by Ronan Frost
“Thank you for flying with Tibetan Airlines, flight why-do-we-have-to-get-out-of-bed-so-early. We would like to thank you for choosing to fly with us, and hope you’ll enjoy your stay in the modern world. Flights back in time are available upon request.”
“Shut up,” he said.
“That costs extra,” Carter told him, and he could well believe that.
It took them a quarter of an hour to reach the front of the procession of cars and trucks, the sun rising markedly in the sky in that time so it cast a hot band of light across Rye’s thighs. It worked like a magnifying glass on his skin; thankfully he wasn’t an ant ready to burn.
One of the border guards banged on the roof of the truck’s cab, and another gestured for them to pull over out of the flow of traffic. Both men, he noticed, were armed with semi-automatics, though they looked more like schoolboys playing dress-up rather than soldiers. That, in part, was down to their racial characteristics, he realized, and he didn’t like the way generations of preconceived ideas still filtered through his mind despite the fact he liked to think of himself as a prejudice-free modern man.
There was, of course, no such thing.
We were all the sum of our experiences, our environment, and our best efforts to be our best selves, but we were always going to fall short of perfect.
That was the essence of being human.
The human condition.
To try and to fail, only to try better and fail harder.
“Papers?” the guard asked, that one English word uncomfortable in his mouth.
“Of course,” Carter said, reaching into his pocket for a billfold which contained the five hundred bucks they’d set aside to bribe their way beneath the gateway into another country.
The guard took it, rifled through the notes as though counting them, then asked, “What is this?”
“Our paperwork,” the thief said. “It’s all there, count it.”
The guard’s brow furrowed, as though he didn’t grasp the fundamental concept of being paid off to look the other way.
“American?”
Carter nodded, “Good old USDA prime.”
“You people make me sick. You think you rule the world. You throw your money around like it is the answer to everything, no thought for just how insulting it is to those of us on the receiving end. You think our integrity can be bought so cheaply? This is our country, we are as proud of it as you are of your apple pie. You want to come in, you want to climb, you will follow the proper procedures, apply for your visas and permits for the mountains you intend to climb, and wait for them to be granted.”
“We could do that,” the thief agreed. “But our colleague was assured that these five hundred dollars would be more than enough compensation to pay for your troubles.”
“Then you were misled.”
“How much will it cost?” Rye asked.
The man sniffed and said something to his companion, who pointed at the black SUV, no doubt reminding his friend that there was a whale to be gutted here. They traded a few more words in their native tongue, then the guard leaned back into their window and said, “This much, each. There are four of you. Two thousand should be enough to secure the proper paperwork from my office.”
“Two grand? That’s daylight robbery.”
“Yes it is, but that doesn’t change the price.”
“We don’t have that kind of money on us.”
“That is unfortunate, but it is not my problem. That is the price.”
“How much have you got on you?” Rye asked him.
“Another couple of hundred, and my Amex.” He turned to the guard. “I don’t suppose you take plastic?”
The man shook his head. “There is a bank in town. It opens in an hour. Go there. Tell them I sent you. They will allow you to take the money from your card, for a fee. I will keep your truck here as insurance until you return.”
“Jesus, what a con.” Carter turned to Rye. “Will you be all right in the truck?”
“You stay here, I’ll go,” Rye said. “I could do with the walk to clear my head.”
“Knock yourself out.” The thief reached back for the handle that would recline his chair and closed his eyes.
“Where’s the bank?” Rye asked the border guard as he clambered out of the battered old truck. He pointed the way, offering rudimentary directions, and told him his name as though it was the key to the kingdom, which maybe it was in this corrupt little junta.
Rye pressed the earbud to activate it.
“You realize how ridiculous this is? We work for a billionaire and we can’t afford to pay a miserable little bribe?” he told Byrne through the earpiece. That earned a laugh in his ear.
“It wouldn’t matter if we’d had the cash, they’d have found an excuse to send us to this bank of theirs, and charged us to exchange it, or deposit it; it’s all about working the angles. They’re embracing capitalism.”
This time it was Rye’s turn to laugh.
The bank wasn’t a bank at all.
It took him ten minutes on foot, and he was sure he’d walked the wrong way somewhere along the route when he faced a big wooden door that led into a courtyard. It looked more like an apartment than a bank, and his impressions of the place only got worse when a kid on the bottom step begged loose change off him. He went inside. The floors were marble, and the iron balustrade on the staircase was worn free of varnish in places from years of people running their hands across it as they climbed and descended. It was easily ten degrees cooler inside than it was out. Rye climbed the stairs. “This place is weird,” he told Byrne. “I feel like Hansel wandering off into the worst enchanted wood, ever.”
“If he offers you candy, you might want to run.”
It was good to know the other man was there.
He went up.
There were two doors on the next landing, one with a brass plaque above the mailbox. He couldn’t read what was written on it, but at least it looked official, so he knocked on the door and waited.
