The corners of the old man’s mouth curved up into a sadistic smile, and he started laughing slowly and menacingly. The sound slithering from his crimson lips was a rasping wheeze, and with an arthritis-ridden, shaking hand he leaned forward and reached for a cruel-looking hooked scalpel from the wooden box.
That was when Roxana moved.
In a gloriously fluid and surprisingly powerful manoeuvre she twisted her left arm out of Mr Wang’s grip in a blinding blur of speed, snatched up a loose scalpel, jumped to her feet and then spun about in a ballerina’s twist, slashing the blade across Mr Wang’s throat.
His eyes bulged with shock as the scalpel pared his throat wide open, but he was a master fighter, through and through; without hesitation, and despite the grievousness of the wound, he launched a furious counterattack: a lightning-fast roundhouse kick aimed at Roxana’s head, which she darted under while whipping the blade across the inside of his groin, opening up his femoral artery and unleashing a cascading spray of bright blood. Undeterred by his mortal wounds, Mr Wang fought on, aiming a flurry of high-speed Wing Chun punches at her, but she dodged and blocked every single one with almost superhuman speed before zipping through his defences and plunging the surgical instrument directly into his left eyeball.
With the scalpel embedded in his eye socket, blood gushing out from his wide-open throat and spurting liberally from his inner thigh, Mr Wang stumbled back, gasping and batting weakly at his destroyed eye with his left hand as he tried to open his jacket with his right so he could access his concealed pistol. Roxana, however, wasted no time in preventing this; she took two running steps forward and then launching herself into a flying kick. Her foot thumped into Mr Wang’s chest with the force of a woodsman’s axe, and the impact sent him crashing to the ground. He tried for a moment to get up, but all his strength had now deserted him, and after he briefly managed to raise his torso up from the floor he flopped back down and then lay there, twitching, as blood pumped from his half-severed neck in gruesome bucketloads.
Roxana strolled calmly over to him, opened his jacket and removed his pistol. After kicking the firearm a safe distance away she turned to Mr Ma, who was scrambling for a panic button located on the right post of the bed. With effortless speed and precision, she plucked the scalpel from Mr Wang’s eye socket and flung it like a throwing knife. It transfixed the geriatric’s wrist and thudded into the wooden backboard of the bed, pinning his arm there.
Gone from the girl’s face was the expertly rendered masquerade of helpless terror and naïve fear, and in its place was an expression of blank, automaton-like neutrality. As she slowly advanced on Mr Ma, his eyes began to register an emotion that had not entered those dark orbs for decades; raw animal fear.
‘I am AH-477,’ the assassin said flatly, dropping forever the fictitious ‘Roxana’ moniker and personality that had been her disguise over the past few weeks. ‘And I have come here to terminate your existence.’
Mr Ma grunted and gasped, struggling to pull the scalpel out of his right wrist. AH-477, however, sprang lightly onto the bed, leaned over the old man and broke his left arm with casual ease and a blank expression on her pretty face, not registering an ounce of emotion as Mr Ma writhed and cried out in pain beneath her. She then climbed off the bed and pulled the silk blanket off of Mr Ma, exposing his thin, wrinkled body, leaving him naked and utterly vulnerable in the soft light. She dropped the blanket and walked past Mr Wang, who was convulsing in his death throes in a pool of blood on the floor. She paid no heed to his jerking body, but she did make sure that she didn’t get any blood on her bare feet as she strolled past.
AH-477 headed straight to the bathroom, from which she emerged wearing Mr Ma’s black and gold silken bathrobe, and carrying a bottle of drain cleaner fluid.
Mr Ma screamed when he saw what was in her hands – although the sound that emerged from his mouth was not so much a cry as it was a guttural, hoarse gargling. He tried to backpedal and aimed a feeble kick at the assassin when she climbed back onto the bed with him, but she blocked the weak attack and punched him with vicious precision in his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him and incapacitating him.
She then positioned herself over him and pinned him down with her knees and thighs, and her young face was as cold and devoid of emotion as any pharaoh’s death mask.
‘Sigurd Haraldsson sends his regards, evil one,’ she said, speaking flawless Mandarin. ‘It is his wish to send you to hell at this exact time, and in this exact fashion. He was very specific, in fact, about the manner of your demise.’
She unscrewed the top of the drain opener bottle, and immediately its noxious, corrosive fumes began to fill the interior of the canopy bed. Mr Ma’s eyes bulged white in their discoloured sockets, and he writhed and wriggled with pathetic desperation, but the girl had him pinned down firmly.
She cocked her head and stared with an almost reptilian fascination into his eyes for a few moments, and
