His underling, Tomaz, grabbed her bound ankles and yanked her into the morning sunlight. A dagger appeared in his hands and sliced the plastic ties. Her wrists remained bound behind her back.
Placed roughly on her feet, she realized she was on the tarmac of some remote airstrip. A sleek jet waited thirty yards away. Its stairs were down, ready to receive its passengers. A figure appeared in the open doorway and stepped into the light.
A large splinted bandage covered his broken nose.
Dr. Hwan Pak.
“Ah, our benefactor.” Delgado headed toward the jet, checking the Rolex on his wrist. “Come. We don’t want to be anywhere near Hong Kong after the next few minutes.”
9:22 A.M.
“That’s all you know?”
A mother’s love for her daughter ached in Guan-yin’s voice. She had questioned Gray intently for the past several minutes, probing Seichan’s past, trying to understand how she could still be alive.
They had retreated to one of the sofas.
Zhuang stood guard beside her. Kowalski had wandered over to the fish tank, tapping at the glass, his nose close to its surface.
Gray wished he could fill in more blanks for Guan-yin, but even he did not know the full extent of Seichan’s history, only fragments: a series of orphanages, a rough time on the streets, a recruitment into a criminal organization. As Gray recounted this past, Guan-yin seemed to understand. In some ways, both mother and daughter had taken parallel paths, hardened by circumstances but still able to rise above it, to survive and flourish.
In the end, Gray could not paint a full enough picture to satisfy a mother who missed so much of her daughter’s life. He doubted any number of words could fill that void.
“I will find her,” Guan-yin swore to herself.
She had already passed down a command through her organization to discover where Ju-long Delgado might have taken her daughter. They still awaited word.
“In the past, I failed her,” Guan-yin said, as one finger rose to wipe a tear from the edge of her dragon scar. “My Vietnamese interrogators were cruel, crueler than I suspected even back then. They told me my daughter was dead.”
“To make you despair. To make it easier to break you.”
“It only made me angry, more determined than ever to escape and get vengeance, which eventually I did.” A glint of fire burned through her haunted look. “Still, I did not give up. I searched for her, but it was made difficult in those early years, as I dared not set foot again in Vietnam after escaping. Eventually I had to give up.”
“It hurt too much to keep looking,” he said.
“Hope is sometimes its own curse.” Guan-yin looked to her folded hands in her lap. “It was easier to bury her in my heart.”
Several long moments of silence stretched, marked by the tinkling of the fountain in the atrium.
“And you?” Guan-yin asked, her voice faint. “You have risked much to bring her here, to come to me now.”
Gray did not need to acknowledge that aloud.
She lifted her face to stare him in the eye. “Is it because you love her?”
Gray met those eyes, knew he could not lie—when the first explosion shook the complex.
The blast rocked the entire apartment tower. Water sloshed in the fish tank. The long-stemmed orchids swayed.
“What the hell!” Kowalski yelled.
Guan-yin was on her feet.
Her shadow, Zhuang, already had a phone at his ear, talking swiftly, moving to the wall of windows. Smoke rose up through the rain from below.
Another explosion erupted, sounding farther away.
Guan-yin followed her lieutenant to the window, towing Gray and Kowalski with her. She translated what she overheard from Zhuang.
“Cement trucks have pulled up to all the entrances, coming from all directions at once.”
Gray pictured the large vehicles squeezing down the narrow canyons surrounding this mountain, converging here in a coordinated assault. But they were not cement trucks . . .
Another blast from another direction.
. . . but bombs on wheels.
Someone intended to bring this entire place down around their ears. Gray could guess who: Ju-long Delgado. He must have discovered Gray and Kowalski had come here. The passage of their pale faces through here would be hard to miss.
“We need to get out!” Gray warned. “Now!”
Zhuang heard him and agreed, turning to his mistress. “We must get you to safety.”
Guan-yin stood her ground, back straight, the dragon shining more prominently on her angry face. “Mobilize the Triad,” she ordered. “Get as many residents to safety as possible.”
Gray pictured the mass of humanity below.
“Use our underground tunnels,” she said.
Of course, the Triad would have secret ways into and out of their stronghold.
“You must first go yourself,” Zhuang pressed.
“After you pass on that order.”
It seemed this captain was willing to go down with her ship—and it was coming down. Loud splintering crashes echoed as parts of the complex collapsed. The pall of black smoke now covered the entire wall of windows, as if driven upward by the muffled screams from below.
Zhuang returned to his phone, shouting now to be heard. Moments later, loudspeakers blared throughout the complex, echoing across its many levels, as the command of the dragonhead was spread to all.
Only then did Guan-yin relent.
Zhuang wisely led her away from the elevators. He ushered her through a double set of doors to the same stairs they had climbed earlier.
“Hurry now! We must reach the tunnels!”
As they descended at a run, pandemonium overtook the central courtyard. Multiple fires glowed below. Several floors down, a section of bridge that had spanned the space suddenly broke, spilling a handful of flailing people into the fiery depths. The apartment building across from them began to fold in on itself, imploding floor by floor, falling crookedly away, slowly ripping itself free from the other towers.
Gray ran faster now, leaping from landing to landing. Guan-yin kept pace with him, Zhuang at her side, Kowalski trailing.
A thunderous crack shook the stairs, sending them all to their knees.
The entire stairwell began to peel from the side of the tower.
“This way!” Gray hollered.
He leaped from the stairs, across the growing gap, and reached the tower’s exterior hallway that faced the courtyard. The others followed. Guan-yin tripped, slipping out of her lieutenant’s arms as he jumped. Left behind, she teetered at the edge—but Kowalski scooped her up and vaulted with a bellow to join Gray.