It took a moment before a fat man answered.
He wore a linen suit that looked as though he’d slept in it for the last week, and which came replete with sweat rings beneath the armpits and what appeared to be blood on the collar from where he’d cut himself shaving. “What?” he asked in English. Rye had no way of knowing if he’d guessed based on his complexion or, more likely, if the guard had called ahead to warn him Rye was coming, but the fact he’d not even attempted a hello in his native tongue was telling.
“Metok sent me. He told me you were a bank?”
“How much do you need?” the fat man asked, without actually opening the door wide enough for him to see inside.
“Two thousand US dollars.”
“That is a lot of money. What makes you think we hold that much?”
“He said you would be able to help.”
“Well, yes, but it won’t be cheap. We have to make a living, after all.”
“Of course,” Rye agreed. “How much?”
“What type of card is it?”
“American Express.”
“Ah, that is unfortunate. It is the most expensive card. Mastercard or Visa would have been better. But for you, I can do it for thirteen percent of the transaction fee.”
It wasn’t like he had a choice, and he knew full well had he said Visa or Mastercard it would have been just as unfortunate, and the same thirteen percent. “That’s fine,” Rye said.
“Good. Good. Come in.”
The fat man stepped aside to allow him into the apartment. It appeared to be a single room, with one chair and a desk in the center, no other furniture, no decorations on the bare white walls. There was another door at the far side of the room, which presumably went through to the strong room.
“Sit. Sit,” the fat man said, gesturing toward the chair, while he took the other seat, behind the desk. “So, what brings you to our beautiful country?”
“We’re climbers,” Rye said, sure the man must ha
ve heard the same thing with every shakedown.
“Ah, off to conquer the great peaks? You must be excited. Surely a once-in-a-lifetime experience for someone like you?”
“Something like that,” he said, taking his wallet from his back pocket. The whole situation was a bit surreal, but he handed the card across.
“Ah, straight down to business. I can appreciate that,” the banker said, taking a portable card reader from the desk drawer. He put Rye’s card into the machine and punched in the sequence of numbers, turning it to him to put in his pin number. The screen said the charge was 2,260 USD, which, if his mental arithmetic was right, was thirteen percent. The fact he hadn’t used a calculator to check his math convinced Rye the border guard had called through and he was in on the sting. Well, it wasn’t his money, and it wasn’t as though Rask couldn’t afford it, so he punched in his four-digit pin, and a few seconds later the machine spooled out a receipt.
“Wonderful,” the fat man said, tearing it off and offering him the top copy. “My assistant will be through with your money in a moment. Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Coffee?”
“I’m good,” he said, not wanting to prolong this peculiar experience any longer than he absolutely had to.
It took another uncomfortable minute of silence before the door behind him opened and the boy Rye had seen panhandling downstairs came through carrying a wad of notes.
He gave them to the fat man, who counted them out.
They looked like they’d been spent fifty times over and were close to worn out, but they’d spend just fine and that was all that mattered. “Two thousand dollars,” he said, laying the last note down on the desk. “A pleasure doing business with you.” He pushed the well-used notes across the desk to Rye.
“It’s certainly been an experience,” Rye said, standing up. “This has to be the strangest bank I’ve ever been in.”
“Oh, is that what Metok called it?” the fat man said with something approaching a grin. “That’s an interesting choice of words.”
Isn’t it just, Rye thought, but didn’t say out loud.
He assumed the man’s primary business was drugs, or at least contraband, which made sense, given his close ties to the border guard.
The fat man showed him to the door, but didn’t follow him down the stairs, “You’ll forgive me,” he said, by way of good-bye, “but this body of mine wasn’t made for climbing.” He laughed like he’d just said the funniest thing in the world.
It took Rye half the time to get back to the border crossing because he knew where he was going. He caught himself looking over his shoulder more than once to be sure he wasn’t being followed. The thief’s paranoia was contagious.
Carter was leaning against the side of the truck, smoking and talking with the guard.
The others were still in the SUV, parked up on the other side of the gate.
“I trust you had no problem finding the bank?” the guard said as he approached. Rye noticed that his companion had his own semiautomatic in his hands and was watching him carefully. Having a gun pointed at him wasn’t a feeling Rye ever wanted to get used to.
“Fine,” he said.
“You have the money?”
“I have the money.”
He handed over the thick wad of used notes.
The man couldn’t hide his smile as he counted through it to be sure Rye hadn’t skimmed any off the top. “That’ll do nicely,” he said, a parody of the old advert, and slipped the dollars into his pocket. He nodded toward his companion, who disappeared into the gatehouse and a moment later emerged with a stamped visa and various permissions for a climbing expedition into the region.
“Your paperwork seems to be in order,” he said, handing them over.
FIFTY
They crossed the border into Bhutan.
