Текст книги "Black Sun"

Автор книги: Graham Brown

Соавторы: Graham Brown
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CHAPTER 12

In the depths of the stone brig, Danielle watched as the food was brought to them by armed guards. It was an almost Dickensian scene, with dirty bowls of some rancid, salty broth and some hard, stale bread. Seven servings for seven prisoners, but no one moved toward the food until the guards had locked the iron gate and re-entered the elevator.

Zhou stepped forward first, taking the largest bowl of soup and gathering all the bread for himself. As he did the boy jumped down and snatched a heel.

Zhou grabbed for him, but the child was too quick. He raced back to his shelf.

“I cut your hand off for that,” Zhou said.

The boy didn’t respond. He was trying to feed the bread to the dying Caucasian man.

Zhou stormed toward the child. “Give me the bread!”

Danielle stepped in front of him. “Just let him have it,” she said.

Zhou pushed past her and snatched the bread from the child’s hand, then slapped the child across the side of the head. The young boy screamed and began to cry.

As the others cowered, Danielle stared Zhou in the face, an act he correctly viewed as a challenge. He did not back down.

“You must be something nice, I think.” He let his eyes fall across her hair and down the length of her body. “Otherwise Kang would have killed you.”

She stared back at him, now fully engaged in the test of wills.

Zhou seemed to enjoy it. “Concubine or whore,” he said, curling his lip. “I’m going to find out just what it is that you do.”

Zhou had leaned in toward Danielle, staring down at her in an obvious attempt to intimidate her, but the move had left him vulnerable, his legs straight, his body off balance.

Danielle sat down on the shelf of a bed, sliding back and creating some space between them, as if she’d been cowed by his threat. From her sitting position, she watched him smile disgustingly. She smiled back and in the blink of an eye pivoted and thrust her right leg out, slamming her heel into Zhou’s knee. The joint snapped with an ugly sound, like a firecracker going off. Zhou crumbled backward, howling in pain.

As he fell, he swung at her, but she dodged his fist and stood. With Zhou on the ground, she slammed a second kick into his face and his nose exploded in a spray of blood.

Zhou’s friend leaped from his bunk, charging toward her. He tried to tackle Danielle, grabbing for her throat, but she blocked his hands and using his own momentum against him, flung him into the wall.

Even as he crashed into the stone she held his arm, twisting it around backward and dropping a hammer blow onto his elbow. The man’s arm folded in the wrong direction and he screamed in agony. She slung him onto the floor next to Zhou, his face a bloody mask of shock.

She glared down at him. “That’s what I do, you son of a bitch.”

Zhou slid himself backward along the floor. His friend crawled alongside, and they dragged themselves to a deeper, darker part of the brig.

Around the room, the others looked on, approvingly it seemed. The old man was laughing, giggling at the entertainment. He moved forward, taking back the bread and proceeding to eat.

“Take it all,” he said to the others. “Don’t save any for them.” He was giddy. “With no teeth, they will not be needing food today.”

The young boy jumped down and took the largest bowl of soup, bringing it back to the dying man and trying to feed him.

“You eat it, Yuri,” the man said. “You need it.”

His voice was Eastern European, maybe Russian. She wondered what he and the child had done to Kang to warrant such treatment. Certainly he did not look like much of a threat. With great effort, he got to a sitting position.

“They will try to kill you now,” he told her. “They will want revenge.”

She thought back to the words of one instructor. If you move, make sure you do enough to prevent any countermove. She felt quite certain she’d done that.

“With those injuries, they’ll be immobile for weeks, maybe months without proper care.”

“Be careful when you sleep,” the Caucasian said. “They will come for you.” He pointed to the boy he’d called Yuri. “He can watch for you at night. He never sleeps,” the man said.

Danielle looked at the boy, perched on the shelf like a little bird.

“Is he your son?” Danielle asked.

“No,” the man said. “I kidnapped him, to sell him to Kang.”

Danielle found this revelation hard to fathom. The man seemed to have great affection for the child. “Kidnapped him?”

“I took him from the people he knew, though they were not his family. I took him from the only place he has ever known, though it was not a home.”

“He’s Russian, like you,” she guessed.

The man nodded. “He was under the care of the Science Directorate. They did experiments on him.”

The hair went up on the back of her neck. “Experiments?”

The man began to answer but went into a minor coughing fit first. “I wish I could say we were trying to save him, but that is not the whole truth. Kang wanted him. He promised us his safety and his fair treatment. But we did it for money.”

