Book of Cures (A Thomas McAlister Adventure 2)

by Hunt Kingsbury

  Uri wandered over toward the jeep, acting half blind and uninterested.

  McAlister was gesturing to one of the men, pointing back toward the building.

  The two agents were listening intently. Neither seemed to notice his approach.

  Expertly trained, Uri saw that the man closest to McAlister was wearing an ankle holster. The size of the bulk against his pants meant it was a thirty-eight, thirty-two, or twenty-two caliber handgun. Snub nose, nothing larger.

  The agent on the other side of the jeep wore a windbreaker. Uri could not see him well, but no doubt the man had a gun under his arm. It was probably a large caliber, likely nine-millimeter. One or both of them would have a tactical folding knife, probably a deadly Emerson.

  Now he had broken away from the crowd watching the fire. He wondered when they would notice his approach.

  He had two men to disable and two men to free. He trudged forward, giving the impression of being old, slow, and blind.

  At twenty feet he could hear McAlister arguing, yelling at the man who’d handcuffed him. He was saying, “Fine, don’t release me, but go look for yourself. Behind that building could be the medical find of the century. It’s why I came here. If it’s there, and you let it slip between your fingers, you’ll be writing traffic tickets in Albany before the week is out.”

  Uri stifled a smile. McAlister was good. Uri knew McAlister had already searched the back of the building. He was trying to buy time. McAlister knew these bureaucratic law enforcement agents couldn’t risk egg on their faces if they let something valuable slip through their fingers.

  The agent next to McAlister finally succumbed. “Okay, I’ll go. Frank, you stay with them. I’ll be right back.”

  Frank nodded.

  Uri waited until the man was three-quarters of the way to the burning building and then moved in. He moved slowly around the front of the jeep, looking down, appearing harmless.

  When Uri was five feet away he saw the man look up at him.

  “Stay back,” the agent said sternly.

  Uri bowed his head, put his hands palms up like a beggar, and took two more steps toward the man.

  “Stop. Back away,” the agent yelled, motioning for him to move back.

  Uri paused, feigned as if he was going to turn around and then sprung forward. In a flash he’d driven both outstretched hands, fingertips first, into the man’s throat causing him to collapse like a rag doll.

  Uri floated over him, and in an instant, he had the keys to the handcuffs. Though Dr. Bertram was right next to him, he tossed the keys to McAlister. He didn’t care if Bertram got away or not.

  After seeing that McAlister had successfully caught the keys, Uri blended back into the dispersing crowd. He hoped he hadn’t killed the agent, not because he personally gave a damn, but because he didn’t want McAlister pursued even more fervently, for yet another crime he did not commit.

  Chapter 21

  McAlister couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d never seen a human being move as quickly as the broken-down blind man had when he’d struck the CIA agent on the other side of the jeep.

  Immediately afterward, almost magically, the old Tibetan had hovered over the agent, emerged with the keys to the handcuffs, and tossed them over the jeep.

  By the time McAlister unlocked the handcuffs, the man had disappeared into the crowd.

  “Did you see that?” he said excitedly to Dr. Bertram as he made his way around the jeep to unlock Bertram’s handcuffs.

  “Yes. I mean no, I didn’t actually see it. It all happened too fast. The first thing I actually saw was you catching the keys.”

  When McAlister reached the other side of the jeep, he reached up to unlock Bertram’s cuffs and there was yet another surprise. Bertram was already out of his handcuffs.

  “How did you get out of those?”

  Bertram shrugged. “It’s an old trick. My father was in law enforcement. I’ll show you some time, but right now we’ve got to get out of here.”

  McAlister paused, mildly disbelieving, but there was no time to discuss it. He said, “Right. Let’s go. Get in the jeep.”

  “The cop said this guy was a CIA field guy. That means he’s the one with the car.” Bertram checked his pockets, emerging with a set of car keys. “I’ll take the keys with so they won’t be able to follow us.”

  “Is he okay? I don’t even know what that guy did to him.”

