Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Corbett and Yao began to circle the big man, joined by Liya, a piece of a broken beam raised over her head. Punji’s killer raised his fists at those surrounding him, but his eyes were on the rifle in Shan’s hands.

Ko looked up and nodded, not at Shan but at the rifle. Shan, too, looked at the rifle a moment, then reversed it, took it by the barrel, and flung it far out over the chasm. The big man grinned and bent over, shoving Liya aside, then grabbing Punji’s pack with the torn thangka. He lifted the pack with a taunting expression and ran into the ruins, Corbett and Yao at his heels. Shan glanced at Ko, whose expression rapidly changed, from confusion to anger to disdain. Shan glanced about to make sure Lokesh was still holding Dawa, then ran in the direction he had last seen Lu.

He found the short Han in the shadows of an alley less than fifty yards away, his back to Shan, speaking into a black instrument. Shan slowed, wary of making a sound. Lu was speaking excitedly, gesturing with his free hand. Speaking in perfect English. He heard Lu say, “yes,” and “tomorrow,” then heard him give an assurance that there would be no more problems now. Lu could not speak English, Punji had insisted, and she had used English when explaining to them how to escape. Lu had entered the chamber a moment later. He must have been at the door, must have been listening, and reported to someone on the black box who had then ordered Punji’s death. Now he was calling to confirm she was dead.

Shan lifted a stone and threw it in a long arc, over Lu, so it landed in front of him. When Lu spun about to flee in the opposite direction Shan was less than three feet before him, blocking his way.

“Tell him he can’t hide behind lies anymore,” Shan said in English.

As Lu spun about Shan grabbed his arm. The radio dropped to the ground as Lu twisted, pushing Shan into the rocks, and broke free. In an instant he was gone.

Shan was in the foregate examining the device Lu had dropped when Corbett and Yao returned. Punji’s killer had eluded them.

“Ming,” Yao spat the word like a curse.

Corbett nodded as he took the device, then his face clouded. “It’s not a radio,” the American explained, as he studied the buttons on its face. “It’s a satellite telephone. He could have been speaking to anyone. He could have-” his voice faded as he stared at the little green screen above the rows of buttons. A cold fury grew on his face. “There’s a recall button,” he said after a moment in a chill voice, “to let you contact the last number dialed.” He showed the number displayed on the screen. “It’s in the U.S. A Seattle number.” He pushed a green button and held it out so Yao and Shan could hear.

After a moment there were two rings and a woman answered, speaking in crisp, refined tones. “Croft Antiquities.”

Corbett lifted the phone to his mouth. “Is Mr. Croft there?”

“Mr. Croft has departed,” the woman said after a moment’s hesitation. “Who’s calling please?”

Corbett looked at Yao as he spoke. “Tell him it’s Investigator Yao of the Chinese Council of Ministers. Tell him the Chinese government has some questions for him. Tell him he just changed everything.”

Yao did not protest, did nothing but stare at the little phone, a sad, defeated look in his eyes.

Corbett pushed the disconnect button. “We’ll get the phone records,” he vowed. “In a couple days we’ll know everything there is to know about Croft Antiquities.”

“But what you won’t have is its connection to Beijing, to Ming,” Yao said, gazing into the chasm. “The answer is in what happened that day at the Forbidden City, what the police didn’t report. We have only the letters from the amban. We don’t know what was finally communicated about the treasure. How can we stop them without knowing what happened between the amban and his uncle? The amban’s missing treasure connects them all. That’s where they will be.”

“We know the emperor kept copies of his correspondence,” Shan said. “But I don’t think Ming had it all.”

“What do you mean?” Yao asked in a distant voice.

“It’s still there, in the Forbidden City.”

“You can’t know that.”

“The amban told us. He thanked the emperor for using the words of the sutras. The emperor Tibetan. He meant the emperor was writing in Tibetan. Major McDowell’s confirmed it, that the emperor spoke Tibetan. It would have been the perfect language for keeping secrets from his mandarins. Even if he found them Ming would never have thought a letter in Tibetan to be important. He speaks no Tibetan.”

A glint was in Yao’s eyes as he looked at Shan. He stepped to Corbett, who was still staring at the little telephone.

Liya was standing at the edge of the cliff, tearfully looking into the chasm when Shan stepped to her side. He squatted and drew in the bare soil: an oval with a circle inside, a square inside the circle. “Earth door inside the circle of heaven.”

Liya’s hand went to her mouth. “The tunnel. He was trying to tell me that Lu and Khan had cut a tunnel through the earth, into the mandala temple.”

Shan nodded and remembered the pattern of bones he had seen below the drawing, pointing upward. As he lay dying Lodi had tried to find a way to tell Liya, only Liya, what he had discovered that day in the tunnels. “And he wrote of the Mountain Buddha. Where is it, Liya?”

“Sleeping,” she said, warning back in her eyes.

Shan glanced about to be sure no one else was in earshot. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Ming knows about it from one of the old books. He thinks the golden Buddha should be his. Even if he can’t find the emperor’s treasure he intends to finish with new political power and the golden likeness of the Buddha.”

“There are some things that must be left to Tibetans, Shan,” Liya said. “That is between the people of the hills and Colonel Tan. Nothing you can do will change it. Gendun himself has given his blessing.” She added the last words like an apology. Liya knew Shan would not oppose the old lama.

“But Gendun probably thinks Surya is among the prisoners,” Shan protested. He searched her face as she shook her head from side to side, pleading with his eyes.

Liya offered a thin, sad smile. “It is the only chance in fifty years our people have had.”

“Hide it at least.”

“It was hidden, for fifty years. But Lodi found it. It was his last gift to us.”

“Lodi?”

“You forget I was there too, after he died. I didn’t understand his drawing of the dzi. But I saw the bones. They were pointing to something else.”

“On the ledge?” Shan tried to recall the scene. The barrels on the ledge may well have hidden the tunnel but what else had been there? Heavy yak ropes. Pulleys. Long chisels.

Liya put a finger on her lips as if to quiet him, then extended it toward Shan’s temple. “You’re hurt.”

When Shan touched the spot where the rifle had hit him three fingers came away bloody.

“In the food pack,” Corbett said, “there is a medical kit.”

But when Liya reached into the pack she froze, then looked up in confusion. She slowly extracted a long white cotton pouch, the one they had seen in the major’s chambers.

“The thangka!” Lokesh exclaimed.

Liya opened the pouch and pulled out the top of the old painting. Punji had had her final word, had tricked Lu, putting the torn thangka in Shan’s pack instead of her own.

“With that we have a chance of trapping the bastards,” Corbett said. His voice had a new edge, a sound of vengeance. “Ming and this man Croft.”

As Lokesh straightened the ragged-edged eighteen-inch square of cloth onto the ground Yao quickly produced the folded image of the upper half of the death deity they had printed from Tan’s computer, placing it on the ground above the cloth. The amban’s puzzle for the emperor was to be solved by having both halves. But they could make no sense of it. The combined image seemed no different from the one Shan had seen in the mourning hut at the ragyapa village. Lokesh dropped to his knees, bending over the artwork, the others squatting beside him. They looked for patterns in the colors, anomalies in the images of the great bull deity and the lesser deities that surrounded it, convinced the message they so desperately sought must be hidden in the art like the messages so cleverly disguised in the temple. Lokesh murmured a mantra as if to entice the gods to speak to them.