Ancient Echoes (11 page)

Idaho

SHOCK AND DISBELIEF filled the
students and instructors as the rafts glided away. They cried out; they shouted
accusations and blame; they yelled and shrieked until their throats grew
hoarse.

None of them was aware of the eyes watching them.

Instead, their minds focused on the backpacks and gear lost.
Food, tents, bedrolls, tools, supplies, as well as the professor's map and
satellite communication equipment remained strapped to the rafts.

Devlin cursed and ran along the river bank after the
disappearing guides. Brian followed. The small beach area soon ended, replaced
by rough, rocky land that sloped upward. As they climbed, the Salmon stretched
in front of them. The banks grew steeper, however, and the brambles thicker.
Soon, they gave up and returned to the others.

“It’s all right,” Rempart announced, to everyone’s
amazement. “They may have taken our things, but they also brought us closer to
our destination than we ever would have been on our own. It’s now up to us to
find the ‘Double Needles’ as they called them, and then get on about our
business. I still have the maps.” He patted his breast pocket. “We can catch
fish, and eat nuts and berries for a few days. Live off nature’s bounty! We’ll
be just fine. Let’s go.” He waved an arm and headed north.

“Shit,” Devlin said to Brian. “We lost our
gear,
we’re in the middle of nowhere. We should go home.”

Melisse eyed Devlin. “Scared are you?” she asked. “Okay, we
were robbed.
Big deal.
We’re almost at the site, but
instead of doing the job, you want to go home. You aren’t cut out for
anthropology!”

“She’s right,” Vince said, moving closer to Melisse as he
adjusted his glasses higher on his nose. “I’m not giving up.”

Melisse and Vince followed Rempart.

“Hell,” Devlin muttered, and then he and the others followed
as well.

Evening arrived before they found a stream. By then, they
felt so hungry that nature’s bounty didn’t look very plentiful.

“How are we supposed to fish without hooks or lines,” Devlin
muttered.

“The earliest people here,” Rempart said, “had no metal
hooks. You young people were raised in Idaho. I should think you’d know
something about roughing it.”

Devlin stared at Rempart as if the man was delusional, then
he and Brian went off to find something edible.

They followed the creek and climbed a hill along its bank to
a wide, flat area. To their amazement, it held several bushes with small round
berries. “Hey, are these huckleberries?” Devlin said as he took a tentative
taste.

Brian plopped a berry in his mouth. “Whatever, they aren’t
bad.”

“They’re food. That’s all I care about.” The small berries
tasted tart. Neither of them had ever eaten raw huckleberries, so they didn’t
know what to expect.

They planned to eat enough to stop their stomachs from
growling, and then pick the rest for the others. Huckleberries weren’t usually
found this late in the year, but they guessed the berries hadn’t ripened by
August as normal due to the high elevation.

A strange snort sounded nearby, causing them to stop and
listen, but then all went silent again. “Probably just something small,” Devlin
said.

“Yeah.”
Brian plopped two more
berries in his mouth.
“Something very small.”

They kept eating even though the sense of being watched grew
stronger.

“Do you trust Rempart?” Brian asked quietly after a long
silence.

“Hell, no!
He’s an asshole,” Devlin
said.

“That’s right,” Brian chuckled,
then
took another mouthful. “The dumb fuck’s going get us all killed!”

“We should forget about the place Rempart wants to find and
get the hell back home,” Devlin said. “Stupid berries don’t do it for me. I’m a
meat eater.” He pointed to his teeth. “I don’t have these incisors for
nothing.”

They both laughed, trying to dispel the odd tension in the
air.

“I think I ate too many of these.” Brian made a face and
began to rub his stomach. The berries had stained his hands and mouth purple.
He’d been so hungry that he shoveled them in as fast as he could pick them.
Now, though, he stopped and looked at the berry bushes carefully. “Are you sure
these are huckleberries?”

“Didn't you say they are?” Devlin noticed his stomach
started to ache, too.

“I think I’m going to be sick.” Brian stumbled away.

“Don’t you dare get sick anywhere where I can hear, see, or
smell
it!
” Devlin said. “I want to keep my belly full,
no matter what the hell I’ve just eaten.”

