Dragon and the Dove (21 page)

They stuffed him into a waiting car, which
pulled away from the curb with a squeal of tires almost before the
last man’s foot had left the sidewalk. The white sedan disappeared
over the hill while Jessica was still fumbling with her keys. She
didn’t stop to think about what she was doing. She just
reacted.

Tearing off with her own tires squealing,
her compact caught some air on the first downslope, enough to scare
the hell out of her and make her quickly reevaluate her priorities.
She couldn’t save Cooper if she totaled her car, and saving Cooper
was her single, compelling priority. She wouldn’t let him be hurt,
not while there was a breath left in her body. The desperation she
felt was palpable.

She held her car to the road, and when she
spotted the white sedan up ahead of her, she slowed to a reasonable
distance. She didn’t have to follow the car for long. Three turns
brought them into the heart of Chinatown, and two more blocks
brought them to the herb shop on Grant Street. Any doubts she’d had
about who had abducted Cooper dissipated.

After Baolian’s photograph had come in, the
herb shop had taken a backseat to other details. Now, Jessica would
have given anything to have continued her research into it. She
wished John Liu had come down and checked the layout of the store.
She wished she had a car phone to call the San Francisco Police
Department and a big brother or two.

She wished she could find a parking space.
The white sedan had gotten away with double parking until its
passengers were unloaded. While she was still inching along,
praying for a miracle, it cruised off into the night.

Chinatown was alive with neon and exotic
smells, and crowds of people searching out a bargain and a meal.
All of them were in her way, frustrating her effort to see Cooper
and the men dragging him down the street and into the alley running
next to the herb shop. When she lost sight of him for more than
fifteen seconds, she muttered a foul curse and threw the compact
into its parking gear in the middle of the street. A horn honked
behind her. She ignored it, concentrating her efforts on pulling
her driver’s license out of her wallet and jamming it into the clip
on the driver’s-side sun visor. Signorelli was
listed as her middle name, making
her license
a calling card guaranteed to get
someone’s attention down at headquarters.

She checked three of her doors to be sure
they were locked before she pocketed her .357
in her suit coat. Lights
blinked and glowed in an abstract pattern of red-and-gold
characters reflected in her windshield and on the hood of her car.
Next to the Chinese characters the words were lit in blue and
written in pinyin and English: ZHONGYI—CHINESE MEDICINE.

With her purse slung over her shoulder, she
unsnapped her ring of keys from the one in the ignition, got out,
and locked the driver’s-side door with the car still running
. More honking greeted her
traffic-jam stunt. She only hoped one of the irate drivers called
the cops.

* * *

Cooper’s arms were bound behind him and his
legs had turned to rubber. Every time he tried to stand up or catch
up, they refused to cooperate. He was having a hell of a time
focusing
, too, and he knew his condition had a
lot to do with a recent head wound. Very recent, like less than an
hour old. Ditto for the nausea. Head wounds always made him
nauseous.

He’d been royally shanghaied, and there
wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it except try to keep himself
from getting killed. A niggling in his brain told him the survival
trick was going to be harder to pull off than it had ever been
before. He knew who had him, and he knew his luck had run out.

The smells on the street told him they were
in Chinatown. A minute later the smells told him they were in a
Chinatown alley. They were as distinct and unpleasant as those in
any downtown alley, but with a fragrant backdrop of dim sum and
moxibustion herbs sneaking through the rot and the garbage.

It took a few more minutes and the
enveloping darkness of a narrow stairwell filled with a thousand
scents of dried plants and the muskier smell of desiccated animal
parts before he made the connection with the Grant Street herb
shop.

Jessie had incredible instincts, he realized
with more than a bit of admiration and awe. She’d been right about
the shop and she’d been right about Cao Bo, and the two of them
together were how she would finally be the death of him. Without
her unerring intuition to guide him, he would have wandered through
a labyrinth of possibilities without ever getting this close to
getting himself killed.

