by Rob Jones
“A joke, how British of you... but I thought you would be more interested in her – she is after all the person who killed Felix Hoffmann.”
Hawke finally got his breath back and looked hard at the woman... so she was where all this had started back in Paris.
“I thought,” continued Sheng smugly, “that framing the traitor Dragonfly was a particularly nice touch of hers, but then that’s the Lotus, always thinking outside of the box. Please don’t underestimate her diminutive stature, Mr Hawke. That was Hoffmann’s mistake. The Lotus is an expert in Jeet Kun Do, Jiu Jitsu and Muy Thai.”
“Thank you, but I’ve already eaten today.”
Sheng was expressionless. “I’m glad you have a sense of humor, Mr Hawke. You will need it a great deal over the next few hours.”
Hawke ignored the threat. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“Because I can, is the simple answer. The pursuit of the elixir is a venerable Chinese tradition going all the way back to our very first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, Mr Hawke, as I hope you are aware. I am merely following in a long line of brilliant leaders who desired the ultimate power for themselves.”
“Like Hugo Zaugg, you mean?”
Sheng laughed loudly. “Mr Hawke, please don’t make me laugh. Hugo Zaugg was a small-time amateur compared with me. In fact, as you may know, he was in my employ. Leading a man with his particular psychology to believe he was searching for the map for himself was very easy. Only when he discovered that it was not in Poseidon’s tomb did I redirect my studies elsewhere.”
“And that’s when you found out about Qin?”
“Indeed. I have known about his brave search for the elixir almost all of my life, but it was only when we realized the map was not in the Greek tomb that it became apparent that someone had raided the tomb and removed it. With a little help from Professor Felix Hoffman and the Reichardt Papers we were able to work out that the Secret History of the Mongols had a previously unknown thirteenth chapter, and that in that document we would find the final piece of our puzzle.”
“Only we got there first.”
“Too bad for you, but yes. Now we know that the legends were right, and that the map was raided by men working on the instructions of Emperor Qin himself, and brought back here to Chinese civilization.”
“How did you know we would go to Dr Tsao in Beijing?”
“A simple deduction. Tsao is a world-renowned scholar of ancient Chinese and Mongolian studies, and an acknowledged expert on deciphering linguistic codes. As soon as we cracked the Reichardt Papers we knew we would need Tsao, but as you say, you got there first. We would have beaten you to it had the Lotus brought Hoffman to me alive, as were her instructions, but she has always been very difficult to control and is not the most reliable assassin.”
“You just can’t get the staff these days.”
Sheng was silent for a long time, and then he spoke. “Won’t you please join me?”
Before he could answer, Hawke felt another hefty whack delivered by the Lotus, this time in the small of his back. It was her way of hinting that he should walk with Sheng Fang.
With Lea back in the office, they led Hawke and Han along a plush corridor and into a large chrome elevator. Seconds later they emerged on the roof of the skyscraper. It was a vast area of satellite dishes, industrial-sized water pipes and humming air-conditioning vents. Above the city of Beijing hovered an ominous brown smog.
Sheng wandered casually to the edge of the roof, hands in pockets. He glanced down over the side for a few moments and stepped back. “You see before you the rise of the dragon, Mr Hawke. For hundreds of years your Western nations pillaged us, and humiliated us. Your imperial power took everything from us and left us a burned-out husk, but now all of that is changing.”
“If you say so.”
“We are now the most powerful economy on earth, Mr Hawke, overtaking even the United States. Soon we will dwarf that country, and then we will expand. Our military has the fastest growing blue-water navy in the world, and we launch a new submarine every few months. Soon we will make the Pacific Ocean our private playground.”
“You’re as mad a box of frogs, Sheng.”
“You will find out what insanity is only when your country is humiliated like mine was. What man doesn’t desire that kind of revenge?”
“To be honest, all I want these days is a quiet night in front of the TV.”
