Strong Darkness (40 page)

“No,” Li said, as the elevator door slid open. “The future.”

*   *   *

Paz and Qiang continued to exchange fire, the motion of both constant, each managing to stay just ahead of the other's bullets. A final volley from Paz shattered yet another display case and freed desert scorpions to scurry across the floor. Their stingers were raised ominously as they advanced like an army, the clacking sound they made as they moved en masse sounding oddly like the crackling of fires burning in the hillside slum Paz remembered from cold nights in his youth.

Qiang's final stitch of fire, meanwhile, obliterated the glass of a case holding what Paz recognized as African drum ivy, the deadliest plant known to man. It was more of a vine really, with thick, full leaves that looked like pincers and extracted a noxious white vapor known to cause almost instant death. The drum ivy's deadly defenses were activated by proximity; Paz heard what sounded like a hiss and just managed to evade the escaping vapors that fluttered through the air in a thin cloud, dissipating.

Then he glimpsed Qiang storming across the floor, seeming to soar through the air, the two of them meeting in the room's center atop crackling glass with creatures scampering or buzzing all around them.

*   *   *

The lobby doors forming the entrance to Yuyuan had been locked down, so Cort Wesley shot out the glass with a fusillade that cost him his second magazine. Then he crashed through the solid panes fractured along spiderweb-like lines into the sprawling reception area. Soft music formed an insane background to the sounds of gunfire when he opened up on more Triad soldiers who seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

And that's when time froze, nothing but the staccato bursts of sound and glimpses of movement registering with him at all.

Time changed. Places changed.

But not battle, one exactly like the last and the next. Context, location, and purpose always distinct, while sense and mind-set remained the same.

And Cort Wesley took to this one, just as he'd taken to all the others. Nothing was forgotten, each piece of every other battle he'd ever fought leaving an indelible mark. There was the sense of the assault rifle vibrating slightly as it clacked off rounds, warm against his hands, steady in his grasp. The sight of the muzzle flash, strange metallic smell of air baked by the heat of the expended shells, and his own kinetic energy. The world reduced to its most basic and simple. There was the gun, his targets, the glass and wall between them, and nothing else. Welcome and comfortable in its familiarity with all thinking suspended and instinct left to command him.

“Dad!” Cort Wesley heard Dylan say in his tiny earpiece. “Dad!”

His son's call from outside on the outskirts of the massive crowd gathered to protest Yuyuan sounded more like an echo in Cort Wesley's ravaged ears. The boy was here because he was best able to identify the big wild card in all this:

Kai.

“She's here, Dad, she's here!”

Cort Wesley heard his son's words with an illusionary beat between each of them, making it feel as if his brain and body were detached from each other. “Keep her out of the building!” he ordered, picking up only splotches of his own words. “You hear me, son?”

*   *   *

Dylan slid down a slight rise just over a man-made arroyo used to collect rainwater washed off the nearby four-lane. The tree cover obscured whatever was happening at Yuyuan from him, but he was pretty sure he'd detected the clack of gunfire, light and tinny from this distance with so much additional noise around him. He lost Kai amid the slog briefly, than spotted her again as she moved in lithe, supple fashion through the tightly packed crowd, seeming to glide.

He started toward her through the clutter of humanity, not sure exactly what would happen when he got there; what exactly he'd say or do. Dylan knew she'd used him to get her out of New York, but didn't much care right now. His head was pounding again. His mouth had gone bone dry. He was sweating like crazy even though he didn't feel warm and all he wanted to do was get the girl aside and talk her down.

The crowd thickened the closer Dylan drew to Kai, approaching from her rear flank so she wouldn't spot him before he reached her. She was so beautiful even amid these conditions, the focused intensity he'd glimpsed in her expression, resolve coupled with self-assurance, only adding to the infatuation that had almost gotten him killed.

Dylan was still eight feet away when a fissure opened in the crowd, a clear path between him and Kai when he saw the lighter flash in her hand.

