Don Winslow - The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

“A reckless young man,” Xao answered. “Prone to the sort of rash behavior that leads to accidents. This is a dangerous mountain, particularly on the stretch known as the Elephant’s Saddle. Careless hikers have been known to slip and fall, especially if they were foolish enough to attempt to traverse it at night.”

“But I am afraid I have little choice, Secretary Xao. I wonder if I could borrow a flashlight?”

“Of course. Xiao Wu and my driver will escort you. Mr. Peng will stay here for the night. We have much to discuss.”

Xao smiled pleasantly at Peng. So pleasantly that Peng wasn’t looking forward to the conversation. Xao stood up and offered his hand to Simms.

“Thank you for all your help,” he said.

“Don’t mention it.”

They both laughed at his joke.

Wu sat with Neal at the pavilion near the summit. Neal’s hands were tied behind him. In the three hours since Pendleton’s murder and Li’s suicide he hadn’t uttered a sound, just stared into the distance.

Simms came up, stood in front of Neal, and then kicked him in the ribs. Neal toppled over on his face.

“That’s for the swim in the river,” Simms said.

The driver picked Neal up gently and lifted him to his feet.

“You like to walk, Neal,” said Simms. “We’re going for a walk.”

Simms held a large flashlight in one hand. So did the driver.

The soldier led the way. Simms pushed Neal in behind the soldier, and Wu brought up the rear. They trudged slowly down the Buddha’s Ladder as the driver carefully pointed out the trail with his flashlight. They reached the bottom and started along the Elephant’s Saddle.

“You want to be real careful, Neal, so you don’t slip and fall.”

Neal heard the words with intense relief. They were going to kill him after all.

They’d walked for a couple more minutes when he heard Simms say, “I guess this will do.”

Neal waited for the push. Neal wanted the push.

“Cocksucker.”

Neal turned and saw Wu kick Simms’s feet out from under him. Simms tottered on the edge for a long moment, flailing his arms as he tried to regain his balance. Then he tumbled into the darkness. His scream echoed in the night.

Then the driver lifted Neal into his arms.

Robert Pendleton squatted in the muck of the rice paddy for a moment and came up with a beaker full of mud. He held it up to the light, swished it around, and looked at it carefully.

“It’s the nitrogen content that’s crucial, as you know.”

Zhu smiled and nodded.

“We’ll take this back to the lab and see what’s what,” Pendleton said. He waded up to the dike, shook the mud off his shoes, and looked around him. Dwaizhou’s broad paddies and fields shone green and fertile in the morning sun. He inhaled the fecund scent of the rice crop, so different from the sterile smell of the corporate laboratory, so much richer.

AgriTech, he remembered, had always bragged that it was “where the action is.” No, he thought, this is where the action is.

And what would the boys in the office say if they could see me now? In my green Mao suit, little Mao cap, and rubber sandals? They probably wouldn’t give me a tee time on the company course.

Gee.

He decided to stop off at home for lunch, handed Old Zhu the beaker, and said he’d meet him at their makeshift lab later. The lab was actually pretty good. Nothing like AgriTech, but still pretty decent, all things considered, and he’d given Xao a shopping list to fill as time, money, and secrecy allowed.

Pendleton walked along the dike, then along the road past the rabbit wood to his plain, tin-roofed, cinder-block dwelling on the brigade’s far edge. He found a bowl of cold rice with some fish in it, and a warm bottle of beer, and sat down at the plain wooden table.

The food was good, the beer better, but he would be happy when Li Lan came home. Everything was better when she was there. Well, she should be home from the mountain any day now, any day.

He shoveled down some rice and speculated about the nitrogen content in the Dwaizhou soil.

Neal Carey steadfastly refused to eat. He sat on the kang in his dark monk’s cell not even looking at the bowl of rice that the monk brought in every day. He had a vague awareness of hunger somewhere in his body, but the pain and guilt more than drowned it. Li Lan was dead because of him. Pendleton was dead because of him. He wished the driver had thrown him off the cliff instead of carrying him to the remote monastery on the west slope of the mountain. He wished that Xiao Wu had killed him instead of Simms. He wished he were dead. He wouldn’t eat to keep himself alive.

The monk opened the shutter of the window to let the noonday light in. How many days had it been, Neal wondered. Seven? Eight? How many days did it take to starve?

“You must eat,” he heard a woman’s voice say.

The English startled him and he looked up. Who spoke English on this damn mountain?

Li Lan stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a white jacket and white pants. White ribbons held her hair in two braids. White, he recalled, was the Chinese color of mourning. Behind her stood an older man. The resemblance was startling, even though he wore a green Mao suit with a plain white armband.

Neal blinked twice to try to clear the hallucination from his head. He understood that his subconscious was desperate to relieve the feeling of guilt, so it had produced Li Lan alive for him. But the vision didn’t go away. It stood framed in the doorway, backlit by the sunshine.

Then he understood. It was not Li Lan, it was her sister. They were twins.

“You must eat,” she repeated.

He shook his head.

“You used to like my cooking.”

He looked up again.

“I am alive,” she said. “So is Robert.”

“I saw-”

“My sister, Hong. My twin sister. When we were babies, Father and Mother tied blue ribbons in my hair and red ribbons in her hair to tell us apart.”

Twins.

“It was my sister who took you from The Walled City, my sister who came to you at Leshan and asked you to go home, my sister who made love with you.”

Sister Hong. The actress.

“She told me a story, about her sister killing her mother.”

“She was talking about herself. She could never overcome her guilt. She found herself in the Buddha’s Mirror.”

Neal felt the room spinning. “Why? Why did you do all this?”

The older man stepped forward. “Mr. Carey, I am Xao Xiyang, Party Secretary for Sichuan Province. Lan’s father. Hong’s father. I am the responsible person in this matter.”

Neal could only stare at him.

Xao continued, “You must understand how desperately we need the expertise that Dr. Pendleton can offer us. You have never seen hunger, Mr. Carey. You have never seen starvation. I have seen both. I never want to see them again, no matter what the price.

“When Lan began her relationship with Dr. Pendleton, I was overjoyed. I saw a wonderful opportunity, one that might never come again. As you know, I asked Lan to bring Dr. Pendleton into China. But such an operation was fraught with danger. Your own CIA, the Taiwanese, even our own government-especially our own government-would seek to prevent his defection at all costs.

“You see, Mr. Carey, we are engaged in a desperate struggle for control in China, a struggle between the hard-line Maoists, who seek to reimpose tyrannical madness and backwardness on us, against progressive, democratic reformers. I need not tell you that I am numbered among the latter. I need not tell you it is imperative that we prevail in this struggle. The agricultural advances that Dr. Pendleton could provide may be a critical weapon in that struggle.