“Perhaps I should just crush both their spines now and be done with it,” the white-haired man suggested, grim-faced.
“No, Xi!” ordered Mya sharply, hurrying up the steep stairs behind the others. “This detour has already put the whole operation at risk. I’m supposed to be in Hong Kong in the morning, not here in this fucking rat’s nest! We have a strict plan. We must return to the schedule we agreed upon as soon as possible.”
Indeed up until a few hours ago, everything had gone exactly to plan. Zhang Sen and the Professor had been successfully kidnapped, and the Eye of Fucanglong was in her possession, as were the two zidium devices. Of course there had been one or two close calls along the way, including the destruction of Qahtani’s ship in Yemen and the young college kid’s overly enthusiastic efforts to prevent a smooth exit from San Francisco. Even Mya could not deny there were cracks appearing in the plan. Yes, she had managed to flee in the Zhang Corporation’s private jet at an abandoned airfield north of San Francisco; she had successfully taken a sample of Sen’s and the Professor’s blood before Doctor Cyclops could contaminate it. But after that point, things seemed to hit another unexpected snag. Thus the need to call ahead and rearrange Doctor Cyclops’s schedule.
“You hate it when things don’t quite go as planned, don’t you, Mya,” Sen said now, his voice muffled beneath the black hood covering his face. “You always did.”
“Silence!” Mya barked as they reached the door to the doctor’s room.
Breathlessly, Doctor Cyclops jingled through his keys, unlocked the door, and pushed it open.
Once inside, Mya stood in front of the two captives, then snapped the hoods off their heads.
The Professor stared blindly ahead of him, asking, “Sen, are you all right?”
“I’m okay,” Sen replied. “We’re going to be all right.” But the expression on his face indicated the exact opposite as he took in their surroundings.
The room had no windows, four grimy walls, a rickety old chair and table, a sink in one corner with a cracked mirror cabinet above it, a murky brown toilet, and a stained, tattered mattress.
“Put him here on the table, face up. Use this to tie him down,” instructed Doctor Cyclops, handing Xi a rope and clearing the tipped-over gin bottles and spilled ashtrays off the table.
Xi seized the Professor from behind and roughly laid the blind old man on the table. Sen tried feebly to stop him, but Mya locked his forearm in a strong, painful grip.
“Mya, for God’s sake! Why are you doing this? I’ll give you whatever you want. Just don’t hurt him! Max has nothing to do with this! Please, let him—”
Mya shut the old man up with a backhanded slap across his face so powerful it knocked him to his knees. “Silence!”
The Professor heard the blow and struggled to lift his head and shoulders off the table, as Xi strapped him to the table with the rope. “Sen? Sen, can you hear me?”
“Shut up! Both of you!” Mya ordered, then turned to Doctor Cyclops. “Do you have everything you need?”
Rummaging through the mirror cabinet, Doctor Cyclops nodded excitedly. “Yes, I think so,” he said, rushing to the middle of the room and dumping a metal tray on the table beside the Professor. “For tonight’s operation I have this.” He pointed to the contents of the tray: a blunt scalpel, a rubber tourniquet, a rusty syringe, a clamp, a cigarette lighter, a crumpled piece of foil, a small package wrapped in old newspaper, and a bandage that looked as though it had been used before. Doctor Cyclops smiled broadly, then headed over to his mattress on the floor in the corner. “And for the operation in the mine—”
His yellowed fingers dug inside the tattered mattress, through one of the many tears in its lining, and pulled out a large set of shears, like a giant pair of scissors. He opened and closed them several times in rapid succession, cleaving the air. He laughed maniacally at the thrill of what was to come.
Still on his knees, Sen looked from the crazed doctor to the impatiently pacing Mya. “What are you going to do to us?”
“I said shut up!” she shouted, storming up to the old man in her sleek red dress and striking him so hard he crashed to the floor, unconscious. “You!” she pointed at Doctor Cyclops. “Put that down and get on with it! You’ve got twenty minutes, otherwise you’ll lose more than this contract!”
The deranged doctor’s glee quickly disappeared as he scurried over to the table, nodding emphatically. “Yes, of course, twenty minutes, twenty minutes!”