The farther they drove on the Lateral Road, the more obvious it became just how unstable the geology of the region actually was. Rye saw the stark evidence of landslides along the roadside, with great boulders broken up onto smaller shale by the road crews who had been brought in after the monsoons to clear the debris. There were vast stretches of cliff face that had been propped up with timber from the endless forests of the region.
None of it looked particularly permanent.
The climb was gradual, but the thinning of the air was obvious.
More unnerving than the unstable slopes towering over them were the frequent one- and two-thousand-foot sheer drops where the roadside fell away into nothing. In places the distance between the truck’s wheels and the drop was down to a matter of inches. Carter drove in absolute focused silence, eyes never leaving the narrow road, never risking more than twenty or thirty miles an hour, and often coming down as slow as five or six when tight switchbacks demanded.
The views were breathtaking, the drops never less than dizzying.
Rye realized he had spent the last forty minutes gripping the fake leather hand grip above the open window as though his life depended upon it. It offered a curious illusion of an extra layer of safety, as though if he held on tightly enough it could stop him going over the edge—or at the very least pull the truck back from the edge. He was good with heights, naturally so. He’d clung onto some of the highest structures in the world with nothing more than his fingertips between him and the drop and it hadn’t fazed him, but this was different. It wasn’t down to his skill, it was all about someone he barely knew and hardly trusted not taking them off the road.
He didn’t like it.
Up ahead of them the mountains loomed.
As they neared, it grew more and more obvious that the road was leading them toward a ravine. The asphalt had been replaced by an immense iron two-way girder that had been set into the mountainside itself.
“We’re going over that?” he asked.
“Just don’t look down,” the thief told him.
“It’s okay, I kinda like heights,” Rye reassured him.
“I was talking to myself,” Carter said, and actually managed a glimmer of a grin.
“Of course you were.”
The sound of the wheels on the road changed as they went from stone to metal. Rye looked down. There was something incredible about looking down upon the world from such a height: The tops of the bamboo forest far below them looked like blades of glass rippling in the breeze. The shades of green and brown were all subtly different, like the weave of a beautiful rug left out in the sun to fade.
It took them less than five seconds to traverse the pass. “That wasn’t so bad,” Carter said as they reached solid ground again.
All along this stretch of road Rye saw colorful prayer flags strung up like bunting. “I asked someone about those, back in Phuntsholing,” Carter said, following the direction of his gaze. “Travelers string them up in thanks for their safe arrival. They are all over the region. They are supposed to bless the mountains. The different colors mean different things. There are five colors, each representing one of the five elements, and the five pure lights.”
“It’s as good a faith as any,” Rye said.
“Better than some,” Carter agreed. He didn’t need to say which he didn’t consider worth believing in. Or perhaps his disdain was for all of them. It was hard to tell.
The next pass was considerably worse; first, because of the angle of elevation, with the truck tackling an almost sheer gradient and, second, because they weren’t on reinforced iron girders this time, but rather a single-wide wooden bridge that seemed to be balanced precariously on top of felled trees held together by hemp ropes. It was more than five times the span of the iron bridge, too.
The width of the pass meant a fierce wind blew all around them.
“I’m not loving this,” Carter mumbled, coming down low in the gears. The old truck was stick shift, which forced a greater control on him, but meant he was constantly aware of the engine’s responsiveness beneath him.
The seemingly makeshift bridge held, but Rye couldn’t help but imagine the same p
recarious traverse during the true monsoon season, with the wood slick with rain and the winds whipping the downpour into the windshield faster than the wipers could sluice it away. The mountains would have been impassable.
He looked in the rearview mirror and saw Vic driving the SUV. He seemed at ease with the treacherous conditions, though, like Carter, wasn’t pushing the car, content to get to their destination whenever they got there.
More and more frequently a burst of static in his ear would signify the loss of connection back to Byrne in the US. And the more remote their route, as the road took them through twists and turns up and down the mountain ranges, the harder any sort of sustained communication with the space archaeologist became until it was finally pointless. Rye took the earbud out and pocketed it as they crossed another pass. This time the forests down below appeared to be some sort of orange plantation, the fruit ripe for the picking.
“The temple’s got to be somewhere around here,” he said, looking for some sign of a road or track leading off the one they followed.
“Another hour or so,” Carter said. “I’ve got the coordinates logged in the GPS. It should ping before we pass it.”
During the next hour the drive became more and more grueling, the demands on Carter’s concentration incredible. But he didn’t complain—unlike the old truck’s engine, which did nothing but bitch and moan its way up and down the steep roads. “I don’t mean to point out the obvious,” Rye said, tapping the fuel gauge, “but that red line, that’s a bad thing given the fact I can’t remember the last time I saw a gas station.”
“I’m painfully aware of it,” the thief said. “There’s a couple of gas canisters in with the gear in the back, but right now we’re looking at fumes long before we reach our destination, even without the detour to the Ahnenerbe temple. Byrne’s calculations didn’t account for the demands the constant ascent and descent would put on the engines. Worst case, we get out and walk a bit sooner than we planned.”