The Noah Reid Action Thriller Series: Books 1-3 (plus special bonuses)

by Wesley Robert Lowe

  solomon, proverbs, c. 950 bc

  Author’s Introduction

  Thirty years ago, I was an aspiring jazz pianist in Vancouver. When I was eighteen, I took my first trip to New York and fell in love with its music scene, just walking the streets, seeing the clubs and lounges where my heroes—Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock and Oscar Peterson—played. No concert fees, no huge cover charge, just the price of a drink or two I could nurse for hours.

  And, of course, New York is/was home to world-class recording facilities. Unlike flashy studios in Los Angeles that are destinations in themselves, many New York studios were places in nondescript old buildings you had to be “in the know” about. Definitely cool.

  Years later, I learned of New York’s dark underbelly when the Russian mob tried to recruit an actor friend of mine. He politely declined, but not before his eyes were opened to a world of incredible illicit opportunity. It turns out that what you see in the movies and television isn’t always fiction.

  Prologue

  Twenty-two Years Ago

  “Where have you been, Chin? I haven’t seen you in seven months,” pouted twenty-three-year-old former Miss USA runner-up Elizabeth Watson. “A girl gets lonely, you know.” She massaged his back with the fragrant and more-expensive-than-gold agar wood oil.

  As always, the Shaolin mobster said nothing. That was okay with Elizabeth—his Herculean firepower always spoke louder than words. Turning him over to straddle him on the bed, she sucked his fingers like popsicles before bringing his strong hands to her breasts, then guiding them down… and then Chin took over.

  Her cream-colored body quivered with his hard-chiseled body’s every move, and she moaned in rapture at the dynamic intertwining. Ecstasy came in waves, beginning like surf caressing the shore, then growing until a tsunami possessed her.

  As she basked in the afterglow, Chin looked up and nodded at a camera man who had shot the escapade. He gave Chin the thumbs up and finally, Chin allowed himself a hint of a smile. This would result in further evidence of the master’s prowess with a small, but extremely wealthy group. Less than thirty people would see the video, but every one of them would want to do further business with him. These low lives were impressed that Chin had a voluptuous, blonde vixen begging him to please her and, of course, fantasized about themselves being Chin.

  For Elizabeth, this was not the kind of acting career she wanted but no matter. She got somebody who would take care of her in style. Like clockwork, she had made Chin happy every seven months when he visited for a few days. Then he disappeared again until his next trip to America.

  Today, though, was different. She saw the slight smile on his face that wasn’t normally there. At first, Elizabeth thought her performance was especially outstanding. But Chin deflated her ego with a simple statement. “I have a present for Queenie. Get her.” It was a command, not a request.

  The couple got dressed quickly. Elizabeth went to fetch Queenie from her room while Chin exited the apartment with the camera man.

  Chin returned alone, carrying a small cubed wooden crate, two feet tall, two feet wide, and two feet deep.

  Elizabeth carried out three-year-old Queenie. Dressed in a ballerina tutu with more make-up than a fourteen-year-old skank, it was obvious Elizabeth wanted to turn her daughter into a junior version of herself.

  “Daddy!” cried Queenie with a joyous smile that would melt the coldest heart as she jumped out of her mother’s arms and dashed toward Chin. She hadn't seen him in seven months and had probably forgotten who he was, but undoubtedly Elizabeth, man-pleaser that she was, had been teaching her daughter.

  “Hello, my Queen. I brought you a present.”

  Queenie’s eyes glistened as Chin placed the wooden crate in front of her. “What is it, Daddy?”

  “Just watch.” Chin pulled back his arm and stretched open his hand. With one swift, targeted shot, he swiped at the center of the box, hand landing at a key structural point. The whole box splintered and fell apart, revealing two tawny-colored baby cranes with long spindly legs.

  Little Queenie didn’t bother to hide her disappointment. “These birds are ugly.”

  “Did you ever hear the story of the Ugly Duckling? Ugly baby birds that grew up to be beautiful?”

  “That doesn’t happen. If you’re ugly, you’re ugly.”