He’d known a woman could succeed where a
hundred men had failed. He’d counted on a woman being the key,
staked his reputation and his last dime on a woman—and she’d been
worth every penny, though the ironic relationship between her
success and his demise wasn’t lost on him.

The muted light at the bottom of the stairs
spread and grew nominally brighter as they descended, until they
reached the bottom and a room barred like a cell door. Inside, a
wizened old man sat on a pile of shabby pillows, drawing on a pipe
and watching the world through opium-glazed eyes. His queue was
unbraided in places, with lank strands of gray hair sticking out at
odd angles like a broken spiderweb against his black tunic. A pot
of tea steamed on a low table next to the pillows.

The room was no bigger than six feet by six
feet, paneled in teak and set with tarnished brass like the
captain’s quarters of an
ill-kept
ship, but Cooper could have imagined worse places to be
incarcerated.

He was pushed down next to the old man, who
gave him a toothless grin and blew smoke in his face. He tried to
turn away, but there was no escaping the sickly-sweet smell.

Three of the guards came into the room and
began stripping off their shirts while the fourth man disappeared
back up the stairs. There were hooks along one wall, each holding a
black tunic with a red insignia on the shoulder. Crates were
stacked haphazardly against two of the other walls, along with
various bolts of cloth and a few cases of Chinese and German
beer.

The guards made quick work of changing into
the tunics. No motions were wasted. They were all lean and muscled,
hardened fighting men. Red headbands with a Chinese character
brushstroked across the front were tied on last, completing their
uniforms.

Their transformation did plenty to increase
Cooper’s apprehensions. He hadn’t been kidnapped by just any old
pirates. Fang Baolian’s private honor guard had been sent to
capture him.

The man Cooper guessed was in charge,
because of the double insignia on his sleeve, spoke in Mandarin to
the others, and the men laughed. The old man kept blowing smoke in
his face, irritating him and adding to his lethargy at the same
time, while the guards all had a beer and chattered much too
quickly for him to follow the conversation.

Certain words did register on his
pain-fogged brain. None of them eased his growing sense of
doom.

One word was “ransom,” which could have had
a heartening effect, but the sum mentioned was beyond the resources
of anyone who might care enough to pony up the price. It was a
price calculated to aggrandize him, giving great honor to his
captor, but it also ensured his inevitable death and inevitable
loss of face when no one paid. In short, ransom was a lose-lose
proposition for him.

The next few words he understood dealt
mainly with different methods of killing, some so gruesome as to
make him wish he was already dead. Closing his eyes for a moment,
he rested his head on a bolt of silk and tried to force some
clarity into his jumbled thoughts. The effort was almost beyond the
stupor he was beginning to feel, though the old man’s opium hadn’t
done enough damage to ease the pain lancing through him from the
base of his skull to the small of his back, places where he’d been
kicked, chopped, and punched. His lungs hurt with the effort to
draw air, and when he lifted his lashes, he thought he might never
get his eyes to focus, or his body to stop trembling—trembling like
a leaf in a gale, he realized with a surge of panic. He was shaking
from head to foot, or rather he was being shook.

He instinctively braced himself between the
wall behind him and the case of beer beside him, but it was like
trying to brace a cooked noodle. His body wouldn’t cooperate with
what little rationality he had left to work with. A distant
rumbling, resonating as if it came from deep within the earth, grew
in sound and power.

Earthquake
.

And the big one, if Cooper knew anything
about the rattling and rolling of good old Mother Nature. The other
men in the room seemed remarkably unconcerned with the natural
disaster preparing to engulf them. Then the shaking stopped with a
loud thump.

One of the walls slid to the side, revealing
a grate that the leader released and pushed up out of the way. The
room was actually a freight elevator, and they’d just gone down,
down past any possible sort of building basement. They were at the
core of the Earth.

Cooper’s mouth tightened at the sight of the
abyss awaiting him outside the teak room. For a minute he wondered
if he was still in San Francisco, or if he’d passed out somewhere
between Powell Street and the airport and had been taken someplace
far away.

