Chen Junbin was in a good mood today: the target he had spent nearly two months hunting had delivered itself right into his hands. Maybe now, in front of the boss, he could use this to make up for his failures and win the man's regard again.
Chen Junbin was thirty-five, a retired special forces soldier—medium height, powerfully built, with limbs well proportioned and quick. On the surface he was the sales manager of a trading company; behind the scenes he was one of the small bosses under Tang Jingyao, and his income, open and hidden both, was startling every month. As the saying goes, a man should be established by thirty, and this was the very prime of his life, when his spirits rode high.
Last year he had gone to a temple to burn incense, and a monk who was said to have some genuine spiritual power had told him he still had eighteen years of good fortune ahead and would sail through everything without a hitch.
Then, wouldn't you know it, a mother and daughter had gone missing from under Tang Jingyao's nose, and though he had thrown every asset he had into the search for over a month, he had turned up nothing—which had sent Tang Jingyao into a fury these past days, saying things on the American side weren't looking good.
He had assumed his incompetence was about to be punished. Instead, the woman had walked right up and presented herself, and then—what luck—his men had just happened to spot her daughter on the street. So the monk had been right after all.
Once this year was out, he would have to give a little more in incense money.
As one of Tang Jingyao's trusted men, he knew exactly what this organization did. Tang Jingyao had ties to Mafia families in New York and Italy; China was beginning to develop, the drug market had enormous potential, and those families wanted to get a foothold in the mainland—Tang Jingyao was one of their partners.
For the moment, though, they did not dare sell to small retail buyers; they handled every shipment in and out themselves, supplying only certain sons of great families. Those people could pay, and so they got the best product there was.
Every so often he would recall the oaths he had sworn back in the army, and the childish notions he had held then—ah, but those really had been childish notions. A man has to eat. If the world is black, you have to be blacker than it is.
Once he had worked that out, he had prospered.
When the call came up from his men with the good news, he was at the company closing a big deal. He knew Tang Jingyao's business had to come first, but once this contract was signed, the commission and kickbacks would be considerable.
The boss was busy too, surely, and would not be able to get over there to look into things until evening, so he put his mind at ease. By the time the order was in hand it was already getting dark.
He politely declined the other party's invitation to dinner, phoned the boss's secretary, and, figuring he still had a little time, decided to swing by home to pick a few things up before heading over. The matter was settled anyway; being a bit late would not be a problem.
He had money now, enough to buy himself a little villa on the side. When he got home and opened the door, the living room was pitch black, but from the bathroom around the corner on the second floor came the sound of running water—his wife must be taking a shower. Thinking of her enticing naked body, he gave a dirty little chuckle. Good news lifts a man's spirits. He shut the door quietly, left the lights off, and started upstairs to steal a little intimacy—and let his wife share in his joy.
Two steps in—bam!—light from the bathroom spilled out, and a body came plunging through the doorway to sprawl on the floor. Chen Junbin was special forces trained; in that split second he rolled, meaning to use the glass coffee table in the living room for cover while he drew the pistol from inside his jacket.
But the instant his body hit the floor, the glass table ahead of him burst apart with a bang, his hand went numb, and the gun flew clean out of it. The other man's shot had come through the coffee table in total darkness and struck his pistol dead on—without so much as scratching him.
What kind of miraculous marksmanship was that!
"Move an inch and your wife dies."
That cold, faintly hoarse voice froze Chen Junbin where he stood. The first one had been for his wife; the second would certainly be for him. He looked toward the corner of the second-floor stairs: lit up in the light stood a short man holding two pistols fitted with suppressors, one aimed at him and the other at the woman pinned under his foot. His wife lay naked on the floor, plainly hauled straight out of the shower.
"Turn on the light. There's a button on the inside of the sofa arm. I'd advise you not to think about pressing it."
Chen Junbin's heart jolted, and he no longer dared entertain a single sly idea. Only once the light was on did he truly make out the dwarf's face: the man looked like a middle-aged fellow in his thirties, and not only was he a dwarf, he had a knife scar slashed across his face. People like that were usually disliked by everyone around them, the sort who easily turned into perverts... he analyzed silently, and the memory of that shot a moment ago chilled him further.
"Friend, what line are you in? Whatever offense I've given, a man's wife and children are off limits—at least..." Seeing the murderous glint in the short man's eyes, he swallowed hard. "At least... let my wife put some clothes on..."
"That depends on your attitude." The short man was unmoved. "I don't like wasting words," he said coldly. "The two people your boss is looking for happen to be under my protection. You will take me to where they are now. Otherwise I guarantee you that not only will your wife die stark naked in the most crowded place in Jianghai City—so will... the child in her belly, the one she had checked at the hospital just a few days ago."
"The—the child!" Chen Junbin's eyes went wide. He saw his wife, flat on the carpet, nod in humiliation and shyness both, and he could not tell whether to be glad or afraid. Then the short man spoke again: "This is exactly why I chose you... Chen Junbin, I have made a thorough study of your family three generations back. You had better not imagine you can play any tricks in front of me. I'll give you three seconds to decide. One, two..."
The night was deep, the neon glare dazzling; it was eight-thirty in the evening, and traffic on Jianghai City's main streets still flowed like a river. Shops and supermarkets blazed with light along both sides of the road. A black SUV jeep moved at moderate speed along Airport Road, and inside it sat Chen Junbin, his wife, and the dwarfish killer.