Brian would have laughed, but he felt too queasy. He didn’t
want to look like a baby in front of Devlin. When his stomach started to heave,
he clamped his hand over his mouth and ran behind the bushes, back towards the
ledge.

Devlin stood alone. He looked around him. He didn’t like
being here. They probably shouldn’t have wandered so far from the others. But
then, if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have found the huckleberries. The berries
were fine, he decided; they’d simply eaten too many, too fast.

“Brian?” he called. “Brian, are you okay?”

No answer.

“Brian?”

Devlin ran in the direction Brian had headed. He got there,
but didn’t see any sign of his friend. “Brian? Come on, is this a joke? It’s
not funny, Bri!”

He couldn’t imagine Brian going to the edge of the hill they
climbed earlier. Nevertheless, he went there and looked down. The bottom lay
far below. He scanned the creek and the land along its banks. He didn’t see
Brian. He called over and over.

Brian wouldn’t joke. He had never gone far from Devlin’s
side on this trip, and there was no reason to think he’d start now.

Devlin called and searched another couple of minutes. When
he heard that same, strange, animal snorting sound as he’d heard earlier, he
scurried like a scared rabbit back to the area Rempart had designated as their
camp.

Mongolia

MICHAEL OPENED THE closet door and
peeked out onto an empty, dimly lit corridor. Electricity was an expensive and
valuable commodity in Mongolia, and the state didn't waste it.

He made his way to the laboratories and picked the
old-fashioned door lock. He stepped inside when the overhead lights came on,
bright and harsh.

Two men, one on each side, lunged at him. Instinctively, he
crouched, deflected the outstretched arm of the first one, caught and twisted
it so the man went head over heels. Simultaneously, he swung his leg around,
bent the knee, and then straightened it, jabbing into the second man’s solar
plexus. The opponent was lifted into the air, and then sprawled across the
floor.

In a
shao-lin
stance, knees bent, hands guarding his
heart and chest with fingers pointed upward, Michael poised for another attack.

“Stop, please!” a voice called. “We are not here to arrest
you, Doctor Rempart, but to see you safely from this country. Although with
your martial arts knowledge, my men may be the ones who need protection.” With
that he barked orders in Mandarin to the two attackers, who struggled to their
feet and backed away.

Michael remained on guard as a tall, lean Chinese, his head
shaved, walked toward him from a side room. “I knew you would come here,” he
said, self-assured and impressive, “seeking your treasure.”

“Who are you?” Michael demanded.

“Zhao Yin, Director of the Fourth Chinese Institute for the
Preservation of Cultural Heritage under China’s Ministry of Culture.” He gave a
slight nod of his head.

Michael knew the top archeologists and historians in China
staffed the Ministry of Culture, and its directors possessed serious pull in
the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, the CCP’s inner circle. But right
now, he didn’t care. “Under international law, and agreed to by Mongolia, any
archeological discovery becomes the property of—”

“None of
that matters
, Doctor
Rempart,” Zhao snapped. “The contents of a Chinese tomb are not Mongolia’s to
give away. I am here to assure their safe return to my homeland.”

“You have them?” Michael asked.

Zhao’s expression turned arch.

“Are they so valuable to China that they were worth taking
two men’s lives?” Michael practically spat the question out.

Zhao didn’t react, didn’t flinch. “My task was to be sure nothing
happened to the artifacts.” He withdrew papers from his breast pocket. Michael
saw that he wore Buddhist prayer beads on his wrist. He also recognized that
Zhao neither confirmed nor denied murdering Michael’s assistants. “I have
passage for you and Li Jianjun, nonstop, from Beijing to San Francisco.” He
handed the papers plus Air China tickets to Michael.

“Beijing? But how—”

“You will travel there on one of our planes.” Zhao led
Michael from the room toward an exit at the end of a corridor. “No questions
will be asked. The Mongolians want you out of their country as much as we do.
They don’t want the mysterious death or disappearance of a famous archeologist
to cause the foreign press to descend on their country. People have been
watching you, Michael Rempart, since you began your excavation. In fact, they
helped pave the way.”

