Chapter 40
The look on Kathleen’s face said it all. Well, almost all. The red stains on her dress were also eloquent. Pardington still needed to hear the words from his Chief of Staff.
“What is it?”
He’d risen from behind his seat at the head of the long, gleaming oblong table in the Situation Room. He’d moved in there to monitor what was happening.
He’d barely taken a step forward when White House security rushed in.
“We need to get you into a secure location, sir,” the head of security said.
Pardington was being shoved along, manhandled. He tried to shake them off, without success. But he did manage to stop in front of his Chief of Staff.
Close up, he could see the stress and fatigue on her familiar face, and the red smears on her clothing. He knew what they were.
“What’s happened? Tell me,” he demanded.
“There’s been a shooting in the emergency stairwell.”
“Oh God. The chef, Chief Petty Officer Bahri?”
“Killed.”
“McAllister? He got away?”
“Got away, sir?” she asked, perplexed now, and Pardington realized he hadn’t told anyone else what he knew about his head of intelligence.
“How did you know they were there, Mr. President?” asked the head of security, trying not to make it sound like an accusation but not quite managing it.
“Grant McAllister is the traitor. He’s the contact for the terrorists, passing information on to Pangu.
It must be how they got into the weapons system.
Through him.” He spoke abruptly, ignoring the looks of shock verging on disbelief on their faces.
“He admitted to murdering Alan Zhou and that young man in Madame Li’s home. And now he’s murdered Bahri.”
Dear God, he thought. This is my fault.
“Mr. McAllister?” said Kathleen.
Pardington could see that his Chief of Staff was trying to grasp events that were moving so fast, and in such an unexpected direction.
“He admitted it?” demanded the head of security. “Why didn’t you tell us? We should have arrested him.”
“I can’t explain it all now, but I had Bahri arrest him—”
“The chef?” said one of the agents.
“Chief Petty Officer Bahri. Yes.” He glared at the man who’d spoken and saw the color rise in the agent’s cheeks. “She escorted him the back way down to the cells. He must have overpowered her.”
But Kathleen was shaking her head. “No, Mr. President. Mr. McAllister is also dead.”
Now it was Pardington’s turn to be stunned.
“Mr. President, please.” The head of security was trying to drag him away, but now Pardington actively resisted.
Partly because he needed more information from his Chief of Staff, and partly because he’d quickly realized, with this new information, that there was someone else in the White House, maybe even in the Situation Room, who was even more dangerous than McAllister. He was not going anywhere with anyone.
“No. Stop. I’m safe enough here. This is a national emergency. Find the Vice President. Take him and the senior cabinet to the secure location. But I stay here.”
The team hesitated a beat; then, “Yessir, Mr. President.” The senior officer saluted, then turned and left, with the others following.
“There’re cameras in the stairwell,” Pardington said, turning to Kathleen.
“Yes. I’m having them checked. But I’m afraid whoever did it is long gone.”
The President took a deep breath and glanced at the time. “I doubt it.”
“Holy shit.”
They’d crawled through the hole in the thick wall and found themselves in a village. An entire village. They’d emerged into a warren of narrow passageways. Hutongs. Through an archway, Alice could see a courtyard around which homes with swooping tile roofs had been built.
This was not like some Hollywood set of false fronts. These were actual houses.
The four of them, aliens from another world, stared open-mouthed in disbelief at the village frozen in time.
Alice reached out and touched the structure next to her. It was made in the ancient method, of rammed mud. The earth itself having yielded to the desires of a tyrant emperor.
She quickly realized that while what they were seeing was extraordinary, they should not have been able to see anything, never mind so much. It should be pitch black inside. No light should, could, penetrate. And yet … it was as bright as midday in there.
She looked up. There, shining down upon them, was the sun. A bright orb joined in the azure sky by glittering stars. And over there, just visible beyond the graceful peak of a tower, was the moon.
All the celestial bodies present, together. In one sky. Created to perpetually shine over another celestial body. That of Qin Shi Huang. The man who united China. Who gave the new country his name. “Qin” was pronounced “chin.” China.
This was the sprawling tomb of the first emperor. Where the impossible was made real, by force of will and then some.
“He really did unify heaven and earth,” whispered Kai-wen, bewitched.
The historians were right. This necropolis contained an entire world. Qin Shi Huang’s world. Fifty-six square kilometers of it.
