by Mike Brooks
They took turns sitting outside to guard her door. The room was only one storey above ground level, which wasn’t what she’d expected, but the windows were secured with bars and could only be opened a few inches to allow ventilation. This was presumably for security against burglars, but it functioned just as well for keeping her inside. Resourceful though she might be, she couldn’t conjure a laser torch out of nowhere, so if she wanted to leave the room without her guards’ permission, she’d have to go through at least one of them to do it.
She picked Sacha, for three reasons. Firstly, he’d held a gun to her head. Secondly, he seemed the most overconfident. And thirdly, he wore a belt.
The hotel was clearly owned by Sergei Orlov, as the staff she’d seen had shown no visible curiosity as to why there was a North American woman under constant guard in one of the rooms: Presumably he held people here when he needed to. When they brought her food, under the watchful supervision of one of Orlov’s thugs, they set it down on one side of the room without looking at or talking to her. However, each guard always sent the hotel staff in first, choosing to hover menacingly behind with one hand on the pistol holstered at their side.
It was nighttime, and the advertising holos visible from her window were blinking with the red-and-yellow of Star Cola and other less ubiquitous brands. She’d been listening at her room door and had heard the sullen exchange between Leon and Sacha as they changed over. Leon was tired, and had been in no mood to listen to Sacha’s complaining about how his uncle had been trying to get his “well-connected” nephew to intercede in a squabble with local government over some form of license. In fact, he’d left abruptly before Sacha had finished his story, and Rourke had heard some muttered grumbling at the bald man’s expense from the other side of the door.
Two hours later, right on schedule, the food arrived. They never bothered to knock, presumably to prevent her from setting an ambush, but they’d underestimated her preparation. You didn’t need warning if your target moved to a predictable timetable.
The lock buzzed, and the room’s door swung open to admit a dark-haired young woman in a hotel uniform carrying a tray of food. Rourke, who was waiting in the bathroom suite just past the room entrance, grabbed the girl by the shoulder and hauled her bodily into the bathroom before she’d even registered Rourke’s presence. There was a clatter of plates as the tray spilled to the floor, and Rourke caught a glimpse of Sacha’s handsome, startled face as she slammed the bathroom door shut and locked it.
She turned to the terrified maid and seized her arm, twisting it up to force the other woman down to her knees. It wasn’t, in truth, a terribly painful hold, but it coupled with the girl’s sudden vulnerability to produce the desired effect. The young woman screamed in genuine terror.
Sacha had been in the warehouse when Rourke had taken out two of Orlov’s other thugs and had pulled a gun on the crime lord. He’d seen Orlov deal with their failure, and Rourke was banking on the fact that Sacha didn’t want to become the next object lesson. Allowing his prisoner to abduct another of Orlov’s employees and torture her on the other side of a locked door wouldn’t reflect well on him, so he did what anyone who valued their skin would in such a scenario: He tried to get inside the small, confined space where his greater size and strength would allow him to easily subdue this nuisance.
He tried the handle first but since the door was locked, his next effort consisted of throwing all his weight at it, shoulder first, with the handle still held down. The door was solid, and it withstood his attempt. Rourke reckoned he’d give it three tries before he resorted to something more unpredictable, like trying to shoot the lock off or calling for help from someone who had a key. She waited for him to hit it a second time, then as he would be withdrawing for a third go and his weight would actually be pulling the door shut, reached out and unlocked it.
The door swung inwards easily as Sacha barged at it again, catching him off-balance. Rourke had convinced Andrei on her first day that, since she hailed from the United States of North America, she really, really needed the ability to make coffee. The fact that he’d agreed suggested that he’d never had a mug of boiling liquid with several spoons of melted sugar in it flung at him.
Sacha got the entire pot that Rourke had placed carefully on the washbasin two minutes ago, square in his face.
