by Gabriel Hunt
Threading her arm around his waist, Gabriel led Qi back out into the seething crowds on the street. She bumped one hip into him and forced him to misstep. She was like a warm, skittish animal in his grasp. She laughed and chewed on his neck. Two gunmen were walking right toward them when she grabbed a fistful of his hair and spun him into a devouring full-on kiss, working his mouth hungrily as though she really meant it.
The gunmen split and walked around them, scanning the shadows past them in a desperate attempt to spot their prey.
Gabriel half expected Qi to turn and go after the men from behind and he raised one hand to stop her, but she whispered, “No,” as if reading his mind. “We must get back to the motorcycle.”
Gabriel’s lips were still tingling. She tasted like mangoes and rare spice. Night-blooming jasmine. “The motorcycle,” he agreed.
“Don’t you dare get an erection, or I’ll have to shoot you.”
They were immersed to the collarbones inside a large cauldron of steaming water, which they had bucketed over from a wood fire inside the second of the leaning pagoda’s shrine rooms. Pressed herbs floated on the cloudy surface. Qi had insisted Gabriel join her—for purely therapeutic reasons, she explained, after she had applied antibiotic ointment to his head wound and to a new gouge, raw and red, that he’d acquired on the side of his neck.
As she’d climbed in across from him, Gabriel had noticed that Qi had a tattoo of some Chinese character on one hipbone. Oddly ridged with skin, as though to mask a wound. He did not ask about it.
She closed her eyes. After the action of the day the heat was penetrating to the bone, making them both dopey.
“You may ask me now,” she said, not opening her eyes.
“I’m not an interrogator,” said Gabriel, squeezing water between his palms. “But I would like to know.”
“My father used to bathe me. One day, I remember, he took very special care to make me presentable.”
“Special day?”
“Mmm. The day he sold me.”
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. “Sold you?”
“At the Night Market. Where we just were, today. And he bought me.”
“Cheung?”
Qi opened her eyes, gazing at him, frank, stark, unashamed. Her eyes were like black volcanic glass in the flickering light. “It fed the rest of my brothers and sisters. This is not America, Mr. Hunt.”
Gabriel already knew that centuries of entrenched Chinese dogma and cultural preference held that female children were “undesirable.” The modern one-child-per-couple mandate had only made the situation worse. In the past, female children were abandoned; today they could be aborted if an ultrasound revealed a female child in utero—a practice some called “gendercide.”
It also stacked the census deck to the point where Chinese men had begun to outnumber women by a significant degree. Far from making unmarried women more desirable, women had come to be treated even less humanely…and the world’s second oldest profession—bond slavery—had come into a new underworld vogue. The border between China and North Korea was commonly called a “wife market,” as thousands of female Korean refugees from economic privation flooded forth to find Chinese husbands. They were destined to be sold in the bars and karaoke clubs of the Chinese mafia, if they weren’t scooped up first by the predatory “women hunters” who preyed on the exploding market. Few men were willing to say they had bought a wife, but that didn’t mean they weren’t willing to buy one. They knew they were getting someone pliable, hardworking and submissive. And from the women’s point of view, better that than starving to death in North Korea, watching your family die around you. A Korean woman cost between 240 and 1,700 Euro (about $300–$2,500 American dollars, depending on exchange rates) in a country where the per capita rural income was little more than a hundred bucks a year. Korean customs officers were routinely greased to the tune of $80 per person to cross the border. The bought women were then provided with the birth stats and name of a dead Chinese (for an additional fee), prompting an upsurge in identity traffic among China’s legitimate dead.
Needless to say, beauty, age, physical condition, virginity and health were all factored into a woman’s price. Qingzhao would not have been brought to market as a mere baby factory or working wife. She was young, attractive, robust and healthy, and even more importantly, not Korean, and so had been brokered to the extreme high-end of the human traffic sector—the highest bidders, the shielded and protected elite who gathered at only the most clandestine rendezvous.
