Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Ms Fang smiled broadly.

  ‘I am happy that he is so impressed with it.’

  ‘Also, Ms Fang, he wants you to join the ranks of the Huntsmen, and is prepared to offer you shareholder privileges. He believes that you have an extremely bright future ahead of you in our prestigious corporation.’

  Ms Fang’s jaw dropped in shock, but she quickly regained her composure.

  ‘Sir, I … you don’t know what this means to me, I—’

  Mr Ma held up a wrinkled hand and silenced her, and then communicated in sign language with Mr Wang.

  ‘We will figure out the details later. For the time being, though, you will retain your position as head of this team, of course, because this project takes priority over everything else. There is, however, one further thing: trust. It is of extreme importance that we are able to trust you. Bringing you up into the elite ranks of the Huntsmen Corporation requires an immense deal of trust, and if you ever betray us, it will come at an unimaginable cost to both yourself and anyone close to you. You do understand that this, yes?’

  Ms Fang nodded and swallowed slowly.

  ‘I understand. What can I do to prove my trustworthiness to you?’

  The faintest, most subtle hint of a smile showed its sickle edges at the corners of Mr Wang’s mouth.

  ‘There must be some on your team who are perhaps not quite as loyal as they should be. Who may be, how do I say, weak of character. Able to be bought out by a rival corporation, perhaps, willing to sell our secrets to the highest bidder. You’ve been working on this team for what, sixteen years now? You surely know the strengths – and weaknesses – of every member, do you not?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You understand that anyone who harbours even the most remote possibility of being a traitor must be dealt with immediately. This is crucial to the success of this project; secrecy is of the utmost importance. We cannot tolerate anyone who might compromise the classified nature of this project.’

  Ms Fang’s face was blank as marble-carved death mask, but an almost vicious keenness crackled in her eyes.

  ‘What would you have me do? Whatever it is, I’ll do it.’

  Mr Wang placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it gently and reassuringly and flashed her a subtle yet rather terrifying smile.

  ‘Names, my dear. That’s all we need from you at this point. Just a few names. Anyone on the team who may be a … liability.’

  ‘I can give you names. Yes, yes … I can give you names.’

  ‘Excellent. Huntsmen Inc has many ways of making people … disappear.’

  ‘I can tell you some names right now,’ she blurted out, almost too eagerly.

  Mr Wang chuckled.

  ‘Enthusiastic, you are! Excellent. Your ambition is dripping from your pores like sweat on a Shanghai summer day. I like that. You’ll do well with us.’

  ‘I think I will,’ she said softly, and with that, she began listing the names of those colleagues of hers whose lives would be over before the end of the week.

  28

  NATHAN

  5th October 2020. Elderwood Plantation mansion, USA

  The sky overhead was a rich hue of blue, and the lawn seemed to glow with an oversaturation of green, drizzled with a shimmering mist of bronze from above. The flowerbeds were an explosion of candy colours frozen in motion, and the walls of the enormous mansion were spotless enough, on this bright day, to cause snow blindness. Nathan Deveraux puffed contentedly on his pipe, watching Samuel and his friend Callum racing across the grass, their arms extended horizontally as they pretended to fly. At the poolside, Susanna was lounging on a deck chair, applying bright green paint to her toenails with careful strokes. Nathan stared at the teenager for a while as his thoughts moved, as they often did, to future possibilities.

  The girl had won the genetic lottery; she had inherited the best genes from both sides of the family while avoiding the worst. She had her mother’s model looks and lithe, long-limbed figure, but possessed neither her air-headed stupidity nor her weak, instant-gratification-driven personality that catalysed so many of her addictions. From her father – Nathan’s son – she had inherited his charisma, sharp intellect and calculating edge for diplomacy and manipulation, but not his squat form, excessive body hair and coarse, unattractive features. A successful career in Hollywood was assured her; indeed, with Nathan’s connections it was a given.

