Nadia had slept fitfully, accompanied by unpleasant dreams she couldn’t quite recall. Something about spiders. She hated them, though she’d never told anyone. She never flinched when she saw one, no matter how big. She would just go cold inside, and work out how to kill it. She was staring at one right now, out of reach on the ceiling. The hotter the climate, the bigger the spiders.
She flexed and unflexed the fingers of her left hand, gauging the amount of pain she could tolerate from the patched-up bullet wound in her shoulder. As she checked her arm, she paused, wondering what was happening beneath her skin. On the outside she looked normal, but inside a war raged, one she’d already lost. She’d tried a white flag, but this particular enemy didn’t negotiate, didn’t understand ceasefire, even when it had won. How long did she have before she’d be unable to perform the one task she needed to? Two weeks? Her mother had died of cancer. She had refused chemo, being stage four when diagnosed, and had said there was no point having a few more months of shitty life – better to go faster, the way nature intended.
But this wasn’t nature. She’d been bathed in man-made radiation. Perhaps Sakuro could cure her. He wouldn’t get the chance. He didn’t understand. She had to kill Salamander, and no one else was prepared to do what it took to get it done. And … it was her fault. Bransk had told her. Her father had told her. Kill Salamander when you have the chance. As soon as he’s in your sights. She’d had that chance, had her weapon trained on him. She’d stopped Bransk from pulling the trigger on Salamander back inside Chernobyl’s hot zone, and he, her father and Katya had paid the price. She held up her right hand, the one that hadn’t pulled the trigger, and again considered what was going on inside her.
She deserved this.
She got up, and took a shower in the flat’s tiny bathroom, running it cold. Jake stole into her mind. She’d been trying not to think of him, for two reasons. The first was that he was either dead or being tortured. She didn’t have a clue where he was, and she’d dragged him into this. As the chill water rained down her back, she leaned forward and gently banged her head against the tiles. She wanted to punch them, but last time she’d done that her hand had been out of action for days. Jin Fe was out buying food. Nadia was alone. She let the feeling build inside her, and then let out a growl that turned into a roar and ended in an angst-fuelled, this-isn’t-fucking-fair scream, and finally punched the wall anyway, cracking a tile and grazing her big knuckle. She grew quiet, her head against the ceramic. She began to shiver.
Switching off the shower, she towelled off brusquely, then looked at herself in the mirror, and spoke to the reflection of her body as if it wasn’t hers, because in a way it wasn’t anymore; it was at war with her, killing her.
‘Once Salamander’s dead, you can have me. Until then, you’d better deliver.’
The lift arrived outside. She pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, and snatched up the Glock the Chef had left her. The outer door hinges creaked open, a key slid into the slot, the tumblers did their trick, and the door flung wide. The Chef entered carrying a small grey rucksack. He locked the door. She put the gun down.
‘Is there a plan?’ she asked.
He stared a moment at her red knuckle. ‘Tonight, you and I go to meet Blue Fan. Inside their triad HQ. I have challenged her through another clan. If I win, she will tell us Salamander’s location.’
She remembered her training well. A plan that assumed everything would go well was at best half a plan. She didn’t need to spell it out. It was the Chef who had taught her. But he said no more.
‘Maybe we need to re-think this.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We need to make sure it works.’
Just like her father: if you can’t make the right choice, make the choice right. ‘Okay, then you need to tell me more.’
Jin Fe returned with more than food. She held a brightly coloured plastic bag out towards Nadia. ‘Makeover time,’ she said, grinning. ‘Your face is all over the internet. And you still have bruising on your cheek. You are a kind of celebrity now, and all celebrities use make-up.’
Nadia couldn’t tell yet when Jin Fe was being funny, but she gave her the benefit of the doubt, and peered into the plastic bag while Jin Fe disappeared into the kitchen with a cloth sack full of vegetables. Nadia upended the bag, disgorging the contents onto the table. A black-haired wig done in a bob, the way many Chinese women wore their hair, and various make-up articles, most of which she had no idea about, as she never wore any. And heels.
Dammit, she hated heels.
‘Good,’ the Chef said.
‘It’ll be dark when we leave, I don’t need all this—’
He stopped her with a look.
‘Not the heels,’ Nadia said, defiant. She fished out a transparent casing with what looked like strips of skin. ‘What’s this?’
