Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Among the Killers of Men

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

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:

The Chinese Cooperative Confederation Welcomes Its Honored Guests (private reception)

In any language the message was clear: Keep Out.

If this polite suggestion was vague, the men keeping watch over all ingress and egress were heavy with implied threat. They were all uniformed members of the Peoples Armed Police Force, carrying the authority of the Central Military Committee. Dressed in tightly belted army greens, they bore both sidearms and automatic weapons; in comportment they looked the same as the officer directing the hectic traffic mere blocks away, not far from the world-famous bronze statue of Mao Tse-Tung pointing boldly toward the future. The statue still stood outside the Peace Hotel on the Bund, though Maos historical significance had lately been overshadowed by the political and economic reforms of his successors.

At night the Bund is brilliant with golden light, presently competing with an ever-increasing array of garish neon advertisements in all languages. The most unusual building found on the Bund sits in Pudong Park in Lujiazui. It is called the Pearlshort for the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. It looks like a recently landed spaceship from another planet. A massive tripod base supports three nine-meter-wide columns of stainless steel that encase a variety of metallic spheres and globes. The topmost globe, at an elevation of nearly 1,500 feet, is called the space module. From the large lower sphere, one can see all the way to the Yangtze River. The design aesthetic was to create twin dragons playing with pearls, derived from the presence of the Yangpu Bridge to the northeast and the Nanpu Bridge to the southwest.

The Pearl is home to commerce, recreation, and history. The Shanghai Municipal History Museum is housed in its pedestal. The topmost sphere features a revolving restaurant. In between are shops, more restaurants, hotel facilities and the transmission headquarters for nearly two dozen television channels and FM radio stations. The Pearl is so dominant on the Bund that it can be seen from twenty miles inland; lit up at nighttime, it is a truly eerie, otherworldly sight.

Zhongshan Road was seething with trafficeverything from skate-sized diesel automobiles to pedicabs and bicycles (thousands of bicycles)binding and blending with pedestrians (thousands more). Every twenty minutes the Sin Shan Ferry brought more people, more vehicles. A roiling, complex sea of humanity.

At night the abundance of artificial light from the Bund, and from the Pearl, makes the Huangpu River appear almost black.

Qingzhao Wai Chiu, whose given name meant clear illumination and understanding, understood appearances and how to manipulate them. Klaxons sounded for the docking ferry, and she debarked, pulling her little wheeled suitcase behind her.

There was a beggar trying to negotiate the upward slope of the ferry ramp. It was a legless old woman, hauling herself along on a wheeled platform by means of wooden blocks, totally alone on the concrete ramp until the steel mesh gates withdrew and the complement of ferry passengers surged toward her in an unbroken wave. She kept her eyes down, as is common for beggars. Inevitably her cup was jostled and a few meager coins pinwheeled down the ramp or disappeared beneath the shoes of the incoming.

The disparity between the old wretch and Qingzhao could not have been more striking. Qingzhao was tall for a Chinese womanfive foot nine, rendered even taller by expensive spike heels so new the soles were barely scuffed. Unlike many women, she knew how to walk in those heels. Her stride itself could be a weapon, a statement. Her full, lush fall of ebony black hair concealed many scars. Her gaze could be as steely dark as espresso but it was shielded now behind tinted glasses. She walked with a purpose.

She tucked a one hundred-yuan note into the beggars cup, noticing the depth of the ragged womans platform. It was designed to conceal her lower legs. She was a fake. She looked skyward and off-center at the sound of paper rustling in the cup and Qingzhao saw her milky, cataracted eyes. She probably was not really blind, either. No matter. Qingzhao was faking, too.

The beggar was swallowed by the crowd as Qingzhao made her way toward the rocketship, the TV towerthe Pearl.

The policemen flanking the sign ate her up head-to-toe with expressions just shy of leering. She knew what they were thinking: An entertainer, probably a prostitute. That was what she needed them to think.

First hurdle cleared.

In the Tower lobby there was more security on behalf of the reception for the CCCdouble guards and a walk-through booth twice the size of an airport scanner. Qingzhao knew this was a recently emplaced piece of Japanese technology that could present a body scan in X-ray schematic.

The scan of her trolley case revealed that it contained, among other things, a flamboyant, metallic wigthe sort of thing a dancer might wear. Or a stripper.

The guards made her open the case anyway, mostly so they could sneak peeks down her cleavage. Her silk blouse and leather jacket had been strategically chosen and just as strategically deployed. These baboons would never see the big X of scar tissue beneath her left breast, or care.

Qingzhao was waved toward a lift with brushed aluminum doors. The car shot up nearly a thousand feet in fifteen seconds; she felt her ears pop.

Second hurdle cleared.

The Chinese Cooperative Confederation was the brainchild of a financier who had changed his name to Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung, although Qingzhao knew the man was Russian by birth. It represented a new sociopolitical horizon for 21st Century China, which irritated all the traditionalists and old Party members but represented an enticing commercial future for Chinas so-called new generation. As far as the old school was concerned, giving Cheung a political foothold would be akin to the Mafia fielding a presidential candidate in the United States. But it did not really matter as long as the correct palms were silvered. And Cheung, ever the tactician, was perpetually developing inroads to curry the favor of his harshest opponents.

Of course, politics had nothing to do with the reasons Qingzhao had come to kill Cheung, whose real name was Anatoly Dragunov.

The noise level was painfully high in the middle of the Moire Club, overlooking the Huangpu from the midsection of the Pearl.

On a revolving chromium stage, expressionless dancers in white body stockings and face paint moved like robots, tracking the gyrations of naked men and women being projected onto them from hidden lenses.