The Taste of Fear (A Suspense Action Thriller & Mystery Novel) Read online

  “He’s also part of the Chinese syndicate that held a de jure monopoly on gambling in Macau for the past forty years. Consequently, he’s made a lot of powerful friends—which include half of Asia’s organized crime ring.”

  “And he’s your partner?”

  “Was.”

  “What happened?”

  “After the Macau government ended the monopoly system there in ’02, a number of casino operating concessions were put up for tender. I didn’t win one. So as a last resort, yes, I partnered with Don Xi, because he had a license.”

  “Knowing he was a criminal?”

  “He has criminal connections, sure. But you check his Rolodex, you’ll also find the private numbers for the Clintons, Thatcher, half the world leaders. The world’s not so black and white at the top. You know that.”

  She shook her head. They were getting distracted. How Sal knew Don Xi wasn’t what was important. “Why would he want to kill you?”

  “The man was impossible to work with. We clashed over everything, from the number of VIP suites to who was supplying us with the fucking steel. Being in Dubai finishing up the hotel, I couldn’t oversee every decision. But I was to be informed of the major ones. I wasn’t. Xi had started calling all the shots. I had enough. I had a talk with the directors and we got Xi to walk—and we kept his license.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “Our lawyers were better than his.” Sal shrugged. “Anyway, it seems old Don didn’t take it all very well.”

  Scarlett felt numb. It was a lot of information to take in. So Sal knew who had set the blaze at the Prince. Okay. That was good news. That was fantastic news. Better someone he knew than someone who could disappear, maybe to come back and pick up where he left off another day. However, the fact this guy was some sort of Asian crime lord meant he had a lot of cash and a lot of connections, which meant he could do pretty much anything he wanted.

  Like try another hit.

  “Have you told the police?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Danny doesn’t have enough proof.”

  “So what? Let the police get the proof themselves.”

  “We tip the police off now, Don Xi gets tipped off. By the time the police mount any sort of investigation, Don will be so clean his balls will squeak.”

  “At least if he knows that you know, and that others know, he won’t try anything else.”

  “He won’t try anything else, regardless.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know what I’m doing, cara mia. Let me handle this.”

  She started to protest, but he held up his hand. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “Listen to me, Sal,” she said, gripping his forearm. “Danny isn’t MacGyver. This isn’t a game. Don Xi tried to kill you. He might try again. You have to go to the police.”

  “You heard what I said.” He turned away from her and looked out the window.

  Scarlett clenched her jaw tight. He was impossible sometimes. Maddeningly impossible. If they’d been in LA or Dubai or Paris—or anywhere that had a goddamn infrastructure in place—this would be the time she’d hop out of the car and do some shopping to cool off.

  A faint thrumming had started behind her left eye, matching the beat of her pulse, and she knew another migraine was coming on.

  CHAPTER 9

  Wednesday, December 25, 7:03 a.m.

  Macau, China

  As Xi Dong stood in the doorway of his son’s bedroom, watching the boy sleep, he smiled to himself. His life had turned out well. He was a very lucky man. But his good fortunes had not come easy. It had taken perseverance and hard work and passion to transform his thirty-five thousand dollar inheritance into the multibillion dollar empire he helmed today.

  The inheritance had come after his parents had died in a plane crash somewhere over the Rocky Mountains in August of 1955. He had been twenty-three. Instead of blowing the money, however, he invested the entire lot in a logging company after he learned the provincial government of British Columbia granted logging companies large concessions on land at discount prices. With his considerable profits, he built a chopstick factory and exported the chopsticks to Japan and China, eventually expanding throughout Southeast Asia. In 1960 he moved his head office from Canada to his ancestral country of Hong Kong, to a large building on Nathan Road, which was still referred to as the Golden Mile in those days. Three years later he joined a group of wealthy businessmen who won the bid for all forms of gambling in Macau. And since then everything he touched had turned to gold, from shipping to banking to a newly opened theme park.

