He placed the muzzle of the pistol into his captive’s ear.
Behind Gray, Kowalski had coldcocked the first of his two assailants, snatching the steel bat out of the man’s limp fingers as he fell. In a roundhouse swing, he struck the second in the shoulder. His machete clattered to the ground.
Kowalski kept his bat pointed, warning, as the man stumbled back in pain, cradling his bruised arm.
Gray turned his attention to the camera.
“I only wish to talk!” he called out.
Proving this, he let his captive go and pushed him away. Again, Gray bent down and placed his pistol on the floor. He lifted his hands high, showing his palms to the camera.
He hoped this sudden attack had been a test.
He waited, feeling a trickle of sweat run down his back. A hush seemed to have fallen over the entire complex. Even the chatter of televisions and echoing music was subdued.
Suddenly Kowalski bellowed behind him. “Don’t any of you speak goddamned English?”
A door opened at the end of the hall.
“I do.”
A figure stepped out of the shadows and into the hallway. He was a tall man, with his white hair pulled back in a knot of a ponytail. Though in his sixties, he moved with a silky power in each step. He carried a long, curved sword in one hand, an ancient Chinese Dao saber. His other palm rested on the butt of a holstered SIG Sauer.
“What do you wish to tell our esteemed dragonhead?” he asked.
Gray knew the wrong answer would get them killed.
“Tell her I carry a message concerning Mai Phuong Ly’s daughter.”
From the swordsman’s blank expression, the name meant nothing to him. As answer, he simply turned and walked calmly back into the shadows.
Again they were left to wait. One of the guards barked in Cantonese and forced Gray and Kowalski to retreat a few steps, so another could grab their weapons.
“This gets better and better,” Kowalski said.
The tension stretched to the tautness of a piano wire.
Finally, the swordsman returned, stepping again out of the shadowy doorway to confront them.
“With graciousness, she has agreed to see you,” he said.
Gray let the knot between his shoulders relax slightly.
“But if she doesn’t like what she hears,” the swordsman warned, “her face will be the last thing you ever see.”
Gray didn’t doubt that.
8:44 A.M.
Seichan woke to darkness.
She remained motionless, a survival instinct going back to her feral years on the streets of Bangkok and Phnom Penh. She waited for her muzzy-headedness to clear. Memory slowly seeped out of a black well. She’d been grabbed, drugged, and blindfolded. From the bite of restraints, her wrists and ankles must also be bound. She still wore the blindfold, but enough light seeped through the edges to tell it was day.
But was it the same day she’d been grabbed?
She pictured the crash, Gray and Kowalski flying.
Had they survived?
She didn’t want to think otherwise.
Despair weakened one’s resolve—and she would need every bit of tenacity to survive.
She cast out her addled senses to gain her bearing. She lay on something hard, metal, smelling of motor oil. Vibrations and the occasional jarring bump revealed she was in some sort of vehicle.
Perhaps a van, maybe a truck.
But where were they taking her?
Why not just kill me?
She could guess the answer to that easily enough. Someone must have learned about the bounties placed on her head, someone who aimed to sell her.
“You may now stop pretending to sleep.” The voice came from a foot or two away.
She inwardly cringed. Her senses had been honed sharp by the coarse streets and back alleys of her youth. Still, she’d been totally unaware that someone sat so close. It unnerved her. It wasn’t just his silence, but his complete blankness. Like he didn’t exist.
“First, you may relax,” the man continued, his Cantonese formal and flawless but tinged with a European patois. Considering it was Macau, the accent was likely Portuguese. “We do not intend to kill you, or even harm you. At least, not me personally. It’s merely a business transaction.”
So she had been correct about someone selling her for profit. But it was little consolation.
“Second, in regard to your friends . . .”
This time she did flinch, imagining Gray’s face, Kowalski’s bluster. Were they still alive?
A soft scolding chuckle rose from the man.
“They are alive,” he said, reading her like a book. “But simply for the moment, I’m afraid. It took us a while to track them down—only to discover they had turned up in a most unexpected place, the home of a competitor. Which left me baffled, wondering why? Then I realized it didn’t matter. There is the old Chinese saying: yi jian shuang diao. I think it applies to this circumstance.”
Seichan translated in her head.
One arrow, double vultures.
She went cold at the implication. The Chinese phrase was the equivalent of a more common idiom.
Killing two birds with one stone.
8:58 A.M.
The elevators opened, delivering them from hell to heaven.
Gray followed the swordsman into what must have once been the apartment building’s penthouse. Here there was none of the stifling cramp and grime of the lower complex. The entire space was open, decorated in white furniture with simple, clean lines. The floor was polished bamboo. Potted orchids of every shade and shape dotted the room. A fish tank curved in the shape of a standing wave held myriad snow-white fish. It acted as a divider from a kitchen of stainless European appliances.
But the biggest difference from the hellish landscape below was the amount of light. Even the drizzling overcast day did little to dampen the brightness. Huge windows looked out over Kowloon, high enough to view the shining towers of Hong Kong City. In the center of the penthouse stood a glass-walled atrium open to the sky above, holding a fountain, along with a riotous spread of plants and flowers, all surrounding a fishpond with floating lilies.
A single lantern also gently rocked atop the water.
A slim shape in a belted robe bent over it. With a long taper in hand, she lit a fresh candle in the lotus-shaped lantern.
Gray pictured the festival at Macau, with its thousands of lights, each glow marking the memory of a past loved one.
Gray was marched out of the elevator and toward the atrium.
Kowalski looked darkly back at the elevator. “So why did we climb fourteen flights when they have a frickin’ elevator?”
Its use was likely restricted to the Triad, but Gray didn’t bother explaining, keeping his full attention on the figure behind the glass.