Rain poured down on Lake Street as though the sky had burst open.
Broken glass mixed with bloody water across the ground, gleaming sickeningly beneath the yellow streetlights.
Bullseye crouched behind the tire of the armored SUV, half his face hidden in shadow. He stared fixedly at the mangled roll-up door of 22 Lake Street. The first assault team-five fully armed elite fighters-had been reduced to a heap of mangled flesh in less than ten seconds.
The Asian man inside controlled his submachine gun's recoil as steadily as a fixed gun mount.
A frontal assault wouldn't work.
Bullseye gestured, pressing two fingers together and lowering them.
The gangsters behind him immediately understood. They put away their HK416s, pulled several cylindrical metal canisters from their tactical vests, and yanked out the pins.
Rattle, rattle-
Three tear gas canisters and two flashbangs rolled precisely through the broken gap in the roll-up door and into the clinic.
"Close your eyes! Cover your ears!" Frank's roar erupted inside the clinic.
Whump!
Blinding white light and a blast loud enough to rupture eardrums erupted in the enclosed basement. Immediately afterward, highly concentrated white tear gas gushed out like a fountain, swallowing the entire space in an instant.
No matter how strong Jessica was, her lungs were still those of a carbon-based organism.
The moment the concentrated chemical irritant entered her nose, she felt as though she had swallowed a handful of red-hot broken glass. Tears streamed uncontrollably down her face. She coughed so violently that she could no longer hold the iron pipe, and it clattered to the floor.
"Cough, cough... fuck! Those sewer-dwelling bastards!" Jessica clutched her throat and staggered toward the corner, her vision completely obscured by white smoke.
Frank reacted fast. He tore a strip from the hem of the cotton shirt beneath his tactical vest, hastily soaked it in the nearby sink, and pressed it firmly over his nose and mouth. With one hand, he racked the fore-end of his Remington shotgun.
Click.
A buckshot shell slid into the chamber.
Frank's gaze turned ice-cold. He knew this tactic all too well: use gas to force the targets to move. The men outside would already have overlapping fields of fire established. The moment they showed themselves, they would be riddled with bullets.
Their only chance was to charge out before the gas completely impaired their motor function and trade their lives for the enemy's.
He hunched forward, muscles taut, ready to charge.
"Catch."
An utterly calm voice sounded through the thick smoke.
Something flashed before Frank's eyes. A black object pierced the white haze, flying straight at his face. He instinctively reached out and caught it.
He looked down.
It was a streamlined gas mask with a distinctly futuristic design. Its shell was made from some lightweight matte alloy, and a faint blue light glimmered around the breathing valve.
"Polymer Carbon Crystal Filter Mask." Yang Ming's voice came from deep within the white haze, steady and without so much as a cough. "It can filter vx nerve gas. Put it on. I don't want to have to perform lung lavage on you."
Frank froze for half a second.
Without wasting a word, he pressed the mask onto his face.
Cool air instantly flowed into his nose, sweeping away the burning sensation of the chemical gas.
On the other side, Jessica also found the mask Yang Ming had thrown her and fumbled it onto her face. She took a deep breath of clean, filtered air and finally stopped coughing as though she were about to hack up her lungs.
Yang Ming stood behind the load-bearing wall.
He, too, wore a Stark Gas Mask. The dark silver ring at the base of his right index finger glimmered faintly, then dimmed.
He did not even look outside.
World-Class Firearms Mastery worked furiously in his mind. Yang Ming closed his eyes.
With sight stripped away, his hearing sharpened immeasurably.
The patter of raindrops striking the car roof.
The splash of tactical boots breaking through standing water.
And... thirteen meters away, behind the armored SUV, an exceptionally steady heartbeat brimming with murderous intent. Along with the faint sound of fingertips rubbing against a metal dart.
Wind direction: southeast.
Wind speed: 3.2 meters per second.
Humidity: 98%.
Yang Ming's brain operated like a precision ballistics computer. He slowly raised the Thompson submachine gun in his hands.
Outside the door.
Bullseye lay in wait like a venomous snake. He held a specially crafted steel dart coated with amazonian arrow poison tree extract. The moment someone inside could no longer stand the gas and rushed out, that dart would pierce the Asian underground doctor's throat in a tenth of a second.
