by Don Winslow
“So I am alive.”
“But shouldn’t be,” the monk answered. “By all rights, you should be in bardo, awaiting rebirth.”
“Perhaps I am.”
“Perhaps we all are,” the monk said. “Who knows? My name is Xue Xin.”
“Michel Guibert.”
“If you wish,” Xue Xin said, a trace of amusement in his voice. “We need to turn you back over now, and change your clothes. It will hurt.”
Nicholai felt two pairs of firm hands on his shoulder and then they turned him onto his back. A jolt of pain shot up from his leg to the top of his head and he swallowed a grunt of pain.
Xue Xin looked down on him, and Nicholai recognized the man from the bridge to the Jade Isle, the alley outside the opera, and the Temple of the Green Truth. His close-cropped hair was jet black, but what seized Nicholai’s attention were his eyes — they looked through you, albeit not unkindly.
If Xue Xin was eaten up with sympathy, it didn’t show on his face. “You will have tea.”
“No, thank you.”
“You will have tea,” Xue Xin said.
The “tea,” Nicholai decided, tasted like wet grass, but Xue Xin insisted that the brew of herbs was healing his infection.
“If you want to live, drink,” Xue Xin shrugged. “If you don’t, don’t.”
Nicholai drank.
Colonel Yu was relieved to see the American agent looking better.
At first they thought he was going to die. He’d lost a great deal of blood from the bullet wound and had taken a severe beating as well. The internal damage from the bajiquan blows alone would have killed a man with less ki, and the leg quickly became infected.
Nor did they have the leisure to give him adequate medical care. They’d had to get the American out of Beijing, and quickly. Yu’s own PLA staff carried him to a waiting army truck that quickly drove out to the Ring Road, where they transferred the unconscious man to a military convoy headed south. An army medic dug the bullet out of his leg in the moving truck. Then they managed to hook up a blood transfusion and started to administer morphine for the pain.
It might have been easier to let him die, Yu thought — dispose of the body and simply shrug at the mystery that swept across official Beijing like the north wind.
The government was rattled, to say the least.
The Russian commissioner Voroshenin was dead — officially from a heart attack suffered while watching the opera, but no one in the intelligence or military communities believed that, not along with the “coincidental” murder of Kang Sheng, found with a wire thrust through his eyeball and into his brain.
The American plot had worked perfectly.
Moscow and Beijing were busy blaming each other, Mao dug a hole and pulled it closed over himself— especially with his dog Kang no longer there to protect him. General Liu remained the calm and stable figure, ready to step in to end the chaos.
The only problem, Yu thought now as he looked at Nicholai, was the “disappearance” of a French citizen, Michel Guibert.
He had been seen going to the opera. Voroshenin’s guards, quickly summoned home to Moscow, had reportedly claimed that Guibert was sitting beside Voroshenin in his private box at the time of his death but got up suddenly and left.
Then disappeared.
Was he dead?
Was he involved in Voroshenin’s death?
In Kang’s?
Beijing and Moscow buzzed with rumors. Some had it that Guibert had killed Voroshenin, others that it was his assistant Leotov, who had also disappeared shortly after his boss’s death.
The Russians claimed that Guibert was a Chinese agent, the Chinese countered that he was Russian. Each accused the other of hiding him at the same time that each accused the other of killing him to stop him from talking. To quote the Chairman himself, “All is chaos under the heavens and the situation is excellent.”
“Guibert” opened his eyes.
“Where are we?” Nicholai asked.
“You don’t need to know,” Yu answered.
The air, while cool, was still warm for winter, and the nanmu tree Nicholai could see through the window didn’t grow up north. The brief dialogue he had overheard as the attendants came in and out was unintelligible to him, not Han Chinese at all, so he guessed that it was some southern tribal dialect.
“Sichuan or Yunnan,” he said.
“Yunnan,” admitted Yu. “In the Wuliang hills.”
“Why?”
“Beijing was unhealthy for you.”
Nicholai remembered his manners. “Thank you for saving my life.”
“Gratitude is misplaced,” Yu answered. “I was doing my duty, Mr. Hel.”
88
“HOW LONG HAVE you known my real identity?” he asked Yu.
“Since before you entered Beijing,” Yu answered. He recited Nicholai’s history to him — his birth in Shanghai, his removal to Japan, his killing of Kishikawa, his torture and imprisonment by the Americans.
The Chinese seemed to know it all. Nicholai could only hope that they did not realize the depth of his connection to the late Yuri Voroshenin.
“Am I a prisoner?” Nicholai asked.
“I would prefer to call you a guest.”
“Can the guest get up and leave?”
“The question is academic in any case,” Yu answered. “The reality is that you cannot get up, much less walk. And, even if you could, you have no place to go. They are hunting for you everywhere, Mr. Hel. This might be the only place in the world where you are safe.”
A sadly accurate summation of the reality, Nicholai thought, since the moment I killed Kishikawa-sama. The locations and circumstances change, but the fact does not.
I am a prisoner.
He heard Kishikawa’s voice. If you have no options, then it is honorable to accept your imprisonment, although you might consider seppuku. But you have options.
