Element 42

by Seeley James

  He sneered. “Some things are bigger than you.”

  Car doors slammed outside.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Pull the trigger. Kill me now.” He moved from behind the desk and picked up his daypack. “You might dominate a bunch of washed-up veterans, but you’re no killer.”

  A superior grin spread across his face. He reached back, grabbed the helmet, and threw it at her.

  She squeezed the trigger an instant too late. The helmet hit her outstretched hands and knocked the pistol from her grip. Otis dove for the hallway a few yards behind her. She stretched a foot, snagging his leading ankle.

  He face-planted into the door jam. “You fuck!”

  They scrambled to their feet. Pia searched for her Glock.

  Otis felt his nose, wiped the blood, then ran.

  Pia spotted her handgun under a leather wingback, dropped to her knees, reached and pulled back just as a boot smashed the back of her head. Her face banged into the armrest, her arm and shoulder drove deep into the side. The weapon skittered across the hardwood floor to the corner.

  She heard the garage door clatter as it rolled up.

  The boot landed in her ribs. And again in her hip.

  Rolling back, she scissor kicked her assailant, forcing his gunshot into the wall. Her would-be killer staggered backward into the bookshelf.

  A motorcycle roared to life in the garage.

  Pushing off her back, Pia leapt to her feet and landed a swift kick to the shin followed by a second aimed at his groin. The man twisted in time to offer only a thigh. She kicked it anyway. Stepping close to negate his firearm advantage, she slammed her elbow to his jaw and followed with a shovel punch. The heel of her hand connected with his chin just as her powerful legs accelerated her punch. His head snapped back into the oak bookcase. His eyes fluttered.

  Pia disarmed him, retrieved her Glock, and darted him. She flew down the hall and out the kitchen door.

  Three Kazakhs leaned against a white Mustang smoking cigarettes. They looked surprised when Pia burst into the night. She bolted across the lawn, zigging around trees, heading for the hedge.

  Three shots echoed through the neighborhood.

  She jumped through the bushes, somersaulted on landing, and kept rolling. She popped back to her feet, ran down the alley, and flew to the Ferrari as fast as she’d ever run.

  She yelled to Verges, “You ride shotgun, start it up.”

  Startled but not stupid, Verges did what she asked.

  She vaulted the door, landed in the driver’s seat, threw the car in gear, and stomped on the gas.

  “What happened back—”

  A squeal of tires shrieked behind them.

  “Did you see the motorcycle leave?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Which way did he turn when he hit the main road?”

  “Uh, left. I think.”

  Pia gunned the engine, broke the back end loose, and slid into a four-wheel drift that took them left on the main road.

  “Is there a white Mustang behind us?”

  Verges strained around the headrest. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then duck.”

  CHAPTER 40

  As far as I was concerned, it was just another day in an industrial town. Guangzhou’s pollution rolled across the city like fog in San Francisco. A darted Kazakh lay next to me, snoring like a contented grandfather after lunch.

  I said, “You can hit him from here, that’s why.”

  “No way, Jacob.” Tania squatted next to me and took another look over the edge. She sighed, dropped her butt on the rooftop, and leaned her back against the wall. “Too many problems.”

  “I’ll fix them. Tell me what you need.”

  “Jacob, this rifle’s been floating around the luggage compartment for the last two days. I’d have to find a range and dial it in. Then there’s the glass. We’re not straight on with the window. The round will break it, no problem, but who knows where it’ll go from there? You can’t send a piece of lead at 2,500 feet per second and expect it to fly straight after it hits glass at an angle. For all I know it could deflect and hit the building next door.”

  “Fifteen degrees. Not that big an angle. And the scope was dialed in a couple days ago. It’s good for a thousand meters, this is under three hundred. You could eyeball it.”

  “What about the escape route? You think your girlfriend can handle her part?”

  “Not my girlfriend. She’s with Miguel now.”

  Tania looked me up and down. “So. Emily’s smart after all.”

  My eyes rolled. “It’s Anatoly Mokin, right there in that office. Set up your scope and check it out.”

