The glass was streaked with a milky coating. It smelled like fresh-cut grass and honey. Phoebe took the vial and examined it closely, and her eyes shifted over to the monastery.
Dan was plunging in through the doorway.
“There’s no stopping him now,” she said.
THE CUT BELOW PHOEBE’S SHOULDER had been given as a warning following her failed attempt to escape in the Rover. The gash was deep enough that stitches would be needed. In order to stem the bleeding now, Dr. Tzu was wrapping it with a strip of white cloth torn from the dead man’s shirt.
“I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this,” Phoebe told the doctor.
He looked at her in surprise. “No sorry.”
“No happy either, I’m sure,” I said.
We were crouched behind the cargo van, trying to decide what to do. Six tense minutes had passed since Dan had gone inside. I was watching the entry door intently.
“Maybe he was right,” I said. “Maybe Anand’s been killed.”
“If so, Dan is next,” Phoebe said. “Then they’ll come for us.”
If so, if not, maybe, maybe not—the fog of uncertainty blinded us with fear, and fear hobbled us with more uncertainty. Every move seemed dubious and unpredictable. If we could see clearly what had to be done, we’d be more than halfway to doing it. Clear vision gave conviction, and conviction gave courage. Clarity was a clarion call.
That was Anand’s secret, I decided. Seeing the truth of the matter. Information, intelligence, strategy, a plan. He had asked the doctor to diagram in detail the monastery’s physical layout: the monks’ cells, the temple, the prayer hall, the kitchen, where they were keeping Govindi, where the monks were being held, where the Assassins were stationed, where he could hide if he had to, how he might quickly escape. He had asked all kinds of questions about the three Assassins, and even more about the backgrounds and experience of the monks. After listening carefully, he had figured out a plan. A clear vision of action to embolden him.
By now, I thought, that vision had most likely gone to hell. Nearly thirty minutes had passed. And my lunatic brother had been added to the mix, jacked up on his home-made brew of soma. There was no telling what I’d find if I entered in there now. So I cowered behind the van with Phoebe and the doctor, straining for some vision to embolden me.
I didn’t have to wait for long.
A red-robed monk slipped silently out the door. I recognized at once it was Jamyang. He stole across the lot, glancing nervously about, black brows piled up with tension. When he reached us he was out of breath. “Dr. Tzu…must come now.”
“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Anand?”
“He kill one man, wound another. Wounded man escape.”
“You said there were three of them.”
“Third man in prayer hall. Wounded man there, too.”
“With the monks?”
He nodded nervously. “Man say he kill them unless we bring doctor.”
I looked at Dr. Tzu and Phoebe.
The doctor headed off toward the monastery. Jamyang followed.
“Wait!” I grabbed Jamyang. “What about my brother? He just went in a few minutes ago.”
Jamyang shook his head—he didn’t know. He gently moved my hand from his shoulder, then hurried off after the doctor.
Phoebe and I looked at each other. “You better wait here,” I said. I turned to the body on the ground behind us and rolled him onto his back. Grabbing hold of the dagger, I yanked it out of his gut. The sound it made repulsed me.
When I turned back, Phoebe was taking up the tire wrench. “I’m going with you.”
I hated to think of her facing their knives. “You can’t—you’re bleeding.”
“So was Dan.”
“Dan is crazy.”
She glanced at the bloody knife in my hand. “So are you. Cowboy.”
She hefted the wrench with her good right arm. It reminded me how she’d thrown me in that tower back in Bukhara.
Together, we headed toward the monastery.
81.
Death Chant
BEHIND THE ENTRY DOOR, a short, dark passage led to a large, open courtyard. Phoebe and I peered out guardedly from the shadows. A low sound resonated like a humming hive of bees—the guttural murmur of the monks’ chant. Where was it coming from?
Against the wall on either side stood the two-tiered arcade of the monks’ quarters, chalk-white cells roofed with unpainted timbers. In stark contrast, before us blazed the oxblood red and mustard yellow of the temple and assembly buildings, with staircases rising to high-set doors, and sweeping, green-tiled, pagoda-style roofs, their corners curled to the sky.