Jin Fe came out from the kitchen, saw what Nadia was holding, and beamed. ‘I’m going to make you look Chinese.’
Nadia sighed. ‘How do you know how to use all this stuff?’
Jin Fe shrugged. ‘Some Western men want to dress up as Chinese women. That was my speciality. That and—’
The Chef muttered something in Cantonese, and Jin Fe stopped mid-sentence. She took a breath. ‘We need to start. It takes time for the skin colour to fix.’
Nadia capitulated. It made sense. But for her, it was going to be something approaching torture.
Darkness fell quickly, and Nadia and the Chef descended to street level, then jumped aboard one of the cranky old double-decker trams, and sat upstairs. Hong Kong rattled past: restaurants, laundries, pharmacies, young men playing basketball in floodlit courts jammed in between impossibly tall skyscrapers, many of which were encrusted with flimsy-looking bamboo scaffolding, a wooden spider’s web ascending fifty floors or higher. Eventually they approached Hong Kong harbour and the Convention Centre, its curved roof reminding her of a whale's back.
Her scalp itched again, and she felt damp patches around the sim-skin fattening her cheeks and stretching back her eyes. She’d taken a good look at herself before heading out. Her sister Katya would have laughed her ass off. Never mind. She and the Chef weaved in and out of the throng shuffling across the footbridge spanning rivers of cars. Finally, they sauntered down the long wooden ramp to the Star Ferry’s berth. No one – including two policemen scanning the crowd – gave her a second glance. Faces like hers were everywhere.
Nice job, Jin Fe.
They queued at the barrier, then trooped across the sea-sawing gangway to board the ferry, a waterborne version of the tram, even the same shade of jungle green. Both ran night and day, tirelessly, and – usually – safely. Although the strip of choppy water between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon was short, it wasn’t friendly, and was rumoured to be full of sharks.
Once on Kowloon they walked to Nathan Road, heading away from the waterside where crowds had gathered for the Friday night lights show, when the skyscrapers on Hong Kong island strutted their stuff, vying for applause, the banks giving something back to the islanders who worked so hard to make them richer. Nadia paused a moment and picked out her favourite, a building similar in shape to the Empire State in New York, its lights shimmering hypnotically up and down in soothing shades, from burgundy to purple, to electric blue, to—
The Chef tapped her arm. To business. They walked another five blocks then reached the top of the sort of dark alley that would make a hardened criminal click the safety off his pistol. Waste bins, a skinny alley cat, a couple of punkish adolescents hanging out waiting for trouble to cross their paths, the ubiquitous whirring of aircon fans jutting out above window ledges, and the smell of piss that drew her eye to a small liquid trail leading back to the adolescents. The type of alley any sane tourist would hurry past. The Chef turned straight in. She followed.
The two young men snarled something, presumably gutter Cantonese. The Chef ignored them. The click-click of flick-knives coming out to play was quickly followed by two grunts, as the Chef’s hands whipped out and struck one then the other on their carotids. She knew the move. A glancing blow to the carotid, not very hard, but the sudden interruption in blood-flow to the brain triggered a temporary shutdown. The two boys slid to the ground in their own piss. They’d come to in less than a minute, and then they’d have to go find a laundry that was still open for business, not a problem here.
Dim light leaked from a rickety wooden doorway. Dim because a man was standing there, and unlike the alley cat, he was huge, almost filling the frame. He didn’t have a weapon as far as she could tell, but he had tattoos. As they drew closer, she saw that every speck of exposed skin was tattooed. Even around the eyes, which must have been painful. Dragons and snakes seemed to be the main motif. The Chef said something to him in Cantonese, and the man replied with what had to be a swear word, the only word she could translate being ‘off’. The doorman was three times the size of the Chef. Which didn’t matter. The Chef’s move was so fast that Nadia couldn’t swear it had actually happened, except for the result. The big man made to speak, then he clutched at his enormous throat, his eyes rolling upwards, and he toppled backwards like a felled oak.
The Chef motioned for her to follow as he walked over the man. She trod lightly, not wishing to add insult to injury. Why didn’t triads use passwords to gain entry to secret meetings, like civilised people? Maybe they were testing the Chef, seeing if it was worth Blue Fan dusting off her blades. And then she wondered. Why weren’t they testing her? Maybe because the Chef was making sure he did everything, keeping them focused on him. Everything he did was about strategy.
