Legacy of Fear Read online

  Cover

  Legacy of Fear

  Andra Vandersan is an expert code breaker, as fiercely independent and beautiful as she is brilliant. Working at the highest levels of deciphering, she’s always remained at a safe distance from the seamy underworld of Hong Kong’s criminal elite—but that’s about to change. When her next-door neighbor is brutally murdered in a way that suggests the work of the Chinese triads, two things become clear: Andra was the intended target of the hit, and the assassin is going to return.

  Max True is a world-class linguist, a colleague of Andra’s who once helped her break a code that would destroy a terrorist cell. When he shows up at Andra’s door with a mysterious message, they realize they may have stumbled on a long-lost women’s language that holds the secret to incredible power—and one that the most vicious men in Hong Kong will stop at nothing to get their hands on.

  As Andra and Max work to solve the puzzle of the language, they find themselves in a desperate race against time to escape the mysterious forces who all want the secret of the message—even as they surrender to the forces of an undeniable passion that brings them inexorably and irrevocably together.

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Ryshia Kennie

  Material excerpted from Intent to Kill copyright © 2013 by Ryshia Kennie

  Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  ISBN: 978-1-940846-36-1

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Excerpt from Intent to Kill

  Books by Ryshia Kennie

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The late afternoon sun flirted with the pallid flesh. An arm stretched out from inside the rust-clotted corrugated steel, the fingers curled thick and chunky. Not ten feet away, the shooter’s revolver winked in the sunlight as the second blast echoed through the piles of discarded steel that stretched over a large field.

  The body jerked and then lay still.

  The man slipped the gun into a holster inside his tailored jacket, turned his back and walked away, his pace slow and thoughtful as he headed toward the sleek black Audi that would take him back to the heart of the city. There was no fear of discovery; the pipe factory had been closed for longer than it had been open and the dead man would be forgotten long before his body was found.

  • • •

  Thirty miles away, sirens bit through the steady hum of Hong Kong traffic. Their shrill presence was muted by the noise of the traffic. Max True looked over his shoulder and out the back window of the cab, where a block away the blue flashing lights of an approaching ambulance battled for space on an already crowded road. He could see red and blue flashing lights as the police quickly closed in behind it. An emergency in Hong Kong was not unusual. It was the third police car he’d seen since hailing the cab at his hotel over twenty minutes ago, and the second ambulance. From what he remembered of past visits, this was a quiet day. He shifted the satchel. The doll inside it was awkward; it was either jabbing his side or forcing him to place his arm at an awkward angle.

  Find my heart. Find my girl.

  He thought of the note as he glanced over his shoulder again. Throughout the entire journey he’d had the disturbing feeling that he’d been followed.

  “It’s your imagination,” he told himself as he instructed the cabbie to stop a few blocks away from his destination. He needed time to gather his thoughts. A woman glanced briefly at him, her smooth face denying any sign of age, her dark eyes shifting quickly to the sidewalk. Ahead of him, not half a block away, a high-rise pushed forty stories into the mid-afternoon sky. Beside it a lower-rise apartment with a brick façade, its first two floors obliterated in a curtain of bamboo scaffolding and green mesh, leaned with an almost defeated list like a small, injured bird as its more modern contemporaries crowded around it.

  He swept too-long hair from his eyes. It was pointless. The hair flopped back into his line of vision.

  He passed the bamboo scaffold and green-mesh-covered apartment building and the modern-edged high-rise, rounded the corner and walked another half block of a surprisingly uncongested sidewalk before he could see the smog-muted brick of her apartment building. The sirens wailed as the emergency vehicle overtook and passed him, and stopped two minutes later at exactly his destination.

  It felt like both his heart and his breath had ceased in that moment. He clutched the satchel with one hand while the other hand fisted.

  The unmistakable blue shirt and black pants of the local police faced him as they hurled orders and the glass-plated apartment doors were flung open. From what he could see, it was organized mayhem.

  “Excuse me,” he began, intending to address the police officer directly nearest to him. What the hell could be going on?

  “Get back!” the police officer ordered with an abrupt windmill-like motion of his hand.

  Behind him doors slammed and lights flashed. The red and blue bobbles of the emergency vehicles glazed the concrete with a mixture of hollow light. A stretcher was unloaded and dropped onto the sidewalk. The metal wheels clattered as the ambulance attendants sprang into motion.

  Andra Vandersan.