On the table, the Professor tried to fight against the ropes, but Xi had fastened them firmly, the knots cutting into the old man’s wrists and ankles. He could smell the ginstinking breath of the doctor hovering over him now. He could hear his trembling, nervous fingers fumbling through the items on the metal tray.
The Professor’s sightless eyes turned toward the end of the table. That was where the sound of Mya’s heels had stopped, where she had last struck Sen, who was no longer making a sound. “What’s this all for?” he asked sternly in Mya’s direction, not a hint of fear in his voice. “You’ve got your diamond. What else do you want?”
For a moment, the Professor expected her to tell him to be quiet. Instead, Mya Chan decided to indulge her captive.
Slowly she walked to the side of the table and leaned over him. “You’re asking the wrong questions. It’s not a matter of what else I want. It’s a matter of what
don’t
I want. The answer is quite simple. There’s
nothing
I don’t want, and there’s
nothing
I won’t have. The diamond is but a small part of the sum of my desires. Cash, control, chaos—these are the things at my fingertips now. These are the jewels I will possess. The Eye of the Dragon is a key. You can’t imagine what’s hiding behind the door it opens. You can’t imagine what lies ahead. The world will never be the same again.”
“The Eye of the Dragon isn’t a key, it’s a curse.”
Mya laughed. “Come now, Professor, I thought you were a man of reason.”
“I am. And it’s a reasonable assumption that although you may not believe in the curse, your actions will fulfill it.”
“The words of a moral man. Unfortunately for you, moral men always wind up dead.” Mya leaned in close and smiled. “I’m just chasing my dream, just as your men are no doubt chasing the dragon, or at least what was stolen from it. Which is precisely what you’re about to do now.”
“What do you mean?” the Professor asked.
Suddenly Xi seized the old man’s arm and held it up straight while Doctor Cyclops strapped on the tourniquet. The doctor took the small newspaper bundle and unwrapped it. Inside was a sticky brown substance like resin.
Mya watched the veins on the old man’s arm bulge. “Do you know what dragon-chasing is, Professor? It’s a term used by drug addicts, referring to the injecting of raw opium directly into the bloodstream. Trust me, it’s for your own good. You don’t want to be awake when Doctor Cyclops here cuts into your abdomen to retrieve that tracking device lodged in your intestines.”
“How do you know about that?”
“It’s not important how we know. What’s important is that we get it out of you.”
Doctor Cyclops was already using his scalpel to scrape as much of the sticky brown substance as possible onto the piece of foil. Once the foil was full, he molded it into the shape of a small bowl, then flicked the cigarette lighter and began to wave the flame beneath the foil. Soon the brown substance gave off a tendril of smoke that twisted into the air.
“Beautiful,” he observed with his one mesmerized eye. “They call it dragon-chasing because of the smoke. It’s like a dragon rising up in the air. See its claws curl in search of prey. See its body writhe and snake, escaping the pool of opium.”
As Xi continued to hold the Professor’s arm out, the doctor took the rusty syringe and filled it with the liquid opium. Then, slapping the Professor’s forearm, he placed the tip of the needle against the old man’s skin and slid it into his flesh.
The Professor gasped.
The doctor emptied the syringe, then pulled the needle free.
“The opium works fast.” The doctor grinned. “Sweet dreams, Professor.”
Almost instantly, the Professor’s eyelids began to flutter as his blind eyes rolled back into his head. But before the demons of his opium-induced slumber came lurching out of the shadows of his mind, he whispered groggily to Mya, “You’re not doing this alone,
are you
.” It was not a question.
Mya pursed her lips in a sly smile and shook her head. “There’s an old Chinese proverb. Treat your flaws like holes and fill them in with someone else’s strengths. After all, what’s a business empire without a consortium to back it?”
Slowly the Professor’s eyes closed completely. His arms and legs fell limp and his entire body sank against the filthy table surface.
Doctor Cyclops put the syringe back into the metal tray, unbuttoned the Professor’s shirt, then picked up the rusty scalpel still smeared with sticky raw opium. Without iodine, antiseptic, or gloves, he made a random incision in the Professor’s belly and began probing inside with his rotting, nail-chipped fingers.
