The Curse of the Dragon God (28 page)

Read The Curse of the Dragon God Online

Authors: Geoffrey Knight

Tags: #Mystery, #Suspense, #Adventure, #Gay

BOOK: The Curse of the Dragon God
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“Max!” Sen suddenly pleaded, his face turning red as Chad tightened the headlock. “Max, what are you doing! Don’t let him kill me, please!”
The Professor didn’t take his blind gaze off Bradley. “Kill her. Kill her or we’ll all die.”
Chad laughed and cocked his weapon. “Fine. Do it. We can count to three and do it together.”
Will turned to the Professor, shocked at his words. “Professor?”
“Shoot her now,” was all the Professor could say.
Chad began counting determinedly. “One!”
Bradley squirmed. “Professor?”
Chad raised his voice. “Two!”
In a calm, exhausted tone, the Professor said, “Don’t let go of that gun, Bradley.”
“Three!” Chad cried. He made a move to squeeze the trigger.
Sen begged, “No!”
Bradley threw the gun on the floor. “Don’t shoot him!”
He released Mya and stepped backward quickly, unarmed, at which point Mya turned to face him and struck him with a left hook that knocked him to the floor. She picked up her gun and pointed it at him.
Chad eased his grip on Sen, who gasped with relief, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Bradley.”
“Don’t be,” Bradley replied, not taking his eyes off the barrel of Mya’s gun pointed straight in his face. “I’ll never let them hurt you.”
Sen’s gasps turned to laughter. A weak chuckle at first. Then something louder. Something stronger. Something more than stress or exhaustion. This was genuine amusement. “Thank you, nephew,” he said with a smile. “Unfortunately I can’t say the same of you.”
Will turned to Sen as the grim realization of what he’d just heard set in.
Bradley looked from the barrel of the gun to his uncle, confused, bewildered, fighting off the sense of betrayal that began to flood his heart.
Sen continued to laugh. “As I was saying, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but you should have listened to the Professor.”
Chad removed his gun and began to untie Sen. “I hope I didn’t hurt you,” Chad remarked as he released Sen’s hands.
Bradley stared, uncomprehending at first. Then the hurt and anger slowly seeped in. “Uncle?”

 

Doctor Cyclops’s fingers rattled like the needle on a Richter scale. He had decided to start with the inner thighs. High up Luca’s leg. Right beside the scrotum. He could smell the scent of fear, of sweat. He watched with one eye as the young Italian’s balls writhed inside their sack, squirming, trying to escape the knife.
“Don’t do this,” Luca tried to negotiate desperately. But the doctor had been a little too generous with the dosage he’d given Luca, and soon his eyelids grew weary and settled shut.
“Dammit,” cursed the doctor. He had wanted Luca to watch. Nevertheless, with fingers trembling, Doctor Cyclops pressed the rusty scalpel to his specimen’s inner right thigh. He pushed deep and popped the skin. A thick drop of blood appeared and drew a red line down to the bedspread.
His fingers shaking, the doctor tried to follow his inked blueprint down the inside of Luca’s leg, managing to follow his mark no more than two inches before the door to the car burst open.
Richard entered, took one look around, and said, “What the—?”
He saw the doctor stand up stiffly from between the now unconscious Luca’s thighs. In one hand he held his scalpel, shiny with blood.
“Jesus Christ,” Richard tut-tutted in his British accent. “You really are one sick bastard, aren’t you.”
“What do you want?” the doctor snapped.
“Chad needs you in the master carriage. The old man’s making a bloody mess.”
“The old man?” the doctor uttered fearfully.
Richard shook his head. “Not
our
old man. The other old man. The Professor. Now put down your toys and follow me.”

