Chant stepped back three paces where he could cover both Bai and Soussan, then turned to the stunned Baldauf, who was staring in disbelief, mouth open, at the old man on the floor. “The only thing Master Bai loves more than ritualistic challenge is a good show,” Chant said to the pale-faced fat man. “Rising from the dead and killing me in front of your eyes at dawn was going to be his little surprise for you; he wanted to make an impression. Actually, you’re probably lucky I’m still around to protect you, Baldauf. All I’ll take is your money. I do believe you made Master Bai cranky with your remark about his being a ‘Jap asshole fake.’ He would have taught you a few things about pain.”
“Chant,” Soussan whispered, her voice hollow “I can explain. I love you. Look at me, please.”
“I can see you, sweetie.”
“Please look at me directly, Chant. Look into my face, my eyes. See what’s there.”
“I know what’s there, and I can see you clearly enough to put a bullet in your brain the instant you start to make any sudden move. Don’t test me, sweetie.”
“No, Chant,” Soussan said in a clear, firm voice “You can’t kill me.” But she remained still.
“Your three killers were never the point, Sensei,” Chant said to the old Japanese who was now staring up at him as he lay on his belly, his broken arms and legs splayed out to his sides The eyes glowed with naked hate and pain “Ko, Yabu, and Kiyama weren’t the challenge—you undoubtedly suspected from the beginning that I could defeat them. They were just meant to distract me while your most dangerous weapon—your granddaughter—went to work on my head. Both of you may have sensed that it was your three men, not me, who were about to die earlier, and so Soussan killed them—something she planned to do anyway, eventually, to ‘save’ me and try to gain my trust so that this show could be set up. Baldauf has the shit scared out of him, all seems lost, and then—Voilà! Good stuff, Sensei. Too bad the show’s closing out of town.”
Bai laughed in his thin, high-pitched, nasal giggle, then torturously lifted one shattered arm and pointed a long, bony finger at Chant. “You are wrong, John. If you will look at Soussan, you will see that the curtain has not come down yet.”
“If I have to put a bullet through your brain to convince you that it is down, Sensei, I will. Yield, and do it convincingly, and I’ll let your granddaughter drag you back home to die in peace. Knowing you, you’ll develop a whole new school of wheelchair martial arts—but I’ll risk it.”
“Look at my granddaughter, John.”
Chant remained perfectly still, eyes fixed on the old Japanese.
“Are you beginning to understand that you’ve lost, John?” Bai continued. “The scar on your cheek; the real wound is in your heart, and it will never heal. What entered your bloodstream when Soussan scratched you was an unbelievably powerful hypnotic drug and aphrodisiac which, if the old manuscripts are to be believed, binds a man forever to the first woman with whom he has sexual contact. I’m told it’s quite effective. I would appreciate your opinion, John. Is the potion as powerful as the ancient masters claimed?”
Chant said nothing, gritted his teeth against the hammering of his heart and the insistent throb of his stiff penis.
“Ah,” Bai continued in a sibilant whisper when he saw Chant’s reaction. “Now I believe you understand; you’ve suspected from the beginning, but were powerless to do anything about it. You were lost from the moment Soussan put the mark on your cheek and kissed you. However, you’re quite wrong about any intent to kill you. Why waste such a fighter? Mr. Baldauf wanted your balls. He may or may not have been speaking figuratively, but I chose to take his request literally. He shall have your balls, perhaps to pickle and put in a jar on his desk.”
“Yeah.” Baldauf’s voice was like an obscene prayer. “I’d like that.”
“But I shall have you, John,” Bai said. “Castration should not effect your fighting abilities too much, and it won’t effect your considerable intelligence and tactical abilities at all. You’ve put me in a wheelchair, but you shall now be my arms and legs and eyes, roaming the world to carry out assignments that come to me, and training my apprentices You’ll do this because, from time to time, Soussan will reward you by allowing you to use her body for whatever degree of sexual satisfaction you will still be able to enjoy. Finally, after all these years, I will get my due. Black Flame shall claim you.”
