Tolonen wiped it against his sleeve, then turned it over, studying it. It seemed like an ordinary pouch; the kind one kept tobacco in. For a moment he hesitated. What if it was a bomb? He ought to hand it over to the experts. But he was impatient to know, for the man – and he was a man, there was no doubting that now – had almost killed him. He had been that close.
Gently he pressed the two ends of the wallet's rim towards each other. The mouth of the pouch gaped open. He reached in with two fingers, hooking out the thing within.
He stared at it a moment, then handed it across to Karr. He had known. The moment before he had opened it, he had known what would be inside. A stone. A single white wei chi stone. Like a calling card. To let the T'ang know who had killed him.
Tolonen met Karr's eyes and smiled bitterly.
‘DeVore. This was DeVore's work.'
Karr looked down. ‘Yes, and when he hears about it he'll be disappointed. Very disappointed.'
Tolonen was quiet ag tpt t quiet a moment, brooding, then he looked back at Karr. ‘Something's wrong, Gregor. My instincts tell me he's up to something. While we're here, distracted by this business. I must get back. At once. Jelka...'
Karr touched his arm. ‘We'll go at once.'
DeVore turned in his chair and looked across at his lieutenant.
‘What is it, Wiegand?'
‘I thought you should know, sir. The Han has failed. Marshal Tolonen is still alive.'
‘Ah...' He turned, staring out of the long window again, effectively dismissing the man. For a while he sat there, perfectly still, studying the slow movement of cloud above the distant peaks, the thin wisps of cirrus like delicate feathers of snow against the rich blue of the sky. Then he turned back.
He smiled. Like Wiegand, they would all be thinking he had tried to kill Tolonen, but that wasn't what he'd wanted. Killing him would only make him a martyr. Would strengthen the Seven. No, what he wanted was to destroy Tolonen. Day by day. Little by little.
Yes. Tolonen would have found the stone. And he would know it was his doing.
There was a secret lift in his room, behind one of the full-length wall charts. He used it now, descending to the heart of the warren. At the bottom a one-way mirror gave him a view of the corridor outside. He checked it was clear, then stepped out. The room was to the left, fifty ch'i along the corridor, at the end of a cul-de-sac hewn out of the surrounding rock.
At the door he paused and took a small lamp from his pocket, then examined both the locks. They seemed untouched. Satisfied, he tapped in the combinations and placed his eye against the indented pad. The door hissed back.
The girl was asleep. She lay there, face down on her cot, her long, ash-blonde hair spilling out across her naked shoulders.
He had found her in one of the outlying villages. The physical resemblance had struck him at once. Not that she would have fooled anyone as she was, but eighteen months of good food and expert surgery had transformed her, making the thousand yuan he'd paid for her seem the merest trifle. As she was now she was worth a million, maybe ten.
He closed the door and went across, pulling the sheet back slowly, careful not to wake her, exposing the fullness of her rump, the elegance of her back. He studied her a moment, then reached down, shaking her until she woke and turned, looking up at him.
She was so like her. So much so that even her ‘father' would have had difficulty telling her from the real thing.
DeVore smiled and reached out to brush her face tenderly with the back of his hand, watching as she pushed up against it gratefully. Yes. She was nearly ready now.
‘Who are you?' he asked her gently. ‘Tell me what your name is.'
She hesitated then raised her eyes to his again. ‘Jelka,' she said. ‘My name is Jelka Tolonen.'
Jelka was kicking for Siang's throat when the far wall blew in, sending smoke and debris billowing across the practice arena.
The shock wave threw her backwards, but she rolled and was up at once, facing the direction of the explosion, seeing at a glance that Siang was dead, huge splinters jutting from his back.
They came fast through the smoke: three men in black clingsuits, breathing masks hiding their features, their heads jerking from side to side, their guns searching.
Ping Tiao assassins. She knew it immediately. And acted...
A backflip, then a single-handed grab for the exercise rope, her other hand seeking the wallbars.
The middle as&rsly riddle assassin fired even as she dropped. Wood splintered next to her. She had only to survive a minute and help would be here.