  His heart raced. He could only hope she was unhurt as he clutched the satchel, hovered on the periphery of a small group of pedestrians, and waited for a chance to slip past the police guarding the perimeter of what was obviously a crime scene.

  • • •

  Andra stood back as the police arrived and were followed closely by the ambulance attendants.

  “Over there.” She pointed with a shaking finger. “I found her,” she said in a rush to get the words out. “It was too quiet and the door was open.” She chafed
her forearm. “She screamed, I think.” She knotted her fingers. “I’m not sure any more what I heard. I . . . I shouldn’t have waited.”

  “You said she screamed?” The police officer paused as his partner stood, one hand on his belt. Both officers looked at her, one with impatience, the other with some interest. His dark eyes scrutinized her as his gray hair seemed to glint even in the shadowed light of the apartment’s narrow entrance.

  “I think so. I don’t know anymore.”

  The police officer nodded; his partner was silent. The medics moved in, pushing past her.

  “If I’d checked earlier . . .” She drew a strand of hair off her forehead. “Maybe she’d still be alive.”

  “We’ll take a full report later, ma’am. Now, if you could just stand back.”

  She nodded and bit the edge of her thumbnail. She dropped her hand. “There was noise, thumping, more noise than usual. I thought . . . Oh, God.” She wrapped her arms under her chest.

  “Just stay here, ma’am, I’ll take a full statement later,” the officer repeated.

  “All right.” She shook her head. She couldn’t seem to stop talking. “Why didn’t I know her better? She was my neighbor and I never had her over, never . . .” Her voice trailed off and she dashed what she hoped were the last of the tears from her eyes.

  She pushed up against the wall of the bachelor apartment. Only the swirl of officials in the room, the three police officers, two medics and a cluster of official-looking people, seemed to bring any reality to her. And in the midst of all that, hidden behind badges and uniforms, was her neighbor—Margaret. Dead on her tiny kitchen floor, pieces of an uneaten ham sandwich strewn around her.

  It was fifteen minutes before the same police officer she had spoken to earlier came over. “You don’t mind if I record this?”

  She shook her head.

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  She wiped another tear. “Not much. I know that sounds odd, we were neighbors and all, but we mostly said hello in the hallways. I never socialized with her or anything.” She chafed her elbows. “She’s an expat like me but she wasn’t a close friend. She’d only been here four months. But I suppose you might already know that.” She shook her head. “Other than how I found her, like I told you earlier, I can’t say much more except that she’d mentioned she came from Baltimore. I believe she has a brother there but she never mentioned his name.”

  “Any enemies.”

  Again she shook her head. She wiped the tears with the back of her hand. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine she would have. But I really don’t know.”

  “Anything else? About the deceased specifically, her habits, anything.”

  “There’s nothing more I can tell you,” she assured the officer. “I arrived to find her already gone.” Two police officers hovered by the doorway, the others seeming to have filtered out of the room in the last few minutes. She looked away as Margaret’s body was loaded onto the stretcher. “Was it gang-related?” she whispered.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Her throat was slit in a way that the triads might.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I lived here as a child,” Andra clarified. “Moved back to the States and then returned as an adult. I’ve been here ten years. One becomes familiar with the triads, if only through the media.”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.” He glanced down at his notes. “Had you spoken to her in the week prior to her death?”

  “No.” Andra shook her head. “We passed in the hallway and said hello a few days ago. That was it.”

  “And you heard noises next door?”

  “Yes. I heard a crash. I assume that’s when she . . . fell.” She choked out the last word and for the first time since she’d found the body, her knees shook and she had to concentrate to remain on her feet. “The scream . . . I don’t know.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No, not about the scream. About everything else, yes.”

  “What else?”

  The door was ajar. She didn’t answer my knock.” She remembered how the door had eased open as if someone from the other side, as if . . . She shook her head trying to clear her mind of the macabre thoughts.

  “Had you seen anyone strange around the building?”

  Faces reeled through Andra’s mind. “No . . . yes. Wait, I saw one man a few days ago and then again yesterday—a young man, thin and maybe a few inches taller than me, twenty or so with a slightly scarred face—acne, I think, and a beige nylon jacket. He could have been visiting someone, I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders and her stomach heaved and for a second threatened to give up the small meal she’d had an hour earlier. “I remember him over anyone else who was a stranger to me only because I saw him twice.”

  “Did you exchange words with him or notice any unusual behavior?”

  “No.” She shook her head.

