The Trail to Buddha's Mirror

by Don Winslow

“I know all that. She told me.”

  “Can we get out of the bathroom?” Neal asked. “It’s starting to feel like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.”

  Lan and Pendleton sat on the bed, which seemed appropriate enough to Neal, and he sat down in the old overstuffed wingback in the corner, by the window.

  “So it’s true love, right?”

  Right. They told him the story, sharing the narrative like newlyweds telling a stranger how they met. She was a spy of sorts. It was her ticket out, the price for a life of relative freedom in Hong Kong and America. She really was a painter, and that was her cover in the States. Her handlers approved because it gave her access to culture, which in the States meant money, which meant power. She made it a point to attend all the cocktail parties, all the receptions, all the corporate bashes. Usually her bosses required nothing more than simple reports on who was who, who was doing what, and who might be sympathetic toward a struggling nation of communist reformers.

  Then Pendleton’s conference had come along. She’d picked him up in an expensive restaurant—charmed him, flattered him with the simple gift of attention. She’d led him into leading her to bed, taught him the things that her trainers had taught her, talked to him, listened to him.

  In the morning she reported back, in the afternoon received her orders, and that night went back to his bed. She took him to the clouds and the rain, and then lay still in his arms as he told her about his life, his work, his secret dreams. They went on a long, early-morning walk in Chinatown, watched the old ones do t‘ai chi, shopped in the markets, went for dim-sum and tea, and then back to bed. She had to go to Mill Valley for her show, and he visited her there and met her friends, and went there every day.

  Then he came: the White Tiger soldier, Mark Chin. Their escape was narrow, they needed somewhere to hide, and Li Lan talked to her good friend Olivia Kendall. In the quiet of the Kendall house, Lan and Pendleton talked for hours, told each other the heretofore covert parts of their lives, wondered what to do. Pendleton knew that AgriTech would come looking for him, maybe send a Company errand boy to fetch him, and sure enough, Neal had turned up. They weren’t sure whether he was CIA or a rent-a-cop hired by AgriTech, but they had to get free of him. Along with dinner, they cooked up a plan to give him the slip: get him drunk, get him unclothed in the hot tub, and give him a good reason to sit there and wait for Li Lan to come back. Only, of course, Li Lan wasn’t coming back. They were going to run to Hong Kong, where she would play along with her bosses and their 14K allies to hide long enough to figure out what to do. She was as surprised as Neal when the shot whooshed through the air. Scared, she had run all the faster, and they’d caught the next flight to Hong Kong.

  According to plan, she should have just turned him over to her handlers, but she hedged. They were in love, truly in love, and she knew full well what was in store for him in the PRC. And her life of freedom would be over. Her cover blown, she could not return to the West. She would be given some drab bureaucratic job, and there would be no more decadent painting. So she made up stories, said she was having difficulty persuading him, she needed more time, more space. Besides, their trail was still too hot. She urged patience.

  “Then I turned up again,” Neal prompted.

  She nodded. “You were telling everyone where we were.”

  So she had to stop him. He was bringing the world down around them. Her bosses were getting nervous, White Tiger might pick up the trail, the CIA was surely sniffing around. He was putting them in great danger. Himself as well: Her bosses wanted to have him killed. So she had to stop him, had to meet with him to persuade him to stop this crazy search.

  “That’s when you called me to set up the meeting at Victoria Peak. But you still weren’t exactly sure who I was, so you brought backup along, just in case,” said Neal.

  “Her people insisted,” Pendleton said. “These 14K goons trailed along. And it was a good thing they did.”

  Because she spotted Ben Chin, whom she mistook for his cousin. Not that it made any difference, he was still a White Tiger Triad member assigned to kill them. She thought that she had made a terrible mistake, that Neal was not a private detective or a government agent, but a White Tiger hireling paid to set them up. She ran him right into the ambush, the ambush that Ben Chin was too smart to fall into. He went right for his target, but couldn’t catch them in a spot where he could gun them down and hope to get away. They shook him off and came back to their hideout, the obscure YMCA.