What are they?
Nikko, you must find them yourself. Examine the go-kang. When you are trapped and can find no escape route, you must create one.
Again, please, how?
It is your kang, Nikko. No one else can play it for you.
“You wanted Voroshenin dead,” Nicholai said, probing.
“Obviously.”
“To create a rift with the Soviets.”
Yu nodded.
“And you rescued me from the American ambush because …”
“How often would we get a chance to obtain an American agent so motivated to cooperate?” Yu asked. “I’m sure you can tell us names, places, methods of operations. After all, you agreed to be rescued.”
Hel had understood the monk’s warning and signaled in turn that he understood, the act of a drowning man reaching out for the rope. Surely he knew it would come with a price.
Nicholai said, “I will tell you nothing.”
“The Americans betrayed you,” Yu answered. “Why would you hesitate to betray them in turn?”
“Their dishonor is their own,” Nicholai responded. “Mine would be mine.”
“How Japanese.”
“I accept the compliment,” Nicholai said. He tried to sit up, but the effort was painful and enervating. “I will not become an informer, but I will force the Americans to honor the arrangement they made with me.”
“And how will you do that?” Yu asked, amused at this wounded man who could barely support his own weight.
Yet there was something in Hel’s eyes that made Yu believe him.
89
“WHERE IS HE?” Singleton demanded.
“I don’t know,” admitted Haverford.
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Alive?”
“Again …”
Diamond didn’t bother to conceal his smirk. Singleton frowned at him and then turned his attention back to Haverford. “You don’t know much.”
“I’m trying to find out.”
“Try harder.”
Haver
ford thought briefly of defending himself. Voroshenin was dead, apparently at Hel’s hands, and the Chinese and Russians were snapping at each other’s throats. And while Hel had possibly escaped, he hadn’t been found — not by Moscow or Beijing anyway —because there had been no blowback at all. Apparently no one had connected Voroshenin’s assassination to the Company.
“I want him found,” Singleton said. “Do you understand?”
“I do,” Diamond said, stressing the first-person pronoun and sounding like a sycophantic schoolboy.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Haverford asked.
“Hel’s gone over to the other side, and you know it,” Diamond said. “And I’m not so sure you’re not happy about it.”
“That’s a goddamn lie.”
“You calling me a liar?” Diamond jumped up from his chair.
Haverford stood up. “A liar, a torturer —”
They started for each other.
“This is not your sixth-grade schoolyard. Sit down, both of you.” Singleton waited until both men took their chairs.
My straight line and my circle, Singleton thought. We shall see which one wins. It is a basic law of Go and of life — the side that wins is the side that deserves to win.
Haverford thought of resigning on the spot. He could probably find a job in academia, or in one of the new “think tanks” — there’s a concept — now sprouting like mushrooms in the damp intellectual soil of the greater Washington metropolitan area. The place had, after all, once been a swamp.
But there was unfinished business, so he clamped his jaw tight and listened.
“Assume Hel is out there,” Singleton said. “Lure him in.”
“How?”
“You’re clever young men,” Singleton answered. “You’ll think of something.”
The meeting was concluded.
90
THINK LIKE NICHOLAI HEL, Haverford told himself as he left the building for his hotel in Dupont Circle. No easy task, he admitted, as it was probably true that no one else in the world thought like Nicholai Hel.
Well, try anyway.
He ran his thoughts through Nicholai’s options.
Would Hel …
Could Hel …
Yes, he decided.
Both.
91
“I’M GOING TO DELIVER the weapons,” Nicholai said.
It was a bold, even risky move. A breakout maneuver on the go-kang that had small chance of success and could only place him in great danger. Still, when one is surrounded there are few choices other than to surrender, die, or break out.
“Please don’t be ridiculous,” Yu answered. “Your cover as an arms merchant was just that, a cover. Not a reality.”
“I saw the rocket launchers,” Nicholai said. “They looked quite real.”
“Props,” Yu answered, “for your little opera. The play is over, Mr. Hel.”
“And yet here you are in Yunnan,” Nicholai answered, “for weeks now, near the Vietnamese border. Perhaps that is mere coincidence, or perhaps you are overly solicitous of my recuperation, but more likely it’s because you intend to take the rocket launchers across the border into Vietnam.”
“Even if that were true,” Yu said, “it hardly concerns you.”
“Let me tell you why it does,” Nicholai said. “I have demonstrated skills that might be very useful. I’m fluent in French, have an established cover as an arms merchant, and I’m a kweilo, which would give me certain advantages in the French colonies. So much for my utility, here is my offer: I will deliver the weapons to the Viet Minh and retain the payment as my recompense for services rendered. Once the weapons have been safely delivered, you will provide me with a new identity and documentation. Then we are quit of each other.”
It seemed the perfect solution, Nicholai thought. The Americans, through the gift of the rocket launchers, would unintentionally honor their deal with him, and it would have the added effect of harming their interests.
“You think a lot of your value, Mr. Hel.”
“It is simply an objective evaluation.”