  “Any reason you know of that someone would want to kill Miss Langford?”

  Andra stopped for a moment. “I knew her name was Langford but . . . It’s just so odd to hear it. I . . .” Again she shook her head. “I wish I’d spoken to her more but I’ve been caught up with a project translating recently discovered messages that were slipped across enemy lines during World War Two and . . .” She looked up. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. Margaret mentioned nothing to me. Like I said, we weren’t that close.

  “Anything else?”

  She shook her head. “No. I wish there was. Oh, she taught English as a Second Language at the Chay-Lan Institute. We had a shared interest in language, language is a kind of code.” She stopped, her hand flitting to her mouth and then dropping. “And I know so little about her.”

  “Is there anyone else we can contact? Friends maybe?”

  “Other than the brother, I don’t know.”

  She shuddered when she finally closed her apartment door and faced a room that was, décor aside, a mirror reflection of Margaret’s. Her arms were folded tight as if that would offer some protection. A knot seemed stuck in her gut—maybe the tears she couldn’t shed, maybe guilt at her inability to stop a tragedy—she couldn’t identify it and yet the feeling bore an odd resemblance to how she had felt at other times when she had faced loss and tragedy or pain in her life; her parents, her siblings. She’d mentally built a wall and stored her emotions tightly in the furthest corner behind it.

  She drew in a straggled breath. This was not the same. Why would someone kill Margaret? What did she have that was valuable? It made no sense.

  She raised a shaky hand to her forehead. It was cool despite the heat in the poorly ventilated building. She supposed she might, all things considered, be in shock. The intercom buzzed and she jumped. She let out a small shriek as the tinny alarm sounded again.

  She punched the button. “Hello?”

  “Andra Vandersan?”

  “Max?” She drew in a relieved breath. “I’d recognize your voice anywhere. You got in what, five hours ago? I forgot . . . Oh, God, never mind. I’ll just buzz you up.”

  Chapter Two

  The door was dark with the stain of too many hands and years imprinted on it. It swung open and light spilled into the narrow hallway, and for the first time Max laid eyes on his colleague.

  “Andra?”

  Her whole appearance was a surprise. Despite speaking with her online a number of times and numerous phone conversations and e-mails, in person she was not quite what he’d expected. She was lithe and elegant with long dark hair wound in a half-up, half-down style and her skin was porcelain, like she had never looked at the sun. Somehow, the computer screen hadn’t been as clear.

  Her eyes met his, dark gray eyes with just a startling fleck of blue. And her legs were endless and bare as she stood in a multicolored floral sundress and pink flip-flops. He dragged his gaze back to her face.

  “Are you all right? I saw the ambulance, the police. They weren’t letting anyone in.” He ran a thumb along the strap
of his leather, age-softened satchel. “I’ve been outside waiting.”

  “I’m fine.” But she clutched her arms under her chest as if warding off further grief. “Max.” Her voice had a quiver to it. “I’m so glad to see you. How was the flight? I checked and saw there was a delay in the takeoff out of Pennsylvania. I can’t imagine that was too pleasant.”

  “One word to describe it, long,” he said and smiled when all he wanted to do was hug her. Instead he found her hand in his as they shook hands and she looked at him with a sad smile that never reached her eyes. It wasn’t enough. He drew her into his arms, holding her slight and trembling against him. This moment had been too long coming. The bag bumped against her.

  “I’m sorry.” He let her go as he shifted the bag to his other hand.

  “Yes, my linguistic friend. At last we meet.” Her words were without enthusiasm as she stepped back, her full lips taut. “Unless you can call our online conversations meeting.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I remember our first conversation. Despite your qualifications with a doctorate in linguistics, and a professor at Penn, I thought you’d be no help whatsoever . . .”

  “Whoa.” He smiled and held up his hand.

  “Well, you have to admit I hadn’t had any luck with academia before.”

  “And you painted us all with the same brush.”

  “I did. And instead, between us we managed to crack the code that allowed authorities to stop a terrorist cell . . .”

  “I remember, but we can talk about this another time.” He shifted his satchel as the bulge in one side continued to bump his thigh. “I arrived at a completely inappropriate time. I’m sorry . . . a murder in your apartment building. Shocking.”

  “She was a neighbor. Not that I knew her well.” Her lips pinched together and a line bracketed around her mouth. “They interviewed all of us. Door to door, I believe. I don’t know, I was still in her apartment so I was first, as I found the body.”