by Jon Land
But before Zhen could utter another word Caitlin slammed her forehead into the bridge of his nose, Zhen sent reeling backward with her pistol flying from his grasp.
107
NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS
Cort Wesley had momentarily forgotten about Dylan’s warning that he’d spotted Kai, lost in the environment of spilled bodies, pooling blood, and a wailing alarm that only just reached the edge of his consciousness. That mind-set was the only way to survive this kind of battle time and time again.
But for now anyway he was the only man standing. The lobby belonged to him, his ground to defend. Shapes of Chinese gunmen, provided by the Triad no doubt, continued to emerge from different points in different moments. But they were ill prepared for this kind of fight, especially against a professional as seasoned in battle as Cort Wesley was. They were killers, yes, but killers used to being met with far less resistance, if any at all. The shots several managed to get off flew wildly off kilter, which in Cort Wesley’s lexicon meant missing him by more than a foot.
He could feel their fire dancing through the air, sizzling past him. Could almost imagine being able to follow the errant path of their bullets the same way he could the vapor trail of a jet passing overhead. Then a single bullet found his body armor, knocking a measure of his wind out and twisting him to the side. But he caught the shooter in his next burst as the man tried to launch himself airborne behind an indoor rock garden. Cort Wesley ejected the spent magazine and rammed a fresh one home in less time than it took to find his next breath.
Then he heard something—no, not heard so much as felt, the floor starting to quake beneath him as if the earth was ready to open up and swallow the world whole. His gaze twisted toward the lobby’s glass front wall to see the endless wave of humanity streaming toward the building.
* * *
Dylan had seen Kai touch the lighter to the packages of firecrackers, had done the very same thing himself on enough occasions to know what was coming next. Her eyes met his and held there in the last moment before …
Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!
The Fourth of July had come early, the staccato crackle of the fireworks racking his head to the point he had to close his eyes briefly to chase away the pain. But it must have indeed sounded like gunfire to the masses gathered, because the crowd suddenly whipsawed in all directions at once, seeking routes of flight denied by the congestion. Left to charge in the only direction available: straight across the road toward the Yuyuan complex, the hate that had brought the members of the crowd here further fueled by relentless, unstoppable panic.
Dylan felt himself jostled one way, and then another, his head feeling like somebody was banging golf balls around inside his skull with each impact. His stomach lurched and he felt dizzy, woozy, on the verge of passing out. He almost lost his footing, managing to glimpse Kai slicing a path through the crowd, angling herself toward Yuyuan. He fought the nausea down and took a single deep breath to settle himself enough to pick up the chase.
“Dad!” he yelled into the wrist-mounted microphone his father had given him. “Dad!”
But there was no response.
* * *
Paz clung to his balance and drove Qiang backward into a still whole display case. The back of his bald head crashed through the glass and what looked like giant hornets buzzed at him from a hive that had ruptured on impact.
Paz held Qiang there as long as he could, until the hornets attacked the back of his hands. The stings felt like sharp pinpricks, the pain radiating inward and then seeming to spread across the interior surface of his skin. Paz realized his hands were seizing up on him from whatever poison the stingers contained, Qiang’s face a mass of blistering boils from the stings that had closed one of his eyes and swelled one side of his mouth to the size of an apple.
Qiang seemed to have trouble breathing as he mounted a desperate shove backward that Paz was powerless to counter with his cold, tingly hands, his fingers rendered stiff appendages he couldn’t flex into fists or even rotate. Qiang’s one working eye bulged with a rage fired by the pain pulsing through his blood to every part of his body, as he continued thrusting Paz backward.
Paz twisted, trying to add his own force to the equally big man’s momentum. His hands, though, weren’t up to the task, the result being to strip him of his balance. He felt himself canting for the tile, his legs losing their grasp on it as well. But he managed to loop his stiff hands behind Qiang’s head, taking him down too.