An endless array of tunnels snaked out from
the elevator, their differing directions marked only by faint
smudges of light in the far-reaching darkness. If this was
Chinatown, he was at the nerve center. If Fang Baolian had come for
her daughter, she was waiting for him here.

The men pushed him forward into the far-left
opening. He went without a struggle, because there was no way for
him to fight and win—and because he was suddenly very curious about
what he would find at the other end of the tunnel.

Jessica stepped into the shop and into
another world. Hundreds, if not thousands, of clay and glass jars
lined shelf after dusty shelf in the store. The cases holding the
shelves were tall and narrow, stacked together with barely enough
room between for a person to squeeze through. The only open space
in the room was the slightly wider alley leading from the front
door to the back counter, where an elaborate brass-and-ivory abacus
lay next to an ancient cash register. Long strings of glass beads
covered two doorways behind the counter.

Adjusting her purse strap on her shoulder to
hold the bag closer to her body, Jessica walked forward slowly,
careful not to nudge or bump anything. Her gaze drifted over the
many jars, noting the different stoppers of cork and rags, and
the occasional metal screw lid. Each jar had two
labels, both neatly lettered, the first in Chinese characters and
the other an English translation.

Some of the translations inside one locked
case gave her a moment’s pause and made her stomach lurch. She’d
never thought of dried tiger penis as a medicinal ingredient.
Never. Truth be told, she’d never thought of tiger penis at all,
let alone dried and packaged for sale.

A quick perusal of the rest of the shelf
indicated that she’d found the aphrodisiac section. There were any
number of antlers and horns stacked on the shelves, most of them
showing some wear where they’d been ground down. She refrained from
reading the labels on the more disreputable, animal-part-looking
packages, having already discerned what was in them and not
actually caring to compare sizes and shapes.

Another case had a display of acupuncture
needles, and behind the counter were shelves of books, all old
looking, some bound in leather, some rolls of parchment tied with
silk cords. A delicate scale for weights and measures sat next to
the register, and beside the scale was a small box of papers.

There was no sign of human habitation, but
Jessica knew this had to be the place where they’d brought Cooper.
By lifting a hinged section of the counter, she let herself get
back by the books and the two doors. Her decision of which door to
take was a toss-up, until she heard the sound of an even and steady
gait coming from the door on the left. Without hesitating, she took
the door on the right.

* * *

Cooper had lost track of how many tunnel
off-shoots they’d passed, though he’d done his damnedest to
remember. Any chance he had of getting out alive would require
being able to negotiate the maze of pathways carved out of earth
and stone, pathways made even more labyrinthine by the multiple
intersections with the city’s electrical and sewer conduits.

He’d never seen anything like it. He’d never
smelled anything like it.

He couldn’t imagine that Fang Baolian,
Empress of the South China Sea and Dragon Whore Supreme of the
aforementioned piece of watery real estate, would leave her
luxurious phantom ship to live in a god-rotting hole in the ground.
He found it even more difficult to imagine the meticulous Chow
Sheng mincing his way down these tunnels to do the dragon whore’s
bidding, his silk robes dragging in putrid water and his soft kid
slippers sliding through scum.

Rats, lots of rats, scurried hither and yon,
squeaking and scuffling. But the rats didn’t bother him nearly as
much as the indefinable creatures he heard slapping and slithering
around in the fetid pools. Blind fish came to mind, yet the rising
hairs on the back of his neck insisted on telling him that what he
was hearing wasn’t fish, but something more reptilian, something
with bigger teeth, maybe something with coils and fangs and slimy
skin, something deformed from its aboveground origins.

In among the slapping and the slithering, if
he listened carefully, he could hear an occasional low, plaintive
hiss, as if the creatures were in pain, or hungry.

His skin was crawling by the time they came
to the end of a tunnel that did not branch off into another four
directions. A door built like an air lock was set into stone, the
only light being the red glow of an electronic keypad.