The Curse of the Dragon God by Geoffrey Knight Page B

tried feebly to stop him, but Mya locked his forearm in a strong, painful grip.
    “Mya, for God’s sake! Why are you doing this? I’ll give you whatever you want. Just don’t hurt him! Max has nothing to do with this! Please, let him—”
    Mya shut the old man up with a backhanded slap across his face so powerful it knocked him to his knees. “Silence!”
    The Professor heard the blow and struggled to lift his head and shoulders off the table, as Xi strapped him to the table with the rope. “Sen? Sen, can you hear me?”
    “Shut up! Both of you!” Mya ordered, then turned to Doctor Cyclops. “Do you have everything you need?”
    Rummaging through the mirror cabinet, Doctor Cyclops nodded excitedly. “Yes, I think so,” he said, rushing to the middle of the room and dumping a metal tray on the table beside the Professor. “For tonight’s operation I have this.” He pointed to the contents of the tray: a blunt scalpel, a rubber tourniquet, a rusty syringe, a clamp, a cigarette lighter, a crumpled piece of foil, a small package wrapped in old newspaper, and a bandage that looked as though it had been used before. Doctor Cyclops smiled broadly, then headed over to his mattress on the floor in the corner. “And for the operation in the mine—”
    His yellowed fingers dug inside the tattered mattress, through one of the many tears in its lining, and pulled out a large set of shears, like a giant pair of scissors. He opened and closed them several times in rapid succession, cleaving the air. He laughed maniacally at the thrill of what was to come.
    Still on his knees, Sen looked from the crazed doctor to the impatiently pacing Mya. “What are you going to do to us?”
    “I said shut up!” she shouted, storming up to the old man in her sleek red dress and striking him so hard he crashed to the floor, unconscious. “You!” she pointed at Doctor Cyclops. “Put that down and get on with it! You’ve got twenty minutes, otherwise you’ll lose more than this contract!”
    The deranged doctor’s glee quickly disappeared as he scurried over to the table, nodding emphatically. “Yes, of course, twenty minutes, twenty minutes!”
    On the table, the Professor tried to fight against the ropes, but Xi had fastened them firmly, the knots cutting into the old man’s wrists and ankles. He could smell the ginstinking breath of the doctor hovering over him now. He could hear his trembling, nervous fingers fumbling through the items on the metal tray.
    The Professor’s sightless eyes turned toward the end of the table. That was where the sound of Mya’s heels had stopped, where she had last struck Sen, who was no longer making a sound. “What’s this all for?” he asked sternly in Mya’s direction, not a hint of fear in his voice. “You’ve got your diamond. What else do you want?”
    For a moment, the Professor expected her to tell him to be quiet. Instead, Mya Chan decided to indulge her captive.
    Slowly she walked to the side of the table and leaned over him. “You’re asking the wrong questions. It’s not a matter of what else I want. It’s a matter of what don’t I want. The answer is quite simple. There’s nothing I don’t want, and there’s nothing I won’t have. The diamond is but a small part of the sum of my desires. Cash, control, chaos—these are the things at my fingertips now. These are the jewels I will possess. The Eye of the Dragon is a key. You can’t imagine what’s hiding behind the door it opens. You can’t imagine what lies ahead. The world will never be the same again.”
    “The Eye of the Dragon isn’t a key, it’s a curse.”
    Mya laughed. “Come now, Professor, I thought you were a man of reason.”
    “I am. And it’s a reasonable assumption that although you may not believe in the curse, your actions will fulfill it.”
    “The words of a moral man. Unfortunately for you, moral men always wind up dead.” Mya leaned in close and smiled. “I’m just chasing my dream, just