Impact rattled the floor, sending a bevy of desert scorpions scurrying from their path amid the shattered glass. Qiang landed on top, hands closing on Paz’s throat when an African tree frog opened its mouth wide and secreted a foul-smelling ooze straight into Qiang’s face. It stitched a neat line across his brow, looking as if it had been painted into place, Qiang’s one working eye twisting up as if to look for what struck him. He jerked a hand upward to try to wipe it off in the same moment Paz recovered enough feeling in one of his hands to grab hold of the Chinese man’s shirt and yank him to the side.
Paz twisted, turned, rolled, straight into the path of two black mambas converging on him.
* * *
Caitlin didn’t bother going for the pistol: with her hands bound behind her there was no point. She followed up her head butt of Zhen by shoving her shoulder into him, driving both of them backward for the wall. Her intention was to create enough force to break his ribs on impact, disabling him. But Zhen surprised her, twisting deftly just enough to pitch both of them over a counter.
Caitlin fell hard to the floor with him atop her, nothing to cushion her fall. She took the brunt of the impact on her shoulder, feeling something crunch inside the joint itself. Zhen hammered her twice with open-handed blows to the neck and head that left her stunned, even as blood from his shattered nose showered her in rhythm with him jerking from side to side.
Caitlin felt his knobby, gnarled, swollen fingers struggling to close on her throat. She kicked at a raised platform near which they’d landed, kicked and kept kicking until a big computer console resting there dislodged and came crashing down upon Zhen.
108
NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS
The crowd was everywhere, Dylan powerless to do anything but move within its flow. It was like being swept forward in some vast tsunami of churning feet and desperation. He felt light, as if he were floating, and wondered if he was on the verge of passing out.
Each foot of progress he made toward the front of the mass and Kai was negated by a shift sideways or backward, mandated by the flow of unrestrained panic that had taken on its own life. The crowd didn’t so much move as one as form into separate ripples linked by some invisible connective tissue that kept it somehow whole.
Dylan, having lost track of Kai, realized he’d been swept up in a flow that had taken him across the street toward a wall of glass off which the sun reflected in blinding fashion.
The entrance to the Yuyuan building.
* * *
The rumble in Cort Wesley’s mind had become audible, deafening by the time the crowd reached the glass. Momentum pressed the first wave so tight against the facade that those comprising it were trapped there, suffocating as they struggled fitfully to wedge themselves free.
The effort proved futile, no one was going anywhere with so much weight and impetus shoving in against them. In his mind, Cort Wesley could feel, almost see, the heavy safety glass buckling. A glance far to his left revealed the gardens Caitlin had told him about beyond the glass, Cort Wesley starting that way in the last moment before the entry doors at last gave and caved inward behind the force of an endless mass surging through.
* * *
Paz just managed to avoid one snake by twisting left, then another by jerking forward, both of their jaws left snapping at the air. A third with the mouse just clear of its mouth came at him from the side and Paz snatched it out of the air by the neck as it pounced, feeling it writhe in his grasp, tail whipping from side to side as i
t tried to free itself.
But Qiang had regained his footing and loomed over him as well, having hoisted a glass terrarium with a glass bottom now swimming with what looked like tiny spiders. Paz hurled the snake up toward Qiang just as he was prepared to unleash it, enough to throw off his timing and send the case crashing downward just to Paz’s right. It exploded upon impact, tiny spiders and more shards of glass sprayed in all directions.
Paz avoided both by lurching back to his feet just as a desperate and nearly blind Qiang managed to find his throat with one flailing hand and then another, driving Paz backward hard and fast.
* * *
The monitor slammed into the back of Li Zhen’s head, its now cracked screen seeming to drive his stunned form downward. This allowed Caitlin to twist aside and brace herself against a divider between two workstations and regain her feet. She saw her SIG across the floor a dozen feet away and scrambled toward it, while Zhen fought to regain his footing with blood now dribbling down his forehead.