The scalding, syrupy mess stuck to his skin, burning on contact. Now it was Sacha’s turn to scream, the full-throated howl of a man introduced to pain the likes of which he’d never felt before, but he was still in motion. Rourke dropped the coffee pot and caught his gun arm, angled it across her body so the weapon was pointing fairly harmlessly at the wall, and kicked out his near leg. Sacha’s own momentum sent him face-first into the washbasin, and he collapsed to the floor making little more than a stunned whimpering.
Not good enough: Rourke twisted the gun out of his unresisting fingers—Kobel .45, twenty-round clip, lightweight and reliable—and struck him directly behind the ear with the butt. That knocked him out, and she used one hand to roll him over onto his back while pointing the gun at the maid with the other. The girl had gone beyond screaming and was now kneeling and watching with the wide, terrified eyes of someone who wouldn’t be sleeping well for quite a while.
“Give me your shoes,” Rourke snapped in Russian, the fingers of her right hand unfastening Sacha’s belt. The girl didn’t immediately react, and Rourke deactivated the safety for a moment simply to get the distinctive buzz of arming it again. “Your shoes. Take them off and give them to me, or I will kill you and take them myself.”
Thankfully, this threat jolted the maid into action. She pulled off her uniform-matching flats and tossed them over before curling up in a ball, now starting to weep in apparent terror. Rourke judged it very unlikely that she was faking, and put the safety back on Sacha’s gun before pulling the shoes on. The thug’s belt slipped free from around him just as he started to come to, but she had time to grab his comm from his ear and snatch his pad from his pocket before he was even conscious enough to realise that his face was still burning, let alone that his prisoner was getting away.
She slipped out of her room and pulled the door shut behind her, then set off down the hall while threading Sacha’s belt through the waist loops on her borrowed pants, the gun riding in a pocket and the stolen shoes a bit too big on her feet. With any luck the maid would be too terrified to come out of the bathroom without prompting, and Sacha would be preoccupied with trying to save his features. She would have really liked to tie them both up, but although she could have theoretically torn strips off her bedsheets for the purpose, she’d decided against it. It would have taken too long, for one thing, and the longer she’d spent in close proximity to Sacha, the more chance he’d have had to properly get hold of her. Besides which, throwing a potentially disfiguring liquid into someone’s face and then tying them up so they could do nothing about it swung rather closer to torture than she felt comfortable with.
The stairwell down to the ground floor was deserted, but she still rode the bannisters down to make her time there as brief as possible. Instead of turning right towards the low conversations she could hear from the main reception, she slipped left into the dining room. It was deserted—she’d worked out that she got fed after the rest of the hotel had dined—with the chairs upside down on the tables. Over on the far side she could see the glow of an emergency exit sign from behind a thin gauze curtain.
She paused for a moment. Her immediate instinct was to get out as quickly and quietly as possible, and slip away into the New Samaran night. However, she suspected that the hotel would have cameras, and while her movements around inside might not have attracted anyone’s attention yet, she was pretty sure that leaving through an emergency exit would.
Very well then. GIA training had drummed into her that if you couldn’t sneak away unnoticed, you should create a very good reason to leave obviously, so she pulled out the gun and used its butt to smash the glass over the fire alarm ac
tivation point by her elbow.
Sirens started wailing immediately, loud enough to rouse any sleeping guests and alert everyone in the building. Rourke didn’t waste any time: She stowed the gun and ran across the dining room, swept the curtain aside, and threw her weight against the emergency door. The lock had been released by the alarm, and the double doors swung open, bringing her out onto a patio area at street level with tables for guests to sit at in good weather. She paused for a moment in the fresh air, looking back up at the building as though scanning for flames, then vaulted over the rails onto the pavement and fumbled Sacha’s commpiece into her ear. She pulled his pad out and hurried away, looking for all the world like someone retreating to a safe distance and calling the emergency response services.
