Max took a breath and steadied himself. Heard footsteps now, from his opposite side. The shadow pushing toward him might have been startling in its immensity had he not been braced for Xiang's attack. Still, his limitations of movement and balance made it impossible to avoid.
Gonna get hurt no matter what I do, he thought. Might as well dish some hurt of my own.
Whirling toward the giant, he lunged forward in a bullish rush, Xiang's torso looming up like a marble pillar as he drove in and butted him with his head.
Xiang snorted in anger and surprise, the kris dropping from his fingers. Max kept his head lowered and again slammed himself into his columnar chest. The gigantic islander staggered back but did not fall. His knife forgotten in his rage, he lurched forward like a wounded bear, his colossal arms spread wide, biceps expanding and rippling under his flesh. Snarling, he clamped his hands over Blackburn's shoulders and hefted upward.
Max felt a wrenching pain as his feet left the floor. Though he weighed a solid hundred-eighty pounds, Xiang lifted him seemingly without effort.
Blackburn saw an atavistic savagery in his features that instantly made him cold inside. The giant wasn't thinking about the information they were trying to get out of him. Wasn't thinking about what his boss wanted him to do. Wasn't thinking, period. His fury was a cyclone that had pulled him into its maw as it gained destructive energy and momentum. He was just along for the ride.
In a sense, they both were.
Xiang shook Max furiously, holding him suspended above the floor so they were almost eye-to-eye. He rattled out a groan, the strength he'd mustered through sheer willpower draining away, his body too hammered from abuse to comply with the demands he was making of it. Suddenly he knew what was coming, knew with such a sure sense of inevitability that he could almost hear a door shutting in his head. There would be no last-minute escape of the sort that might occur in a novel or film, no orchestral swells as the larger-than-life hero fought his way to safety. It stank, yes, but real life was like that sometimes, you never knew when the smell would come wafting up out of the kitty litter, and the best he figured he could do was express his feelings about it in a manner that would translate across any language barrier.
Filling his mouth with moisture, he spat in Xiang's face.
Xiang growled, actually growled, his cheek glistening with bloody saliva. He took a broad step forward, another, pushing Max up against the wall. Then, with a tremendous heave that bulged the muscles of his upper back and shoulders into a corded mass, he slammed Max backward with stunning force, pulled him in toward his chest again, slammed, pulled, slammed. Max tugged unavailingly at his cuffs, his upper body writhing, a mire of blood flooding his mouth, the chair splintering between his back and the wall, cracking into jagged pieces of wood that spilled to the floor underneath him as Xiang slammed and pulled and slammed….
Lost in a roseate haze, Blackburn felt a snap somewhere in his neck, followed by a bright sparkle of pain. The haze darkened and solidified. From what seemed a great distance, he heard the Thai shout something in an agitated voice and a language he didn't understand. He had a sensation of disconnected free fall, as if he were a small stone plummeting into a bottomless chasm.
Then he ceased to feel anything at all.
'Stop!' The Thai clambered across the barn toward Xiang and grabbed his arm. 'That's enough lunacyV'
The giant glanced over at him. An instant later, his face changed — the furious, wildly unreasoning look clearing from it. He turned toward the limp form he was pressing to the wall, stared at it a moment as if seeing it for the first time, and let it drop.
Luan knelt over Blackburn and hurried to check his pulse. He didn't like the way his head was leaning, the rubbery tilt of his neck.
When his eyes jumped up to Xiang, they were glacial. 'He's dead,' he said.
Chapter Thirteen
Every weekday morning at 5:30 Roger Gordian left his home outside San Jose, got into his raven-black 1984 Mercedes SE, then headed east along El Camino Real to the San Carlos Street exit and through the downtown area to UpLink's corporate headquarters on Bonita Avenue. Like Gordian, the Benz was in generally fine condition despite showing a few signs of age: a cranky starter here, a clogged line and worn part there, nothing that, in his estimate, couldn't be remedied with regular maintenance and an occasional highway workout.
Still, those around him fretted. Concerned about its reliability, Ashley had been pressing him to drive one of their newer vehicles to the office, but the Land Rover seemed too damn big and the '01 BMW too damn small, lacking substance and character, and resembling an electric shaver or a soap bar. Concerned about his personal safety, Pete Nimec had tried convincing him to hire a driver or bodyguard, but Gordian liked having the solitary time for thought as overflowing rural greenery became neatly fenced suburban yards and then a crowded metropolis, the transition seeming to mirror the thrust of human advancement itself.
And he liked driving along with his hands on the wheel as the big V-8 engine ran with a low satisfying sound that reminded him of a perfect, sustained note coming from deep in the belly of an operatic tenor.
And he liked how there were just enough motorists on the freeway to give him a sense of forward progress, of linkage to other people pursuing their daily objectives, each of them slightly ahead of the pack, moving toward their destinations in lanes that would jam tight only a few hours later.
On his way to work now, he was undeniably pleased that he'd resisted Pete and Ashley's urgings. There were a number of things on his mind, things he needed to sort through without interruption, and the driver's seat of his car was the ideal place to do precisely that.
It always comes down to willt timing, and maneuverability, he reflected. You have to avoid getting stuck on any one battle, and make sure you're ready to exploit any possible chance to take the opposition by surprise.
That was modern combat doctrine in a nutshell, although in this instance Gordian was thinking neither about armed conflict, nor even the martial art of highway driving, but business, which he had long ago learned was its own species of warfare — coldly opportunistic, full of hidden traps, and capable of heaping loss and carnage upon the unprepared, the indecisive, and the inflexible.
The night before, Gordian had gotten his call to war from Chuck Kirby, who had phoned to confirm what he'd already known in his gut, and what legal disclosure requirements would reveal to the public within days: The tender offer for the Spartus holdings had been made by Marcus Caine through a rather thinly disguised corporate surrogate… specifically, a Midwestern concern called Safetech.
Okay, next item, he thought. Having established what Caine wanted, the issue of why he wanted it still remained to be tackled. A takeover seemed the obvious objective, but things were not necessarily that clear. The Williams Act and a whole slew of California securities and antitakeover statutes compelled Safetech to state the reasons for its stock acquisition in a Schedule 13D filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in other documents it was required to exhibit to shareholders. Even playing strictly by the rules, however, Caine had plenty of wiggle room in which to obscure his intent.
His offer-by-proxy left no doubt that he at the very least wished to remain discreet — and one thing Gordian knew about Caine was that he never stayed in the background unless there were some very compelling reasons to do so. While Marcus was often unsubtle, he was not unsophisticated. If he was preparing to mount a raid, he would bide his time until he was in the best tactical position to execute it. Hands down, he would represent himself in the schedule as seeking not to wrest control of UpLink from Gordian and its board of directors, but rather to obtain a substantial minority interest that would give him a say in managing its assets, and allow him to protect his investment. Whether that position would bear up under scrutiny was immaterial, because all the courts were likely to do in the event of false or incomplete disclosures was order that they be revised.
Meanwhile, Caine would be getting exactly what he needed: time to woo other large shareholders to his side, time to sidestep the Williams Act's disclosure provisions by purchasing smaller blocks of UpLink stock on the open market, time to develop and refine any number of additional takeover strategies.. assuming, of course, that a complete acquisition was his goal.
How, then, to anticipate it? Kirby and his trustbusters were already formulating a civil action on the grounds
