Cryptozoica (18 page)

And black silence.

Shielding his eyes, Howard Flitcroft watched the ASTAR helicopter inscribe a languorous circle over the bay. He glimpsed Jack through the portside window, looking down at him. He waved more by habit than a sincere greeting. His strongest emotional reaction was annoyance, since he felt like he was being pestered.

Flitcroft certainly didn’t envy Jack ferrying around the supercilious Englishman and his party, particularly since Belleau presented a grave threat to the man’s autonomy and lifestyle—what there was of it.

Flitcroft didn’t look forward to his meeting with Bai Suzhen, either. The noonday sun shone down upon the waters of the bay with such dazzling intensity, he put on a pair of wraparound sunglasses. The heat was cloyingly oppressive. Sweat gathered on his face and his Hawaiian print shirt clung to his damp back.

Shifting position on the splintery plank that served as the sampan’s bench, he grimaced as a needle of wood pricked his right buttock. He glanced back at Den Chu, sitting astern, hand on the outboard’s prop control. The round brim of the man’s lampshade hat cast his features into a semi-circular shadow pattern. A long, cloth-wrapped bundle lay on the deck, his sandaled feet resting on it possessively.

Looking forward past the mouth of bay, Flitcroft saw towering cumulus clouds massing on the horizon. They were very far away, but still the clouds portended the imminent arrival of the monsoon season. Whatever form Cryptozoica Enterprises morphed into, he wanted it over and done with long before the first raindrops fell and turned Little Tamtung into a perennial steam bath.

Howard Flitcroft thought of himself as hard and canny, a man who knew his own mind, and after years of strategic planning, he had finally come into his own. Brought up in a world of savage economics where illusions of fair deals and honoring handshakes were the punchlines of happy hour jokes, Flitcroft had opened his first Atlantic City casino and hotel while still in his twenties.

He built the Sunrise Hotel and Sunset Casino with mob money because there was no way around it, but those finances had been bolstered when he married Merriam Pendlebury, heiress of the Pendlebury baked goods dynasty. He had never loved her, he had never really loved anyone, but a five hundred million dollar fortune served as an acceptable substitute.

Flitcroft’s overriding ambition was not to be loved himself but to be respected and remembered as a great man, an adventurer, a risk-taker, a visionary. He had never met any man like that, outside of the cheap paperback novels he read while growing up in Yonkers, so he aspired to be one himself. He’d involved himself in a number of flamboyant stunts, like epic hot air balloon flights across the Pacific, as well as transmitting a live TV special from the site of an erupting volcano.

Then he met Jack Kavanaugh and Augustus Crowe, men who were naturally what he strove to be. Through Horizons Unlimited, they had introduced him to a world he hadn’t known existed except in the imagination, full of vivid color, extreme personalities and very often, big risks.

Cryptozoica Enterprises was Howard Flitcroft’s biggest risk, his most foolhardy commercial venture, but he could still easily recall that first giddy thrill upon seeing the herd of Hadrosaurs and Parasaurolophus in the living, breathing flesh. No other experience in his life compared to that, not even when he opened a chain of highly profitable Internet cafes around the globe. Everything else felt trite in comparison.

Although the collapse of Cryptozoica Enterprises had been a financial disaster, emotionally, his reaction was akin to that of losing a beloved child on whom he had lavished wealth, love and hope. Flitcroft blamed Kavanaugh for the catastrophe, but he also knew he could have put a stop to it with only a word.

Franklin Jessup, Maurice Cranston and Shah Nikwan represented nearly half of the world’s wealth and even the five hundred million dollars Flitcroft had married into was little more than upkeep fees on their various properties around the globe. They were cold, grim men who had long ago lost interest in anything the world had to offer—except for the unique and the bizarre. They were collectors of rare items and many of those items were animals, whether they were King of Saxony birds of paradise or Asiatic lions. They became obsessed with the idea of being the only men in history with dinosaur heads mounted and hanging on their den walls.