 

In the master carriage, Sen laughed at his nephew as the young man stared back in astonishment and anger. “Oh, Bradley, you have no idea how pathetic you are. So honest. So naïve. Your parents would be proud of you. Be sure to give them my regards, you’ll be seeing them again sooner than you think. I’m sure you’ll have a lot to talk about.”
Bradley shook his head in disbelief. “What are you saying?”
Sen shrugged. “I’m saying that sometimes accidents happen, and sometimes, well—sometimes there just aren’t enough diamonds to go around. Of course there was a time when I would have shared my life happily with those I loved. Isn’t that right, Max? But those days are long gone.”
Sen was standing now. He shot a commanding look at Mya and ordered, “Get my nephew back in his chair.” Mya promptly acted, hoisting Bradley to his feet and shoving him onto a chair. Chad kept his gun on Bradley while Mya secured Bradley’s ropes.
Sen made his way almost casually over to the window and peered outside. He saw the white tips of the forest trees capped with snow, and beyond them a large expanse of white. “Ah, the Lake of a Thousand Stars,” he commented, almost sentimentally. “This was always my favorite part of the journey, even as a child—watching the lake go by as the train curved its way around its shores. The water was always such a deep, bottomless blue in summer. And at night, a perfect mirror of the stars. A thousand stars, just like its name. Except, of course, now, with the coming of winter, when its surface is frozen solid.”
At that moment the door between the cars opened. Richard and Doctor Cyclops entered the room, and in an instant Sen’s look of fondness turned to controlled rage. He stormed up to Doctor Cyclops and slapped him across the face.
“That’s for being too enthusiastic with the acting,” Sen scolded.
“I’m sorry I touched you,” Cyclops replied, trembling.
Sen turned to Mya sternly. “Are you sure this fool can do the job?”
Mya nodded, though the deep breath she took made her own doubts evident.
“What more can he do?” Will demanded. “Look at the Professor! Haven’t you butchered him enough?”
“Not quite,” answered Sen. “We need to cover our tracks. We need to make allowances for the scientific investigations that will no doubt ensue over the following months, years, decades. In case they uncover molecules of DNA in the devastation we’ll leave behind. And for that, we need the Professor’s body. Not all of it, you understand. We’ll be taking the head with us and disposing of it elsewhere, in case forensics does manage to recover any trace of skull or teeth in the ruins of the mines; they’re always a dead giveaway. Which is why we need the doctor.” Sen shot Doctor Cyclops another angry glare, and Cyclops cowered backward fearful of a second slap, or worse. Sen turned back to his captives and continued. “As for the rest of the Professor, however, if there’s so much as an atom left at the scene for the investigating authorities, they’ll trace the DNA back to me. Zhang Sen. I’ll be the one they confirm as dead.”
“How can the Professor’s DNA match yours?” Will contested. “That’s impossible.”
“You’re absolutely right. Unless of course you alter the information at the source.”
“The blood,” the Professor panted, recalling his long journey to China. “The blood Mya took on the Learjet. You’ve switched it with yours.”
“Very good, Max,” Sen said with a smile.
“I don’t understand.” Will strained against his ropes, frustrated, confused, impatient.
The Professor explained drowsily, “Before they operated on me, before they drugged me full of opium and cut the tracking device out, Mya took a sample of my blood.”
“Which I switched with the sample in the security vault in the laboratories run by the insurance firm in Beijing,” Mya put in, adding her part to the puzzle. “Which was why I arrived late for the meeting in Hong Kong—just in time to find you snooping through the files on Chad’s computer.”
“That’s not entirely true, is it, Mya,” the Professor challenged weakly. “You were in fact scheduled to deposit the sample the following day, but you were forced to make an early rendezvous with Doctor Cyclops for one reason. The tracking device. You had to get rid of it. You didn’t know about it until we were all on the plane. In fact, nobody knew about it, except myself and my men—and Sen.”
Slowly Sen started to applaud. “I was wondering when you started to piece everything together. Always so sure of yourself, aren’t you, Max. Let me remind you, you’ve made mistakes before. Even you’ve been guilty of trusting the wrong person in the past. What if you had been wrong this time? What if Chad had shot me?”
“You were the only one who knew about the tracking device. Only, by the time we told you, in the boardroom back in San Francisco, there was no time, no opportunity to tell the others. Not until we were on the jet and Mya escorted you to the bathroom. That’s when you told her. That’s when she changed plans. That’s when she took my blood—”
“—and made it into mine,” Sen said with satisfaction.
The Professor took a breath. A short breath, his chest tight, his heart heavy inside. “But why? You could have taken anyone’s blood, you could have used the body of any man your age. Instead you risked everything to get me involved.”
Sen stopped in front of the Professor and looked down at him, his face full of nothing but tortured hate. “Don’t you see, Max? You turned my heart to ice and you didn’t even know it. All my life, all I wanted was revenge.”
But as Sen looked into Max’s blind eyes, all he could see was the reflection of his own hate in the Professor’s sightless gaze. Angrily he pulled himself away and walked over to the desk, where he unlocked the second drawer down. From it he took an old envelope, still sealed. On the front, handwritten in faded ink, was the name
Max
.
Sen took a daggerlike letter opener from the drawer and said, “I could open it, but whose heart would I be cutting out?”
Then he placed the letter opener down on the desk and pulled a lighter from the drawer instead. He triggered it with his thumb and a flame ignited. He held it to a corner of the envelope, then placed it gracefully, almost ritualistically, down on the desktop. The flaming envelope and its contents burned bright, charring the marble top.
Maximilian Fathom could smell the flames, he could smell the black smoke. And he knew then the damage he had done. That there was not a fire on earth that could melt the icy heart of Zhang Sen now.
It was far too late. And Max knew there was nobody to blame. Nobody but himself.
XIX
The Zhang Diamond Mines, Mountains of Shandong
SPARKLING CRYSTALLINE FLAKES OF SNOW DANCED AND drifted in the spherical silvery reflection of the orb. To Will, the sight seemed almost magical, something straight out of a small-town Christmas parade or a wondrous winter festival.
But the orb was not filled with magic or wonder. It was filled with zinc, iridium, and plutonium. It was filled with wires and a fail-safe timer. It was filled with death and the promise of mass destruction.