  “Just wait.” Chin left the apartment again, then wheeled in a much bigger crate, about five feet all around. As with the smaller box, he made one well-aimed strike and the box splintered. This time there were two fully-grown majestic red-crowned cranes with white-and-black plumage.

  “These are the same birds as the ugly ones except they’re fully grown.”

  Chin lifted the two cranes, one in each hand and carried them over to the wide-eyed girl.

  “They are so bee-you-ti-ful.” Queenie dragged the word out. “Will I be beautiful when I am big?”

  “No, Queenie. You are already beautiful. I brought these to show you who you are. You are a crane. To Chinese people, they are symbols of strength, long life, and beauty.”

  “I want to be beautiful. I want to be strong.”

  “Don’t you want to live a long life?”

  Queenie shook her head. “Mommy says being rich is the most important thing in the world and you have to do anything to get there.”

  Chin glanced at Elizabeth, unsure whether to thank her or kill her. He turned back to Queenie. “From now on, just listen to me.”

  “Okay.”

  As Chin planned, this introduction to cranes set the path for Queenie’s life. Fascinated and enchanted, she discovered, as she grew, that the birds were more than pretty playthings. At eight, she began using crane feathers in clothing. Feathers started showing up on her tops, dresses and jeans. When she was ten, she found out the feathers could be used as writing instruments.

  The entrepreneurial young girl saw opportunity. She began selling clothing using feathers and specialty pens from her pets. This was a most profitable enterprise, and she learned how to leverage the power of others. She farmed out work to her classmates, who were happy to make a few bucks. It was the kind of initiative that Chin hoped might happen. How many twelve-year-olds made three hundred bucks a week, tax free?

  Like her father, Queenie had incredible muscle speed and strength. Like all her siblings, she had rigorous martial arts training and was able to fend off paramours, perverts and posers with well-placed shots to the windpipe or groin.

  She got a most unusual present for her fifteenth birthday: a trip to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. When she asked Chin if he was going to accompany her, he simply said, “You should do this by yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re so damned stupid,” Chin reprimanded. “Yes, you’re making money, but the profits are going up your nose or into your arms.”

  “It’s my life and I will do with it what I want and I want to go back to New York. Now!”

  “NO!” thundered Chin. He strong-armed Queenie onto a private plane that took her to the Red-crowned Crane Sanctuary by Tsurui.

  With nothing else to do, the rebellious teenager wandered to the sanctuary’s frozen lake. The shivering girl cursed her father until… until she saw poetry. Thirty red-crowned cranes appeared and engaged in a mating dance, ballet-like in its beauty and execution. Almost, as if human, pairs of cranes bowed to each other, jumped in the air, then floated back to earth. The sight of the lustrous, elegant winged creatures gliding through the shimmering atmosphere brought her to tears. I am a Crane.

  Below the multi-colored lights of the aurora borealis in this natural paradise, she made a decision. I’m quitting cold turkey.

  Three months after their Japan trip, Chin officially discarded Queenie’s mother. The marriage had been a sham for years and Elizabeth, at thirty-three, was washed up. She had no skills other than how to please men and Queenie couldn’t take it—she hated seeing Elizabeth’s pitiful attempts at offering herself up to any man with a dollar bill
in his hand and vowed she would never be in that position.

  She moved out and, at fifteen, she became a woman.

  From watching her mother, Queenie learned how to use men. She knew just how far she could push before she might really have to deliver. She also had no qualms about delivering if it meant she could get something of value.

  And if guys didn’t feel like giving her what she wanted? She had an ace up her sleeve—the dance she learned from watching the cranes on the frozen lake in Japan drove men wild. Suddenly, closed doors would open, tight fists would unclench.

  Queenie determined to have her own stable of cranes. She concentrated on two main species: the sandhill and the Japanese red-crowned cranes. While they were from completely different geographies and their plumage was not at all similar, she loved the red patch of skin on top of their heads.