*   *   *

Caitlin felt Zhen drag her from the elevator by her cuffed hands. Banks of dull overhead lights snapped on, illuminating a sprawling floor of computer terminals, servers, and mainframes. She recognized what looked to be routers and relays nestled on a floor dominated by a long series of wall-sized monitors broadcasting the constant scrawl of ten-digit combinations that could only be phone numbers across the nation being stored by Yuyuan satellites orbiting hundreds of miles overhead. The room was utterly devoid of humidity, feeling chilly and airless to her.

“This is where the end of your country begins,” Zhen clamored, dragging her across the floor by her hair. He plopped her down in the first chair they came to and jerked her head backward with a final tug of her black locks, his dry odorless breath pouring into her. “This is where my family gets even! My destiny, my fate.”

“Murdering tens of millions of innocent people?”

“It would have been
hundreds
of millions if your interference hadn't forced me to activate my plan ahead of schedule,” Zhen corrected and pressed the SIG against her temple, the muzzle of the barrel feeling like ice. “The signal will go out over the four G network, not nearly as effective but a satisfying result just the same.”

“Why not just kill yourself, Mr. Zhen? It's what you really want, probably since the first time you slept with Jiao. You want to blame America for you being reared in poverty, go ahead. But this country had nothing to do with you raping your daughter. She was only thirteen when Kai was born. Tell me, did you ever rape her too?”

But Zhen's mind was somewhere else, not seeming to have registered her words at all. “Just a few strikes on the keyboard and it begins,” he said. “My satellites waiting to receive the data in order to transmit a signal that will automatically dial those cell phone numbers ringing right here in your country at a hundred thousand per second. You are about to bear witness to the end of life in the United States as you know it.”

“Only until you're dead, Mr. Zhen,” Caitlin said, trying to remain composed, not ready to concede anything, keenly aware Zhen was having trouble keeping the pistol steady in his arthritic hands, which grew shakier with each passing second.

He moved his face closer to hers. “You'd like that, wouldn't you, for the simplicity it suggests? The way it was in the time of our grandfathers. But those times are long past. The satellites operate remotely. Once the operation is triggered, your country's fate becomes inevitable. My death will mean no more than your life,
Cat-lan
Strong. You will witness me bringing that to be, witness me—”

But before Zhen could utter another word Caitlin slammed her forehead into the bridge of his nose, Zhen sent reeling backward with her pistol flying from his grasp.

 

107

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Cort Wesley had momentarily forgotten about Dylan's warning that he'd spotted Kai, lost in the environment of spilled bodies, pooling blood, and a wailing alarm that only just reached the edge of his consciousness. That mind-set was the only way to survive this kind of battle time and time again.

But for now anyway he was the only man standing. The lobby belonged to him, his ground to defend. Shapes of Chinese gunmen, provided by the Triad no doubt, continued to emerge from different points in different moments. But they were ill prepared for this kind of fight, especially against a professional as seasoned in battle as Cort Wesley was. They were killers, yes, but killers used to being met with far less resistance, if any at all. The shots several managed to get off flew wildly off kilter, which in Cort Wesley's lexicon meant missing him by more than a foot.

He could feel their fire dancing through the air, sizzling past him. Could almost imagine being able to follow the errant path of their bullets the same way he could the vapor trail of a jet passing overhead. Then a single bullet found his body armor, knocking a measure of his wind out and twisting him to the side. But he caught the shooter in his next burst as the man tried to launch himself airborne behind an indoor rock garden. Cort Wesley ejected the spent magazine and rammed a fresh one home in less time than it took to find his next breath.

Then he heard something—no, not heard so much as
felt
, the floor starting to quake beneath him as if the earth was ready to open up and swallow the world whole. His gaze twisted toward the lobby's glass front wall to see the endless wave of humanity streaming toward the building.

