The Fourth Sacrifice (The China Thrillers 2)

by Peter May

  Li said, ‘No wonder they knew how to replicate the murders. They had the whole thing on tape.’

  One of the uniformed officers made a dash for the bathroom, hand over his mouth.

  ‘What’s Yuan doing?’ Wu asked in a hushed voice. ‘What are those figures he’s looking at in the background?’

  Li picked up the remote control and pressed the pause button. The picture flickered momentarily, and then held in a perfect freeze-frame. Li leaned forward to try to make out what it was in the background. ‘In the name of the sky,’ he whispered. ‘They’re Terracotta Warriors.’

  *

  Margaret stood shivering among the silent figures. She was not certain if it was the cold or her fear that made her tremble so violently. In the momentary glow of the pinpoint of red light that flashed at regular intervals overhead, the faces of her companions took brief form in the dark and then plunged again into blackness. But their faces were cold as stone, lifeless eyes staring off towards an eternity into which they had been marching for two thousand, two hundred years. She did not know how many of them there were. Dozens perhaps. They stood in hushed rows, one behind the other in the cold and dreadful darkness of this underground chamber. They had had time to get used to it. Margaret had not.

  At first, after the lights had gone out, there had been a distant clang of metal and she had called out, frantically hoping that someone would hear her. Terrified, she had felt her way back up the tunnel, inch by inch, one hand on the wall, one probing the darkness ahead of her. She could not remember ever having been so completely without light. The blackness seemed to take form and substance, enveloping her totally. It was frightening, disorientating. She had wondered if this was how it felt to be blind, and thought briefly of Pauper losing her sight slowly, first one eye, then the other. When she had told them her story of the sun rising red over the Yellow Sea and firing the town of Chongqing in the light of its crimson dawn, Margaret had been able to visualise it so clearly. Now she could see nothing, not even in her mind’s eye.

  Up ahead her hand had touched something cold and wet, and she recoiled with a little scream. After a moment she had reached out again, and realised that what she felt was the cold metal of the gate at the tunnel’s entrance. Her relief was only momentary, as she realised that the gate was shut. And locked. Any illusions she may have harboured that she had been shut in here by accident had quickly vaporised. Her fear had turned to terror, and she had made her way quickly back to the chamber where the Terracotta Warriors stood waiting for her, as if it had been their destiny, and hers, to share the darkness of this awful place.

  It was some time before she had realised that the winking red light which afforded her the briefest glimpses of her companions, was the light of a security camera mounted on the wall above the tunnel entrance. Was it an infrared camera? Was there someone, somewhere, at a monitor who could see her in the dark, who was watching her every movement? The thought made her feel sick.

  Now she squeezed herself carefully among the warriors to crouch down and obscure herself from the camera and huddle, arms around her legs, for warmth and comfort. She wanted to cry. She did not know how long she had been here. But it seemed like a very, very long time.

  III

  Li slammed down the phone and shouted, ‘Wu!’

  Wu appeared quickly in the doorway. The office behind him was buzzing with activity.

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘Get down to the Procurator General’s office and pick up that warrant for Zimmerman.’

  ‘On my way.’

  Qian took his place in the doorway as Wu left it. ‘No one seems to know where Zimmerman is, boss. He’s not out on location, or at the production office. He’s not at the American Embassy …’

  The phone on Li’s desk rang. He snatched the receiver. ‘Just a moment,’ he barked into it and put a hand over the mouthpiece. He flicked his head at Qian. ‘Try that bar where he said he was the night of Yuan’s murder. The Mexican Wave. I think it’s in Dongdaqiao Lu.’ And into the phone, ‘Deputy Section Chief Li.’ He flicked open his file on the murders and a couple of sheets of paper fluttered to the floor. He leaned over to pick them up.

  ‘It’s Mr Qi here, Deputy Section Chief. At the Centre of Material Evidence Determination. Hope I didn’t get you out bed.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Li was in no mood for Qi’s levity. He laid the fallen sheets on his desk in front of him.