Alice was the first to recover, suddenly overcome with the urgency of the situation. This was vast. Somehow she’d thought they’d emerge through the wall, see Pangu’s headquarters, and immediately stop the attack. With one gun and pickaxes. And pluck.
How could she ever think this little crew of frightened elders and a terrified blogger would be able to stop hardened terrorists? Seemed Wang was not the only one who was insane. And she could not even blame mercury.
How to even begin to find the terrorists in this city? Never mind stop them?
She heard a gasp and turned quickly to see Ming-na shrinking back. Alice followed her stare and felt her heart contract.
There, in the middle of the narrow alleyway, blocking their only way forward, stood a huge soldier. Glaring at them. He’d been waiting. Expecting them. Or would have been, had he not been made of terracotta.
Still, they held their breaths, waiting for the clay man to step toward them. Another impossible thing.
They waited, waited; then first Vivien, then the others chuckled softly, a nervous laugh. He was not real. Though he looked as real as any of them.
Her heart pounding, Alice crept up to him and looked at his face, meeting his ferocious glare. His eyes, she could now see, were rubies. His beard tiny whisps of hair. The detail was extraordinary, right down to the pockmarks from some childhood infection.
She had the sudden fear that he had once been flesh and blood, but had been encased in clay. Baked. And this was the result.
Given what she knew of the emperor, that was not impossible.
The gang of four tiptoed past, afraid to wake him.
As they made their slow, careful progress through the village, they saw other figures.
No longer just warriors, here were terracotta merchants in shops, selling their terracotta wares to bickering clay customers.
Bolts of silk, bronze vessels, intricately inlaid ornaments.
The clay faces were animated with expressions of hard bargaining, of joy, of suspicion, as though they were being bilked.
Each emotion tangible. Each one a fully realized individual.
“It’s unreal,” Kai-wen whispered.
“This isn’t.” Vivien was touching an amulet around the neck of a woman. “This is real jade.”
They took a closer look at the vendors. At the clay women and children. At the stray dogs and cart horses. Each had ruby eyes and hair made of strands of fine gold.
Precious stones, necklaces, and wide bracelets spilled from urns.
“So this is how they bankrolled the operation,” whispered Vivien.
One of the reasons governments, including the Americans, were slow to accept such a terrorist organization as Pangu existed was that it would take years and a monumental investment of money to build and maintain it.
To bribe. To blackmail. To buy the people, the informants, the scientists and technology necessary to create APAI.
Surely, the governments argued, there would be some sign of that amount of money being moved.
It would take hundreds of millions of dollars. Billions.
Or a few handfuls of the emperor’s treasure. Sold on the black market.
“Come on,” said Alice. “We don’t have much time. We have to find—”
Without warning, she fell forward with a loud thump.
“Alice!” Vivien called out.
Liu stood over the hospital bed. The medical staff had tried to stop him from entering intensive care, but he showed them his ID and shoved past their outstretched arms and angry glares.
Now he stared down at Wang’s wife. Hooked up to monitors. Eyes closed, head bandaged. She lay still. Very still.
After failing to find anything in Wang’s secret office, Liu knew there was only one other possible source of information. His wife. Whom Wang trusted completely.
Had he trusted her with this? Might she know about Pangu?
“Lan?” he whispered, bending low and speaking into her ear. “Lan?”
Nothing.
“Lan, I need to find Pangu.” He stared at her, his nose practically touching her cheek.
Nothing.
“Lan!” he shouted.
The heart rate monitor peaked. But her eyes remained closed, her face in repose.
“Give her something to wake her up.”
“No.”
“Do it.” Liu brought out his gun. “Now. There’s going to be another attack, any moment, and she knows how to stop it.”
The doctor looked down at her patient. A woman close to seventy. Was that possible?
Liu took the safety off the gun. “If you don’t do it, I’ll shoot everyone here until someone does.”
A moment later, the doctor was injecting adrenaline into her patient.
Nothing. Nothing.
Then the heart leaped again, and Wang’s wife opened her eyes. Wide. Unnaturally wide.
Liu knew he had moments. Just seconds. “Wang needs help. Where is Pangu?”
The eyes focused for a moment. She muttered something.
“What?” Liu bent closer.
A sound. Slurred. Not really a word. It seemed to come from her depths, expelled on a breath: “Nnnnnnn.”
Then, “Shhhhhoooo.”
Lan’s eyes glazed, then rolled to the back of her head. The heart monitor, so jagged, flatlined.
