Golden Buddha

by Clive Cussler

  Earplugs were slipped into his ears. He could not hear Reyes tell Lincoln, “I’ll go find a room service cart. You stay here.”

  Lincoln nodded and flipped on the television. Their prisoner was not going anywhere. He lay trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey, not moving a muscle. Eight minutes later, Lincoln and Reyes had snuck him out a back entrance of the hotel, then brought the car around and slid him onto the backseat.

  “I’m hungry,” Reyes said as he reached over to place the car in Drive.

  “Man,” Lincoln said, “you always say that.”

  25

  AT the same instant that Reyes and Lincoln were pulling alongside the Oregon and parking, Max Hanley was checking a device in the Magic Shop. In the background, on one of the numerous workbenches, the machine that heated liquid latex beeped to signal it was at operating temperature, then automatically went to standby.

  Hanley turned and stared at the latex machine, then diverted his eyes back to the small box in his hand. “Okay,” Hanley said to Barrett, “let’s try it again.”

  “Testing, one, two, three,” Barrett said. “The brown cow jumped over the red moon, four score and seven years ago our—”

  “That’s fine,” Hanley said, cutting him off.

  He stared at the small box, then placed it to his throat and repeated what Barrett had said. Staring at a computer screen displaying a series of bar graphs, he noted the discrepancy and adjusted a series of tiny stainless-steel screws on the rear of the box with an optometrist’s screwdriver. “Go again.”

  “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” Barrett said. “Read my lips, no new taxes. Out of respect for the family, I will not answer that question, la de dah.”

  “Hold on,” Hanley said.

  He repeated Barrett’s ramblings while staring at the screen. Barrett watched and raised an eyebrow. His voice was coming from Hanley’s mouth. It was both eerie and amazing.

  “My mother couldn’t tell the difference,” he said.

  “Modern technology,” Hanley said, “still astounds me.”

  “How are you going to attach it?” Barrett asked.

  Hanley showed him.

  REYES glanced around the port; no one was watching. With Lincoln’s help, he removed Talbot from the rear seat, then dragged him up the gangplank onto the Oregon. Met at the inner door by Julia Huxley, the trio was directed down to the Magic Shop. Talbot, still blindfolded, stumbled down the passages, into the elevator, then along the last stretch of hallway until they reached the Magic Shop. Once Lincoln opened the door, Reyes directed Talbot to a chair, then sat him down and placed straps across his body. A light was moved to the front of Talbot’s seat, then turned on. Talbot could feel the heat from the lamp. A few seconds later, his blindfold was removed and the blinding light met his eyes.

  “You Michael Talbot?” Hanley asked.

  “Yes,” Talbot said, turning from the light.

  “Eyes forward,” Hanley said.

  Talbot complied, but he had a hard time looking into the light. He could sense someone was behind him, but the straps were too tight to turn.

  “Did you have sex with a teenage boy in Indonesia?”

  “Who are you people?” Talbot said.

  A second later, he felt a touch on his neck, then a surge of electricity hit his body.

  “We ask the questions here,” Hanley said. “Did you have sex with a teenage boy?”

  “He told me he was eighteen,” Talbot said through gritted teeth.

  “We’re tired of slime like you coming over to Asia to partake of your sick desires,” Hanley said. “It’s giving America a bad name.”

  “I’m here on busi—” Talbot started to say.

  The sharp bite of electricity.

  “Silence,” Hanley snapped.

  Talbot was afraid, the kind of deep-down fear of the unknown and unseen that creeps into a man’s soul and plays with his nerves and internal organs. Talbot began sweating from his forehead and the need to urinate was overpowering.

  “I have to pee,” he said.

  “When we say you can,” Hanley said. “First we are going to make a mold of your head. Then we will produce a three-dimensional image of it, which we will transmit over our computer network. From here on out, the Asian police organizations will be on the lookout for you. Then you are going to read a confession aloud. If you cooperate and perform these tasks, you will be taken to Hong Kong so that you can catch the first flight to the United States. Screw with us in any way and you will be washing up on the beaches of mainland China a few days from now. What’ll it be, lover boy?”

