could ever gain that much of Cheung’s confidence. No woman, either.” She pulled her knees to her chin in an aerobic stretch.

“Who is he?”

“Longwei Sze Xie. His given name means ‘dragon greatness.’ He is commonly called ‘Ivory.’ No one knows why.”

“How did you leave Cheung’s…employ?”

“Cheung and Ivory became convinced that I would serve as an adequate sacrifice for a bad business decision.”

“Michelle Quantrill was in the same kind of situation,” said Gabriel. “She was falsely implicated, too. When Cheung killed her sister, he left Michelle to take the heat. I got her out of jail and told her to stay put, but she assumed her sister’s identity to come here and…” Gabriel trailed off. “Well you know the rest. It didn’t work out.”

“And why did you come?”

“To talk her out of what she was trying to do.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew something bad would happen to her, like what did happen to her. I think she knew it, too. I just don’t think she cared.”

“She came as a ghost, then,” Qi said contemplatively. “She was already dead. I knew we were linked when I first saw her. I just knew.“

They sat regarding each other for a silent moment. The connections between people are not reducible to hard statistics, Gabriel knew. Sometimes attraction was a thing of looks and moments, half-drawn breaths and secret approval. Intuitive, as when things denied logic yet felt correct. He resisted the urge to lean forward, to taste the spice again.

“I betrayed no one,” Qi said, “regardless of what they claimed. And I survived their attempts to destroy me. Twice now I have tried to take him, and twice I have failed. Once in the Pearl Tower. Once at the Zongchang casino. I failed the second time because your friend was in my line of fire—on a similar mission, though I did not know it.”

“And you think you owe yourself another stab?” Gabriel could not quite bring himself to say, Let it go; get past it. Qi would just ignore him if he did. “He’s not just going to forget your face. He’ll see you coming.”

“I want nothing less,” she said quietly.

“Then you’ll die, same as Michelle did.”

“As long as he dies first.”

Gabriel had encountered fatalism before, and zealotry, and devotion to a cause; but rarely held with this combination of unquestioning conviction and yet so little emotion.

“I know when the children will next be sold at the Night Market,” she said. “Cheung will be there. From high places, the rich bid on the poor. I can kill him there. But I cannot do it alone. Think on this for a night. Do not answer now. I am going to sleep.”

With a complete absence of shame or self-consciousness, Qi rose from the cauldron naked, stepped over its iron side and walked away, leaving a trail of wetness on the ground. Her body was lean and hard, muscular, pantherish. Before she’d turned, Gabriel had seen there was another ungainly X of scar tissue beneath her left breast, where some other possessive malefactor had tried to brand her, or take something away from her. Gabriel watched her until she was out of sight, engulfed by the night.

After a moment sitting alone in the cooling water, Gabriel rose dripping and got his gear, because there was work to do before sunrise.

Chapter 9

The workings of the pedestal proved more frustrating to operate than a public telephone in Beijing.

The hidden lever freed itself by degrees, measured in Gabriel’s sweat. At full cock it released a panel on the far side of the iron base. The panel was heavier than the door in a Swiss bank vault and meant to be slid horizontally backward into a recess in the wall that was clotted with decades—perhaps more than a century—of mulch, roots and earth. Gabriel spent the better part of an hour scraping dirt before he realized the sheer weight of the door would prevent him from moving it; it wasn’t as though it was on ball bearings or a hydraulic arm or something.

He hit upon using Qi’s motorcycle as a conscripted assistant, since Qi was definitively out of the action.

The revving four-stroke engine raised a hellacious chain-saw racket and the spinning high-treads kicked back a tsunami of dust from the floor. In the lantern light it looked as though the shrine room was on fire. Russet clouds rolled and settled on everything, including Gabriel, who had begun to look a bit like a terra-cotta warrior himself.

The iron panel, nearly a foot thick, was gradually inched backward until there was a gap into which Gabriel could shove a lantern. He saw the boundaries of a twelve-by-twelve cobwebbed room—beneath the base of the statue—and the edge of a stoneworked archway that indicated the passage went deeper.

After more revving and straining, the space became big enough for Gabriel to wriggle through. He was parched from his exertions, though he had already drunk at least two quarts of water, and his shoulders pulsated with fatigue. He grabbed some road flares from Qi’s stores along with a flashlight and an extra lantern. He’d figured he’d need all the light he could get.

The interior directly beneath the statue’s base, sheeted in iron, was disappointingly vacant. It bore the musty mothball smell of old, dead air.

Past the archway was another room lined with wooden shelves, many of which had dried out, become porous, and collapsed over time. Arrayed upon the shelves that remained were hundreds of miniature warriors, each about nine inches in height and made of fired porcelain. Many of them had been unceremoniously dumped by time and the crumbling shelves; they lay in shards on the floor, which also appeared to be metal, judging by how his footsteps rang against it whenever they weren’t squashing something underfoot. He was within what amounted to a big iron box, Gabriel concluded, one that could only be accessed via the statue’s base—metal above, below, and except for the archway he’d entered through and another on the far wall, all around, so no one could dig their way in.

Gabriel recalled Emperor Qin’s city-sized necropolis, which had been constructed in relative secrecy and then hidden away underground. Logistically speaking, it would have been much more difficult for Favored Son Kangxi Shih-k’ai to pull off such a feat at the beginning of the 20^th Century, when labor was more dear and secrecy harder to come by. Perhaps he had rendered his vaunting self-tribute only in miniature, except for the handful of life-size guardians Qi had found in the room outside. Enough niches spun off from this chamber to suggest there might be several thousand doll-soldiers here.

Was this Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s grand joke on history?

Was this the great prize Cheung sought?

From what Mitch Quantrill had told Gabriel, the would-be warlord thought he was going to claim his putative ancestor’s skeleton—which the great man would’ve been hard-pressed to have inserted into something the size of an action figure.

Gabriel popped a flare and dropped it on the floor. That was when he first saw that the metal surface he was standing on was writhing with worms and salamanders. He examined a nightcrawler under his flashlight. It looked like some sort of troglobitic millipede with a nasty oval mouth. Some were as much as a foot long.

That meant…

Then he noticed the heavily ammoniac, compost stench wafting toward him from the far archway. Opening the portal had caused a tiny bit of air movement, and the flow was eye-watering.

That also meant…

…that there had to be another way in.

Quickly he drew a small automatic pistol—also procured from Qi’s stores—and advanced behind his upheld light toward the second archway.

Stone stairs wound down into blackness. The stench was already a physical thing as oppressive as wrapping your head in a piece of rotting cloth.

The stairs were long disused, crumbling, slicked with a gray organic fluid that glistened with phosphorescent mold spores. It was like walking on treacherous ice, the kind that could upend you and send you sprawling.

He was traversing downward at about a thirtydegree angle. He could hear trickling water now. He had to duck; the headroom was low.

The stairs broadened into a tiny pavilion with carved rails, all of it indistinguishable beneath caked, stinking muck.

Twin terra-cotta sentries stood mute guard over the pavilion with long-corroded weapons of bronze that had rotted away to stubs and flakes. The standing soldiers appeared to have been dunked in cake batter and left to decay for a century. Their features were not apparent. They were clotted and bloblike, runny pseudohuman monstrosities, more manlike in size and general outline than in any internal detail.

The pavilion faced a grand chamber at least the size of a football field. The distant sound of a small stream or other subterranean waterway was louder here, joining with the other ambient noises and echoing slightly, indicating that this was a very big room.

The whole place was a hibernaculum.

The concave dome of the ceiling was wall-to-wall with thousands of nesting bats. He could identify at least three species at this distance—the horseshoe bat, the long-fingered bat and the roundleaf bat. There were also lizards and annelids and other scavenger-parasites that fed on bat guano, which would be abundant indeed here.

Gabriel stepped forward very cautiously.

To either side of the pavilion he could now make out two large, hinged wooden constructions like catapults or small cranes. A shaft held an ironbound basket the size of a bale of hay aloft over a reservoir, which Gabriel presumed had once been filled with water, long-since evaporated.

And below, massed on the floor of the huge chamber, standing in a foot-deep tar pit of urine and guano, was Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s army of life-sized figures.

Then Gabriel heard Qi calling out to him from above, as loudly as she could, and thousands of bats took wing, flying straight for him.

Chapter 10

Gabriel smashed the only fuel lantern he had to make a pool of fire near the archway during his hasty retreat, but the bats’ sonar had unerringly informed them of a new way out of the cave. Some of them sported a wingspan of two feet or more.

From Qi’s point of view it was as though Gabriel was propelled out of the base of the idol by an unbroken thunderhead of swarming bats.

They were not vampires or the dreadnaught-sized killers of the Amazon, but this many airborne teeth and claws could make life terribly inconvenient, especially if the horde was hungry.

Gabriel struck Qi like a linebacker, sprawling them both onto the floor, shielding her face and burying his own into her shoulder in a duck-and-cover as the black beehive madness of the bats filled the shrine room. Eventually they would peter out and find their way into the night. They were just bats. But Gabriel did not know if Qi harbored any phobias or other reactive behaviors that might complicate their survival right now.

When the first wave ebbed, they worked together to seal the sliding iron portal. With two pairs of shoulders and thighs heaving and amped up on adrenaline, they no longer required the motorcycle to move the door.

Stragglers winged wildly about the upper reaches of the room. Gabriel looked as though he had lost a paintball fight, and this time Qi’s reaction could not be dammed back. She found his appearance hilarious.

“Very funny,” said Gabriel.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting to use the bath again?” she said.

“Briefly,” he said.

“Bats are good luck all over Asia.”

“But not all over my head.” Gabriel made his way to the other shrine, stripping off his shirt as he went.

“My mother used to tell me,” Qi said, following, “if a bat lands on your head, you should hope the cricket sees rain coming because the bat won’t get off your head until it hears thunder.”

He ducked his head under the now cool water, ran his fingers through his hair. He finally came up for air again.

Qi was still beset with mirth over Gabriel’s condition. It buoyed him to see that Qi could laugh.

He described for her what he’d found in the giant chamber below the statue.

“It’s almost worth telling Cheung,” Qi said. “The thought of him rooting like a pig through tons and tons of dung, looking for his precious skeleton. On his knees. Slowly being driven mad by the smell.”

“Except that he’d send lackeys to do the digging while he watched from a safe distance,” Gabriel said.

“Yes, and then shoot them when they finished.” Qi wasn’t laughing anymore. “I want to see this room for myself.”

“Then why’d I bother getting cleaned up?” Gabriel said. But the truth was, he wanted to see it again, too. His explorer glands were firing hotly already, reinvigorating him; he could feel the gnawing need to find out burning in his brain afresh. Was one of the figures Kangxi Shih-k’ai? If so, which one? You’d think a man with an ego like that would put himself at the head of his army, leading it—but in the quick glance he’d gotten, there hadn’t seemed to be such a “leader” figure. And to find any one figure hidden among the lot of them, one would have to spend hours digging through calcified strata of crap.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Before the lucky wildlife returns.”

