Chasing the White Lion by James Hannibal (best free e book reader .TXT) 📗

standing over the geek’s shoulder—hovering. She had decided to lean on him and be grateful, but that didn’t change the helicopter-mom feel.

“Atan has his fingers in a few extra pies. Unless he’s selling black-market Kobe beef, those refrigerators mean drugs. The annual market for illicit pharmaceuticals is around seventy billion dollars.”

“We have a real pack of winners here,” Talia said, watching Atan’s workers push another refrigerator into place.

“Tell me about it.”

Talia staked out the bazaar for two more hours, but Atan never showed. Either she or Val needed to make contact. He had a part to play in the con. Talia wanted to send him a private message, but Tyler warned her off. “He has to come to us, not the other way around. Otherwise the play won’t stick.”

By the time she left, the scoreboard hanging over the exit showed her and Val at seventeen million each. The grifter had been too successful for Talia’s own good. The others now had a seven-million-dollar motive to kill her, not to mention gain the coveted bay.

She needed to get to the room and stay awhile.

The maze ahead looked darker than before as Talia crossed the bridge. The city lights no longer penetrated the outer walls. And there were colors—pale reds and oranges.

“Something’s changed, Eddie. What’s happening?”

“The board did say you’d entered Round Two. I’m guessing Boyd polarized the windows. And with the clear walls and floors, adding colors makes the maze look totally different. No big deal. Use your slate.”

She tried. The message board was still running on the glass screen. Bi Fan was in the open chat room as the Clouded Leopard, offering to split a bay with anyone who would help her kill Panther Eight Two and take it. “Thanks, Bi Fan.” Talia tapped the arrow icon for directions to her room.

Nothing happened.

She tried again.

ROOMDIRECTIONSARECURRENTLYDISABLED

PLEASETRYAGAINLATER

Eddie must have read the message through her glasses-cam. “More changes for Round Two,” he said. “Boyd is raising the difficulty level. Not to wor . . . We hav . . . y ma . . . After the stairw . . . ake your fir . . .”

“Eddie?”

The geek made no response.

“Val?” Talia touched her ear. “Anyone, come in.”

No one answered. The maze no longer registered with Talia’s eidetic memory, and now she had lost comms. She was on her own.

CHAPTER

SIXTY-

SEVEN

WESTERN TOWER

TWIN TIGERS COMPLEX

BANGKOK, THAILAND

WANDERINGINTHEMAZE was a death sentence. Without directions, Talia couldn’t get back to the room. “I can’t do it,” she said out loud.

A voice answered from deep inside. Trust.

“Right. Okay.” Dear God, show me the way.

Talia closed her eyes. Without the distraction of the red and orange lights, she could remember the path. Once she felt she had a handle on it, she opened her eyes again and pushed herself out of the corner. Patience was the key. One step at a time. She reached the first corridor and took a right. A long passage followed. At the dead end she expected to squeeze her way around the false wall Eddie had shown her.

Prudence told her to use the glow of her slate as a light in the dim and strangely lit hallway. But the glow might also confuse her perception of the maze, not to mention make her an instant target. Instead, Talia put a hand out in front to feel for the back wall.

She stepped into dead air.

With a gasping scream, Talia teetered forward, flailing for a handhold. Her slate went flying, clattering against artificial outcroppings sure to take her head off if she fell. She caught the glass wall, slipped, and caught it again. Her fingers wrapped the edge. Her body swung sideways toward oblivion. Years of balancing racing shells on the Potomac saved her. Talia used her core muscles to stop her momentum and powered her body back to safety.

She collapsed on the edge. “What is happening?”

Her memory flashed through the labyrinth, looking for something new.

Hinges. Slides. Motors.

Boyd had changed more than the maze’s lighting. He had changed the maze itself. The walls were movable.

Not all the walls. Logic precluded it. Talia hadn’t seen enough infrastructure to account for much. But Boyd didn’t need many moving pieces. One or two per floor, leaving glass cliffs in the shadows, gave the maze a whole new level of deadly.

Talia started again. The missing wall at the back of her current passage meant she had to turn her back to the emptiness to squeeze her way around the false dead end into the next passage over. She moved on, this time keeping her weight on her back foot until she confirmed each step.

“Eddie? Val?”

The comm link didn’t return. It had been a jury-rigged system from the start, built from parts scrounged from the Bangkok markets in a half day of searching.

Twenty excruciating minutes later, Talia heard a blood-freezing cry. She knew the voice. “Atan.” Who had gotten to him? Bi Fan? The White Lion?

A silhouette hurried through the orange and red light several floors below, but quickly disappeared in the utter black of a darkened hallway. By the speed of the killer’s movement, he—or she—knew the maze. Whoever it was would be coming for Talia next.

From then on, every turn felt like a guess. Every dark corner looked like a hooded figure wielding a stiletto. Talia turned the last corner into what she hoped was the final passage, and found a black void.

Thirty meters or so of pure darkness, twisting with the curvature of the building.

Boyd had engineered the new lighting to make certain hallways look and feel like black holes, like the one that absorbed the silhouette of the killer after Atan’s scream.

What if the same silhouette, moving with such confidence through the maze, now waited for her in this very hall.

Talia drew her gun and set off. She crept along at a steady pace, one hand on the wall. Twenty meters in, a shadow barred her path. “I see you,” she said, and pulled the trigger.

“Don’t!” The figure lunged, knocking the gun aside to spoil her aim. The low-velocity P3Q round smacked against the