Hunt Among the Killers of Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t kid yourself. You clear the paperwork and I kick down the doors.”
    “You really think,” Michael said, “there’s a second terra-cotta army out there no one’s ever seen, waiting to be discovered.”
    “I do,” Gabriel said. “And even if there isn’t, there’s a young woman out there who’s going to get herself arrested and executed for trying to kill somebody who, as you point out, we don’t even know has done anything—not to her, at least.”
    “This is the girlfriend of your…what was she again, one of your nurses in the hospital in Khartoum?”
    Gabriel had made up a story, at Lucy’s request; she didn’t want Michael to know she was in New York. So Gabriel had, but he unfortunately no longer remembered what it was he’d said. “Something like that. Look, Michael, it won’t cost much—”
    “It’s not about the money, Gabriel. It’s the principle of the thing.”
    “I agree. And as a matter of principle, I don’t like to let innocent people get themselves killed when I can prevent it.”
    “I suppose,” Michael said in a resigned tone, “you’ll be taking the jet.”
    “Yes,” said Gabriel. “For two reasons. One: I can’t go as you on a commercial flight—they’ll check my passport.”
    “What’s the other reason?”
    “Because I don’t want to run this through baggage check.”
    Gabriel hoisted up his work-belt, worn around the world in one situation or another. It was tooled steerhide with faded intaglio, furry at some of the rivets, an old friend and constant companion that had seen him through more than one tough scrape. Lashed to the belt was a big holster. Sheathed inside was an even bigger sidearm, itself a pricey antique, Gabriel’s own restored single-action Colt Peacemaker—a first-generation Cavalry model circa 1880 with the 7 1/2-inch barrel, chambered for the .45 “Long Colt” cartridge. The original heavily distressed ivory grips had been replaced, by Gabriel himself, with burnished mahogany.
    Nearly two centuries ago, Samuel Colt had been the man who did not understand the meaning of the word “impossible” when naysayers told him the idea of a repeating handgun could never be realized. While he did not actually invent the revolver, he won his first patent in the early 1800s and was instrumental in introducing the use of interchangeable, mass-produced parts.
    Whenever people said “impossible,” or that a thing should not be done or could not be done, Gabriel always thought of old Sam Colt.
    Michael was staring at his older brother with an odd tilt of his head, like an explorer mantis or a curiouspuppy. “Okay,” he began carefully. “What part aren’t you telling me? What are you leaving out?”
    “There is one thing,” Gabriel said.
    “I knew it.”
    “The name of the man behind the second terra-cotta army,” said Gabriel, not without a dramatic flourish. “It’s Kangxi Shih-k’ai, Michael. The Favored Son of China. The last real-man warlord before the modern world stomped them down. The Vlad the Impaler of Chinese history—the history that the Cultural Committee never talks about during stuff like the Olympics. We’re not talking about an ordinary monarch, Michael. We’re talking about one of the most frightening figures of his time, or any time. You remember what he called his champions while he was alive?”
    “The Killers of Men,” Michael murmured.
    “The Killers of Men, that’s right. And this is the man who constructed a second terra-cotta army as a monument to his ego, and nobody has ever seen it. Can you imagine what those figures must be like? Wouldn’t you want us to be the first in the world to see them, to bring them to light?”
    Gabriel hefted an original hardcover first edition of Space, Time & Earthly Gods by Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt, first published in 1982, the year their daughter Lucy had been born. “Take a closer look at Appendix III—the one where they listed what they thought were the greatest