Chapter 11

Quite abruptly, Gabriel found himself back in the world. Clean clothes, wired cash, at least semilegitimate to all outward appearance but for the recent scars on his head and neck. Michael Hunt was in the air over the Pacific Ocean, racing to pick up the lecture series where it had so unceremoniously been abandoned. Gabriel had e-mailed him a brief, discreet summary of everything that had happened, using carefully veiled language on the theory—hell, the certainty—that all outbound e-mail sent from the complimentary terminal in a five-star hotel’s business center would be read by the authorities. He’d sent another even briefer message to Lucy, at the anonymous e-mail address she’d given him before getting on the plane for Arezzo: Am still in China, L, but M is gone—I’m sorry. Her response: Gone missing or gone dead? To which he replied, Don’t know which. Doesn’t look good.

She hadn’t written back.

Meanwhile, Gabriel prepared for his visit to the Night Market and his meeting with a contact called Red Eagle. Earlier in the day Qi had pulled together an assortment of goods—galvanized steel pails, tensile wire, firecrackers and cherry bombs, several large jute bags of money all in coins. She did not specify their purpose. But she had pointed out several other things to Gabriel as they toured incognito, both their faces hidden behind the popular surgical-style paper masks many pedestrians wore and shaded by wide-brimmed hats.

“Nine corners,” she had said, indicating the zigzag bridge to the Tea House. “Nine turns, so that evil spirits will become disoriented and cannot pursue you.” Gunmen, Gabriel knew, might not be as likely as spirits to get disoriented, but the nine turns could still help break up lines of sight—and of fire.

Qi’s combat access to the Night Market was via tunnels beneath the Tea House, part of the old aqueduct system, and she’d showed him the exit she would use tonight. “Tuan has all the best maps,” she noted, adding that on auction nights, Cheung would have all the surface entrances and exits heavily fortified.

She had stopped next to a stand whose sign read CRISPY FRIED ANTS—MARINATED SCORPION—TURTLE SHELL GELATIN and ordered a vile-looking beverage from the vendor, a tiny man in an Edwardian suit with the obligatory status-symbol label sewn to his outer left cuff.

“God—what is that?” said Gabriel, his throat constricting at the sight of it. The stuff looked like deep red cough syrup with a floating skin of herbs.

“Double Penis,” she replied. “Deer and bull. Good for bones, circulation, heart, memory.”

“Also is excellent aphrodisiac,” said the vendor with a sly wink. He pointed out the source organs, hanging from a drying rack. The deer members looked like rawhide doggie treats two feet long. The bull penis was the size of a Louisville Slugger.

“Drink,” Qi said, as though sealing some covenant between them. “It’s expensive.”

Gabriel downed the viscid brew, keeping his eye on a Tibetan spinning a prayer wheel in the distance. He swallowed twice, then swallowed again. It seemed there was now a smoldering lump of raw lead between his lungs.

Qi had moved on to a small shrine with an urn for burning money. She lit joss sticks, bowed and offered some bills to the pot.

“Now you,” she said, gesturing for Gabriel to do likewise.

“But I don’t believe in—”

“You must believe in something,” she said, eyes flashing.

That had been their afternoon. Now it was nighttime.

Showtime.

Chapter 12

Qingzhao could not believe she had missed the shot, and quickly chambered her tracer—her followup round, to track and correct aimed fire.

She’d had Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung dead in her sights on the balcony across from her, with only a ten-degree angle of correction for a downward shot. The picture in the crosshairs told her that Cheung was history. Her trigger pull was a steady, clean, slow squeeze.

But the man standing next to Cheung had died instead.

Which meant that the sights on this ex– Royal Marines rifle had been tampered with.

Her tracer shot strayed to bounce off one of the hanging cages and ignited the wallpaper inside Red Eagle’s eyrie. Perhaps it was because Qi, too, had seen the young girl up for sale, so much like herself, once; perhaps it was because Qi had fired with tears welling in her eyes? But no—the tracer proved the weapon’s sights to be decalibrated. The scope was supposed to have been zeroed. It obviously had not been. Useless.

Even more useless: The adjustment ticks on the scope had been shaved down, preventing a fast adjustment with a coin edge or anything else.

Cheung was under cover by now. Ivory’s response was frighteningly efficient.

She could have chambered the next powerful Magnum round and taken out one of the bodyguards, but there was little point.

Her window of time had spoiled faster than burning paper. Without checking the window again she fired up her preset fuses and ran from the room, abandoning the rifle and going hot on her backup pistol—a supersized Ruger revolver, so as to avoid even the faintest possibility of a jam.

Ten seconds later, cherry bombs, M-80s and firecracker strings began to detonate around the perimeter below. This would give eager bodyguards false gunfire they would waste time trying to track. The final fuse crisped the support rope for her buckets of coins, which tumbled loose and sprayed a metallic rain of money from the sky, all jingling downward to spin and roll across the cobblestones of the Night Market. Everyone below would scramble to collect the coins, which was good for Qi’s escape plan. Sentries would be blocked, hazarded, mobbed and trafficjammed as they tried to fan out from the archways.

From the doorway into the wild free-for-all of the Night Market, it was five swift steps to the bridge to the Tea House. Qi sprinted across, zigzagging. The propane tanks she had emplaced earlier were still in position. She shot each one with modified tracers like the big hazard-striped rounds she had used at Pearl Tower. Both tanks combusted and blew spectacularly, punching the air out of the space with twin fireballs and lopping off the first fifteen feet of the bridge, which noisily redistributed itself over the surface of the pond water, blackjacking a few curious fish.

Inside the Tea House was a narrow stairway leading down to a supply room with a trapdoor in the floor. The access led down into the sewer system, where Qi had a small motorboat waiting.

Gabriel was not there to meet her as planned.

She had to leave the area now. She waited a few extra beats anyway.

At the very least, she had seen Cheung crawling on his hands and knees, clothing disheveled, panic on his face.

That would have to do until next time.

Chapter 13

Imagine you are in another country.

One where you cannot speak the indigenous languages, know no one local, are unfamiliar with the grid, and through no fault of your own, stick out like a hangnail on a sore thumb.

You obviously do not belong here.

And it is only a matter of time before some grown-up, some authority figure, strolls in and asks what the hell you think you’re doing.

So—what do you do?

Further imagine that after fewer than 24 hours on this alien planet, you have met the person who objectifies your hatred…and failed to kill him.

That during a mad popper-party of shooting, screams and panic, you may have caught a transient glimpse of an old ally from home—a glimpse so fleeting that it might have been a hallucination of wish-fulfillment.

But you cannot pause to debate that information because you have gained a new benefactor, a sharp Asian woman who knows how to deal with gunfire.

Your brain, playing mind tricks on you, gives you another flashpop look at the man you think you know, but already your mind is confusing the new helper with the old helper, and the endorphins are flooding because you are in wild retreat and have just stopped a bullet.

Stupid, careless, getting tagged like that.

None of this matters because in one stuttered, brokenfilm eyeblink of time, you’re facedown in a freezing, fast-flowing river with a bullet in your shoulder.

Now imagine what your last thoughts might be.

Sorry, Val. Sorry, Lucy. Sorry, everybody. I could not save anyone, or change a single bad thing. I have disappointed every person with whom I have ever come in contact.

But strong hands fish you from the black maw of the water, telling you no one should die so ignominiously just for the sake of being dead. And your dying mind agrees that this, in fact, is a reasonable point of view.

So—what do you do?

You try to answer the question your rescuer has posed to you.

Where is Qingzhao Wai Chiu?

You say: Dead, I think. I’m not certain.

The rescuer says: Are you certain of anything?

Then he says: It is true that if I had needed to kill you, you would be dead. My offer still stands. I can show you a way out. No police. No adversaries.

But first there is the tiny matter of digging his own bullet out of your shoulder.

This is accomplished in an apartment…somewhere…an identity-less box, a clean and welllighted place, as Hemingway might have said. A window offers a choice view of Shanghai nightlife, far below.

You find yourself naked in an old-fashioned bucket shower, an anomaly in this modern place. You remember a water dipper. Stitches. Candlelight. A bowl of noodles. You’re disconnected, but ravenous. Ninety percent of your identity seems to have astral-projected out of your body and gone somewhere else, and you have a quick thought about the pharmaceutical painkillers that are probably coursing through your system along with the soup.

Then you forget the thought.

There is a saying in China, Noodle Man tells you. “The heat of anger burns only the angry.”

Great, you think. Did you read that on a fortune cookie?

The fortune cookie was invented in America, Noodle Man tells you with a total lack of irony.

Ivory, you remember. This person is called Ivory. He even introduced himself to you, back at the casino.

I need to express my sympathy, Ivory tells you. For your sister. Is it your intention to avenge her death?

Dumb question.

I did not participate, Ivory tells you. Romero, Chino, some of the others used her very badly. Cheung ordered it. I am far from innocent. It saddens me still.

Spare me, you think. This man Ivory consorts with Valerie’s murderers.

Unless he is lying about his own negligence or blameworthiness.

You feel you have begun something, Ivory tells you. A process in which you are trapped, and you feel a misguided urge to see it through to some end. The end can only be catastrophic for you. Do you see that?

Your brain tries to frame a counterargument but your thoughts are leaking out, wino-bagged in a sieve. Some drug in your blood is definitely messing with you.

Would you leave China now, if you had the chance? Ivory asks you.

So—what do you do?

It becomes very important for you to say the word NO. Aloud. Repeatedly.

Shanghai can be a very dangerous place. You are not sure if Ivory says this, or if you just think it. Fifty-fifty.

The drugs keep your brain drunk but your reflexes vital and threat-responsive, you discover later. Most likely, the prescription changed.

You are given an attacker and your entire personality reverts to instinct.

You are given a mask so you may be hidden in plain sight.

You fight through a waterlogged gray curtain, as though puppeteering a bloodless simulacrum in one of the violent games children so love to entertain themselves with back home, sitting lazily in front of the television. But there is no laziness to it here, nor even very much sitting. Just violence.

And in a way you accomplish what you came halfway across the planet to do. You kill. You prevail.

That is what you do. It is who you are, now.

The food, the drugs deftly separate you from a world that had little use for you, back there in behind-time.

It is not such a bad life, fulfilling in its primal imperatives. Fight. Survive. Eat. Sleep. Fight again.

You see a man in a cage, less fortunate than you. You are in control of your little universe. The man in the cage has no control. Perhaps you will face this Other in the fighting pit.

But a minuscule ember of memory remains. You recognize this person.

His name is Gabriel. You were introduced to him once.

Chapter 14

“Jin Huáng, this is your rest period,” said Ivory.

Mitch hung her head and shuffled away.

“Await me,” Ivory said to her back. She stopped walking. Then started up again.