Even two-plus years after the fact, Flitcroft was not sure what had driven Jack to knuckle under to their demands, unless he was following a self-destructive urge to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. Flitcroft’s own alcoholic father had been such a man, driven by personal demons, but he hadn’t expected it of Jack Kavanaugh.

Jack was basically fearless but not foolhardy. He had brought in United Bamboo money through Bai Suzhen and managed to keep the entire undertaking under the media radar. Even the massive construction projects on the Tamtung islands had gone largely unnoticed.

Of course, Bai Suzhen had hired only people connected to the White Snake triad, either familial or through old, complicated business arrangements that dated back to the opium wars of the nineteenth century.

Flitcroft never questioned the set-up too closely, partly because he wanted a layer of plausible deniability between his company and the triads, but primarily because his interests lay in the final result, not in the million niggling details of how the result was ultimately achieved.

However, he had no problem admitting to himself that Bai Suzhen, Madame White Snake, scared him—badly.

There was something autocratic, aristocratic, and even cruel about her bearing. Bai Suzhen was brilliant and beautiful, yet she seemed untouchable, a woman of great power, remote from the caresses and even the understanding of men.

Although she was desirable, Flitcroft had never dared make a play for her. Upon their first meeting, Bai had made it quite clear that their relationship was one of business and it would remain so for the length of their partnership. Standoffish women usually aroused Flitcroft, since he suspected they were playing games. But he knew on a visceral level that Bai Suzhen did not play games, either in her business or personal affairs.

But Flitcroft had noticed the imperious glitter in her eyes softened a trifle whenever she was in the company of Jack Kavanaugh. He didn’t think Bai Suzhen actually loved the pilot—he suspected she was as much a stranger to the emotion as he—but the man obviously meant a great deal to her.

The sudden trilling of his cell phone made him jump and caused the sampan to rock to and fro. The ring-tone repetitively played the opening bars of Queen’s
“We Are the Champions.”
Digging around in a pants pocket, he pulled out his phone and thumbed up the cover, noting the name and number displayed in the caller ID window.

“What is it, Bert?” he demanded.

Without preamble, Bertram bleated, “That goddamn Tombstone Jack took my cameraman on a flyover without my permission!”

“McQuay is my cameraman. I gave the permission.”

“I’m the goddamn director!” Bertram’s strident shout stabbed into Flitcroft’s right ear. He flinched away and glanced over his shoulder toward the building that housed his office and the hotel.

“You’re also the director with two of his fingers cut off,” Flitcroft retorted. “And the director who slept until noon.”

“You gave me the Percocet!”
“Which you mixed with booze. You’re better off where you are.”

“And where are you?”

Flitcroft eyed the long wooden vessel riding high above the waterline, crafted so its configurations suggested sharp angles, arches and buttresses. The planking and timbers had been heavily varnished and lacquered to the rich bronze color of burnished brass.

Three masts held huge sheets of sailcloth folded as neatly as paper fans. Scarlet Chinese characters marked the junk’s stern, but he could not decipher them. However, he assumed that the
Keying
could be identified as a ship belonging to the White Snake triad by the chops painted on the hull.

“I have an appointment with Bai Suzhen,” replied Flitcroft. “We need to get this buyout business straight.”

Pendlebury’s voice hit a high, quavering note of fury. “Tell that fuckin’ slant-eyed whore she’s going to jail!”

Despite his annoyance and agitation, Flitcroft laughed. “Yeah, I’ll tell her that. She’ll have your balls cut off and shoved into your mouth to shut you up. Let it go, Bert—you brought it on yourself. You got drunk and groped her. You don’t want Merriam to know what really happened.”

Only silence issued from the phone for a long tick of time. Then Pendlebury asked in a small, contrite voice, “What’ll I tell her happened?”

“Make up something dramatic and heroic, like saving me from a barracuda. I’ll go along with whatever you tell her.”

Pendlebury blew out a relieved sigh. “You will?”

“Sure. You’re my director, right?” Flitcroft didn’t add, and my wife’s half-wit brother.

“Thanks, Howard. When will you be back?”