“My tag was here.” She pointed to her left earlobe. A triangle of piercings there. Gabriel had assumed it was for jewelry.
“And this.” Standing, she indicated the tattoo Gabriel had glimpsed on her hip, distorted with scar tissue. “Cheung put it there. I tried to cut it off once. It didn’t hurt.” She poked the area. “Now it has no feeling—none at all.”
She dismissed the topic with a haughty sniff and sat down again. The last thing she wanted was pity. “In time, I became Cheung’s administratrix of protection. Head of security.”
“You were his bodyguard? Like that guy I saw take Cheung through a plate glass window at the casino?”
“Not like him. No simple employee could ever gain that much of Cheung’s confidence. No woman, either.” She pulled her knees to her chin in an aerobic stretch.
“Who is he?”
“Longwei Sze Xie. His given name means ‘dragon greatness.’ He is commonly called ‘Ivory.’ No one knows why.”
“How did you leave Cheung’s…employ?”
“Cheung and Ivory became convinced that I would serve as an adequate sacrifice for a bad business decision.”
“Michelle Quantrill was in the same kind of situation,” said Gabriel. “She was falsely implicated, too. When Cheung killed her sister, he left Michelle to take the heat. I got her out of jail and told her to stay put, but she assumed her sister’s identity to come here and…” Gabriel trailed off. “Well you know the rest. It didn’t work out.”
“And why did you come?”
“To talk her out of what she was trying to do.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew something bad would happen to her, like what did happen to her. I think she knew it, too. I just don’t think she cared.”
“She came as a ghost, then,” Qi said contemplatively. “She was already dead. I knew we were linked when I first saw her. I just knew.“
They sat regarding each other for a silent moment. The connections between people are not reducible to hard statistics, Gabriel knew. Sometimes attraction was a thing of looks and moments, half-drawn breaths and secret approval. Intuitive, as when things denied logic yet felt correct. He resisted the urge to lean forward, to taste the spice again.
“I betrayed no one,” Qi said, “regardless of what they claimed. And I survived their attempts to destroy me. Twice now I have tried to take him, and twice I have failed. Once in the Pearl Tower. Once at the Zongchang casino. I failed the second time because your friend was in my line of fire—on a similar mission, though I did not know it.”
“And you think you owe yourself another stab?” Gabriel could not quite bring himself to say, Let it go; get past it. Qi would just ignore him if he did. “He’s not just going to forget your face. He’ll see you coming.”
“I want nothing less,” she said quietly.
“Then you’ll die, same as Michelle did.”
“As long as he dies first.”
Gabriel had encountered fatalism before, and zealotry, and devotion to a cause; but rarely held with this combination of unquestioning conviction and yet so little emotion.
“I know when the children will next be sold at the Night Market,” she said. “Cheung will be there. From high places, the rich bid on the poor. I can kill him there. But I cannot do it alone. Think on this for a night. Do not answer now. I am going to sleep.”
With a complete absence of shame or self-consciousness, Qi rose from the cauldron naked, stepped over it
s iron side and walked away, leaving a trail of wetness on the ground. Her body was lean and hard, muscular, pantherish. Before she’d turned, Gabriel had seen there was another ungainly X of scar tissue beneath her left breast, where some other possessive malefactor had tried to brand her, or take something away from her. Gabriel watched her until she was out of sight, engulfed by the night.
After a moment sitting alone in the cooling water, Gabriel rose dripping and got his gear, because there was work to do before sunrise.
It took the better part of two hours for Gabriel to clean, hack and chip away the main debris around the base of the giant bronze statue presumed to be warlord Kangxi Shih-k’ai, in the second shrine room. He had to work by fire and lantern-light, with brushes and chisels, the way the old-school guys had before the intrusion of modern conveniences like floodlights. Had workmen built this cumbersome thing inside the shrine? Had they built it somewhere else and hauled it here, and if so…how? It was impossible to calculate the sheer tonnage of the idol, but it would take an earthmover to budge it.
