Gray and Kowalski started to follow, but Hwan Pak tried to interfere, begging for them to take him with them. Kowalski punched out with a fist, as if swatting at a fly. Bone crunched, and Pak flew backward, landing on his backside, blood pouring from his nose.
A moment later, Gray stood next to Seichan by the third-floor door. Kowalski landed heavily behind them.
“Sounds clear out there,” Seichan said, her ear to the door. “But we’ll have to move fast. That ruse won’t last long.”
“We need a way out of this war zone,” Gray warned. “But all the exits from the hotel will be guarded.”
“I may know a way.”
Seichan opened the door, stuck her head out, then bolted into the hallway.
“So how about telling us,” Kowalski groused as he and Gray followed.
Seichan ran for the fire stairs and pounded through the door—only to be faced with a gunman running down from above, leaping steps.
Seichan ducked and hit him low, flipping the assailant over her back.
Gray, a few steps behind, spun on one toe and snap-kicked out with his other leg, catching the flying man in the jaw, cracking his head back. He landed in a crumpled pile.
“Remind me never to get on your bad sides,” Kowalski said.
Gray relieved the Triad member of his weapon, an AK-47 assault rifle. A search quickly revealed a holstered Chinese army Red Star pistol. He tossed the handgun to Kowalski.
“It’s Christmas already?” he mumbled, efficiently checking it over.
“Let’s go!” Seichan urged, poised at the steps leading down, checking the stairwell below.
Gray joined her with the rifle, and they hurried together down the steps, leaping from landing to landing. The firefight above faded slightly. But when they reached the first floor, the exit door began to swing open ahead of them. Whether it was someone seeking refuge or new reinforcements, Gray didn’t care. He fired a spat of rounds, peppering the door.
It quickly closed.
A pistol cracked behind him as Kowalski angled a shot up the stairwell, discouraging anyone from following.
Seichan ignored the first-floor door and continued down toward the basement level. From Gray’s study of the Lisboa, he knew an extensive shopping market tunneled beneath the casino floor. The place was also notorious for its parade of prostitutes, earning the level its nickname, Hooker Mall.
Seichan reached the basement door and cracked it open enough to peek through. It was eerily quiet out there compared to the ruckus above.
She spoke softly. “As I thought, all the shops are barricaded closed.”
Likely the owners had locked down their gates as the firefight began, battening down their hatches.
Gray began to get an inkling of Seichan’s plan. While the public entrances were surely under armed guard, no one was likely to be watching the market’s warehouse ramps and doors. Like Seichan, the Triads knew the shops would bottle themselves up to protect their wares from looting.
So how did she expect—?
Seichan wiggled out of her sweater vest and tossed it aside. She then ripped open her silk blouse, popping buttons across the floor, exposing a black bra, revealing the flat curve of her stomach. She pulled a tail of her shirt out of her jeans and disheveled her hair.
“How do I look?” she asked.
Gray was speechless—and for once, so was Kowalski.
She rolled her eyes at them, turned, and slipped out the door. “Hang back until I get someone to unlock a security gate.”
Gray took her place at the door.
Kowalski clapped him on the shoulder. “You are one lucky bastard, Pierce.”
He wasn’t about to argue.
2:14 A.M.
Ju-long Delgado cursed his bad luck.
He stood before the plasma screen in his office, staring at the smoking hole blasted through the floor of the VIP room. He wanted to blame such misfortunes on the comet in the sky, but he was not a clinger to such superstitions. He knew the true source of his grief.
He had simply underestimated his quarry.
That would not happen twice.
A few moments ago, he had watched the larger of the two men detonate the explosive device—then he could only stand idly by as the trio made their escape, like rats down a hole.
The room’s only remaining occupant huddled in a corner.
Dr. Hwan Pak.
As he stared at the North Korean scientist, Ju-long tapped a finger on the edge of the Portuguese naval chest under the television, running various scenarios through his head, weighing each option for its best advantage.
He settled upon one course.