  “And now you have come again,” Lan said. “But alone.”

  Not quite, Lan. But he skipped that part for the moment, and told them about Friends of the Family, about his assignment, about being duped by the Chins. He told them about Simms’s rescue, about the debriefing, and about the deal that Simms would offer if he had the chance.

  “I don’t know,” Pendleton said. “Can we trust them?”

  “It’s not a matter of trust. You have something they want.”

  “Li Lan, you mean.”

  “There’s a wicked kind of symmetry in this situation. You can go to China, where she turns you over, or back to the States, where you turn her. The issue is simple. Which is better? You go to China, you’re a prisoner for life and so is she. You go back to the States, she’s a prisoner for a while and you’re a free man. They’ll even let you stay together, as long as you’re a good boy.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  Good question, Doc. What is in it for me? I lose Li Lan, but then again, I never had her. And maybe if I bring you back, the powers that be will let me come back too, back to my comfortable cell. Maybe that’s the best you can expect in this world, a comfortable cell.

  So he explained his deal to them. If he could bring them in, he could go back to school, back to his own research.

  “We can have it all,” he said. “You can play with your test tubes, you can paint, I can muck around with eighteenth-century literature. It’s what I’d call a happy ending.”

  “Except Li has to betray her country,” Pendleton said, although it was more like a question.

  She stared at the floor. “It is not a country. It is a prison.”

  “What about family?” Neal asked.

  “Dead.”

  He wanted to hold her. Throw his arms around her and tell her that it was all right, that there were all kinds of families and that she had found herself a new one. She looked tired and hurt and played out.

  “Shall I make the call?” he asked.

  Pendleton looked at Lan. It was her decision to make.

  “Please,” she said.

  Neal picked up the phone and dialed the number Simms had given him. It took a couple of minutes to clear for Simms to come to the phone.

  “Did you forget something?” asked Simms.

  “Your order’s ready. You want to pick it up or you want me to deliver?”

  “Jesus H. Christ. Where are you?”

  “A YMCA on Waterloo, near Nathan Road.”

  “Stay put! I’ll be there in an hour.”

  “Hurry up.”

  Simms’s voice took on an edge. “Is there a problem?”

  “There could be,” Neal said, wondering where Ben Chin was, “but I don’t think the problem will happen as long as I’m here.”

  “I’ll get someone right there.”

  “How will I know him?”

  “Ask him the subject of your would-be master’s thesis. He’ll know.”

  “You guys think of everything.”

  “We try.”

  “I’m only turning them over to you personally. Deal?”

  “Deal.” See ya.

  So that’s that, Neal thought. An hour or so and it’s over. And I’ll never see her again.

  That’s when he heard the awful screech of the elevator, heard the doors slamming shut on the third floor, and stopped wondering where Ben Chin was.

  Neal met him in the hallway. “What are you doing here?”

  Ben Chin rai
sed his hands into a fighting position. “The game’s over, Neal. I’m here to get them.”

  “You’ve been trumped.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that they represent some valuable assets to the CIA, who are not going to be happy with you if you waste them. So let’s not fuck around, okay?”

  Chin dropped his hands and smiled. Then his right hand came up and it had an automatic pistol in it. He pointed the silenced muzzle at Neal’s face.

  “I don’t give a shit about the CIA. I don’t work for the CIA. I don’t want to hurt you, but I don’t care very much one way or the other. So you walk away and we both forget we ever met. Or I do you right here. Either way, they die. So let’s not fuck around, okay?”

  Either way they die. Simms’s second choice. And Pendleton and Lan didn’t care about you getting killed, Neal. They figured it was better you than them. Well, better them than me.

  “Okay.”

  “That’s what I thought. Door locked?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You get out of here, Neal. You’re too far up Nathan Road. Way too far.”

  Neal walked past him down the hallway. Chin turned the doorknob with his left hand and slowly opened the door. Pendleton was sitting on the bed. Lan was standing by the window. Chin dropped into the shooter’s position—knees bent, both hands on the pistol’s grip—and brought the barrel down until it was pointed at Li Lan’s heart. She looked at his eyes.

