Chapter 41
“Mr. President?”
The martial music was already playing. Normally the first few bars would signal Chen’s arrival on the viewing platform to thunderous and, he chose to believe, heartfelt applause.
But now the military band, several hundred strong, was halfway through the rousing march, and still Chen hung back.
In a rare show of mercy, he’d told the other members of the Standing Committee, who’d normally be standing beside him on the platform, to leave. To get out of Beijing with their families.
Chen had hoped that maybe one, just one, would choose to stay with him.
But they had not.
Alone now, one shiny boot on the step up to the stage, Chen hesitated. Would the missiles launch as soon as he appeared? Or would Pangu wait ten minutes, half an hour? Two hours? Knowing each moment he stood there was torture for him.
Would they make him suffer? Probably.
Chen thought about the many times, hundreds, maybe thousands, he’d done the same thing to his political enemies. Having sentenced them to death, he’d commute their sentence at the very last moment. And do it over and over again, until the prisoner went mad. Only then would they be executed.
Anticipation. Uncertainty. That was the worst.
But maybe, maybe Pardington and his people would figure it out. Maybe his own scientists would be able to track down the APAI serpent in the works and stop it.
Maybe Liu would be successful.
That was a whole shitload of uncertainty.
He glanced at his phone. Nothing.
It was time.
“Mr. President?”
“Shi.” He straightened his uniform. He didn’t want to be blown into the next life looking all disheveled.
He prayed whatever happened would be fast. And that whatever deity might judge him in the afterlife understood his decisions. Though he was beginning to have his doubts. More uncertainty.
Eeyore stepped onto the viewing stand to wild applause.
“How are we ever going to find Pangu in time?” Ming-na asked. “Look at this place. It’s a maze. They could be anywhere.”
“Shhhh.” Kai-wen held up his hand.
“Don’t tell me to—” But on seeing her husband’s face, Ming-na shushed.
They all did. There was a sound ahead.
The gang of four clutched their pickaxes tighter and edged to the corner. Alice peeked around it and quickly pulled back. A look of horror on her face.
“What?” hissed Vivien.
“Pangu. Guards. They look … like the undead.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Vivien sighed. “Now zombies? There’s no way.”
She took a look and immediately pulled back.
“What?” whispered Ming-na. “What is it?”
What Kai-wen had heard was feet shuffling toward them. What Alice and Vivien had seen were the people attached to those feet.
Not zombies. Real living humans. Young. A man and two women.
Who knows how long they had been there, but it was obvious that mercury poisoning had taken hold.
They were barely living and had the haunted look of being as mad as hatters.
Their clothes dirty, hair unkempt. Alive, but maybe already dying inside.
The four of them ducked into a shop and hid behind huge lacquered urns, intricately decorated and overflowing with gold and jewels. They held their breaths. Mostly to keep as silent as possible. Partly because there was an unholy reek.
The Pangu guards stopped, stared in, then shuffled off.
They must have been living in here for months, Alice thought. Recruited by Pangu to guard the place, now imprisoned like the thousands of workers who built it for the emperor. This would be their tomb too. She shuddered at the thought.
“What is that stench?” whispered Vivien, scrunching her delicate nose. “It’s putrid.”
There was very little light inside the shop, and Alice preferred not to put on her phone and drain the battery even further. Instead, she reached out. Patting the ground. The ground. The …
Yuck. She made a sound of disgust. Her hand had touched something soft. Slimy. She quickly wiped it off … on Vivien’s Shanghai Tang.
“Hey.” But her protests stopped when a beam of light from Kai-wen’s phone illuminated what Alice had touched.
Now they all scrambled back.
On the ground was the decomposing body of a Pangu guard. She was clutching a handful of treasure and had been shot through with an arrow. Her death was recent enough that the body was still rotting.
“Jesus,” whispered Vivien. “Let’s get out of here.”
“No, wait.”
Alice took a deep breath through her mouth, held it, and bent over the body. With eyes narrowed for the horror of it, she went through the clothes clinging to the soft flesh.
She was looking for a gun, for any weapon. While she didn’t find one, she did find something else. In the dead woman’s pocket was a government ID.
“She worked for the MSS. For Wang,” said Kai-wen.
“For Dad.”
“Maybe.”
In another pocket, she found a photograph of a child and a drawing, a rough map. She looked at it. Could it lead them to Pangu? But it was just a series of squares and a dot in the middle of one. The plan of a building. But no clue which building.