With any luck the hotel would organise a complete evacuation, and in the corresponding confusion it would be some time before her absence would be noted. Even if Sacha had fully recovered, he’d be hard-pressed to find anyone to listen to him for the next few minutes. In the best possible scenario, he’d contact Andrei and Leon, and the three of them would hunt for her themselves, hoping to avoid any retribution from Sergei Orlov. But she held out little hope for that. More likely, the other two would feed him to the wolves and report her absence to Orlov the moment Sacha told them. As soon as Orlov learned of her disappearance, he would undoubtedly send out the kill orders for the rest of her crew.
She had to get to him before that happened.
HIGH SOCIETY
Chief Han Xiuying walked into Room 311 to find the gangsters waiting for her.
Piotr Zhang looked as smart as ever in a dark-red suit with razor creases. The hotelier had the features of a model: a strong, straight nose; a firm jaw flecked with dark stubble; and warm, almost liquid, brown eyes. He possessed a lazy self-assurance that combined with his striking good looks to make him very attractive . . . at least, to those people who didn’t know what he was capable of. Xiuying knew him all too well, although she’d have been too wary to let a pretty younger man turn her head anyway.
Gao Dongfeng, in contrast, looked like his lifetime of ugliness had taken root on his face. Xiuying wasn’t one to judge by appearances, but this lank-haired, broken-toothed old man looked more like a vicious old miser from a folktale than anything else, or possibly an undertaker from a horror holo. If anything, the latter was more accurate than the former: Gao had been a high-ranking Dragon Sons’ enforcer long before the clan had established their base of power in Zhuchengshi, and while he might not do much dirty work himself these days, his ruthlessness was notorious amongst the people who knew about such things. He glowered at her as she walked in, his battered teeth worrying at one of his ragged fingernails.
The final member of the trio was Song Daiyu, seated between her colleagues with her back straight and her long, perfectly manicured fingers steepled in front of her. She had a line of precious stones—genuine diamonds, from what Xiuying had heard—set as subdermal implants in a half-circle around her left eye, and they glinted in the light as she raised her head slightly. The rest of her expression was nearly as hard as the gems: Song ran Zhuchengshi’s Triax-owned casinos, and you didn’t get or hold such a privileged position in the Dragon Sons without inner steel.
Xiuying met her stare without blinking and took a seat facing all three of them, unable to shake the recurring feeling that this was the toughest job interview ever. They never got any easier, these meetings. She always felt like she was trying to outstare three tigers at once, and if she concentrated too hard on one, then the other two would jump on her. She told hold of the underside of the table to pull her chair closer and suppressed a slight grimace as her fingers brushed against what felt like chewing gum, still slightly soft. Disgusting. Gao’s cleaning company really isn’t good enough.
“So,” she said, favouring them with a thin smile and hoping they hadn’t interpreted her mild revulsion as fear, “what do we need to discuss today?”
“We’ve got some ships coming in,” Gao said without preamble, spitting a sliver of nail across the table. Not directly at her—her tolerance had limits—but she still felt herself bristling at the man’s lack of respect. “You don’t get to look inside them.”
Xiuying raised her eyebrows. “Are your smugglers losing their touch?”
Gao glowered at her again. “I didn’t ask for your smart mouth, you stinking whore.”
“Dongfeng!” Zhang snapped, leaning forward and locking eyes with the older man. “Mind your language.” He turned his gaze to Xiuying, all smouldering eyes and sincerity. “Our apologies, Chief Han. Please excuse my colleague. You know how he can be.”
Yes indeed. Vicious, callous, and sadistic. Xiuying wanted to reach across the table and slug Gao on the jaw, but she had a greater sense of self-preservation than that. She stored the insult away instead, as she did with all such incidents. One day the game might be played differently, under different rules, and on that day she would not be above personal revenge.
Of course, it fell to Song Daiyu to bring things back to business. Gao was the iron fist and Zhang the velvet glove, but Song, it was rumoured, directed both.
