“If we can prove that these bush medications work--and we can--we’ll do it at a good time. In the meantime, we don’t need news reports claiming there is a new wonder drug on the market that’s made from a bunch of weeds growing on the side of a mountain in Tibet.
Mortimar’s voice rose. “We also don’t need countries that don’t have a scientific, process-driven regulatory body like the FDA, or an enforceable patent system, producing a drug before we can. They would get first-mover advantage, eating up all of the market share and profit, while we’re at a competitive disadvantage because they can mass-produce the drug as fast they want and sell it to whomever they want on the Internet.
“Meanwhile, we’re tied up in some fucking Phase III FDA trial, losing our jobs because our stock prices are plummeting!”
Joel fell silent. He wasn’t going to win the argument, and in many ways, what Mortimar said made sense. The American healthcare industry was heavily regulated. He had studies confirming that millions of Americans were buying competitive, generic drugs that were made in other countries. This could easily be done over the internet, at rock bottom prices with no prescription.
Bill Smith said, “Don’t worry, Sam, Joel’s on our side. Right, Joel?”
Joel nodded.
“So, what are our next steps, Sam?”
“I’m going to have Klaus continue testing what we have. I’ve already deployed two biochemists in one of our Gulfstreams to track down these plants in Tibet, so we‘ll be able to continue testing with the real botanical ingredients within three to five days.
“Depending on how much progress we make at determining what these plants are, we might be able to get a few in-house confidential clinical trials up and running in a few months. In the meantime, we let McAlister lead us to the rest of the book…agreed?”
All the men nodded.
“Good. Okay. On to our next topic. If you remember, coming out of last month’s meeting, we had three billionaires and three multi-millionaires who did not have the time or inclination to wait for organs on the standard organ donor list. At that time, we agreed to . . . .”
Allowing rich families to bypass traditional organ waiting lists was a topic Joel felt passionately about, but he couldn’t get his mind off the Blue Beryl. If it did, in fact, contain the cure to most every ill, then it was the most valuable book on Earth. But what would Mortimar and the rest of these hypocrites do if they got their hands on it?
Did he want to be a part of a group that was so sinister that they would withhold perfectly good medical cures to ensure maximum financial benefit for themselves?
One thing was for sure--he could do more good if he stayed on the inside, as part of the team, than if he quit.
He looked back at Mortimar’s face on the monitor, while Mortimar waxed on about how much they could make by accepting cash for transplanting organs in some of the world’s richest people. It didn’t matter to Mortimar that the source of those organs might be homeless South Americans. Or people who had been drugged and taken from bars or clubs, only to wake up in a tub full of ice, in a motel bathroom with a phone nearby, and a note that read “Dial 911: one of your kidneys has been removed.”
As Joel had found in this instance, urban legends are sometimes grounded in fact.
Chapter 26
After finding the breastplate, McAlister and Bertram moved forward, quickly clearing the area around the remains of the armor.
The breastplate was still intact, but they found no leg armor. Thomas thought he detected the charred remains of burnt leather; that material could have been worn as a protective pant. Without forensic study, however, it would be impossible to distinguish between leather, clothing and human skin.
There were no bones. They’d either been obliterated by the fire or the passage of time. The metal armor, however, was damaged but had not melted.
Thomas hoped that prior to being burned to death, Ming Wu had tried to steal the Blue Beryl by stuffing it under his armor. If that were the case, he might find remnants or even full pages by carefully searching inside the armor.
Breastplate armor was like a clamshell that opened and closed around a man’s torso. It was held together with straps and buckles over the shoulders and above the waist.
With dirt and debris cleared away from the sides of the armor, McAlister could see the latches that had once held the breastplate together. Kneeling in the dark, musty catacomb next to one of the most imposing structures in the world, it was odd to think that the last human hand to touch these clasps was that of the man who died in this armor-- the man who’d likely been burned alive and reduced to ash.
This was a key moment in the excavation. It had become clearer with each brushstroke that Ming Wu’s body had been burned to ash, completely decomposed, or both.
Either way, it was completely gone and would provide no clues. McAlister worried that if the fire or conditions over the last 350 years had been enough to cause a human body to completely disintegrate, then surely a book made from wood pulp would be gone too…assuming it had ever been there in the first place.
He nodded at Bertram, who was kneeling on the other side of the armor. Bertram nodded back, and McAlister reached down and got a firm grip on the side of the breastplate. He slowly began to lift it up, turning it toward Bertram as though opening the cover of a large book. Once it was fully raised, Bertram lifted it and put it aside.
Only when McAlister was sure that Bertram had a firm grasp did he look down at what was underneath. He’d hoped to see a book, or the remains of a book, or possibly the outline of a human skeleton, but he saw none of these. Only mud.
The body had, in fact, fully disintegrated. With the remains gone, mud had leaked into the cavity of the breastplate, and that was all Thomas saw. Plain mud. No book. No human remains. No clue as to where to look next in his search for the Blue Beryl.
McAlister looked at Bertram, who had lowered the top half of the breastplate to the ground and was now peering anxiously into the hole. He was not an archeologist and wasn’t sure if Thomas saw something promising or not until he saw the disappointment and anger on McAlister’s face.