She took it all and stood up. “Now we can go.”
“Where to?” asked Ming-na. “The attack could be set off any time. We can’t search the whole place for the terrorists. And what about the traps?”
It wasn’t lost on them that they were in the lamentable position of having to save Chen and the Chinese Communist Party. And therefore the regime. One they’d dedicated their adult lives to bringing down.
“The historians wrote about a temple and a grand palace,” said Vivien. “We go to the palace.”
“Why not the temple?” asked Alice.
“Take away all this glitter and it’s still a tomb. Qin Shi Huang is almost certainly in the temple. They’d stay as far away from that as possible. In case—”
“Of booby traps?” asked Alice.
“That, and in case the rest of the legend is true, and if disturbed in any way, the emperor himself will rise up,” said Vivien.
“No sane person would believe that,” said Ming-na.
“Perhaps not,” said Vivien. “But until a few minutes ago, would you have believed this?” She swept her arm around.
“Good point,” conceded Ming-na, whose head did not believe the ridiculous legends of a risen and vengeful emperor, but whose heart just might.
“Besides, the terrorists might not be sane,” said Kai-wen.
“I’m not totally sure we are,” said Alice.
“What’re we supposed to do if we find them?” asked Ming-na.
She was getting on Alice’s nerves. Asking questions. Ones that were, incredibly, annoyingly, valid.
The truth was, they hadn’t thought this through. They were armed with pickaxes and one handgun that Alice wasn’t sure she knew how to fire. Against trained and resolute, albeit insane, terrorists.
Insane and armed. Not promising.
“Let’s find them first, then worry about it,” said Alice. “We have the advantage of surprise. They won’t expect us.”
“I don’t expect us,” muttered Vivien.
“Come on.” Alice moved forward. “Mom’s right. It’s the palace. If we take the alley those guards came down, we know the traps will have already been sprung.”
Liu left the hospital and wondered where to go next.
He looked at the time. Five past eight. Chen would be on the stage. The final act.
Liu looked up into the clear night sky. He couldn’t see the stars for the light pollution, but he knew they were there.
He wished he could see them one last time. He also wondered where Alice was. Where Vivien was.
He hoped and prayed they were safe in Taipei. But there’d been no message from them. Or from the MSS agents he’d sent with them. No replies to his texts. He’d missed a call from Alice and tried to reach her, but there was no answer.
Liu looked around. What to do? Where to go to die? It was now a certainty. He’d failed, and now everyone in this great city would soon die.
He hailed a taxi and headed for the parade that would open a congress that would never take place. Soon Beijing would be a giant crater, filled with the ashes of millions of people.
He might as well die at the parade grounds. At least he wouldn’t be alone. With luck, he’d see Eeyore go first, a millisecond before his own death.
Though, actually …
He leaned forward and instructed the driver to take him to the all-night market instead. If this was it, the end, Liu wanted to go out like that young man Liam. With a coconut bun in his hand.
Goddamned Wang, he thought, leaning back in the seat. Poor insane man. Once so brilliant. Mad people did unexpected things, of course. Liu stared out the window but no longer saw the neon lights and doomed pedestrians.
He’d expected his old friend to have hidden any damning material about Pangu and his plans for the attacks in that secret office beneath the presidential compound.
But that’s what a sane person would do. Someone insane might …
Liu leaned forward. “Take me to Zhongnanhai.”
The taxi changed direction again, the driver muttering curses while Liu closed his eyes and muttered prayers. For his daughter. For a wife he’d never stopped loving.
For himself. And even for the wretched taxi driver.
The narrow alley was dark. Not a lot of the odd light penetrated the high walls, but up ahead there was bright sunshine. An opening.
They ran toward it, unsure if they were heading into more danger, but they had to move forward, had to find where Pangu was operating from.
As they ran, Alice noticed that the terracotta figures were becoming more and more grotesque. Less lifelike. Their faces, their bodies twisted, tormented. Some had horns; other broken wings. Some had terrible wounds.
Many were sorrowful. Grief-filled. Anguished. As though the terracotta figures had also been imprisoned here, with the workers, the designers, the engineers, the scientists and mathematicians. Men, women, even children.
Alice picked up her pace, desperate to get out of this misery. It was like a howl chasing her. She could no longer tell what was real and what her imagination was manufacturing.
They burst out into the open and found themselves in a field. Yet another world. The meadow undulated slightly, as though mimicking waves on an ocean.