Terrell looked past Ryker’s shoulder. “Where’s your partner?”
“At the Grand Hyatt, conducting part of the investigation there.”
“What investigation is that?”
“The son,” Ryker said simply. There was no need to be coy, especially since Danny Lin’s death had made the front page news. “And I guess you know that, right?”
Terrell nodded. “Kind of big news around here.”
Ryker glanced at the ceiling, several stories overhead. “Is Lin upstairs?”
“He is.”
“How do I get there?”
“Follow me,” Terrell said. He started lumbering across the lobby, and glanced over his shoulder at the younger security guard. “I’ll be right back. Keep your eye on things while I’m gone, and if I come down and find you surfing porn on the workstation, I’ll kick your ass.”
“In your dreams,” said the other security guard.
It took almost thirty minutes for her to make her way to the side of the building where Lin’s office suite lay. The vents leading to the office itself were too small for her to make use of, unless her intent was to drop a hand grenade into the office and hope for the best. Of course, that was not part of the plan. The plan was to see Lin’s blood flow from her artful blade work, to peer into his eyes as the light in them slowly faded. But a direct attack was out of the question. The vents were just too tiny.
But the single vent leading to the outer office was larger, and while not as wide as the duct she had crawled through for the past half hour, it was large enough. Slowly, she edged into it head-first, using the palms of her hands as brakes. Her shoulders barely fit, and she worried about her hips, but they were just narrow enough to allow her to slide her body inside the smaller channel. The aluminum sheath that made up the ducting flexed slightly, but the sound was virtually lost in the medley of background noise. She edged closer to the grating covering the vent’s terminus, barely moving now, descending only millimeters at a time, as silent as a phantom gliding through still air. She peered through the grate and looked into Lin’s secretary’s office. She could see only a small portion of the room; directly below her was a credenza and a patch of gray carpeting, over which a Persian rug had been thrown. She thought she saw a hint of a desk’s return, but the grating was too small to allow much more of the room to be shown. She examined the grate itself. It was plastic, and hinged on one side. Opposite the hinges was a small lever, meant to be pulled from the outside so the grate could be opened. She slowly reached for the lever with her left hand. As she did so, she heard a small squeak from below, something barely audible above the building noise that filled the duct. She watched as Manning suddenly appeared, leaning back in an office chair, his hands clasped behind his head. She couldn’t see much more than that, only the top of his head and a bit of his shoulders. His attention was not directed at the vent overhead.
With that thought, Meihua Shi closed her legs and allowed her body to fall through the grate life a warm knife through butter.
“So the department’s still the same, huh?” Terrell asked as he escorted Ryker to the elevator bank.
“Same thing. More politics, though. Tough to get work done.”
“Tell me about it.” Terrell punched the UP button and turned back to Ryker. His expression still wasn’t very friendly, but it was more welcoming than the one the kid had shown him at the door. “Politics are the death of the department. When that lesbian became the chief a few years ago, that absolutely blew my mind.”
“She’s gone. Replaced by a guy named Hallis.”
“He and I worked Tenderloin together, and later in the 80s, Western Addition. He was an okay cop then, I thought. How is he as a chief?”
Ryker shrugged. “Not a lesbian.”
Terrell allowed himself a glimmer of a smile, then looked up as the elevator arrived and the doors slid open. He preceded Ryker inside and pressed the button marked 45.
The ceiling collapsed before Manning could do anything more than fling himself forward, out of the secretary’s chair. Even as he did, he felt something bite the back of his left shoulder, something that penetrated the fabric of his jacket and the shirt underneath. As he hit the carpet, he cursed himself for not having the foresight to wear body armor. What the hell had happened to all his training?
He rolled onto his back as quickly as he could, moving fast, the injury to his shoulder not slowing him for a moment. Behind him, the chair he had sat on was flung into the wall, striking it so hard that it shattered into two pieces and cracked the expensive mahogany paneling. A figure clad in black from head to toe caught itself on its hands, folded at the waist, and alighted on its feet like some sort of circus performer. A small slit in the black hood was just wide enough for the assassin to see through. Black eyes glittered there, eyes that Manning recognized, though when he had last seen them they were full of a different kind of passion.
“Shi Meihua,” he said quietly, as he brought up the Smith amp; Wesson. His training had reasserted itself fully now. He pushed his personal feelings aside and allowed it to take over. The person who stood before him wasn’t his lover of no more than sixteen hours ago; the person there now was a target, someone who intended to kill him unless he struck first.
There was no hesitation on her part, and she hurled the knife she held at him with expert accuracy as Manning fired, aiming for her center of mass. Two rounds found their target, and she was flung against the credenza, arms flailing beneath the power of the double impacts. At the same time, her knife slashed through Manning’s abdomen; it had been skillfully thrown, and it cut deep into his liver. Manning ignored the spike of pain as he gathered his feet beneath him and stood, reaching across his body with his left hand. He grasped the knife and pulled it out, gasping slightly as a greater degree of pain lanced through him, a kind of agony he had thought he’d grown used to. As the black-clad figure rebounded off the credenza and fell toward the carpet, Manning tracked it with his pistol, but he was off by just a fraction. His responses slowed by the spreading web of pain, he was slow to respond to the change in her body’s attitude. She wasn’t slumping to the floor, a victim of what had to be two fatal shots. Instead, she gathered her legs beneath her and hurtled toward Manning like a guided missile.
He fired again, twice. The first shot tore through her left thigh and blasted a path out of her calf. The second missed entirely. And then the pistol was sent flying as her left hand knifed out and struck his wrist with all the power of a sledgehammer, making his entire arm light up with pain. Manning pivoted at the waist and lashed out with his left fist, driving it into the side of her head with as much power as he could muster, which wasn’t much given his current position. He knew her target would be the knife wound. The liver was one of the most vulnerable organs in the human body, and he doubted her knife had perforated his entirely by accident.
Her body slammed into his, and the force of the impact made him stumble backwards as she wrapped her arms around his waist. Her uninjured leg scythed out, describing a brief crescent as it tangled up with one of his own legs. Manning fell onto his back, his right arm flopping uselessly at his side as he fired off another punch. Meihua’s head rocketed back under the force of the impact.
And then she punched the knife wound.
As the elevator reached the 45th floor, both Ryker and Terrell heard the gunshots, two fired close together, another a moment later. Ryker pulled his pistol as the doors slid open and held it in a combat stance, feet spread, crouching slightly. The elevator bay was empty, so he stepped into it, panning the pistol from left to right. There was no target for him to engage.
“What do you want me to do?” Terrell asked. He had no weapon, and he had pressed himself against one of the elevator’s walls.
“Call nine one one, tell them shots fired at this address and floor, and tell them I’m on scene. Then let the cops up here as soon as they arrive. It’s probably going to be a few minutes, though.”
“No kidding?” Terrell knew the traffic patterns of San Francisco as well as anyone.
“Where’s Lin’s office?”
“Far corner. Left out of the elevator lobby, walk to the wall, then hard right. Office suites are at the end of a
