Deshi (33 page)

Wu said it almost matter-of-factly, but you could see some of Kita’s spearmen bristle at the import. Han turned to face them. Wu glanced over to Sarah and the Rinpoche and his voice changed. It was casual, almost friendly.

“You led me on a merry chase,” he called, and rubbed his injured head gently with his gun hand. “But there is no need for more hide and seek.” He gestured at them. “Come here.”

Sarah looked at me, silently pleading for advice. Changpa seemed calm, almost resigned to things.

“Oh, I get it now,” I said. My brain had been racing as I put things together. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a plan to get out of this mess. When in doubt, stall. “You’re a seeker all right, Kita,” It was finally coming clear in my mind. I spoke loudly enough so everyone could hear me. “Traveling all over Tibet, getting access to all these holy men with weird powers.” I glanced at Changpa, who drifted toward us as if pulled by a force not under his control. “Did anybody ever wonder how it was that you were able to do this? A foreign national in Tibet? Getting access to people the Chinese government didn’t want anyone to see?”

Kita made a calming gesture at me. “Please. Your imagination has gotten the better of you. I was fortunate in being able to study with the lama, to be able to preserve a rapidly disappearing body of wisdom…”

“Oh, save it!” I spat. “It took me a while to piece it together. You weren’t fortunate. You had help.” I looked at Wu, remembering what Wilcox had told us of him. His time in Tibet. His probable involvement with smuggling. The man from the Chinese embassy looked at me, his eyes intent behind hooded lids. “That’s how you two met. The seeker and the secret agent. I’ll bet he could arrange access for you. But it came at a price.”

Wu’s casual stance grew more rigid. The gun hand, waving casually a minute ago, slowly rose into place, cocked at his hip. “This is what happens from leaving loose ends,” Wu spat to Kita.

Kita’s face was pale. I couldn’t tell whether it was a trick of the storm’s light or the reaction as a realization set in.

I looked around at his followers. “You’ve all heard the list of holy men he studied with,” I told them. “Teachers with mystic powers. It’s part of his PR.” They stood there like stone pillars, deaf to reason. But I kept at it. “It’s interesting that when you track Kita’s progress across Tibet, a series of unfortunate events seems to follow.” I gestured at Changpa. “Ask the Rinpoche. He monitors the fate of prominent monks in his country.”

“The allegation…” Kita’s face grew hard and his eyes narrowed “… is false. You have no idea of the complexity of the situation there.” He was facing me, but the words were for his students.

“I know that in every case, after you finished studying with a lama, he was arrested by the Chinese authorities.” I saw Changpa’s eyes close in sorrow. Or in sudden pain. “What was the deal, Wu? Kita’d pump them for information, you’d loot whatever artifacts you could find, and then arrest them? Career advancement and some extra money in one fell swoop?”

“The government keeps a close watch on the religious in Tibet,” Kita protested. “The Interior Ministry controls all access to the holy men… I had no choice but to comply with their rules…”

“It wasn’t a rule,” I said. “You two cut a deal. And sold the monks down the river!”

Now Kita glanced at Wu, as if for help. The man from the consulate was watching me intently with pursed lips, obviously trying to figure out what I really knew and what I was guessing at. But he said nothing.

Kita licked his thin lips. “You fool!” he said to me. “This is all conjecture! I went to the Roof of the World to save the last remnants of esoteric knowledge. To preserve it for generations to come! The authorities were slowly smothering the old ways. It would happen with or without me.” He gestured with a jerk of his hand at Changpa. “None of us can alter that fact. So I chose to save what I could. In any way I could…”

I snorted with contempt. “You used them for your own gain. To create a reputation. And it’s as fake as the inka you had created for yourself.”

He rocked back as if struck. There probably wasn’t much talking back at the Mountain Temple. I pressed him. “The irony of it is that Kim wasn’t even sure what he really had in his hands. All kinds of facts but precious few connections. Maybe the inka was fake, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.” I turned to Wu.

“It’s not about Kita, is it? Not really, I mean. He’s just one of the loose ends that lead to you. No one really cares about the calligraphy.” And I had to shake my head at how stupid I had been. “Maybe some of the Hollywood people who bankroll Kita wouldn’t be happy to hear that he was an informant for the Chinese. But that’s not why all those people were killed.”

Wu was very still, and although the weather was whipping around us, it was as if things got very quiet there for a minute.