 

After rounding the ridge surrounding the frozen lake, the steam train had journeyed further south, heading higher into the mountains, passing more lantern-lit shacks and villages. At one point it passed a track switch where the railway line divided into two parallel tracks before merging into a single track again several miles up the line.
Eventually, with an exhausted puff and a sigh of steam from the undercarriage of the engine, the train had arrived on the turntable terminal of the Zhang diamond mines near a mountain summit.
Sweating despite the freezing night air, Xi had slipped his shirt back on, shut off the vent to the furnace, and opened a small metal trunk near the rear of the engine compartment. Out of it he took a utility belt lined with small cylindrical grenade explosives. He strapped the belt around his waist before joining the others in the master carriage.
Will, Bradley, and the Professor were untied. Will and Bradley were ordered at gunpoint to help the Professor up and take him out into the cold and dark.
Mya alighted from the car first. Will and Bradley followed her, easing the badly injured Professor out of the car and into the falling snow.
Chad stayed close behind them, followed by Doctor Cyclops, who had by now retrieved his large cutting shears from the bedroom carriage, reluctantly leaving the unconscious Luca still strapped naked to the bed.
Xi carefully lifted one of the zidium devices out of its crate and carried it out into the drifting, dancing snow. It looked like a giant bauble on his arms, a perfect shining sphere, with the exception of the timer panel set into the curved surface, its small rectangular screen black and unactivated.
Richard watched Xi carry the bomb from the car and said, “I think I’ll stay right here.” He began sifting through a box of Cuban cigars sitting on the antique side table beside his lounge. “Don’t get me wrong, you all know I love a little reckless adventure. But someone has to cover up the evidence if you lot blow yourselves to kingdom come.”
“Perhaps you could make yourself useful by rotating the turntable track,” Sen told him. “We want the train to be ready to return to Beijing as soon as we’re done with the mines.”

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