The first rays of dawn spilled in through the windows, making the swirling dust motes from the disturbed tapestry glow golden.
“Now, Grandfather?” Soussan asked in a mild, matter-of-fact tone.
“Yes,” Bai replied. “Present Mr. Baldauf with his trophies.”
“Chant, darling,” Soussan murmured. “Please look at me. I promise that you’ll like what you see.”
As when Soussan had first scratched his cheek, Chant felt dizzy and disoriented. Feeling like a marionette controlled by invisible strings emanating from Soussan’s voice, Chant found himself slowly turning to directly face the woman, who had risen to her feet.
Soussan removed the clasp at her shoulder, shrugged. The ceremonial robe whispered down off her body, came to rest in a multicolored mound at her feet. Like the dust motes in the air, her naked body glowed golden in the dawn.
A long, curved dagger identical to the one Bai had used glinted in her hand, and she used the flat of the blade to slowly lift her breasts, tease her stiff nipples. She pulled the dull back of the blade slowly through her crotch, and the steel came away slick.
“I want you to fuck me, Chant,” Soussan whispered as she winked at him, then opened her mouth wide and rolled her tongue over her lips. “I want to suck you, and have you suck me—one last time.”
Chant, feeling as if there were a great sea anchor strapped to his wrist, brought the .45 around, centered it on Soussan’s chest. Sweat poured from his forehead, rolled into his eyes and stung them.
Soussan, dagger held out in front of her, stepped out of the circle of the robe and walked slowly toward him. Her eyes were very bright, burning with Black Flame.
Bai cackled. “She’s going to slice off your balls, John. Why don’t you kill her? Quickly now … she’s almost on you! Ah, but your love is too strong, your lust too overwhelming. I win! You can’t kill her!”
“Ah, but I can,” Kim Chi said as she stepped down from the curtained alcove where Soussan had first appeared and fired off a burst from the Uzi submachine gun Chant had given her into Soussan’s midsection. Soussan died instantly, yet Kim Chi kept firing. Blood and pieces of torn flesh splattered in the face of the old Japanese as his granddaughter’s body spun and danced in the air under the relentless impact of the bullets. Finally, Kim Chi took her finger off the trigger As the shattering roar of the gun ceased, Soussan’s pulped corpse collapsed to the floor at Chant’s feet.
Chant felt as if his world were collapsing in on itself; the only emotions inside himself he could touch were loneliness and despair The best he could hope for, he thought, was to somehow keep functioning—and hide his feelings.
“You brought Soussan and your men in here under the nose of a cretin, Sensei,” Chant said. His jaws ached with tension, and his tongue felt swollen—but his voice was firm and clear. “I brought Kim Chi in under the noses of two ninja.”
Bai’s parchment-colored flesh was stained with his granddaughter’s death. As he stared at what was left of Soussan, his mouth dropped open and he uttered a high-pitched, keening sound—a wail of hopelessness and irretrievable loss. Indescribable pain welled up from the bottom of his being and was translated into an eerie howl that rose and fell, echoing off the walls of the library.
“Well, old man,” Kim Chi said in a flat, pitiless tone, “now you know why he’s called ‘Chant.’ I’ve heard his enemies make that sound before.”
Bai stopped howling, fixed his hate-filled gaze on Chant. His eyes burned with the same Black Flame Chant had seen in his granddaughter’s. “You might as well have cut off your own balls when you killed Soussan
!” the old man screamed. “Do you understand?! There’ll never be another woman for you! Never!”
“Chant,” Kim Chi whispered to the gaunt, staring man, “I love you. I will heal you.”
“No!” Bai shouted. He struggled to rise, but his broken limbs would not support him, and he could only flop around on the floor “He will never be whole again! He will never be a man again!”
Kim Chi shot Bai once, through the head.
Without any change of expression, Chant turned to Baldauf. Baldauf saw the look in Chant’s eyes, backed up until he met the wall behind him.