“I don’t know how Kim got the stuff he did,” I continued, “but once it was out, it was only a matter of time until someone started digging through it and making connections. So you turned Han loose.” “Ridiculous,” Wu scoffed. “How can you know this?”

“Sakura told me,” I replied.

“The dead tell us nothing,” he replied with certainty. There was a grim satisfaction to his tone, and he seemed to relax slightly.

It was my turn to give a hard smile. “You’re wrong. Sakura left us a clue. A message in his last piece of calligraphy. Don’t you know what he wrote before he was killed?” Wu looked at Han, but the giant said nothing. Kita’s eyes were lit with a jumpy energy.

“He wrote
shumpu
,” I told them. “Spring wind.”

“You waste my time, Burke,” Kita spat, finally coming to life. “This is of no interest to me.”

“And yet it should be,” Yamashita interrupted. He had been nothing but a stout figure, pushed at by a hard wind. Immobile. But now he spoke. “It comes from a poem by a Zen monk…”

“Bunkko Kakushi,” I added.

“His monastery was raided by barbarians,” Sensei said, then gestured at me to continue.

“As they broke in on his meditation and threatened him,” I said, “he composed this poem:

In heaven and earth no place to hide;
Bliss belongs to one who knows that things are
empty and that man too is nothing.
Splendid indeed is the Mongol long sword
Slashing the spring wind like a flash of lightning.”

I looked at the Mongol. He stared back at me with no apparent emotion—a homicidal robot waiting for someone to punch the “on” button. “Sakura fingered your man, Wu,” I told him.

“Absurd!” he protested haughtily.

“Maybe,” I said, “but we’ve got Kim’s notes to suggest a motive. And once the cops start digging, I’ll bet they can pin it on him. And on you, too.”

I turned to Kita. “Now you’re not only a fraud, you’re an accomplice to murder.” The wind dragged his long hair across his face and Kita clawed it away from his eyes, his demeanor altered. He looked at my teacher and me with pure hatred, stepping back as if to avoid contamination. He reached out with his hands, the fingers like talons, straining toward us. Then he jerked his hands closed into fists and made a motion as if dashing us to the ground. The order was silent, yet unmistakable. The spearmen began to move.

Events became as swirled and jumbled as the air. Yamashita glanced at me, sending silent messages and simultaneously moving to intercept some of the attackers. Stark, still gasping on the ground, rose shakily and lunged to try to stop the Mongol. The killer knocked him back over with easy contempt and the spear drove down with an almost casual brutality. Stark’s choked gasp of pain was masked by the sound of the wind and the distant scream from Sarah. Kita’s robes swirled in the wind as he whirled away. The spearmen closed on Yamashita and me. And a pistol shot boomed through the clearing.

“Police!” a familiar voice shouted. The spearmen hesitated for a moment, unsure as to what to do next. Another shot punched through the air. “Freeze! I’ll shoot the next asshole that moves!” Micky yelled as he and Art, guns drawn, moved into the clearing from the access road. Wallace brought up the rear, carrying a shotgun at high port. I sighed in relief.

Art leveled his pistol at Kita, who was edging closer to Sarah and the Rinpoche. “That includes you, too, Johnny Cash,” he said.

An enormous boom shook the mountaintop. It was as if the air had been rent apart in a powerful convulsion, a flash of pink light and the concussive blast of the thunder. It stunned us, freezing us in our tracks for a moment. But Kita recovered first.

“Han!” he called. Kita drew a short sword, the
wakizashi
, from his sash and slipped behind Sarah with the fluid, predatory moves of a snake. The long blade was at her throat before we could do anything. The Mongol left his spear buried in his victim and drew an automatic pistol from under his gi top. Stark, pinned to the ground, had stopped making noises. His legs moved in faint, aimless jerks, spreading the blood that pooled under him. Wu sidled along, using the spearmen as cover, toward the trees.

“Do not move!” Kita screamed. Han pointed the pistol at my head. Micky and Art stood, guns up, but frozen into stillness. Wallace looked at them quizzically.

“Do what the man says, Wallace,” Art told him. We all knew that this was a standoff.

Kita smiled tightly in triumph. “We are leaving,” he told us. “Move away from the cars.”

“Won’t do you any good,” Micky told him. “State troopers were on their way when we came up. The roadblock’s probably already set.”