They proceeded down a corridor with bare planks and flaking whitewashed walls, then descended an iron spiral staircase. Nadia hesitated. There was no safe way to go down one. If someone below wanted to shoot you in the leg or the head, there was absolutely nothing you could do about it. But the Chef went ahead, so she followed. At the bottom was a large room lit by candles in jars, marking out a wide ring on the dusty floor. The jars were red, lending an eerie glow to the room, its sides lost in darkness. She had no idea how big it was, or how many people might be lurking in the shadows. She listened, to hear breathing, clothes rustling, the shifting of weight from one foot to another. There were quite a few people hiding in the shadows. Maybe armed, maybe not. Enough of them that they wouldn’t need to be.
She stood behind the Chef, keeping up the charade. No one searched her. She had nine bullets in the Glock. Not nearly enough. And from what she knew of triads, trying to take someone hostage, such as Blue Fan, in order to get out of there alive, would only be seen as an opportunity by whoever was next in line for leadership. Still, she would use the pistol if she had to.
A man stepped forward, very old. Make that resurrected. He studied the Chef, then walked in front of Nadia. He had penetrating, teal-coloured eyes, the only parts of him that looked as if they had a right to be alive. He took both her wrists in his waxy fingers, and felt her pulse, or rather the Chinese version of it, with his forefingers on her wrist crease, and two more fingers placed slightly along her forearm. His fingers palpated up and down, as if riffing on a guitar’s fretboard. One of his fingers dug in hard, pushing through the sinews almost to the bone. She winced, and he let go. He cast her a grave look before turning away.
Blue Fan walked into the light, wearing a black silk outfit with a Chinese collar, a green dragon emblazoned across her chest. She stepped lightly around the ring, treading softly like the Chef – no footprints in the dust.
‘There is a matter we must attend to first,’ she said, her English good, her voice steel, like her daggers. She ignored the Chef. But then she had probably been watching him via a camera outside to see how he performed.
Nadia heard scuffling, a muffled voice. A handsome, thirty-something man with shoulder-length black hair and a miniscule goatee was dragged in by two triad heavies who made the doorman look underfed. Which meant there had to be another entrance, because these two wouldn’t fit through the one Nadia had taken. She noticed the man’s feet, and swallowed. They were broken. As they dragged him forward, his legs twisted beneath him. His knees had been shattered, too. No way he could stand. His face was locked in a grimace. She was surprised he was conscious. The two heavies stopped at the edge of the circle, holding him upright in front of Blue Fan.
‘Chao Ling,’ Blue Fan said, her voice raised so that all could hear, especially those in the shadows. ‘You have contravened one of our sacred oaths.’
Nadia knew about the triad oaths. Thirty-six was the usual number. In order to become a triad initiate – a Blue Lantern – you had to recite them flawlessly, and then uphold them. Breaking any of them was punishable by death. Only the form of death varied, and then not by much.
‘Speak the oath you have violated,’ Blue Fan instructed.
Chao glowered. ‘I did nothing wrong. I fell in love with—’
Blue Fan’s raised voice quashed his. ‘SPEAK THE OATH!’
Chao tried to raise himself a little taller, as best he could. ‘I must not commit adultery with the wives and concubines of my sworn brothers.’
‘And the punishment is?’
‘Death by myriads of daggers.’
The old man watched Blue Fan carefully, and Nadia got it. He was the Judge. But he wasn’t here for this poor wretch and his crime of passion – he was judging Blue Fan and her leadership, and Blue Fan knew it.
‘I want this lesson to be heeded by others,’ Blue Fan said, addressing the shadows. ‘And not only by the fear of death.’ She turned to face Chao. ‘You say you loved her.’
Chao hesitated, then nodded, his bloodshot eyes listless, shivering with pain, looking forward to the end.
Blue Fan nodded to the two heavies, who shoved the wretch into the ring, where he landed with a grunt. Nadia felt her guts twist. She wasn’t one for theatre. Just kill him and get it over with.
The man propped himself up on his arms. There was still some defiance in him. Good for you. Not that she necessarily approved of adultery, but in her book it wasn’t a capital offence.
Blue Fan made a hand sign, and something was hurled from the darkness. It thudded into the circle and rolled next to the man. Nadia felt sick. The man wailed, and tears fell from his face onto the severed head of his dead lover, as he crumpled, and finally broke.