  ‘I’ve got the results here that Dr Campbell asked for. She wanted me to phone you.’

  Li frowned. ‘What results?’ His eyes were drawn by the printed sheets he had picked from the floor. They were in English, two of the pages from the print-out Margaret had made of the North California Review of Japanese Sword Arts after she had downloaded it from the Internet.

  ‘The dark blue dust she brought in this morning. She wanted me to run a comparison with the samples you found on Professor Yue and at Yuan Tao’s embassy apartment.’

  Li was mystified. ‘She brought you a sample? This morning?’

  ‘Yes,’ Qi said. ‘It was a positive match.’

  He now had Li’s full attention. ‘Did she tell you where she found it?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Qi. ‘It was in the tread of her shoes from when she was in the pits of the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an.’

  But Li barely had time to register this information before a name leaped out at him from one of the sheets of paper on his desk. A name that came several paragraphs below Yuan’s, in a list of winners in a minor Tameshi Giri competition in San Diego. It seemed extraordinary to him that they hadn’t seen it before. But, then, they hadn’t been looking. He felt sick.

  ‘Hello … hello …’ he heard Qi saying. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Sure.’ Li’s throat was thick. He knew now who had killed Yuan. ‘Thank you, Mr Qi.’ He hung up and sat for a moment. A thousand conflicting computations ran through his mind before one of them punched up an answer that sent a chill through him. He became aware that the sheet of paper in his hand was trembling.

  He jumped up suddenly, lifting his jacket from the back of his chair, and headed for the door. In the detectives’ office he called to Qian to give him the mobile phone. Qian threw it across the desk and he caught it deftly and clipped it on to his belt. ‘Keep me in touch with any developments,’ he said. ‘I’m going to try to find Dr Campbell. I think she could be in danger.’

  *

  The playpark was almost deserted. A handful of toddlers played in a sandpit watched by their mothers, who sat nearby on toy cars, smoking and talking. A breeze that stirred the leaves of the surrounding trees rattled the empty climbing frames. A giant Donald Duck, facing a slightly smaller dinosaur, presided over motionless swings and roundabouts. Out on Lake Houhai, the warm wind sent tiny ripples racing across the surface of the water. Li looked around with an increasing sense of anxiety. Margaret and Xinxin should have been here by now. But there was no sign of them. There was a shop in a tiny pavilion on the waterfront selling soft drinks and cigarettes. The proprietress sat reading a magazine. She shook her head when Li asked if she had seen a yangguizi with a little Chinese girl. No, she said. She had been here all morning and would have noticed something so unusual.

  Li hurried back through a small park, past a garden where a woman in a white coat administered a massage to a fat, middle-aged man lying face down on a table. A few old men sat on benches around a circular flowerbed, staring into space. There was barely a flicker of interest in their eyes as Li ran past them to the hutong where he had parked the Jeep. He backed up and drove to Mei Yuan’s siheyuan.

  She was surprised to see him, and he was relieved to see Xinxin. He looked around. ‘Where’s Margaret?’ he asked, expecting that she would come through the door from the other room any moment.

  ‘She wouldn’t take me to the park,’ Xinxin said petulantly. ‘She promised.’

  ‘She said she’d be back later,’ Mei Yuan said to her. ‘You know that.’

  Xinxin
folded her arms crossly. ‘Fed up waiting,’ she said.

  ‘Well, do you know where she went?’ Li asked impatiently.

  Mei Yuan nodded towards Xinxin’s trainers by the door. ‘She got very excited when she found some dark blue powdery stuff on Xinxin’s shoes.’

  Li stooped immediately to look at them, and recognised the blue-black ceramic dust he had found on Professor Yue and in his killer’s apartment. He frowned his confusion. This didn’t make any sense. He looked up at Mei Yuan, but she just shrugged.

  ‘She said she had to go to the university.’

  IV

  Margaret felt her fingers and joints stiffening. She had started to shiver uncontrollably, her lower lip trembling with every breath. It was, she recognised, the early stages of hypothermia. She had lost all sense of time now, and realised that soon she would start to become drowsy, comatose. If she allowed herself to drift off into sleep she knew it was a sleep from which she would never awaken.

