Hunt Among the Killers of Men gh-5

by Gabriel Hunt

  “Cheung has offered a flat ten million dollars to anybody who can find the terra-cotta warrior of Kangxi Shih-k’ai,” said Mitch.

  “But that makes no sense,” said Gabriel. “Kangxi Shih-k’ai lived at the end of the 19th Century—the terra-cotta warriors are two thousand years older.”

  “Kangxi Shih-k’ai apparently had his own terra-cotta army made,” Mitch said. “That’s what Valerie told me. And it has never been found.”

  “Hold on,” Gabriel said. “You’re saying he built an entire second terra-cotta army and buried it somewhere in modern China and nobody has ever heard about it except your sister?”

  “No, Mr. Hunt,” Mitch said. “Except my sister and this guy Cheung. And he’s looking for it.”

  “Did she say what he wants with it?”

  “The main resistance Cheung is getting to the rise of the CCC is from old-school Chinese traditionalists. If he can prove he’s somehow related to Kangxi Shih-k’ai, that resistance evaporates.”

  “And how would the statue prove anything?”

  “Because it contains Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s skeleton,” she said. “Sheathed in lead and gold. Or at least his skull—Valerie wasn’t clear which. But something. Something Cheung could use to perpetrate a bit of DNA flummery, I guess, or maybe that wouldn’t even be necessary. It’s such a powerful cultural icon, just possessing it would give him enormous credibility.”

  “Your sister told you this?”

  “Yeah,” said Mitch. “Right before she went to a meeting with Cheung and wound up dead.”

  The cab drew up to the curb beside Valerie’s building. Gabriel gave the driver a twenty and followed Mitch out the door.

  They plodded through the typically New York experience of the walk-up: twelve steps, turn; twelve steps more. Mitch had a fistful of keys out, but it was Lucy who reached the apartment door first. She paused, then raised one hand in a silencing gesture.

  “Hang on,” she whispered. “It’s already open.”

  Upon sighting the forced door and the visual evidence of damage to the jamb and molding from a professional jimmy—someone had come prepared enough to outfox the overkill of multiple locks in Manhattan—each of the three people in the stairwell reacted differently.

  Lucy, experienced in urban rat-traps, flattened against the wall so as to provide herself with maximum cover should an assault issue from the doorway.

  Mitch’s hand automatically flew down to draw a gun she did not possess. It was a flicker, a notion instantly replaced by the reset of her body into a defensive combat stance, one forearm up to shield, the other to strike, sharp key-points extending between her knuckles.

  Gabriel had already moved past both of them to be first through into possible hazard. “Hold it,” he whispered. “I don’t hear anything inside.”

  They were at his back (in a classic triangle defense pattern, he noticed; good for them) as he toed the door open. His perimeter senses were keyed up full. His shoulders relaxed.

  “Whatever happened here, I think they’ve already come and gone.”

  Mitch sagged as though she knew what they would find. The one-bedroom was in a state of disarray that suggested a thorough yet not particularly malicious burglary—drawers dumped, knickknacks scattered. Mitch’s eyes went straight to the desk where it looked Valerie had had her computer setup.

  “They took her hard drives,” Mitch said numbly. She dropped the keys in the newly empty space on her sister’s desk.

  Gabriel scanned the room. “Two men, I’ll bet. One for lookout, one for the turnover.” He ran a finger over the surface of the computer table. “Powder,” he noted. “They came in wearing latex gloves.” He turned to Mitch. “I don’t suppose she told you what kind of evidence she had?”

  “There wasn’t any time,” said Mitch. “She picked me up at Newark when I came in. We had lunch at some fancy joint, one of those places where they have a whole separate menu for water. We couldn’t talk too openly there, with all the waiters listening. She was going to tell me later—but first she had this meeting. I thought it was weird that it was so late at night, but she said these guys had come in internationally, were still on Shanghai time. It was a ‘face’ thing. And the meeting was important to her—she was going to confront them with what she’d found, tell them she couldn’t be involved in any sort of cover-up; she wasn’t telling them what to do, just backing out gracefully herself. You see how well that worked. I was sitting around here like a patsy when the cops showed up, and meanwhile the Zongchang boys were private-jetting it back to the CCC.”

  “So,” Gabriel said, “the first, best hope for the new, modern China, the dedicated wannabe chief big grand kahuna of the CCC, this guy who is Russian pretending to be Chinese, the guy hunting for a one-of-a-kind statue of a dead Chinese warlord, comes to New York and, confronted with evidence that he’s not what he says he is, kills the woman who found it and ransacks her apartment?” Gabriel was looking around the apartment—the leftovers of Valerie’s life—with a renewed intensity in his gaze.

  “Yeah,” said Mitch. “Or it was done on his orders.”

  Gabriel turned to Lucy. “Okay, now I’m interested.” He picked up the ring of keys. “Your sister gave you these?”

  Mitch nodded. “In case I needed to go out before she got back.”

  The bundle contained four door keys, a main entry key, a foyer key, a mailbox key, a trash-door key and a riot of dead weight in the form of a pewter Empire State Building, a rabbit’s foot (dyed pink), a big rubber sandal with the name VAL embossed on it…and something else.