  “Okay, okay,” Talbot blurted. “But I’m about to pee my pants.”

  “Take him to the facilities,” Hanley said.

  Blindfolded once again, Talbot was led to a restroom and his hands untied.

  Four minutes later, he was back in his seat and strapped in place. Fifteen minutes after that, the mask was formed and the voice print recorded. A few minutes later, Michael Talbot was placed facedown on the rear seat of the sedan again and was driven toward the ferry dock.

  WINSTON Spenser was trying to figure an angle. There was none. He had grabbed for the brass ring and come up short. His choice now was to live or to die, and the people that were controlling him had made a compelling argument. He’d walk out with a new identity and a million in funding. He decided this was a deal he would honor.

  Spenser stared at his new passport and documents, then watched the lady in the group talking on the cellular telephone. She disconnected and turned to the leader.

  “The president is on his way, Mr. Chairman,” she said. “He’s taken care of the problem.”

  Spenser had no idea of the identities or affiliation of the people who had taken him hostage. He only knew from what he had witnessed so far that they had a power that went far beyond anything he had ever seen. They seemed to exist in a world of their own creation, a world of control and illusion, and whatever Spenser may have planned, they had always been one step ahead. And then it hit him.

  “You were at the auction in Geneva,” he said to the leader.

  Cabrillo stared at Spenser, as if trying to decide. “Yes, I was.”

  “How did you know I’d switched the Buddhas?”

  “You paid our company to fly the icon here to Macau, then take it by armored car to the temple,” Cabrillo said.

  “So you staged the entire affair at the party as a ruse?”

  “That, and we wanted to fulfill your deal with the man outside,” Cabrillo said.

  “Unreal,” Spenser said. “And the one hundred million?”

  “It will go to charity,” Cabrillo said. “We were hired to bring the real Buddha back to its rightful owner—this side deal is just frosting on the cake.”

  Spenser thought for a moment. “What is your ideology, your group’s motivation?”

  “We are a corporation,” Cabrillo said. “That is the only ideology we need.”

  “So you exist to make a profit?”

  “We exist,” Cabrillo said, “to make right from wrong. But along the way, we’ve learned how to make that a very lucrative enterprise.”

  “Amazing,” Spenser said.

  “Not as amazing as this,” Cabrillo said as the door to the hangar opened and the car carrying Hanley drove inside. Once the door closed, Hanley climbed from the passenger side of the SUV. “Meet Michael Talbot,” Cabrillo said to an astonished Winston Spenser.

  THE software billionaire took a key from a chain around his neck and opened the leather portfolio on the table. Then he removed a folder and flipped through the papers. The stack of papers was nearly an inch thick and was composed of bearer bonds in various amounts. The largest denomination was for an even $1 million. The smallest, $50,000. The banks that had issued the bonds were from a hodgepodge of European countries, from Great Britain to Germany to the most prevalent, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The total was $100 million.

  It was a king’s ransom to purchase a
princely prize.

  But to the software billionaire, it was just money. He lived for the fulfillment of his own desires. It was not the art of the Golden Buddha that intrigued him, nor the history that surrounded the icon like a cloud; it was the fact that it had once been stolen and now it had been stolen again. It was the crime that turned him on, the inflation of his ego he would feel when he knew that he was the only man in the world to possess the rare and priceless artifact. Truth be told, he already owned a collection of stolen art that rivaled any museum in Europe. Monet, Manet, Daumier, Delacroix. Da Vinci sketches, Donatello bronzes. Illuminated manuscripts, crown jewels, stolen historical documents.

  Warehouses in California were filled with antique automobiles, historic motorcycles, and early airplanes. Stolen Civil War artifacts, Romanov icons heisted from a museum in St. Petersburg, scientist Nikola Tesla’s writings lifted from a museum in Romania after the fall of communism, secret presidential letters, even a toilet from the White House.

  The first computer, the first personal computer, the first mass-produced consumer computer.