  She started to breed the birds. Considering the rents in New York and the space needed to keep each five-foot tall twenty-pound adult bird, her twenty birds were an expensive but necessary cost of doing business—they were the source of the feathers.

  She sold feathered clothing, boas, and quills to the public but kept the best plumage for herself. Already an attention getter, her amazing use of feathers just added to her allure. She didn’t have to do any marketing at all. In the very elite circles she started to travel, she was “the crane babe.”

  While she stopped using drugs herself, she immersed herself in the drug culture. With the profits she made on her feather lines, she began making deals in the lucrative New York markets.

  Between the drugs and her crane lines, she was pulling in over ten grand a month. Not bad for a kid who wasn’t legal to drive so, when her Grade 9 English teacher promised to give her an “A” if she spent extra time “studying” with him, she ended her school career by shoving the end of a quill into the creep’s eyeball, permanently blinding him.

  Three years flew by and, on her eighteenth birthday, Queenie had one of her increasingly rare visits from Chin. It was less than three minutes, long enough to hand her a shoe box and say, “Be smart with this because that’s the last you’ll ever get from me.”

  The box contained a million dollars in cash.

  Chapter 1

  Taking in the view from her two-thousand square-foot penthouse in Manhattan, Queenie was pissed. Where the hell was King? It had been more than a week since the Eurasian beauty spoke to her brother. “Speak” was not exactly the right word. She was so angry that she blistered his ears for twenty minutes when he told her there would be a further delay in the delivery of the three hundred Chinese illegals and two hundred fifty pounds of heroin onboard their newly acquired tramp freighter.

  It began innocently enough. The boat had barely left the Chinese port of Guangzhou when King called to say, “I need Cheryl for a little job.” While Cheryl had assisted in transporting thousands of illegals around the globe, it was her first voyage as captain. Queenie was positive that the only reason Cheryl got the gig was because of King’s libido. He had bored Queenie for hours with tales of the former Olympic gymnast’s “acrobatic virtues.”

  When she stated her reservations, King assured her, “Relax. It’ll only take an extra day.”

  She reluctantly agreed but, when she didn’t hear from him for three days, she started calling for an update. Initially, when he didn’t answer, she was ticked but not angry. However, as the unanswered texts and voicemail messages mounted into the hundreds, she felt herself wanting to shove a lit stick of dynamite up his rectum. When King finally picked up, there was no apology, only some comments about dealing with “family business” in Shanghai.

  That’s when she went ballistic. He patiently listened to her tirade before answering with a flippant, “I feel for you. Talk to you soon.” Then he hung up without explanation.

  And that was the last Queenie heard from him.

  After two weeks, she freaked. The customers awaiting the illegals pressured her about the delay and wondered aloud if they’d made a mistake in giving her a down payment. There were hourly phone calls from San Francisco to New York and none of the conversations were pleasant. And she still had the huge monthly mortgage payment to pay for living in one of the most highly priced areas in the world.

  Now Alexei wanted to meet in three hours and there was no way to delay him again.

  The squeeze was on.

  Her cell phone rang. There was no ID from the caller, but that was normal for her line of work. She had a generic way of answering these calls that either encouraged business or flattered the caller, making him want to get to know her better.

  Queenie hit the familiar green button with a telephone image. “Hello, Sexy. What do you want?”

  “Not what you’re suggesting,” said the familiar voice.

  Queenie gulped. Not a good way to start a conversation with your father. “Hello, Father.” She could never bring herself to call this almost totally absentee parent ‘Dad.’ “What do you want?” There was a coldness to her voice. A month or so ago, when she went to see him in a cave in India, he had sicced tigers on her and her siblings. She knew he’d only wanted to teach them a lesson about always being on guard, but that didn’t stop her from thinking it was an asshole thing to do.

  “King is dead,” stated Chin in a flat voice. “And there’s no point getting emotional. That’s not going to help you.”

  Queenie dug her fingers into her cheeks, trying to control herself. This confirmed her worst fears. She took a breath. “Do you know what happened to my boat and cargo?”

  “Confiscated by the authorities.”

  “Cheryl should have been able to handle them.”