Earlier, Ju-long had tried to raise Tomaz at the Lisboa, to warn of their targets’ pending flight, but he had failed to reach anyone. He pictured the firefight being waged across the floors of the casino. It was a war being fought at his own behest, so he could not fault that it demanded Tomaz’s full attention at the moment.
So be it.
He pressed a button on his phone. As it was answered, he passed on a terse order. “Bring my car around.”
As he waited, someone knocked softly on his door. He turned to see it open, and a small figure slipped inside wearing a short silk robe and slippers. She was a vision in tanned skin, draped with a flow of honey-colored hair. As she crossed toward him, she cradled her swollen belly with one hand.
“Natalia, my sweet, you should be in bed.”
“Your son won’t let me,” she said with a tender smile, her eyes glancing invitingly toward him. “Perhaps if his father were lying beside me . . .”
“How I wish I could, but first I must attend to some business.”
She pouted.
He crossed to her, dropped to his knees, and kissed her belly where his son slumbered. “I’ll be back soon,” he promised them both, adding a kiss to her cheek as he ushered her out.
He truly wished he could join her—but at his father’s knee, he had learned that whether in war or business, sometimes one simply had to get one’s hands dirty.
2:16 A.M.
Seichan sensed the walls closing in on her.
The longer they remained trapped inside Casino Lisboa, the slimmer were their chances of escaping.
She drew upon that desperation as she rushed from the stairwell door and out into the open of the basement shopping mall. Feigning a slight limp, she put on a great show of distress, pretending to be one of the mall’s prostitutes caught amid the firefight.
She spun around in a circle, pulling at her hair, crying for help in Cantonese. Tears streamed down her face as she ran from one gate to another, pounding to be let inside, for someone to rescue her.
As with many such places, she understood there was an unspoken relationship between the storeowners and the prostitutes who prowled this lower level, defined by the mutually beneficial flow of commerce.
The shops drew prospective clients, while the prostitutes lured potential shoppers.
The great circle of life.
She counted on that relationship extending to the two sides protecting each other. When she reached a farmers’ market, she sank to her knees against its steel fence. She rocked and moaned, looking lost and frightened.
As she had hoped, her plaintive cries finally drew someone out of hiding. A tiny white-haired man with a dirty apron came timidly to the gate. He made a motion to shoo her away, scolding her.
Instead, she clung to his gate, hanging from it in an operatic display of despair and fear, pleading with him.
Realizing she wasn’t going to leave, he dropped to a knee. He searched over her shoulder to make sure she was alone, and only then did he risk unlocking the gate.
As soon as he began to lift the steel fence, Seichan secretly motioned to Gray and Kowalski.
The stairwell door creaked open behind her, accompanied by the pounding of boots coming toward her.
The proprietor’s eyes grew huge. He tried to push the gate back down. Before he could, Seichan skir
ted under it and elbowed him back with one arm and yanked the fence higher with the other.
Gray ran up and skidded on his knees under the gate.
Kowalski barrel-rolled after him, slamming into a stand of oranges.
Gray pointed his rifle at the man.
“Lock it,” Seichan ordered, straightening her back and shedding her act like a snakeskin.
The storeowner obeyed in a rush, resecuring his gate.
“Tell him we mean him no harm,” Gray said.
Seichan translated, but from the cold look in her eyes and her stony countenance, he did not seem soothed. She questioned him briefly, then turned to Gray.
“The warehouse exit is back this way,” she said and led them in that direction.
Moving deeper into the market, they passed along a long counter supporting boxes of locally grown fruits and vegetables. On the other side, rows of watery tanks held live fish, turtles, frogs, and shellfish.
Upon reaching the far side, she found a concrete ramp headed up, ending at a large roll-up door used by delivery trucks. A smaller service entrance beckoned to the left.
Glad to be rid of them, the proprietor keyed the side door open and angrily waved them out into the night.
Gray led the way with his rifle.
Seichan followed, pushing into a narrow service alley.