Liu was shoved aside as the medics tried to revive her. But she was gone. And with her last breath went his last chance.
He backed out of the intensive care room and, turning away from the activity, walked down the hall, pursued by the scream of the monitor accusing him of her death.
It was not wrong.
Alice was lying on her stomach, staring ahead. Hyperventilating. Breathing in soil that had been undisturbed for millennia.
Then she scuttled away in horror. She’d tripped over a skeleton.
They’d been so busy looking around, they’d failed to see what was on the path right in front of them.
“Oh God.”
Now they saw that the place was littered with bones, in the courtyards, in the shops. Through the open doors, they could see piles of them. Skulls. Curved ribs. Bleached bony fingers reached out to them.
“Those who accompanied the emperor in death were extremely numerous.”
“I beg your pardon?” Kai-wen turned to his sister. “What did you just say?”
“It’s what the ancient historians wrote about the tomb,” said Vivien, her voice hushed.
She’d read and reread the description so often, she’d inadvertently memorized it.
“After the treasures had been hidden away, the workers and craftsmen who had constructed the mechanical devices would know about the buried treasures.”
Alice was on her feet, frantically brushing the dirt off her. As though to get rid of the memory. That was not yet a memory.
“Consequently,” said her mother, narrating Alice’s nightmare, “after the treasures had been hidden away, the main entranceway to the tomb was shut off, and the outer gate lowered, so that all the seven hundred thousand workers who’d built the tomb and the craftsmen who had buried the treasure were shut in, and there were none who came out again. ”
Consequently. Consequently, thought Alice. Oh God, there are going to be consequences …
The consequences were staring at them.
These were the workers. The remains of the hundreds of thousands of laborers, the designers. The army of artists. The engineers. Entombed with their emperor to prevent them telling his secrets.
They’d died of thirst, of starvation. A slow, agonizing death.
Now Alice was truly terrified. What the hell was she doing here? She wrote a food blog, for God’s sake. She ate juicy dumplings and wrote about them.
“Juicy.” There’s a good word. Must make a note …
But here she was, in a cursed tomb, tripping over skeletons to stop terrorists. Kai-wen knelt beside the skeleton on the path and pulled out a long arrow.
“He tripped a booby trap,” he said. “A quick death. One of the lucky ones.”
“Jesus,” said Vivien. “So that part was true too. All the old myths. Not myths after all.”
She looked back at the hole in the wall, just visible down the alley. What in the world were they doing there? They had no idea.
They sold noodles, and wrote food logs or blogs or vlogs. She gave lectures on democracy and the need to stand up to tyrants, then went out for sumptuous dinners.
She wanted to sit in the Shangri-La hotel atrium, in her Shanghai Tang jacket, wearing her Shanghai Tang water lily bracelet, eating delicate cucumber sandwiches with her manicured fingers. Holding court. Being fawned over.
Not … she glanced around … this.
She looked at her bloody hands. At her torn fingernails. At her ripped clothing, at her wrist where the bracelet should be but had long since fallen off.
The great freedom fighter, the one whose accusations made the Chinese leadership quake, wanted now to sit down and weep.
They were going to die there and become yet more skeletons. And no one would ever find them.
Vivien opened her mouth to speak again. To say they needed to leave. To go back through that hole in the wall and pretend this never happened. They had no business being there …
But instead, she said, “Now what?”
It was, to her surprise, directed at her daughter. They’d all turned to Alice for direction.
Alice took a deep breath in. A deep breath out.
She patted her pocket to make sure the gun given to her by the young MSS agent, the one who’d abandoned them, was still there. It was.
Coconut buns. Coconut buns. Coconut buns.
“We find Pangu.”
She went to step over the skeleton when she felt a hand on her arm.
“I’ll go first,” said Vivien.
“No.” When Vivien began to step forward anyway, as though her daughter hadn’t spoken, Alice said, “Don’t make me shoot you.”
Vivien turned and smiled. It was only in the last few days that she’d realized that a lot of what Alice said was meant to be funny. Self-effacing. Not to be taken literally or seriously. And yet, for decades, she had. And so had missed the point. Missed her daughter.
“Probably not the first time you’ve considered it,” said Vivien.
Alice returned the smile. “But the first time I’m actually armed.”
Then the noodle merchants and the lecturer followed the food blogger deeper into the lunatic emperor’s necropolis.