“We would not normally request this level of indulgence from you, Chief Han,” the younger woman said in a clipped tone. “As you say, we can usually find . . . other avenues . . . to avoid unnecessary complications with our imports. And if we lose a shipment here and there to the authorities, well, that is the price of our business.” She laced her fingers together on the desk top, the long nails moving past each other like a battery of tiny blades. “However, on this occasion we cannot risk any intrusion. We require you to ensure that on seventhday next week our contractors are uninterrupted when they make port.”
Xiuying looked at each of them in turn, trying to gauge them. No gangster was an open book unless they wanted to be, but these three in particular were hard to read. Gao was always sullen, Zhang always lazily flirtatious, and Song could have been one of the statues standing in her own premises’ forecourts for all the emotion she displayed in their meetings. That said, Han Xiuying had been swimming in dangerous waters for a while now, and she had grown used to the predators there. She could see faint hints of tension at the corners of Song’s eyes, in the way Gao wouldn’t quite meet her gaze now, in Zhang’s overly casual slump in his chair. This was big to them. Huge, perhaps.
“That’s only eight days from now,” she said seriously. “I imagine that the shift rotas have already been drawn up. Changing them now to ensure we only have sympathetic staff onsite would risk drawing exactly the sort of attention you’re looking to avoid.”
“Shifts change all the time,” Zhang said reasonably. “People get dropped, people get called in; who gives a shit?”
“The people who get dropped give a shit; I can assure you of that,” Xiuying snapped at him. “If you lose a shift, you lose money, and people pay attention when they lose money. Are you really so naïve that you think my officers don’t know which of their colleagues are on your books? If we have to move one or two people off shift, that might be ignored. If we have to reschedule half the port staff, and people realise that there’s a pattern to it, that’s going to cause the kind of disruption neither of us want.”
“Remind me, what are we paying you for again?” Gao sneered. “Make it happen.”
“You’re paying me to ensure we both make a profit,” Xiuying told him coldly, “but I’m not the ultimate authority here. Have you bought off the governor yet?”
There was a stony silence. Xiuying sat back in her chair and folded her arms.
“No, I thought not. That one’s an idealist, and she’s got ambitions beyond this planet, which she won’t get to realise if she’s seen as weak or corrupt. So long as Governor Mei is in power, she can call for an investigation into me and my department, a central investigation with the full authority of the government. You don’t want that. I don’t want that. I’ve kept her happy with my ‘efforts’ so far, but if enough voices start shouting from ground
level that something big is going down, and it’s found that I ignored it, or facilitated it . . .” She spread her hands. “If central government comes in with their big boots on, it will be the end of me, and of our special relationship. It’ll be the end of you too.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” Gao snorted. “The government’s weak, and we are strong.”
“The government here is weak,” Xiuying countered. “Your kind is ignored so long as you don’t cause too much trouble. If you get too blatant, then a bigger fish will sit up and take notice. Beijing and Moscow don’t have high tolerance levels, and they have little regard for collateral damage. Do you want martial law on these streets? If you provoke them enough, they’ll shut this planet down and rip away all your hiding places until they find you.”
She paused, aware that she was breathing a little heavily, but she could see that her words had made an impact. The threat of central government had always been her nuclear option, the course of action that would guarantee her own downfall but bring the Triax down with her. There was always the risk that they would try to call her bluff if she’d threatened it herself, but they might be more inclined to listen to a warning that they could bring it down on their own heads.
She really hoped they’d listen. If the nuclear option ever became a necessity, she wanted to be the one who invoked it so she had as much time to prepare as possible.
“I appreciate your concerns,” Song Daiyu said carefully. “I assure you, none of us wish to cause any far-reaching consequences.”
But . . .
“But the fact is, we do not have the authority to either cancel or reschedule this shipment,” Song continued. “We have our instructions, which is to ensure that it lands and is unloaded without any interruption from the authorities. Our failure in this matter would have more immediate and certain consequences for us than anything sanctioned by Old Earth.” She shrugged. “I know all about odds. We’ll take our chances.”