“You’ve drugged her into some kind of…robot,” Gabriel said from the cage.

“A preparation from Mr. Cheung’s resident mystic,” said Ivory. “It subverts the will.”

“I’ll say.”

Ivory unpocketed a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Gabriel.

“No thanks,” said Gabriel. “I never got to finish my drink.”

“We of course had your identity the moment you entered the Zongchang casino,” said Ivory matter-of-factly, not even looking at Gabriel. “I suspected some connection between you and this woman. The cameras confirmed it when you took them both into the river.”

“Well, good for you,” said Gabriel. “I gather this is the part where I’m just supposed to listen to your brilliant strategy and not ask you why the hell you have me locked up in a cage.”

“Unfortunately for you, you have been tricked into consort with the Nameless One,” said Ivory. “Mr. Cheung is very protective of his interests, and disapproves of those who would oppose him for shallow and misguided reasons.”

“You mean like because he murdered your newest fighter’s sister in New York?”

“Ah. That is the link, then.” Ivory rubbed his forefinger against his lips, a nervous gesture. “And you sought to redress this injustice?”

“Mitch did,” Gabriel said. “All I wanted to do was get her out of here. That’s the honest truth.” He hoped he sounded sincere. “This is not our country. Your fight’s not our fight.”

Ivory pondered a moment, then said, “Let me tell you a story.”

“I don’t see how I can stop you.”

“Let us say that this story is about an imaginary person named Valerie Quantrill. Who worked quite expertly in the transfer of digital data. Let us imagine that Mr. Cheung’s company hired her to bring everything in the organization online for access via the latest state-of-the-art equipment. Broadband literacy is essential to a man who aspires to take an entire country to a new horizon.”

“But he didn’t count on his imaginary data transfer czar being broadband-literate herself,” said Gabriel. “And stumbling on things he didn’t want her to know.”

“There was no stumbling, Mr. Hunt. It was deliberate, premeditated and malign. She hacked firewalls, she stole passwords. All deliberate. She deliberately gained access to data that was damaging to us. We foresaw blackmail, threats, sealed envelopes in secret drops. But Mr. Cheung was not enraged—he was pleased. He saw this initiative as a valuable skill. He seeks to encourage people to their best potential—that is why so many in China take him seriously.”

“He’s a madman who participates in slave auctions,” said Gabriel.

“You persist in Western linear thinking,” said Ivory. “But I believe you to be an intelligent and perceptive man. Think of the small crime with yield for the greatest good.”

“Every madman in history has justified his madness that way. Look at Hitler.”

“Yes, yes, Hitler.” Ivory glared at him. “Are you quite through?”

“Not quite,” said Gabriel. “But I’m the one in the cage. I’m through if you say I’m through.”

“Let us say that instead of chastising Valerie Quan-trill, Mr. Cheung offered her a new and expanded role in his grand plan—one that would potentially have made her very wealthy, and free to move about the world as she pleased. And let us say further that she came to the meeting in New York to turn him down. That would have been an entirely honorable decision, you understand—but a bad choice. Mr. Cheung would have perceived her disinclination as a threat to use what she knew.”

“You mean he lost his temper and killed her. Hypothetically speaking.”

Ivory pressed his lips together and looked at the floor for a moment. He released a sigh, as though venting psychic decay.

“If this happened,” he said, “I assure you it was not with my approval.”

“You didn’t prevent it,” said Gabriel.

“Perhaps a Westerner cannot understand. It is not my place to prevent Mr. Cheung from doing what he wishes. I am bound by my fealty to him.”

“Fealty?” Gabriel shot back. “Ivory, he’s not even really Chinese!”

“I know. I have accepted this.”

“Look—you’re better than this guy. You saw Mitch come to kill him and you saved his life, but you saved her life, too. Only now you’re letting your sense of obligation hamstring you.”

“I saved her out of regret for her sister’s fate,” Ivory said. “Were I a disloyal man, I would not have informed Mr. Cheung. Instead I proposed an alternate course, and he approved.”

“And if he hadn’t? If he’d told you to kill her? What would you have done?”

“I would have killed her,” Ivory said, but he said it quietly, in a voice of utter commitment but also some sadness.

There was a deep conflict aboil just under Ivory’s bulletproof surface. Gabriel had sensed it the first time they had met.

“You’re attracted to her,” Gabriel realized. “More than that, you’ve got the obligation of her sister hanging around your neck. Putting her in a human cockfight may not seem merciful, but it beats killing her—at least she has the chance to defend herself. Cheung is happy. And you get to control her. You’re her steward. Her trainer. Her keeper. Her man.”

Ivory shook his head forcefully, but not without a little sweat on his face.

“Beats buying yourself a wife—you didn’t even have to pay anything,” said Gabriel, gripping the bars. “You’re the guy who jams her with drugs, I’ll bet, and I’ll bet you do it in the most loving way. You take care of her after the fights, don’t you? Backrubs and front-rubs, all that. And this’ll go on until she dies, or maybe until you get tired of her, till your aching conscience quiets down. Then what? Do you throw her away, the way Cheung discarded Qi?”

Here at last was a charge Ivory could answer and he leapt at it. “The Nameless One failed Cheung. I corrected that oversight.”

“You corrected…you tried to kill her!”

“I trained her,” shot Ivory. “She was the best of our candidates! And at the critical moment, she failed. Her failure permitted Mr. Cheung to be wounded, something that is not allowable, and I—”

“You nothing,” Gabriel overrode. “You turned your back and Cheung threw her to the same pack of thugs and murderers that killed Valerie, assuming he didn’t participate himself. Only Qi somehow survived to come after you. Yes, you—not just Cheung, don’t fool yourself, she wants you, too. She wants to kill Cheung, but you…you she wants to humiliate. And what greater dishonor than to kill Cheung right under your umbrella of protection?”

Ivory’s stilted quiet was an indictment in itself. At last he said, “Her story will end very soon. Tuan betrayed her. He betrayed us, too, of course, but that is no more than one should anticipate from denizens of the Night Market.”

“And what happens to Tuan?” said Gabriel.

“Tuan’s story is already over.”

“I see. Did you kill him yourself?”

“It was my honor, and Tuan knew that.”

“Your honor,” Gabriel said. “You make it sound so very noble. Never mind the dirty, grubby politics of it—the fact that it also conveniently eliminates one of the three other power-bosses on the Bund. Who’s left that isn’t under your control yet? Hellweg, the water-and-power guy, right? And the fellow who runs the police; I forget his name.”

“Zhang,” said Ivory. “You are right—to win Zhang to our cause would be to put the entire army at our disposal.”

“Why not just kill him the way you killed Tuan?”

“Zhang has not betrayed Mr. Cheung. He will be offered a deal, as Mr. Hellweg will be.”

Gabriel almost wished Ivory weren’t being so open in discussing his plans—it surely meant he was confident Gabriel would never leave the cage alive.

“Listen, Ivory,” Gabriel said, figuring he might as well confront it head-on, “you and I can work out a deal, too.”

“I am sorry for your unfortunate confinement,” Ivory said, “but no. If I were to let you go, I would have to answer to Mr. Cheung. As I would if I allowed Qingzhao to continue living. There are no options.”

“There are always options,” Gabriel said. “And if I find one before you do, you may regret not making a deal with me.”

“You speak very bravely for a man in a cage, Mr. Hunt.”

“I’m not being brave,” said Gabriel, “just telling you the truth. I have something Mr. Cheung wants very badly. How long do you think he’ll keep me in this cage?”

Gabriel caught the fleeting expression of uncertainty that ghosted across Ivory’s face at this news. But he had no time to appreciate it, because while he was watching Ivory someone slipped up from behind and jammed a spike full of joy juice into Gabriel’s shoulder.

Chapter 15

Mitch’s defeated opponent from the Iron Fist bout that Gabriel had witnessed turned out to be a lot more important than anyone reckoned.

The woman’s name was Garima Bhatia; in her native Indian dialect “Garima” meant “prowess, strength and honor.” That she had been tough and competent did not matter. That she had lost money for some bettors did not matter. That she had been defeated by Mitch did not matter.

What mattered was that Garima Bhatia had died soon after the match from a brain aneurysm.

What mattered more was that Garima had been Mads Hellweg’s fighter, bonded and branded.

Mads Hellweg, the underground lord of New Shanghai’s water and power, had long distrusted Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung, and had significant reservations about the fixing of matches at the Iron Fist. For the purposes of inside intelligence, Hellweg had emplaced most of the Sikh guards used by Red Eagle, having obtained these men through the same channels and business interests in India he had used to procure Garima. But over the prior months the pipeline had broken down and his Sikh spies were being kept out of the information loop. Garima’s defeat had come at an inopportune time, never mind her death, and Hellweg was now in dutch with the local Triad shylocks.

Normally, Hellweg would have requested that Cheung use his influence to take some of the creditor heat off. Except he knew that Cheung was brimming over with his own plans and needed to curry favor with the selfsame Tong bosses to get what he wanted. Hellweg’s request was doomed to go into channels and never come out.

Plus, Cheung was visibly becoming increasingly erratic. Assassins were trying to kill him in public. He had taken to soliciting the counsel of an astrologer. And he had fallen into the habit of murdering rivals at the least disagreement or split-hair detail. Hellweg had begun to suspect his uneasy relationship with Cheung was going to blossom into a less-than-equal partnership.

Fortunately, Hellweg had other allies. Quietly marshalling their forces against the Tongs in China were the members of the Japanese yakuza. Though nominally subject to a cross-cultural cease-fire, they were just waiting for the right excuse to commence full-scale gang warfare in the streets of Shanghai. Hellweg had maintained a back-door deal with some of the oyibuns of the 30,000-strong Kobayashi Clan just in case it ever proved necessary.

And this, he thought, could be the moment. If he deactivated the Iron Fist using yakuza mercenaries, Cheung would blame the Japanese and drag the Tongs in for reprisal. Both sides would suffer glorious losses, including the Triad loansharks trying to bleed Hellweg, and Hellweg himself would skate blame-free.

Then, when the tumult died down, he could debut his own fighting pit, one strictly under his control.

Best of all, if Cheung didn’t suspect his involvement, he might even come to Hellweg for support, might ask him to help architect the retaliation against this bold, slap-in-the-face attack by Japan. This moment would bond them as equals in a way nothing else had to date…

Hellweg made the call on his ultra-secure landline.

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.

Chapter 17

“We need to get out of the middle of this thing,” said Gabriel. “Nobody is going to back down. Everybody is going to get killed.”

The leaning pagoda was within view as they crested a jut of rock. Mitch was climbing right behind him, but her attention seemed to be wandering and she had gone from breathing nasally to orally—not a good sign, for someone as fit as she was.

“You’re part of it now, too,” she said, her breath more ragged than it should have been.