  Those last were for nostalgia, since computers were where his fortune had come from. He still had a hard copy of the first program his company had sold—one he had stolen himself from an unsuspecting programmer who’d believed he was just helping another enthusiast. That had been his first and largest theft, and it had set the stage for all the others.

  He stared at the bonds again, then reached for the satellite telephone.

  EDDIE Seng watched as a pair of olive-green Zodiac boats were raised from a lower deck on a utility elevator that exited amidships on the Oregon. As soon as the elevator stopped, Sam Pryor hooked a cable to the center hoisting ring of the first boat and swung it over the side, then into the water. Down at water level, Murphy took the bowline of the boat and tied it to the dock. While Pryor was hooking up the second boat, Murphy climbed aboard and checked the fuel and oil for the high-output four-stroke outboard motor. The oil was fresh and full, the tanks topped to the rim. Murphy turned the key and watched the lights on the dash; once he was sure everything was fine, he twisted the key and the engine started and settled into an almost silent idle.

  Once the second boat touched the water, Kasim duplicated Murphy’s efforts. The two boats sat idling in the night. Seng climbed aboard Murphy’s vessel and checked the supplies that had been loaded aboard down in the inner workings of the Oregon. Finding all in order, he spoke to Huxley in a low voice.

  “You got everything?”

  Huxley stared at her list, then found the last item. “We’re good.”

  Next, Seng reached across between the boats and handed Kasim a CD. “These are the coordinates for the onboard GPS—we are running an exact copy on this boat. Let’s try to stay within ten feet or so of one another, that way the radar shielding should hide us both.”

  Kasim nodded. “You got it, Eddie.”

  “Okay, Mark,” Seng said quietly as he threw off the line, “you can take us out.”

  Murphy slid the control lever down and the boat backed in reverse. A few minutes later, the two boats were skimming across the rain-splashed water at speeds of nearly thirty knots. For all intents and purposes, they were undetectable. Any radar that might try to paint them was being jammed; anyone listening for the engines would not be able to hear the noise over the storm. Help was coming.

  TWO in the morning and the trio in the tunnel had between three and four hours until first light.

  That was not as much of a problem as it might seem. Right now, the main threat was drowning. Hornsby stared ahead to where a large tile pipe was spilling its contents into the main sewer. What had begun as a trickle from the offshoot pipes had grown into angry torrents of water. The pipe ahead was raging with such force that the stream of water was slapping against the far wall of the main sewer like the torrent from a broken fire hydrant.

  “From that point forward,” Meadows said, “we lose the bottom half of the sewer to water.”

  Already the water was knee-deep, and the farther the men had gone, the more it had risen. Now they were at an impasse. From here to the end of the line, the water would be too deep to walk through. “Let’s inflate the rafts,” Jones said wearily.

  Hornsby opened one of the duffle bags and removed a pair of folding rafts. Taking a high-pressure air supply from inside the bag, he attached it to a raft and turned the switch. The raft unfolded and quickly became rigid. Two minutes later, Hornsby turned off the inflator.

  “We need to place the Buddha in one raft,” Hornsby said, “and the three of us in the other.”

  “Weight problems?” Jones asked.

  “Each raft can carry a maximum of seven hundred pounds,” Hornsby said. “Since none of us weighs under a hundred pounds, he’ll need to ride alone.”

  Meadows was unpacking the second raft. He laid it out and attached the inflator. As it was filling with air, he spoke. “What do you think?” he asked his partners. “Should we let the Buddha lead or follow?”

  Hornsby thought for a moment. “If he’s behind, the weight might push us into something.”

  “But if he leads,” Jones said, “we can let go of the lead rope if we get into trouble.”

  Meadows stared at the rapidly filling pipe just ahead. “There will not be much steering required,” he said, pointing to the rising water. “I think we’ll all just go with the flow.”

  “Then he leads,” Hornsby said as he grabbed one end of the Buddha to wrestle it onto the raft, “and we just go along for the ride.”