*   *   *

Dylan had seen Kai touch the lighter to the packages of firecrackers, had done the very same thing himself on enough occasions to know what was coming next. Her eyes met his and held there in the last moment before …

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

The Fourth of July had come early, the staccato crackle of the fireworks racking his head to the point he had to close his eyes briefly to chase away the pain. But it must have indeed sounded like gunfire to the masses gathered, because the crowd suddenly whipsawed in all directions at once, seeking routes of flight denied by the congestion. Left to charge in the only direction available: straight across the road toward the Yuyuan complex, the hate that had brought the members of the crowd here further fueled by relentless, unstoppable panic.

Dylan felt himself jostled one way, and then another, his head feeling like somebody was banging golf balls around inside his skull with each impact. His stomach lurched and he felt dizzy, woozy, on the verge of passing out. He almost lost his footing, managing to glimpse Kai slicing a path through the crowd, angling herself toward Yuyuan. He fought the nausea down and took a single deep breath to settle himself enough to pick up the chase.

“Dad!” he yelled into the wrist-mounted microphone his father had given him.
“Dad!”

But there was no response.

*   *   *

Paz clung to his balance and drove Qiang backward into a still whole display case. The back of his bald head crashed through the glass and what looked like giant hornets buzzed at him from a hive that had ruptured on impact.

Paz held Qiang there as long as he could, until the hornets attacked the back of his hands. The stings felt like sharp pinpricks, the pain radiating inward and then seeming to spread across the interior surface of his skin. Paz realized his hands were seizing up on him from whatever poison the stingers contained, Qiang's face a mass of blistering boils from the stings that had closed one of his eyes and swelled one side of his mouth to the size of an apple.

Qiang seemed to have trouble breathing as he mounted a desperate shove backward that Paz was powerless to counter with his cold, tingly hands, his fingers rendered stiff appendages he couldn't flex into fists or even rotate. Qiang's one working eye bulged with a rage fired by the pain pulsing through his blood to every part of his body, as he continued thrusting Paz backward.

Paz twisted, trying to add his own force to the equally big man's momentum. His hands, though, weren't up to the task, the result being to strip him of his balance. He felt himself canting for the tile, his legs losing their grasp on it as well. But he managed to loop his stiff hands behind Qiang's head, taking him down too.

Impact rattled the floor, sending a bevy of desert scorpions scurrying from their path amid the shattered glass. Qiang landed on top, hands closing on Paz's throat when an African tree frog opened its mouth wide and secreted a foul-smelling ooze straight into Qiang's face. It stitched a neat line across his brow, looking as if it had been painted into place, Qiang's one working eye twisting up as if to look for what struck him. He jerked a hand upward to try to wipe it off in the same moment Paz recovered enough feeling in one of his hands to grab hold of the Chinese man's shirt and yank him to the side.

Paz twisted, turned, rolled, straight into the path of two black mambas converging on him.

*   *   *

Caitlin didn't bother going for the pistol: with her hands bound behind her there was no point. She followed up her head butt of Zhen by shoving her shoulder into him, driving both of them backward for the wall. Her intention was to create enough force to break his ribs on impact, disabling him. But Zhen surprised her, twisting deftly just enough to pitch both of them over a counter.

Caitlin fell hard to the floor with him atop her, nothing to cushion her fall. She took the brunt of the impact on her shoulder, feeling something crunch inside the joint itself. Zhen hammered her twice with open-handed blows to the neck and head that left her stunned, even as blood from his shattered nose showered her in rhythm with him jerking from side to side.

Caitlin felt his knobby, gnarled, swollen fingers struggling to close on her throat. She kicked at a raised platform near which they'd landed, kicked and kept kicking until a big computer console resting there dislodged and came crashing down upon Zhen.

 

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The crowd was everywhere, Dylan powerless to do anything but move within its flow. It was like being swept forward in some vast tsunami of churning feet and desperation. He felt light, as if he were floating, and wondered if he was on the verge of passing out.