“No, I’m not, and neither are you. We get to Qi’s place, I call my brother. I’m pretty sure Qi’s got a secure cell phone or can bash one up. Michael calls the embassy and the Marines and we burn our tail feathers straight out of here.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?”

He turned and gave her a hand over the next rise. “You’re going to tell me that the guy who imprisoned you, drugged you, turned you out to fight for money, the guy who imprisoned me, for god’s sake, has some kind of hypnotic hold over you that’s going to keep you trying to kill phantoms?”

“No,” she said. “Stop. Please. I’ve got to stop.” She halted, bent over, hands on her thighs.

Mitch sat down heavily on a knobby outcrop of feldspar.

“It is the drug?” said Gabriel.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I can’t tell if this is an aftereffect, or withdrawal, or bad chemistry, or what. But it’s starting to hurt so bad I can’t keep my eyes open.”

“You can’t go to sleep,” warned Gabriel. “You might not wake up.”

She took a deep breath and her vision seemed to clear slightly. “He told me a story,” she said. “A parable.”

“Ivory?”

“Yes. He asked if I’d ever had a crisis of faith…god, I can’t remember what he said. It seemed to make a lot of sense at the time. He was talking about himself, I’m pretty sure, and about Valerie. He said he didn’t kill her. But he didn’t stop it when he saw it happening.”

“That was his crisis of faith,” said Gabriel.

“Exactly. His duty versus his honor. Very Chinese.”

“I know how this one ends,” said Gabriel. “Betrayal. It’s who betrays whom I’m having a hard time figuring out.”

Meanwhile, Gabriel was suffering his own crisis. He still had a syringe of the Iron Fist happy-hour cocktail in his pocket. He’d grabbed two and only used one on the gunner in the cage room. The other he’d begun thinking he could get to a lab, have them break it down, analyze it. Synthesize countermeasures.

But if what he was seeing in Mitch was the first stage of withdrawal, he was going to have to use the needle on her. Perhaps diluted. Perhaps in increments. But even so, the sample would soon be gone—and she’d be rendered a null-sum as a team member for the duration.

Part of his mind—the impatient part, the selfish part, the part that had so often kept him alive in tight spots—was asking what, really, did he owe her? Hadn’t he picked up that check? Hadn’t he been picking them up for Mitch ever since he’d posted her bail back in New York? Hadn’t he paid plenty in skin and blood and gunfire; in nightmares and pain?

But his sense of justice was at stake here. That was the other part of his mind, the part that kept getting him into all those tight spots in the first place. He had allowed the undertow to drag him this far because Lucy was relying on him—and because men like Cheung needed taking down. And if Mitch’s tragedy was a minuscule one for planet Earth, so what? Move a single grain of sand on a beach, everything in the world is changed. How’s that for Zen?

“I’m not so sure Qi won’t just shoot us on sight,” said Gabriel, considering their range from the pagoda. “If Tuan knew her whereabouts, then Ivory knows, which means Cheung knows. And if she’s found out that Tuan’s dead, that he betrayed her…”

“…she may be in a mood to shoot anyone that approaches.”

“Keep your eyes open,” Gabriel said.

“I’ll try,” Mitch said.

Chapter 18

Gabriel riffled Qi’s first-aid supplies for saline with the thought he might be able to play alchemist and whip up a larger batch of the mystery drug from the eight cc’s he had remaining in the syringe. Mitch had lapsed into comfortable silence in the big iron tub, much akin to a heroin nod. Without a fresh application of the drug, the slamming headaches and disorientation would soon resurge, and without a medical facility at hand, Gabriel was trying his best to preload a stopgap.

All the supplies he and Qi had ferried back from her bartering excursion were still here, indicating that whatever had happened to Qi, she had not yet abandoned her stronghold. But of saline there was none. Gabriel gently set the precious syringe down under a protective protrusion of rock and turned his attention back to the big bronze statue.

He had gathered 200 feet of climbing rope in 50-foot coils, along with a basic climbing kit—a bandolier of base hooks, rock anchors, carabiners, pitons and spikes; a vertical harness, an array of belay and rappel geegaws, plus a couple of high-impact strap-lamps. Among his other tools and gear were a crate of chemicals in plastic bottles, and a few sticks of dynamite, this last courtesy of Qi’s armory.

“How’re you doing, Kangxi, old fella?” he said. “Still rotting away inside? Still got bats in your belfry?”

Those bats needed to tell Gabriel how they normally got out of the cave to hunt. He presumed a hole in the ceiling somewhere, fifty or sixty feet above the dung-fouled bowl of the floor.

Only once he’d found this secret could Gabriel put the Killers of Men to work on his behalf.

Chapter 19

Michael Hunt was met at the airport by an official car that conducted him into the city, and the waiting representatives of the Shanghai Cultural Alliance. Much bowing, many cocktails, even more handshakes as a modest summit was initiated, and Michael suffered it all graciously. As Gabriel often pointed out to him, pressing the flesh took time and patience—a patience that Michael had cultivated while his brother was gallivanting around the globe.

His brother, from whom he had not had word in days. Who was presumably somewhere in greater Shanghai; who had, by all best guesses based on personal experience, gotten swept up in yet another sideroad that rendered him incommunicado. It was Gabriel’s rowdy way. If anything were truly amiss, Michael would have seen a red flag, a flare, a message in a bottle, something. Meanwhile his duty was to make nice with the academics Gabriel had jilted at the start of his trip and tell them the things they wished to hear.

Michael’s schedule awaited him in his suite, printed out and laid against the stacked pillows on the kingsized bed. He was staying in a hotel off the Bund that had apparently been an embassy at some past time. Looking over the printout, Michael saw there were the usual tours of monasteries and museums, as well as a brace of receptions, the first of which was—oh, look at that—in exactly 45 minutes, at some location he could not have found with a map, a native guide and a GPS device. He was in the hands of his handlers and had no choice but to trust himself to them.

Showered, shaved, plucked, dressed and polished, he presented himself at the appointed time (thanking all the valets and doormen in Mandarin) and found himself whisked to a phantasmagoric skyscraper-top discotheque one entered by walking through the enormous resin-cast jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull.

The throb of the music was physically assaultive, the bass notes reverberating in his diaphragm. Strangers shouted greetings he could not hear, and the best response he could manage was to smile, nod and allow himself to be swept along through the strobing neon, the dry-ice fog, the mirrored surfaces that multiplied several hundred jam-packed revelers into thousands. Everyone was smoking, drinking and whipping themselves into an aerobic frenzy.

Michael winced inwardly, but on the surface showed nothing but serenity, calm, earnest goodwill. Patience.

His stewards guided Michael to one of many private VIP rooms fanning out from the central club floor. These exclusive chambers were lozenge shaped—like railroad flats—and padded with a sort of silver lamé tuck-and-roll on the walls that made them look like high-class cells in some A-list lunatic asylum. Table pods sprouted from the floor like mushrooms. And when the door thunked shut, the music vanished to a mere background thrum.

Michael snuck his cheat sheet out of his pocket, glanced at it. This event involved city fathers and local politicos who wished to have a posed snapshot with the head of the Hunt Foundation. It was the next best thing to a grant, and seen by some of them as a likely (perhaps necessary) prelude to same. As they filtered into the VIP room one by one, he shook hands and accepted proferred drinks, which he then mostly set down on the table behind him, untouched.

Eventually the line of people waiting to meet him had dwindled to just a single, singular individual, a willowy black masterpiece that exceeded six-two in heels. She took his arm like a lover and urged him out of the room. He glanced at one of the handlers who’d been steering him around all afternoon, and the man nodded. Michael allowed himself to be led by this amazon—whose name, he gathered, was Shukuma—toward a table in the back.

A burly cosmopolite rose to greet him, an unusuallooking Chinese with stark blue eyes.

“Mister Michael Hunt,” Shukuma said, “may I present Mister Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung.”

“This is both a great pleasure and a deep honor,” said Cheung. They shook hands briskly in the Western style. “Please join us.”

Chapter 20

Outside, crouched among the rocks, Mitch spotted the helicopter through binoculars, coming in soft about a hundred yards from the pagoda, the blades on powerful Ribinsk turboshafts spinning a silver halo above the craft.

“It’s a Kamov,” she said. “The kind the Russians nicknamed the Orca. Jesus, there could be twenty guys in there.”

Gabriel grabbed Qi’s upper arm. “Could you have been tagged somehow? Followed?”

Surprise and incomprehension sparked within her dark gaze. “No, I…”

Then brutal logic slapped her. “The Glock,” she said with disgust.

“What Glock?” said Mitch.

Qi snorted, angry at her own lack of vigilance. “Why would he have a Glock? Ivory prefers fully automatic pistols—that is why he has that Russian monstrosity. He would not have a Glock around unless it was disposable.” She drove a fist into her own hand. “Damn it. He handed it to me. He knew I’d take it. Stupid!”

“He misdirected you,” said Gabriel. “Could have happened to any of us.”

“He gave me the chance to shoot him with it!”

“Well, obviously he was confident you wouldn’t take him up on it.” The location of the leaning pagoda had just ceased to be a bargaining chip. They had been made, blown, outfoxed.

“Load everything,” said Qi. She was obviously envisioning some kind of glorious standoff that would get them all killed.

“Wait,” said Gabriel. “Let’s see if they’re soldiers, Red Police guys or Cheung’s men.”

“I see the bald guy from the casino,” said Mitch, still glassing the slope, where the men from the chopper were now climbing, hunched over in a protective crouch.

“That is Dinanath,” said Qi. “Number Two, after Ivory.” She ducked into her armory and came up with a Nightforce-sighted LMT rifle, already zeroing in.

“Wait!” said Gabriel. “No shooting! We can still—”

Qi fired without hesitation just as Gabriel shot out a hand, bumping her aim off true. The 5.56 round spanged off a tree branch, severing it two feet from Dinanath’s head.

Cheung’s crew answered.

The rocks all around began to flint and chip with bullet hits, half of them silenced. The other half of the shooters didn’t care if they were heard, time-delay gunshots bouncing around the hillside and trapping them in a weird Doppler cone of weapons fire. Mitch, gunless, had hit the dirt, and Gabriel was trying not to get nailed by flying frags of rock.

He took the binoculars from Mitch, peered through them. At least eighteen men were coming at them up a hillside with excellent cover.

Qi could pick some of them off one by one, pacing her fire, but there were too many. She could never bag them all.

Gabriel held her in abeyance until the first salvo wrapped.

“Don’t,” he cautioned her. “We have something they want. We still have the upper hand. Cheung’s not even with them. Let me handle them.”

Disappointment flashed in Qi’s eyes.

“There will be no more shooting, Mr. Hunt,” came Dinanath’s voice over a bullhorn. “We have your brother Michael. You will cease fire and stand down now.”