The bottom half of the breastplate had acted as a bowl. Over time, the top half acted as a lid, holding the mud in the bowl. They needed to clean it out in order to remove the bottom half of the breastplate.
McAlister began gingerly removing the mud from the bottom half of the breastplate. He worked with a wooden kitchen spoon, softer than a metal trowel, slowly scooping dirt out spoonful by spoonful.
When he was about halfway through the mud, probably three inches from the bottom half of the breastplate, an odd thing happened.
McAlister shoved the wooden spoon into the mud and felt it strike something. Then when he tried to pull the spoon back, it didn’t move. It was as if Ming Wu’s ghost had grabbed the tip of the spoon, preventing it from pulling out again. McAlister stifled an urge to forcibly yank the spoon out. He pulled his hand away and stared into the hole.
Bertram had been watching and now looked at him quizzically.
“What would cause that?”
McAlister began tentatively removing dirt around the tip of the spoon with his hands. He cautioned himself not to get excited. Although something odd was happening, it might mean nothing. It could have simply been caused by suction he’d created while digging in the wet mud.
When all the dirt around the spoon was cleared away, it magically continued to stand straight up, seemingly on its own, with no help from McAlister, Bertram, or the dirt around it.
McAlister looked at Bertram, who shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. Without thinking, McAlister waved his hand over the top of the spoon, just to make sure there were no invisible strings or currents of air in the catacomb that might account for a spoon standing on end, all by itself. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, the spoon fell over.
McAlister picked it up and looked at the end. It was covered with dirt. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. He then l
ooked in the hole. Still, he saw nothing that would account for the spoon getting stuck and standing as it had. He ran his fingers over the mud where the spoon had magically stood up. As he did, he felt a sharp prick on the pad of his middle finger.
“Ouch!” He quickly pulled his hand away, sure that he’d been bitten by a spider, or stung by a scorpion.
Bright red blood was already flowing from the cut. He showed it to Bertram, then pulled out a handkerchief and tied it tightly around his middle finger. He glanced back at the breastplate, and there in the center, he saw a small dark point protruding a few millimeters out of the mud. It looked like the end of a needle.
“What is that?” The question was as much for himself as Bertram.
Bertram shone the flashlight into the bottom of the hole. Forgetting about the cut on his finger, McAlister leaned forward to take a closer look. As he did, he pulled out his Emerson folding knife. The blade snapped open as he removed it from its holster. He prodded the tip of the point that was sticking up out of the ground, heard a clink, and was shocked to find that it was metal.
“Odd to find something metal in the middle of a breastplate…at first, I thought it could be a piece of Ming Wu’s vertebra. Vertebrae can develop sharp points as they degrade, but this is metal. Unless the 17th century Chinese were using metal pins to fix broken bones, I don’t know what this could be.”
“What about a necklace? Could he have been wearing a necklace under the breastplate?”
“Could be,” Thomas answered, “Let’s see if it’s attached to anything.”
McAlister put the Emerson away, grabbed a smaller trowel, and began expertly shaving dirt away from the sides of the object. Bertram looked on, transfixed by the mini-excavation.
The tip was revealed, and as McAlister continued to scrape dirt away, he became more and more convinced that he knew what the object was. His heart raced. If it was what he thought, it meant the search might not end here, unsuccessfully, in this dank, dark pit near the Potala Palace.
A smile formed as the object began taking shape.
“My God,” Bertram said, “it’s a knife blade!”
“Yes,” McAlister replied, “and a big one--military.”
“What does this mean? Why would there be a knife blade inside the breastplate?”
McAlister kept digging, faster now. “I’m not sure yet, but I think it means Ming Wu was killed--stabbed in the back.”
“Wow.” That was all Bertram could say, a thousand data points swimming through his mind.
He stole a glance at McAlister, for whom he had a newfound respect. They’d come all the way from New York and managed to find something that had been buried for hundreds of years, with no treasure map and limited information.
Thomas scraped faster and soon he hit the back half of the breastplate. He cleared all the remaining dirt away.
“Look, here you can see where the knife punctured the breastplate. It came cleanly through. The edges are bent back.”
“This wasn’t light armor. It must have had extreme force to come all the way through like that.”
“Oh, it was no accident,” Thomas assured Bertram. “Help me lift the lower half. The hilt of the knife is buried beneath it, so let’s slide it up over the blade. I want to be very careful not to let the breastplate scratch the sides of the blade as we lift it, so let’s go very slowly.”
Once they removed the blade, a Chinese Special Guard’s dagger was fully revealed.
“Let’s dig it out and get a look at the hilt,” Bertram said excitedly.
They put the breastplate down, and Thomas quickly cleared mud from all four sides of the buried knife hilt. Then, a millimeter at a time, he shaved away dirt so that finally, all he had to do was use a horsehair brush to clear away the final layer.
McAlister could see areas where leather had disintegrated, leaving only expertly woven gold threads that would have been both decorative and functional.
“We need to get this out into the light. Let’s take it back to camp and clean it.”