“What do you mean? Who are ‘they’?” Michael demanded.

Zhao’s gaze was frigid. “Batbaatar was not who you thought.
If you were successful, he was to make contact with people who wanted the
contents of that tomb. He set up the skull and candles that made the workers
run off. He wanted you alone, unprotected, so that his bosses could come and
steal the findings in the tomb.”

“I don’t believe it. Batbaatar was loyal to a fault!” Michael
said.

Zhao shrugged. “The radio equipment he used did more than
pick up NESDIS. The Chinese government has been monitoring it for some time.
But the sandstorm made everything go wrong for those he worked for, which gave
me and my men time to mobilize.”

“It makes no sense,” Michael said. “Who did he contact?”

“Someone who had enough money to bribe his way into
Mongolia,
find
Batbaatar and others to do his bidding,
and then plan to steal the contents of the tomb and remove them from Mongolia.
That person has remained well-hidden...perhaps by your own government.”

“The U.S. government has no interest in ancient Han tombs,”
Michael said, furious now. “Besides, why should I trust you to tell me the
truth?
Especially when you’ve all but admitted your men killed
Batbaatar and Acemgul!”

Zhao smiled. “You really don’t know what happened out there,
do you? We believe someone from your country wanted to study Lady Hsieh.
To determine if alchemy worked.
They were the ones who
raided the tombs, killed your men and should have killed you. After Batbaatar
finished his part of the assignment, he needed to be eliminated, and Acemgul
was merely an unwanted witness. The mercenaries were to take the contents of
the tomb. We stopped them as they were removing sand from the tomb, and they
fled. We then continued the job. We didn’t open the coffins until they were in
a safe environment in the museum laboratory.”

Michael sucked in his breath. “You must have some idea who
was behind all this.”

“My answer would only be speculation,” Zhao said, then
stepped out to the loading dock.

Michael followed. A truck stood at the end of the dock. As
the doors shut, he saw large crates inside, crates the size of the coffins he
had found.

Past the dock, a limousine waited for them. Michael saw
Jianjun inside, his face scrunched with worry and fear.

Michael, Zhao, and his two bodyguards got into the limo. As
soon as it drove off, Zhao said, “Now it is time for you to answer my
questions. What was in the coffins?”

Michael wondered if this was some sort of trap. How could
Zhao not know? “Lord Hsieh’s skeleton and the beautiful Lady Hsieh,” he said
cautiously.

Zhao’s dark eyes flashed with suspicion. “You saw Lady
Hsieh?”

“Yes.
Perfectly, incredibly preserved.”
When Zhao said nothing, a chill pulsated through Michael. “Didn’t you see her?
What was in her coffin?”

“Nothing but ash.”
Zhao’s calm tone
made his words all the more jarring. “She was gone.
As she
would have wanted.
The symbol outside Lady Hsieh’s coffin proved she was
an alchemist.”

“You’re talking about the circle-and-triangular symbol?”
Michael asked.

“Yes.” Zhao drew in his breath. “Archeologists and
historians laugh about alchemy. I wonder if they’ll laugh now.”

“You and I both know alchemy is no more than superstition.
Whatever happened out
there,
wasn’t supernatural.
Someone opened the coffin and stole her body. We’ve got to find whoever did
it.”

As the limousine drove through Ulaanbaatar to a small,
private airport on its outskirts, Zhao waited until Michael’s anger quieted a
bit, and then said softly, “History is filled with proof of alchemy working. It
is we who refuse to accept what others saw with their own eyes.” His fingers
touched the prayer beads, one by one, as he continued. “During the Han dynasty
of Lady Hsieh’s time, a great warrior named Bo Yi Kao fought the barbarian
hordes of the north, the Mongols. He possessed an invincible body that no
spear, arrow, or sword could penetrate. A Chinese Achilles, if you will. He
bore a mark on his chest which became his crest, the same symbol as on Lady
Hsieh’s coffin. We call it the symbol of immortality. One day, an enemy archer
struck him in the chest, on the black circle. Only then did Bo Yi Kao die. That
was the only vulnerable spot on his immortal body.”