  “Cheryl’s dead, too. King took her on a wild goose chase.”

  Queenie shook her head. Complete screw-up. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “I didn’t know the two of you had a deal on the go until just before this call, after my man went through King’s computer. There were no details but enough for me to figure out that you should change plans.”

  Chin waited as Queenie unleashed a string of four-letter obscenities before continuing. “Now you know why I didn’t come in on your deal. Greedy people wind up with nothing. You and King were greedy. You thought you could become billionaires overnight with little work. It took me years to build that fortune, not weeks.”

  “My whole damned life is on the line and the bastard will take me apart if I don’t pay up. It’s your fault. You introduced me to him.”

  Chin interjected, “Who are you talking about?”

  “Alexei Gudonov.”

  “The Bolshevik Meathead?” sneered Chin.

  “Yeah. I’ve got to go see him after lunch. I owe him a million bucks and I got bupkis to give him. What should I do?”

  “One, don’t let him see you sweat. Two, don’t defend; attack. Think outside the box. Of course, if you play by normal rules, it’s your funeral.”

  “Thanks for nothing.” Queenie punched the end call button viciously, glaring at the phone as if it was the phone’s fault. She sat abruptly on the floor. The shipment she and King had put together was gone. Pretty much everything she had was invested in that deal. As she put things in perspective, she decided there was no point in being mad. That was no defense against a baseball bat against her head or a bullet to her brain.

  It was pointless asking for more time. This was a disaster and she needed a brand new strategy on her own without help from anyone.

  Fast. Unless she just wanted to disappear, but that was not her. The exotic femme fatale, like her siblings, was determined to show the world—and their father, that they were equal and more to him.

  Think outside the box. Queenie smiled. She didn’t have to do that. She’d use the weapon that beautiful women have used against men since time immemorial.

  She entered her bathroom and showered with the hottest water she could stand for ten minutes, scrubbing herself thoroughly. After drying herself, she applied moisturizer to her face and breasts. Waiting for
the moisturizer to absorb, she dyed a crimson patch on top of her jet black hair.

  Satisfied, she applied delicate amounts of glitter to her cheeks. On and around the tattoo of a Japanese red-crowned crane on her left breast and the nipple of her right breast, she sprinkled more sparkles.

  She pored through her jewelry box and picked out a navel ring with a revolver hanging below the jewel. She slipped it through the hole above her navel, then stepped to her full-length mirror. Even she had to admire her hot bikini body.

  Eschewing panties, she slipped into a black leather mini-skirt. Examining herself again in her mirror, she saw the outline of what men considered one of the most glorious asses in New York.

  As a final touch, she liberally sprayed cheap perfume on her lithe arms and legs, then put on a sheer, short lavender top that exposed her dangling navel bling. The translucent material allowed for a full view of Queenie’s luscious, contoured glamourous breasts, leaving nothing to the imagination.

  Over the top? Tacky? Absolutely, but that was because Queenie knew that Alexei was not much for subtlety. Trashy tramps were his style and her pornstar look was perfect.

  Now she was ready to see Alexei.

  Throwing a hand-made feather boa over her shoulder, she exited her apartment.

  Don’t let him see you sweat. Don’t defend; attack.

  She thought about her father’s words and nodded.

  Chapter 2

  Talk about an unlikely trio. Twenty-eight-year-old Noah Reid, the straight-laced president of the Chad Huang Foundation; bald-headed JJ, about the same age as Noah and a Shaolin martial arts grandmaster; and fourteen-year-old Sam Xi, a former teenage hoodlum until Noah took him under his wing.

  The exhausted trio was unwinding in the executive class lounge at the Shanghai International Airport. Even though their flight was not for another several hours, they had been in the private luxury parlor for a while. They needed to recuperate from their harrowing experience at Heaven, JJ’s former ancient, mysterious mountain monastery where, decades earlier, Noah’s mentor, Master Wu, left defiantly when he felt it could offer him no more. Noah and Sam had recently taken the aged sifu for a final trip of reconciliation with his former masters.