Caitlin was still conscious of the cool wash of the air-conditioning over the room full of machines, in stark contrast to the fetid air of Zhen’s terrariums upstairs, promising death to millions and millions if she failed to stop the computerized instructions and data from being sent to satellites orbiting overhead.
With Zhen still dazed, Caitlin dropped and slid across the floor toward her SIG Sauer, back-crawling the last stretch of the way to ready her cuffed hands to grasp it. She felt her fingers brush against the steel and kept groping, managing to get it up and as close to steadied on Zhen, who was wobbling back to his feet, as she could manage.
She fired twice, aiming in the opposite direction of the one in which she was facing and missing wildly. Fired three more times, finally getting her shooter’s bearings when Zhen pounced and she felt the pistol wrenched from her grasp, twisting to find him looming over her.
“You stop nothing! You achieve nothing! You are nothing, Cat-lan Strong!”
Her name spoken as an afterthought, her pistol held in his trembling, deformed hands. Li Zhen was just about to fire when a new voice echoed through the emptiness over the quiet whir of the machines.
“Hello, Father.”
* * *
Cort Wesley was halfway to the entrance to the gardens when he glimpsed his son trapped amid the mass just back from the glass wall. Dylan hopelessly snared, caught in a vice between the crowd’s expanding force forward and the building’s glass facade. The boy’s eyes met his, the panic filling them enough to drive Cort Wesley to tilt his assault rifle upward and blaze a stitch of bullets across the glass atop the crowd and back again. The glass spiderwebbed, its integrity compromised, the crowd crashing through it in a heap when it ruptured entirely along invisible fault lines.
Cort Wesley found himself amid the mass of humanity. He clung to his footing as he swept through the struggling pile until he spotted Dylan’s long hair sweeping from side to side, while the boy fought to free his legs pinned by bodies that had collapsed atop them.
Cort Wesley reached down and jerked his son free, hoisting him airborne and then half-carried, half-dragged him toward the entrance to the gardens.
* * *
Paz felt Qiang’s thumbs closing, pressing, contracting the cartilage over his throat. The man’s one functioning eye bulged with rage, his features swollen to monstrous proportions, his face barely recognizable as human anymore.
Paz started to reach outward, realizing in that moment the seconds left to him weren’t enough to pry the powerful grasp from its place. Then he noticed exactly what Qiang had slammed into, the contents in the shattered terrarium immediately above him.
Paz reached up and closed both hands over thick swatches of African drum ivy, tore it from its bounds and lashed it forward. Pressed it into Qiang’s swollen face.
Hssssssssssss …
Paz wasn’t sure if the sound made by the deadly vapors being unleashed actually came from the plant or were a product of his imagination. It didn’t matter.
Only the effects did.
Qiang released his grasp almost instantly, flailing wildly for the noxious vines still pressed against his face. He recoiled, hands dropping to reveal his skin bubbling and puckering as if coming to a boil. The big man’s one eye started jerking from side to side, his entire body struck by a spasm before it seized up all at once and he keeled over at Paz’s feet like a felled tree.
* * *
Cort Wesley and Dylan charged along the narrow path cutting through Yuyuan’s gardens. The sky had clouded up, a storm in the offing that seemed to wash the color out of the scene.
Cort Wesley ran with the assault rifle shouldered and his Glock nine-millimeter pistol in hand, preferable in close quarters, ready in case more Triad soldiers were laying in wait. He had no idea where the path or the gardens led, certain only he couldn’t go back toward the chaos of the lobby.
A gunman lurched out to his left. Cort Wesley took him down, then swung immediately to his right, shooting another. They seemed to be coming from all angles, Cort Wesley firing as if this were some sort of crazed video game. He felt Dylan pressed up against him, his son needing him for balance to avoid falling, and Cort Wesley loosened his grip on the Glock so he could loop an arm protectively around the boy.
“I’ve got you, son, I’ve got you!”