“There,” Phoebe said, pointing. “The prayer hall.”
Jamyang and Dr. Tzu were rushing up the stairs. The hall seemed to be where the chant was coming from. I noticed, emblazoned on the façade above its wood-pillared porch, the chariot wheel chakra—Ashoka’s Wheel of Dharma.
Beneath it, Jamyang rapped the red double-doors. One of the doors opened and the two men meekly entered. A bearded Iranian emerged—dark suit jacket, open collar, and in his hand, a dagger. The Assassin scanned the courtyard. Phoebe and I drew back.
The throb of chant again subsided as the prayer hall door swung shut. We crept out from the shadows. For the first time I noticed the sound of trickling water.
A round, stone-rimmed pond, fed by an open channel, occupied the center of the courtyard, its surface green with lily pads. In the middle, like an island, a stone Buddha rested on a giant stone lotus.
“The center of the mandala,” I said. Even the Buddha’s hand gestures appeared exactly the same: right hand reaching to touch the earth, upraised left hand holding a sculpted lotus. I quickly scanned the pond for the soma plant. Pale pinks, yellows and whites abounded, but there were no red-and-gold flowers to be seen. “It’s not here,” I said.
“Jack!” Anand had emerged from a cell to our left, bearing the body of a monk in his arms. His white lab coat was streaked with blood.
Weapons drawn, we hurried to him.
“Drop those,” he ordered, “and get her out of here, quickly.” He held the body out to us—a woman!—she was alive.
“Govindi?” Phoebe asked. She tossed aside her tire wrench, I dropped my dagger, and we took the woman into our arms.
“She’s lost consciousness,” Anand said.
Sleeping Beauty, I thought at first glance, and wondered if she really was a nun. Though she wore the customary crimson robe, her head had mercifully not been shaved and her feet were clad in sneakers. Her face appeared a pretty blend of Asian and Caucasian, with jet-black hair pulled into a pair of girlish pigtails, and beaded necklaces glittering in the open cleft of her robe.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her face. “Gabby,” I said.
“What?” Phoebe asked.
“I know this woman,” I said. “I...met her...just a few days ago in Rome.” I remembered leaving her asleep in her bed. Now her robe felt damp in my arms. When I looked at the palm of my hand I saw red.
“Right arm and abdomen,” Anand said. “Wrap them and get her to the hospital at once.” He started across toward the prayer hall.
“Where’s Dan?” Phoebe called.
Anand looked back. “When he saw what the Hashishin had done to her, he went charging out after them.”
Phoebe and I glanced at each other.
“Go now,” he said. “Hurry.” He crossed the courtyard, drawing out his blade, and disappeared into the passage between the prayer hall and the temple.
With Govindi growing heavy in our arms, Phoebe and I headed for the exit.
“What about Dan?” she asked.
I was afraid to answer. With the soma and the sight of Govindi in his head, he must have gone into a rampage. The two of us peered up warily at the prayer hall. The building seemed alive with the insect drone of the monks. Even the painted wheel appeared to pulsate.
“Didn’t Jamyang mention a rear door?” I
asked.
“That must be where Anand—”
The entry doors of the prayer hall suddenly crashed open. Dan staggered out, bloody dagger in his hand.
“He’s been cut!” Phoebe cried.
Blood drained down from his un-bandaged face and streamed from a gash on his arm. He stumbled forward, delirious. At the top of the stairs, he collapsed.
We set Govindi down in the passageway and started across the yard toward the stairs. The chant of the monks echoed out from the hall. A large man appeared in the doorway. Face bloodied, blade in hand, the Assassin lurched toward Dan.
Phoebe screamed in warning. We raced across the yard.
As Dan struggled to his feet, the Assassin swung his crescent. Dan wheeled to dodge it, but the knife slashed across his back and his eyes bulged in pain. Teetering, he dropped his dagger and tumbled to the bottom of the stairs.
We reached him as he came to a stop, face-down. Phoebe crouched beside him. The long scarlet gash had opened up his back. In the blood I glimpsed the white of his spine.
“Daniel!” Phoebe struggled to turn him over. I dropped to my knees and helped her. When we finally saw his face, his eyes looked dead as stones.
