Jade Island by Lowell Elizabeth

Author:Lowell, Elizabeth [Lowell, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary, Romance Suspense, Fiction
ISBN: 9780061745539
Publisher: Avon
Published: 1999-04-06T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

The guard at the Institute of Asian Communications dock was unarmed, polite, and immovable until an invitation came from Han Seng for the Tomorrow to tie up. Then the guard escorted them to the executive pavilion, rang the bell, and waited for someone to come and take the visitors off his hands.

Gleaming in the twilight, the pavilion was a surprisingly successful combination of glass walls, cedar pillars, and Oriental rooflines. The evergreen-scented air was clean and crisp, with a delicious tang of ocean. The view to the south was two hundred degrees of salt water, complete with commercial shipping lanes, navigation buoys, pleasure craft, and rugged, fir-covered islands. The closest islands were uninhabited; Jade Island was one of them. Other than passing ships and a few houses on the shores of distant islands, little light showed except the moon rising through slate-colored clouds.

“Nice view,” Kyle said, resettling a heavy carton of jade in his arms.

The guard didn’t answer.

Neither did Lianne. She was wondering just where Seng was throwing his party. The executive pavilion had a few lights on. So did another part of the institute’s complex, but there was none of the noise that she had expected. Either the soundproofing was as spectacular as the view or the party was a dud.

A middle-aged man whose clothes weren’t up to the expensive standards of the institute cracked the pavilion’s heavy cedar door and peered out. As the door swung fully open, the smell of Chinese tobacco rolled over Kyle and Lianne. There was another man sitting ten feet inside the door, a younger man, Chinese, unsmiling. Even though his clothes were flamboyantly expensive, the tailor hadn’t been able to conceal the cannon under the man’s left arm. “Entry here is pleasure,” the middle-aged man said in barely recognizable English. “I to Mr. Han are cousin.” Lianne answered in Mandarin. “Thank you. There is no need to disturb Mr. Han. I know he is very busy tonight and we are early in any case. Just take us to the room where he has set out his jade for me to see.”

“No possibly,” the man said in English, turning away. “Stay.”

Lianne tried Cantonese, but he just kept walking. The other man, the one with the badly concealed gun, didn’t move from his chair. He simply watched them with black, unflinching eyes.

“No common language with the cousin?” Kyle asked Lianne quietly.

“Several,” she said in a clipped tone. “That’s Han Ju, Han Seng’s shirttail cousin and personal assistant. Ju speaks Mandarin and understands Cantonese. He’s simply being rude.”

“Does that mean Seng isn’t thrilled that you came on your own boat with a colleague?”

“Probably.”

“Tough.”

Lianne glanced up at Kyle. The open pleasure he had shown in her and the salmon was gone. Now his expression was shuttered, measuring everything and everyone with a probing intelligence that made no allowances for human frailty. He seemed older, harder, colder. Like Archer, who had been the only Donovan not to accept her with real warmth last night. “You look like your brother,” she said.

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