Hunt Among the Killers of Men gh-5

by Gabriel Hunt

  The whole place was a hibernaculum.

  The concave dome of the ceiling was wall-to-wall with thousands of nesting bats. He could identify at least three species at this distance—the horseshoe bat, the long-fingered bat and the roundleaf bat. There were also lizards and annelids and other scavenger-parasites that fed on bat guano, which would be abundant indeed here.

  Gabriel stepped forward very cautiously.

  To either side of the pavilion he could now make out two large, hinged wooden constructions like catapults or small cranes. A shaft held an ironbound basket the size of a bale of hay aloft over a reservoir, which Gabriel presumed had once been filled with water, long-since evaporated.

  And below, massed on the floor of the huge chamber, standing in a foot-deep tar pit of urine and guano, was Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s army of life-sized figures.

  Then Gabriel heard Qi calling out to him from above, as loudly as she could, and thousands of bats took wing, flying straight for him.

  Chapter 10

  Gabriel smashed the only fuel lantern he had to make a pool of fire near the archway during his hasty retreat, but the bats’ sonar had unerringly informed them of a new way out of the cave. Some of them sported a wingspan of two feet or more.

  From Qi’s point of view it was as though Gabriel was propelled out of the base of the idol by an unbroken thunderhead of swarming bats.

  They were not vampires or the dreadnaught-sized killers of the Amazon, but this many airborne teeth and claws could make life terribly inconvenient, especially if the horde was hungry.

  Gabriel struck Qi like a linebacker, sprawling them both onto the floor, shielding her face and burying his own into her shoulder in a duck-and-cover as the black beehive madness of the bats filled the shrine room. Eventually they would peter out and find their way into the night. They were just bats. But Gabriel did not know if Qi harbored any phobias or other reactive behaviors that might complicate their survival right now.

  When the first wave ebbed, they worked together to seal the sliding iron portal. With two pairs of shoulders and thighs heaving and amped up on adrenaline, they no longer required the motorcycle to move the door.

  Stragglers winged wildly about the upper reaches of the room. Gabriel looked as though he had lost a paintball fight, and this time Qi’s reaction could not be dammed back. She found his appearance hilarious.

  “Very funny,” said Gabriel.

  “I suppose you’ll be wanting to use the bath again?” she said.

  “Briefly,” he said.

  “Bats are good luck all over Asia.”

  “But not all over my head.” Gabriel made his way to the other shrine, stripping off his shirt as he went.

  “My mother used to tell me,” Qi said, following, “if a bat lands on your head, you should hope the cricket sees rain coming because the bat won’t get off your head until it hears thunder.”

  He ducked his head under the now cool water, ran his fingers through his hair. He finally came up for air again.

  Qi was still beset with mirth over Gabriel’s condition. It buoyed him to see that Qi could laugh.

  He described for her what he’d found in the giant chamber below the statue.

  “It’s almost worth telling Cheung,” Qi said. “The thought of him rooting like a pig through tons and tons of dung, looking for his precious skeleton. On his knees. Slowly being driven mad by the smell.”

  “Except that he’d send lackeys to do the digging while he watched from a safe distance,” Gabriel said.

  “Yes, and then shoot them when they finished.” Qi wasn’t laughing anymore. “I want to see this room for myself.”

  “Then why’d I bother getting cleaned up?” Gabriel said. But the truth was, he wanted to see it again, too. His explorer glands were firing hotly already, reinvigorating him; he could feel the gnawing need to find out burning in his brain afresh. Was one of the figures Kangxi Shih-k’ai? If so, which one? You’d think a man with an ego like that would put himself at the head of his army, leading it—but in the quick glance he’d gotten, there hadn’t seemed to be such a “leader” figure. And to find any one figure hidden among the lot of them, one would have to spend hours digging through calcified strata of crap.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Before the lucky wildlife returns.”

  Gabriel’s second descent yielded three bits of information.