  Neal barrel-rolled him from behind, taking him in the back of the knees and sending him flying onto his ass. Neal jumped on top of him and grabbed his wrist.

  Chin was fast. He used his free hand to punch Neal in the side of the head and then he threw him off. He kicked Neal in the ribs, and the force of the blow crashed Neal into the hallway wall. This took about a second and a half, and neither Li nor Pendleton moved an inch. Neal slumped against the wall. His head was spinning and he couldn’t catch his breath to move. The pain in his ribs doubled him over.

  “Asshole,” Chin said. He raised the gun to finish him off.

  Li Lan flew, or at least it seemed that way to Neal. One second she was standing against the wall and the next instant she was flying through the air, her legs curled beneath her. She flew until she was even with

  Chin’s head, and then her right leg shot out like a snake striking. The foot hit him on the underside of his jaw and his head snapped backward. He was unconscious even before the back of his head hit the wall and he slid to the floor.

  He woke up hearing Li Lan urging him, “Come, come. We must go.”

  He was lying on the bed in their room. He felt like throwing up, and his rib cage felt as if somebody had stuck burning matches into it. She would have looked like an angel to him if he hadn’t just seen her kick a man’s head about off. Maybe she looked like an angel anyway.

  “Come on. We must go,” she said.

  He shook his head. That was a mistake—Quasimodo crawled in and started ringing the bells. “We have to stay put. Simms will be here soon.”

  Pendleton pointed to Chin. “He won’t be out forever.”

  “He might be dead,” Neal said.

  “Yes, he may be,” said Li Lan. “We must go now.”

  Pendleton jerked him to his feet. The corridor wasn’t spinning. It was lurching like a broken carny ride with a drunken operator at the controls.

  “Where are we going?” Neal asked.

  “I know a place to hide until we can call your Mr. Simms,” Li Lan said. “Now come, please.”

  “We should take the stairs. Elevators are traps,” Neal said. He leaned over painfully and picked up Chin’s gun. “I suppose you know how to use one of these things?”

  “Yes.” Li Lan took the pistol, unscrewed the silencer and dropped it to the floor, then stuck the pistol in the front of her jeans, under the jersey. “Can you walk down the stairs?”

  “If you’re absolutely sure I can’t just lie here and take a nap.”

  “Where we are going you can rest.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To see Kuan Yin.”

  “Naturally.”

  Elevators may have been traps, but the stairs were murder. Each step drove a jolt of pain through Neal’s ribs and up into his head. He was beginning to wish Li Lan had let Chin shoot him.

  When they reached the door to the lobby he said, “You’d better let me go first. Chin may have friends down here.”

  He didn’t. He was so fucking arrogant he had come alone. Neal signaled his new friends and he, Li, and Pendleton strolled right out the front door onto the street.

  Chin’s crew stood across the street, leaning against a parked car.

  “Hi!” Neal shouted as he waved. “Boy, I’ll bet you never thought you’d see me again, huh?”

  The three thugs straightened up and started for him, spreading out as they did. Neal walked slowly toward them as Lan and Pendleton moved sideways behind Neal’s screen, getting ready to run up Waterloo to Nathan.

  “Yeah, I beat the crap out of those guys back on the Peak! Thanks for leaving us back there, by the way! Now don’t come any closer! The lady has a gun! Show the boys the gun, Lan!”

  Li Lan showed the gun.

  A boy inside the parked car stuck the barrel of an M-16 out the window.

  Li grabbed Pendleton’s hand and ran. The sniper in the car couldn’t sweep fire without hitting his own guys, and was about to pop off a single round into Neal’s chest when the car took off after the runners. The car doors swung open and the other punks scrambled into it as it headed up Waterloo Road. Neal ran after them and saw Li lead Pendleton into an alley. The car screeched to a stop, and three of the hunters got out. The car went on to circle the block, probably to cut off the other end of the alley. They were setting up a classic block-and-sweep operation wherein the three “sweepers” would drive their quarry into the “block”—in this case bursts of fire from an M-16. Li and Pendleton were trapped.