“Hey, Sinclair,” Baldauf croaked, “I didn’t mean it about putting your balls in a jar. And I didn’t know anything about this drug business. I mean, you were going to kill me.”
“I was, wasn’t I?” Chant said evenly as he began to walk toward the other man.
“Sinclair!” Baldauf screamed. “Everything you wanted for the Hmong and yourself! It’s done! It’s yours! Just don’t kill me!”
But Chant kept coming.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Chant Series
the run
With Montsero offering a thousand dollars in bonus money to the winner, and with no rules except that the winner would be the first to cross the finish line, Chant had anticipated that there would be a lot of kicking, swinging of fists and elbows in the tightly packed starting area. Intent on masking the range of his skills from Montsero whenever possible, Chant had avoided initial physical combat by actually stepping back and to the side when Montsero had dropped his arm to signal the start of the cross-country run. As the others, cursing and swinging at one another, scrambled away, Chant unhurriedly removed his boots and socks and tossed them to the side.
Montsero grunted with surprise. “You’re not running on the beach at Acapulco, Alter. Your feet will freeze in this weather, if you don’t break a couple of toes.”
Chant merely smiled at the renegade psychologist, then started off at an easy trot after the others as the leaders disappeared over the crest of a small hill two hundred yards away.
Chant loped at an easy pace until he was over the hill, out of Montsero’s sight, then abruptly broke into a seiki-kwa style of running designed for moving with fluid grace and considerable speed over rough terrain Within a minute after shifting to seiki-kwa motion he had caught and passed the last runner besides himself at the back of the group. Chant silently shot past him, and the man could do nothing but stare in astonishment after the big man who seemed not so much to run as to float, his bare feet hardly seeming to touch the sharp rocks or frozen, rutted ground over which he passed.
The next five men were bunched together on the far side of a steep embankment leading down to a frozen stream; unwilling to risk breaking a leg by walking or running down the hill, the men were negotiating the descent on their backsides. Chant paused for just a moment at the top of the hill to gauge his own angle of descent, grinned with pleasure at the challenge offered by the precipitous slope, then leaped headfirst out into the freezing air. He hit the first patch of ice-encrusted snow on his left shoulder and rolled, coming up on his feet and immediately springing out into the air once again. In this way, by literal leaps and bounds, Chant flew down the steep embankment.
Sometimes it appeared that he must collide with one of the numerous outcroppings of sharp rock, but at the last moment he always glided just past or above them. An observer would have considered Chant’s headlong plunge down the steep, boulder-strewn slope suicidal, but in fact he was enjoying himself immensely, reveling in the sensation of flight through the cold air. All of his senses were finely focused on, tuned to, his surroundings, and his body had become not an opponent of, but part of the earth over which he traveled with such seemingly effortless grace and speed. This blood test, he thought, was perfect for his immediate purpose—which was not to win the race (which he knew he would), but to practice his very special mental and physical skills
Within five minutes he had caught the leader; the man who had sprinted out ahead of the pack at the beginning was just ahead of Chant, virtually exhausted but plodding on nonetheless. Sensing rather than hearing Chant coming up behind him, the man stopped and turned, his face flushing with consternation and rage. With Chant barely twenty-five yards away, the man picked up a sharp-edged rock and flung it at Chant, who plucked the rock out of the air and, without breaking stride, flicked his wrist and flung the rock back at the man with the speed and power of a major league catcher firing a ball to second base. The man cried out in surprise and barely managed to duck in time as the rock whistled through the air over his head.
Obviously baffled by Chant’s speed and reflexes but still enraged by the thought that he could lose the race and bonus money, the ex-convict picked up a heavy, dead branch from the ground and, cocking it like a baseball bat, moved threateningly into Chant’s path. However, at the last moment the ex-convict thought better of attacking this strange, quiet man who had nearly killed him with his return throw of the rock, he dropped the branch, then quickly backed away as Chant loped past without even glancing at him.