  He didn’t like the fact that he could hear the music blaring in her earphones from across the pool; that could cause permanent hearing loss, and he did not want to see his future investment damaged. Before he could chastise her, however, the phone started buzzing.

  ‘Nathan Deveraux here,’ he said curtly. As he listened to the words the voice on the other end was saying, his face folded into a grim frown. ‘I understand,’ he muttered after a few moments. ‘I’ll be there shortly.’

  With that he cut off the call and stood up with the aid of his narwhal cane. He waved to Susanna, who only looked up after some rather wild gesticulating on the part of her grandfather.

  ‘Yeah grandpa? What?’ she yelled, trying unsuccessfully to disguise her annoyance at the fact that he had unplugged her from total social media immersion.

  ‘I have to go out,’ he answered curtly. ‘Business call, urgent matter. You keep an eye on your brother now please, and for your own sake keep the volume in those damned headphones down!’

  He hurried over to the house to get changed, dragging his gammy left leg, as he always did. In the thickness of trees and vegetation at the edge of the expansive grounds, a waifish figure, dressed in camouflage and armed with a suppressed M-16 assault rifle, glided with swift and silent purpose, shadowing his every movement.

  Half an hour later Nathan was being ferried along the interstate in the back one of his Range Rover SUVs. His chauffeur accidentally met his eyes, while glancing in the rear-view mirror to check that the bodyguards were following on their motorcycles at an appropriate distance. The man quickly averted his gaze; a lowly driver did not look Nathan Deveraux in the eye. Ever.

  Next to Nathan, in the passenger seat, sat his primary bodyguard, the one who had been patrolling the forests of his mansion grounds – an East Asian girl, from the secret facility in China. She was an A-grader; Nathan wasn’t going to take any chances with his life, anywhere or any time. She remained silent, but her eyes were everywhere, always scanning, always analysing.

  Nathan’s phone buzzed again, and before he answered it he set down his tablet, upon which he was examining a digital brief.

  ‘Deveraux,’ he answered flatly.

  ‘This is Agent Silveira, sir. He’s going to wake up any moment, and when he does, well, he’ll be pissed, sir. If he shifts forms, we’ll have a situation on our hands. We’d obviously hate to have to terminate him … but we’ve been given the authority to do so if such a course of action becomes necessary, sir.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Nathan growled, ‘not until I get there.’

  ‘Permission to terminate the subject comes from the very top. I’m afraid you don’t have the authority to overturn that … sir.’

  ‘I’ll fucking terminate you if I get there and the subject is dead, is that understood you fucking piss-ant?!’

  ‘Understood. Try make your way here ASAP though, sir.’

  ‘Fuck off!’

  With his temper boiling, Nathan reached for the door, wanting to fling the phone out onto the freeway. He forced himself to stop, though, before actually undertaking that course of action.

  ‘Useless goddamned sons of bitches,’ he growled. ‘Pieces of rat shit, fucking diseased whores’ haemorrhoids. Driver! Step on that fucking gas pedal! Go, go!’

  ‘Sir, um, the possibility of—’

  A pulsating vein threatened to burst through the skin of Nathan’s crimson neck as he leaned forward and roared at the driver.

  ‘I don’t fucking care! Step on it, you worthless cum-stain!’

  The driver nodded, shi
fted gears and floored the accelerator without any further protest.

  Around thirty minutes later they arrived at their destination: an abandoned US Airforce base – or, at least what appeared to be an abandoned base. As the Range Rover pulled up to the rusty gates, two men in black suits and sunglasses came out of a crumbling guard hut, brandishing M-16 rifles, which they shouldered and aimed at the car as Nathan rolled his window down.

  ‘At ease boys,’ he said, staring coolly down the barrels of the assault rifles.

  ‘Sir,’ they barked in unison, immediately lowering their weapons and saluting.

  One man scanned the road for anyone following the convoy, while the other unlocked and heaved open the decaying gate.

  ‘Lock it up again, and lock it tight,’ Nathan commanded, staring out the window at the nearest man as his chauffeur drove into the base, followed by the two riders on their motorcycles.