It was the first incision of many.
VII
Hong Kong, China
RAYS OF EARLY-MORNING LIGHT BOUNCED OFF THE ZHANG Diamond Tower as it stood tall and proud next to the soaring Two International Finance Center and the other high-rise buildings of Hong Kong Island’s financial district. It was barely 7:00 A.M., yet the streets were already bustling with briefcase-carrying businessmen and financiers all hurrying to work.
Even at this early hour, the air was thick with the smell of the salty harbor and the sweet scents of sticky rice congee pouring out of street stalls.
Through the smells and the crowd of workers raced Will and Bradley. They had leapt from a water taxi and were now charging as fast as they could from the wharf, across the financial district’s waterfront toward the Zhang Corporation’s Hong Kong Headquarters.
They hit the revolving doors of the tower and spun into the lobby of the building.
The elderly Chinese security guard at the desk immediately stood at the commotion, not recognizing Bradley for a moment.
“It’s okay, George, it’s just me,” Bradley told him.
“Oh, Mr. Zhang, I’m sorry,” a flustered, concerned George apologized as Bradley and Will bolted past him for the elevator. “Mr. Zhang!” he called after them. “Mr. Chambers has canceled all office work for today. None of the employees will be coming in except for the members of the board. Some kind of emergency. Is everything okay, Mr. Zhang?”
“It will be,” Bradley replied, hitting the elevator button. He smiled at Will confidently, recalling the young college student’s comforting words on the way here. Will beamed back as the elevator doors opened before them and the pair hurried inside the lift.
On the flight from San Francisco, Will had noticed how agitated and tense Bradley seemed. As Bradley’s hand clutched the end of the armrest, Will placed his hand firmly on top of Bradley’s. Bradley smiled and let Will’s fingers interlock with his. “You’re very sweet, do you know that?” Bradley said, his voice still a little anxious. “I only just met you, yet you make me feel…I don’t know…safe, I suppose.”
“It’ll be okay,” Will said, speaking softly so as not to wake the other passengers. “You’ll see. Everything will be okay.”
Bradley sighed and whispered back, “I’m scared for him. And I’m scared that perhaps I never told him enough how much I love him.”
“He already knows.”
Bradley shook his head. “I’m not so sure. My uncle can be a hard man. After my parents died, he raised me. I love him, and I need his respect, it’s part of our culture. He knows who I am, deep down, but we never discuss it. I’ve never tried to hide who I am, but sometimes he does. Being gay in the world of Hong Kong business can be difficult. China’s a very traditional place. Homosexuality isn’t illegal there but it’s hard to be—different.”
“Being gay isn’t about being different. It’s about being you. You’re not some kind of freak and you’re not alone.”
“Sometimes that’s how it feels. My uncle likes to think he’s open-minded, but sometimes I think he questions my ability. I can see it in his eyes, as if he wants to disown me. That’s how it was with my figure skating. I could have been a champion, you know. But he told me all I’d end up being was a laughingstock. He told me he could offer me a job at the company, an honorable job, but only if I started at the bottom. Which I did. I worked hard, all the way to the top. I tried to become something he could be proud of, but even now I feel like an outsider. Even now I feel—dispensable.”
“Is it what you want? A future at the company?”
“The dream of being a skater is long gone. I’ve worked long and hard to get to where I am now, so yes, it is what I want. I like what I do. I’m good at what I do. I just need others to see that. It’s hard. Sometimes I think it would be easier to just give up.”
Will shook his head. “Never give up. Someone told me that once, and I’ve never forgotten it.”
“Someone special?”
Will nodded. “Someone I think of as my father. Although he’s not really my father. He’s my friend. I had an accident once. Ended up driving my motorbike off a cliff into the sea, nearly got myself killed. But Felix was there for me. I remember lying in the hospital bed. I think he thought I was unconscious, maybe I was, but I heard his voice. He told me: Never change, never apologize for who you are, and when things can’t get any harder, do whatever it takes to pull through. But never give up.”