Sirens echoed from all directions as emergency vehicles closed in on the Lisboa, but the press of the festival’s crowds around Nam Van Lake and its surrounding streets continued to stymie a fast response.
In fact, out here, most of the drunken revelers seemed unaware of the neighboring turf war. Fireworks rang out from the crowd around the lake, exploding over the waters, reflecting among the thousands of candlelit lanterns floating on the lake. Closer at hand, the neighboring Wynn casino danced with flumes of water, rising from an acre-sized fountain, the jets set to the tunes of the Beatles.
“What now?” Kowalski asked, having to yell somewhat.
“We need a fast way out of here,” Gray said, heading down the alley toward the crowds around the lake. “But it’ll be hard to hail a cab, and it’s not like we can blend into the crowd.”
“I can,” Seichan said.
She closed her ripped blouse by crossing one side over the other like a sarong and tucking the ends into her jeans to hold everything in place.
“You stay here,” she ordered. “Stick to the shadows until I return.”
2:28 A.M.
Gray kept to the mouth of the alley, his eyes never leaving the festival crowd. Kowalski hung back deeper in the alley, making sure no one snuck up behind them.
A moment ago, he had traded weapons with Kowalski. The big man’s long duster made it easier to hide the length of the AK-47 rifle. Gray kept the pistol at his thigh, turning his body to keep it out of direct sight.
Sirens grew louder and louder.
To his right, the grounds around the neighboring lake were still packed with revelers, but to his left, the throngs on the streets were already beginning to stream away, heading to bed or into one of the many casinos or bars.
As he stared down the street, the flow of pedestrians began to scatter, like startled pigeons.
The sharper timbre of a two-stroke engine cut through the cacophony of music and voices. A motorcycle burst into view, carrying a familiar rider. Seichan artlessly plowed through the straggling crowd, trusting them to jump out of her way.
As the people cleared, Gray saw it wasn’t a cycle but more of a rickshaw. The front end was a motorbike, the back end a small-wheeled buggy. Such vehicles were called trishaws. He had seen them whizzing about the streets on their way here. In Macau, a city with one of the densest populations, trishaws were much more practical than cars.
But maybe not when one was being hunted by warring Triads.
Seichan skidded to a stop next to them. “Get in! Stay low!”
With no choice, Gray and Kowalski climbed into the buggy in back. Gray felt exposed in the open like this, especially as one of the rare white faces amid a sea of Asian countenances.
Kowalski tried to sink into the depths of his long coat, clearly mindful of his conspicuous bulk. “This is a bad idea.”
Once they were seated, Seichan sped the vehicle around and headed away from Casino Lisboa, skirting the edge of Nam Van Lake.
“It’s the best I could commandeer,” she yelled back to them. “Roads are blocked all over the city. No way I could get something larger through in time.”
She continued around the lake.
Gray realized they were heading away from the Macau ferry terminal.
“Where are you going?”
“Over the causeway.” She pointed across to the neighboring island of Taipa. A brightly lit bridge crossed to it from here. “A smaller ferry terminal lies on that side, not far from the Venetian hotel. It’s less likely anyone will be looking for us over there. I learned the last boat of the night leaves in twenty minutes.”
And we need to be on it.
With targets painted on their backs, Macau had become too hot.
Gray hunkered low in the buggy seat as Seichan hit the main drag and raced toward the causeway. She wound in and out of traffic, even flying through slower-moving bicycles and pedestrians when necessary.
As they hit the bridge, it was a straight three-kilometer shot to the other island. Congestion bottlenecked on the bridge, but it barely slowed Seichan. They whisked along at a heady pace, weaving and dodging their way across. To either side, the moonlit waters of the Pearl River Delta glowed with thousands upon thousands of floating lanterns, spreading far out to sea, mirroring the stars in the sky.
Ahead, Taipa Island blazed with neon, a cheap spectacle to the quieter beauty found here.
In less than ten minutes, they had cleared the causeway and turned for the narrow streets that fronted the Taipa ferry terminal.