Chapter 21

Right on cue, a wayward bat flittered out of the crack on the right side of the idol once Gabriel had worked the hidden lever. Its timing could not have been better. Dinanath’s men watched it wheel crazily around the upper curve of the shrine room until it found a roost.

“Hold it,” said Gabriel, raising a hand. Dinanath turned to his crew and everyone froze. “See that bat? There could be more inside. We don’t know how large the chamber actually is. We have to be quiet and cautious.”

Fully half of Dinanath’s force was conscripted to muscle the foot-thick iron panel, which yielded by degrees. Gabriel raised a hand and pointed at the small chalk mark he had made at about the midpoint of the panel’s arc—when the opening was slightly wider than a man.

“Stop,” he said. “We must not open this all the way.”

“Countermeasures?” said Dinanath.

“Yes—remember your history. Traps in tombs. We must be silent and very careful. Do you smell that? More bats inside. The footing will be treacherous. Excess noise will disturb the bats. Have you ever done this sort of thing before?”

“No,” said Dinanath, uncertain whether his rank was being usurped.

Gabriel picked up a flashlight. “Mask these like so. Focused beams, not wide light.” He was halfway through the doorway when Dinanath yanked him back, bodily.

“You could have a weapon just inside the door,” the big man explained calmly.

“How could I…?” Gabriel raised his hands in conciliation. “Okay. You’re the boss.”

Dinanath directed two men to precede Gabriel. They self-consciously stayed as quiet as mute cats in a library, whispering back a description of the hundreds of miniature warrior figures they saw inside.

The information grapevined through the rest of the men and Gabriel could witness its effect. They were eager, hoping for treasure and measuring the capacity of their own pockets for same.

Dinanath posted two gunners at the base of the idol. Two more at the mouth of the shrine room. Two more on perimeter, outside. Their check-ins were leapfrogged so that the first sign of trouble would bring a radio alert to the unit on Dinanath’s belt.

“Now you,” said Dinanath, directing Gabriel to step through.

The men inside were already picking up the small soldiers, examining them for traces of precious metals or jewels. The men behind Gabriel were eager to start nosing around on their own. Dinanath squeezed through behind Gabriel.

“Cover pattern,” he hissed to his subordinates. “Keep sight of the man in front of you!”

Men were filing in behind them, grouping, oozing the point of the expedition through the second chamber and toward the head of the stone stairway. They had begun to notice the abundance of creepy-crawly life-forms among which they were standing, and Gabriel turned back to shush them. “They’re not poisonous,” he whispered. “Just move through them swiftly.” Several of the men nodded. The more he asserted himself as knowledgeable and a leader, the more they would look past Dinanath to him for guidance when things went wrong.

This was Gabriel’s third foray into the realm of the Favored Son’s Killers of Men. His first exploration had released the bats. His second had revealed to him the ways in and out of the massive vault. Before he’d left the second time, he’d also observed the mechanics of the giant, pendulum-like iron baskets bracketing the stairway that led down from the stone arch. He had set to work on them, using the tools and climbing gear he had to restore the ancient mechanisms’ original function. And then he’d paced off the distance from the entryway to the spot below the funnel that wound its way to the outside. Keeping himself precisely oriented as to distance and direction, he could now move to that exact location even in the dark.

Standing at the head of the dung-befouled stairway, Gabriel reached back to tug Dinanath forward by the sleeve. “The Killers of Men,” he whispered, shining his masked flashlight forward into the void.

Dinanath’s mouth dropped open at the sight. His men crowded in behind him, eager to see for themselves.

Gabriel gave Dinanath a hard shove. The big man lost his balance against the thick oilslick of guano on the floor. Then Gabriel dived onto the right-hand balustrade and slid down into darkness as everybody started shooting.

Chapter 22

While the engines were spinning up, Mitch noticed the helicopter was not outfitted with any exterior firepower. Kamovs were workhorses adaptable to a number of applications, including air ambulance and search-and-rescue over land or water, but they were originally developed by the Russians as antitank choppers. Not this one. Fully stocked with armament, the machine could chew up and spit out a Cobra gunship, but this one was fangless, with not a gun or bomb in sight. At least its defensive features were still in place: the energy-absorbing seats, the beefed up landing struts, the nonfragmenting fuselage. The rotor blades were made of a composite material that could withstand a hit by a 23mm projectile and keep functioning.

“This thing is a taxi,” Mitch said as the rotors reached takeoff speed. “Stripped down for fast insertion and extraction.”

“Good,” Qi said. “We should try some fast extraction now.”

Running from their abandoned cover to the chopper, both Qi and Mitch had scanned the area for any sign—any glint of metal in the distance, any sound—that might portend imminent gunfire, but they’d reached the vehicle and the two dead bodies before it without attracting anyone’s attention. The two men had been neatly shot—but by whom? They’d put the question to one side much as they did the bodies themselves, then climbed up into the cockpit and began preparations to leave. As Mitch worked the controls, desperately forcing her hands to remain as steady as she could get them, Qi held their small arsenal of guns at the ready and watched for trouble.

But none had surfaced, and now, after readjusting her seat several times and getting the feel of the throttle, Mitch was able to float their craft into the night air. They hovered at about ten feet while she triplechecked her board. Then she seemed confident enough to loft them into the sky.

The helo accident for which Mitch had been cashiered out had occurred during a soft landing on an aircraft carrier, strictly a milk run. She was an Air Force loan-out for Naval pilot trainees, occupying the Number Two slot on the MH-60S Knighthawk when wind shear and a rolling carrier made tacking on the landing platform more difficult than her superior, the pilot, had been prepared for. They counter-rolled as the ship surged upward on the tide, and the rotor blades snapped off like popsicle sticks against the deck, gravely wounding two runway rats and scratching one chopper at a cost of about $28 million. No time was wasted in assigning a scapegoat, especially since it would boil down to a Navy versus Air Force beef.

But Mitch could jockey these beasts. She knew it, and the brass knew it too, even if they’d never admit it. She’d longed for a gunship and the chance to deploy its devastating firepower in combat, just once. This might have been that chance, but Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung, wily devil that he was, had provided no bangbang aboard this eggbeater.

They had their rifles, and the guns taken off the dead pilot and his companion. Mitch had spotted a few racked grenades. And they had the helo.

“This puts us into the center of things,” said Qi.

“Meaning?” Mitch concentrated on the rudder, which was a little slushy-feeling. She wiped sweat off her forehead.

“Cheung’s helipad directly accesses his headquarters. No infiltration, no disguises. No strategy. All that is left to us is the lightning raid.”

“You mean barge in, guns blazing, and hope for the best?” Mitch sucked air between her teeth. “Sorry, but that sounds a lot like your other plans, based as they were on the idea of a one-way mission. I’m no kamikaze.”

“We have the Killers of Men as a bargaining chip. Cheung may hate us. He may want us dead on sight. But he is not so foolish as to risk this prize.”

“So we fly right in like we own the place?”

“Exactly. Without Ivory or Dinanath, Cheung’s subordinates will stand down.”

“You hope.”

Qi almost smiled. “Always. But I also prepare for the worst.” She went to work stripping and cleaning the guns.

Chapter 23

Shukuma strode forward with her hands clasped behind her. She was not used to addressing Cheung as his direct subordinate. That was for Ivory, or Dinanath, neither of whom was here. Romero and Chino were dead. Tuan and Mads Hellweg had been eliminated.

Cheung was in his Temple Room, carving another little casket. Sister Menga was in her incense-clouded corner between the two Tosa guard dogs, who were sleeping at her feet like puppies. Her eyes were rolled back into her head, showing only whites to the world of mortals.

“Victory over an enemy,” Sister Menga mumbled. “The exposure of traitors. All as prophesized.”

“You said that before,” countered Cheung. She had said it in regard to Tuan. “Are you certain your bones and animal guts are not giving you recycled information?”

“More than one victory,” Sister Menga intoned, her silver eyes coming down to meet Cheung’s. “More than one traitor.”

“And Longwei Sze Xie is lost to me?” Cheung said. “No. He would go neutral, not virulent. Besides, I would miss him.”

The tall black bodyguard knew that, other than Sister Menga’s, Cheung rarely accepted counsel from females—more traditional Chinese horse manure, she thought. If the boys on the team could not handle everything falling to pieces, she could prove herself here and now. The lessons of the tenure of the Nameless One were lost on her. Venerable laws, likewise—she thought herself above their teaching, and in doing so made the error that always brings disaster to the prideful.

“The helicopter has returned,” she told Cheung. “It is in the middle of the street below, burning.”

“Then Dinanath failed,” said Cheung. “Let General Zhang handle the rabble.”

Shukuma dared to add, “You seem unconcerned.”

“The Killers of Men are within my grasp. The disparate threads are all finally twining together. Binding, as Sister Menga foretold, into the pattern of the future.”

“And the men that went to the pagoda with Dinanath?”

“Expendable,” Cheung said. “Shukuma, you are my new Immortal. You shall assume Ivory’s station from this moment forward. If you see the American woman, the Nameless One, Ivory, Dinanath or anyone else other than Mr. Gabriel Hunt, you are to retire them immediately and report to me. If there is fire and chaos in the streets, one or more of them will be coming.”

“What about Michael Hunt?” she said.

“Keep him under guard until my dealings with his brother are concluded. Then you may kill all of them.”

“You can depend on me, sir,” Shukuma said, happy with her promotion.

The paws of the sleeping Tosa dogs twitched, as though they were dreaming at the feet of Cheung’s sorceress. Dreaming of prey, thought Shukuma—human or animal, it didn’t matter, we all dream of our prey.

And the first place to check for her prey would be that helicopter in the street outside.

Chapter 24

Ivory pushed up, glass fragments in the palms of both hands, to come face-to-face with General Zhang.

“I have lost men,” Zhang said sternly. “What is Cheung doing? Tell me or I shall have to expedite you.” He had the backup to prove he was serious.

“The helicopter was stolen by assassins,” said Ivory smoothly. “The plot was to kill Cheung in the Peace Hotel.”

“Massacre in the streets does not reinforce his position,” said Zhang. “The Tong leaders will want an explanation.”

This seemed pretty slick, coming from the man who had watched Cheung blow Mads Hellweg into the afterlife right in front of the Tong bigwigs at Tuan’s funeral and not said a word against it. Of course, while that had been public violence, too, it had been less public than this.

“Do what you do best, General,” Ivory said with respect. “Order needs to be restored here. Cheung shall answer fully.”

Gabriel swore he could see telepathy passing between the two men, and Ivory saying: I shall fix it.

“Very well.” Zhang turned, pointed and barked orders to his men. “You say that this assassin—the one who has been trying to kill Cheung—is now neutralized at last?”

A quick check of the steaming wreckage of the chopper, now cordoned off by men with chemical extinguishers, confirmed this. Gabriel saw Ivory’s stature warp almost imperceptibly; the cool-as-ice operative’s shoulders bowed slightly in sadness.