A minute. It was too long. She would have to attack.
She went low, slid on her belly, then was up, jumping high, higher than she had ever leaped before, her body curled into a tight ball. All three were firing now, but the thick smoke was confusing them; they couldn't see properly through their masks.
She went low again, behind Siang, taking a short breath before turning and kicking upward.
One of the men went down, his leg broken. She heard his scream and felt her blood freeze. The other two turned, firing again. Siang's body jerked and seemed to dance where it lay. But Jelka had moved on, circling them, never stopping, changing direction constantly, dipping low to breathe.
In a moment they would realize what she was doing and keep their fire at floor level. Then she would be dead.
Unless she killed them first.
The fact that there were two hindered them. They couldn't fire continuously for fear of killing each other. As she turned, they had to try to follow her, but the rapidity of her movements, the unpredictability of her changes of direction, kept wrong-footing them. She saw one of them stumble and took her chance, moving in as he staggered up, catching him beneath the chin with stiffened fingers. She felt the bones give and moved away quickly, coughing now, the smoke getting to her at last.
Fifteen seconds. Just fifteen seconds.
Suddenly – from the far end of the arena where the wall had been –
there was gunfire. As she collapsed she saw the last of the assassins crumple, his body lifted once, then once again as the shells ripped into him.
And as she passed into unconsciousness she saw her father standing there, the portable cannon at his hip, its fat muzzle smoking.
Chapter 50
SHADOWS
Tolonen sat at his daughter's bedside, his eyes brimming with tears.
‘It was all a terrible mistake, my love. They were after me.'
Jelka shook her head, but a huge lump sat in her throat at the thought of what had happened.
She had spent the last ten days in bed, suffering from shock, the after-reaction fierce, frightening. It had felt like she was going mad. Her father had sat with her through the nights, holding her hands, comforting her, robbing himself of sleep to be with her and help her through the worst of it.
Now she felt better, but still it seemed that everything had changed. Suddenly, hideously, the world had become a mask – a paper-thin veil behind which lay another nightmare world. The walls were no longer quite as solid as they'd seemed. Each white-suited attendant seemed to conceal an assassin dressed in black.
It made it no better for her that they had been after her father. No, that simply made things worse. For she'd had vivid dreams – dreams in which he was dead and she had gone to see him in the T'ang's Great Hall, laid out in state, clothed from head to foot in the white cloth of death.
She stared at him a moment, her eyes narrowed slightly, as if she saw through the flesh to the bone itself, and while he met her staring eyes unflinchingly, something in the depths of him squirmed and tried to break away.
They had been Ping Tiao. A specially trained cell. But not Security trained, thank the gods.
He looked down at er wid twhere his hands held those of his daughter. The audacity of the Ping Tiao in coming for him had shaken them. They knew now that the danger was far greater than they had estimated. The War had unleashed new currents of dissent: darker, more deadly currents that would be hard to channel.
His own investigations had drawn a blank. He did not know how they would have known his household routines. Siang? It was possible, but now that Siang was dead he would never know. And if not Siang, then who?
It made him feel uneasy – an unease he had communicated to Li Shai Tung when they were alone together. ‘You must watch yourself, Chieh Hsia,' he had said. ‘You must watch those closest to you. For there is a new threat. What it is, I don't exactly know. Not yet. But it exists.'
Bombs and guns. He was reaping the harvest he had sown. They all were. But what other choice had they?
To lie down and die.
Tolonen looked at his daughter, sleeping now, and felt all the fierce warmth of his love for her rise up again. A vast tide of feeling. And with it came an equally fierce pride in her. How magnificent she had been! He had seen the replay from the Security cameras and witnessed the fast, flashing deadliness of her.
He relinquished her hand and stood, stretching the tiredness from his muscles.
They would come again. He knew it for a certainty. They would not rest now until they had snatched his breath from him. Instinct told him so. And though it was not his way to wait passively, in this he found himself helpless, unable to act. They were like shadows. One strove to fight them and they vanished. Or left a corpse, which was no better.