“What happened? How did you end up down here?”

The man coughed harshly once again, fighting to control it. “Things went wrong on our voyage. The navigation system, the radios, everything failed us, and my vessel lost its way in the Arctic. My crew thought we had been cursed. And maybe they were right.”

“I don’t understand,” Danielle said.

“We were tracking south through the night, following the compass. But when dawn came we realized we had been going the wrong way. Akula, orca, they followed us as if they knew we would soon fall into the sea. They pushed us onto the ice, slamming into our boat over and over again. Three and four at a time. The crew made it to the escape raft, but they were attacked and killed. And as the boat went down, I escaped to the ice floe with Yuri.”

Danielle looked him over. He smelled of decay. He had a stump wrapped in rags where his foot should have been and his hands, nose, and other parts of his face were black with gangrene. The child didn’t appear to have suffered the same way.

“How come he’s not frostbitten?”

“I used my knife, I dug us a small cave, and I surrounded him as best I could,” Petrov answered. “We were there for three days. Days almost without sun. I was certain we would be dead on the fourth, but a helicopter came. Kang’s people found us.”

“Why did he put you down here?”

“We were so far off course, he believed we meant to betray him.”

Danielle looked at Yuri. “All this for a child?” she said. “Why? Who is he?”

“He’s no one. He has no family that I know of, but he is unusual,” the dying man said. “He was born with a degenerative neurological disorder. His parents could not care for him and he was given to the Science Directorate. They use him in experiments, and somehow they stopped the progression of his disease. But there was a strange result, a side effect. They say he senses things, sees them.”

The man spoke in a wavering voice and she wasn’t sure the information was any more firm than the voice. Certainly it sounded odd.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Like a psychic?”

The man shook his head. “No. Physical things. Magnetic anomalies, electromagnetic disturbances. They say he can see beyond the normal human spectrum.”

“Can he really do this?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” the man said, coughing badly. “Kang thought he could.”

“Then why is he down here?” Danielle said, realizing he’d used the past tense. “Does he not think so now?”

The man shook his head. “Yuri would do nothing he asked,” he said. “No matter the beating or incentive. No matter the threat. He only talks to himself or sings. And he would not leave my side. So Kang sent us down here. His men told Yuri that he would see me die and then he would have only his new master to cling to.”

Danielle looked at the young boy, slurping up the soup broth. “Does he even understand what Kang is asking?”

“I think so,” Petrov said. “He just doesn’t respond.”

Suddenly the boy looked up. His eyes darted toward the elevator door. Nothing happened, no sound could be heard, but seconds later the car slid into place at the bottom of the shaft and the doors opened.

The guards stepped out with their Tasers in hand.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Petrov,” he said. “Alexander Petrov.”

He went into another coughing fit, his body racked with spasms for twenty long seconds, and this time when he pulled the rag from his face, it was covered in blood.

CHAPTER 13

When Hawker didn’t respond to the man who questioned him, one of the thugs raised a gun and aimed it at his eye.

“You really won’t get much out of me if I’m dead,” he told them.

The thug was unmoved but the man behind him laughed. “Bring him with us,” he said.

Hawker was blindfolded and dragged into a waiting van. From there it was a short trip to the waterfront and a forced walk onto a waiting vessel, a diesel-powered junk.

As they rumbled out into the harbor, Hawker tried to guess their direction or speed.

“Where are you taking me?” he asked after a minute or two.

“I’ll gladly answer that, once you tell me what you’re doing here,” the Russian voice said back to him.

Hawker gave no answer. He was still trying to figure out the dynamics of the situation. Why should he, an American, have to explain to a Russian what he was doing in Hong Kong?

The motor beneath the deck cut back to idle and then died away. Soon the boat’s momentum ceased and the vessel began to rock back and forth in the chop of the waves.

“Stand up,” the man said.

Hawker stood, holding the rail, as one of the man’s guards pulled the blindfold away. He began to turn.

“Eyes forward!”

A rifle jabbed him in the back.

Hawker did as he was ordered. They were a mile out into Victoria Harbour, looking back at the skyscrapers of Hong Kong.

“You are a man without a home, or so I hear. A man with debts to pay, who is wanted even by his own country.”

Hawker did not respond.

“You go by the name Hawker,” the Russian said. “An interesting metaphor this word. Where I come from, it means a seller in the marketplace, a shill, offering goods or services.”