  “Then why not kill him and be done with it?”

  “Because we need to find Element 42 first. And I want to look him in the eye when I pull the trigger.”

  “You’re fucked up. Have you been talking to that Greek god again?”

  “Roman. And no.”

  “This is a distraction, Jacob. We should find this Fang-guy and save Philly.”

  “This is for Carmen.” I said. “Verges said Philly’s out of danger for now. Besides, Ms. Sabel’s following the clues in DC. We have Mokin right in front of us, overlord of the mass grave on Borneo, mastermind of the Algeria attack, a member of the Windsor board, and the man who ordered Carmen’s murder.”

  Tania turned back to look over the wall again.

  I said, “He would’ve whacked the rest of us too.”

  “And you want to give him a second chance?”

  “Give me that thing,” I said. “I could make a decent shot from here.”

  “You’d kill him.” She pulled the rifle out of the case, checked out the action, attached the suppressor, dropped the bipod legs, and chambered a round. She knelt behind the wall and rested the bipod on top. She eased her shoulder into the stock and aligned her eye to the sight. “I hate this position. This is no sniper blind.”

  “Want a chair? I can get you a chair.”

  “No. Hang on a second. He’s with someone, walking around with a suitcase, fresh off a flight … dang it.”

  “What?”

  “Remember Kasey Earl back in Kabul? You cut his ear off when he bragged about raping a local woman?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s… Damn. It’d be better if they had picture windows. There’s a mullion…”

  We stayed silent for three minutes. I’d never been a spotter, but I knew that sniper-mojo revolves around long stretches of stillness.

  Mercury said, I’ve been thinking about your future, brotha.

  I said, Not now.

  Mercury said, It ain’t good. You’ll want to hear—

  I tuned him out.

  Tania said, “You ready to make that call?”

  I dialed and Mokin picked up. “Hey Anatoly-meister, Jacob Stearne, Sabel Security here. I told you I’d see you this afternoon. Nice of you to wear a tie, but plaid? Way last year. Here’s a bit of advice: If you’re going to hang out with slime like Kasey Earl, you should wear a biohazard suit.”

  “Where are—” he began.

  I clicked off.

  Tania fired.

  Miguel threw the door open for us. We jumped three rickety stairs at a time, winding down six flights to the ground floor where Emily waited. She had her nose in the cracked door and her palm facing us. Stop.

  We fell in behind her hand.

  She was trembling when she pulled her nose back in. “Three Kazakhs talking to our driver.”

  Tania grabbed the bag hanging on Emily’s shoulder and tossed brightly colored, cheap windbreakers to each of us. We wadded them up and shoved them in the nearest pocket. Changing your color scheme while making a getaway has been known to work sometimes.

  Miguel pushed us all aside and stuck his nose into the door’s thin gap. He glanced back at me and whispered. “I take the two on the right. You take one on the left.”

  We slipped past Emily.

  Miguel grabbed the c
losest Kazakh by the back of the neck and smashed his head into the head of the second man. It sounded like coconuts banging together. I punched the third guy in the face while Tania kicked his ass hard. Miguel’s guys reeled back, hands to heads, confused and disoriented. He took advantage of the situation and banged them together a second time. I put my guy in a head lock and let Tania kick him in the balls. Emily joined in; she didn’t have any skills but kicked for all she was worth. We dropped our unconscious foes on the pavement. Twelve seconds start to finish.

  Our driver was running away from us like an antelope fleeing a cheetah. A block away, three Kazakhs were running straight at us, passing our ex-getaway driver. I pressed my face to the Buick’s window. No keys.

  Miguel tagged me and nosed at two more Kazakhs coming through an alley on the left. Both groups were still a hundred yards out. On the far side of the building, wailing sirens echoed and screeched their way into the neighborhood.

  “Plan B,” I said. “Rendezvous in an hour.”

  Miguel grabbed Emily’s hand and yanked her down the alley on the right. Tania gave me a dirty look and hustled across the street, into a shop. I pulled out my tourist map and pretended to look at it then strode up the big boulevard. As soon as I was a block away, I unfurled my windbreaker and donned it. Somehow I’d ended up with pale lavender.