  Neal flattened himself against the wall of the building. He looked up and saw a fire escape. Jesus loves me, he thought, this I know…. Hong Kong or no Hong Kong, a city is a city, and nobody does a city better than your friend Neal Carey.

  Pulling himself up onto the fire escape, he climbed to the roof of the building, then crawled to the edge and peered down through seven stories of darkness into the alley. He could just make out Li and Pendleton, who were working their way along the near wall, trying to make it out to the other side. Shit, didn’t they realize they were caught in a trap? He could also see the three hunters spread out across the alley, moving steadily and confidently.

  Well, maybe he could worry them a little bit.

  It took him maybe thirty seconds to find something. A concrete block had been set near the door of the stairway, probably to prop it open in the heat of the day. He carried it to the edge of the roof, tiptoeing along until he was even with the line of sweepers. He hefted the block up to his waist and flung it over the side.

  It missed the end sweeper by a good foot, but the sound was like an explosion, and fragments of concrete flew everywhere. The three men dropped to the ground. One of them held a hand over his eye and screamed.

  Lan and Pendleton stopped and looked up.

  “Don’t go out the alley!” Neal yelled.

  They squatted behind some garbage cans and froze.

  Ah, rooftops, Neal thought. Tar Beach. The last refuge and repository of the cityscape. The final storage place. He found a cardboard carton overflowing with beer and wine bottles, evidence of some husband’s secret tippling. He carried it over to the edge of the roof and looked down to see the two unwounded sweepers get up carefully and slowly begin moving up the alley.

  Neal was impressed with the aerodynamics of the wine bottle as it plummeted through the night sky. He had given it a slight backflip, so it revolved end over end in a gentle arc before smashing on the concrete of the alley floor. The sound was spectacular. The two sweepers dove for cover on either side
of the alley. He aimed his second one at the sweeper on the far side and scored a direct hit on his back. The sweeper yelped and rolled backward to the near side. Neal launched another one, and then another, and then risked a long peek over the edge. The two sweepers had their faces pressed up against the near wall.

  Your basic standoff.

  A burst of machine-gun fire raked the edge of the roof and sent Neal sprawling. Lying flat along the edge, he risked opening one eye, and saw the boy with the M-16 advancing from the other end of the alley, gun held at his hip. He was shouting to his comrades. You didn’t have to speak any Cantonese to understand that he was asking them what the fuck was going on, or to comprehend that they were trying, as quickly as possible, to tell him to shut the fuck up. The boy stopped and just stood there in the alley, rifle on hip, finger on the trigger, waiting for something to happen.

  Nothing happened. Li Lan was either too scared or too smart or both to go against an M-16 with a pistol, although the boy made a perfect target standing for a one-shot deal. Maybe, Neal thought, she can’t see him from where she is. That must be it. Maybe I’m the only one who can see him, which really stinks. Why me?

  Neal reached out and pulled the carton away from the edge. Crawling on his belly, he pushed the box in front of him. It seemed to take forever to reach the point where he figured he’d be about even with Machine Gun Kelly. He inched the carton to the roof’s edge and peeked over. The boy was starting a cautious advance, moving sideways, close to the near edge of the wall so as to give Li Lan as small a silhouette as possible.

  Neal wished he had paid even a little bit of attention in Mr. Litton’s physics classes back in high school. Litton had always been hauling the students up to the roof to drop shit off and then perform calculations, but Neal was goddamned if he could remember what the calculations were or what they were intended to prove except the fact that he was the dumbest kid in physics class. So he just shoved the carton off the edge of the roof and hoped for the best.

  One of the sweepers must have seen it go, because he shouted a warning to the gunner, who had a natural but stupid response: He looked up.

  That cost him the two precious seconds in which he might have ducked, or run, or even just covered his head with his hands. But he didn’t do any of those things. He just looked up into the darkness, not seeing anything at all until the whole sky was filled with one massive, empty beer bottle hurtling straight toward his face.