Chapter 39
Even the other members of Pangu called her Auntie Gugu.
She’d been an original member of the organization, recruited by her nephew Liu Tongzheng.
They’d all been so young. Even her. Idealistic.
Believing that, despite the crackdown and violence of Tiananmen, they would prevail.
The international community would protest, would rally behind the students. Reform would come. Freedom would come.
China would climb out of its primordial ooze and become great again.
And when that didn’t happen, when the international community not only didn’t stand up to the regime but actively promoted closer ties.
Business ties. When the years marched on and human rights abuses piled up.
When prisons filled up with intellectuals, artists, journalists.
When things got worse, not better, that’s when the new Pangu was formed.
Created not by the dissidents but by the regime itself.
Their excesses, their brutality, forged their enemy.
Auntie Gugu, from her stall in the market, became more and more resolved. More militant. She did not want a new China. She wanted the old one. The one whose borders were closed to foreigners. To foreign money and influence. One where the Han were in charge and all others subservient.
China was becoming nothing more than a mongrel state and, worse, a colony of the West. Their bloodline, their traditions, watered down.
No. Enough.
They had to return to the old days. The good old ways. If they were to build an even less penetrable wall, they’d need to return to the vision and methods of the first emperor.
If they could not actually resurrect his warriors, they had to be the warriors.
They’d planned for decades, setting recruits up in incubators of research. It cost a fortune, but then they had untold wealth at their fingertips.
And then, finally, the day came when she got the message. Their scientists had cracked it. They’d created adaptive predictive artificial intelligence.
A tool so powerful it could end hunger, end pollution, end disease.
A weapon so powerful it could end the world.
Now she sat in her office and looked at the message. Wang was dead. McAllister was dead. It had to be done. She was grateful she had people in Zhongnanhai and the White House.
Vivien Li, her daughter, Tank Man, and his wife were dead. Auntie Gugu spared a moment to inspect her feelings. But she had none.
Liu was still alive, but not for much longer. Not if he was in Beijing.
Auntie Gugu looked at the time. It was five thirty. They’d be saddling up the horses soon. Holding last-minute rehearsals for the young dancers and gymnasts. All for the immense, immeasurable ego of that narcissist Chen.
There would be final security sweeps of the reviewing stand and surrounding area.
None of that would help since the missiles would be coming from far, far away. From the USS Ronald Reagan in the South China Sea. According to her counterpart in the Pardington administration, the President was aware of the APAI intrusion. But Auntie Gugu knew there was nothing anyone could do.
Within hours, the current China would die and the new, old one would be born. Like all the great gods, it would rise up out of the conflagration.
As soon as the helicopter touched down, they were approached by security guards. Not the same ones Vivien and Alice had seen on their last visit. These were holding automatic rifles. Hardly standard issue for an archaeological dig and tourist site.
When the guards saw the senior MSS officer, they hesitated, then continued forward.
“How may we help you, sir?”
“You can come with me,” he said.
The others followed. Vivien wondered if Hu realized these were probably not actual guards.
Once inside the now deserted structure built over the excavation site, Captain Hu turned his gun on them.
“Drop your weapons and get on the ground.”
They did not. But the experienced soldier could read their minds:
“No,” he said. “You should have shot us right away. You lost your advantage.”
He prepared to fire.
They released their rifles and dropped to their knees. Then, at a sign from Hu, they lay prone. As Corporal Song zip-tied their hands behind their backs, Ming-na asked Hu, “How did you know they wouldn’t shoot?”
“They’re clearly hired guns, and mercenaries are reluctant to die for someone else’s cause. Unfortunately, the others we’ll run into will probably be less accommodating.” He turned to Alice. “We’re here. What now?”
“Now we grab these.” She walked past the rifles on the ground and went over to a neatly ordered rack of pickaxes.
“Why?” asked Ming-na, though Kai-wen had already grabbed two.
“Just follow me.”
“Where’re we going?” Vivien demanded. She was half running to keep up with her striding daughter. Where did this confident young woman come from? She was sounding like Vivien herself. “Why don’t you just tell us?”
“If I told them,” she whispered and jerked her head toward the MSS officers, as well, Vivien realized, as Kai-wen and Ming-na—“they wouldn’t come, and we need them.”