  “What’s this?” said Gabriel, peering closer.

  It was a silver charm in the form of a little hardcover book about a half-inch tall. The cover was engraved with the legend DRINK ME.

  Gabriel pried the seam with a thumbnail and the tiny book popped open like a locket to reveal its cargo.

  “Aha,” he said, looking at the narrow black sliver inside. It was plastic and had tiny metal contacts at one end. “It’s a…thing.”

  “Give me that,” Lucy said. Gabriel plucked it out of the book and handed it over. He could navigate the tunnels of the Paris sewer system in the dark and tell you where an obsidian blade was made by the strike pattern on the stone edge; modern technology, though, was not his bailiwick.

  Fortunately, it was his sister’s. “Memory stick,” she said, turning the sliver over. “Four gigs. The kind you plug into a cell phone.”

  “Like this one?” Mitch held up a unit she’d unplugged from a charger dock that lay overturned on the floor. It looked like the kind of biz-crazy portable device that did everything except unzip your duds and make you see the face of God.

  “We have a winner,” Lucy said, popping a hatch on the back of the thing and sliding the stick inside.

  Mitch, meanwhile, was staring into one of the desk drawers, riffling its contents. “Her passport’s still here. Some credit cards. ID.” A tear leaked from one eye, dropped and spattered across the back of her hand.

  “Let me see that,” said Gabriel while Lucy worked on the phone. “I’d like to see her face.”

  The family resemblance was undeniable.

  “This is some bizarre stuff,” said Lucy, scrolling through data on the phone’s tiny screen. “Mostly spreadsheets, it looks like. Amounts of money, invoices, bills of lading.”

  “She must have known something was going to happen to her,” said Mitch, straining to keep the tremor in her voice from showing. Gabriel could tell she was the sort who wanted to be in control, in charge of her messier emotions, and who would beat herself up for any public display she thought looked weak. “To leave all this stuff behind.”

  “We need to print this out,” Lucy said. “You can’t read it properly on a screen this size.”

  “I’m sure Michael’s got a setup we can use, back at the town house,” Gabriel said. And to Mitch he said, “You want to come with us? I’m not sure it’s good for you to stay here alone.” He put a hand on Mitch’s
shoulder, but she shook it off.

  “I’m fine,” she said roughly, sounding anything but.

  “I’ll stay,” Lucy said. “I don’t have to be on a plane till tomorrow morning—”

  “I’m okay,” Mitch said. “You don’t have to get yourself in trouble on my account.” She turned to Gabriel. “And you don’t have to take care of me, either. I’m not a fragile flower. I’m a soldier, goddamn it. Or I used to be. I’m not going to sit around moaning or feeling frightened—I’m going to find the men who did this and make them sorry they did.”

  “Maybe,” Gabriel said. “Or maybe they’ll make you sorry you did. I don’t think you know the kind of power you’re talking about taking on.”

  “Listen, stud, if you’re scared and want to drop out, that’s fine,” Mitch said. “You posted bail. That’s plenty.”

  “If you want to go up against the CCC and you want to live to tell about it,” Gabriel said patiently, “you’ll listen to me and you’ll do it very, very carefully.”

  “He can be a pain,” Lucy said, “but he does know what he’s talking about, Mitch.”

  Mitch threw up her hands. “All right. You’ve got something to say, I’ll listen. But I’m not waiting long.”

  “Fair enough,” Gabriel said. And to Lucy: “I’ll be back as quick as I can. Couple hours at most. You guys can stick around here that long, right?” Lucy looked anxiously over at Mitch, who was pacing impatiently. She nodded.

  “All right. Call me if anything happens.”

  Gabriel left them to pick up the pieces at the apartment while he headed back to Sutton Place with the cell phone and the memory stick.

  Michael would be able to print the document, and from there, well…they’d see what they would see. He shared Mitch’s preference for action and distaste for waiting around, but jumping into a conflict with the CCC wasn’t something you did lightly.

  Or at least it wasn’t something he would do lightly.

  It wasn’t two hours later that Valerie’s cell phone, now sitting in a docking station attached to one of Michael’s computers, started vibrating, and when Gabriel opened it and brought it to his ear, he heard Lucy’s voice shouting at him. “Gabriel? That you?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s gone,” Lucy said. “I went to take a shower, and when I got out…”

  “No Mitch,” Gabriel said.

  “She left a note,” Lucy said. “Just one line.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “ ‘Enough’s enough,’ ” Lucy read. “ ‘I’m going to get those bastards.’”

  Chapter 3

  “For god’s sake, Gabriel, you don’t know anything about the Han Dynasty,” Michael grumbled. “The Later Han Dynasty? The Three Kingdoms and the Period of Disunion? You’ll never get away with it.”

  “For one or two lectures? I think I can. And then you can take over from me after that, finish the tour yourself.”

  “What, are you going to speak to Mandarin students in Cantonese?”

  “I’ll speak English. They’ll chalk it up to American arrogance and move on. They’re used to it.”