It had to be constructed of sections, Gabriel concluded. Components. Which meant seams. He had thought of this angle of attack while puzzling over the cunningly engineered box back at Tuan’s. The base of the idol was a crude rectangular metal slab, not nearly as detailed as the rest of the statue. It was aesthetically offensive. Why? Nothing about the composition of an idol like this was an accident.
Here, on one face of the pedestal, were ideograms. Spackled with the “alpha decay” common to archeological bronze, the writing was invisible until Gabriel was able to sculpt out the calcareous accretions. Perhaps here were instructions, clues, leads; unfortunately, the language variant was one Gabriel did not recognize. And on the other faces of the pedestal—nothing. No marks at all.
The dry environment of the room and mountainside had helped retard corrosion, but nothing could stop the process. Using an improvised potter’s cut-off tool he fabricated from a nail and a paintbrush handle, Gabriel was able to scrape the patina of ages from a small seam about two inches down from the top of the base. Following it, he was able to describe a small, rough rectangle about a foot high. It did not appear to want to travel anywhere laterally, so Gabriel struck it with a hammer. The metal made a loud clang like a muffled bell, but Qi did not come running.
Decay and flakes of oxidized metal sifted floorward. Gabriel hit it again.
The rectangle had sunk into the pedestal about an eighth of an inch. Maybe the pedestal was hollow. Rough acoustics indicated it might be.
Bang, again. And again.
Whatever this little component did, it had not done it for nearly a century, and it resisted easy cooperation. But every time Gabriel struck it, it retreated into the base a bit farther until it was sunk nearly half a foot…
…revealing a small inset on the right-hand side, like the dado joint on a drawer. Gabriel could just curl his fingers around it. It was meant to be pulled out, like a lever.
Using all of his strength and most of his weight, Gabriel was able to budge it about half an inch. He then lost another half hour devising a rudimentary block-and-tackle system to loop around the exposed end and leverage it.
He had to have more than one warm body on this line. He took a break to wash down some caffeine pills he found in one of Qi’s bags with a draught of strong (though cold) coffee, and went to seek his mysterious partner.
He found her asleep on a pallet on the third level of the pagoda, still naked though tightly bound up inside the punctured sheet of tin, which she’d wrapped around her torso and secured with wet leather thongs that constricted as they dried. It was like a penitent’s scourging corset and looked intensely painful, but Qi seemed sound asleep.
Then Gabriel caught the flickering residual tang in the air and realized that among the other provisions Tuan had supplied Qi, besides food, weapons and equipment, there had been a dose of opium. The long pipe was still at her side like a snoozing demon lover.
Chapter 9
The workings of the pedestal proved more frustrating to operate than a public telephone in Beijing.
The hidden lever freed itself by degrees, measured in Gabriel’s sweat. At full cock it released a panel on the far side of the iron base. The panel was heavier than the door in a Swiss bank vault and meant to be slid horizontally backward into a recess in the wall that was clotted with decades—perhaps more than a century—of mulch, roots and earth. Gabriel spent the better part of an hour scraping dirt before he realized the sheer weight of the door would prevent him from moving it; it wasn’t as though it was on ball bearings or a hydraulic arm or something.
He hit upon using Qi’s motorcycle as a conscripted assistant, since Qi was definitively out of the action.
The revving four-stroke engine raised a hellacious chain-saw racket and the spinning high-treads kicked back a tsunami of dust from the floor. In the lantern light it looked as though the shrine room was on fire. Russet clouds rolled and settled on everything, including Gabriel, who had begun to look a bit like a terra-cotta warrior himself.
The iron panel, nearly a foot thick, was gradually inched backward until there was a gap into which Gabriel could shove a lantern. He saw the boundaries of a twelve-by-twelve cobwebbed room—beneath the base of the statue—and the edge of a stoneworked archway that indicated the passage went deeper.
