The Noah Reid Series: Books 1-3: The Noah Reid Action Thriller Series Boxset

by Wesley Robert Lowe

He turned to look at the wall behind Master Wu. His eyes fixated on another symbol of familiarity—a watercolor painting of a tiger entwined with a crane. Noah did that painting many years ago as a gift to Master Wu and his particular field of martial arts expertise—Hung Gar, Tiger and Crane Style. Although it was crude and childish in execution, it was Master Wu’s prize possession. Noah wondered where it was when he entered the building. He realized he missed it because it was in the most unlikely place for such an amateurish work—right in the center of the main wall, impossible to miss except if you were looking for it.

  Master and disciple moved up to face each other and made the Shaolin hand sign. Hands came together with palms touching and fingers erect and then were brought to the chest. They made the ancestral bows. While one expected fit young Noah to be able to touch his forehead to his knees, it was amazing that the aged Wu was able to do the same.

  The skirmish began. Noah approached his mentor warily. His right leg flew out toward Wu, but the sifu easily deflected it with a kick of his own. Noah attacked while Wu’s leg hung in the air, but the old man grabbed his foot and with an effortless push shoved Noah to the floor.

  “Focus, Noah. Focus.”

  Without responding, Noah rose and advanced cautiously. Circling... circling... Noah adopted the position of a snarling tiger as if to hypnotize Master Wu.

  Undaunted and uncompromising, Wu glared back at Noah and countered with his own tiger stance. Right foot ahead of left, weight primarily on the back foot with a slight amount on the balls of the front. Both arms raised, one a few inches higher than the other. Readying for attack, Noah spread his fingers open and formed them into the shape of tiger claws.

  Noah attacked Wu’s back flank, but Master Wu abruptly wheeled around at the speed of light. He easily knocked Noah to the ground. As the younger man tried to get up, Master Wu pivoted and dropped him again. Noah leapt to his feet then stepped backward.

  Master Wu’s palms touched together as if praying, and then his hands sprung out, pushing Noah, tripping him with his leg, sending Noah to the floor once again.

  Noah was panting, but Wu’s breathing was still calm and relaxed as he adopted the ready position. As the new lawyer tried to lift himself again, a swirling, spinning Master Wu drove his legs into Noah with a rapid combination of left and right, sending him colliding with the floor.

  Noah, lying on his backside, gasped, “Where did you learn that?”

  “Did you think I took up knitting while you were gone? I created that. Thinking keeps you young. You should try it sometime.”

  Noah shook his head. “I could never do that, no matter how much I thought or practiced.”

  Wu took his young protégé’s hand and helped him to his feet. “A sapling grows into a tree with deep roots and a thick trunk.”

  “I doubt it. I’m going nowhere.”

  “You did much better than I expected. Did you find someone to work out with in Los Angeles?”

  “Hardly,” Noah said grumpily. “My routine every morning before brushing my teeth, taking a shower or going to pee was to spend half an hour on the drills you taught me. Same deal every day, sickness or in health, rain or shine, exam or holiday.”

  “That shows discipline.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t improve. I just stayed static.”

  Master Wu nodded. “You know the moves but lacked the need. However, when the time comes, you will release your inner tiger.”

  “Not likely. I just had a seventy-two-year-old spank my ass,” Noah said.

  “It’s the heart,” Wu said gently. “Not the muscle, not the age.”

  “I’m soft. It’s in my genes. Blame Mom and Dad.”

  Without warning, Master Wu whipped around and put Noah in a headlock, applying painful pressure. “Do not talk disrespectfully about your parents.”

  Noah flailed away but was unable to free himself. “It was a joke,” he protested.

  “It wasn’t funny.” Master Wu released Noah, who stepped back and rubbed his temples, trying to get some circulation back into his brain.

  “Your heart is what will give you strength when the time comes. And you will attack because you are a warrior.”

  “Sifu, I’m about to become a professional paper pusher. I’m no hero, no warrior. No Jet Li. No Sammo Hung. No Donnie Yeo. No Chuck Norris. No Rambo. No eye of the tiger.”

