I get numbers, data, phone calls, instructions, all jumbled in their memories. But the overall strategy is pretty easy to read: they are going to kidnap us and take us out of here.
Zhang is long gone by now. Doesn’t want to get any of this on his nice suit. I can’t blame him. If I’d been smarter, if I’d been thinking ahead, Sara and I would have been out the door as soon as I recognized him. Instead, I sat down and had drinks with the guy.
Zhang was right: I’ve gotten lazy, relying on my talent. I’ll be sure to address that if we don’t end up in a Chinese black-site prison before the end of the night.
I look around the room, my mind racing, looking for any possibilities. There are no other ways out, except for that plate-glass window over the thousand-foot drop. I can do a lot of things, but I can’t fly.
The two headed toward Sara and me are halfway across the room now. The other two are still behind us, letting other people pass, but ready to move if we turn and make a run for it.
“John . . .” Sara says, just the barest hint of panic in her voice. “Those guys—”
“I know. Give me a second.”
I try to come up with a brilliant plan. Pretty much fail. Come up with a half-assed escape route instead. That will have to do. This is going to get ugly and public. No other way around it.
So we might as well get it started.
But first, I decide to take a page from Godwin’s playbook. Let’s see how Zhang’s men react to a flashmob themselves.
I say to Sara, “When I start moving, follow me and stay close. Don’t get distracted, don’t worry about whatever you see. Just stick with me.”
I’m grateful that she trusts me enough now to simply nod, despite the misgivings running beneath the surface.
Then I take a deep breath, try to find a moment of calm somewhere inside myself. Remember the feeling of touching all those minds at once in Reykjavík. Extend myself as far as I can go.
It occurs to me that this could go bad in any number of ways, but by then, it’s too late. I’m plugged into the entire party. Feeling all the thoughts and sensations of the guests like a network, with signals humming along invisible cables between everyone here.
In my mind, I reach out for one of those cables, and I send an image along it, a picture from my mind. Godwin specializes in hate and anger. For this crowd, I create the perfect fear.
Several people will later swear that their phones buzzed with an emergency alert on the screen, the kind the authorities use when there’s a kidnapped child.
Except in this case, it says there’s been a terrorist attack in Hong Kong.
ALERT ALERT ALERT—TERRORIST ATTACK—POSSIBLE “DIRTY BOMB” DETONATED NEAR HARBOUR—BIOLOGICAL AND/OR CHEMICAL AGENT— AUTHORITIES BEGIN EVACUATION—
They don’t panic, even though they feel a charge of shock and anxiety. They do their best to keep their faces blank.
But they start to move for the exits, or to collect their spouses or their lovers or their lawyers.
And they begin to whisper the news to one another.
The news spreads fast. I hear it everywhere, in their minds, and in quiet tones.
I hear a half-dozen people on their phones, hissing at the pilots of their private jets: “Get us in the air as soon as possible—don’t ask me why, just do it!”
The security detail, which was cutting smoothly through the crowd toward us, is suddenly bogged down by dozens of people all moving in different directions, nobody willing to yield.
I grab Sara’s hand and start pushing toward the door along with half of the other guests. Good manners are barely prevailing, more because no one wants to alert anyone else to what’s going on. Everyone here wants to be first out the door. Information is power, after all. I figure we have a few moments, at best, before the pushing and shoving starts.
The first security guard scowls and begins body-checking his way toward us. People yelp in protest, but then back away when they see his size and his scowl. He crosses the remaining distance between us in a few long strides.
He reaches out for me. “You,” he snaps. “Come with me.”
I reach into my memories and draw out the feeling of a punctured lung. Got that off an Iraq vet who took a round in the chest.
And I put it right into the front of his mind, stabbing it there like a knife.
His eyes go wide. He gasps for breath, falling almost to his knees. For a second, it’s like there’s a boulder trapped inside his chest, pressing against him, taking up all the space where the oxygen should be.
Sara sees it, knows the signals well enough by now, and we move faster through the crowd.
Now the panic is beginning. The man who has fallen, gasping, plays right into the fears I planted. “He can’t breathe,” someone says, an edge of hysteria in his voice. “He can’t breathe!”
I wonder if this was the smartest move. Too late now. Just have to ride it out.
People are moving as fast as they can now, carrying us along with them. Sara’s heels click rapidly on the tile floor.
But the guys at the door aren’t fooled. They’ve been warned. I can see it in their minds. They know not to trust their eyes or their feelings or anything else going on around them.
They let the other guests stream out past them, keeping their eyes locked on Sara and me. They both go for their guns.
There is no plan. They are simply going to stop us, and if we don’t stop, they’re going to shoot us.