  Stiffly she got to her feet again and stamped them on the concrete floor. She swung her arms in circles around her body to try to get her circulation going and generate the heat that would keep her alive. For a long time she had been afraid of someone coming. But now she would have welcomed it. Anything would be better than dying down here in the cold and dark, simply slipping away without so much as a fight. They were insidious, intangible enemies, the cold and dark. You could not fight them. Their patience was endless, and would far outlast her will to survive. It seemed ironic that just a few feet above her the sun was shining, warm and bright and full of life. But there was no way she could reach it, or it reach her. And not for the first time did she feel the urge to cry, but fought it back. Tears would be futile.

  She had long ago stopped trying to make sense of anything. Her thoughts and her senses had been focused on the need to stay alive. Twice she had made her way back to the gate hoping that she might find some way to break it down or force the lock. But it was solid and unyielding.

  She had carefully picked her way through the ranks of the warriors to the back of the chamber. There it narrowed, and two steps led down to the opening of another tunnel. Hope had flared briefly, only to be extinguished by the discovery of another gate, which was also locked.

  One by one she had counted the warriors. There were sixty-seven of them, including eighteen kneeling archers. She had felt their features, as if she might find in their faces some expression of comfort. But their cold, hard bodies were icier to the touch than the dead she had dissected on her autopsy table. And now she felt physical and mental control slipping away from her. Fear of death was slowly giving way to acceptance of it. How long could you remain afraid? Fear, like pain, could not sustain itself indefinitely.

  But it was fear that returned, like a knife plunged into the heart, as suddenly she found herself dazzled by light. They were the same feeble lamps as before, but their light now seemed blinding after the dark. She screwed up her eyes against the glare until her pupils shrank to bring the light into perspective, painfully restoring her sight. The chamber appeared smaller somehow than it had in the darkness of her imagination. The warriors stood mute and expressionless, unblinking in the sudden light, unmoved by her plight.

  She heard the distant clang of the metal door and the scrape of it on the concrete floor. She eased herself back among the soldiers as if they might protect her. A soft footfall echoed along the corridor towards her. She strained in the mist and gloom to see who it was, fear almost robbing her of the ability to breathe. This is what she had wanted. This is what she had told herself would be preferable to dying of hypothermia alone in the cold and dark. Now she was not so sure.

  The shadow of a man moved through a halo of light cast by the lamp in the tunnel just beyond the chamber, but it had no definition in the mist, insubstantial and wraithlike. She wanted to scream, but no sound would come. And then the figure stepped into the chamber and she saw Michael’s sad, smiling face, and her legs nearly buckled under her with relief.

  ‘Michael,’ she gasped. And his eyes flickered among the serried ranks of the warriors until he picked out her face, pale and frightened, among the bold, bearded faces of her protectors. But her relief was momentary, and quickly replaced by a deep chill that had nothing to do with the cold in this place. ‘Michael, what are you doing here?’ And she was almost surprised by the calm of her own voice.

  He shook his head, and his smile was laden with regret. ‘I should be asking you that.’ He stepped towards her and she withdrew among the warriors.

  ‘Don’t come near me!’

  ‘Jesus, Margaret, you don’t think I’m going to harm you!’ And there was hurt in his voice that she could believe him capable of such a thing. ‘I love you.’

  She looked at him and was shocked to see that he meant it. ‘So what are we doing here, Michael?’ she asked. ‘I mean, this is where Professor Yue was killed, isn’t it? Right where you’re standing. Before you moved the body to his apartment.’

  Michael looked down at the dried pool of blood at his feet. He nodded slowly.

  ‘For God’s sake, why?’

  He looked up again, and there was a light in his eyes. ‘It’s the final part of the story,’ he said. ‘The only bit I can’t tell. At least, not yet.’