“Oh, God,” Phoebe said.
The Assassin gazed down in triumph.
I could see he was not Vanitar, but a giant of a man with a broad, flat face and ears the size of an elephant’s. Slowly, I rose to my feet.
The giant lifted Dan’s dagger off the floor and tossed it out over the stairs. It landed with a thud on the ground in front of me.
I stared down at the bloodstained blade. Phoebe, cradling Dan, peered up at me. “Jack. You can’t.”
I looked at her. The terror in her eyes. Dan lying dead in her arms.
I bent down and picked up the knife.
“No,” she said. “Please!”
I started forward, as if in a trance. Dragging my foot up the first step. I took it, slowly, then took another. Then, more slowly, another. My gaze rose up to the Assassin.
He stood on the platform watching me. A ravenous look on his face.
Phoebe pleaded behind me. The chant of the monks seemed to petrify the air. My legs grew thick and heavy. I tried to raise my foot up, ascend another step. The leg turned solid as cement.
I couldn’t move.
The Assassin, watching, smiled.
Anand burst out the doorway behind him, bloody smock flying and kukri in the air, a mad butcher erupting from an abattoir. The giant whirled to face him. They launched into a swirl of feints and flashes, a storm of lightning strikes. Steel gnashed steel. The slashing crescents hooked. With a single, sudden, sweeping pivot, Anand sent the Assassin’s dagger flying and impaled the man’s throat with his kukri.
It stuck. Anand released the knife and the man reeled back, hands swatting vainly at the handle. Gurgling, choking, he turned to get away—and toppled over the rim of the landing.
I felt the earth shudder as the body hit the dirt.
The guttural dirge of the monks droned on, a zombie din of death. The Assassin lay twisted with his face toward heaven, the kukri still jutting from his throat. Nothing of him moved but the outpour of his blood. His bulbous eyes seemed locked in awe—of black-cloaked Death, or Allah.
I descended the stairs in dread. Phoebe was still cradling Dan’s head in her lap. “Your brother is alive,” she said.
ALIVE AND IN A STATE OF SHOCK. At least that’s how it seemed. We feared the slash across his back had damaged his spinal cord. Although conscious and alert, he appeared numb to what must have been excruciating pain, would not move his limbs when we asked him to try, and repeatedly failed to respond to our questions. He remained almost creepily detached and observant, watching us move and talk around him without moving or speaking a word himself. Phoebe was frightened for his life.
I thought it might be the soma. Prayed it might be, actually. Dr. Tzu said the soma might be alleviating his pain, but he wasn’t sure why Dan was not responding.
He and Phoebe were on their knees, preparing Dan for transport. Watching them, I felt a sense of helplessness and shame. “Dan didn’t hesitate for a second,” I said. “I couldn’t even bring myself to move.”
Phoebe looked up from him. “I’m glad you didn’t,” she said, “or you’d be lying dead beside him now.”
We loaded Dan into the cargo van on a wood plank employed as a stretcher. Govindi lay semi-conscious on the floor beside him, moaning intermittently and calling out a name: “Ätti.” The hospital was less than half an hour away, but with riots still raging in the smoke-plumed city, Dr. Tzu said an ambulance was out of the question, and so it was decided that Phoebe would drive while the doctor worked in back to keep his two patients alive.
“Ätti…”
Dr. Tzu pulled shut the van’s rear doors. I escorted Phoebe to the driver’s seat.
“Swiss-German,” she said. “She’s calling for her grandfather.”
Dr. Fiore. The Swiss mountaineer. Student of religion, connoisseur of plants. Pharmaceutical CEO turned Tantric Buddhist monk. I remembered him wading serenely through that clover pond in Rome—and wondered why his granddaughter had wanted to sleep with me.
It hadn’t been for sex. I was knocked out. Govindi must have spiked the carafe of red wine we shared.
“What’s wrong?” Phoebe asked.
“My phone...”
“Your cell? You told me—”
“That night I met Govindi in Rome—that’s when I started having problems with my phone.”
“You think...she bugged it?”