  Wu’s eyes bored into Noah. “You don’t need to be. You are Noah Reid.”

  Chapter 6

  It was five a.m., and a silver Toyota Corolla pulled in front of an apartment complex. This was not Garret’s normal car, but he didn’t want any attention drawn to his presence, which his regular car would. This building was part of an expat community, a place where overseas employees who worked in a foreign country could live, shop and send their kids to school without having to mingle with the locals. Garret hated these places. Just as Chinatowns outside of Asia formed as a way to keep the yellow peril from contaminating white society, expat enclaves existed so whites could stay together and not have to associate with the coloreds. For Garret, who had lived and breathed Asian culture since he was a teen, this attitude was an insult. He hid it, but just barely.

  Garret, already dressed for work in a gray power suit, stepped out of the car with his briefcase. He took a few confident steps, and a uniformed guard saluted the senior lawyer before letting him in. With deliberate, strong movement, Garret strode down the hall and knocked on the door of a particular apartment unit.

  Thirty-five-year-old prematurely balding Ron Armstrong, dressed in his pajamas, answered.

  “What the...? Garret, do you know what time it is?”

  Garret looked at his watch.

  “It’s time to get to work. I suggest you shower, shave and grab a coffee.”

  Garret opened his briefcase and handed Ron a thick file of documents and a USB flash drive. “I’ve gone over the Golden Asia financial statements and have flagged a few areas that need modification.”

  Ron winced as he gave the file a cursory glance. He restrained himself from hurling f-bomb invectives.

  “We were already up to midnight preparing these, and I dropped them off at 12:30,” he growled.

  “And I have been looking them over carefully since then.”

  “You couldn’t have found anything wrong.” Ron was starting to get angry. “The team went through things with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “I didn’t say there was anything wrong. I said I flagged some areas that need modification. Get them done by lunchtime.”

  The implication of Garret’s words needed no elaboration to Ron. “Cook the books.”

  Ron ran his hands through what was left of his greasy hair, perusing Garret’s notes.

  “This is a lot of number crunching. A lot.”

  Garret looked away briefly, then folded his hands. There was an threatening undercurrent in his velvet-toned voice. “I pay you a lot of money. A lot. Do it, Ron.”

  Garret turned away and headed back down the hall without awaiting Ron’s answer.

  ***

  PACIFIC NORTHWEST

  An old tramp freighter beached on the shore of a small, uninhabited island off the state of Washington. There were no passengers in sight, but several crew members brandished machine guns. The muffled speech in a foreign language being shouted wafted up from below the cargo deck, but no one paid any attention.

  In the sky, an AgustaWestland helicopter descended. At a price of $9,000,000, it was in stark contrast to the freighter that looked like Krazy Glue and duct tape were holding it together. The helicopter landed, and three passengers got out. They could be clones of each other. No racism here. One was Asian, one Caucasian, one black. Each one was somewhere in his twenties, wearing designer clothes, and had a body that looked like he spent half his waking hours in the gym.

  King, the Asian leader, looked especially sinister with a four-foot-long Taipan snake draping his neck. He nodded to the captain, who opened the door to the cargo area. Two hundred an
d fifty illegals poured out, waving their arms in ecstasy at the sight of sunlight and the breath of the fresh ocean air.

  For forty-seven days, they had not seen the light of the sun or moon. Their food, what little there was, had long gone stale. They looked more like wild beasts than human beings, but what really stood out more than anything was the smell.

  No showers or baths during the trip, buckets overflowing with feces and urine all over the cargo floor, and the human cargo squished together with little more than enough room to breathe.

  Yet all of them had boarded willingly. Some were as young as seven, others in their fifties. They thought they were tasting freedom for the first time in their lives and watched in anticipation as the leader of the helicopter group stepped forward to speak to them.

  As the cargo hold belched out its final passenger, the black man whispered into the Asian leader’s ear. The leader asked the captain what happened to the other sixteen that were supposed to be onboard. The captain shrugged. “They died.”

  King took a deep breath and removed his sunglasses, revealing the knife-scarred face of one tough mother, and turned to the motley voyagers.

