Betty snapped her whip. “I said
now
, you cowboy slut!”
Several hands began pushing Shane from behind; several more pulled him forward as the crowd bellowed and boomed. By the time the tall cowboy reached the front of the room, the enthusiastic drunks practically threw him onto the stage. He slid across the grimy boards and came to a halt at Betty’s fat stilettoed feet. He moved to grab his hat on the floor next to him, but the whip split the air inches from his hand.
“On your feet!” Betty ordered in her thick Chinese accent.
Nervously Shane did as he was told, standing almost twice as tall as Betty once he straightened up—but then again, he wasn’t the one holding the whip.
Taking four or five steps back, Betty eyed Shane’s tall, muscular form from top to toe, then with a sweep of her arm the whip sliced the air and bit off the top button of Shane’s shirt.
Completely motionless but for his gulping throat, Shane saw the button shoot across the bar just before Betty worked her whip again.
The second button was plucked clean off.
Snap! Pop!
The third, then the fourth button of Shane’s shirt shot across the room like bullets.
With each flying button the crowd roared, watching with sheer drunken delight as Shane’s shirt fell open further and further, revealing his large swollen chest, his lungs full of trapped air; he was too terrified to do anything but hold his breath.
Another crack of the whip and the last button took to the air.
The shirt fell open.
Nervous sweat trickled down Shane’s abs.
Betty looked on approvingly, then shouted to the crowd, “More?”
Arms and empty glasses flew into the air as the cheer went up. “More! More!”
Betty grinned. The tongue of her whip struck the button at the top of Shane’s jeans and spat it across the floor.
Shane finally let out a whimper.
“Your dick likes danger!” Betty observed, eyeing the bulge in Shane’s jeans.
Shane swallowed hard. “And I like my dick, so please don’t—”
“Silence!” she ordered, and then with a wicked grin on her face declared, “The highest bidder joins me and the cowboy slut in Betty’s Den of Iniquity!”
At that point, to say that Beijing Betty’s bar went into a state of hysteria would be an understatement. Money flittered through the air like a ticker-tape parade. Men cursed and screamed at one another. Punches were thrown.
And all Shane could do was bite his lip and whisper to himself, “Den of Iniquity? Oh, that sounds bad!”
After tossing Shane’s hat, Luca vanished swiftly through the crowd. He slipped his way past the bar and into the stinking garbage room and found an unsteady staircase leading upward. He began kicking rats out of his way as he quickly ascended, until he realized the rats were licking at something on the stairs: solid black pools of dried blood.
With a furious squeak, another rat went flying off the end of Luca’s boot. The young Italian knelt down low and stuck his finger in a coagulated pool. It was blood, all right, spilled within the last few hours.
Hastily Luca followed the trail up the stairs, beyond the second floor and up to the third. The spatter trail led down a corridor and disappeared beneath a splintered door with bloody fingerprints on the handle. Luca checked his watch. The red dot on the grid was still flashing, still indicating he was within the vicinity of the Professor. He tried the handle—locked—then didn’t hesitate putting his shoulder into the door.
It popped open, sending the old rusted lock rattling across the blood-soaked floor inside.
Luca had to hold on to his stomach. The scene was deserted—and grisly. A table in the middle of the room looked as though it had been used to slaughter an animal, filling Luca with dread. Then a flash caught his eye and he saw it, shimmering in a groove between the floorboards: the tiepin.
The tiny tracking device had been cut out of Professor Fathom’s gut—but not crushed under Doctor Cyclops’s boot as everyone had thought. He had simply wedged it in a crack between the floorboards and not bothered to check. That was the first mistake Doctor Cyclops had made after the operation.
The second mistake was forgetting to take the map to the Zhang Diamond Express train terminal with him. It was a map Mya had given Cyclops after the operation, just before she and Xi had departed for Hong Kong, with strict instructions to deliver Professor Fathom and Zhang Sen to the train and wait for her arrival. In his drunken haste and his excitement Doctor Cyclops had left the map lying on the tattered mattress in the corner.
Luca slipped the Professor’s bloodstained tracking device into his pocket and made his way over to the mattress, having spotted the unfolded map.
He squatted and looked at it. It was a large-scale map of central Beijing. There was an
X
marked at the center of the map, and next to it in red pencil was something in Chinese, something Luca couldn’t read. From this central
X
a wide circle had been drawn, capturing what looked like a large portion of Beijing. More Chinese symbols were noted inside the circle.
Luca’s heart sank with fear.
He grabbed the map and quickly raced out of the dank room and down the corridor and began pounding on doors. He tried doorknobs. “Hello! Hello? I need help!”
A young Chinese woman peeked out her door, a baby in her arms. She looked frightened.
“Don’t be afraid,” Luca insisted, although his desperation made her all the more wary of him. “Do you speak English?”
The woman nodded cautiously. “Yes. A little.”
Luca thrust the map at her with such a flap it made the woman jump.
“It’s okay, it’s just a map. I need to know what this says.”
Luca pointed to the
X
in the middle of the map. The woman squinted at the scribbled handwriting next to it. “Zhang Terminal,” she read.
“And this?” Luca pointed to the words scratched next to the wide circle.
The woman looked at it, then looked at the young man at her door with grave concern and said, “Blast radius.”
Luca swallowed hard, then pointed from one side of the circle to the other. “How far is it from here to here?”
“I don’t know. Five miles. Perhaps more.”
Luca looked from the map to the woman. “Are we in this circle?”
The woman nodded fearfully. “Yes.”
“Pack. Get anything you need now!” He raced back down the corridor and began banging on the other doors again. “Get out! Everyone get out of here! Now!”