  Nevertheless, more than any of this, the reason Xi Dong thought he was the luckiest man in the world was his son, Ka-chun. Xi’s first two wives had failed to provide him with a child. By the time he married his third wife, Zhang, he was seventy-one, what he thought would be too old to produce an heir to his vast empire. But within months of their wedding day Zhang became pregnant. It was the happiest day of his life, and ever since his heart had been full of pride and joy.

  Xi closed the door to his son’s bedroom, then went down the hall to Zhang’s office. She was sitting in front of the computer. Shopping, he thought. “I’m going to walk the dog,” he told her.

  She had been born in Guangxi and spoke Zhuang and Mandarin, not Cantonese, so they communicated in English.

  “Okay” was all she said. She didn’t look at him.

  They were in the middle of a prolonged fight that had begun after she discovered various rooms in his various casinos were permanently occupied with a close circle of mistresses who called him “master.” He was trying to make it up to her with expensive gifts. He didn’t have the energy for another divorce, and Ka-chun needed a mother.

  In the kitchen, he found the white-and-brown shih tzu asleep on the slate floor. “Leash,” he said in Cantonese.

  Sun immediately leapt to his feet, spun in a circle, then disappeared from the room, returning moments later carrying his leash between his jaws and wagging his tail furiously. Xi hooked the clasp to the dog’s nylon collar and went outside.

  October to December was his favorite time of year in Macau because it was neither too hot nor too humid. Tonight it was overcast, and he could not see the ocean, but the sulfuric smell of decomposed plankton and seaweed told him it was low tide.

  As he crossed the villa’s landscaped yard to the high stone fence, Sun scurried ahead of him, tugging at the leash. At the gate he started yapping loudly.

  “Hush,” Xi ordered, punching a code into the alarm box.

  It buzzed. He shoved the gate open and stepped through the Roman archway. As he was pulling the gate closed behind him, something hard was pressed into his back.

  “Walk,” a man’s voice commanded in English.

  “What is this?”

  “Walk. Or I carry you. Limp.”

  Xi walked while Sun barked away at his side. Unfortunately, he was no guard dog. Nobody else was on the street, which wasn’t surprising. It was late, and it was a very private neighborhood.

  The stranger directed him to a black minivan parked alongside the curb. “Open the side door.”

  Xi refused. “Do you know who I am?”

  “I know exactly who you are, koos. That’s why I’m here.”

  Xi felt a sharp whack on the back of his head, then consciousness fled.

  When Xi Dong came around he was in a dark room. The air was musty and smelled of concrete and sawdust. He tried to move, but his hands and ankles were fastened to the chair in which he was seated. A gag was in his mouth. Where was he? In a basement somewhere? A construction site? How long had he been out for? He didn’t have answers to any of those questions, but his throat and eyes were dry, which meant he was dehydrated, a consequence of being unconscious for a substantial amount of time.

  He turned to see what was behind him, and a smoldering pain awoke in the back of his skull. He grunted. Mo
ments later he heard footsteps approach. A gas lantern in a far corner of the room cast enough light to reveal the man who appeared on his right. He was young, muscular, dressed entirely in black, and moved with a confident swagger. Xi recognized him immediately. He’d seen him enough times over the past year. His name was Danny Zamir, and he was Salvador Brazza’s muscle—the same muscle who’d rescued Brazza from the Prince Tower fire. But he was more than a mere bodyguard. At least, that’s how Xi read it. Zamir showed deference to his boss, of course, but Xi didn’t think Danny Zamir believed he was beneath any man, regardless of their wealth or power.

  It was an extremely cocky paradigm. It was also an extremely naïve one.

  “I’m going to ask you a few questions, old man,” Zamir said. “I want you to nod your head if the answer is yes, and shake it if the answer is no. Do you understand me?”

  Xi only glared at him. Despite his predicament, he did not jump through hoops for anyone, especially this snake.

  Zamir went behind the chair, and Xi heard the light grating noise of metal being dragged on concrete. A pipe? He tried to turn his head again, but couldn’t see anything. He gave up and stared forward. His heart pounded inside his chest.

  What was coming?