“An hour or two. Do me a favor while I’m gone and monitor the GPS weather reports in the radio room. That way I can make travel plans.”

“Will do. ‘Bye.”

Flitcroft folded his phone and returned it to his pocket just as the bulk of the
Keying
filled his field of vision.  Den Lai eased up on the throttle of the outboard and pointed the sampan’s bow toward the junk’s hull. It bumped gently against the side, where a rope ladder hung from the deck railing.

“Do you want to wait for me?” Flitcroft asked Den.

The man nodded his head, his woven straw hat making him look a mushroom caught in a breeze. “I wait.”

Flitcroft checked his Rolex and said, “An hour from now.”

Den Lai nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Flitcroft clambered up the rungs of the rope ladder, hearing the sampan’s outboard motor cease droning. He paid no attention to it after he reached the
Keying’s
deck. Although he saw sailors lounging about among the rigging, he also saw several sear-faced, brown-skinned men wearing casual uniforms of black T shirts and khaki shorts. They wore Sam Browne belts with pistols holstered at their hips. Their round faces smiled as impassively as a Buddha’s.

A slender man he recognized as one of Bai Suzhen’s bodyguards stepped out of an open hatch beneath the elevated superstructure of the foc’sle. He gestured with one hand for Flitcroft to approach. A pair of stone Fu guardian dogs snarled on either side of the hatch.

Without hesitation, Flitcroft entered a dimly lit companionway, carefully climbing down a short ladder into a spacious cabin. The first thing he noticed was the blessed coolness of the room. The interior was air-conditioned and the temperature difference was akin to walking from a Turkish bath into a glacial cave.

The wooden bulkheads were hung about with brocades of the finest silk, many of them depicting scenes from myths. They were acrawl with golden tigers, crimson dragons and blue archers. Large-breasted, serpent bodied women were a recurring motif.  A mahogany screen with circular yin and yang symbols on the two panels enclosed a round Chinese bed.

Bai Suzhen sat behind a desk in a chair made of tangled rootwood. The surface of the desk was intricately inlaid with ivory and jade. Illuminated by tea candles floating in large, water-filled glass bowls on either side of her, the woman’s skin appeared almost golden. Her fine-pored complexion was unlined.

She wore a sleeveless blouse of red silk, studded with mother-of-pearl buttons and black knit slacks. She wore no jewelry except for a delicate silver ring on her left hand. It was made in the form of a scaled serpent, coiled in two loops. The snake body terminated in the head of a woman with cut ruby eyes. The scent released from the candles smelled delicate and exotic, like whiffs of distant honeysuckle.

Bai Suzhen’s black hair was carefully brushed back and streamed over her shoulders. It caught the glow from the candles and the sunshine shafting in through a porthole and shone with glossy highlights. Her eyes held no expression, but they were hooded, like those of drowsing falcon’s.

“Hello, Howard,” she said softly, gesturing to a cane-backed chair.

Taking off his sunglasses, he nodded and seated himself opposite her. As always, Flitcroft felt extremely uncomfortable in Bai Suzhen’s presence and that discomfiture put him on the defensive. Although he knew she was a minimum of ten years his junior, he always sensed she was much older and wiser and that she would always be wiser, no matter how many years he lived.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked, extending a glass tumbler toward him.

“No, thank you. I’m still a little hung over from last night.”

Her eyebrows lifted like dark wings over amused almond eyes. “It’s just a fruit juice blend, Howard. I assure you it’s not spiked or poisoned.”

Flitcroft took the glass and sipped at it, finding the taste a little acidic but still sweet. He smiled appreciatively. “It’s nice, thank you.”

“How is your brother-in-law faring today?”

“Still mad, but he knows it was his fault. I apologize for his behavior. He’s not used to booze and women.”

“So I gathered,” Bai replied dryly.

Flitcroft waited for her to issue an apology or a word of regret for the actions of her bodyguard. When neither was forthcoming, he glanced around at the furnishings and said, “You’ve got some interesting decorating ideas here. What’s with all the snake-ladies, though?”