The highest bidder was an obese investment broker from Shanghai whose body consumed a squeaky vinyl sofa. He stared humorlessly into space, stoned out of his brain, as he guzzled down his scotch.
Betty didn’t care. She could barely even see. The Den of Iniquity was a room made opaque by a fog of opium smoke and illuminated only by candles. A lot of candles. Burning dangerously close to the plush curtains surrounding them.
She was standing beside a large silver bowl. In it was an enormous cake of white opium; underneath was a single candle, heating the opium enough to send up tendrils of smoke that filled the whole room.
Betty took a deep breath and waved the smoke into her lungs. Then she looked at Shane and giggled and waved the smoke in his direction. “You like, cowboy slut?”
Shane couldn’t answer, on account of the black leather gag in his mouth. Instead he just grunted, half angry, half high, his hands cuffed in front of him and ankle cuffs binding his feet.
Betty took the grunt as defiance and quickly pulled out her whip. “You have problem, slave? Then you demand discipline! Now dance, bitch!” she hissed as she cracked the whip at Shane.
He was naked but for his cowboy hat, his crocodile tooth necklace, and a leather-studded codpiece courtesy of his captor. As the whip snapped again near his left shoulder, he growled. Then the opium haze made him giggle. “Op ee,” he muttered through the gag in an attempt to say “Stop it.”
“Not until you dance!” ordered Betty. She turned back to the highest bidder, swaying. “You like my new slave?”
The fat bidder just continued to stare into space.
Betty turned back to Shane. “He like you! Everyone gonna like you! Now, dance!” She flicked the whip again.
This time Shane giggled less. “Ah! At urt!”
“Then move your feet, bitch boy!”
Snap!
This time the whip nicked into Shane’s side. “Uck!” he shouted, the opium no longer able to make him laugh at the situation.
“You not like?” Betty sneered. “Bad luck for you! Welcome to my world of pain!”
Betty cracked her whip at him once more, but this time Shane held up his cuffed hands and let the tip of the whip latch on to the chain binding his hands together. The leather looped fast and locked hard around the chain links. Between Betty and Shane the whip held taut for one surprised moment. Then with a swift jerk Shane snapped his hands back and yanked the handle of the whip clean out of Betty’s grasp.
The tail of the whip flicked across the room and smashed into a candelabra, knocking one of the candles off its perch and into the silver bowl, setting the opium cake alight and sending a giant puff into the air like a smoke bomb.
The candelabra tipped over, spilling its other candles across the floor, igniting everything like a bonfire.
Betty screamed.
The fat bidder didn’t move from his sofa, staring at the flames as though he was watching a movie.
Shane looked on wide-eyed and muttered through his gag, “Oh, uck!”
As the clouds of opium churned through the room, the flames shredded the curtains and snaked quickly across the carpet.
Shane tried to make his way over to the stoned bidder on the sofa, but the shackles around his ankles sent him tumbling flat on his face. With great effort, Shane got himself back onto his feet, using his cuffed hands and every muscle in his bare torso and legs to right himself. With several long, high hops he bounded over the flames that crisscrossed the floor, seized the bidder’s tie in two cuffed hands, and screamed through his gag, “et up!!”
The desperate command shocked the stoned businessman into action, and with a petrified squeal he launched himself off the sofa and through the blazing curtains. His squeal was like a siren. Every drunk patron began to fumble and shout as they caught sight of the fire and smoke billowing from the Den of Iniquity. Panic instantly swept the club as men trampled for the exit.
Inside the den, Betty was still screaming. Shane quickly hopped through the flames to her and seized her by the corset.
“eeee! Where’s da eeeee!”
Betty just stared at him, terrified. Shane rolled his eyes, then shook Betty on her stilettos until he heard something jangle. His fingers followed the sound of the tinkling keys to an anklet on her left foot.
As the flames intensified, Shane’s fumbling fingers tried one key at a time in the handcuff lock until eventually they snapped open. He did the same thing again with the ankle cuffs until—
ching!
He was free.
In one quick movement he scooped the screaming Betty up in his arms, leapt under the threshold of fire, jumped clear of the burning carpet, and launched himself into the mayhem of the bar. Once there, he plonked Betty down and she hit the ground running, tearing patrons out of her way to get to the exit first.
As the fire began to gnaw its way through the club, Shane saw Luca come clambering down a staircase behind the bar with a woman and a baby.
“uca!” Shane suddenly realized he still had the gag on, and his fingers tore it from his mouth. “Luca!”
“What the hell are you wearing?” Luca shouted to Shane over the top of several panicked heads as he and Shane brought up the rear, shoving everyone toward the exit.
“I was keeping Betty distracted, no thanks to you! What did you find?”
“This,” Luca said, holding up the bloody tracking device, then producing a folded piece of paper. “And a map!”
The last patrons and residents stumbled out of the now blazing Beijing Betty’s, followed by Shane and Luca. Everyone pulled back from the inferno as far as they could, coughing and spluttering, watching the fire dance and the opium cloud billow into the night.
Shane turned to Luca and shouted over the roaring fire, “A map to where?”
“Hopefully, to the Professor,” Luca shouted back. He then turned to the crowd and tracked down the young woman with the baby, grabbing her by the elbow. “Get out of here. Tell as many people as you can. Get out of central Beijing!”
At that moment, the shrill, angry voice of Betty could be heard piercing the crowd. She was cursing furiously in Mandarin, pointing at Shane, angrily rallying her patrons.
“Oh, dear,” Shane uttered to Luca. “I think Betty’s pissed!”
The crowd began to turn on them. The bleary eyes of drunk, enraged patrons flickered with fire. But, just then, Luca and Shane heard the clownish horn of a pedicab as it pulled up behind them.