“Always with the jokes... but life is more serious than you admit. Your Western ideas have dominated our world because of your military and economic power, but now we are overtaking your military and economic power the ideas will soon change too. The world will have our values, not yours.”
Hawke laughed. “And how do you plan to make all this happen?”
“I am the Thunder God, Mr Hawke! Reincarnated and ready to take my destiny in my own hands. What I make happen will happen. It is preordained.”
“Better make that five boxes of frogs!”
“Ah – you think it is insanity to talk of being a god... of course you do! You have such an ordinary mind. You should ask yourself what makes a god?”
Sheng clicked his fingers and the Lotus and another guard dragged a woman from the elevator. She was unconscious, so he had the Lotus kick her in the stomach. Seconds later she was awake and gasping for breath.
Hawke saw Han’s eyes widen in horror. “What is it, Han?”
“That’s my sister! They have my sister!”
“A god is a god because he is immortal, Mr Hawke,” Sheng continued, watching the poor woman with relish in his eyes. “A god may give life and take life.”
“A few assumptions there, but do go on... I haven’t had a good sleep in a long time.”
Sheng ignored him. “And so if a mortal man could become immortal then would he not be a god?”
Sheng spoke in rapid Mandarin to the Lotus and she dragged the woman to the edge of the skyscraper. She made no effort to escape and a look of total despair spread across her face like a hideous shadow.
“The God of Thunder, Mr Hawke – Lei Gong! A genius! A powerful and divine ruler who used his omnipotence to punish sinners – but he was once a mortal man, just like me. A mortal man who tasted the peach of immortality... and I too will drink of the elixir that gives eternal life, and have the total power and knowledge that comes with it!”
“I’ve heard it all before, Sheng,” Hawke said, thinking of Switzerland. He knew he had to stand up to this maniac and not show any sign of weakness. “Zaugg had the same look in his eyes as you do now – until I killed him, that is.”
“As I have said, poor Hugo had no real fight in him. He was obsessed with his father’s Nazi legacy and allowed too much of the past to cloud his mind. Also, he made the fundamental mistake of surrounding himself with idiots, which I have not done.”
As he said these words, the elevator doors opened to reveal a stocky man with a long pony tail and wispy black beard. He stalked across the roof of the building and approached Sheng. They exchanged a few quick words, and then Sheng turned to Hawke.
“This is the indispensable Mr Luk, from Hong Kong. He has certain unique talents which are hard to come by, but so necessary in my line of work.”
Luk’s face was expressionless, his eyes cold as sharpened steel.
The Lotus held Han’s sister on the edge, where one nudge meant a fall of hundreds of feet to her certain death. Luk joined her and grabbed Han’s sister by the neck.
“Where is the final chapter of the Secret History?” Sheng demanded, staring expressionless at Han.
“I... I don’t know,” Han said, glancing from his terrified sister to Hawke.
“An unfortunate lack of knowledge on your part,” Sheng said, and ordered Lynn Han an inch closer to the edge. Luk and the Lotus pushed her almost over the side, holding on to her by her arms.
“Please!” Han screamed. “Don’t hurt her. She knows nothing.”
“Don’t tell them, Qiao!” his sister screamed.
�
�I assure you I am not bluffing, monk,” Sheng said firmly. “In less than a minute your sister is about to commit a terrifying and extremely painful suicide. The location of Khan’s manuscript, now!”
“I... I...” Han shut his eyes tight and shook his head in disbelief. Hawke had been to the same place in his mind, but knew it wouldn’t help Han change the reality of the situation no matter how much he wanted it to.
“You’ll pay for your life with this, Sheng,” Hawke shouted. “I’ll see to that personally.”
Sheng was calm and undeterred. “I think not, Englishman.” He stepped closer to Han, almost face to face now, and lowered his voice to a whisper, icy cold and emotionless. “Last chance – the location of the missing manuscript or she dies, right now.”
Hawke saw Han wrestling with his terrible situation. On one hand, his very own sister, her life in his hands, and on the other, a lifelong vow of the most grave import.