  Bertram grabbed the agent’s wrist, paused, and said, “Strong pulse. Let’s go!”

  They piled into the Land Cruiser; McAlister popped the clutch and they sped away. It was bumpy heading back to the road to Lhasa, but McAlister could still see O’Brian frantically running to the spot where the jeep had been parked. He was yelling, probably cursing, as he and Bertram made their getaway.

  McAlister glanced over at Bertram, questions swirling in his head: who was the Tibetan man who helped them and why had he done it? And how had Bertram gotten out of the handcuffs?

  “We’re going to have to use extreme care excavating around the Potala Palace, basically avoiding all contact with the public.”

  Bertram looked over at him. “You think it’s that bad?”

  “Yes. Someone followed us to Dr. Li’s clinic and killed him before we could talk to him. Whoever it was is an expert, and we can’t let him know what we’re doing next. If he’ll kill for one page, God knows what he’ll do to get the rest of the book. Also, that’s twice I’ve just barely eluded Detective O’Brian. I have a feeling he’s not used to failing and will be angrier than hell when he finds out we’re gone. He knows we’re going to Lhasa. We’ll need to lay very low.”

  Bertram nodded in agreement, then said, “Watch out!”

  McAlister swerved left, just avoiding a collision with a man on a scooter who was heading in the same direction.

  The jeep’s rearview mirror was cracked, but as McAlister looked back, he thought the man on the scooter resembled the blind man who helped them escape a few minutes earlier.

  He looked again but it was bumpy and the jeep was kicking up too much dust for him to see clearly. No, he told himself, that man was blind. And he’d looked poor, far too poor to own a scooter.

  Chapter 22

  “Ready to head back into the pit?”

  “Sure, let’s go.”

  The pit that Dr. Bertram was referring to was about 150 yards behind the northwest corner of the Potala Palace. In the eighteenth century, it had been a wing of the Red Palace called the Hall of Scriptures. Later, an outbuilding had been built over the site, which had subsequently been demolished.

  Currently, McAlister and Bertram were working in catacombs where the Hall of Scriptures had been in 1751, when it housed the Blue Beryl.

  The Potala Palace was the jewel of Lhasa. It sat 150 yards away from them, atop the Marpori, or Red Hill. It imposed its view upon the entire city, and its singular presence gave Lhasa and all of Tibet validation. It was also the home of most of Tibet’s precious jewels.

  The treasure was such a point of pride that by age four, every citizen knew the exact number of gold leaf taels wrapped around the long dead 5th Dalai Lama (one hundred and ten thousand) and how many pearls and gems were inlaid into his quilt (eighteen thousand, six hundred and seventy-seven).

  The Potala Palace was built of wood, earth, and stone in 614 A.D., and additions had been made countless times. Its thousands of maze-like rooms, ten thousand shrines and two hundred thousand statues were divided into two connecting palaces, the Red Palace in the center and the White Palace surrounding it.

  During the Chinese incursion of 1751, the rear section of the Red Palace, which included the Hall of Scriptures, had burned to the ground. It had never been rebuilt and was now separate from, and outside, the palace grounds in an area that was overgrown and forgotten, completely out of view of the main palace.

  What remained now was a musty, damp, rat-infested crawlspace-like area that McAlister and Bertram called the pit. It was here that they hoped to find a c
lue as to what happened on that terrible day in 1751.

  Learning about the Potala Palace and its history had fascinated Thomas, but the real bonus had come while he was reading at the Royal Library in Lhasa. With the help of a translator, he read eye-witness accounts that were written by monks and other military historians of the Chinese incursion.

  Though invaded, the Potala Palace was not maliciously sacked for two reasons: the Chinese wanted to preserve as much as they could, and they didn’t expect much resistance since it was primarily inhabited by monks.

  As a result, the invasion force was not massive, but elite and well-armed. In addition, many of the Chinese soldiers had been stationed in Lhasa and had a reverence for the palace.