I almost admire their focus and commitment. They’re not going to take any chances. They don’t waste time on disbelief, like so many of the goons I’ve gone up against before, because they’ve worked with Zhang, so they know what he can do. They don’t care about the party or the witnesses. They’ve got a job, and they’re just going to do what it takes. They’ll worry about the mess later.
All right, then. No need to be gentle.
I reach inside the first man’s brain and interrupt the connection between his inner ear and his nervous system, shorting out his sense of equilibrium instantly. His eyes roll, he makes a valiant effort, but he immediately collapses.
I get a tiny amount of what he’s seeing. Up just became down, the walls flipped position, and his stomach tied itself in knots. For him it was like gravity reversing itself. He clutches the floor like it’s his mother.
My own foot nearly slides out from under me, but Sara is right there, perfect timing, and she takes my arm and steers me toward the door, still heading straight at the other guard even though he’s got his gun out.
I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve this kind of trust, but I’m damn sure going to earn it now.
I can’t risk anything that will leave me too helpless—God only knows what’s waiting outside for us—but we need this guy down and out quickly.
I jump into his head and hit the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus, a tiny region in the pons, right between the midbrain and the medulla oblongata. The orexin neurons there regulate sleep like a light switch. And I imagine I’m slamming a sledgehammer into it.
In other words, I just gave him narcolepsy.
His eyes flutter like he’s been hit with a d
art gun. The tension ebbs from his body like an uncoiled spring. He’s fighting it, but the gun droops in his fingers, which have suddenly gone slack.
I’m feeling a little drowsy myself, but I shake it off and summon everything I can and put it into a palm strike into his face.
He falls backward, almost comically, feet flying up in the air. The gun drops to the floor. We barrel past him and out the door.
People are shouting as we hurry out the door and down the entryway’s stairs. There’s no one waiting for us—until we get outside.
The crowd breaks apart as we move outside. The valet is suddenly besieged on all sides, guests arguing, shouting, offering wads of cash along with their tickets, each of them with the firm belief that they are the most important and therefore should be helped first.
Meanwhile, I see four more goons scrambling away from an idling van to intercept us. They were expecting us to come out quietly; I can read the surprise in all of them. But they’re catching up with the plot pretty well.
Then we see the Bentley, still sitting where the white-haired man left it, right by the valet stand.
Sara latches on to the idea at the same time I do. We sprint for the car.
I snatch the keys from the pegboard and dive inside the big old beast. It must be from the fifties, easily. The front seat is like a leather couch and the instrument panel looks like something a World War II flying ace would see just before he sighted his guns on the Luftwaffe. I slam the door and reach for the wheel and remember that I’m in Hong Kong and this thing was built when England was still an empire and everything is on the other side. Fortunately, Sara is already there. She grabs the keys and the wheel, which is big enough to fit on a sailboat, and cranks the engine to life. She’s a better driver than I am anyway. (Tactical and Defensive Driving Course for Close Protection Officers, instructor, four years.)
The security detail is moving toward us, but they’re suddenly swamped by people from the house, demanding help, shouting over one another, wanting to know what’s being done here. They expect answers, because they pay people like these men, and they are used to getting what they pay for.
I can sense the indecision in the minds of the security detail. They all have their guns under their jackets, but they don’t know if they should pull them in public like this. The guests are all people who matter. It would cause some problems if one of them caught a stray bullet.
The guards begin to shout in angry Chinese and English as Sara slams the Bentley into reverse. We are blocked in by a Porsche. There’s a crunch and the squeal of rubber as Sara uses the Bentley’s rear bumper to sweep it out of the way.
We still don’t have room to turn around, and Sara doesn’t want to stop, or even slow down. So she keeps it in reverse, and aims the car butt-first right at the crowd in the driveway.
She revs the engine and jams the horn once in warning, and people turn and scramble out of our path.
The security detail is the last to move. The front fender clips one of them as we pass and he flies away, spinning like a top. I get a twinge of his pain, a muffled snap as he breaks a leg. Then we’re moving down the driveway backward and way too fast.
The security team’s van is still blocking the exit back onto Severn. Sara slams right into it. The Bentley shudders and we both bounce hard inside the car, but the van skitters out of our way like a shopping cart.
And then we’re hurtling in reverse down Severn Road. It’s too narrow to make a fast K-turn, and Sara doesn’t want to let up on the accelerator.
I feel someone lining up a shot and understand why. A hole appears in the windshield, followed by another. Apparently the guards got over their indecision. We’ve reached the shooting portion of our evening.
Sara is halfway turned around in the driver’s seat, neck craned, trying desperately to keep the Bentley on the road. The engine is screeching at the very limit of reverse gear, and gravity is doing its best to drag us down even faster.
“Are they following?” Sara shouts over the whine of the motor.
Suddenly the van, with its crumpled front end, comes screaming around the curve just above us.