  From the corner of his eye, Xi caught a flash of movement—something silver—moments before pain exploded in his right kneecap. The gag muffled his scream. He writhed in misery and fury until the chair toppled over. His head smacked the ground, like a bowling ball hitting the hardwood on the lane. Dazed, he remained on his side. Cold concrete pressed against his cheek. His breathing came in rough, animalistic snorts through flaring nostrils.

  Danny Zamir’s black boots appeared a few feet from his face. The steel club face of a putter appeared in front of the boots. “Was the Prince Tower fire set deliberately?” His voice seemed to be coming from somewhere far away.

  Knowing he was already a dead man—you didn’t kidnap and torture the most powerful man in Macau, then let him go, not if you wanted to live past the next sunrise—Xi remained silent. To forget the pain, he concentrated on what he’d be doing to Zamir right then if their positions were reversed.

  Suddenly he was being swung through the air as the chair was righted.

  “Was the fire set deliberately?”

  “Go to hell.” He could barely muster the words.

  With a curt laugh Zamir ruffled Xi’s hair, like you do to little children. Somehow that gesture was worse than the putter to the knee. It was humiliating.

  Zamir went behind the chair again. Xi’s muscles tensed involuntarily in preparation for the inevitable assault.

  Nothing happened.

  Five seconds became ten. Thirty stretched into a minute. Two minutes passed, three. And against every instinct Xi found himself relaxing. Zamir wasn’t going to do it. He didn’t have the balls—

  Xi Dong’s other knee, his good knee, dissolved into a sea of white-hot needles. The gag stifled his scream once more.

  “Was the fire set deliberately?”

  “Go to hell.”

  Zamir slapped him across the face. “I can do this all day.”

  “You’re dead . . . a dead man.”

  Another slap, harder. “Was the fire set deliberately?”

  Xi barely heard the question. He was slipping into the numbness of unconsciousness.

  At some point pain catapulted him from his stupor. His eyes slashed open. There was a table beside him now. No, not a table—an industrial drum of some sort. It was standing vertically. His left arm was strapped to the flat top with silver duct tape.

  His ring finger was gone, he noticed in a hazy epiphany of horror. Completely gone. The stump where the finger had been was spurting blood. Xi turned his head, not wanting to look at the butchery, and his eyes fell on Danny Zamir, who held a knife in one hand and the dismembered appendage in the other. The gold wedding band Zhang had given him winked in the feeble light.

  “I’m getting tired of this game, ben zona,” Zamir said. “I’m also getting hungry. So I’m going to ask you one final time whether the fire was set deliberately. But”—he shook the severed finger meaningfully—“I want you to think about your answer carefully. Because if you tell me to go to hell one more time, I’m going to go back to that nice little beach house of yours, round up your nice little wife and boy, and bring them here to join the party—”

  “No!” Xi hissed, though the word might only have been inside his head.

  The gag was torn away. He gulped in a mouthful of air.

  “What did you say?”

  “Ka-chun—”

  “Did you arrange the fire?”

  “Yes,” he breathed. He had no choice. He would die one hundred times to protect his son.

  The world went black again, inky. Xi heard a series of beeps. A cell phone? He heard words being spoken. Felt the phone press against his ear.

  “Don’t go away just yet, old man,” Zamir told him. “Your partner wants to have a word with you.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Wednesday, December 25, 2:58 p.m.

  Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

  Scarlett’s migraine was just waning when they arrived at Naabi Hill Gate, the eastern entrance to Serengeti National Park. The digging behind her left eye had been maddening for the past several hours, the gnome on the drill in a particularly evil mood. But the three aspirin she had taken seemed to have helped. So, too, had the big Dior sunglasses she wore to combat the migraine-induced photophobia.

  As the ranger drove them through the vast yellowish-brown grasslands, patches of blue sky began to form between the dreary clouds, lightening her mood. What buoyed her even more were all the animals they passed. Dozens of burly roan antelope with their ringed, sweptback horns hanging out beneath the branches of an umbrella tree. Ungainly looking Coke’s hartebeest, which were built like horses, grazing nervously on red grass. A harem of Bambi-like dik dik hiding within a patch of whistling thorn. At one point the ranger had to swerve to avoid hitting a warthog and her piglets, which had darted out across the muddy road, each of their little tails pointing skyward, like antennae.