Chen Junbin was driving. The dwarfish killer sat motionless in the passenger seat, eyelids lowered as though resting his eyes. The beautiful young wife, who had been dragged naked out of the shower not long before, had now put on a bathrobe; she sat in the back of the jeep with her hands and feet bound with rope, staring in open terror at the scarred dwarf in the passenger seat.
Both hands gripping the wheel tensely, Chen Junbin breathed in short gasps. Noticing that the dwarf had shut his eyes, he weighed the situation for a long while; then, tentatively, he had barely lifted his right hand from the wheel when a gun was instantly pressed to his temple: "Until I say otherwise, your hands don't leave the wheel."
He gripped the wheel tight. After a moment the dwarfish killer spoke: "Relax. In any matter, whatever it may be, I give a man one chance. But... only one." Chen Junbin was more alarmed still, because that line was one of Tang Jingyao's standing sayings. Just what was this man's background...
Suddenly he remembered the last time the boss had hired Pei Luojia to kill that mother and daughter. After their people had looked into it, Pei Luojia judged that a single man would be enough to wipe out everyone present, bodyguards around the pair included, and his own men had heard that and bristled.
Sure enough, that night Pei Luojia's killer finished off every one of the bodyguards—but in the end the mother and daughter slipped away. At the time he had assumed the killer got careless after finishing the guards and was shot dead by the Mafia miss.
Now it occurred to him: had the pair been rescued by a terrifying man like this?
At that thought he stopped daring to entertain any sly ideas. The jeep ran on a while, and a red light appeared ahead—and stopped ahead of them was a rather expensive silver convertible sports car. The man in the driver's seat still had a scarf wrapped around him on this summer night, and while waiting at the red light he climbed up onto the seat back and sat there lazily, as though admiring the scenery. The rather eccentric style drew pointing fingers and remarks from the people around.
On any other day Chen Junbin would have stared at that silver sports car and daydreamed that a few more years in the business would let him buy one, but tonight he was in no mood for it. His eyes fixed straight ahead, his thoughts in a tangle, he failed to notice that the dwarfish killer had opened his eyes, was gazing at the sports car and the man ahead, and had frowned slightly.
Pei Luojia... so it's him...
A moment later the light turned green, and the sports car ahead turned onto the fork to the right. In the instant Chen Junbin hesitated, the dwarfish killer had already swung his gun around and aimed it at the young wife in the back seat.
"A very important fork in the road. If you still insist the people are at the Jiangdong Sand Plant, I'll blow her belly open right now."
Chen Junbin seemed to let out a breath; then the nose of the car swung over, and the jeep, which had been about to go straight, turned right after the silver sports car.
"S-sorry. The people are actually... actually at the abandoned site of the Second Cement Plant. Please don't hurt them. I won't do it again..."
"Don't explain to me. As for directions, you've just used up that chance. If you make a mistake like that again, I guarantee you'll both get a very entertaining way to die. Now speed up and pass."
A moment later the jeep passed car after car, and the silver sports car, too, was overtaken. On it drove, until it turned toward the derelict grounds of the Second Cement Plant, shut down years ago, on the city's outskirts.
Soon the car turned onto a branch road with little traffic. The road was smooth, wide enough for only two cars abreast, but there were no streetlights along it. In the darkness, a lone jeep drew slowly away from the glowing metropolis: on one side of the road a wall of rock, on the other a small ravine—not especially deep, though if a car really did go over, it would still be the death of you. That was why squat, sawtooth concrete blocks lined the roadside, serving as a makeshift guardrail.
Following the killer's instructions, the jeep held its speed through the dark, now and then passing a small car coming the other way. After a while lights shone from behind, and in the rearview mirror the approaching vehicle was coming at an incredible rate; it looked about to catch up with the jeep. The dwarfish killer's voice sounded again: "Speed up, and keep to the inside lane and let him by."
Accelerating in darkness like this was dangerous, but naturally Chen Junbin did not dare say a word. He gradually left the ravine side of the road open, and the car behind came rushing up with a roar and drew level with the jeep. It was that expensive silver sports car from the city earlier.
The man in it had his scarf streaming out behind him; he raised a hand toward them and seemed to call out "Hi!" So the man was a racing maniac—the jeep had passed him earlier, and now he had passed it back and wanted to show off besides.
On an ordinary day, seeing the other man driving a sports car like that, Chen Junbin would not have dared say anything; now he dared even less to make any gesture. At that same moment a pistol was suddenly jammed against his temple, and the dwarfish killer, who seemed to have lunged over, shouted, "Let go of the wheel!"
The pistol did its job beautifully. In an instant Chen Junbin's hands sprang off the wheel as though they had caught fire; the killer seized it, wrenched it hard toward the outside, then wrenched it back.
With a boom, the silver sports car, running at full speed, was struck hard. Its wheels rode up over the little concrete blocks, and then the whole car, and the man flaunting himself in it, went flying up at an angle, the body spinning, its lights carving a beautiful arc through the air before it dropped into the ravine below. The jeep swerved drunkenly on for a good distance before a violent shock ran through it: behind them, the sports car had exploded at the bottom of the ravine and risen into the sky as a huge fireball.
"Very good, very powerful... let's keep going..."
Drawing back the complicated gaze he had cast behind them, the dwarfish killer issued his order in a flat voice.