Prayer of the Dragon (22 page)

No! a voice shouted in his head. He had to escape, whatever the cost. He would knock down the soldiers and run, dodging their bullets. He would leap out of the helicopter as it rose from the ground. He would dive out the door if they flew over a lake. There was a murderer on the mountain and Shan had to stop him. Gendun was in the clutches of Chodron, and had to be saved.

He rubbed the bump on his head where he had been struck, realizing in sudden panic that he had no way of knowing how long he had been unconscious. The cement floor and stone walls gave no clue as to where he was. He could have been drugged and transported miles away from the mountain. He searched his palate for the bitter tinge of the drugs that Public Security favored for prisoners. Nothing. Then a tiny vibration came through the ceiling, an intermittent, rhythmic rumbling. Rock and roll music.

A shadowy figure materialized at his cot without sound, holding a hand lantern, shaking him from a restless sleep. “They hit you too hard,” came the soft words in Tibetan, and a porcelain cup of steaming tea was extended toward him. “They’re just boys, most of those soldiers. Children with guns.”

Gao’s housekeeper helped him sit up and dabbed at his head with a damp cloth as he drank the strong brew. She answered his questions in quick whispers explaining that he had been brought here to the cellar of the tower by the soldiers, that he had been in the room for nearly half a day, that the other gentleman was being prepared, that a helicopter was coming that afternoon. Shan shot up and staggered to the door, where he clung to the frame a moment as his head cleared. Then he stepped into the hall.

Following a short corridor, he found himself in the austere chamber where he had seen Gao doing Tai Chi exercises. As he climbed the staircase to the sitting room, a figure in green fatigues leaped from a chair by the front door, hand on his pistol holster. Shan froze as he took in the unexpected scene. Thomas lounged in one of the overstuffed chairs, reading a Western magazine. Kohler stood at the telescope, watching the nest of fledgling lam-mergeiers. At a small table set before the long row of windows, Gao and Hostene were playing chess. The muted music of a string orchestra emanated from the hidden speakers.

Gao caught the soldier’s eye and raised a hand. The soldier frowned but retreated. When the guard reached the chair where he had been sitting, Gao made another gesture and he left the room.

“You missed lunch, Inspector,” Kohler declared with amusement.

“The metal boxes,” Shan said. “Some sort of surveillance device?”

“Motion detectors,” Kohler confirmed. “We told the army we were having trouble with predators.”

“Meaning that you want no more intruders from the other side,” Shan offered.

Hostene rose and inspected the raw patch on Shan’s temple, then nodded as if satisfied with what he saw. “It’s OK,” the Navajo said. “They know who I am.”

“We understand you saved our new American friend,” Gao said in perfect English.

“Again,” Hostene added.

“For now,” Shan replied, trying to eye the door inconspicuously. Thomas had said Gao wanted him to vanish, by means of a bullet if necessary.

“But he’s free now,” Gao said. “On this side of the mountain. His nightmare is over.”

“We left”—Hostene seemed to search for a word—“someone. Shan and I must go back.”

Gao sighed, a father losing patience with his children. “Surely you understand it is too dangerous.”

Kohler appeared between Shan and Hostene, pacing slowly, playing with the end of the white cashmere scarf draped over his collar. He looked at them. “An illegal foreigner and an outlaw investigator. Perhaps they are trying to decide which side is most dangerous for them. Over there they merely have a crazed murderer to deal with.”

“Heinz, perhaps you forget that Inspector Shan navigated the minefields of Beijing his entire career.”

“Half a career,” Shan inserted. “I prefer to think of it as a rite of passage.”

“What I don’t forget,” said Kohler, “is that he left us rather abruptly on his last visit.”

“We won’t be so careless this time,” Gao observed. “We have summoned reinforcements from the base.”

“I am going back,” Hostene said. “The miners will cool off and then I must return. No one is going to stop me.”

Gao shrugged. “I thought I mentioned the soldiers.”

“They were already here,” Hostene shot back. “You didn’t summon them because of me.”

