Shadow of the Dragon полностью

Clark turned, spotting the girl first. She moved quickly, not running, but clearly trying to make time. Apparently unaware that the European was closing in on her, she looked over her shoulder at every other step. She knew somebody was out there, hunting her. Her yellow T-shirt had seen better days. Sagging at the collar and torn in several places, it looked to have been used as a rag to wipe the girl’s grimy face as much as an article of clothing. Filthy denim shorts were cut high, revealing a map of faded bruises on her thighs. She wore heavy eye makeup, but no shoes. A band of pale skin stood out starkly from the otherwise olive complexion of her wrist, where she’d once worn a watch.

“I’ll go after her,” Lisanne said, already walking, showing Clark a grim smile. “You’re liable to scare her.”

“Copy that,” Clark said, moving to intercept the oncoming European. He was close, so it didn’t take long.

Clark got a clear glimpse of a pair of flex-cuffs protruding from the European’s pocket — and the black butterfly knife in the man’s clenched fist. It was closed now, as the European made his way through the crowd, but with a flick of his wrist, he could flip it open in an instant. It was a wicked little weapon, devastatingly effective in the right hands. And not at all likely to be carried by any sort of law enforcement in the process of arresting a fleeing teenage girl.

Certain now that the European had nothing but bad intentions, Clark jostled him lightly as he went by. There were plenty of non-Asians in the crowd, and the European gave the gray-haired Clark no more than a passing grunt for getting in his way.

The man had just begun to push off with his trailing foot when Clark drove the heel of a boot straight into his Achilles tendon.

Cursing in Slovakian, the man sagged, instinctively moving to shield his injury. With all the weight now on the man’s forward leg, Clark gave him a brutal side kick. Human knees were not designed for lateral movement, and the ligaments and cartilage fairly exploded. Clark snatched away the butterfly knife. It had all happened so quickly and the man was so immersed in pain that there was a good chance he wasn’t completely sure Clark was the person responsible for his injuries.

The crowd closed in around him as he fell, and Clark, as was his habit, melted into the shadows. Lisanne was still out there, watching out for the fleeing girl.

Clark found them less than a hundred feet away, at the edge of the no-haggle area where blue-smocked salespeople charged fixed prices for their wares.

Clark pushed his way through a knot of concerned gawkers — local Vietnamese and assorted tourists — to find another European flat on his back, unconscious, blood weeping from the burst flesh above a bushy black eyebrow. This one was shorter than the partner Clark had dealt with, broader, with the flattened face of a boxer — for all the good it had done him.

Clark scanned for other threats, but no one stood out. A frumpy saleswoman in a sky-blue smock held up her phone and rattled off something in Vietnamese. Clark recognized the word for police.

A frail Vietnamese woman who looked to be in her fifties clucked her way through the crowd. She wore a nun’s headscarf and a sincere but stern look that Clark knew all too well from his childhood. The frightened girl stepped from around Lisanne at the sight of the nun and rushed into her arms, tears and words pouring out of her. Clark caught part of it, but his Vietnamese language skills had grown worse than rusty after all these years. The sobbing didn’t help.

He shot Lisanne a look and nodded toward the market. Both knew any contact with the local gendarmerie would gain them unwanted attention that they didn’t need. The rest of The Campus would be working here for a week, and he and his new operative still had a lot of work to do.

The nun enveloped the girl with her arm, like the wing of a mother hen, and led her back the way she’d come, disappearing in the mass of humanity. Evidently, she didn’t want to get involved with the police, either.

“She’d come to meet the sister,” Clark said, tipping his head toward the nun.

“I only got to talk to her for a couple of seconds,” Lisanne said. “But as I understand it, those guys were pimping her out at a couple of the local hotels. They’d brought her to meet a client across the street and she bailed on them… At least, that’s what I think she said. Her English wasn’t much better than my Vietnamese.”

Clark walked beside her, turning down a narrow alley made of bolts of colorful cloth stacked nearly to the ceiling.

“You made short work of the hairy guy,” Clark observed. “I’ll be interested to hear how you did it.”

“Sure,” Lisanne said, smiling. “Remember that upright cement post where I was standing?”

“I do,” Clark said, seeing where this was going.