Gambit by David Hagberg (manga ereader .txt) 📗

I didn’t like it very much. Maybe they’ll both die.” He took the envelope.

Tarasov nodded. “Your call.”

“Would you like to stay for lunch?”

“No,” the Russian said. “I want to get as far away from you as I can, at least for now.” He went to the slider, but then turned back. “I wish you luck. I sincerely mean it.”

Susan joined him without a word, and they watched Tarasov board the helicopter and take off.

“Chinese Scorpions?” she asked. “I love it.”

“You heard?”

“Most of it. Are you going to take the gig?”

“Of course,” Hammond said. “But first, let’s fill Glory with a lot of friends and have a party in the middle of nowhere.”

“We don’t have any friends, Tommy boy, but what the hell, it sounds like fun to me.”

PART

TWOMiddle Game

When he realizes he is being hunted, what will he do?

Hide or fight back?

TWENTY-FIVE

Chan Taio, wearing only black silk pajama bottoms, walked out onto the open second-floor balcony of his and Li’s duplex overlooking the beach and high-rises in Hong Kong’s Repulse Bay and breathed deeply of the mild morning air.

At five ten, he was tall for a Chinese, and his muscles, especially those in his chest, were well defined. His facial features were almost Western mostly because he’d had his eyes altered when he was sixteen. A lot of his friends had done the same thing at the time. It was cool. And with the light brown wig he sometimes wore to cover his very short, intensely black hair, he could and had passed as a Westerner.

He was at Zen peace with himself, though one section of his brain—and his heart, if he were to be honest—yearned for another operation. At thirty-one, he and his partner, Li, who was twenty-seven, were at the height of their physical and mental abilities.

Their initial training days and nights for three grueling years had taken place at several mainland Chinese Special Operations Forces bases. Individual and small-team survival skills, camouflage, weapons, navigation, communications, infiltration and exfiltration, and close-combat scenarios, including sniper training and room-clearing in what were called kill houses.

Finally, they’d been recognized for their outstanding all-around abilities and had been sent to the Special Operations Academy for junior officers in Guangzhou, which had actually been the beginning of the end for them. They’d become too good and too independent for the strict SOF regimen that forever bowed to a civilian leadership that demanded total obedience. Included in their orders was the strict rule that officers did not closely fraternize with each other.

But he and Li fell in love at the academy after only three assignments—one of them when they were sent to London to kill a dissident who’d worked at a fairly high level for the Ministry of State Security in Beijing. The man had been responsible for recruiting, vetting, and assigning deep-cover agents around the world. At the time, he was working out of the Chinese embassy, and it was thought that he was making plans to defect to MI6 and had to be silenced.

They had carried out the op with what a colonel had reported was a terrible, silent efficiency. “They were scorpions,” he’d supposedly said.

Afterward, they had asked permission through channels to marry, but their request had been denied. They got orders, her to remain at the academy, him to Hong Kong. They were at the end of their third two-year term of service, and they’d resigned their commissions within one month of each other.

Their discharges were honorable, so no one had come looking for them. Within a few weeks, Li had joined him in Hong Kong; they got married and began taking freelance operations, some ironically through the same SOF they’d been members of.

Li, wearing only the silk top of Tiao’s pajamas, came to the open slider. “Enjoying the image of yourself in the glass, or is there another gaggle of Western girls in bikinis on the beach?” she asked, her voice musical.

“Both, actually,” he said. He turned.

She had her iPhone, and she brought it out and handed it to him. “This came overnight,” she said.

It was a text message addressed to COUNTER-T EXECUTIVE ACTION SOLUTIONS. It was their business. The Counter-T stood for counterterrorism, and twice, they’d actually taken the simple assignments, in both cases acting as glorified bodyguards for business executives working in war zones, once in Afghanistan, and the second time in Syria.

The real business of the business was assassination, such as the ones like the London op. They were fast, brutally efficient, obscenely expensive, and not once had they ever failed. In the trade, they had maintained the sobriquet as the Chinese Scorpions, nobody remembering where the moniker had originated.

“Is it from anyone we know?” Taio asked.

“The Russian.”

They never knew the Russian’s name, though they strongly suspected he worked for the GRU and that he handed out special assignments that couldn’t be traced back to Moscow, and paid very well and very promptly.

“A special client needs an operation. Meet soonest aboard the MV Glory lying Skagway, Alaska. Legend as movie producers ex-Taiwan. Ten million U.S.”

Taio texted back. “When?”

Li looked past his arm at the screen.

“Soonest.”

“Who is the client?”

“Details to follow acceptance.”

“Is he involved with movies in the U.S.?”

“Details to follow acceptance.”

Li was a full four inches shorter than her husband and, at only a little over one hundred pounds, was tiny, her skin pale. People said that she looked like a porcelain doll. Her face was round, her lips full and her eyes wide and expressive. She smiled and looked up at him.

“What would you like to do?” she asked.

“We don’t need the money.” They’d paid ten million euros cash for their condo and owned a Mercedes convertible and matching Augusta motorcycles. Between assignments, they never took vacations, except locally. Their major source of recreation was planning, stalking, and killing individuals for hire. It was what they lived for.

“That’s not what I asked, husband.”

“I think we’d better dress warmly.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Alaska is bound to be cold, even