“You’re trapped, Kita,” I shouted. I was watching Han, looking down the barrel of his pistol and trying to see Wu out of the corner of my eye. I heard Kita cackle.

“Trapped? We will see…” Sarah gave a little shriek and I half turned away from the Mongol to see what was happening. Kita was dragging her backwards, using her as cover, heading toward the old logging trail. Rain began to slant down.

“Wait!” the Rinpoche commanded, and his voice had an odd, powerful resonance, even in the midst of the rain and wind. It was the first overt action he had taken since preventing Sarah from following Stark into the killing zone. The lama walked slowly toward Kita. He was dressed in his full robes, the deep crimson of his sash looking even darker in the storm. He stood and faced Kita. Their eyes locked.

“I will go with you as a guarantee of safe passage,” Changpa told him. Kita grimaced and jerked at Sarah as if to resume his retreat. “Do not!” Changpa said in that quiet, compelling voice. “Think. This one is an innocent, but she will fight you.” Wu had made it to their side. The lama gestured at him. “You know this already. I will go willingly. As a hostage.” He turned to look at us all. His eyes behind his rain-spotted glasses were sad as he took in the men with guns, the men with spears. His gaze lingered on Stark’s body. “There has been enough suffering here. These men do not wish me harmed. It will be your guarantee of safe passage.” He held out a hand in supplication and slowly, Kita’s blade came down from Sarah’s throat. The lama took her hand and passed her to Art, then crossed to Kita’s side.

Kita barked a command and the spearmen trotted into the forest ahead of their master. Wu was already fading into the brush. The Mongol gave me one last deadly look and turned to him. Kita dragged Changpa along to the trail’s entrance. It was like a dark mouth in a green wall that hissed and moved with the storm. I felt sick with a mixture of dread and an odd sense of the familiar, a horrible experience of déjà vu. Changpa paused, framed by the trail’s darkness and a lightning flash made his glasses go opaque for a moment. Then he turned and was dragged down the trail, vanishing from our sight along with the others.

We all stood without moving for a minute, then Yamashita shot across the clearing. He, too, paused at the trail’s mouth, like someone taking one last look at the world before entering the cave to hell. The rain was cold, but that wasn’t why I shivered. It struck me. My dream. I had seen this before.

“
Hakka yoi
, Burke,” Yamashita called to me. Hang in there. Stay ready. Then he, too, was gone.

Sarah Klein looked at me with big, sad eyes. Then she knelt down, rocking silently in the rain as she cradled Stark’s head in her lap. Wallace came over and checked for a pulse. It was something to do. He looked up at us, blinking in the down-pour, and shook his head no.

“What a clusterfuck,” Micky said as he came up to me on the run.

“What took ya?” I protested.

Micky squinted at me. It wasn’t just the rain. At first he looked like he was going to say something cranky, but he got a good look at my condition and said in quiet voice, “Lucky your lady friend got ahold of me. All hell’s breaking loose. The Feds are down there, screwing everything up.”

“The Feds!”

“Later,” Micky said tersely. Then he looked at me again. “Can you hold it together a bit longer, Connor?” He was, after all, my brother.

I nodded. “What now?”

Micky jerked his head and we all moved to the trailhead. The trees offered some shelter from the storm. “The troopers will be all over this hill soon. So Kita can forget his car. Maybe they can get back to the resort thingy…”

“The Yamaji,” I corrected.

“… but there’ll be units there as well. So they’ll run wherever this path leads them and hope that they can find a car or something when they get down.”

“What about Changpa?”

“Hostages are a pain when you’re on the run,” Art told me. “They’ll keep him long enough to make sure they can get away…”

“And then?” I pressed him. Art shrugged.

“They’ll toss him,” Micky said, and it was clear from his tone of voice what he meant.

I thought about Kita, scrambling to keep things together. Of Wu, obsessed with loose ends. And the Chinese had no love for Changpa. “We gotta go after them,” I said.

“We’re goin’,” Micky said, “but us, not you.”

“Eight, maybe nine guys,” I told him. “And you and Art.” I nodded at Wallace. “And him. You like the odds?”

“I don’t like anything about this,” Micky said tightly. All three men were checking their weapons and looking down the trail. The rain fell steadily, and the earth was dark.

Micky looked at Art and Wallace. Both men nodded at the unspoken question. I went and spoke with Sarah.