There was a swishing sound, and a dagger flew from the darkness into his leg. He didn’t seem to notice as he cradled the bloody head of the woman he’d loved, sobbing, muttering pointless words to her, stroking her blackened lips. Another dagger struck his arm. Another, and another. He collapsed, his head level with his lover’s, beside himself with grief.
Blue Fan spoke to the shadows. ‘We are Green Dragon triad. We are wise, and the wise learn from others’ mistakes.’
In a single blurred movement, a flash of silver left her hand and stilled Chao Ling forever. Nadia heard murmuring in the shadows. Blue Fan said something, quietly, and three men carried the dead lovers away. She turned to the Chef.
‘Why have you challenged me?’
He replied matter-of-fact, no tension in his voice, as if someone had asked the time of day. ‘We need to know the whereabouts of your grandfather.’
She turned to the Judge. ‘Why is he allowed to challenge me?’
The faintest of smiles stretched the ancient’s parched lips. ‘You had the same teacher. This one should be a worthy opponent.’
Nadia detected a slight tightening of Blue Fan’s lips. The Judge hadn’t told her who she’d be fighting. Maybe that was protocol. Or maybe he wanted to put her off-balance. And maybe, just maybe, he wanted her to fail.
Blue Fan stood close to the Chef in a face-off, the way boxers do right before a fight. Her eyes obsidian, his emerald green. Neither of them blinked.
‘Knives,’ she said.
No reaction from the Chef. Not outwardly. But when they broke off their stare contest he glanced at Nadia, just a momentary look, and she knew he was prepared to lose. It drained her. She’d always believed the Chef unbeatable.
Blue Fan stepped into the ring. The Chef took off his jacket, then his shirt. Nadia definitely heard breathing this time – of the inward kind – as those in the shadows saw his torso. It wasn’t the lean muscles, nor the sinews that seemed to have a mind of their own, like snakes beneath his skin. Nor were there any tattoos. It was the scars. Long and deep, each one full of vicious intent, yet all those who had signed his body, whether using blades or bullets, were dead by his hand. She watched Blue Fan, and as the Chef bent forward to retrieve a long-bladed commando knife from his bag, Blue Fan’s eyes toured the sculpted man before her. All of Blue Fan’s psychological tactics, her show of skill, power and bravado, blinked before this man who had visibly been to hell and back.
He stepped into the ring amidst complete silence. No one breathed, including Nadia.
The Chef had taught her knife-fighting years earlier. He’d said there were two strategies. One was direct frontal attack – find an opening or create one with a feint, strike a major organ and then follow-up with the kill, a heart strike or throat slash. The second strategy was attrition. Small cuts to the extremities, or a surgical swipe at the eyes or forehead, to progressively weaken the opponent until the kill became inevitable, a mercy even. All the rest, the gymnastics and acrobatics you saw in films, was bullshit. And as for throwing the knife at your opponent …
They faced each other, each with the hilt of the knife in their right fist, blade pointing diagonally downwards. They bowed a few centimetres. As they straightened, men with spears trooped out from the shadows and surrounded the ring, forcing Nadia back. The ring was fenced in by steel blades. No backing down. Blood would be spilt. Only one of them was going to leave the ring still breathing.
Nadia suddenly felt several blades prod her neck, making her stretch upwards, almost on tiptoe. A hand reached into her pocket, and her jacket became exactly one Glock lighter. The blades remained around her throat. A couple of the men in front of her parted just enough so she could watch.
The Chef and Blue Fan stood tall, then they both dropped into a loose boxer’s stance, and began circling. They moved so smoothly you could have placed a cup of tea on both their heads – not a drop would have been spilled. Blue Fan’s hands moved in fluid patterns: arcs, figures of eight. Almost hypnotic. The Chef’s hands stayed in front as he watched his opponent. Nadia knew he wasn’t ignoring the hands. Instead he was using peripheral vision to map them, to detect the pattern, or the instant an attack formed.
And then Blue Fan’s hands stilled. She moved towards him fast, like a fencer on the attack, her arm straight, her knife like the end of a spear. The Chef dropped into an impossibly low crouch as his knife scythed in a savage upward slash that should have found her wrist, but instead whished through empty air. Her foot cannoned forward to where his head had been a split-second earlier, but he had already rolled to the right and sprung back up. Yet as they resumed their circling, Nadia noticed blood dripping from his left forearm. His face remained dispassionate, as did hers. But as the fighting continued, it was clear which strategy Blue Fan had selected.
