Corporal Riley had come to understand the nature of cages. He had been a prisoner in Yuan Shikai's townhouse, a prisoner of his own guilt, and now, he was a prisoner in a quiet, nondescript safe house in a leafy suburb of St. Louis. This cage was the most comfortable, and the most maddening. He was a pawn, a valuable piece in a game whose rules he did not understand, being held by American military intelligence, waiting to be traded or sacrificed at the convenience of powerful men.
But Riley, tormented by the ghosts of the men who had died in the Appalachian Fire, and by the blood of the Chinese agents killed in the flophouse, had decided he would be a pawn no longer. He wanted to confess. Not to a quiet man in a dark room, but to the world. He wanted to unburden his soul. He had a desperate, half-mad plan. He would escape his comfortable prison, make his way to the World's Fair, and find the press corps that was covering the Olympic Games. He would tell them everything.
On the morning of the Marathon, he made his move. He slipped out of the safe house, using his old Marine skills to evade the two distracted handlers watching him, and melted into the bustling crowds that were surging toward the fairgrounds.
His escape did not go unnoticed for long. The alarm was raised, and within minutes, two separate, deadly hunts began.
In an elegant suite at the Jefferson Hotel, Madame Song received the news. Her network of informants, which she had swiftly and expensively established in St. Louis, had reported the American intelligence safe house was in chaos. The asset was in the wind. Her orders from Yuan Shikai were absolute: Riley could not be allowed to talk. She dispatched her best team of enforcers, the same ruthless men who had shot up the Tianjin flophouse, with a single, simple command: find him and kill him.
Across town, in a discreet command post set up by the Ministry of State Security, Section Chief Ling received the same intelligence. His mission was far more complex and delicate. The Emperor's negotiations with the Americans were at a critical stage. A public assassination of a key witness on American soil would be a diplomatic catastrophe. But Riley's public confession would be even worse. Ling's new orders were a paradox: he had to capture Riley alive and silence him, preventing both Yuan's assassins and Riley's own desperate plan from succeeding.
The great city of St. Louis, and the sprawling grounds of the World's Fair, became the hunting ground for a three-way shadow war.
The chase took place against the surreal, almost hallucinatory backdrop of the 1904 Olympic Marathon. It was a race that would go down in history as one of the most bizarre and disastrous sporting events ever held. The runners were forced to compete in blistering, near-100-degree heat, over dusty, unpaved country roads that were still open to motorcars and horse-drawn carriages. The air was thick with dust kicked up by the vehicles, choking the runners. Water was provided at only two spots along the entire 25-mile course. It was less an athletic event and more a brutal test of human endurance and sheer, dumb luck.
This real-world chaos provided the perfect cover for the hunters and the hunted.
Riley, a trained Marine in peak physical condition, was a difficult quarry. He moved through the dense, cheering crowds with a runner's stamina and a soldier's purpose. He knew his only chance was to reach the finish line at the Olympic stadium, where the world's press was gathered.
Yuan's assassins were phantoms in the crowd, their eyes scanning for their target, their hands never far from the concealed weapons beneath their jackets. At one point, one of them, a man with a scarred face, had a clear shot at Riley as he paused by a water vendor. But just as he was about to draw his pistol, two men from Ling's team, posing as drunken fair-goers, stumbled into him, jostling him and whispering a threat in his ear before melting back into the crowd. A silent, brutal turf war was being fought amidst the celebration.
The chase became a desperate, running battle along the marathon route itself. Riley, seeing a gap in the crowd, leaped onto the dusty road, weaving his way between the exhausted, staggering runners. An American runner, delirious from heatstroke, saw Riley and believed him to be a rival, attempting to take a swing at him before collapsing in a heap. A Cuban runner was chased off the course by a pack of stray dogs, creating a diversion that allowed Riley to gain a few precious yards.
The three factions converged near Francis Field, the Olympic stadium where the race was set to finish. Riley could see the grandstands, could hear the roar of the crowd. He was so close. He was cornered near a refreshment stand, with two of Madame Song's men closing in from one side and Ling's agents from the other.
He made a final, desperate break, sprinting across an open plaza toward the main entrance of the stadium. Madame Song's top assassin, the scarred man, saw his chance. He had a clear line of sight. He raised his pistol, concealing it behind a folded newspaper.
Just as he was about to squeeze the trigger, a body slammed into him. It was Section Chief Ling. A silent, vicious, and expert hand-to-hand fight erupted in the shadow of a grand pavilion. It was a deadly ballet of violence, completely hidden from the cheering, oblivious crowds just feet away. Ling, trained in the Emperor's elite schools, was the superior fighter, but the assassin was a desperate, brutal brawler.
Riley, seeing his chance in the chaos, sprinted for the finish line, for the reporters, for the end of his torment. He was yards away. He could see the flashbulbs of the cameras.
At that exact moment, a large, black motorcar, one of the official vehicles that had been following the race, suddenly swerved, its tires skidding on the dirt, and cut him off, blocking his path. The back door swung open. The man inside was an American, grim-faced, dressed in a dark, severe suit. He was one of Elihu Root's personal agents from the Military Intelligence Division.
"Corporal Riley," the man said, his voice calm and utterly authoritative. "Get in the car. The Secretary of War would like a word."
Riley froze, his desperate sprint coming to an abrupt halt. He looked at the chaos behind him, the two groups of Chinese killers locked in a deadly struggle. He looked at the finish line, so close and yet so far. And he looked at the open door of the car, an offer of a different kind of cage, but a cage that promised, for the moment, survival.
He stumbled into the car. The door slammed shut. The vehicle accelerated smoothly, disappearing into the chaos of the fairgrounds just as the first official marathon runner, a man named Thomas Hicks who was half-dead from a cocktail of strychnine and brandy given to him by his trainers, staggered across the finish line to a confused roar from the crowd. Corporal Riley had been snatched from the jaws of both Chinese factions by a third, far more powerful player, his public confession silenced, his value as a secret weapon preserved.