Qingzhao Wai Chiu had been incinerated. Gabriel felt the regret settle on his shoulders as well.

But there was no sign of Mitch.

“Cheung needs to be told immediately,” Ivory said. “And he will not believe it unless it comes from you or me.”

“I have duties here,” Zhang sniffed with harried-bureaucrat superiority. “It is your burden.”

Ivory’s performance was pretty spectacular, thought Gabriel. But damn it all, the man had not lied to Zhang. He had merely found a way to circumvent the truth. And in the bargain, won both himself and Gabriel an armed police escort right up to the entrance of the Peace Hotel.

Chapter 25

The hairy eyeball. That is what the black-suited Cheung men were giving Gabriel. They had been vaguely alerted, but few specifics had trickled down the chain of command this far, to the ground-level enforcers. They were strictly guns, muscle, hired hands.

Further, they eyeballed every Zhang soldier who saw fit to trespass upon the Peace Hotel as though personally affronted their limited authority was being usurped by the emergency brewing out in the street.

They were tetchy and trigger-happy; itching for conflict.

“You are going to have to be my prisoner,” Ivory told Gabriel. He drew his trusty OTs-33, his thumb automatically switching the gun to three-shot-burst mode.

For him to grab Gabriel’s arm would be too aggressive, thus alerting the sentries. For them to casually stroll in without a declared hierarchy—Cheung operative plus prisoner—would be too casual. Ivory opted for polite formality: The captive or suspect proceeds one pace ahead, to the left. Normally this was a submissive, almost servile position for the man behind, but the guards would understand that Ivory was keeping a ready weapon trained on Gabriel’s kidneys. Under normal circumstances, a jacket would be draped over the weapon in deference to public view. These circumstances were not normal—weapons were abundant thanks to the panic from the chopper crash—hence Ivory’s gun would be visible, reinforcing the idea of a general alert. The guards would see the gun and the prisoner and never think this was any sort of deception. This was business, expediently out in the open, and so Ivory would be taken at face value since his disfavor in Cheung’s eyes was still not widely known.

The two men bracketing the brass doors to the Peace Hotel were named Bennings and Jintao. Acquisitions, Ivory knew, from a recent canvass of Cheung security candidates based on such employment advantages as blackmail leverage, capacity for violence and general criminal records.

“For Cheung,” Ivory said, indicating Gabriel. “Dinanath was sent to retrieve this top-priority guest. He failed and I have assumed personal responsibility for the delivery. Check with Constantine on the fifth floor if you must, but this is most urgent.”

Gabriel did his best to look captured and cowed.

Bennings, a rangy Australian, was the guy giving Gabriel the once-over, twice. “Does this have anything to do with that balls-up?” he said, pointing to the wreck of the helicopter and the attendant madness.

“With what?” Ivory said, not even looking back.

Gabriel had to admire the ice-cold resolve of this guy.

Jintao had removed his sunglasses, silently exposing his eyes to his superior, and Ivory gave the man his own stern gaze in response. Jintao averted his gaze first.

“Is there a problem?” said Ivory.

“No problem,” said Bennings, waving them inside.

They crossed the lobby in silence. The Old Jazz Bar of the Peace Hotel featured a large easeled placard that boasted Real Shanghai Style Jazz Nightly!

“I helped Jintao’s children get into their present school,” said Ivory finally, when they were out of earshot. “There are many like him in Cheung’s employ—decent men who do this work from fiscal necessity. It would have been a pity to kill him.”

“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.

Chapter 26

Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung was laughing. He loved the theatrical. Exaggerated gestures. Glandular suspense. Cheap thrills.

He and Mitch were pointing guns at each other. Ivory was pointing a gun at the back of Mitch’s head. And Gabriel Hunt was pointing a gun at Ivory.

Alliances were more fluid than they seemed.

“Laugh at me, you bastard, and I’ll blow your tongue through the back of your head,” said Mitch, holding steady with the Chinese carbine. She could do it, too, with this gun—maybe twice before gravity dropped the man. Upon entering the Temple Room, Mitch’s first sight was Sister Menga raising a hand against her. The seer’s ornate fingernails caught the light and suggested a weapon. Mitch was aboil with endorphins and the drug coursing through her, and her body reacted without the time-delay of premeditation. She had automatically put Sister Menga down because her eyes had seen a threat. Her eyes had lied. But so what?

In response to Sister Menga’s moist demise, Cheung had whipped out a Czech CZ-52 pistol, two pounds of gorgeously machined steel filling his enormous hands.

Their stand-off was about five seconds old when Gabriel and Ivory brought up the rear.

Ivory put his pistol, still set on three-shot-burst, within four feet of the curve of Mitch’s occipital.

Gabriel’s hands familiarized themselves with Dagoberto Ayala’s M4, which he’d scooped up on the run from the Junfa Hall. Cocked, locked, ready to rock. He did not think Ivory would actually shoot Mitch, but he had to draw on somebody, and Cheung was already staring down the bore of Mitch’s rifle. Tension ran molten-hot through the room, thickening the air. Hell, sheer trigger reflex would kill them all if somebody sneezed.

That was when that son of a bitch Cheung started laughing.

“You impress me,” Cheung told her. “You have accomplished the unthinkable. You got under Ivory’s skin. You have truly earned my awe.”

“Mitch,” Gabriel said softly. “Don’t take him. Not yet. He’s got my brother.”

“He already got my sister.”

“I could use someone like you,” Cheung told Mitch, “as my new head of security.” His gaze indicted Ivory, but Ivory did not waver.

“Lower the weapon, Jin Huáng,” Ivory said. It was not a request.

Gabriel saw Mitch almost comply.

“No.” She refocused on Cheung. “Valerie Quantrill.”

“Who?” said Cheung.

“My sister. You should think more about the people you murder.”

“And how many have you murdered?” said Cheung, almost avuncular. “Killed in the name of your just cause? You should thank me. I determine what people like you become.”

“Don’t listen, Mitch,” said Gabriel.

“You may avenge your sister’s death,” said Cheung, “but it will cost you your own life.”

Cheung smiled like a cobra and lowered his own weapon.

Gabriel’s hand touched Ivory’s back, but he spoke to both Ivory and Mitch: “I need him alive.”

Tears were rolling from Mitch’s eyes but she fought to preserve her zeroed aim.

“Cheung—let them out of the building and I will take you to the Killers of Men. I alone know the burial secrets of the Favored Son. The men you sent to the site have fallen to those secrets. I will guide you and you may do with me what you will…but you will guarantee the release of my brother.”

“That, I believe, was our agreement,” said Cheung.

Ivory put a hand on Mitch’s shoulder, turned her slowly. “Please,” he said. His eyes were entreating. He backed her toward the glass doors, her gun gone wayward.

“I can’t just leave—” she began.

“You must,” said Ivory. “Trust me.”

Gabriel let his muzzle drift in their direction. “Get her out of here or I’ll shoot you both myself,” he said, not taking his eyes off Cheung.

Mitch was still trying to process what had gone wrong, and the drug inside her was not helping. Soon enough the spikes, the flares, the knifing headaches would resume, and Gabriel knew that Ivory knew that, too.

“It seems that our moment is over before it has properly begun,” said Cheung as he watched them exit. “Too bad. For just a second, there…” He sighed. “It would have been magnificent.”

Chapter 27

Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung stared dourly at the dead man’s arm sticking out of the base of the giant bronze idol in the shrine room. His expression seemed to say: Hmm, he almost made it.

Gabriel was the focus of two aimed guns, in the hands of the pair of Cheung men who had accompanied them in an armored limousine to the leaning pagoda. Shorthanded, Cheung had snatched them off guard duty in front of the Peace Hotel and both men, smelling imminent promotion and favor in the boss’s eyes, were eager to comply.

They seemed just as eager to fill Gabriel up with bullets.

“A booby trap,” said Gabriel. “As I warned you.”

“It certainly seems that the obvious way in is not the way in,” said Cheung.

“My brother. What assurance do I have you will release him?”

“You have no assurance, Mr. Hunt. Once my needs are seen to, then I shall consider the disposition of your brother.”

“Then you are not a man of your word,” said Gabriel.

“And you are not naïve,” said Cheung. “It is your duty to acknowledge who holds the power in our brief relationship. You have cost me immeasurable time and resources. Your help inside this tomb could compensate for all that, but in the meantime you are at my command.”

The two Cheung men glanced at each other.

“I was you, mate,” said the taller Cheung man in an Australian accent, “I’d answer direct questions as asked, and otherwise keep my big yap shut.”

“But you’re not me,” said Gabriel. “Too ugly and stupid, cowboy.”

The guard bristled but kept his place.

“Now, Mr. Hunt,” Cheung said. “As you say in New York: Time’s wasting.”

Under the gaze of the guards, Gabriel climbed down into the trench and brought up the big, faceted orb of crimson glass.

“There were two at some point,” he told Cheung. “Now there is only this one. Watch.”

As Cheung and his bodyguards looked on, Gabriel climbed the bronze idol and mounted the jewel in the socket. Under direct lamplight, they all saw the arc of backward ideograms projected on the far wall.

“Now, if we move it to the other socket…”

Gabriel had a good grip on the jewel and hated to let it go. The thing was at least a century old and surely unique. But survival called for sacrifice. He made a show of carelessness and let an expression of not entirely false horror emerge on his face as he allowed the orb to slip from his fingers. It shattered into a million crushed-ice fragments on the floor.

“What have you done?” demanded Cheung, growing red in the face, but when he looked up again he was staring into a pistol in Gabriel’s hand. There’d been more in the trench than just the jewel.

The Australian leveled his .45 automatic at Gabriel, but Gabriel said, “Don’t move or your boss gets it.”

“Shoot him,” said Cheung, regaining his composure. “Just not fatally. We still have need of him.”

A pair of gunshots erupted—but not from the Australian’s gun and not from Gabriel’s. The blasts came from the other guard’s M4. The Australian, Bennings, clenched tight with hits and fell down dead.

Cheung quickly raised his own pistol and blew the other man apart at the seams with three perfect shots.

“Poor Jintao,” said Cheung. “I was hoping Ivory had not gotten to him.” He prodded Jintao’s corpse with the toe of one boot. “You see, Mr. Hunt? Betrayal at every turn.” He waved his gun in Gabriel’s direction. “Come down off that statue, please. And throw the gun away. You will not shoot me, not when I hold your brother’s life in my hand. Let us stop wasting each other’s time, shall we?”

Slowly, reluctantly, Gabriel tossed his gun and began to descend.

Chapter 28

“The vent is corkscrew-shaped, with a switchback,” said Gabriel when they had reached the rockfall that disguised ingress to the cavern. The climbing had been steep, and Cheung had made Gabriel go first, knowing of his physical abilities and desirous of keeping his gun.

“The Killers of Men are inside?” said Cheung.

“Just inside. I can show them to you.”