Dragging Dylan onward, Cort Wesley jerked the assault rifle downward and started clacking off shots from it in place of the Glock. Swinging one way, then the other, then back again, an imaginary bell chiming in Cort Wesley’s head as his score continued to climb.
He tightened his grasp on Dylan and drew the boy to the right, off the path where he’d glimpsed a fence obscured by heavy vines.
It looked easy enough to scale by using the vines for climbing leverage. And that’s exactly what father and son did, cresting over the top and dropping down on the far side of the complex just as an explosion shook the Yuyuan building at its core, coughing smoke and rubble into the air.
109
NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS
Zhen didn’t fire, trapped between intentions and actions, the pistol stopping somewhere between Caitlin and Kai.
“Do you recognize me, Father? How many years has it been?”
Li Zhen didn’t answer her. His eyes widened. His face broke out into a strange leering grin, his mind in a place Caitlin didn’t want to consider, while he continued to regard his daughter as if she were just another actress on an audition reel.
“You have exceeded my expectations,” he said coldly, calmly.
He seemed to delight in the sight of her, the pistol in his hand forgotten. Caitlin imagined him looking at Kai now but seeing her as the little girl he’d handed over to the Triad in exchange for the standing he enjoyed today. She stood before him with a radiance and beauty that defied the hatred that drove her.
“Why don’t you shoot me, Father?” she said, an overstuffed backpack slung from her shoulder. “Kill me as you killed Jiao. You remember her, don’t you? I wish I did more clearly. But it’s been so long and I had nothing to remind me of her, not a picture or keepsake, when you let them take me away.”
Caitlin lumbered back to her feet, noticed the elevator door was still open. Even in the dim lighting dominated by the glow of the big wall screens with numbers scrolling across them, she could see how beautiful Kai was, how Dylan could have fallen for her so quickly. Her complexion looked more like something lifted off a magazine photo. But her expression today was frozen somewhere between acceptance and sadness, so flat and smooth that Caitlin wondered if a smile had ever broken it. It wasn’t just her training, the ability to coerce and seduce. It was an innocence and vulnerability forever suppressed and yet somehow still lurking just below the surface.
“Because that would be a terrible waste, to strip the world of such a beautiful flower.”
“Tell that to my sister. When I finally learned the truth, everything made sense. But that doesn’t change the fact I never learned how to feel, or
how to enjoy it. I guess you were training me for the life you finally sold me into without even realizing.” Kai stood there, shaking her head. “But you don’t believe you’ve done a thing wrong, do you?”
“I knew I’d see you again. I knew fate would bring you back to me, knew that someday—”
“You’d come back for me,” Kai said, cutting him off with her own thought. “That’s how I survived the first months, by convincing myself you’d come back. I dreamed about that day just as, later, I dreamed about this one. I’ve followed you, Father, studied your every move. Made it my life’s work to learn everything there was to learn about you. That’s how I found out the truth about my sister … and myself. I even uncovered the plans for this building, this secret level so befitting a man whose life is nothing but secrets. I’m glad I got here in time to stop you from destroying any more lives.”
Caitlin watched Kai approach her, a small knife appearing in her hand. She felt the young woman ease her cuffed wrists upward and heard a brief grating sound as Kai sliced through the plastic.
“Leave,” she said, meeting Caitlin’s gaze.
Caitlin glanced at the gun trembling within Zhen’s arthritis-riddled hands. “I can’t do that, ma’am.”
“Leave,” Kai repeated coarsely. “This doesn’t concern you.”
Caitlin backed off to keep both father and daughter in her line of vision, shaking her hands to restore the blood flow as best she could. “Listen to me. Do this and you’re no different from him. You can be better, you are better.”
Kai’s gaze darted briefly to her. “I can get the only one who matters, the one who left me for dead a long time ago. It’s time for him to pay for what he’s done, all the pain he’s caused.”
