“What do you want to know?”
“We’ll start with the location of my friend, Lexi Zhang.”
Rat visibly deflated and closed his eyes. His breathing had calmed now, and he’d had time to assess the situation. He might be a ruthless, trained assassin but today his greed and stupidity at the racecourse had gotten him into a lot of trouble. Now his life was reduced to a fight for his survival, and everyone in the room knew it.
“They’ll kill me,” he said at last.
“So will we,” Scarlet said.
Dearlove moved forward from the corner. “This has to stop now.”
Reaper put his hand out and stopped her from going any further. “Let them work. They won’t kill him, but we need the information.”
She gave the Frenchman a doubtful look and then nodded her assent. “But I’m keeping a close eye on this. If it goes much further it has to stop or I’m calling into my superior. What’s going on in here is torture.”
“Where is Lexi Zhang?” Hawke interrupted bluntly. He knew Samantha Dearlove better than to accept she cared about the torture of a man like Rat. Her concerns were entirely for her career advancement and that ranked considerably lower on his scale of concerns than the kidnap and potential execution of a member of his team. “I want to know right now or things are going to get ugly.”
Rat was working hard to stay in control. Recalling his training. Thinking carefully about how his boss back at the Ministry, the much-feared Zhou Yang, would deal with him when he found out he’d given up the location of the traitor Dragonfly to save his own worthless skin.
“Is it Beijing?” Hawke asked.
“Yes, but they’re not keeping her in the Ministry itself,” he said, glumly accepting his fate. “She’s in a government facility used by the Zodiacs. There is no way you can get to her. That is why she is there. It is one of the most secure sites in China.”
Reaper, Devlin and Dearlove shared a look of hope. Hawke was getting somewhere after all.
“Tell me more about this facility. I want to know exactly where they’re holding her and how I get there.”
Rat managed a laugh. “You’re crazy! I already told you it’s one of the most secure government sites in the entire country. You’d have more luck trying to break into Fort Knox.”
Scarlet swung the wrench again, and Rat spilled all the information they wanted in a hurry. “She’s in the basement of a building called the Torture House.”
“Of course she is.”
“It’s on East Chang’an Avenue near Tiananmen Square.”
“Turns out you can be a very helpful rat when you have to be,” Scarlet said with a smirk.
“Now you trade me for her?”
“Never mind trading you for a hostage, buddy,” Hawke said, staring at him without so much as blinking an eye. “You’re going back to the UK on an RAF transport plane. You’ll fly into Brize Norton and then disappear.”
Rat was deflated. “You will regret this.”
“I think not, pal,” Hawke said. “But you’re going to regret hurting my friend.”
He swung a powerful uppercut into the man’s face and knocked him out for the second time in the hour.
Dearlove gasped. “Was that strictly necessary, Hawke?”
“Not at all,” the Englishman said with a grin. “But it sure was fun. Now, we need to get to this building he’s just described and work out a way to get into the basement levels.”
“And how hard can that be?” Devlin said.
“Exactement,” said Reaper. “We will be in and out with Lexi like this.” He snapped his fingers to indicate the lightning nature of their raid.
“Either that or breaking into one of the most heavily guarded government sites on earth is a suicide mission,” Scarlet said, lighting a cigarette. “And we’ll all be dead within twenty-four hours.”
Hawke laughed. “Always the optimist, Cairo.”
“You know me. And we’re one Zodiac down now, as well. Only three more to go.”
“Let’s go get our friend.”
Two thousand kilometres north, Lexi Zhang awoke to the sound of a door slamming. She was certain it was day, but the world was black. Her breath was warm on her face and when the confusion cleared she realized she had a bag over her head.
Footsteps clipped on the stone. A man sighed. She heard a lighter fire up and then smelled smoke.
“I’m very disappointed in you, Xiaoli.” The words were delivered in quiet, calm Mandarin.
Zhou.
Shit.
She kept her voice level. “I’ll never talk.”
“I think we both know you will.”
She said nothing.
“Not only will you tell me everything I want to know about your treachery, and any other details I desire to know, but you will also beg me to make your death a quick and painless one.”
“Screw you, Zhou.”
“When did you first cross to the other side?”
“Who killed my parents?”
Another deep exhalation and the smell of smoke. “The Zodiacs.”
“Which one?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because whoever did it is going to die very painfully.”
He sighed. “I understand you’re angry, but you don’t seem to grasp the situation. You are a prisoner now. Chained up in a location quite unknown to you. Soon you will be tortured until I am satisfied you have been squeezed dry of all information, and then you will be slowly killed. There is no possibility of you exacting revenge against my men.”
“Which one!”
“When did you first defect?”
“I will never talk.”
She heard him tap on the door. The hinges creaked and then she heard Zhou speaking with some men.
“Good news, Xiaoli. Pig is here.”
She said nothing.
“He thinks you are very beautiful. He particularly admires your hands. He says he finds your nails very tantalizing. So much so, he wants to pull them out and keep them for himself.”
She felt her skin crawl. “You bastard, Zhou.”
“Tell me what I want to know or I will let him go and get his toolbox and take a pair of pliers to you.”
“Son of a bitch!”
“We’ll leave you now. Give you some time to think. When we return, you will talk or I will give him carte blanche to do as he pleases with you.” She heard them walk to the door. “And then you will talk, believe me.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
After watching the police load Camacho and Kim into a cruiser and drive into the night, Lea and Ryan climbed into the back of an ambulance and gave the paramedics a weary smile.
One was an older man with red cheeks and thinning hair. He climbed into the back alongside her and immediately made Ryan comfortable and started up a morphine drip. The other was a young man, with a neatly clipped beard and tanned skin like polished bronze. He turned the key in the ignition and the engine growled to life under the hood.
Lea expected him to pull away and make his way to the closest hospital in Pretoria, but instead the rear doors opened and a tall man with a moustache got in. He was wearing a dark suit and the seat groaned when he sat down on it. He slammed the rear doors and buckled his seatbelt. “I’m Officer Paton,” he said blandly. “I’m here to escort you back to the hospital until we can ascertain why you’ve been blowing up houses in my city.”
“There’s really no need,” she said. “We’re the good guys, and Ryan’s not going anywhere with a gunshot wound like this.”
The paramedic smiled at her, but from Paton there was nothing but another empty smile. “Orders from above. Sorry.”
The ambulance pulled out of Kruger’s property, weaving in and out of the various fire trucks that had arrived to extinguish the blaze. Looking at Ryan, she saw he was in less pain now. Morphine was dripping into his system via a canula in his right forearm, and a silly smile was slowly spreading on his unshaven face.