88° North. J.F. Kirwan

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СКАЧАТЬ Chapter Twenty-Five

       Chapter Twenty-Six

       Chapter Twenty-Seven

       Chapter Twenty-Eight

       Epilogue

       Extract

       Endpages

       Copyright

Prologue

      When killers enter a dark, smoke-filled room hunting their quarry, they don’t usually look up to the ceiling. Which was exactly where Blue Fan was, her hands and feet wedged against the edges of a recess, as if crucified on an X-shaped cross. Like a sacrifice. Which is what she’d have been if they’d detected her. One of them did glance her way, but not long enough to distinguish her head-to-toe camouflaged suit from the matt black ceiling. Muscles taut, not breathing, she counted the rifle-sight lasers criss-crossing the empty chamber. Three. Disappointing.

      She was worth more.

      As the door sealed behind them, shutting off all light, the night-goggled men stole forward. All she saw now were the lasers. They told her where the men were, which way they were facing. She listened to their measured breathing, smelt the fresh Hoppe’s No. 9 gun oil smeared on their weapons. They were directly below her. The one on the right stalked away from the other two.

      A mistake.

      Two stilettos hung immobile from breakable lanyards around her wrists. She took a silent breath, relaxed her elbows and kicked off with her feet, snatching the handle of each blade as she dropped.

      One of the two men below her must have heard the whisper of flesh against stone, because he turned, too late. Her first blade syringed into the closest soldier’s neck, transecting his spine at C5, taking him out of the game, while her second blade – for the soldier who’d turned – ice-picked through the gap just above his breastbone. Mortal wound, not yet dead. She used his crumpling body to pivot, and landed in a crouch. Withdrawing the first blade, she sheltered behind her human shield as the third soldier whirled around and squeezed the trigger on his automatic rifle, and didn’t stop. The deluge of bullets finished his comrade.

      ‘Lights!’ she shouted.

      The room flooded with bright light, blinding the third soldier. He ripped off his goggles but didn’t release the trigger, pummelling her body-shield while she waited for his magazine to empty. He let go of the rifle to grab his handgun, but she’d already sprung upwards. His eyes locked upon her empty throwing hand as the blade speared his throat. Two rounds blasted into the concrete floor as he choked, drowning in his own blood, his free hand uselessly trying to stem the flow from his neck. He fell backwards onto the concrete, already dead, his arms and legs splayed, a mirror image of her on the ceiling six seconds earlier.

      Blue Fan surveyed the scene. All dead. All clear. She retrieved her stilettos, and wiped off the blood on one of the soldier’s uniforms. The door opened. Two heavily-tattooed, unarmed men strolled into the room, as if this was business as usual. One of them kicked the third soldier, just to be sure, or maybe for the hell of it.

      ‘Weapons to Kai Tak,’ she said. She studied the three corpses for a moment, and their military insignia. British. SAS. Okay, that made up for it a little. Aside from the wounds, they were in good condition – or at least most of their organs would be, not to mention their bone marrow. “Bodies packed in ice, straight to Dr Lam.’

      Another man entered. Not merely old, ancient, his white beard knotted together by a pale blue opal ring, the same colour as his eyes. Like Death come for a visit. The Judge, independent from any triad, yet holding them all to account. She had other names for him.

      ‘You know what day it is?’ the Judge croaked.

      How could she forget? It was her birthday. Which meant this had been nothing but a warm-up. These men had been professional soldiers. But today she would face something else. A triad assassin. Someone like her. Not as good, though. Never as good.

      ‘You must prepare,’ he said.

      As if he cared. He’d love to see her dead on the floor, sell her kidneys, her eyeballs, probably give them away for free. He was Old School, and she was a woman, one who’d risen higher than any other in a triad. She met his eyes. They exuded warmth, friendship, trust. She knew better. He’d spent a lifetime perfecting how to lie with his eyes, and too many had gone to their graves trusting them.

      ‘I am always prepared,’ she replied.

      ‘We shall see.’

      ***

      The rain fell thick and fast, like dull blades. Blue Fan stared down at the tangle of silver carp wriggling in a white plastic box, protected from the downpour by a tarpaulin. Their sharp eyes accusing, their mouths gaped, barely able to breathe. Soon to be bought, cooked, digested, excreted, chemically treated, and flushed back into the sea. She selected the healthiest, most vigorous one. The fishmonger, a stooped and crinkly old woman with dyed red hair in a bun, snatched the fish out of the bucket with bony fingers, quick as a heron, then went back into slow motion. Blue Fan regularly saw this woman teaching tai chi fan at six every morning in Victoria Park. Funny, in the West, people flaunted their talents. Here, they concealed them.

      The open-air food market in Wan Chai bustled as always, Blue Fan’s nostrils assaulted on all fronts by pungent spices and glutinous stews. She didn’t need to buy food. She was the acting head of the Green Dragon triad, its enforcer. She could breeze into any one of a hundred homes and they would let their children go hungry in order to feed her. Yet every day she walked the streets on which she’d grown up, reminding herself who she was, how far she’d come, and how easy it would be to fall back there. She glanced up through the torrent to the overpass, clogged with taxis on their way to the snail’s-pace undersea tunnel to Kowloon. Turning back, she scanned the apartment windows, each with its dim aluminium box housing an aircon unit, searching for a thin sniper’s barrel. Nothing. The attempt would be close-quarters. Triad custom. A knife, or a butcher’s cleaver, perhaps even a spear. Or a death-touch, though that skill was almost lost now.

      The sea of faces around her were all normal; people hurried on account of the rain and the imminent threat of a cyclone – it was August, the season for them – whereupon everything would be quickly battened down and all the streets would empty. A few confused tourists sheltered their phones more than their heads in order to translate shopping requests. Triad assassins would never masquerade as foreigners. There was a code, after all. They lived and died by it, herself included. She searched for men with tattoos. Nothing. The warning had said noon.

      It was 12:03.

      She heard it before she saw it: the stuttered hum of a bladed weapon tomahawking through the air. She dropped down low into a snake posture, right leg outstretched on the soggy ground, left leg bent double, as the axe sailed past her and squelched into the forehead of a balding man with an umbrella, his shirt spattered by rain, a sheen of sweat on his face СКАЧАТЬ