30
Emptiness
Zhen disliked staying in the honey-trap apartment. Her personal flat was in a smaller building in Mid-Levels, where she was surrounded by her books, yoga materials, and comfortable furniture. Staying in this nearly empty apartment was an inconvenience. It, moreover, meant the assassination phase was near, and although she had no compunction about eliminating a target, she was always depressed at the conclusion of an operation. She enjoyed the hunt: engineering first contact, coyly developing the relationship, the heady thrill of seduction, and the dizzying anticipation of the final act, up to the moment she eased a steel needle between the cervical vertebrae of the neck, or looped a silk rope around a throat, or watched a victim’s eyes grow in alarm as the chest-constricting effects of a poison were first felt. But afterward there was an emptiness, a depression, a melancholy. An emptiness that yoga helped relieve.
Zhen always told herself that she worked as a poison-feather bird to feed her stomach, but she practiced yoga to feed her soul. Practice gave perspective, energy, and the strength to accept what she could not change. But there were some things she could indeed change. Her unhappy childhood and subsequent exploitation as a teenaged concubine, and the humiliating scurvy years in Nightingale School and at the Institute in Beijing learning to kill increased her resolve never to let anyone mistreat her again. The first time had been in London, at university, where she had been singled out as a shy exotic by a group of male students, the majority of whom were simply bullies, but one of them had wanted more. Zhen did not bring any of the usual weapons from the institute with her to the United Kingdom, except for two gongfu shàn, pleated kung-fu fighting fans, one black, one red, wide and delicate with expanding wings of edged metal affixed to the fan folds. These were medieval martial-arts weapons and Zhen could make them flutter like birds wings, snapping them open and closed with a report like a gunshot.
There was a complicated social protocol as well in the use of fans, ancient Chinese conventions essentially lost on most Britons, but Zhen had studied them because they would be most relevant when she returned to the Orient as a seductress. Drawing a closed fan along the cheek meant “I want you.” Touching the edge of the extended fan lightly with the fingers meant “I want to talk to you.” To tap the lips with a closed fan meant “kiss me.” None of these applied to the rangy British Romeo named Rowdy White who pushed his way into Zhen’s dormitory room one night, and stood amused as she held two puny folded fans in front of her, ready to defend herself. Rowdy’s cumulative experience with fans was limited to the big ostrich-feather variants used by the dancers in the strip clubs off High Street. When Rowdy reached to grab Zhen by the arm the black fan opened with a pop, deflecting his hand. Chuckling to himself, Rowdy again reached for her and the red fan snapped open, blocked his other arm, then folded in the blink of an eye, and snapped down across his wrist. That hurt. He snarled, stepped forward, arms extended, and both fans snapped open with a clatter like pigeons taking flight in a park, and the leading edge of one fan was raked across his face an inch above his eyebrows, slicing his forehead and blinding him as blood streamed into his eyes and down his cheeks. It was Zhènniǎo’s first blood, and she was mildly surprised how easy it had been.
She wasn’t hungry but she made a small pot of shēngcài soup, simple lettuce soup, and let it cool on the stove. She opened the balcony door for the night breeze, and sat naked on the big pillow on the floor in the darkened empty living room inhaling great draughts of air, distending first her stomach, then her diaphragm, then her lungs, and expelling her breath in reverse order, pulling her navel in and up, and locking her root chakra. She quietly repeated the Adi Mantra: ong namo guru dev namo, bowing to the teacher within, and continued breathing. She got to her feet and leaned forward into a deep lunge, her body glistening, breasts straining, muscular arms above her head, then flowed into a series of poses, her breath steady and hissing on the exhale. But something was wrong. Her concentration was off tonight.
She liked the young American, and had to admit to herself that he was decent and charming. His comments about freedom and Hong Kong were obviously recruitment talking points, but she agreed with them. She wondered what he’d be like in bed—she did not sleep with men after Nightingale School—but she didn’t much care whether he lived or died. She was alone in the world, not aligned with anyone, not with Beijing, not with the MSS, not with the hotel to which she devoted all her energies. She knew Nate was CIA, and that he wanted to recruit her. She had used her professional wiles to encourage him, flirted with him, and kissed him, all to maneuver him into the kill zone. Her recruitment was an impossibility, of course—she would never ally herself with the Americans—and besides, the MSS was observing everything. Zhen had been told that she had to elicit, or trick, or fuck the name of a mole out of him but if after two nights she was not successful, she was to assassinate him. It would happen tomorrow night.
She would take a vial of monkshood distillate mixed with fragrant ylang-ylang oil and using great care—a drop on her own skin could be fatal—apply the poison on Nate’s skin (she had established the practice of dabbing him with the oil over the last two nights), this time with a bamboo stick applicator. The aconitine would slowly flood his system and kill him hours later, long after he returned home. Zhen got to her feet, folded forward with her palms flat on the floor, and exhaled. She straightened, and walked to the bedroom to take a shower before bed, snapping lights off as she walked through the apartment. She lighted a sandalwood taper and took her shower by candlelight.
The woody fragrance of sandalwood was a nice change from the ylang-ylang oil, which hung heavy everywhere without dissipating, like the copper stench of stale blood in a charnel house.
Nearly midnight. It was a good thing that Benford and Nate were not going to hear what Dominika planned. There were no other options. They were going to kill Nate tomorrow night, and she didn’t even have to think too hard about it. She was going to kill Zhènniǎo, the poison-feather bird, or try to, anyway. Dominika stood in the darkened living room of her MSS guest flat wondering if she would survive the next half hour. She wore black pajama pants and a black T-shirt over a sports bra that flattened her chest and hugged her ribs. She didn’t want to be flopping around if she actually had to engage Zhen hand to hand. She wondered if the Russian Spetsnaz-derived Systema fighting technique she had learned over the years would even come close to what she imagined a Chinese assassin’s martial-arts skill would be. She still had to try. Otherwise Nate was dead.
Dominika had no intention of standing toe-to-toe with Zhen. She likely had weapons hidden all over the apartment, not to mention bullets, arrows, darts, and daggers, all dipped in lethal compounds. Having seen her move via surveillance monitor, Dominika also knew that Zhen was strong, lithe, and flexible, and no doubt would be able to absorb a lot of punishment in a stand-up fight. Dominika, therefore, had to ambush her and instantly incapacitate her. It would be the only way she could win.