  “I want to remind you that the ten thousand dollars paid already is just the down payment. For the next ten years, fifty percent of everything you make will be mine. I will provide all the jobs and places for you to stay. If you do not agree, you will never leave this island. See if you can swim fifty miles to land. If, during the ten years, you do not pay me, I will report you to the authorities for immediate deportation. If you choose to hide and I cannot find you, I will kill your relatives. Any questions?”

  No one had any questions. Every one of them had friends or family who had already come. They knew the drill.

  “Good. This will be your home for two weeks. We will clean you, feed you and clothe you so that you look presentable. Afterward, we will transport a few of you at time to your new homes in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Denver and New York.”

  While this was hardly a celebration-inspiring speech, smiles and happiness broke out on their faces. After all, what they were going to was a hundred times better than what they escaped. And ten years would go by very quickly.

  King turned to the captain. He took the snake off his neck, knocked it on its head and threw it at the captain. The angered snake bit the captain’s neck, and he dropped to the floor in pain. The Taipan was one of the world’s deadliest snakes, and the man would be dead within the hour.

  King fixed the newcomers with a scowl. “He allowed sixteen of you to die on the trip,” he told them in a soft, menacing voice. “Sixteen deaths represent over one hundred sixty thousand dollars of lost revenue per year for the next ten years. I don’t tolerate incompetence. Remember that.”

  Chapter 7

  HONG KONG

  Somewhere else in the city, in a new apartment provided by his new employer, Noah was dead to the world. After he finished at Master Wu’s, Noah had to walk two miles before there was enough civilization to find another cab brave enough to pick him up. By the time he got to the new apartment provided by his employer, it was 4 a.m.

  Noah sat at a table, sleeping, his head propped on his right hand. A cup of cold coffee the size of a small bucket sat beside a thick open law textbook titled Principles of Litigation. He thought he could pull an all-nighter and brush up on his worst subject just in case he got asked about complex legal disputes, but it was not to be.

  The alarm clock on his cell phone rang and rang, but he paid no attention to it until his arm collapsed and his head hit the table. He checked the time on his phone. “Reid, you are so dead.”

  He frantically pulled himself up and hopped into the shower. It was freezing, but Noah had no time to be picky. Besides, it helped to wake him up. To save precious seconds, he brushed his teeth in the shower, then used the shampoo from his hair as shaving gel and ran the razor over his face. Suddenly, the water from the shower got scalding hot.

  “Damn, damn, damn.” He hopped from foot to foot as the stinging water peppered his skin. He leapt out of the shower, barely patting himself with a towel before throwing a shirt and pair of pants on his still-damp body. Never mind that they were wrinkled. No time for ironing, but he couldn’t even if he wanted to because he hadn’t been settled in long enough to get an iron.

  “Please, no, don’t fire me... Mr. Southam, the plane was late.” No, he knew the plane got in late. “Mr. Southam, the neighbor’s dog died, and she wanted me to cremate it.” No, numbnuts. This is a no-pets building. How about the truth, Reid? Duh. “I was late because I slept in because... because I wanted to see my sifu?” That’s would no doubt be a winner.

  With no time to look in the mirror to check for proper grooming, he rocketed out the door with briefcase in one hand as he struggled to tie his tie with the other. There was just one problem. Behind his shirt collar, the back part of the tie still showed—a sure sign of a putz.

  He didn’t see it, but everyone else sure would.

  ***

  A towering, post-modern skyscraper stood a thousand feet tall. If you were standing on the roof and tilted your focus down its eighty-eight-story glass facade construction to the front of the building, you’d see three colorful fountains with water dancing in front of three sets of revolving doors. Over fifteen thousand people worked full time here and, at 7:57, it seemed to Noah that every single one of them had arrived at the same time to start an eight o’clock shift.

  Under the cloudless sky with blazing sun, a sweating Noah jumped off the bus and peeled into the building. A quick glance at his watch showed that his efforts had not been in vain—he’d be at work on time if...

  There was a line for the elevators, and he saw a tiny space that he might just fit into. He jumped the queue and squeezed in just as the elevator door closed.

