Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

And Margaret realised it was not really her he was addressing, but his audience. This was a story he had probably rehearsed in his mind a thousand times. She glanced up at the security camera and wondered if the performance was being recorded for posterity.

‘Hu and two of his colleagues slipped out of Beijing and travelled to Xi’an to see for themselves.’ Michael’s absorption in his story was complete. ‘It was true. They talked to the people at the cultural centre, the peasants who had dug the wells, and persuaded the head of department back in the capital that an exploratory dig was worthwhile. But they would make no big thing of it, for they did not want to attract unwelcome attention.

‘And no one paid them any. A bunch of old men, with the aid of a few enlisted peasants, digging holes in the middle of nowhere.’ His eyes sparkled and he clenched his fist in triumph. ‘But those holes took them right down into what the official team later called the fourth chamber. And, just like the archaeologists who came so soon after, they found that it was empty. Filled with sand and silt.’ He paused, eyes wide, breath billowing about him in haloes. ‘Except for one ante-chamber that was crammed with warriors. Nearly a hundred and thirty of them. Perhaps they had simply been stored there, awaiting later deployment. Perhaps they were flawed in some way and had been discarded. We’ll never know. But Hu and his colleagues understood the importance of their find. And they knew that it was only a matter of time before the authorities found out what they were up to.’

Michael moved about upon his stage, as if addressing himself to an audience of the very warriors he was talking about. But his eyes were fixed on Margaret, appealing to her to share his excitement, desperate to draw her into his story, to know how it was he felt, how this had all come about.

‘The warriors they found had been badly damaged by the collapse of the roof and the walls,’ he said. ‘But Hu’s greatest fear was that the Red Guards would come and destroy them for ever, denounce them as “old culture”, proof of the crimes of the “imperialist royalists” of China’s past. So they brought in a mechanical digger and simply dug out the whole ante-chamber, filling crate after crate with earth and pieces of the broken warriors. The crates were shipped back to Beijing by road and stored in a warehouse belonging to the university in Haidan. Then one by one they were transferred to the university itself and secreted down here in the bomb shelter that their predecessors had dug in the sixties.’

Michael let out a deep breath and smiled at Margaret. ‘You see, they thought they were saving them for posterity. But, then, to everyone’s surprise, the authorities sanctioned an official excavation, and within a year the thousands of warriors in Pit No. 1 were being uncovered. Hu Bo and the others were trapped by their own good intentions. To admit that they had removed the warriors from the fourth chamber could leave them open to accusations of theft, or worse.

‘So they made a pact. They spent the next twenty-five years restoring the warriors they had recovered from Xi’an, piece by tiny piece, down here in what they came to call their own fourth chamber, and upstairs in the conservation lab. Their existence, in fact the very existence of the bomb shelter, was known to only a few. The university authorities who had been here in the sixties had long since been purged. Officially, this place didn’t exist. Still doesn’t. It was the perfect hiding place for the warriors.’

In spite of herself, in spite of her situation and her fear and her anger, Margaret had been drawn into Michael’s story. ‘What was the pact?’ she asked.

Michael knew now that he had her back again. ‘They agreed that whichever of them outlived the others, would reveal the existence of the warriors before he died, so that they could be returned to the nation and their rightful place in the fourth chamber that they had been taken from.

‘In 1998, Hu Bo, who by then was the last surviving member, was diagnosed with cancer. He had only weeks to live, and he confided the secret of the fourth chamber to his protégé here at the university.’

‘Professor Yue,’ Margaret said. Michael nodded. She said, ‘Don’t tell me, I can guess the rest. He got greedy, right? I mean, down here there’s all these Terracotta Warriors that no one else knows about. If he can get them out of the country, boy, is he going to make a lot of money. How much would just one of these fetch in the West?’

Michael spread his hands. ‘They’re priceless, Margaret. We’re talking millions. For the lot, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions. And not too many to flood the market and bring down the price. There are dozens of tycoons out there, men who have everything, men who will pay extraordinary amounts just to know that they have a genuine Terracotta Warrior standing in their library or in their study.’

‘And so all that stuff about the wonders of history and the science of archaeology goes out the window because you see the chance to make a fast buck.’ Margaret had moved now, out from the safety of her towering warriors. She remembered the night she had first met Michael at the ambassador’s residence. The truth is never dull , he had told her. That extraordinary mix of human passion and frailty, maybe darkness, that leads to the commission of the crime . No, she thought now, it wasn’t dull. Just sordid.

Michael seemed shocked by the sudden contempt in her voice. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t like that. Yue Shi had no way to get them out of the country. When he confided in me I knew I was uniquely placed to do it. I’d organised exhibitions before, my high media profile gave me a lot of clout. But, I mean, it’s not as if we were stealing them. No one knew about them anyway. And they’d be just as safe, if not safer, in the hands of private collectors. And the things I could do with the money, Margaret. The projects I could fund without having to go cap in hand to universities and charitable organisations and broadcasters back home. There are excavations all around the world that are just waiting for funding.’

‘How noble,’ Margaret said. ‘And this money, these excavations … they’re worth killing for, are they? Worth the lives of men?’

Michael shook his head and moved towards her, appealing for her understanding. ‘For God’s sake, Margaret, that’s really not how it was.’

‘Don’t come near me!’ she shouted. And he stopped in his tracks, startled by the fear in her voice and the hate in her eyes. He had lost her again.

He sighed. ‘We’d installed a video security system,’ he said, almost hopelessly. ‘So that none of us who knew what was down here could cheat the others.’

‘Whatever happened to honour among thieves?’

He shook his head, ignoring her barb. ‘I got a phone call from the lab assistant upstairs. He and the professor had been organising the removal of the warriors, one by one, to a workshop we were renting in Haidan. He was in a hell of a state. Professor Yue had been murdered down here in the underground chamber. The whole thing was on tape. I hurried over and we found the body lying there, decapitated.’ He looked down at the huge pool of dried, crusted blood. ‘We knew we had to move it or risk the warriors being discovered. We wrapped him in blankets and polythene sheets and took the body to his apartment. It was a bloody affair. I’ve never seen so much blood.’ He blanched at the thought, remembering the detached head, the strange form of the headless body. ‘And then I looked at the tape and recognised Yuan Tao straight away. God knows why the professor brought him down here. Maybe he was trying to buy him off, buy his life back. Who knows? The thing was, Yuan had seen the warriors. He knew they were here. We were no longer safe.’