Alone, comfortably ahead of the others, Chant stopped and glanced around him Throughout the run he had been occasionally bothered by the feeling that he was being watched—not by the ex-convicts, who were for the most part unobservant, inarticulate and respectful only of strength, will, and ruthlessness, but by someone else. The men pitted against him in these trials would be impressed only with what he did, not by how he did it; they would take no notice of the techniques of seiki-kwa, would care only that he had somehow managed to best them.
Montsero, or another trained observer watching him from a distance, could be quite another matter.
Chant finished the run, without employing seiki-kwa, and as he crossed the finish line pretended to be much more tired than he actually was.
CHAPTER ONE
It was a typically cold, rainy English day but in the great library of the Elizabethan manor that belonged to the man known as Sir Gerald Coughlin, a bright, cheerful fire burned In an armchair by the fire sat a towering man with iron-colored eyes and close-cropped, iron-colored hair.
Few here in England knew the true identity of this man, who years before in Vietnam had been Captain John Sinclair and was now known more frequently to both friends and enemies simply as Chant John Sinclair was the Most Wanted Man on the hit lists of everyone from the CIA and the KGB to Interpol and the FBI, not to mention a hundred or so local police departments around the world. He therefore found it preferable while in England to pose as wealthy and influential Sir Gerald Coughlin.
The man who fussed with a pile of newspaper clippings on a desk in one corner of the room was one of the few who knew all of Chant’s real identities; he was Alistair Powers, valet, butler, chauffeur, personal secretary, and researcher to Chant It was his duty to collect file clippings from newspapers around the world, collate information, and suggest possible future operations At this moment, he was in the process of winding up the paperwork on a successful operation Chant had recently finished—eliminating an old-age-home scam in Florida.
As Alistair worked, he would occasionally glance up idly at the television near his desk, whose images flickered silently on an all-news channel He was about to look away, when a picture on the silent screen caught his eye—and suddenly he felt his breath catch in his throat He just managed to stifle an exclamation of shock and sorrow.
On the screen, in stark close-up, was the bloody, bullet-riddled body of a gray-haired, aristocratic-looking man whose face was now clenched in a grotesque death grimace It was a face Alistair knew very well, for he had admitted the man many times through the gates of this very house—served him drinks and dinner, talked with him It was the face of a man who had known Alistair’s secrets, as well as John Sinclair’s, and whom Alistair had liked very much.
The camera slowly panned a few feet away to the corpse of a second, bearded man dressed in ragged clothes, and Alistair received his second s
hock.
Alistair knew that his employer, whose back was to the television, could not see the images on the screen, and he quickly turned up the volume on the set, rather than waste any time alerting Chant The camera cut to a montage of Rome.
“—after pursuing some of the most powerful and dangerous men in Europe, there is perhaps more than a touch of terrible and bitter irony in the fact that Vito Biaggi finally met his death at the hands of a down-and-out, crazed American ex-convict who undoubtedly did not even know who Vito Biaggi was In what Italian authorities agree was a senseless killing—”
There were a few minutes more of the same, but the newscast was nearly finished, and the television soon switched to coverage of the busy London social scene Alistair looked up from the television to see Chant once more staring into the fire, but he knew that his employer had heard and seen the shocking news. He sat back himself and stared at the ornate ceiling as his mind turned back to the bloody images on the television set, the announcer’s voice, and thoughts of the gentle, bearish Italian magistrate who had been one of the few people entrusted with secrets that could destroy and kill John Sinclair.
Alistair had never understood the process by which his employer chose the men and women he would confide in. There were large rewards offered by organizations on both sides of the law for information leading to the capture, or death, of John Sinclair; yet he, with what seemed to Alistair casual disregard for his own safety, continued to offer to certain people he had decided to trust the secret of his real identity. Alistair, of course, was one of the select few, yet he did not understand why he had been chosen. He knew only that John Sinclair had changed his life, given him more than he had ever hoped to have in his life, and that he would gladly give his life for the enigmatic man with the iron-colored eyes and hair who offered life and justice to some, while delivering quick, often gruesome, death to others.
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