Kohler rolled his eyes. Gao conceded the point with a nod.

“My niece is on the other side of the mountain. I will move heaven and earth to find her.”

Gao shot a confused glance at Kohler. “Your niece? You let a young girl roam the mountain?”

“She is thirty-four years old and a professor of anthropology. We were together, a party of four, doing research.”

Comprehension lit Gao’s face. “The other two were the murder victims.”

Hostene nodded soberly. “I think she believes that I am dead too. No one has seen her since the murders.”

“I may have,” Kohler declared. “Five days ago. With my binoculars.”

Hostene stepped closer to Kohler, his eyes bright with excitement.

“You were on the other side?” Shan asked.

“Hunting wolves. Does she have long black braids? A gray sweatshirt? The woman I saw seemed to be taking measurements on a rock face. She kept stopping to look over her shoulder.”

“But surely you went to investigate?” Hostene asked.

Kohler shrugged. “I was following a fresh trail. I planned to go back if I found the wolf or lost the trail. But I never saw him. And when I went back, she was nowhere to be seen. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Where was this?” Hostene asked.

Kohler withdrew a folded map from a bookshelf and laid it out on the dining table as Hostene and Shan pressed close. “Here.” He pointed to a spot two miles above Little Moscow. “She didn’t come down the slope or I would have seen her. And”—he gestured toward the set of undulating ridgelines, the steep terrain closer to the summit—“this is no man’s land. She should have known better. I’m sorry,” he added.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s too dangerous up there. Wolves. And the winds. Winds explode out of nowhere, strong enough to knock a man off a cliff. And as she goes higher, there is the lightning.”

“Lightning?” Hostene asked. “Everyone makes so much of the lightning here. Surely it is no different from anywhere else.”

“Wrong,” Kohler rejoined. “Scientific fact. Some kind of geologic anomaly, probably related to all the iron in the mountain. We studied it before we set up the base below, to understand any possible effects on our radio telemetry. There are more lightning strikes here than on any mountain for hundreds of miles, maybe more than on any other mountain in all of China. Storms sweep over the Himalayas filled with water from the ocean. The moisture is dumped on the southern slopes, which is why Tibet stays so dry. But they still retain a lot of energy when they reach the northern side of the range. Sleeping Dragon Mountain is where they discharge it. The configuration of the ranges funnels storms to us. Metallic deposits at the top do the rest.”

Hostene and Shan exchanged a worried glance. Lightning. Abigail was looking for the home of the mountain deity, the dragon that gave birth to lightning.

“I’m sorry,” Kohler said in a sorrowful tone. “I should have gone to save her.”

“Save her?” Hostene asked, alarmed.

Kohler left the room for a few minutes, returning with a rag in his hand. “I did try to look for her later, and the next day as well. I think I may have seen her once more. I think it was her. A figure in the distance, standing on a high ledge, in an impossibly dangerous spot. A squall struck out of nowhere. The wind would have scoured that cliff of anything that wasn’t tied down, even without the lightning. It was impossible to see what happened, with all the flashes. But afterward I went to the base of the cliff. I don’t know who it was for certain. This is all I found.”

Kohler tossed the rag onto the map. With a trembling hand, Hostene smoothed and straightened it. It was a piece of charred fabric from a gray sweatshirt. Despite several holes burned into it, the English words that encircled a small yellow sun rising over mountains were still legible. The surviving letters spelled The U ver ity of New Me ico.

Hostene buried his head in his hands.

“It could have been a miner,” Kohler said. “I don’t know. A miner could have found the shirt and worn it.”

“It was a miner,” came a voice from the kitchen doorway. “It had to be.” Thomas stood there, earphones around his neck.

“What haven’t you told us?” Gao demanded.

Thomas sank into one of the chairs. “I thought I could find her. A day before the murders, I went past one of those old paintings that had been overgrown with brush, so you could hardly see it. Three days ago I went by it again and the painting had been uncovered. Someone had cut the brush down, and there were the fresh marks of a tripod in the soil.”