She glances back and we nearly go over the edge.
“Just drive!” I shout at her, and she focuses on the road again.
By the time I look through the windshield again, one of the guards is leaning out the window, aiming carefully with his pistol.
The Bentley twists and veers another hairpin turn just as he fires. I can hear the bullets as they hit the old Bentley’s all-steel chassis.
Thank God for classic cars, built back in the Iron Age. If this was a newer model, the shots would have torn right through the plastic and into us.
“Shoot back!” Sara yells, and I realize her gun is in my lap now.
I lean out of the window and nearly get a concussion for my trouble as the Bentley swerves again and my head bangs against the doorframe. An-other volley of shots from the van and our windshield shatters completely.
Sara is doing her best to keep the big engine block between us and our pursuers, but they’ve got the advantage over us. They just have to throw more bullets, or drive us off the hill.
I will never make a shot under these conditions. They have to get lucky only once.
So I decide, screw this.
I pull my head back inside the car. Calm myself as best I can. Ignore the swerving and the squealing of brakes and the screech of the tires.
I feel myself lock on to the mind of the driver in the van. Feel his concentration, sharp as a blade, as he follows us down the road.
I blind him. I blank the signal from his optic nerves to his brain. Everything goes dark.
He screams—I can’t hear it with my ears, but it echoes through my mind—and slams both feet on his brakes.
I open my eyes in time to see the van nearly leave the road, almost pirouetting on two tires as it struggles against physics. It comes down with a bang, and then skids into a complete three-sixty, totally out of control when it hits the retaining wall on the side of the hill.
I can feel the bones break on impact. None of those guys were wearing seat belts.
Sara lets out a yell of triumph, slams the Bentley to a halt, and then jams the gearshift quickly into drive, barely losing any momentum at all.
We are almost home free, just about to join the main road back down the Peak into the city.
Sara makes a skidding right turn onto the road when I sense it, too late.
Something moving toward us at over fifty miles per hour, breaking into my thoughts too fast to do anything.
I look up and see the car just before it slams into the side of the Bentley.
Without airbags or seat belts, we’re both thrown around the inside of the car like eggs in a falling carton.
I hear Sara say my name. Then the roof flies up and hits me in the face, and everything goes black.
///22
A Pretty Good Night
I blink, trying to clear the darkness out of my eyes. My first thought is that I’m lucky—however bad the crash was, at least I’m not dead.
And then I try to shift my head, a wave of nausea rushes through me, and I’m suddenly not so sure about that.
My mind is still fuzzy and thick. It takes me a moment to realize I’m outside and the sky above is dark. I can’t move my hands or feet. Then I hear voices.
“Hurry up. He’s coming to, he’s coming to.”
“Going as fast I can . . .”
“Hurry up!”
“Hey! You want to do this, man?”
Water. I hear something like waves, slapping against the sides of a boat. So the rolling isn’t just in my head. I’m on a wooden deck. I smell diesel-scented air. There’s something tugging at my legs. I try to pull away, and someone yanks on my feet. My head hits the deck again, and my vision dances with spots. I feel like I’m going to throw up, but I manage to keep it inside.
I look around and see that I’m on
a boat, somewhere out in Victoria Harbour. I can still see the lights of the city, but they’re wobbling and blurry in the distance. We are far away from any other boats.
I feel something tugging at my ankles again, and I realize that one of the hired goons is tying something to my legs.
It’s an anchor. He’s wrapping my feet with some kind of cord.
This is bad. This is really bad.
I don’t need my talent to know what they’ve got planned. They heave me over the side, tied to the anchor, and I’m done.
I close my eyes and try to suck down a deep breath. Everything spins again. I just need a minute to recover. That’s all I need.
I’m not going to get it. Strong hands lift me up. I can’t even get their names from their minds, or anything about them. My brains are still too scrambled. I’m going to have to do this with brute force alone.
Problem is, I don’t have much of that either at the moment. But I’ve got to try.
I start kicking furiously, but they’ve already got the cord looped around my feet.
“Aren’t you done yet?”
“Can’t get the knot tied if he keeps moving.”
I can feel the cord cinch tightly around my ankles. If he knots that thing to me, I’m truly dead. No way I can untie it before I drown.
So I take my best shot. I thrash and buck and kick. One guy drops me, banging my head on the deck again. The second guy tightens his grip while the third guy kneels on my legs. They have me laid out and helpless, like a fish they’ve just landed.
I keep struggling. I feel a little slack in the cord. It’s the best I’m likely to get.
I use everything I’ve got and hinge upward from the middle. The first guy moves back, just in time to avoid my skull cracking into his. The guy on my legs does not. His eyes go wide, and I head-butt him right in the nose. I hear bone snap. He falls back, holding his face, bleeding and shouting in pain.
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