Either the man didn’t buy Austin’s bluff or he didn’t care. He raised his own gun, and Austin thought he was going to shoot, but instead the man let out a snarl and dashed toward the railing, firing from the hip as he ran. Austin ducked for cover, and when he dared look again, the man had disappeared. He heard the sound of an outboard motor starting and ran to the railing. The boat was already up on plane, and within seconds it had disappeared into the darkness.
He stared at the pale wake foaming the water and was listening to the motor fading into the night when there was a new sound on the deck behind him.
Footfalls.
Austin pivoted into a crouch, only to relax when he saw why the man had decided to bolt. Zavala had emerged from the control center and was trotting toward him. They both grabbed fire extinguishers from a bulkhead and sprayed the Humongous with foam.
“It sounded like World War Three out here,” Zavala said after they had the blaze under control. “Glad to see you’re still in one piece.”
“Thanks to your timely appearance,” Austin replied. “Wish I could say the same for the Humongous,” he added with a tinge of guilt in his voice.
Zavala gazed in wonder at the smoldering ROV, its components scattered around the deck.
“I can see now why the video died,” Zavala said.
“That’s not the only thing that died,” Austin said.
He went over to the bodies lying on deck. He removed the mask from the man who had tried to kill Marla, revealing a cruel face with Asian features. The second man was Asian as well. Austin surveyed the deck, which was covered with cartridge shells. The smell of cordite hung in the smoke-filled air.
“Now we know why the B3 was attacked,” he said. “Doc Kane . . . We’ve got to talk to him.”
“Good luck!” Zavala said. “Doc made it pretty clear that his work was none of our business.”
Austin’s lips tightened in the smile that, in Zavala’s experience, had always presaged trouble.
“That’s too bad,” Austin said in an even tone. “Because I’m making it our business.”
CHAPTER 15
SHANGHAI, CHINA
THE LICENSE PLATE ON THE SILVER MERCEDES S65 AMG sedan that emerged from the parking garage under Pyramid Trading Company’s fifty-story building displayed only the number 2, suggesting that the car’s owner enjoyed extreme wealth. Vanity plates were auctioned off for millions of dollars to affluent and superstitious bidders who believed that the low numbers would bring good luck.
To reinforce that good luck, the car’s skin was fashioned from rocketproof armor plate and its tinted-glass windows were bulletproof. The underside was fortified against street bombs. The six-hundred-horsepower V-12 engine under the hood could push the car’s speed up to two hundred miles an hour.
An armed guard wearing denim fatigues sat in the front seat next to the driver. For added security, the Mercedes was sandwiched between two four-hundred-ninety-three-horsepower Mercedes G55 AMG SUVs. Each SUV carried a driver and five guards armed with Chinese-made, lightweight Type 79 submachine guns that had firing capabilities of five hundred rounds per minute.
The three-vehicle motorcade followed a route that took it away from the high-rise apartment complexes and glitzy clubs around the Oriental Pearl Tower, the tallest building of its kind in the world. The car and its escorts sped along the banks of the Yangtze River, then turned off the highway and headed toward the destitute neighborhoods that are the embarrassing underside of the largest and wealthiest city in the People’s Republic of China.
The procession plunged deep into the warren of slums, entering a hellish landscape of a no-man’s-land that was so burned out and devoid of human life even the most desperate slum dwellers avoided it. The vehicles turned onto a narrow, unlit street and went through a gate, pulling up next to an abandoned brick warehouse. Weathered plywood covered the widows, broken glass and boards from packing crates littered the oil-soaked dirt parking lot, but the razor wire topping the electrified chain-link fence that gleamed in the headlights was brand-new.
The guards poured out of the SUVs and formed a cordon between the Mercedes sedan and a loading platform. The man riding shotgun in the sedan’s front seat got out and opened the rear door. The lone passenger emerged and walked briskly toward the platform, accompanied by his bodyguard. As the men climbed the platform stairs, a door on well-greased rollers slid silently open.
They entered the warehouse and the door slid shut. The illumination from fluorescent overhead lights revealed that the passenger from the Mercedes was a small man dressed in a medium blue suit that had been hand-tailored in London, a neatly knotted silk tie, and Testoni shoes that sold for two thousand dollars a pair. He had a rigid, almost military posture about him.
Silver hair, neatly parted on the left, and black-plastic-framed glasses gave Wen Lo an avuncular air of bland respectability more befitting a desk clerk in a three-star hotel than the head of a giant real-estate and financial consortium that was the cover for extensive prostitution, gambling, and drug operations on a global scale.
Wen Lo’s face
was asymmetrical, not from left to right but from top to bottom. The lower part of his face featured plump cheeks and a boyish smile while the upper part had a wide forehead, heavy furrowing brows, and soulless jade-green eyes that showed no more emotion than an abacus.
Waiting inside the warehouse door were three men in blue-green hospital gowns and a pair of heavily armed guards wearing generic tan security uniforms. The hard-faced guards carried Tasers, sidearms, and clubs that hung from their wide leather belts.
A balding, weasel-faced man dressed as if for the operating room stepped forward.
“An honor to have you visit us, sir,” he said, giving a quick bow of the head.
Wen Lo responded with a barely perceptible nod.