  When McAlister overlaid monks’ accounts with the concise, detailed journals left by the Chinese military secretaries, every element of the invasion had become clear. The military records even illuminated specific troop detachments and assignments.

  The military records depicted carefully developed invasion plans that outlined exactly what part of the building each troop of soldiers would be responsible for securing. A team of twenty soldiers from General Kwan Kung’s elite brigade was dispatched to the rear half of the Red Palace. Two of the soldiers, Ming Wu and Hai Cai, were given the task of securing the Hall of Scriptures.

  Records indicated that Ming Wu and Hai Cai had encountered resistance. A small hand-to-hand skirmish followed, and multiple lanterns fell to the ground, igniting the centuries-old wooden floor and walls. None of the records or chronicles indicated whether the Blue Beryl and other priceless ancient scriptures and texts had been destroyed when the Hall of Scriptures burned to the ground.

  One of the soldiers, Ming Wu, had been killed in the fighting. His body had been consumed in the fire and never recovered. His partner Hai Cai had lived. Disillusioned over the death of his partner and friend, he went AWOL after the skirmish and was never heard from again.

  After learning that Ming Wu and Hai Cai were the only two men who had been deployed to the hall, McAlister and Bertram had on their previous visit to Tibet gone to the public records office to try to find out more about them.

  They had discovered profiles on both Ming Wu and Hai Cai, and found that they were polar opposites. Ming Wu, the soldier who had died in the fire, had been married with three children, all daughters. He was from a large family, and there were many records pertaining to him, his parents, siblings and offspring.

  On the other hand, Hai Cai, the surviving soldier, had no other relatives mentioned anywhere in the records. Oddly, there weren’t even any birth records, so it was impossible to determine who his parents had been. McAlister had found a remark in his military file in which one of his commanding officers had referred to him as a loner. Ming Wu had been killed, leaving a widow with three young girls to raise, and Hai Cai deserted them.

  McAlister and Bertram scoured the records for the sixty years following the incursion, but Hai Cai’s name never appeared again in any of them. He must have been somewhere else when he died. Hai Cai was a dead end, and there were no other clues as to whether or not any of the pages from the Blue Beryl survived.

  With no other obvious leads on their previous trip, McAlister and Bertram had determined where the Hall of Scriptures had been. They decided to quickly excavate it to see if it yielded any clues as to what had happened on the day of the invasion back in 1751--anything that might lead them to the Blue Beryl.

  If the excavation had been sanctioned by the government, or at all legal, McAlister would have put his archeological training to use and conducted a detailed stratigraphic analysis. But as it was, he planned to dig a series of holes, coined Hartman’s Holes after the archeologist who had pioneered the concept . The process essentially involved digging test pits to analyze the contents at each level.

  McAlister and Bertram had surveyed the site on their previous visit in preparation for a detailed mapping, so they were familiar with the layout and already had a plan of attack.

  One of the basic principles of stratigraphic archeology held that the newer material would be near the top, and the oldest at the bottom. Rather than analyze the entire site, however, McAlister’s present goal was only to use the test pits to find cinder or charred debris that might have resulted from a fire.

  Far back in the dusty recesses of his brain, he harbored the hope that maybe if luck played any hand at all, he would find the charred remains of the book, or maybe even its unburned core pages. The inner core of thick books, like phone books, often survived house fires. But he said nothing of the sort to Bertram. In fact, he pushed the thought out of his own mind, knocking on the wooden handle of his trowel as he did so.

  Their first test pit was five feet deep, and there were no remnants of fire. That pit was near the perimeter of the catacomb, and Thomas decided to dig the next one directly in the center of the chamber.

  They dug in shifts, one person digging and the other hauling away the dirt to a far corner of the room. It was dark and musty and there was no ventilation. After ten minutes of activity, both men’s clothes were soaked through with sweat. Their faces were covered with thick grime, so that only the whites of their eyes were visible.