The name had come to him as a code, one he’d kept for his own reasons. He didn’t try to explain.

“At any rate, you are here plying your trades, both gross and fine, only in this case, it is at the behest of your own nation’s security apparatus. Care to tell us why?”

Hawker held the rail. He guessed that the man already knew the answer, or some version of it. He remained quiet.

“Come now,” the Russian said. “You’re among friends here. To prove it, I’ll answer for you. You’re here to do something that might infuriate the Chinese. Something the people who hired you don’t want to be known for. Murder?”

“I’m not a killer,” Hawker said.

“You are a killer,” the man replied, emphatically. “But not a murderer, perhaps. What then?”

Hawker thought of leaping over the rail, but guessed he’d be riddled with bullets before he hit the water.

“It’s not so complicated,” the man said. “In fact, the answer is right in front of you.”

Hawker looked across the water, staring straight ahead. The boat had been lined up with Kang’s Tower Pinnacle, its white marble façade gleaming in the morning sun.

“They have something your people want back,” the man added.

Hawker’s eyes followed the contours of the tower down to the bedrock at its base. Whatever cover he’d once thought he had was nonexistent at this point.

He turned around slowly, and this time no one stopped him.

Ten feet away, hidden in the shade of the boat’s pilothouse, stood a short, gaunt figure of a man. He wore a black peacoat and leather gloves. No more than five foot six, his round face was marked by sunken cheeks and whitish stubble the same length as the buzzed gray hair on his head.

Hawker guessed the man’s age was close to seventy. His face was pale, his eyes almost gray. Apparently his host was a confident man. His henchmen had vanished and no gun or weapon could be seen.

“Who are you?” Hawker asked.

“My name is Ivan Saravich,” the man said.

“Are you my contact?”

“No,” Saravich said.

“What happened to him?”

Saravich waved a hand in a manner of swatting away an insect. “Don’t worry about him. He chose a bribe over a job. I treasure men like that.”

“What do you want from me?” Hawker asked.

Saravich explained. “I want to help you get at Kang, to help you recover your missing person.”

“And in return?”

Saravich stepped into the light, shielding his eyes from the sun. He walked to the rail, looking toward the Tower Pinnacle in the distance.

“Kang is not a very discriminating man,” he said. “In addition to your missing friend, he has taken one of our citizens, a child, whose mother is a prominent member of our Science Directorate.”

That sounded like a legitimate possibility from what Hawker had been told, but there had to be a reason. “Why would he do that?”

“She’s an expert in high-energy physics,” Saravich said. “What Kang cannot buy he steals; what he cannot steal, he extorts. He wants information from her.”

Information on high-energy physics. Hawker wondered if it were related to what Danielle and McCarter had been working on.

“For weapons?” Hawker asked.

Saravich shrugged. “No one knows,” he said. “Kang is rumored to be very strange, obsessed with exotic areas of science and compulsive in regard to other things like medical oddities and genetic deformation. It is said he has a zoo of humans born defective.”

“Charming,” Hawker said. “Why do you need me to deal with him? Why not take him out yourself?”

Saravich exhaled. “I would prefer it,” he said. “But certain niceties must be observed. You, on the other hand … well, a man with no home does what he does. There can be no proof of whom he works for or why.” He shrugged. “There can be suspicions, yes. Whispers and rumors. Of course. These things will always fly, but in the end it will never be clear, and that is what we prefer. Just as your people do.”

“Of course,” Hawker said. “Everyone’s afraid of the dragon these days.”

“Don’t want to wake it,” Saravich said.

“You want me to get the kid back?”

Saravich nodded. “You can get them both at the same time.”

Hawker might have asked what the alternative was, but it was fairly clear to him that there was none. He was now working for Moore and the Russians. He smiled at the irony, wondering what Moore would think, footing the bill personally with his cold war enemies riding along for free.

Perhaps it was for the better not to try this act alone. He turned back toward Kang’s fortress of a tower. “You think they’re inside?”

Ivan nodded. “We have surveillance video showing them entering the building and no indication of their departure.”

It had been eight days since Danielle’s capture in Mexico. “That’s not exactly conclusive.”

“We know Kang.” Saravich was insistent. “We know his ways. If your friend is alive, then she’s there. And he wouldn’t have brought her here if he planned to kill her quickly.”

He studied the building. “Well, that narrows it down to a hundred floors or so.”