Yu stared at him. “If you reemerge anywhere in Indochina, the Americans will find you.”
“Just so.”
Yu agreed to consider his offer.
The Americans will find me, Nicholai thought when Yu left the room. No, we will find each other, and I will hold Haverford accountable for his treachery.
And then I will find Solange.
92
DIAMOND PORED over the Hel file.
Goddamnit, he thought. How could Hel have escaped the trap in the Beijing temple and that Chinese kung-fu son of a bitch who was supposed to have been so good? Yeah, so goddamn good that he let Hel put a bullet in his head and kill the rest of his men as well.
Two swings at Hel, he thought, two misses. First he dispatches the two would-be killers in Tokyo, then the massacre in Beijing.
Three strikes and you’re out, Diamond told himself.
The next try has to connect.
But you have to find Hel before you can kill him.
“Lure him,” Singleton had said.
Easy for the old fart to say, a little harder to do. Lure him with what? What bait can you set that would bring Hel in?
Diamond went back to studying the file that Singleton had forced Haverford to turn over. Start at the beginning, he told himself.
Start in Tokyo.
Find the bait that will bring that arrogant half-Jap bastard waltzing in.
93
NICHOLAI’S ROOM WAS pleasant.
Large, airy, made entirely of poles, it sat on stilts, the space below housing chickens and a pig. Nicholai learned that it sat on the edge of a remote Buddhist monastery in the hills of Wulian, high above the Lekang River, and that the nearby villagers were Puman people, an ethnic minority that spoke a Dai dialect but little Han Chinese. He could see the people through the window — the men wore black turbans, the women colorful headscarves with pieces of silver sewn into them.
It was all so different from drab Beijing.
As a further comfort, Yu had acquired all of Guibert’s clothing and personal effects and had them brought to Yunnan. Nicholai particularly appreciated the razor and small travel mirror, and one morning asked for a bowl of hot water so he could shave.
His image in the mirror was a bit of a shock. His skin was pale, his face drawn, the beard gave him the look of a prison camp survivor. Shaving made him look and feel better, but he realized that he would have to start eating regularly to regain his health.
“I want to get up,” he said.
The young monk who had brought the water looked nervous. “Xue Xin says not for five more days.”
“Is Xue Xin here at the moment?”
The young monk comically looked around the room. “No.”
“Then help me get up, please.”
“I will go ask —”
“If you go ask,” Nicholai said, “I will try to get up on my own while you are gone, and probably fall and die as a result. What would Xue Xin say to you then?”
“He would hit me with a stick.”
“So.”
The monk helped him out of the bed. Nicholai tentatively put some weight on the wounded leg. The pain was ferocious, and it started to buckle beneath him, but the monk steadied him and they walked across the room.
Then back again.
After three trips, Nicholai was exhausted and the monk helped him back into the bed.
The next morning he walked outside.
Painful and slow at first, his walk from the village to the monastery became part of a thrice-daily routine as he rebuilt his physical and mental stamina. Making his unsteady way along the narrow, stone-laid paths, he focused on details — unraveling individual birdsong from the cacophony of a score of species, identifying types of monkeys from their incessant chatter and warning screeches, distinguishing plants and vines from among thousands in the verdant forest.
The jungle was recla
iming the monastery.
Its vines cracked the old stones, swallowed columns and stiles, crept over flagstone pavilions like a patient, persistent tide of Go stones on a board. Yet statues of Buddha peeped through the vegetation, his eyes content with the knowledge that all things change and all physical matter inevitably decays.
The discipline of the walk was good for Nicholai’s mind, and every day the pain lessened and his strength returned until he could walk with strength and confidence. His spirit recovered as well, and soon he began to think about the future.
He almost tripped over the monk.
Xue Xin was on his hands and knees with a small blade, carefully trimming vines away from a stone path that led to a modest stupa. The monk wore a simple brown robe tied at the waist with a belt that had faded almost to white.
He looked up and asked, “Are you feeling better?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Xue Xin slowly got to his feet and bowed. Nicholai bowed deeply in return.
“You don’t bow like a Frenchman,” Xue Xin said.
“I was raised in China,” Nicholai answered. “Later in Japan.”
Xue Xin laughed. “That explains it. The Japanese, they like to bow.”
“Yes, they do,” Nicholai agreed.
“Would you like to help?” Xue Xin asked.
“Forgive me,” Nicholai said, “but it seems an impossible task.”
“Not at all. Every day I clean each day’s growth away.”
“But it grows back,” Nicholai said. “Then you just have to do it again the next day.”
“Exactly.”
So Nicholai took to helping Xue Xin with the repetitive task of trying to keep the path clear. They met every morning and worked for hours, then stopped and took tea when the afternoon rain slashed down. Nicholai learned that Xue Xin was an honored guest at the monastery.
“They put up with me,” Xue Xin said. “I work. And you?”
“I don’t know if I am a guest here or a prisoner,” Nicholai answered truthfully, although he left it at that.
“As in life itself.” Xue Xin chuckled. “Are we its guest, or its prisoner?”