  Ducking through a couple shops and alleys, I made my way to the wedding dress street. It looked like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, only it was all wedding dresses. Traditional Chinese use bright colors for weddings and reserve white for funerals. Modern Chinese go with the Western concept. The shops weren’t taking any chances and had the whole rainbow.

  I heard Kazakhs yelling at locals behind me, ordering them to point out the Imperialist Yankee. I rudely pushed past a mother and daughter and ducked into the alley between shops. Mannequins dressed in bright reds and pale greens and deep blues took up most of the walking space. There was little more than a tight pathway between the lesser shops that couldn’t afford street-facing real estate. I slowed to an anonymous stroll, looking like any other groom shopping for bargains. I thought about Tania in a wedding dress. Would she wear white? She had a Chinese grandmother somewhere in Brooklyn. Or was it Japanese? Shouting echoed through the alley behind me, and I continued looking for dresses while sneaking a peek at the harried Kazakhs searching for me. Ten minutes of ambling brought me back to the main boulevard, Jiangnan North Road. Everything was relatively quiet.

  I leaned against a building and checked out the pedestrians as cars and motorcycles and bikes streamed by. Guangzhou’s a lesson in city planning. There isn’t any. Every block had a gleaming skyscraper pointing into the heavens surrounded by dirty sidewalks and beaten-up stores and shabby apartments ready to fall over. Alternating blocks of the boulevard were ghetto and Madison Avenue. The storefront in front of me was painted in garish new colors while the shop on its left hadn’t been touched since Chiang Kai-shek ran the country.

  I watched the eyes of passersby. No one was interested in me. I’d made it.

  Mercury said, You’re not done. There’s more.

  I said, Please. I beat those clowns two blocks ago.

  Mercury said, Whatever, man. You never listen to me anyway. You haven’t even made a single votum to me, much less—

  One Kazakh, fifty yards diagonal, scanned down the street while I scanned up. Our gazes met and our recognition kicked in at the same moment.

  He raised a big, nasty revolver.

  I smiled.

  Every third car flying between us on the four-lane road was a delivery van. The vans were small enough to fit inside a UPS truck back home, but they were big enough to derail his aim. Taking a shot at that distance would end up causing an accident and a panic that would bring a herd of cops. There was no way in hell my Kazakh was that stupid.

  He pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER 41

  Drivers slammed on their brakes. Ten cars transformed into a sheet-metal accordion on the compression stroke. Glass flew and metal crunched and people screamed—and I fled like an antelope, jumping vendor buckets on the sidewalk and crashing through racks of clothes, spinning past families and parting the tide of pedestrians.

  After dodging ten thousand rounds fired by jihadi warriors—who at least wanted to kill me on behalf of their god—the last thing I wanted was to be gunned down by the dumbest mercenary in Asia.

  A greasy alley gave me a place to dump my windbreaker. Around the corner, the world’s tiniest tourist shop afforded me a place to catch my breath. I pulled a tractor cap off a rack and checked the price: 90 RMB. I slapped a twenty, American, on the counter with the tag and nodded to the lady behind the counter. Her gaze slipped past me to the street. I slapped another twenty on the counter and pointed to her back room. She looked at me, the twenty, and back out at the street. She shook her head and pushed me into the corner and rolled a rack of t-shirts in front of me. I peered around. There was no back room. No back door, no window, no way out.

  Between the hangers I saw my nemesis looking left and right and left again. His eyes aimed straight at me but kept moving. He moved up the alley and made a phone call. No doubt telling his crew he’d spotted me and leaving out the part about the havoc he’d left behind.

  The lady stepped to the front of the store and called out to another shopkeeper across the way. Several back-and-forths led to a man rolling down the steel cover to his shop and trotting out to meet her. Together they stood in her entry and watched my personal Kazakh until he was a safe distance away. They pulled me out from behind the t-shirts.