“I..., Lynn... I’m...sorry...” He lowered his head and began to sob.
Sheng raised his chin and looked at Han with something that might have resembled respect in a man with any humanity. Then, with no further thought he snapped his fingers a final time and Luk and the Lotus launched Lynn Han over the side of the building. They all heard her screams recede into the busy Beijing bustle. Moments later the sound of car horns and sirens.
Han collapsed and screamed with rage on the concrete roof of the skyscraper. Hawke clenched his jaw and fixed his eyes on the monster who had ordered an innocent woman’s death right in front of him.
“I can see your psychological training is indomitable, monk,” Sheng said. “But if I cannot break the mind, I will break the body.”
He ordered Luk and the Lotus over to Han, where they roughly hauled him to his feet and Hawke saw the monk’s tear-streaked face in the bright sunshine. His neck muscles were bulging with rage as he began screaming at Sheng in Mandarin, but Hawke needed no translation to understand what was being said.
Before Han could finish his threat, Luk punched him in the back of his head and knocked him out. Moments later they were tying him to the side of an industrial air-conditioning unit. Then, Luk tore the shirt from the monk’s back as the Lotus pulled a horsewhip from her belt and prepared to whip him until he gave the location of the missing text.
A wave of crushing disappointment and anger rushed over Hawke as he watched the eyes of Sheng, Luk and the Lotus settle on the monk’s back for the first time and behold the elaborate tattoo. Sheng smirked. They had what they wanted, and when Han awoke from his unconsciousness, he would know he had lost his sister for nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Shanghai
Jason Lao had turned the top floor of an abandoned office building into a temporary HQ and Scarlet was silently impressed as she watched a group of men in boiler suits add the finishing touches to the office – wifi routers – telephones and laptops.
They had landed back in Shanghai less than one hour ago and after a rendezvous with Ryan, Sophie and Commodore Hart they travelled across the city in a private SUV to meet Lao. Scarlet was used to working fast and moving even faster, but even she had found a moment on the plane to think about what fate might have dealt Hawke, Lea and Han since their kidnapping back in the capital.
Now, somewhere in the distance she recognized General Frank McShain as he stood among a small group of American and Chinese military personnel. She considered how big and real a threat had to be to bring the American and Chinese military top brass together like this, and the conclusion was an unsettling one.
Lao and Lexi shared a few words of Mandarin before they were all invited to sit down for the briefing, which would be delivered by General McShain in English first. Scarlet took a seat at the back – an old habit – and Hart joined her, along with Ryan and Sophie. She watched Bradley Karlsson with more than a little suspicion as he took a seat at the front alongside Lexi Zhang and Jason Lao.
“As you know,” McShain began. “We are here to neutralize a serious threat that is jeopardizing both our nations and many others. That threat is the billionaire telecoms magnate and people trafficker Sheng Fang.”
Scarlet watched a ripple of excitement, tinged with apprehension go around the office. Something told her she was about to get the fight of her life.
“It has come to our attention that Sheng Fang is seeking a very ancient power the likes of which no one on Earth has experienced for millennia. We don’t know exactly what form this power will come in, but we do know...” McShain took a breath and looked anxiously around the room. All eyes were on him, hanging on his every word.
“He can hardly believe he’s about to say it,” Scarlet said.
McShain cleared his throat. “But we do know it more than likely contains the power to greatly extend a man’s life, possibly infinitely.”
The room erupted with agitation when the general delivered these words, with American and Chinese intelligence operatives and military personnel hardly able to believe their own ears.
“Everyone calm down!” McShain said firmly. “That’s enough!”
The room settled.
“I know what it sounds like, but there it is. We have very good intel on this, part of which came from a recent attempt to secure the...ah... power that I just described by a man named Hugo Zaugg, who thanks to British intelligence we now believe was being used as a sort of puppet by Sheng.”
“And what about the burning sky reference?” Scarlet called out from the back.
McShain looked at her with irritation as another wave of concern rippled through the room.