  One: That the bats obviously had some other way in and out of the mountainside, some path yet undiscovered, since a good portion of them had returned by the time he and Qi went down, and more filtered in every minute. Qi and Gabriel moved slowly and quietly, to avoid triggering another mad onrush.

  Two: That the catapult/crane devices were some ancient form of automated defense against intrusion into the chamber, though fortunately they had long since rotted into inutility. Peering at them more closely, Gabriel saw they were still loaded up with fist-sized iron spheres protruding with spikes on all sides. He lifted one, hefted it briefly and dropped it back into place, then wiped his hand on the seat of his pants. He wouldn’t have wanted to see even one of those flying his way, never mind the hundred or so piled up here.

  And three: That Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s lost terra-cotta army…wasn’t.

  “These aren’t statues,” Gabriel whispered, after examining one from close up. “They’re bodies. Skeletons now, but bodies when they were planted here.” He pointed at the metal shaft sticking up from the ground and continuing into the seat of the figure’s rotting armor. “He dressed them up in battle gear and rammed them upright onto spiked poles. I’m guessing they were alive at the time.”

  Qi’s expression darkened at the revelation.

  “I can’t imagine even the most devoted warrior army submitting to that sort of death,” Gabriel said. “He must have conscripted a special group of victims for the purpose.”

  “Peasants,” she muttered. “Slaves.”

  “I thought it was just hyperbole when they called Kangxi Shih-k’ai the ‘Vlad of China,’” Gabriel said. “But this…There must be more than a thousand people here, all murdered at his hand. And for what? To provide him with…human mannequins for this display?”

  They made their way carefully back up to the shrine and forced the doorway shut.

  “So these are not the Killers of Men we have found,” said Qi. “They are not the members of his army.” She took a mouthful of water from a dipper and spat it out on the ground. Gabriel understood the impulse.

  “Well, there’s no way to know, but I doubt it,” Gabriel said. “More likely they’re people his army rounded up as a sort of mass sacrifice when Kangxi Shih-k’ai died.”

  Qi bowed her head. She spoke quietly. “One of the reasons this area has been abandoned as far back as anyone can remember was a belief that the area was full of ghosts. People said it was haunted by spirits in pain. My mother said people were telling stories like that when she was a girl.”

  “That would have been, what, in the sixties? Back then there might still have been people alive who had been children when the slaughter took place. Maybe even some who’d been adults.”

  “Maybe even one or two who’d participated in it,” said Qi darkly, “and wanted the traces never to be uncovered.”

  “Maybe.”

  “In any event,” Qi said, “it’s been a no-man’s-land for most of the past century. No one comes here. Except ghosts like me.”

  Her gaze was abstracted into the small fire they’d built.

  “Qi,” Gabriel said. “I know your priority is Cheung—”

  “My life is Cheung. My death, too.”

  “—but there’s something bigger here. The world should know about this discovery.”

  “So let them know. When Cheung and I are dead.”

  “There’s no reason you have to die.” Gabriel tried to take her hand, but she harshly jerked it away.

  “Share this discovery with me,” he said. “Let me get you safely out of China. The Hunt Foundation has influence,
and once we reveal this to the world…we can take action against Cheung in other ways. And we can keep you safe.”

  “Can you? Can you really? Cheung’s men came all the way to New York to murder your friend’s sister. They would not hesitate to find me, track me like an animal, and kill me like less than an animal.” She fixed Gabriel with a hooded gaze. “You’re going to say I could change my identity perhaps. Maybe I could get surgery to alter my appearance, the way Cheung did. No. None of it will matter, in the end. You have not accepted the inevitability of this.”

  “I don’t believe in inevitability,” said Gabriel.

  “It doesn’t matter what you believe,” Qi said, shaking her head.

  Gabriel was not accustomed to feeling impotent. The Foundation, the specialists he knew, the money he could wield—none of it mattered here in a part of China where it might as well have been hundreds of years ago, where a flock of bats had the power to defeat him and a young woman could embrace a suicide mission because she saw her own death as inevitable.

  “If you wish to help me,” Qi said, “you can. But there is only one way. By coming with me to the Night Market.”