“And this climbing equipment?” Cheung indicated the gear still scattered around the vent.

“Turned out to be unnecessary,” said Gabriel.

“This is an interesting conundrum, Mr. Hunt. If I let you precede me, you might enact some futile ambush. If I go first, you could conceivably slam the door on me.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have shot your other bodyguard,” said Gabriel.

Cheung steamed briefly. “Pah! Bodyguards are no more than physical extensions of my command. Without my authority, no power exists in the first place, do you understand? Kangxi Shih-k’ai, the Favored Son, was unafraid to lead his men into battle. No warlord fears to put himself at risk above all. That is why I do not fear you.”

Gabriel said nothing. He knew his brother’s life was dependent on making Cheung believe that whatever happened next was Cheung’s own decision.

“Snap these tight, so I can see them,” said Cheung, tossing Gabriel a pair of manacles retrieved from some inner pocket of his jacket.

“The funnel is difficult to negotiate.”

“You will cuff yourself and hold the lamp as we both proceed.” The ever-present gun terminated further debate.

Gabriel dropped the loose climbing gear back into the pile. Why hadn’t he thought to leave himself an extra gun here as well? He cinched the cuffs onto his wrists. Cheung checked them, tightened each to make sure Gabriel was secured. Then they went into the hole.

With his hands locked together by four links of tempered steel, Gabriel was reduced to the motility of a snake, his own lamp blinding him as Cheung squirmed through close behind. The rock jags made even a lucky kick impossible.

Several strands of climbing rope were threaded through the passage, like bright blood vessels.

“What are these for?” demanded Cheung.

“I was going to haul out some of the artifacts,” said Gabriel. “There wasn’t time.”

“Yes—robbing the graves of other cultures is a pastime of yours, isn’t it? And what is that smell?”

“There are bats in the cave.”

“And my men?”

“I doubt any survived.” Gabriel had to fold up, then extend himself to scoot along, clearing the way for Cheung to follow, never forgetting the pistol pointed at him from behind. The way widened slightly as they proceeded toward the wide end of the funnel. “Kangxi Shih-k’ai rigged the entryway with a series of traps. Once the idol locked shut, there was no way in or out.”

“Except this way.”

“Yes—see for yourself.”

Gabriel expected Cheung’s lust to get the better of him as he approached his goal, and sure enough, Cheung was wriggling past him now like an eager child. But there was no room to move. No leeway for a blow or a chokehold. Gabriel felt the gun against him as Cheung passed.

Cheung swept his light across the blunt heads of the Killers of Men far below, his heart pounding, his breath short with astonishment.

“There must be…thousands of them,” he said in awe. Then he levered his fist right into Gabriel’s throat. “You didn’t say anything about there being a drop! You climbed out!”

“I thought that was obvious,” Gabriel said, chocking his boots against the nearest outcrop of rock.

“Damn you! It must be twenty meters to the floor!”

“I know,” said Gabriel.

In another two seconds, Cheung would be angrily backtracking to get all the mountaineering gear. Which made this the time to act. Gabriel lunged to his knees, swung his chained hands over Cheung’s head, pushed off like an Olympic swimmer, and launched them both into the black sky below.

Chapter 29

The jazz band at the Peace Hotel was actually quite good. All the musicians looked to be over sixty, and the saxophonist seemed to be channeling Coleman Hawkins directly when he blazed out the solo to “Body and Soul.”

Gabriel caught Ivory tapping his foot more than once to the music.

“I still don’t understand how I could have been duped so thoroughly,” complained Michael Hunt. “It never occurred to me I was a captive. I just assumed, you know—gunfire in the street, my floor on lockdown, no cell phone service…”

“You blamed China,” Mitch said. “I made the same mistake, I suppose. In my own way.”

The barman in the lounge had talked Gabriel into sampling a drink that was essentially vodka on the rocks with most of a lemon squeezed into it. Gabriel considered the beverage moodily. It was good but somehow the celebratory atmosphere seemed askew.

“It turns out the coordinates in our parents’ notes were about five miles off,” said Michael. “They were amazingly close to discovering the Killers of Men.”

“The official discovery now must be handled with utmost delicacy,” said Ivory. “I agree with your brother, Gabriel—he should finish the lecture series as planned and in that context he can provide a clue that our own scholars may follow to deduce the location. Let it be done that way. Credit will accrue to our cultural historians and you will not be blamed for the damage discovered at the site.”

“And what of Cheung?” said Gabriel. “Or should I say Dragunov.”

“That was also not his real name,” said Ivory. “It is just the identity he used in the Soviet Union. I believe he was born in Ukraine, and from what few facts I learned over the years, it is entirely possible that his birth mother really was Chinese.” His voice had a tinge of sadness to it. “We met in the midst of a gun battle, you know. It was a long time ago. He was a bad man even then—a drug smuggler. But not yet an insane one.”

Mitch shifted uncomfortably at the mere mention of drugs. She wasn’t drinking, just nursing a tall glass of seltzer. The purge program for xipaxidine worked on her by Pan Xiao, the monk-who-was-not-a-monk, had been effective but fluidly gruesome, and her insides were still fragile.

“What about the big payoff?” she said quietly. “The gold statue, or the treasure, or whatever it was that was supposed to be there?”

Gabriel and Michael looked at each other with an air of conspiracy.

“What?”

“We went back,” Gabriel said, keeping his voice low. “After putting in a call to the Foundation and having a truckload of gels and gems and lenses overnighted. We tried them all in the statue’s eyes, various combinations. Eventually got an arrangement that mimicked the jewels and allowed the ideograms to converge on the far wall.”

“And what did they say?”

“It took a while to translate and some of it is still obscure,” Michael said, “but—”

“But it boiled down to ‘Dig here,’” Gabriel interrupted. “Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s burial place is behind about a foot of rock directly across from the idol—the idol’s looking right at him.”

“The ideograms describe his tomb,” Michael said. “His body was apparently installed inside a hollow jade carving of a warrior. It is described as weighing five hundred pounds.”

“Five hundred pounds of jade?” Mitch said this a little too loudly and some heads turned their way.

Michael waited till the eavesdroppers had returned to enjoying the music. “Yes. And supposedly his body was completely outfitted in gold. Gold armor, gold clothing, gold weapons. Please don’t shout.”

Mitch restrained herself. “And this will all now be discovered by the Chinese government.”

“It is their treasure,” Michael said. “Their history.”

“And what of Cheung?” Gabriel asked again.

“He perished, sadly, in his sleep,” Ivory said. “It seems to have happened the night of the unfortunate helicopter crash in the street outside this hotel. It may have been a heart attack, perhaps brought on by the shock. He has already been cremated, in keeping with his instructions.”

“And who’s going to take his place on the Bund?” Gabriel said.

Ivory lowered his gaze in modesty. “There are enough of us. Enough loyalists to repair the New Bund without the incursion of gangsterism.”

“Will Zhang give you trouble?”

“General Zhang is content to run the People’s Police,” said Ivory.

“You won’t have an easy time of it,” said Gabriel. “Cheung left quite a mess behind him.”

Ivory nodded in agreement. “Yes, but…I have excellent advisors.”

When he said this, Mitch took Ivory’s hand.

“I’m staying,” she said.

Gabriel and Michael exchanged their second glance of the evening, less conspiratorial this time than incredulous.

“You’re staying?” Gabriel said.

“What have I got to return to? My sister was my only family. She’s dead. The Air Force doesn’t want me back. I have as much to offer here as anywhere.”

“What about—” He’d been about to mention Lucy’s name, but realized that doing so in front of Michael would be opening a can of worms; in front of Ivory, too.

But Mitch knew what he’d held back from saying. “I’ll see her again,” she said. “When the time is right.”

“Who?” Michael said. “That nurse from Khartoum?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said. “The nurse from Khartoum.”

The four of them drank their drinks, and the music played on.

“What about you, Gabriel?” Michael said finally. “Would you like to come with me on the lecture circuit or would you prefer to go home?”

Gabriel was sunk in thought. He’d spent the past day trying to make amends and lay ghosts. He’d sought out the little old lady in charge of the Su-Lin Gun Merchant shop and crossed her palm with enough money to fund her retirement in the country and out of the firearms trade. On her little translating screen she had typed: I THANK YOU AND TUAN THANKS YOUR GRACE.

It had made him feel better, briefly.

“What about me?” Gabriel repeated. “I was thinking I might take a trip someplace quiet.”

Preview

And now—a sneak preview of the next Gabriel Hunt adventure:

HUNT THROUGH NAPOLEON’s WEB

Gabriel Hunt’s grip on his pickaxe was slipping.

He had been in worse scrapes before; it’s just that he didn’t particularly relish the thought of dying while caving for fun and practice. That would be an embarrassment. When it was truly his time to check out, Gabriel would much rather have his obituary say that he’d been eaten alive by an angry tiger or felled by gunshots from enemy assailants. Or old age. That wouldn’t be so bad.

But to fall into a gaping pit because he had slipped on bat guano? Preposterous!

Gabriel called down to his friend and caving partner, “How you hanging, Manny?”

Horizontal and belly-down, Manuel Rodriguez dangled in midair on the end of the static nylon rope, fifteen feet below Gabriel’s legs. His only hope for survival was Gabriel’s grip on the pickaxe.

“Is that a joke, amigo?” Manny shouted. He was trying to keep the terror out of his voice but wasn’t doing a very good job.

It had happened quite innocently. Every two or three years, Gabriel made an excursion to one of various caves around the country so that he could hone his skills. His travels sometimes required that he perform a bit of spelunking—an outdated term, but Gabriel liked the sound of the word. It had a certain romance to it.

Dangling within an inch of one’s life over a dark abyss, though, didn’t have any romance to it at all.

Manny lived in New Mexico near Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Besides the exceptional landmark that was open to the public to tour on a daily basis, there were several other caverns in the park that were available only to experienced cavers. All it took to access them were a small fee and a license. Gabriel had done it many times, very often with Manny, a fifty-eight-year-old former ranger at the park and an expert spelunker.

They had been in one of the more “challenging” (as Manny had described it) caves for a little more than three hours when Gabriel and Manny—secured to each other by a fifteen-foot-long buddy rope—sat down to rest on a ledge above a black pit that supposedly led to a chamber of noteworthy formations. The hole was ninety-six feet to the bottom. They had come equipped with all the right gear. They each wore the necessary helmets, grubby clothing, knee and elbow pads, sturdy boots. Both men carried plenty of light sources and extra batteries, as well as water, snacks, trash bags, empty bottles in which to urinate, and a first-aid kit. For the vertical descent, Manny had brought along an assortment of tools such as carabiners, rope, waist and chest harnesses, Petzl stops, rappel racks, handled ascenders, pitons, chocks, hammers, and a couple of pickaxes. The goal, however, was to accomplish the journey without damaging the cave at all. Hammering pitons into the rock face was to be avoided if possible. It was best to use noninvasive tools such as Spring-Loaded Camming Devices that wedged into already-existing cracks or in between stone protrusions. “Leave nothing but footprints” was the motto amongst serious cavers.