Before they had gone twenty yards, the massive grill of a Cadillac Escalade careened out of an alley to the right and T-boned their trishaw, sending it spinning and slamming it hard into a waist-high beach wall.
Gray got tossed, flying, tangled with Kowalski.
They hit the rocky sand and rolled. Gray managed to keep hold of his pistol as he came to a skidding stop. Still on his back, he swung the weapon up toward the road, where the Cadillac sat askew, blocking traffic.
Men—a mix of Chinese and Portuguese—burst out of its doors, but they kept low, the wall blocking a clear shot. They swarmed to the left as a group.
Only then did Gray realize Seichan wasn’t there.
With his heart pounding in his throat, he rolled to his knees for a better vantage and began firing. He struck one assailant in the arm; the next three shots went wide. Then he saw Seichan hauled up among them. She was dragged toward the Cadillac, dazed, her face half covered in blood.
Cursing, Gray lowered his pistol, fearful of shooting into the cluster of men who held Seichan.
The enemy was not so reticent.
Sand blasted around Gray’s knees.
Steps away, Kowalski finally freed his AK-47. Holding it with one arm, he strafed the wall, driving back the pair of shooters. His other arm pointed toward the shelter of the causeway.
They were open targets on the beach.
With no other choice, they sprinted for its shelter. Gray fired a few potshots back toward the Cadillac. A tall, bearded man stood beside the SUV, unfazed by the rounds ricocheting off its bulletproof windows. The figure scooped Seichan’s limp form from the men and rolled her into the back.
Doors slammed, and with a squeal of tires, the Cadillac careened away. A few gunmen remained, shooting toward them, but Gray reached the causeway and ducked under the bridge, Kowalski at his heels.
“I told you this was a bad idea,” Kowalski said.
“Keep moving.”
Ducking his head, Gray passed beneath the causeway. He needed to shake the gunmen left behind. Reaching the far side, he crossed back to the beach wall next to the bridge an
d clambered over it. The snarl of traffic was slowly clearing.
Taking advantage of the bedlam of honking horns and bumper-to-bumper vehicles, Gray kept low and maneuvered across the street. To his left, a gunman searched the beach. Another one hopped over the wall to get an angle of fire under the bridge.
Gray rushed across the road and into the densely packed maze of streets and alleyways. Kowalski followed, huffing heavily next to him.
“Seichan?” Kowalski asked.
“They didn’t immediately shoot her,” he answered.
Thank God for that.
They continued for another quarter mile, mostly paralleling the beachfront, heading away from the causeway. The streets were still crowded, but not as thickly as earlier in the night. Still, in a sea of Asian faces, the two Americans stuck out too prominently. It would not be hard for the hunters to track them.
Knowing that, they dared not stop moving.
“What’s the plan?” Kowalski asked.
Until now, Gray had been running on pure adrenaline, but Kowalski was right. They needed to think strategically.
Whoever had staged this attack had cleverly assumed they might make a break for the other ferry terminal. With the causeway being the closest access to the other island, it was easy enough to set up the ambush at this choke point and wait for their targets to come to them.
“They’ll certainly be watching the ferry terminal,” Gray said, planning aloud. “That means we’ll have to find another means to reach Hong Kong.”
“What about Seichan? Are we just going to leave her?”
“We have no choice. If the gangs have her, we don’t have the firepower to go after her, even if we knew where she was being taken. And it’s not as if we can move about Macau inconspicuously.”
“So we run?”
For now.
Gray had slowly sidled back toward the waterfront. He nodded to a marina a few blocks away. “We need a boat.”
He shifted into the flow of carousing partiers still cruising along the beachfront, Kowalski in tow. Once they reached the marina, he turned into it. Lanterns decorated the waters around the moored yachts and motorboats. They marched along the docks until they found a sleek midnight-blue speedboat being prepped by a middle-aged couple, who from their accents appeared to be British expats, a husband and wife, likely on their way home after the festival.