  Along the way Scarlett snapped thirty or forty pictures, including two of Sal, which, admittedly, she did to irk him. She told him she was going to put them on her Facebook page, which irked him even more. Although he had acquiesced and said he would give Danny one last day to do whatever he was doing before he went to the police, she was still miffed with him. It didn’t make sense. She should have been happy with the compromise. But she wasn’t. She thought it was because Danny was still number one in Sal’s eyes. Sal was choosing Danny over her, or something like that. It was petty, but she couldn’t help it. She really didn’t like Danny Zamir.

  The ranger shouted over the noise of the engine for them to put on their seatbelts. Scarlett promptly obeyed, wondering what he knew that she didn’t. Suddenly the Land Rover swung off the dirt track they’d been following west and jerked over the uneven ground through a forest of strangler figs. The trees thinned and they emerged in a clearing shaded by an immense kopje. They stopped beside a doused bonfire. Sal paid the ranger whatever they had agreed upon, and he and Scarlett got out while Silly unloaded their luggage.

  Scarlett barely had time to give the ranger a tip before a bald, barrel-chested man dressed in khakis emerged from the nearby mess tent and called jovially, “Mr. Brazza? Miss Cox? Merry Christmas! And welcome to the Safari Moving Camp. Cooper’s the name, and wildebeest are the game!” He pumped both their hands with equal enthusiasm. “Sorry about the rough jaunt in, but it’s too dangerous to set up out in the open. You’ll understand if I don’t want to wake up smack-dab in the middle of a sea of wildebeest.”

  “We didn’t see any on the way in,” Scarlett said.

  “That’s because they haven’t arrived yet.”

  “Do they need an invitation?” Sal remarked.

  “Predicting where the herd is going to be isn’t an exact science, Mr. Brazza. They follow a general migr
ation pattern. But their speed and direction are determined just as much by the weather. Where it’s raining, to be precise. They may congregate in one area for two days or five days, it’s impossible to say for certain.”

  “So you’re saying we’re not in the right position?”

  “Oh, we’re in the right position. They’ll be coming down this way, that’s for sure. They just might not be getting here today, that’s all.”

  “But we’re only here for one day,” Scarlett pointed out.

  “Don’t you worry about a thing, love. That’s why we have the balloon. As soon as you’re ready to go, I’ll show you more of those ugly beasts than you can count. In the meantime, come with me.” He led them to the mess tent. “Kitoi!” he bellowed. “Get out here and meet our guests.”

  A lanky black man wearing loose trousers and a plaid button-down shirt emerged through the zippered door.

  “This is Kitoi,” Cooper announced. “Or Kit, if you can stand being affectionate toward him. He’s my tracker, and the best I’ve ever seen. He can follow the spoor of a chipmunk through Times Square.”

  Kitoi smiled at the compliment, showing very white teeth. “That is true. Without me, Mr. Cooper cannot even find his boots in the morning.”

  “His English is better than his humor. Now, let’s head around the tent. You’re late for lunch. Mind you, watch where you step.”

  “Snakes?” Scarlett said.

  “Shit. Great piles of it, love. Giraffe, rhino, elephant—you name it.”

  They arrived at a small outdoor table done up with a red-and-green tablecloth, red candles, china, crystal, and silver. Scarlett appreciated the Christmas touch. Kitoi apologized for not having turkey and served them duckling sautéed in curry tomato sauce, cooked bananas, potatoes, cassava, ugali made with white cornmeal, and papaya for dessert. A couple lilac-breasted rollers and ring-necked doves hovered nearby throughout the meal. Scarlett suspected they were either hungry themselves or trying to see if it was their buddy on the menu. After the late lunch, all four of them packed into the double cab of a Toyota Hilux and drove to an open patch of grassland about a mile from camp.