“Then tell me.” Vivien had also dropped her voice to a whisper. “I won’t leave you.”
And Alice realized she believed her mother. “Mercury.”
“The planet? I’m not sure this is the way.”
Despite her stress, Alice laughed. Until the past few days, she hadn’t realized that some of what her mother said was meant as a joke. Often on herself. Like now. Vivien clearly did not believe her daughter was taking them to—
“No.” Vivien grabbed her daughter’s arm in a grip strong enough to stop Alice in her tracks. “No, we can’t.”
She looked, and was, terrified. Vivien Li had realized what her daughter meant by “mercury.”
“We can and we will. We must.”
Alice yanked her arm free and walked quickly down the aisle. Past the looming Terracotta Warriors who were taking everything in.
Vivien now knew they were going to where the warriors ended and the thing they were protecting began. The tomb of Qin Shi Huang. The first emperor. Who’d been buried amid flowing rivers of …
“Mercury,” she whispered.
“Put your shoulder into it,” commanded Liu Tongzheng as he watched the young MSS officer he’d recently suspended thump into the door. “Harder.”
They were in the sub-basement of one of the office buildings in Zhongnanhai, just off the janitors’ storeroom. The last place anyone would look for the all-powerful, the feared, often brutal and capricious head of the Ministry of State Security.
Wang had shown this place to his old pal Liu when they were still old pals. It was where Wang, such a public figure, could go to be alone. And latterly, Liu suspected, to drink. And to scheme. And, finally, to hide.
If Wang had secrets, this was where they’d be kept. There’d been no key to this door among Wang’s effects, so they had to break in.
Wang had never had the door reinforced, believing none of the few who knew about this lair would ever suspect him of being a traitor. Though Liu was pretty sure no one involved in Pangu considered themselves traitors. They were, in their own deluded minds, patriots.
But then that’s what he and Vivien had thought too, when they’d created Pangu.
Thud, thud. Sigh. Louder thud.
Wang’s delusion had only been heightened by his exposure to mercury, as the autopsy revealed. While it explained his confusion and twitches, Liu wondered how he would have been poisoned by it. If somehow, in constructing this building, the workers had stored mercury in the sub-basement.
But how? Why? And if that was the culprit, wouldn’t others be affected? While the young and now bruised and exasperated agent continued to throw himself against the door, Liu brought out his phone and looked up “uses for mercury.”
Thermometers. Dental fillings.
He lowered his phone. How many fillings could the man possibly have had? He’d have to ask the coroner. And had they degraded over time so that Wang was swallowing the poison fillings? Could they have rotted his brain? Was it possible?
Liu went back to the article.
Mercury, he read, was highly conductive and, because of that, was often used in electrical components. In the past, it was also used in traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM.
Now that was interesting.
Finally, there was a great rending of wood, and the door burst open.
They’d arrived at the end, and in many ways the beginning.
The gang of four, and the two MSS officers, stood in front of the thick rock wall that had been put in place thousands of years ago and left undisturbed ever since. Not even the ubiquitous and industrious grave robbers had dared violate this tomb. For fear of what would be waiting for them.
It was a fear shared by the six people staring at the stones.
Just a few feet away was one of the great unexplored treasures. An archaeological, historical, mystical mystery.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” said Captain Hu. “You want us to break into his tomb?”
He wouldn’t even mention Qin Shi Huang’s name, for fear it would penetrate the wall and raise the magnificent monster.
Up until they were faced with it, none of them would have admitted they believed the stories.
Of a great city, temples and roads, palaces, created for the emperor in his afterlife.
Of riches beyond imagining. Of lethal and cunning traps set to protect the man and his treasures.
Anyone who violated the tomb would die a terrible death.
Worse still, if it was opened, the emperor himself would rise up and, with the help of his Terracotta Army, slaughter everything, everyone, in his way. And beyond.
“Mercury,” whispered Vivien, looking from the wall to her daughter.
“Shi. Dad said Wang was as mad as a hatter. We know what drove hatmakers crazy hundreds of years ago—”
“They used mercury in the process,” said Kai-wen.
“Exactly. Exposure over time rots the brain. Wang must have been exposed to it for a long time, maybe years. But how?”
“Fillings?” suggested Ming-na. “I have mercury in some of my teeth.”