  “And doing what?”

  “You can get close to Cheung. He doesn’t know what you look like. I doubt his men do either—at most they have a blurry image from the cameras on the ship, probably not even that.”

  “You’re forgetting they found us after we left the Night Market, when they ambushed us in the pedicab.”

  “They were following me, not you. You could have been anyone. And no one who got a good look at your face that night lived to tell.”

  Gabriel thought back to the brutal firefight in the street. It was true enough. “So what, exactly, do you have in mind?”

  “We can both return to the Night Market, Gabriel Hunt. I as a vengeful ghost. You—you as a bidder.”

  “A bidder,” Gabriel said.

  “A wealthy foreign guest,” Qi said, reaching out with one hand to stroke along his cheek, “with a taste for young Chinese flesh. Cheung will probably pour you a drink himself.”

  Chapter 11

  Quite abruptly, Gabriel found himself back in the world. Clean clothes, wired cash, at least semilegitimate to all outward appearance but for the recent scars on his head and neck. Michael Hunt was in the air over the Pacific Ocean, racing to pick up the lecture series where it had so unceremoniously been abandoned. Gabriel had e-mailed him a brief, discreet summary of everything that had happened, using carefully veiled language on the theory—hell, the certainty—that all outbound e-mail sent from the complimentary terminal in a five-star hotel’s business center would be read by the authorities. He’d sent another even briefer message to Lucy, at the anonymous e-mail address she’d given him before getting on the plane for Arezzo: Am still in China, L, but M is gone—I’m sorry. Her response: Gone missing or gone dead? To which he replied, Don’t know which. Doesn’t look good.

  She hadn’t written back.

  Meanwhile, Gabriel prepared for his visit to the Night Market and his meeting with a contact called Red Eagle. Earlier in the day Qi had pulled together an assortment of goods—galvanized steel pails, tensile wire, firecrackers and cherry bombs, several large jute bags of money all in coins. She did not specify their purpose. But she had pointed out several other things to Gabriel as they toured incognito, both their faces hidden behind the popular surgical-style paper masks many pedestrians wore and shaded by wide-brimmed hats.

  “Nine corners,” she had said, indicating the zigzag bridge to the Tea House. “Nine turns, so that evil spirits will become disoriented and cannot pursue you.” Gunmen, Gabriel knew, might not be as likely as spirits to get disoriented, but the nine turns could still help break up lines of sight—and of fire.

  Qi’s combat access to the Night Market was via tunnels beneath the Tea House, part of the old aqueduct system, and she’d showed him the exit she would use tonight. “Tuan has all the best maps,” she noted, adding that on auction nights, Cheung would have all the surface entrances and exits heavily fortified.

  She had stopped next to a stand whose sign read CRISPY FRIED ANTS—MARINATED SCORPION—TURTLE SHELL GELATIN and ordered a vile-looking beverage from the vendor, a tiny man in an Edwardian suit with the obligatory status-symbol label sewn to his outer left cuff.

  “God—what is that?” said Gabriel, his throat constricting at the sight of it. The stuff looked like deep red cough syrup with a floating skin of herbs.

  “Double Penis,” she replied. “Deer and bull. Good for bones, circulation, heart, memory.”

  “Also is excellent aphrodisiac,” said the vendor with a sly wink. He pointed out the source organs, hanging from a drying rack. The deer members looked like rawhide doggie treats two feet long. The bull penis was the size of a Louisville Slugger.

  “Drink,” Qi said, as though sealing some covenant between them. “It’s expensive.”

  Gabriel downed the viscid brew, keeping his eye on a Tibetan spinning a prayer wheel in the distance. He swallowed twice, then swallowed again. It seemed there was now a smoldering lump of raw lead between his lungs.

  Qi had moved on to a small shrine with an urn for burning money. She lit joss sticks, bowed and offered some bills to the pot.

  “Now you,” she said, gesturing for Gabriel to do likewise.

  “But I don’t believe in—”

  “You must believe in something,” she said, eyes flashing.