  “You give twenty dollar.” The man held out his hand. I tried to look him in the eye, but he kept his gaze fixed on my hands.

  “You speak English?”

  “Duh. You too.”

  “I need a ride.”

  “I know. She know. You give twenty dollar.”

  I fished into my wallet without pulling it out and extracted what I hoped was a twenty. It wasn’t. I saw only a flicker of President Grant’s portrait before it disappeared from my fingers. “Hey. That’s a fifty—”

  The greenback went straight from his fingers to hers. “She save life. Now give me twenty dollar.”

  For a moment, I considered taking my chances with the Kazakh. Instead, I pulled my wallet and carefully shielded its contents from prying eyes. I pulled my second-to-last twenty and it too vanished instantly. With his skills, he could’ve joined Cirque du Soleil.

  He put his palm to my face. “Stay. No move.”

  He went to a storage space across the street and came out pushing an electric green Znen Roar, the Chinese version of a Vespa with a racier look. I joined him and he handed me his helmet. I tucked it under my arm and straddled a sliver of seat.

  “Where go?” he asked.

  “People’s Park.”

  “No good for you. No foreigners. You go Yuexiu Park.”

  “I’m meeting someone in People’s Park, at the warrior statue of a guy named Zhang Zhixin.”

  He turned all the way around to stare at me like I was stupid. “No picture in guidebook? Zhixin a woman.” He shrugged and began to push off, then stopped.

  He pointed at the Kazakh, disappearing out of sight in the narrow alley. “You take swipe?”

  “Love to.”

  “Twenty dollar.”

  I should’ve seen that one coming. I dug out my last twenty and he made it vanish. He spun up the bike quickly, dodging the myriad of wares that narrowed the alley to a footpath. He gained enough speed then cut the engine and glided silently behind the world’s dumbest Kazakh. I put the helmet on the end of my fist and whumped the mercenary in the back of his head as we glided by.

  We watched him face-plant into a bookrack. I hopped off, grabbed the Kazakh’s phone and jumped back on. My personal courier snapped the engine back to life and slipped into traffic over the Haizhu Bridge and into downtown Guangzhou. He dropped me at the yellow gates of the park and gave me an idea of how to find the statue.r />
  “My friends and I might need another ride,” I said.

  “I give phone number. Twenty dollar.”

  I shook my head. “No thanks. I’m done with the twenty-dollar thing.”

  He reached in his pocket and pulled out a card. He pointed below the chicken scratches of glyphs that make up their written language. “OK. No twenty dollar, this time only. You need help, you call Tang. You find money first. ATM. How many friend.”

  “Four.”

  Tang looked over his shoulder. “No problem. You call Tang.”

  He sped away.

  A moped went by with two guys crouching behind the driver, an inch of toe-hold each. Another bike passed going the other way with two kids on the handlebars and a woman holding two buckets behind the driver.

  Tang’s bike stood out in a crowd. Ducking behind the park gate, I waited and watched. Mokin’s men weren’t all stupid. Thirty seconds later a bike stopped, parked on the sidewalk, and a Kazakh dismounted. The man pulled out a phone and made a call as he walked. He strode past me, looking forward. I stepped in behind, pressing my Glock to his head. He froze.

  I pried the phone out of his fingers before I darted him and eased his body into a large hedge.

  “Anatoly,” I said. “I wanted to meet at your office but your men keep trying to kill me before I could get there. That’s not how we welcome guests where I come from. So we’ll just have to meet somewhere else. I’ll find a nice bistro and call you back.”

  He was yelling in his language when I clicked off. I tossed the phone into a bag hanging from a passing bike and watched it disappear down the block.

  I strolled into the park. Right away someone pointed at me and made a joke to his family. They laughed. Tang was right—I was the only Westerner in the park, and six inches taller than the tallest local guy. Pulling my tourist map out, I held it up and slouched, doing my best not to look American. I followed directions and still couldn’t find the right statue. Instead, I ended up in front of a gorgeous, naked woman-warrior riding a rearing stallion, aiming her bow behind her. One statue is as good as the other in my book.