  “You…you don’t even have a degree!” Michael protested, flustered. If you started counting up Michael’s assorted doctorates on your fingers, you’d be compelled before long to remove your shoes.

  “We’re not talking about a debate, Michael. I don’t need to hold my own. You’ll give me your slides and I’ll work off them. Not like I can’t regurgitate names and dates with the best of them.”

  Michael switched gears: “You don’t even know if this Cheung had anything to do with that woman’s death.”

  “Well, according to you, these documents show he’s guilty of plenty else.” He waved the sheaf of printouts in Michael’s face. “Arms trafficking, drug smuggling, racketeering, not to mention a murder or five.”

  Michael flushed crimson. “Gabriel…it’s a different country. Different laws. We’d be intruding where we’re not invited.”

  “My specialty,” said Gabriel, with slightly more pride than he needed to drive his point home. “One day of travel in, one day out. In between, a couple of days of poking around the edges of things. See what spills forth. Michael—it’s what the Foundation does best, don’t kid yourself. You clear the paperwork and I kick down the doors.”

  “You really think,” Michael said, “there’s a second terra-cotta army out there no one’s ever seen, waiting to be discovered.”

  “I do,” Gabriel said. “And even if there isn’t, there’s a young woman out there who’s going to get herself arrested and executed for trying to kill somebody who, as you point out, we don’t even know has done anything—not to her, at least.”

  “This is the girlfriend of your…what was she again, one of your nurses in the hospital in Khartoum?”

  Gabriel had made up a story, at Lucy’s request; she didn’t want Michael to know she was in New York. So Gabriel had, but he unfortunately no longer remembered what it was he’d said. “Something like that. Look, Michael, it won’t cost much—”

  “It’s not about the money, Gabriel. It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “I agree. And as a matter of principle, I don’t like to let innocent people get themselves killed when I can prevent it.”

  “I suppose,” Michael said in a resigned tone, “you’ll be taking the jet.”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel. “For two reasons. One: I can’t go as you on a commercial flight—they’ll check my passport.”

  “What’s the other reason?”

  “Because I don’t want to run this through baggage check.”

  Gabriel hoisted up his work-belt, worn around the world in one situation or another. It was tooled steerhide with faded intaglio, furry at some of the rivets, an old friend and constant companion that had seen him through more than one tough scrape. Lashed to the belt was a big holster. Sheathed inside was an even bigger sidearm, itself a pricey antique, Gabriel’s own restored single-action Colt Peacemaker—a first-generation Cavalry model circa 1880 with the 7 1/2-inch barrel, chambered for the .45 “Long Colt” cartridge. The original heavily distressed ivory grips had been replaced, by Gabriel himself, with burnished mahogany.

  Nearly two centuries ago, Samuel Colt had been the man who did not understand the meaning of the word “impossible” when naysayers told him the idea of a repeating handgun could never be realized. While he did not actually invent the revolver, he won his first patent in the early 1800s and was instrumental in introducing the use of interchangeable, mass-produced parts.

  Whenever people said “impossible,” or that a thing should not be done or could not be done, Gabriel always thought of old Sam Colt.

  Michael was staring at his older brother with an odd tilt of his head, like an explorer mantis or a curious puppy. “Okay,” he began carefully. “What part aren’t you telling me? What are you leaving out?”

  “There is one thing,” Gabriel said.

  “I knew it.”

  “The name of the man behind the second terra-cotta army,” said Gabriel, not without a dramatic flourish. “It’s Kangxi Shih-k’ai, Michael. The Favored Son of China. The last real-man warlord before the modern world stomped them down. The Vlad the Impaler of Chinese history—the history that the Cultural Committee never talks about during stuff like the Olympics. We’re not talking about an ordinary monarch, Michael. We’re talking about one of the most frightening figures of his time, or any time. You remember what he called his champions while he was alive?”

  “The Killers of Men,” Michael murmured.

  “The Killers of Men, that’s right. And this is the man who constructed a second terra-cotta army as a monument to his ego, and nobody has ever seen it. Can you imagine what those figures must be like? Wouldn’t you want us to be the first in the world to see them, to bring them to light?”

  Gabriel hefted an original hardcover first edition of Space, Time & Earthly Gods by Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt, first published in 1982, the year th
eir daughter Lucy had been born. “Take a closer look at Appendix III—the one where they listed what they thought were the greatest undiscovered treasures of the modern world.”

  The Hunt Foundation’s foundation (as it were) was the success enjoyed by Gabriel and Michael’s parents through a series of improbably popular books that conjoined history, religion, linguistics and anthropology for the modern reader. Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt were hailed as the new Will and Ariel Durant, and at the time of their mysterious disappearance (to this day, even Michael was hesitant to say “death”), their fame had spread worldwide.

  Gabriel gestured with the book; did not open it. “It’s right there at big number four, before the Bermuda Triangle pirate shipwrecks and after the ‘lost pyramid’ scroll that supposedly explains the destiny of the world. It doesn’t say what it is, exactly, but it talks about ‘the legacy of Kangxi Shih-k’ai.’ Check Dad’s journal library and you’ll find a lead he recorded, right outside Shanghai. It’s one of the last entries before they vanished.”