  That had been their afternoon. Now it was nighttime.

  Showtime.

  The Iron Fist was exactly what its name implied: an under-the-table combat venue hiding in plain sight, where human beings tried to beat each other to death for money. Gabriel passed through several dining rooms and then a billiard hall before he found the grand stairway for which he was looking. It swept upward into a well appointed—and well guarded—amphitheater from which he could already hear the flat, meaty sounds of flesh battering flesh, lubricated by blood.

  But no crowd noise. No jeers or cheers or frantic yelling.

  Gabriel was admitted through a curtained foyer. The central focus of the room was the fighting pit, an oval thirty feet across at its widest point, girdled by a chain-link barrier. Two gigantic urban predators, steroidal nightmares, sought to terminate each other in the pit. They were collared together by eight feet of chain. Each wore a spidery leather mask and a studded bludgeoning glove on one fist.

  The room was opaque with cigarette smoke and crowded with bettors wall-to-wall, standing room only. They stood in total silence, like the spectators at a chess match. They wagered with nods and winks and raised fingers. Their manner was of banking, not bloodsport.

  One of the fighters finally fell like a chopped oak and stayed still. He was dragged out of the ring by his feet. Then the onlookers came unglued, jabbering in fifteen languages, waving money, offering critique.

  Two new opponents entered the ring. It was not obvious at first due to their masks and squarish figures, but they were both women.

  “New fighters are always cause for excitement,” said a voice behind Gabriel. “Their odds are not known.”

  “Do I know you?” said Gabriel.

  The newcomer was a classically handsome Chinese man who looked like an executive or playboy, clad in an expensive tailored silk suit and obviously packing at least one sidearm in a shoulder rig. There was a fine-cut tightness to the material across his back that suggested body armor. His hair and eyes were jet. He smiled at Gabriel like a matinee idol.

  “I am Longwei Sze Xie. Please call me Ivory, Mr. Hunt.”

  This was the part where Gabriel would discover whether any of his hasty fabrications would hold an ounce of water. They shook hands in the Western fashion.

  “Do I stick out that obviously?” said Gabriel.

  “Forgive me,” said Ivory. “Part of my training. I always index newcomers…is ‘index’ the correct word?”

  “I know what you mean.”

  Ivory pointed to the fighte
r on the far side of the pit. “That is the fresh fighter. Called Jin Huáng, for our purposes.”

  “Chinese for ‘yellow’ or ‘golden’?”

  “Very good, Mr. Hunt. Of course there are a hundred character variants for ‘yellow’ in traditional Chinese. Depending on the usage, jin huáng could be an expression for mulled rice wine, pornography, an eel, Hell, or…”

  “Or, if you reverse it to huáng jin,” said Gabriel, “it refers to the Yellow Turbans peasant uprising at the end of the Later Han Dynasty.” Gabriel silently thanked his brother Michael for this tidbit from his lecture notes, hoping he would not be called upon to discuss the matter in any more depth.

  “Outstanding!” Ivory clapped his hands together. “Full marks. But then, of course, you are a man who knows his history.”

  “That’s why I’d like to speak with Mr. Cheung.”

  “Mr. Cheung is available later this evening, and has expressed great interest in what you may be able to tell him about Kangxi Shih-k’ai. You understand his need for a considerable degree of discretion and personal security. After we complete this diversion—and please don’t feel rushed in any way, if you are enjoying yourself—I should advise you in advance that I will have to search you, although I’m certain it is quite unnecessary.”

  Oboy, thought Gabriel, this guy is really good at his job.

  Jin Huáng danced into the fight, making her opponent swing the early blows, high, wide and powerful. None connected. She was going to air her opponent out a bit before wrecking and damage. The mob fell into library silence once more.

  Gabriel and Ivory were able—and obliged—to whisper. Gabriel noticed the comm button seated in Ivory’s right ear.

  “I hope I’m not intruding on Mr. Cheung’s, ah, other interests,” said Gabriel. “I mean, I understand tonight is—”