“That is nothing to be concerned about.”
“What does she mean?” shouted a man in the front row.
“It's nothing, like I said,” the general repeated. “There is a peripheral reference to the sky setting on fire if the source of eternal life is ever manipulated by mortal man, but that is not our concern right now. We don’t know what it means, if it means anything at all – and it’s just another reason for us to redouble our efforts to stop Sheng from getting his hands on the map that leads to this power, at all costs.”
Ryan smirked. “Nice work. You really put him on the spot.”
“Yeah, but I bet he’s not going to mention the Tesla device,” Scarlet said with a palpable lack of surprise in her voice.
“Hardly a shocker,” Hart said.
“Very funny,” Sophie said.
Scarlet remembered that only she, Hawke and Lexi had been at that meeting back in Hong Kong. “But Lao knows. I was in the office when McShain told us about someone swiping it from the American transport vessel. We now know that was Sheng.”
McShain ran through a raft of tactical details about Sheng’s retreat on Dragon Island, most of it garnered by on-going satellite surveillance, others gathered by spies posing as fishermen or tourists in the water park. He explained how Sir Richard Eden had confirmed that Lea’s tracker showed they were in the air, and sat-surveillance showed the airfield on Dragon Island was being readied for the flight so the inference was they would land on the island, not Shanghai.
“Another thing we all need to be aware of is that a few hours ago Sheng took two of our people and a third man hostage. They are Joe Hawke, a former British Special Forces man with considerable experience, and Lea Donovan, a former Ranger with the Irish Army. Both are very capable people who are able to look after themselves in grim situations like this but at this moment in time we have no idea if they are alive or not. The same goes for the monk. All personnel need to be aware of these three friendlies during the assault. The last thing I want to hear about is their deaths from friendly fire.”
Upon hearing McShain’s terse words and grim analysis, Scarlet thought about Hawke and Lea and whether Sheng had killed them or not. She thought not, because they would be good to barter if things got really sticky during a firefight and he was backed into a corner. But then second-guessing the logic of egomaniacs was never a great idea.
She wondered how
Hawke would react if anything happened to Lea, knowing the terrible impact that Liz’s death in Hanoi had made on him all that time ago. She had heard about the murder when she returned from a joint SAS-SBS operation to rescue two kidnapped journalists in Iraq.
That was a good mission. They arrived by helicopter and marched for six hours in order to conduct a surprise attack on a compound near the Jabal Kumar mountain. They rescued both the hostages and killed all fourteen of the kidnappers in less than four minutes. Scarlet was disappointed. She had made a bet it could be done in less than three.
But when she was on the transport back to England, one of Hawke’s colleagues in the SBS had gotten wind of the murder and told everyone on the plane. She phoned Hawke when she landed but he had already dropped off the radar. When he resurfaced weeks later she tracked him down to his house, sitting in a darkened room with his hands wrapped around a bottle of cheap Scotch.
She hoped nothing like that ever happened to him again, and she put the whole thing behind her and focused. All those years in the SAS had to add up to something other than a reputation, after all, and she returned her attention to McShain’s briefing, which, she hoped, might at some point get interesting enough to pay attention to.
*
Later, after the briefing, Ryan and Sophie made use of one of the laptops to get deeper into their research of Sheng and the Tesla threat. Scarlet walked over with Olivia Hart while Lao and McShain finalized details with their teams in preparation for the assault.
“I noticed McToughnuts over there never mentioned the Tesla device,” Scarlet said, gesturing at McShain. “Anything about that?”
Ryan nodded grimly. Scarlet had only known him a short time, but lately he seemed to have aged a lot. She could see rings around his eyes from the lack of sleep and he seemed to spend a lot of time drinking coffee and Coke to keep himself going.
“Yes, but not a lot,” he said in reply. “As you can guess, to say a device like that would be classified is a ludicrous understatement and I’ve been trying to look at stuff away from what McShain’s already given me, just to make sure we’re getting the whole picture.”