  They rolled past rotting planes and other rusting hulks, and then pulled up in front of an enormous aircraft hangar. Two more men were waiting there, and they hauled open the hangar doors, which were bent, dented and covered in badly peeling, sun-faded paint. As the vehicles entered though, the scenery changed completely. Everything inside was new, spotless and gloriously hi-tech; there was technology in this hangar that the rest of the world – even the most connected and clued-up of technophiles – had no idea even existed. Men and women in white lab-coats and safety googles hurried about with a buzzing sense of purpose and drive, while soldiers, armed to the teeth, patrolled and kept a watchful eye on everything. This was Thule, one of the primary Huntsmen bases, a place from which the Huntsmen Corporation planned, coordinated and controlled many of its most secretive activities across the world.

  Another of the board members, Tarek Hajjar, flanked by two elite female bodyguards and dressed in long white Arabic robes, was waiting for Nathan. Tarek was a short, portly fellow, and his round face was dominated by a noticeably skew nose, cauliflower ears and heavily scarred eye-rims; in the days of his youth he had been a champion boxer, and the scars that remained bore testament to many hard rounds in the ring. He had won most of his matches by KO, and was as ruthless a negotiator and businessman as he had been as a boxer. Nonetheless, he conducted himself with an air of quiet dignity, and in his soft-spoken manner of speech, with his understated hand gestures, he came across as genteel, trustworthy and compassionate – a façade that rather effectively masked his true nature.

  When Nathan’s chauffeur opened the door and guided the old man out, Tarek bowed stiffly and smiled.

  ‘Nathan, it is good to see you, despite the circumstances of our meeting.’

  Nathan subtly puffed out his chest, tightened his shoulders and stiffened his back, making sure that his posture was ramrod-straight; no sign of weakness could be shown here. He strode up to Tarek, doing his best to mask the limp in his left leg. His A-grader protector followed at a respectful distance, as did his other two bodyguards, two burly men dressed in black who had been riding motorcycles.

  ‘Tarek. Always a pleasure. Now, shall we?’

  ‘We shall. Come, the subject has just regained consciousness. He is still groggy from the anaesthetic, but he is presently capable of something resembling coherence.’

  The rich Oxford accent in which Tarek spoke English – his fourth language out of twelve in which he boasted fluency, yet one in which he communicated as smoothly as any native speaker – annoyed the hell out of Nathan. All manner of British accents seemed to get on his nerves, especially the ones he perceived to be emblematic of Old-World pompousness and colonial snobbery. Tarek’s accent was definitely one of these; every inflection and mispronounced vowel made his skin crawl with a very particular kind of loathing. He shuddered at the thought that he would have to deal with yet another British accent, this one from an actual Englishwoman, Duchess Emily Younghusband, another board member who was waiting for them downstairs. Nathan found her accent, a cultured northern English one, to be a few degrees more tolerable than Tarek’s though. Well, perhaps one degree, maybe one point five.

  With this barely concealed contempt bristling just below the surface of his tanned skin, Nathan straightened his tie – gunmetal grey, to match his dark grey suit, under which he wore a stylish black shirt – and limped after Tarek and his female bodyguards, with his own protectors bringing up the rear. One of the black-suited soldiers led them to an elevator and opened the doors to it with a triple scan: retina, thumbprint and forehead-implanted chip.

  ‘Livin’ in, the land down under,’ Nathan sang under his breath; his own little joke whenever he journeyed to the lower section of the base, located a mile and a half under the ground.

  All of them stood in silence in the elevator as it whisked them along a silky-smooth passage through the crust of the earth. Nathan continued to hum the Men At Work tune the whole way down. He knew the others could just discern the notes, and he hoped that the song irritated Tarek as much as Tarek’s accent and lazy, thick-lidded eyes annoyed him.

