The Curse of the Dragon God by Geoffrey Knight Page A

can’t hear you,” shouted the white-haired Chinese man behind him.
    “This way. Through the garbage room.”
    They were in the back of Betty’s, pushing their way through bags of overflowing garbage. The tall, young, white-haired man pushed two smaller, frailer men in front of him, both wearing black hoods over their heads.
    Behind him, a small, slender woman in a red evening gown followed, stepping precariously across the slippery floor in her expensive heels. Mya Chan glared past the white-haired henchman and her two captives and shot Doctor Cyclops an unimpressed sneer. “This had better be worth it!”
    “No questions asked, no face remembered, no health care card required.” Doctor Cyclops started snickering and spluttering at his own joke, then almost tripped on the first step of the backstage staircase.
    Mya noticed. “Are you drunk?”
    Doctor Cyclops rubbed at his eye patch, grinning a little uneasily, showing his jagged yellow teeth. “You’re two days early. This job is very short notice.”
    Mya took a small item from her pocket and handed it to him. “Here’s your down payment. You’ll get the cash when everything’s over.”
    Doctor Cyclops took the wrapped object. Unfolding the paper, he beamed at the sight of a large glass bead with a diamond embedded in the face of it. Like the pupil of an eye. “Oh, it’s beautiful,” he breathed, then quickly shoved the bead into his pocket. “Don’t worry, I won’t let him die on the table. Not unless you ask me to.”
    “Perhaps I should just crush both their spines now and be done with it,” the white-haired man suggested, grim-faced.
    “No, Xi!” ordered Mya sharply, hurrying up the steep stairs behind the others. “This detour has already put the whole operation at risk. I’m supposed to be in Hong Kong in the morning, not here in this fucking rat’s nest! We have a strict plan. We must return to the schedule we agreed upon as soon as possible.”
    Indeed up until a few hours ago, everything had gone exactly to plan. Zhang Sen and the Professor had been successfully kidnapped, and the Eye of Fucanglong was in her possession, as were the two zidium devices. Of course there had been one or two close calls along the way, including the destruction of Qahtani’s ship in Yemen and the young college kid’s overly enthusiastic efforts to prevent a smooth exit from San Francisco. Even Mya could not deny there were cracks appearing in the plan. Yes, she had managed to flee in the Zhang Corporation’s private jet at an abandoned airfield north of San Francisco; she had successfully taken a sample of Sen’s and the Professor’s blood before Doctor Cyclops could contaminate it. But after that point, things seemed to hit another unexpected snag. Thus the need to call ahead and rearrange Doctor Cyclops’s schedule.
    “You hate it when things don’t quite go as planned, don’t you, Mya,” Sen said now, his voice muffled beneath the black hood covering his face. “You always did.”
    “Silence!” Mya barked as they reached the door to the doctor’s room.
    Breathlessly, Doctor Cyclops jingled through his keys, unlocked the door, and pushed it open.
    Once inside, Mya stood in front of the two captives, then snapped the hoods off their heads.
    The Professor stared blindly ahead of him, asking, “Sen, are you all right?”
    “I’m okay,” Sen replied. “We’re going to be all right.” But the expression on his face indicated the exact opposite as he took in their surroundings.
    The room had no windows, four grimy walls, a rickety old chair and table, a sink in one corner with a cracked mirror cabinet above it, a murky brown toilet, and a stained, tattered mattress.
    “Put him here on the table, face up. Use this to tie him down,” instructed Doctor Cyclops, handing Xi a rope and clearing the tipped-over gin bottles and spilled ashtrays off the table.
    Xi seized the Professor from behind and roughly laid the blind old man on the table. Sen