Gabriel had finished eating a power bar, coiled a long section of rope around his shoulder and back, and stood on the ledge to locate a convenient spot to install a chock or SLCD for what was called an SRT—Single Rope Technique—descent into the hole. The plan was that Manny would follow him, staying tethered to him throughout the excursion. But when Gabriel had stooped to examine a possible position, his boot slipped on something wet and slick. He slammed hard into the ledge, facedown, and continued to slide across the slimy ridge until his body was falling through space. He must have plummeted twenty feet or so before he realized that he had pulled Manny off the ledge as well. Another dozen feet shot past before Gabriel swung the pickaxe that was, miraculously, still in his right hand. He chopped the rock face in front of him as hard as he could—and broke his fall. Hanging on to the axe’s handle was another thing altogether. It had a ridged rubber grip and a lip at the bottom against which the side of his right hand collided painfully—but it was enough to enable him to hold on. He gripped the axe handle as tightly as he could with both hands, but already he could feel the strain in his fingers and arms. Making matters worse, his palms were moist from the sudden shock. And when Manny reached the end of the tether with a violent jerk, Gabriel really did damn near lose his grasp.

Then Gabriel was presented with the ultimate insult—he smelled the stuff he had slid across. It was all over the front of his pants and shirt.

Bat turd.

Gabriel winced, remembering a cave full of bats he’d found himself in half a year earlier in China. The smell was the same all over the world.

“This is the last time I go caving with you!” Manny called. His added weight dangling at the end of the line was slowly pulling Gabriel’s shoulders from their sockets. “I’m a fool for letting you talk me into this again!”

Gabriel resorted to an old ploy—bravado could cover up genuine terror every time. “Come on, Manny,” he yelled down, “you know you have to stay on top of the game. Sharpen your skills every now and then.”

“I’m nearly sixty years old. I don’t have anything left to sharpen.”

Gabriel attempted to flex his arms and pull himself up, but with the extra load hanging below him it was impossible.

“What the hell do we do now?”

“Relax, Manny. I’ve got it under control.”

In fact, Gabriel had no idea how to get out of the predicament they were in. The rock face sloped inward in front of him, so there was no foothold within reach. The more serious problem was that he had only two hands, and they were busy holding on to the pickaxe for dear life.

After a few seconds of silence, Manny asked, “Anytime you want to start letting me know how you’ve got it under control is okay by me.”

“Your light’s still working, isn’t it?”

Manny had a light affixed to his helmet. As he twisted slowly on the end of the line, the beam traced the pit’s circumference.

“It’s the only part of me that isn’t failing,” Manny answered. “My bowels are gonna be the next to go.”

“Hold on, Manny. Take a look around you. Is there a ledge you’d be able to stand on if you could get to it?”

During his next 360-degree turn, Manny replied, “Yeah. Over on the other side. Behind you. But I can’t reach it.”

“All right. Let’s see if we can get a little swing going, okay?”

“We need music for that, amigo.”

Sweat poured off Gabriel’s forehead beneath his helmet, ran over his brows and stung his eyes. Another problem on the rapidly expanding list.

“Shut up, Manny, and see if you can swing over to the ledge. Slow and easy. I’ll try and get you started with my legs.”

Gabriel managed to grip the taut tether with the insteps of his boots. He then strained to wiggle the rope enough to send some movement down to his partner. At the same time, Manny flapped his arms and legs as if he were trying to fly—anything to propel himself back and forth in the air.

“You look real graceful,” Gabriel said through his teeth. It was becoming much more difficult to hold on.

“Not half as graceful as we’re going to look when we’re flat as tortillas on the bottom of the cave.”

Gabriel was glad that Manny was keeping his sense of humor. A good sign. But as his friend attempted the circus feat, the pickaxe started to squeak. As if it were about to come out of the rock. Gabriel needed to lessen the weight on his body in a big way. The sooner Manny got over to the ledge, the better.

He tugged on the rope with his legs some more and felt his partner’s momentum increase a little. Manny was now a human pendulum, swaying feet first toward the target ledge, back and forth at a 20-degree angle…which soon increased to 30 degrees…and finally to 35 degrees. And then Manny’s boot touched the edge of the stone outcropping.

“Almost there, Gabriel!”

The pickaxe creaked again.

Manny swung back to the ledge and came close enough to push off from it with his legs. The maneuver gave him more speed and force—but it also placed much more strain on Gabriel’s wrists and the pickaxe. The metal lip at the bottom of the handle was deeply embedded in the flesh of Gabriel’s hands. Then the axe slipped a few millimeters with a painful wrenching sound.

“One more push and I think I can make it!” Manny announced.

Gabriel was unable to speak. He simply closed his eyes and willed his partner over to the other side of the pit.

Anytime, Manny, anytime…

Manny returned to the ledge and pushed off hard. He swayed so far to Gabriel’s side of the hole that he was able to touch the wall there. Then, on the way back to the ledge, he hurtled himself up and over—and fell onto the ledge with a smack.

“I made it!” Manny rolled and came to a sitting position. He panted for a few seconds and said, “Pardon me while I say a few Hail Marys.”

The subtracted weight relieved the pressure on Gabriel’s arms. He was now able to concentrate on the next problem at hand—saving himself. Manny was on the opposite side of the cave from where Gabriel hung and a couple of yards lower. The two men were connected by a fifteen-foot tether. Gabriel could simply let go, fall and hope that Manny was able to pull him up to his ledge. But then they’d be stuck there. Most of the ascending equipment was back at the top, on Bat Guano Ridge.

No, wait.

He had some tools in his pack and in his trouser pockets. A few pitons. A couple of ascenders. A rappel rack.

Gabriel thought that if he could place an anchor in the rock face, he just might be able to attach his rope and a carabiner. He could then use the assembly to raise himself a few feet. Then he’d have to plant another…and another…all the way to the top. If he ran out, he could pull out one of the lower ones and re-use it. The trip would be slow going and painfully tedious…but it could be done.

Now if he could just grow another arm or two…

“So now what?” Manny called. His voice echoed in the well. “Dying from the fall would’ve been better than starving to death here.”

“Don’t be a pessimist, Manny,” Gabriel growled. “I’ll get us out of here. Trust me.”

He took a deep breath. What he was about to do required concentration.

Gabriel squeezed the axe handle harder with his right hand…and let go with his left. Hanging by only one arm, he reached back with his free hand and dug into his pack. His fingers found one of the pouches—he hoped it was the correct one—and wormed them into it. He felt something cold, hard and metallic. A piton! The angle was awkward, but he managed to grasp it. The next step was to pull it out of the pouch without…dropping it…

The piton fell into the darkness below.

He and Manny heard the clang when it hit bottom.

Gabriel rarely cursed, but he did so—loudly.

Let’s try that again…

Still clinging to the handle with a very sore right hand, Gabriel reached back to the pack a second time. He dug into the pouch and took hold of another piton. This time he made sure he had it firmly in hand before removing it.

His right shoulder and upper arm were killing him. The strain was becoming unbearable.

To hell with not damaging the rock.

With the piton in his left hand, he eyed the rock face in front of him. A small crack ran diagonally across the limestone. Aiming as best as he could, Gabriel jabbed the piton’s point into the crack. The first attempt only chipped some of the stone away. The second try created a small hole. With the third stab, the piton stuck.

Gabriel grabbed the axe handle with his left hand to relieve some of the tension on his right arm. Then, with his weakened but now free arm, he reached for the small hammer that hung on the right side of his belt. He succeeded in pulling it out of its sheath…but since the piton was to the left of his body, he now had to switch it to his other hand. He’d never be able to hammer it with his right hand.

Only one thing to do, and Gabriel knew he had only one shot to do it. There would be no second attempt.

Okay, the left hand is holding the axe. The right hand has the hammer. Let’s do it…Ready?…One…two…THREE!

Gabriel tossed the hammer into the air and grabbed the axe handle with his right hand while simultaneously releasing the handle with his left. The hammer had reached the top of its arc while he was making the exchange and was now plunging downward. Gabriel’s left hand shot out and snatched the hammer out of midair as it fell.

He had to stop and breathe for a moment after that little stunt. Compared to it, hammering the piton into the limestone was easy.

Still using one hand, he unwrapped the rope from his shoulder and stuck an end in his mouth. He gripped it with his teeth, and then dug a carabiner out of a pocket. It was yet another awkward operation to secure the end of the rope to the ’biner with a bowline knot one-handed, but he did it. He then hooked the carabiner into the eye on the exterior end of the piton. The rope was now fixed and safe to use.

Then his cell phone rang.

“What the…?” He looked back at Manny. “You mean to tell me there’s actually service down here?” Gabriel took hold of the rope with one hand and his legs, let go of the axe handle, and hung there, suspended.

The phone rang again.

“You’re not gonna answer that, are you?” Manny asked.

Gabriel hated cell phones the same way he hated most modern technology—but that didn’t stop him from feeling compelled to answer the thing when it rang. He fished it out of his trouser pocket and brought it to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Gabriel?”

“Michael?”

Gabriel immediately pictured his younger brother sitting at his desk back in the luxury of his clean and comfortable New York office. He’d rarely envied his brother his stay-at-home life—but at this moment he came close.

“Are you sitting down?” Michael asked.

Gabriel grimaced. “Not precisely.”

“It’s Lucy, Gabriel.”

The urgency in Michael’s voice gave him pause. Lucy—short for Lucifer—was the youngest sibling in the family. Their imaginative parents had named each child after one of the archangels in the Bible. It didn’t seem to matter to them that their daughter would have to bear the ignominy of her moniker for the rest of her life. In an attempt at kindness, her brothers called her Lucy, but ever since she’d run away from home at age seventeen, she’d taken to calling herself “Cifer” instead. Pronounced like cipher, it made a fine name for the scofflaw computer hacker she’d turned herself into.

“What about Lucy?” Gabriel asked.

“Are you sitting down?”

“No, Michael, I’m not sitting down! Just tell me!”

“She’s in terrible danger. You need to come back to New York as quickly as you can.”

“How is she in danger?”

“It looks…it looks like she’s been kidnapped.”

He wasn’t sure he’d heard Michael correctly. “Say that again?”

“She’s been kidnapped.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. And there’s a ransom demand.”

“How much do they want?”

“They don’t want money, Gabriel. They want you.”

DON’T MISS THE NEXT EXCITING ADVENTURE OF GABRIEL HUNT!

Enjoy these other Gabriel Hunt adventures:

HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY

HUNT THROUGH THE CRADLE OF FEAR

HUNT AT WORLD’S END

HUNT BEYOND THE FROZEN FIRE

HUNT THROUGH NAPOLEON’S WEB^*

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A LEISURE BOOK^®