  Margaret found herself breathing rapidly, almost hyperventilating. Her fear and panic was mixed in equal parts with disillusion, frustration, even anger. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Hu Bo’s greatest achievement.’ Michael sunk his hands in his pockets and moved across the chamber, head bowed as if deep in thought. Then he looked up and his face was alive and intense. ‘The building above us,’ he said. ‘The Arts building. It was the home of the archaeology department during the Cultural Revolution. It’s where Hu Bo and several of his colleagues sought refuge from the madness. Here, they could keep their heads down below the parapet and wait until it was all over. Then, in ’74, they got word of an extraordinary find in Xi’an. Life-sized warriors fired in clay and buried underground to protect the tomb of the First Emperor. Some of them had been dug up and restored by the local cultural centre. But the authorities in Beijing did not yet know.’ He drew his hands from his pockets and spread them out towards her, as if appealing to her imagination to picture what he was telling her. ‘Imagine, Margaret, how they felt. What could turn out to be one of the most extraordinary finds of the century, discovered at a time when Red Guards were still roaming China, ransacking museums, destroying the country’s relics and artefacts.’

  And Margaret realised it was not really her he was addressing, but his audience. This was a story he had probably rehearsed in his mind a thousand times. She glanced up at the security camera and wondered if the performance was being recorded for posterity.

  ‘Hu and two of his colleagues slipped out of Beijing and travelled to Xi’an to see for themselves.’ Michael’s absorption in his story was complete. ‘It was true. They talked to the people at the cultural centre, the peasants who had dug the wells, and persuaded the head of department back in the capital that an exploratory dig was worthwhile. But they would make no big thing of it, for they did not want to attract unwelcome attention.

  ‘And no one paid them any. A bunch of old men, with the aid of a few enlisted peasants, digging holes in the middle of nowhere.’ His eyes sparkled and he clenched his fist in triumph. ‘But those holes took them right down into what the official team later called the fourth chamber. And, just like the archaeologists who came so soon after, they found that it was empty. Filled with sand and silt.’ He paused, eyes wide, breath billowing about him in haloes. ‘Except for one ante-chamber that was crammed with warriors. Nearly a hundred and thirty of them. Perhaps they had simply been stored there, awaiting later deployment. Perhaps they were flawed in some way and had been discarded. We’ll never know. But Hu and his colleagues understood the importance of their find. And they knew that it was only a matter of time before the authorities found out what they were up to.’

/>   Michael moved about upon his stage, as if addressing himself to an audience of the very warriors he was talking about. But his eyes were fixed on Margaret, appealing to her to share his excitement, desperate to draw her into his story, to know how it was he felt, how this had all come about.

  ‘The warriors they found had been badly damaged by the collapse of the roof and the walls,’ he said. ‘But Hu’s greatest fear was that the Red Guards would come and destroy them for ever, denounce them as “old culture”, proof of the crimes of the “imperialist royalists” of China’s past. So they brought in a mechanical digger and simply dug out the whole ante-chamber, filling crate after crate with earth and pieces of the broken warriors. The crates were shipped back to Beijing by road and stored in a warehouse belonging to the university in Haidan. Then one by one they were transferred to the university itself and secreted down here in the bomb shelter that their predecessors had dug in the sixties.’

  Michael let out a deep breath and smiled at Margaret. ‘You see, they thought they were saving them for posterity. But, then, to everyone’s surprise, the authorities sanctioned an official excavation, and within a year the thousands of warriors in Pit No. 1 were being uncovered. Hu Bo and the others were trapped by their own good intentions. To admit that they had removed the warriors from the fourth chamber could leave them open to accusations of theft, or worse.

  ‘So they made a pact. They spent the next twenty-five years restoring the warriors they had recovered from Xi’an, piece by tiny piece, down here in what they came to call their own fourth chamber, and upstairs in the conservation lab. Their existence, in fact the very existence of the bomb shelter, was known to only a few. The university authorities who had been here in the sixties had long since been purged. Officially, this place didn’t exist. Still doesn’t. It was the perfect hiding place for the warriors.’