After more revving and straining, the space became big enough for Gabriel to wriggle through. He was parched from his exertions, though he had already drunk at least two quarts of water, and his shoulders pulsated with fatigue. He grabbed some road flares from Qi’s stores along with a flashlight and an extra lantern. He’d figured he’d need all the light he could get.
The interior directly beneath the statue’s base, sheeted in iron, was disappointingly vacant. It bore the musty mothball smell of old, dead air.
Past the archway was another room lined with wooden shelves, many of which had dried out, become porous, and collapsed over time. Arrayed upon the shelves that remained were hundreds of miniature warriors, each about nine inches in height and made of fired porcelain. Many of them had been unceremoniously dumped by time and the crumbling shelves; they lay in shards on the floor, which also appeared to be metal, judging by how his footsteps rang against it whenever they weren’t squashing something underfoot. He was within what amounted to a big iron box, Gabriel concluded, one that could only be accessed via the statue’s base—metal above, below, and except for the archway he’d entered through and another on the far wall, all around, so no one could dig their way in.
Gabriel recalled Emperor Qin’s city-sized necropolis, which had been constructed in relative secrecy and then hidden away underground. Logistically speaking, it would have been much more difficult for Favored Son Kangxi Shih-k’ai to pull off such a feat at the beginning of the 20th Century, when labor was more dear and secrecy harder to come by. Perhaps he had rendered his vaunting self-tribute only in miniature, except for the handful of life-size guardians Qi had found in the room outside. Enough niches spun off from this chamber to suggest there might be several thousand doll-soldiers here.
Was this Kangxi Shih-k’ai’s grand joke on history?
Was this the great prize Cheung sought?
From what Mitch Quantrill had told Gabriel, the would-be warlord thought he was going to claim his putative ancestor’s skeleton—which the great man would’ve been hard-pressed to have inserted into something the size of an action figure.
Gabriel popped a flare and dropped it on the floor. That was when he first saw that the metal surface he was standing on was writhing with worms and salamanders. He examined a nightcrawler under his flashlight. It looked like some sort of troglobitic millipede with a nasty oval mouth. Some were as much as a foot long.
That meant…
Then he noticed the heavily ammoniac, compost stench wafting toward him from the far archway. Opening the portal had caused a tiny bit of air movement, and the flow was eye-watering.
That
also meant…
…that there had to be another way in.
Quickly he drew a small automatic pistol—also procured from Qi’s stores—and advanced behind his upheld light toward the second archway.
Stone stairs wound down into blackness. The stench was already a physical thing as oppressive as wrapping your head in a piece of rotting cloth.
The stairs were long disused, crumbling, slicked with a gray organic fluid that glistened with phosphorescent mold spores. It was like walking on treacherous ice, the kind that could upend you and send you sprawling.
He was traversing downward at about a thirtydegree angle. He could hear trickling water now. He had to duck; the headroom was low.
The stairs broadened into a tiny pavilion with carved rails, all of it indistinguishable beneath caked, stinking muck.
Twin terra-cotta sentries stood mute guard over the pavilion with long-corroded weapons of bronze that had rotted away to stubs and flakes. The standing soldiers appeared to have been dunked in cake batter and left to decay for a century. Their features were not apparent. They were clotted and bloblike, runny pseudohuman monstrosities, more manlike in size and general outline than in any internal detail.
The pavilion faced a grand chamber at least the size of a football field. The distant sound of a small stream or other subterranean waterway was louder here, joining with the other ambient noises and echoing slightly, indicating that this was a very big room.
The whole place was a hibernaculum.
The concave dome of the ceiling was wall-to-wall with thousands of nesting bats. He could identify at least three species at this distance—the horseshoe bat, the long-fingered bat and the roundleaf bat. There were also lizards and annelids and other scavenger-parasites that fed on bat guano, which would be abundant indeed here.
Gabriel stepped forward very cautiously.