“She was working with Fiore. They were hoping to locate Dan.”
“You can’t blame them, Jack. They’re trying to keep the lotus from these butchers who misuse it. We have to do whatever we can to help them.”
As usual, she was right. “We’ll find Fiore, I’m sure of it.” But I spoke with a confidence I didn’t really feel. Jamyang had said the monks were not told where the old man had been taken. Our only hope was the injured Assassin tied up in the prayer hall; Anand was up there now trying to get the man to talk.
I opened the driver’s door for Phoebe. “You just take care of these two,” I said.
She nodded in agreement but seemed preoccupied. “Remember Dan said he wouldn’t leave here without her? I guess he really meant it.” She tried to smile at the irony, but her eyes were welling up.
Sympathy overcame my own jealousy. “I know you still love him, Phoe—”
“Love him?” She hopped in the van. “I hate him. All this time I stayed away from you—and he was in love with Govindi!”
I laughed. She started the van. For a moment, we looked at each other.
“It’s my fault,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“Please. Don’t be sorry. And don’t be a hero, cowboy. Make sure you come back.”
“I will,” I said.
“No...I mean… Come back to me.”
Her blue eyes glistened, displaying that naked longing I had glimpsed the night before. It struck me like a thunderbolt. A Vajra to the heart. That place inside of her was that place inside of me. I suddenly imagined the two of us would never be apart.
“I reckon’ I ain’t never leavin’ you, Slim.”
She leaned out and I kissed her. A tender kiss that lingered, that filled us both with longing, that did not want to end...
82.
Womb
THE MONKS HAD STOPPED THEIR CHANTING. A silence hung over the courtyard, deepened by the trickle of the lotus pond and the stillness of the vigilant Buddha. I mounted the stairs of the prayer hall. A faint humming caught my ear, like a lingering echo of the monks’ chant. Below, on the ground where it had fallen, the corpse of the Assassin hosted a frantic orgy of flies. Two red-robed monks laid the wood plank down and prepared to move the body. One of the men looked up at me and I saw that he was Jamyang.
He nodded a bow. I nodded back. Just another day in Shangri-la.
Inside, huddled in
shadow under avenues of pillars, a sea of scarlet monks squatted silent on the floor. Dim sunlight filtered down from above, through air reeking of burning butter and layered with the blue haze of incense. The glow of flickering butter lamps, blazing by the hundreds, lit paintings and carvings of bodhisattvas and saints gazing down from darkened niches in the walls. The walls themselves, and even the pillars, were draped with fiery fabrics—deep-dyed yellows, crimson reds, incandescent oranges—luminous up in the sunlight but dimmer down in the shadows, so that despite its airy heights, the room felt warm and womb-like.
Up front, under the gaze of an enormous golden Buddha, Anand paced slowly back and forth. I made my way toward him. The meditating monks, bald-headed boulders, eyes focused inward, paid no mind as I quietly padded past. Anand appeared to be mulling over the problem of the Assassin. Propped against the golden Buddha’s massive lotus throne, the wounded Iranian sat on the floor, hands and ankles bound with rope, white shirt soaked with blood. His head hung down with his chin on his chest; I wondered if he might be unconscious. But then I saw that beneath his brow he was following me with his eyes.
Was this Vanitar? My only glimpse of his face in Rome had been in the dark on the roof, and later through the rain-fogged window of the Alfa. I paused to look at this man now as he raised his gaze to mine. His eyes were black and menacing. The untrimmed beard reached high across his cheeks; the moustache scowled beneath his nose. The skin of his face was pocked and dark. I saw no scar at his mouth.
“Where is Vanitar?” I asked.
The assassin peered up at me, silent.
Anand stopped pacing. “Won’t say. Won’t say where they took Dr. Fiore, either. In fact, he won’t say anything at all.”
The killer’s stare shifted from Anand back to me. I wondered if Dr. Tzu had given him pain medication. He appeared to be enjoying our predicament.
I looked to Anand. “What are you going to do?”
“What do you think we should do?”
The casual tone of his question annoyed me. “Aren’t you supposed to be the expert at this?”
The Assassin Lotus Page 35