  A blue button flashed, indicating that they had reached their destination. The doors opened without fanfare, and they entered another hall filled with technological wonders and busy workers. The Duchess was there to greet them, dressed in a subdued green business suit that complemented her dazzling emerald eyes and crown of red hair, which retained the richness of its natural auburn hue despite her fifty-nine years on this planet. She cut an imposing figure; at six foot two she was taller than most men, and she was heavy of bone structure and broad-shouldered to boot. Her oblong face was dominated, structurally, by a strong, jutting chin, and although her hands were adorned with an array of feminine jewellery and decorations, there was a distinctly masculine cast to the length and thickness of her fingers.

  ‘Honourable fellow board members,’ she said with a slight bow, ‘you have arrived just in time. The thing has awoken, and it is ready to communicate with us.’

  The Duchess never referred to beastwalkers using human personal pronouns – she only used ‘it’ or ‘they’.

  ‘Excellent, Duchess,’ Tarek replied in his soft voice, beaming a smile at her. ‘Shall we go and speak to the creature, then?’

  ‘Aye, we shall. After me, gentlemen.’

  ‘I’ll take the lead, as we discussed,’ Nathan said. ‘I know it’s not ideal to keep a beastwalker alive, not while—’

  ‘Well the only other option would have been termination—’ Tarek began.

  ‘A solution that I cannot recommend strongly enough,’ the Duchess interrupted, speaking harshly. ‘You know how much of a farce, nay, an outright failure I believe the Alliance project to be. It served our predecessors well enough, but over the last half century it has become increasingly irrelevant. Termination of every one of these … things … should be our policy once again, as it was for centuries.’

  Nathan agreed completely with this sentiment; he wanted the Alliance dead and buried, for a variety of reasons. Tarek and the Duchess were two of his key allies, and both backed his proposal to nullify the Alliance. They did not yet, however, have the strength of numbers necessary to do this.

  ‘Now hold your horses there, Duchess,’ he said cautiously. ‘We all have strong feelings about the matter, you especially, and we understand and respect that, ain’t that right Tarek?’

  Tarek nodded, curving his lips upward into a respectful smile.

  ‘I realise,’ Nathan continued, ‘that we need to kill every last one of the Rebels, especially Gisborne. But we must find the Mothers … you understand that too, don’t you? And now we’re in a better position to do that than ever before in history! I want to take down the Alliance project as badly as you do, Duchess, believe you me, but we have to be patient, and strike when the time is right.’

  The Duchess regarded Nathan with a cold glare and parted her lips to speak, but decided against it at the last moment and remained silent instead.

  ‘What some of us tend to forget,’ Nathan continued coolly, ‘is that the Alliance was not on
ly about harnessing beastwalker powers for our own good, but also dividing them, turning them against each other, and thereby severely weakening the Rebels by having them fight a war on two fronts instead of just one. The ol’ divide-and-conquer strategy, see? And in that respect – weakening and dividing them – the project has been a runaway success. As much as I hate to admit that, it is a fact, and we can’t deny that. But things are gonna be changing, and changing soon. Real soon. Once the Rebels are finally broken, and once all access to the Ancient Powers has been destroyed, then we can turn on our Alliance partners. We hit ‘em fast and hard; a Night of the Long Knives, as such. After that, we can focus one hundred percent on finding the Mothers … but only after the Rebels have been defeated and eliminated.’

  The Duchess spoke in a soft, cool tone that betrayed none of the seething emotions boiling beneath her freckled skin.

  ‘Aye, I understand, and you know that you have my support for this, as much as I dislike it.’

  ‘Right now we don’t have much of a choice anyway. Ma’s being real hush-hush about this new tech development that he seems to think is gonna be a game-changer.’

  Tarek nodded and began to speak.

  ‘My sources have been unable to unearth any significant details about the project. Have any of you two been able to find out anything?’

  The Duchess shook her head, as did Nathan.

  ‘Ma’s got the lid screwed on real tight,’ Nathan muttered. ‘That sumbitch ain’t letting a single damn detail out. But he’s demanded that we provide him with a beastwalker, alive, kicking and relatively willing. So here we are, doing what we’re told.’