  The work was worse than McAlister had expected, and made him question his strategy of setting up a bivouac just outside the catacomb rather than finding an out-of-the-way hotel or boarding room. The problem was they would be remembered by everyone who saw them, and with O’Brian prowling the streets, scouring Lhasa to find them, it was just too dangerous.

  Bertram had finished the first pit, so McAlister took first shift on the second pit. He’d gone down about three feet and had made his eyehole wider in order to make it easier for Bertram to maneuver.

  Three feet down, Bertram took over digging and McAlister assumed dirt-removal duty. It was on Bertram’s first shift, after only five minutes in the hole, that his shovel struck something solid. It wasn’t a deceptive small rock, as before; no, this was a unique sound, one that McAlister had not expected to hear. It was the gritty, muffled scrape of a trowel making contact with something metallic.

  McAlister had been nursing a thermos full of tea, and reflexively put it down. His mind was so completely absorbed with considering the limited number of metal items that could be present under three feet of earth beneath the Red Palace in Lhasa that he forgot to crouch; he stood and bumped his head solidly on the low ceiling.

  Seeing stars, he crawled his way over to the hole. Bertram had already put the shovel down and was on his hands and knees, in the bottom of the hole.

  The edges of his world were still dark, and a periodic star still shot from the periphery of his vision. “What is it?” He could see that Bertram was busy with his brush.

  “Not sure. Give me more light.”

  McAlister twisted on his Maglite flashlight and trained the beam on the ground below Bertram's brush.

  There is a moment in archeology, one that doesn’t come too often, when you actually really find something. Sometimes it’s not even what you’re looking for, but that doesn’t matter. The sheer thrill of living in that moment, the thrill of digging something very ancient out of the ground, can be enough to re-energize an archeologist for years.

  Years ago, after realizing he was addicted to this feeling, McAlister decided to find out what was causing it. He learned that when on the verge of finding a treasure, the brain is active, which results in increased neuron firing. The pituitary gland, seeing all of the activity in the brain, thinks there’s an emergency and releases hormones that tell the adrenal glands to begin producing epinephrine, the ”fight or flight” hormone.

  Adrenaline does many things, but primarily it causes the pupils to dilate, breathing tubes to open, heart rate to increase (which increases sugar output from the liver to provide extra energy), and the blood vessels on the surface near the skin to constrict (slowing blood flow to cuts or bruises). Blood flow to muscles is increased.

  All of this activity helps to stimulate p
roduction of dopamine, a neurotransmitter, that activates the pleasure center in the brain.

  As Bertram swept black, charred earth away, McAlister instantly recognized the object that he saw for exactly what it was--an expertly forged eighteenth-century Chinese dragon.

  The dragon was one of the twelve symbols of Chinese sovereignty. In 1750, one year before the palace invasion, the twelve symbols had been exclusively reserved for garments worn by the emperor, known as the Son of Heaven, and other high-ranking civil servants--such as elite soldiers. McAlister smiled for the first time in many days. This was what he’d been hoping to find.

  As Bertram cleared more dirt, Thomas could see that the dragon was the centerpiece to a breastplate, which is commonly known as a cuirass in academic circles. He knew from his research that it was the exact style and size of one that would have been worn by a Chinese soldier early in the Manchu Q’ing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1911.

  McAlister was certain they’d found Ming Wu’s breastplate. What he really wanted to know, needed to know, was whether he’d find the Blue Beryl safely stashed underneath, resting peacefully along with Ming Wu’s bones.

  Chapter 23

  “My God, are you seeing this, Thomas? I think it’s a dragon,” Bertram said, instantly addicted to the hunt.

  “It is. It’s from the early Manchu Q’ing Dynasty era. It’s got to be.”

  “It’s so well-preserved.”

  “This is a nice environment for preservation.”

  There was a long pause. “Look, it’s attached to something.”

  “Brush a little more away, to the right.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, like that. A little more.”

  Bertram grunted with effort. “I think we’ve found it. I think it’s Ming Wu’s breastplate. That dragon’s got to be the centerpiece. This could be exactly what we’re looking for!”