Shan studied the boy as he spoke, remembering Thomas’s warning that Gao intended to kill him if he crossed the mountain again. Had Thomas lied to him deliberately? Or had Gao changed his mind?

“Then yesterday I met a miner working by himself, singing a song. He had a new Swiss watch. A woman had given it to him, he said. She had traded it for his horse, asked him for directions to the nearest town, to Tashtul, and galloped off. She spoke Tibetan, but no Chinese.”

Hostene hastened to Thomas and put a hand on his shoulder. “The watch, did you get a good look at it?”

“Silver. A red cross on the face. Little pieces of turquoise framed it.”

“It’s her! I gave her that watch! She finally realized her danger, and she left,” Hostene said, relieved.

“Thank God,” Kohler sighed. “I was going to town on business tomorrow,” he announced. “I will leave today. If the army has a helicopter available I can be there before dark, probably before she gets there. Tashtul’s a small town, and there’s only one trail leading to it from here. An American woman on an exhausted horse shouldn’t be hard to find.”

It was the safest course, they quickly decided. Hostene would have difficulty navigating the long journey to the city alone, and Shan would not leave the mountain until Gendun and Lokesh were safe. But Hostene traveling with Kohler on a military aircraft might raise questions with Public Security that could not be conveniently answered. Kohler would have to make the trip alone.

Hostene visibly relaxed as Kohler reappeared, ready for travel, a pack on his back. The German shook the Navajo’s hand energetically, assuring him his niece would be found safe. Then he took the trail that led to the base below.

The housekeeper brought bowls of soup. Shan and Hostene both consumed double servings before the Navajo accepted Gao’s invitation to use a spare bedroom at the base of the tower, behind the kitchen.

“What am I going to do with you, Shan?” Gao asked as soon as they were alone.

“Help me find a murderer.”

“No. That’s not my job. And it’s not yours either. Heinz is going to call Public Security when he reaches town. You haven’t brought justice. You bring grief. You bring chaos. You bring crowds,” he said. “You should leave the investigation to the authorities.”

“That’s what upsets you the most, isn’t it? Being disturbed.”

Gao’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t pick this site by happenstance. I demanded anonymity. Secrecy. Privacy. A rather substantial investment has been to assure that I have it.”

Privacy. It was, Shan well knew, the rarest treasure of all of China. “This is an elegant hermitage,” he concluded. “Some make do with caves.”

Gao ignored him. “The government can be tedious about protecting its investment.”

Shan’s stomach began tying itself into a knot. “What have you done?”

“I promised Kohler that you will dictate a transcript of what you know to Public Security when they arrive here tomorrow.”

“And you worry about
me
disturbing the sanctity of your retreat? Wait until the Public Security knobs arrive. They will rip the mountain apart. Your little castle will be on the front page of American newspapers by the time they are done.”

Gao studied Shan in silence, then frowned.

“Do you have any medical books?” Shan asked. “A dictionary of pharmaceuticals?”

Gao turned with a frosty gaze. “What do you wish to know?”

“Pencil and paper?”

Gao pointed to a drawer of the sideboard.

Shan quickly recorded the names of the medicines in Hostene’s bag and handed the paper to Gao, who took it and went into his office. Shan stood to follow, thought better of the notion, then took more paper from the sideboard. He stared at the blank sheet for a long time, then wrote shorthand phrases describing events. A miner dies. Bing is elected to lead miners. Old mine destroyed. Abigail constructs a skeleton. Young miner killed at blue demon painting. Sandpainting destroyed. Professor Ma and Tashi, the guide, murdered. Camp equipment looted. Corpses mutilated and their hands taken away. Abigail’s equipment removed from cave.

There were connections between each event he could not fathom. But did he even have the sequence properly? He studied the notes then added three more phrases. Yangke receives his canque. Hostene ventures into Bing’s camp. Thomas, the fledgling entrepreneur, begins giving valuable goods to Rapaki, for which Rapaki cannot pay.