  “Hear, hear,” Meadows said.

  “Makes sense to me,” Jones added.

  26

  “TALBOT?” Spenser said. “You’re part of this?”

  Hanley walked over to Spenser and stood as the art dealer examined him. At least he seemed to be passing the visual test—Spenser was waiting for him to answer.

  “Win…ston Spen…ser, you old…,” Hanley croaked.

  He sounded like a cheap P.A. system in a run-down school. Hanley moved the small device from his voice box and spoke in his normal voice. “Kevin,” he said, “come take a look at this—I thought I had it dialed in right.”

  Nixon walked over and flipped the device over. He took a pen from his shirt pocket and clicked a small toggle switch over two notches. “You had the delay used for telephone transmissions engaged, boss,” Nixon said. “Try it now.”

  “Hi, Winston,” Hanley said. “Long time no see.”

  Spenser stared at the man and shook his head. Had he not seen the device malfunction, he might have been all right—as it was, everything that had happened to him was rushing back in a flood. Now these people had created some kind of robot. Who knew what they might do next?

  “Mr. Talbot,” Spenser managed to say.

  “I think you fixed it, Kevin,” Hanley said.

  Spenser stood mute.

  “Okay, everyone, listen up,” Cabrillo said, “it’s almost time.”

  DETECTIVE Ling Po stared at the mass of melted metal. The support beams of the float had been twisted into grotesque shapes by the intense heat of the fire, and they were wrapped around the remains of the motorcycles like the blackened tentacles of an octopus. A handler with a dog was poking at one side of the wreckage.

  “Sir,” the handler said, “the dog is not signaling any human remains.”

  “Does that mean there are none?” Po asked.

  “Usually, it would need to be an extremely hot fire to fully turn a corpse to ash. Anything less than that he’ll smell.”

  Po glanced at the wreckage. It had melted the asphalt of the road, and parts of the metal support beams were imbedded into the roadway. There was no way to tell with any certainty what was underneath.

  “Hook a chain to the end,” Po said, “and drag it with one of the trucks. I want to see what’s under there.”

  A fireman ran to remove a chain from the storage compartment on his truck. A few minutes later he had one end secured to the wreckage and th
e other end to the truck’s bumper. Slowly, the fireman eased the truck forward and the wreckage was wrestled from down in the asphalt. After dragging it a few feet north, the fireman stopped his truck.

  “It that far enough?” he shouted out the window to Po.

  “Perfect,” Po said, staring at the manhole cover.

  Bending down, Po tried to lift the cover, but he had no luck. Another fireman removed a tool from the truck and slid it into the small opening on the manhole cover, then pried it open. He slid the cover a few feet away. Po removed a small flashlight from his pocket and shined it down into the hole.

  “Bingo,” he said.

  Reaching for his cell phone, he dialed the number for headquarters.

  “Sir,” he said, “I think I know where the A-Ma Temple Buddha went.”

  THERE are a total of sixteen places in Macau where the storm runoff exits into the bay. Seng and his team were pulling up to the only one that mattered. After securing the Zodiacs to some rocks alongside the grate, Seng walked over and examined the metal shield. The square screen was made of tubular stock, with the openings measuring some two feet by two feet, or large enough to allow any trash to pass through. It was connected to the angled concrete slab that attached to the storm sewer by a series of large bolts. Seng walked back to the Zodiac and removed a toolbox. Finding the proper size socket, he attached it to a battery-operated wrench, then walked back over to the grate and began to remove the bolts. Once the bolts were all free, Seng, Huxley, Murphy and Kasim positioned themselves on all four corners of the grate and lifted it free. The water was racing out of the outflow, and on the far side Murphy and Kasim had some trouble pulling the grate onto the rocks. Once it was out of the way, everyone stared into the opening.

  “It’s becoming a river in there,” Huxley said finally.

  Seng threw a strip of bright yellow plastic in the stream and then timed the movement. He stared at the second hand of his watch intently. Once the piece of plastic was fifty yards out in the Inner Harbour, he calculated the speed.