He covered the knife with a towel and firmly twisted it around the dagger, and then he tied it in place by cutting a shoelace in two and tying the towel at each end. Next he hid it in his Filson field bag, underneath the excavation tools.
“Let’s bring the breastplates too. Can you carry them?” he asked Bertram.
“Sure.”
They carried the items a hundred yards northwest, into the forested area where it was necessary for them to camp using materials Bertram had purchased in Lhasa.
McAlister cleaned the breastplate and knife in a nearby stream, using a toothbrush and damp cloth. It was a relatively generic piece of armor. The bronze was the exception.
Prior to the widespread use of gunpowder, there was a constant tradeoff between the weight of the metal and the protection it afforded the wearer. Thicker metal provided more protection, but was often too heavy to be worn for more than an hour or two without exhausting the user.
Whoever had produced this armor had done a nice job of balancing form and function. It was a nicely shaped, wearable piece of body armor that would deflect many types of blows, except for a direct hit by a mallet or a perpendicular puncture by a sharp knife or spear. The latter was what had befallen Ming Wu.
McAlister was about to put the armor down when he noticed something etched into the metal in the back of the neckline, just below the piped border. The etching was filled with mud. He cleaned the grooves with the tip of his knife, brushed the dirt away, and saw Ming Wu’s symbol:
“Bertram, look at this.” He leaned over and showed the mark to Dr. Bertram.
“Yes, I already saw that. Look--this side has the same markings. It’s an identification mark, an ancient nametag. It’s very common--in fact, it’s mandatory in the Chinese military. Soldiers put it on every piece of their equipment--armor, swords, shields and clothing--so there was no confusion as to ownership. If someone lost something, like a sword, they were fined by the military. Without these symbols, it would’ve been easy to steal someone else’s sword.”
“Interesting,” Thomas said, “So your side has it too?”
“Yes. See, it’s exactly the same.”
“I wonder if the knife will have a symbol on it.”
“Probably. It’s likely to be Chinese military issued, but maybe not. Ming Wu was probably stabbed by one of the monks he encountered as he and Hai Cai made their way through the Hall of Scriptures. The knife could be Tibetan. If you’re ready, we can take a closer look now.”
McAlister gave the breastplate a final once-over. “I don’t see anything else notable on this half. Do you see anything?”
Bertram laid his half in his lap and looked at McAlister. “No, this breastplate was standard issue, Elite Special Guard. Regular infantry wore lamellar cuirasses made up of hundreds of small, overlaying pieces of leather, or brigandine leather, with mail-plate inserts. This, however, was Special Guard--Storm Troopers.”
He looked hopefully at McAlister. “I would love to take this with us. It’s museum quality.”
Bertram didn’t say it, but McAlister knew that good-quality, authentic 17th century armor would probably fetch a few hundred thousand dollars at auction. But there was no way he was going to try to sneak this armor out of the country, given his timeline. He couldn’t risk being detained. These days, stealing antiquities was just as bad as smuggling drugs.
The knife, on the other hand, was small and could be hidden.
He shook his head. “We’ll have to rebury them and come back when we have more time and the proper permission. Let’s see what we can learn from the knife. If Ming Wu had the book when he died, it’s possible that whoever stabbed him took it. Would a Tibetan monk’s knife have any unique identification markings?”
“It’s possible; it depends on his level in the monastery. If he was an elder, or well-known, then yes. If he was a plebe, probably not.”
McAlister needed the knife to wield a clue. If it didn’t, t
hey’d likely have to dig more, and the digging was slow and arduous. He was also worried about attracting the attention of the Palace guards. If one of them were to wander away from the perimeter of the palace and discover their camp, it would be the end of their search. Bertram had already described horror stories of trying to get diplomatic permission to dig in Tibet or China.
Bertram handed the wrapped knife to McAlister. “Let’s have a look.”
As he unwrapped the knife, McAlister willed the knife to have a marking, anything at all, that would provide a clue as to who its owner might have been. The man who killed Ming Wu would have been one of the last people to leave the Hall of Scriptures--if not the last person--before it burned to the ground.
In less than ten minutes, he’d have the knife cleaned and would know whether his search was over, or if it was just beginning.
Chapter 27
Two hundred yards away, The Clone watched McAlister and Bertram through high powered night-vision binoculars. He tracked them as they carried items back to their camp by the stream.
Something seemed different about McAlister. He was somber, probably wondering if the items they’d found would provide the clues he needed. The Clone, excellent at reading people, was sure something significant was going on. He would have to keep a close watch on McAlister and Bertram during the next few hours. They could be leaving Tibet soon.
He turned and leaned against the hill he was perched on. He had a lot of cover; it had turned out to be the perfect vantage point.
He looked around to make sure no one was coming, then he unzipped his pants, took out his fully swollen penis, and masturbated. He couldn’t build a web, but he would mark his territory in the best and only way he knew.
Waves of pleasure coursed through him as he fantasized again and again about how good it would feel the moment the long, custom-made silver spikes pierced the skin and began to slowly, but firmly, sink into his adversary’s neck . . .
Book of Cures (A Thomas McAlister Adventure 2) Page 12