  Noah counted at least another nineteen men crammed in like sardines along with him. All seemed cut from the same cookie cutter, with dark suits, white shirts and gray ties. And then... magic. Holy babe-alicious beauty, Batman.

  The babe happened to be Olivia Southam. Noah shoved through the other guys, managing to irritate every one of them, but no matter. He’d almost reached his goal. There was only one person standing between him and his goddess. He was only aware of her tantalizing perfume, which was even more attractive than her creamy skin and long lashes. Noah melted, ignoring the other passengers as he fumbled for something, anything, to say. “Thanks for holding the elevator,” he blurted.

  Olivia remained silent, but not the suit that stood between them. “No one held the elevator. You butted in. I hate jerks who jump in at the last second.”

  After this auspicious start, it was tension all the way to the twelfth floor. The elevator stopped, and the disagreeable man got off. As the door closed, Noah gave a little wave. “Let’s do lunch, real soon,” he called. “Friendly guy,” he said to no one in particular. “I like him. Maybe I’ll ask him for a drink next time.”

  With the obstacle out of his way, Noah edged a little closer to Olivia, who just as quickly eased away. He gave her his best Tom Cruise smile, a smile that would normally melt an iceberg. Olivia’s eyes focused straight at the elevator door.

  Her fragrance of roses, jasmine and Italian cinnamon was unavoidably alluring. Noah inhaled her scent and daringly tried a different tactic. “I’m a lawyer with Pittman Saunders. And you?”

  Before she could respond, the elevator stopped again, this time at the sixteenth floor. The next suit glared at Noah as he got off. “There are seven hundred seasoned attorneys in this building alone, half of us making five hundred Gs and more. Why would any secretary be interested in a rookie?” He darted out of the elevator.

  Before the door closed and before anyone could respond, Olivia swung her purse at Suit Number Two. Everyone gave her a little space.

  Noah ventured, “What does he know? The most important person in any office is the secretary.”

  Up, up, and away went the happy group in silence. Noah tried again. “I
’ve got a black belt in Hung Gar Shaolin martial arts, second degree.”

  Olivia didn’t say anything, but the short pudge beside her certainly did, in a fake effeminate voice. “I’m so impressed. May I have your autograph? Please?”

  Still no word out of Olivia. At the eighty-eighth floor, Olivia got off, held the elevator open, then turned to face the cringing men. “I am not a secretary.”

  Every guy on the elevator stared; with the echo of her footsteps thundering like cannon blasts aimed at them, none dared to move. As the doors closed, Olivia marched away, revealing a huge PITTMAN SAUNDERS logo on the wall.

  Noah shouted, “That’s my floor! That’s my floor, and it’s eight-o-one. I’m gonna get killed.”

  He frantically jabbed at the stop button, and the elevator lurched to a standstill. The doors refused to open, and the emergency bell shrieked. The remaining passengers glared at Noah.

  “You are a complete toad, rookie,” an ill-tempered suit leered. “You won’t last two weeks.”

  The fast-wilting newbie lawyer glanced around the enclosed cubicle, but no savior was in sight.

  Chapter 8

  In his huge master bedroom that overlooked the pool, Tommy sat on his oversized bed with the gaudy yellow silk sheets. He looked around and saw touches of Abby’s artistry everywhere. When he told her he wanted a Chinese motif, she went to town and made him promise not to interfere. Her taste was exquisite, and the room could easily be a showpiece for a reality television show on luxurious bedrooms of the uber-rich. Among the special items were the Chinese words meaning “double happiness” written in calligraphy onto a rice-paper canvas, an original Chinese ink painting of a horse in full gallop by legendary artist Xu Beihong, and a mammoth-sized, hand-knotted Chinese rug with a stunning array of colors in a floral design.

  What drew his attention most, though, was an old color Polaroid photo on the mahogany night table beside his bed. It was a picture of him, his late wife and Abby, the last picture ever taken of Jocelyn. Not a day passed since she died that he didn’t look at this picture for at least thirty seconds. Soon, very soon.