The Chef did land one strike, across Blue Fan’s thigh. A flesh-wound, a token gesture in the grand scheme of things, but still, Nadia wanted to cheer. He’d once told her that an assassin must be a jack-of-all-trades, and so was at an obvious disadvantage when confronting an expert who’d spent their whole life training on one weapon.
The Chef was limping. A gash on his left cheek, just below his eye, dripped constantly. Blood trickled from the back of his calf. The left arm had major damage; Blue Fan had severed a tendon near the shoulder. That arm was now nothing more than dead weight, useless and upsetting his balance. His breathing was laboured due to blood loss, and his parries were noticeably slower. His eyes remained sharp, though. The cobra was still there.
Blue Fan could have ended it several times, that much was clear to everyone, but she chose not to. As with the adulterer, killing the Chef wasn’t enough. She wanted to break him first. Nadia couldn’t tell if Blue Fan chose this strategy because she enjoyed it, or because it was the only way to maintain her status in a male-dominated triad.
A commotion erupted behind Nadia, footfalls on the metal staircase. She couldn’t turn around, but there were voices. A number of the men in front of her glanced back to see who dared enter at such a time, and then their faces showed awe as they whispered a name Nadia didn’t recognise.
Blue Fan heard the name too, and for the first time her face showed concern. In that moment she switched strategies: her entire body tense for the final thrust. Nadia held her breath.
‘Tihng dai!’
The voice was old, yet saturated with authority. The blades at Nadia’s neck receded, as the men parted to allow a short, fat man, assisted by two younger men, to approach the circle. He reminded her of statues she’d seen of a happy Chinese monk, except he didn’t look happy.
Blue Fan clearly knew who it was, but didn’t take her eyes off the Chef until the new arrival kicked over two of the candles, breaking the circle. The spears retracted, and Nadia rubbed her throat.
The Chef stood up, held his knife out in front of him, the blade in his open palm, then let it pirouette to the floor, where it stuck in the ground, blade-first.
Blue Fan turned to the newcomer. ‘You have no right to do this!’
Nadia watched the Judge. Apparently, he held the same opinion.
The old man waved a hand dismissively. ‘Your opponent joined the Green Dragon triad last night. I asked him to challenge you, to test you. But he has broken no oath. You have proven yourself. There is no need to shed blood.’
Blue Fan spun around to the Chef. ‘Did you join –’
The old man raised his voice. ‘Are you doubting the word of your Sifu, Blue Fan?’
All eyes were suddenly on her. She thrust out her knife arm as the Chef had done, and let her blade fall. It, too stuck into the ground. ‘Of course not, Sifu,’ she said, with the tiniest of bows. She turned to the Judge. ‘What now?’
But it was her Sifu, her master, who answered. ‘We must talk. The five of us.’ He nodded to the Chef and then the Judge, and then with his left hand, without looking, he pointed directly at Nadia.
Lights came on, making Nadia squint, and she saw the room in its entirety, not as big as she’d thought, men crowded three-deep at the walls, five darkened corridors leading elsewhere. A warren. The men quickly siphoned out, leaving the five of them alone.
‘We need a moment,’ Nadia said, ‘to clean up.’
The Judge pointed to a doorway. Nadia went to help the Chef, but he preferred to walk on his own. Passing Blue Fan, he spoke softly. ‘Next time, hand-to-hand.’
She didn’t react.
Only when Nadia had closed the bathroom door behind them, did the Chef stagger and nearly collapse, at last accepting Nadia’s support. She washed his wounds. The cabinet was stacked with bandages and ointments. Evidently the training area was in regular use with live weapons. As she stemmed the blood flow, he laid his head back against the cheap pink tiles.
‘I am sorry you have to see me like this,’ he said.
She jerked the bandage tight around his arm and tied a knot. He didn’t wince. ‘You taught me never to say stupid things,’ she said.
He didn’t answer, but the corners of his mouth twitched upwards a fraction.
‘Did you really join Blue Fan’s triad last night?’
He shook his head.
So, the Sifu had lied. But why? What was really going on here? But there was no time.
‘Ready?’ she asked.
‘Always, Nadia.’
That was more like it.