"He's coming out!" a henchman shouted excitedly.
A dark shape flickered at the edge of the smoke.
Bullseye suddenly leaned halfway out from behind the SUV, his back and waist muscles drawn taut like a bowstring as he turned his wrist.
Half a second before he unleashed the throw.
Bang!
A single, startlingly abrupt gunshot rang out inside the clinic.
The bullet tore through the white haze and flew out with a piercing shriek.
Bullseye's heart clenched. But he realized the bullet was not aimed at him at all. Its trajectory was wildly off, heading toward a point seven or eight meters above his head.
Had he missed?
No.
Clang!
The sharp sound of metal snapping rang out above Bullseye's head.
It was a heavy cast-iron streetlamp left over from the Victorian Era. Years of exposure to wind and rain had badly corroded the bolts at its joints. Yang Ming's shot had struck with extraordinary precision, shattering the last point supporting its weight.
The fifty-pound cast-iron lamp housing plunged straight toward the top of Bullseye's skull, the wind howling around it.
Bullseye's scalp prickled.
His throwing motion was violently interrupted. He desperately rolled to his right.
Crash!
The cast-iron housing slammed into the spot where he had just stood, gouging a deep pit in the asphalt and scattering fragments of iron in every direction.
With his throw forcibly interrupted, the poisoned dart in Bullseye's hand lost its accuracy. It grazed the doorframe and flew into the clinic, embedding itself in the brick wall with a thunk, its tail vibrating violently.
Bullseye rolled through the muddy water and dropped to one knee, about to raise his head and locate his target.
The curtain of rain before him suddenly warped in an eerie way.
It was as though some invisible force had folded space.
There were no footsteps, no sound of breathing.
Bullseye's battle-honed assassin instincts screamed a warning, every hair on his body standing on end. He drew a tactical knife from his waist with a reverse grip and, without looking, slashed viciously at the air in front of him on instinct.
The blade sliced through the rain and struck nothing.
The next second.
A hand wearing a black Kevlar cut-resistant glove emerged from empty air and seized Bullseye's knife-wielding wrist.
Its strength was astonishing, like a hydraulic clamp.
Then a corner of the silver Optical Camouflage Medical Blanket lifted.
Yang Ming's masked face, his eyes cold as ice, appeared close to Bullseye without warning. Less than twenty centimeters separated them.
A dark gray high-carbon titanium-alloy scalpel was already pressed firmly against Bullseye's carotid artery. The blade broke the skin, and a thin trickle of blood slid along its edge.
"Your dart," Yang Ming said through the mask's voice transmitter, his voice carrying a metallic chill, "isn't as fast as my blade."
Bullseye's pupils contracted sharply.
He wanted to resist, to reach for the backup weapon at the small of his back with his other hand.
Too late.
Yang Ming gave him no chance to fight back. Rather than cutting with the scalpel pressed against Bullseye's neck, he reversed it and struck Bullseye's carotid sinus with the handle, brutally and with pinpoint precision.
This was the body's blood-pressure control center, packed with pressure receptors.
The instant the blow landed, Bullseye's vagus nerve fired wildly. His heart rate plummeted, and his blood pressure collapsed.
The blood supply to his brain stopped.
Bullseye did not even grunt. His eyes rolled back, and he collapsed like a heap of sludge into the oil-slicked standing water, completely unconscious.
Kingpin's most terrifying assassin had been captured alive in less than ten seconds face-to-face.
The dozen or so gangsters remaining on the street stared in stunned disbelief.
The boss they were so proud of, that remorseless killing machine, had gone down like a dead dog after a doctor struck his neck once with a knife handle?
"Run... run!"
Someone broke down and screamed.
The gang's morale crumbled instantly. No one cared about Kingpin's orders anymore. The dozen or so men abandoned their heavy weapons and scrambled into the rainy night, wishing they had another pair of legs.
Yang Ming did not pursue them.
He shook out the Invisibility Blanket in his hand and returned it to his Storage Ring.
Bending down, he grabbed the back collar of Bullseye's combat suit with his left hand and dragged the nearly two-hundred-pound man all the way back into the clinic like a dead pig.