“Actually,” the Russian said, “we have only one floor to worry about.” He handed Hawker a spotting scope. “Look at the foundation.”

Hawker trained the scope on the black bedrock from which the tower seemed to sprout. He saw the remnants of fortifications and old stone walls, even a broken set of stairs leading down to the water.

“Kang built his tower on the ruins of Fort Victoria,” Saravich explained. “A fort those hardworking Brits carved out of solid rock in 1845, before building Fort Stanley a few years later. Kang uses the old brig as his private gulag. Down there he keeps those who owe him what they cannot pay or those who cross him and survive. A very rare few have even been ransomed out.”

Hawker studied the jagged black stone, wet from the spray of the waves.

“He has both of our people,” Saravich said. “I promise you, he has them there.”

CHAPTER 14

Byron Stecker, current director of operations for the CIA, had a phone to his ear. On the desk in front of him lay an internal report, one that was highly critical of a fellow organization. An organization that had been a thorn in Stecker’s side for years: the NRI.

Since the NRI’s creation, there had been those at Langley who disapproved of what they considered a competing agency. Few were more vocal than Stecker, and for the past two years he’d fought to bring the NRI under the Agency’s control. So far it had been a losing battle.

In hindsight, Stecker assigned the bulk of that failure to a situation beyond his control: the president’s friendship with Arnold Moore. But after two years of running into that particular wall, Stecker had come up with a new plan, one that would turn that personal connection between the two men from a roadblock into an advantage.

The president may have been Moore’s friend but he was a politician first. And like all politicians he feared the appearance of impropriety. In fact, if he was like most of them, he feared the appearance of impropriety more than the actual act of impropriety itself.

With this in mind, Stecker realized what he needed: a scandal at the NRI. If such an event could be managed correctly it would shine a harsh light on Arnold Moore. And the president, ever mindful of how their friendship looked, would be forced to act more harshly than another man. Even if just to prove that he played no favorites.

Stecker would get everything he wanted and this time he wouldn’t even have to ask.

A click on the phone line told Stecker he’d been transferred into the Oval Office. The president came on the line.

“Afternoon, Byron,” he said politely. “What have you got for me?”

Stecker looked down at the report; there were several disturbing rumors to choose from, including one that suggested the NRI was conducting some type of dangerous nuclear experiment at its headquarters in the suburbs of Virginia. He doubted that could be true, but the other information his people had dug up would be damning enough.

“Mr. President,” Stecker said, speaking with a melodious southern drawl and at this moment an exaggerated sense of concern in his voice. “I have a warning flag to run up the pole for you. Have you checked on your good friend over there at the NRI lately? Because he seems to be turning up the heat on a few people whom you might want him to leave alone.”

“What are you talking about, Stecker?” the president asked.

“I’m afraid Moore’s gone off half-cocked,” Stecker said. “Hired some mercenary ex-agent of ours to start himself a private little war over there in China.”

“What gives you that idea?” the president said wearily.

“I have confirmed sources reporting from Kinshasa and Hong Kong,” Stecker said. “I’m afraid the NRI has overstepped its bounds yet again.”

Stecker knew he was laying it on a little thick, but what the hell, he had Moore dead to rights this time. Might as well enjoy it.

The president didn’t reply, but the ringing silence had an edge to it and if Stecker knew anything, he knew this dart had hit the bull’s-eye.

“You bring me those sources,” the president said eventually. It sounded to Stecker as if he were talking through a clenched jaw. “And you bury this story. Understand? If it comes out before we can deal with it, I’ll know who to burn.”

Though leaking the information would have been personally satisfying, Stecker would not let it happen. Better to show the president who had control of their organization and who didn’t.

“Of course, Mr. President,” he said. “Honestly, if Moore has gone off the rails, I would consider it my duty to keep it quiet if at all possible.”

“Cut the crap, Stecker,” the president said. “You’re not the one running for office here. Be at the West Wing foyer tomorrow morning, seven a.m., sharp. Drive your own car and don’t bring any assistants.”

The president hung up, the snap of the phone ringing Stecker’s ear. He felt he’d made his point, but there was more to it than that. The president was angry, but he didn’t actually sound surprised. No, it was more like disgusted, like a man hearing of an accident he thought he’d already avoided.

A grin formed on Stecker’s face as he put the phone down and closed the report. Perhaps this would be more interesting than he’d guessed.